Addressing a single executive order from Donald Trump’s voluminous first-day edicts is like singling out one bullet in a burst from an AK-47. But one of them hit me in the gut. That is “Establishing and Implementing the President’s Department of Government Efficiency.’’ The acronym for that name is DOGE (named after a memecoin), and it’s the Elon Musk–led effort to cut government spending by a trillion bucks or two. Though DOGE was, until this week, pitched as an outside body, this move makes it an official part of government—by embedding it in an existing agency that was formerly part of the Office of Management and Budget called the United States Digital Service. The latter will now be known as the US DOGE Service, and its new head will be more tightly connected to the president, reporting to his chief of staff.

The new USDS will apparently shift its former laser focus on building cost-efficient and well-designed software for various agencies to a hardcore implementation of the Musk vision. It’s kind of like a government version of a SPAC, the dodgy financial maneuver that launched Truth Social in the public market without ever having to reveal a coherent business plan to underwriters.

The order is surprising in a sense because, on its face, DOGE seems more limited than its original super ambitious pitch. This iteration seems more tightly centered on saving money through streamlining and modernizing the government’s massive and messy IT infrastructure. There are big savings to be had, but a handful of zeros short of trillions. As of yet, it’s uncertain whether Musk will become the DOGE administrator. It doesn’t seem big enough for him. (The first USDS director, Mikey Dickerson, jokingly posted on LinkedIn, “’I’d like to congratulate Elon Musk on being promoted to my old job.”) But reportedly Musk pushed for this structure as a way to embed DOGE in the White House. I hear that inside the Executive Office Building, there are numerous pink Post-it notes claiming space even beyond USDS’s turf, including one such note on the former chief information officers’ enviable office. So maybe this could be a launch pad for a more sweeping effort that will eliminate whole agencies and change policies. (I was unable to get a White House representative to answer questions, which isn’t surprising considering that there are dozens of other orders that equally beg for explanation.)

One thing is clear—this ends United States Digital Service as it previously existed, and marks a new, and maybe perilous era for the USDS, which I have been enthusiastically covering since its inception. The 11-year-old agency sprang out of the high-tech rescue squad salvaging the mess that was Healthcare.gov, the hellish failure of a website that almost tanked the Affordable Care Act. That intrepid team of volunteers set the template for the agency: a small group of coders and designers who used internet-style techniques (cloud not mainframe; the nimble “agile” programming style instead of the outdated “waterfall” technique) to make government tech as nifty as the apps people use on their phones. Its soldiers, often leaving lucrative Silicon Valley jobs, were lured by the prospect of public service. They worked out of the agency’s funky brownstone headquarters on Jackson Place, just north of the White House. The USDS typically took on projects that were mired in centi-million contracts and never completed—delivering superior results within weeks. It would embed its employees in agencies that requested help, being careful to work collaboratively with the lifers in the IT departments. A typical project involved making DOD military medical records interoperable with the different systems used by the VA. The USDS became a darling of the Obama administration, a symbol of its affiliation with cool nerddom.

During the first Trump administration, deft maneuvering kept the USDS afloat—it was the rare Obama initiative that survived. Its second-in-command, Haley Van Dyck, cleverly got buy-in from Trump’s in-house fixer, Jared Kushner. When I went to meet Kushner for an off-the-record talk early in 2017, I ran into Van Dyck in the West Wing; she gave me a conspiratorial nod that things were looking up, at least for the moment. Nonetheless, the four Trump years became a balancing act in sharing the agency’s achievements while somehow staying under the radar. “At Disney amusement parks, they paint things that they want to be invisible with this certain color of green so that people don’t notice it in passing,” one USDSer told me. “We specialized in painting ourselves that color of green.” When Covid hit, that became a feat in itself, as USDS worked closely with White House coronavirus response coordinator Deborah Birx on gathering statistics—some of which the administration wasn’t eager to publicize.

By the end of Trump’s term, the green paint was wearing thin. A source tells me that at one point a Trump political appointee noticed—not happily— that USDS was recruiting at tech conferences for lesbians and minorities, and asked why. The answer was that it was an effective way to find great product managers and designers. The appointee accepted that but asked if, instead of putting “Lesbians Who Tech” on the reimbursement line, could they just say LWT?

