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💡 Get your daily fix of innovation, gadgets, AI, cybersecurity, and the tech shaping tomorrow. Technology Daily keeps you in the loop with smart, snappy updates—perfect for busy founders, engineers, and curious minds alike.
Welcome to Technology Daily, your source for the latest in tech news. Today is January 28th, 2026, and we've got a packed show covering everything from game-changing hardware to social media shake-ups.
Let's kick things off with some pretty remarkable wearable tech. The folks at The Verge spent serious time with the WiroBotics Wim S—and yes, it's as interesting as it sounds. This is a fanny pack exoskeleton that retails for two thousand dollars, and it actually helped their reporter walk miles through the chaos of CES in Las Vegas. Now, this isn't about making you faster or stronger. What the Wim S does is reduce the energy your muscles need to exert as you walk, essentially putting pep in your step without the burnout. It's designed for people who need to walk long distances or have mobility concerns, and according to The Verge, it makes a real difference. After a year of testing various exoskeletons at tech shows, they found this fanny pack version to be the easiest to use. Definitely an innovation to watch.
In health news, a five-thousand-five-hundred-year-old fossil from Colombia is rewriting what we thought we knew about syphilis. According to Ars Technica, this ancient discovery has scientists completely rethinking the disease's origins. The timeline just got pushed back by millennia.
With tax season fast approaching, here's a heads-up: Direct File, the free government-provided tax service, has been shut down for 2026. That leaves taxpayers looking at IRS Free File if they qualify, or paid options like TurboTax. And speaking of TurboTax, if you've already decided it's a necessary expense this year, Amazon has the Deluxe desktop edition discounted by forty-four percent. That brings it down to forty-five dollars from eighty. The Business version is also on sale at forty-two percent off. An alternative worth considering is H&R Block's Deluxe plus State software, which is fifty percent off, bringing it down to just thirty bucks. Not exactly fun purchases, but at least you can save a bit.
Now for some Apple news. The company is reportedly working hard to keep iPhone 18 prices flat despite a global memory shortage. According to supply chain analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, Apple plans to absorb the rising costs of RAM by leveraging its services business. The H200 chip shortage is real, and Apple is now negotiating memory prices with suppliers every quarter instead of every six months. They're facing another price increase soon, but the goal is to keep that starting price steady. Meanwhile, Apple's most powerful chip, the Blackwell B200, remains restricted for export to China.
In entertainment news, Ted Lasso is officially coming back. Apple TV shared the first look at season four, which will premiere this summer. The show depicts Ted returning to Richmond to coach a second division women's football team. Hannah Waddingham and other returning cast members are joined by newcomers including Grant Feely as Ted's son. After calling season three the final one, fans were thrilled when Apple announced a fourth season was in the works.
Turning to streaming services, new and eligible returning subscribers can snag a month of the ad-supported Disney Plus Hulu bundle for just ten dollars. That's three bucks off the usual rate and a solid deal if you're looking to try out both platforms. Disney Plus offers blockbusters from Marvel, Star Wars, and Pixar, while Hulu brings next-day network episodes and acclaimed originals like The Bear and Only Murders in the Building. It's not quite as good as the Black Friday deal that offered the same bundle for five dollars a month for a year, but it's still worth checking out if you missed that offer.
Let's shift gears to augmented reality. Snap is launching a separate business for its upcoming Specs AR glasses. The new subsidiary, aptly named Specs Incorporated, will operate under Snap ahead of the long-awaited public launch later this year. According to Snap, this move provides greater operational focus, enables new partnerships, and supports clearer valuation of the business. The company is hoping to lure new investors to the project, which makes sense given how capital-intensive AR development can be. Specs are expected to launch sometime this year, with the new model being lighter and more capable than previous developer-focused versions.
In computing news, AMD's Ryzen 7 9850X3D continues to dominate for PC gaming. Wired called it their top choice, and reviewers are consistently impressed by its performance. If you're building a gaming rig in 2026, this chip is definitely on the shortlist.
Now, here's an interesting development in social media. Across six top large language models, Grok—that's the AI from Elon Musk's xAI—performed the worst at identifying and countering antisemitic content. This comes from a study published by the Anti-Defamation League. On the other end of the spectrum, Anthropic's Claude performed the best. The ADL tested Grok, ChatGPT, Meta's Llama, Claude, Google's Gemini, and DeepSeek by prompting the models with narratives and statements falling under three categories: anti-Jewish, anti-Zionist, and extremist. While Claude came out on top, the ADL emphasized that all models had gaps requiring improvement. It's a stark reminder that these AI systems are only as good as their training and guardrails.