Earthblade, the next game from the developers of Celeste, has been canceled. The fantasy-inspired game got its first trailer in late 2022, and the game would have let you explore a “free-roaming, dynamically-loading map,” Extremely OK Games’ Maddy Thorson said at the time. But the team decided to cancel the game in December after a team conflict and because of the pressure of trying to follow up on Celeste, Thorson says in a post detailing what happened.

The “disagreement” was between Thorson and Noel Berry (Thorson refers to the two of them as “us”) and Pedro Medeiros over “the IP rights of Celeste,” Thorson says. “We eventually reached a resolution, but both parties also agreed in the end that we should go our separate ways,” and Medeiros is currently working on a game called Neverway. “Losing Pedro wasn’t the only factor in cancelling the game, but it did prompt us to take a serious look at whether fighting through to finish Earthblade was the right path forward,” Thorson says.

The huge success of Celeste also “applied pressure on us to deliver something bigger and better with Earthblade, and that pressure is a large part of why working on it has become so exhausting,” Thorson says. “Pedro isn’t to blame for this — in fact the split with him has given us the clarity to see that we have lost our way, and the opportunity to admit defeat.”

Thorson and Berry want to refocus on “smaller-scale projects” and are “prototyping again” to try and “rediscover game development in a manner closer to how we approached it at Celeste’s or TowerFall’s inception.”

In 2015, the blogging site Tumblr launched a GIF discovery feature called Tumblr TV as an experimental product. Now, with the U.S. TikTok ban leaving the fate of the short-form video app uncertain, Tumblr has decided it’s finally time to launch Tumblr TV, which has since evolved to support video, to all its users as one of its standard features.

The company on Tuesday announced the product’s graduation from its experimental projects home known as Tumblr Labs, explaining how the tab would become available to everyone. New users will see the tab in a fairly prominent third position in the app. Meanwhile, existing users will be able to toggle Tumblr TV on or off in their Dashboard Tabs configuration settings, Tumblr said.

The decision to promote the video product from an experiment to a core feature nearly 10 years after its creation has a lot to do with the demand for TikTok alternatives in the wake of the U.S. law that banned the app and others with Chinese ownership in the country.

Though enforcement of that ban is currently on hold after President Trump’s intervention, it’s still unclear whether TikTok will agree to a deal — despite its many suitors — to keep the app live in the U.S. after the 75-day deadline extension is up.

Like many apps, Tumblr noted it saw a surge of users joining its service on the day of the TikTok ban on January 19, a company spokesperson told TechCrunch. As a result, the blogging service saw a roughly 35% increase in iOS app installs and a 70% increase in new users joining Communities, a feature that allows users to join various groups focused on specific interests.

In fact, some newcomers even established Tumblr Communities, like TikTok Repository, aimed at those who wanted a place to back up and share their TikTok videos. Another Community, TikTok Refugees, was active with both new and returning users, the company said.

As a competitor to TikTok, however, TumblrTV falls short. Though the company made many improvements while the service was a Labs feature — including the addition of lightbox support, improved scrubbing, and video support — the final product doesn’t feel all that much like TikTok, where original creator content dominates.

Tumblr’s video feed does allow for vertical swipe-based navigation within its channels (like Art or Sports) when viewed on mobile, similar to TikTok. But the GIFs featured in this full-screen viewing mode are naturally grainy, while many of the videos featured aren’t formatted for vertical viewing because they were never recorded for a vertical video app in the first place.

Still, the company hopes that a video feed could make TikTok users feel a little bit more at home if they decide to move to Tumblr.

Of course, with TikTok back online in the U.S. for the time being, the demand for a backup app is likely waning.

Panic over the US TikTok ban increased usage and downloads of a slew of alternative social media apps, including Texas-based Clapper, Chinese-owned RedNote, and Likee, a little-known platform out of Singapore with an AI-powered video feed similar to TikTok’s, according to new market research.

People in the US could not access TikTok for about 14 hours on late Saturday into Sunday after a federal law aimed at curbing China’s alleged influence over the app went into effect and triggered an unprecedented incident of internet censorship in a country that prizes free expression. About 63 percent of US teens and a third of US adults use TikTok, according to Pew Research Center.

Among the places some of them took refuge was Likee, a TikTok clone launched by the profitable Singaporean tech company Joyy in 2017. Likee had about 33.9 million monthly users as of November, most of whom were outside the US. But on Saturday, Likee drew 143 percent more downloads and 37 percent more usage in the US than the previous day, according to Sensor Tower, which estimates figures by gathering data from a sample of devices. The trend continued into Sunday, when Likee usage ticked up 11 percent from a day earlier.

Estimates from Apptopia, another company that studies the app industry, show that for months, Likee recorded less than 10,000 downloads per day in the US before jumping to nearly 167,000 on Sunday and about 286,000 on Monday. Apptopia also estimated similar bumps for TikTok competitors Clapper and Flip.

On Tuesday, shares of Likee’s parent company, Joyy, closed up about 3 percent, outpacing the average gain among its Nasdaq peers. Joyy does not break out Likee’s financials, but it and some of its other sibling apps collectively generated about $73 million in sales during last year’s third quarter from advertising and user purchases. Likee did not respond to a request for comment.

Other less-frequented apps, including Clapper and Snap’s Snapchat, drew increased interest over the weekend to the tune of double-digit gains in user activity. TikTok’s biggest rivals, Meta’s Instagram and Facebook, saw more modest single-digit boosts. YouTube and X, meanwhile, experienced little change in usage.

RedNote, another Chinese app that Americans had flocked to in protest during the days before the ban, added 80 percent more users Sunday than the day before, according to Sensor Tower. In the first two days of the rush earlier in the week, over 700,000 new users joined RedNote, Reuters reported. Known as Xiaohongshu in Chinese, it ranked in recent days as the most-downloaded free app on the Google and Apple app stores in the US.

TikTok came back online in the US on Sunday after president-elect Donald Trump promised to provide a temporary reprieve of the new law when he took power the following day. The statute, signed by former President Biden last year, effectively bans TikTok by threatening to fine web hosting providers and app stores that work with its parent company, Chinese tech giant ByteDance, unless it divests its ownership in TikTok. Users came back to TikTok in droves on Sunday, with daily active users up 17 percent over Saturday, the Sensor Tower data show.

On Monday, Trump issued an executive order providing for 75 additional days to sort out the dilemma over TikTok. But the legality of his decree remains in question, and TikTok is still unavailable in US app stores. But when users search for TikTok, they’re greeted by a list of alternatives—Likee, Clapper, and others among them.

Nvidia has posted a new video showcasing a history of Founders Edition graphics card designs that explores the design of its new RTX 5090 and confirms a previously leaked prototype that used an unconventionally large four-slot design.

As noted by VideoCardz, the prototype “Titan ADA” card first revealed by leaker Kopite7kimi included a triple-fan cooling system, and earlier this month, Gamers Nexus tested and tore down a working version of the prototype.

In the video published today, Nvidia’s EVP of system products, Andrew Bell, explains that Nvidia cards were trending larger and larger, and they wanted to change that. “We didn’t like the idea of it taking up four slots; it was big, it was unwieldy, it worked in a limited number of chassis,” Bell said.

Bell says that the prototype triple-fan cooling system influenced Nvidia’s Blackwell architecture. However, the latest RTX 5090 Founders Edition card that we are currently testing achieves its goals through a modular four-part design with a separate I/O board that allows air to flow through for a more efficient and compact cooler. According to Nvidia, these changes are why the new 5090 fits in two slots on the motherboard compared to the previous three-slot 4090.

In 2015, the blogging site Tumblr launched a GIF discovery feature called Tumblr TV as an experimental product. Now, with the U.S. TikTok ban leaving the fate of the short-form video app uncertain, Tumblr has decided it’s finally time to launch Tumblr TV, which has since evolved to support video, to all its users as one of its standard features.

The company on Tuesday announced the product’s graduation from its experimental projects home known as Tumblr Labs, explaining how the tab would become available to everyone. New users will see the tab in a fairly prominent third position in the app. Meanwhile, existing users will be able to toggle Tumblr TV on or off in their Dashboard Tabs configuration settings, Tumblr said.

The decision to promote the video product from an experiment to a core feature nearly 10 years after its creation has a lot to do with the demand for TikTok alternatives in the wake of the U.S. law that banned the app and others with Chinese ownership in the country.