In major corporate news, Amazon has confirmed it's laying off sixteen thousand workers across its organization. That's a significant reduction. According to company SVP Beth Galetti, Amazon is going through organizational changes to reduce layers and remove bureaucracy. Affected employees in the US will be given ninety days to look for another internal role and will receive severance pay if they don't find one. Galetti also said Amazon doesn't plan to announce broad reductions every few months but admitted the company could make adjustments as appropriate. This comes after Amazon eliminated fourteen thousand roles back in October 2025, citing AI technologies as one of the main reasons. It's worth noting that Amazon's year-over-year net sales grew by thirteen percent in the third quarter of 2025 alone, and net income increased to over twenty-one billion dollars. The announcement also follows news that Amazon is shutting down its remaining Amazon Go and Amazon Fresh physical stores to focus on grocery deliveries instead.
Speaking of AI, LinkedIn is leaning into the rise of vibe coding by allowing users to show off their proficiency with various AI coding tools directly on their profiles. The company is partnering with Replit, Lovabl, Descript, and Relay.app on this feature, with integrations for Microsoft-owned GitHub and Zapier in the works. Instead of self-reporting skills, LinkedIn is allowing the companies behind these AI tools to assess an individual's relative skill and assign a level of proficiency that goes directly to their profile. For example, Lovabl could award someone a bronze in vibe coding, while Replit uses numerical levels. These levels should dynamically update as people get more experience. LinkedIn's head of career products said this is less about replacing existing signals and more about showing new ways people are doing work. It's definitely a sign of how AI-specific skills are becoming increasingly important to recruiters.
Now let's talk about what's happening with TikTok. The app is experiencing significant technical issues following a power outage at one of its US data centers. TikTok says it's working to restore services after the outage impacted the app and others it operates. The company is working with its data center partner to stabilize the service. In a subsequent update, TikTok said the power outage caused a cascading systems failure leading to multiple bugs, including issues affecting view counts and load times. Creators may temporarily see zero views or likes on videos, and earnings may look like they're missing, but the company insists this is a display error caused by server timeouts and that actual data and engagement are safe. The timing is notable—these issues come just days after TikTok finalized a deal to spin off its US business into a separate entity largely controlled by US investors. Many users are already suspicious, especially given the company's push of new terms of service and privacy policy in the hours after the deal was finalized. California Governor Gavin Newsom has announced his office is investigating whether TikTok is truly censoring content critical of Trump. Newsom's office said it was able to independently confirm instances where TikTok suppressed content critical of President Donald Trump.
In regulatory news, the UK's Competition and Markets Authority is recommending measures to give publishers more control over how their content is used in Google's AI overviews. The CMA's chief executive said the aim is to provide a fairer deal for content publishers, particularly news organizations. With Google accounting for more than ninety percent of search inquiries in the UK, the CMA recently designated the company with strategic market status for search under the Digital Market Act. The proposed measures include allowing publishers to opt out of their content being used for features like AI Overviews or to train AI models. Google would also need to properly attribute publisher content. Another measure would require Google to apply fair search result rankings for businesses. In response, Google said it's exploring updates to let sites specifically opt out of search generative AI features while keeping search helpful for people who want information quickly.
China has agreed to import its first batch of NVIDIA's H200 AI chips after the government initially rejected the idea. Several hundred thousand H200 chips were approved for sale in the country following NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang's visit there last week. The US government allowed the sale of NVIDIA's H200 processors to vetted and approved companies in China late last year. The first sales have been allocated mainly to three unnamed Chinese internet companies. NVIDIA's most powerful AI chip, the Blackwell B200, is still restricted for export to China. Despite that, over one billion dollars worth of those and other high-end NVIDIA chips made their way to China via black market sales, according to previous reports. China is trying to become self-reliant for its AI chips and infrastructure, with Huawei currently offering the best processors domestically. However, AI chip experts have said NVIDIA's tech is still far ahead.
In a significant legal development, Meta has been blocking links to ICE List, a website that compiles information about incidents involving Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol agents and lists thousands of their employees' names. Links to ICE List have been spreading widely for several weeks on Meta's platforms, but now clicking on previously-shared links results in a message that the link can't be opened. Users who try to share new links on Threads or Facebook also see error messages. When reached for comment, a Meta spokesperson pointed to the company's privacy policy barring the disclosure of personally identifiable information. The company didn't address why it chose to start blocking the website after several weeks or whether it considers public LinkedIn profiles to be in violation of its rules against doxxing.
Internal communications obtained by the New Mexico Attorney General's Office revealed that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg was opposed to Meta's chatbots having explicit conversations with minors, but he also rejected the idea of placing parental controls on the feature. In an exchange between two unnamed Meta employees, one wrote that they pushed hard