Though enforcement of that ban is currently on hold after President Trump’s intervention, it’s still unclear whether TikTok will agree to a deal — despite its many suitors — to keep the app live in the U.S. after the 75-day deadline extension is up.

Like many apps, Tumblr noted it saw a surge of users joining its service on the day of the TikTok ban on January 19, a company spokesperson told TechCrunch. As a result, the blogging service saw a roughly 35% increase in iOS app installs and a 70% increase in new users joining Communities, a feature that allows users to join various groups focused on specific interests.

In fact, some newcomers even established Tumblr Communities, like TikTok Repository, aimed at those who wanted a place to back up and share their TikTok videos. Another Community, TikTok Refugees, was active with both new and returning users, the company said.

As a competitor to TikTok, however, TumblrTV falls short. Though the company made many improvements while the service was a Labs feature — including the addition of lightbox support, improved scrubbing, and video support — the final product doesn’t feel all that much like TikTok, where original creator content dominates.

Tumblr’s video feed does allow for vertical swipe-based navigation within its channels (like Art or Sports) when viewed on mobile, similar to TikTok. But the GIFs featured in this full-screen viewing mode are naturally grainy, while many of the videos featured aren’t formatted for vertical viewing because they were never recorded for a vertical video app in the first place.

Still, the company hopes that a video feed could make TikTok users feel a little bit more at home if they decide to move to Tumblr.

Of course, with TikTok back online in the U.S. for the time being, the demand for a backup app is likely waning.

Samsung announced the release of its next flagship phone, the Galaxy S25, on Jan. 22 at the Samsung Galaxy Unpacked S25 presentation. As is essential for any tech presentation in 2025, generative AI was at the forefront of the event.

“We are making it [AI] a reality right here right now,” said ™ Roh, Samsung’s president and head of Mobile Experience. “To make the shift possible, we built an AI OS from the ground up.”

Samsung Galaxy S25 offers business as usual outside the AI

The Samsung Galaxy S25 comes in three standard variants:

• The base model Samsung Galaxy S25 has a 6.2-inch display and up to 256 GB of storage.
• The Samsung Galaxy S25 Plus has a 6.7-inch display and up to 512 GB of storage.
• The Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra has a 6.9-inch display and up to 1TB of storage.

All three variants include the Snapdragon 8 Elite for Galaxy chip and Google Gemini as its AI assistant. The largest model, the Ultra, weighs just 218g.

The Samsung Galaxy S25 can be preordered now, with the phones hitting store shelves on Feb. 7. Samsung offers Gemini Advanced and 2TB of cloud storage with purchase. The S25 retails at:

• $799.99 for the base model.
• $999.99 for the Samsung Galaxy S25 Plus.
• $1,299.99 for the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra.

Samsung says the S25 offers the longest battery life of a Samsung phone yet — up to 31 hours of video.

Google Gemini stretches through all aspects of the S25

With the rest of the specifications not varying much from the S24, Samsung wants AI — and particularly its partnership with Google — to provide a reason to upgrade. After introducing the S24 with Google Gemini last year, Samsung has woven AI even more deeply into the S25. A dedicated side button will activate Google Gemini. This replaces most of the requests a user might have made to Samsung’s own Bixby digital assistant before.

Gemini is multimodal, able to respond to voice commands, answer questions about live video, or identify music being played. It can create transcripts and summaries of calls during the call.

SEE: OpenAI and Microsoft joined an AI infrastructure initiative that pledged $500 billion over four years to data centers and more.

AI will have access to any app on the phone and can draw information from all of them. An AI-curated “Now Brief” on the home screen will collect information like weather, upcoming meetings, and sports scores from Google every morning. An “Evening Brief” sums up the day at night.

As expected from generative AI nowadays, Gemini on Samsung will be able to generate text, summarize text, edit images, and answer questions about pictures.

AI data stays on the device

“As AI becomes more powerful, it must also become more personal to deliver class leading personalization we are introducing the Personal Data Engine,” said Roh. “Now you can enjoy tailored experiences while keeping your personal information secured on your device, not in the cloud.”

Essentially, the Personal Data Engine means AI data from individual phones is not used for model training or advertising, Samsung said. Some AI queries may be deleted after the interaction is complete.

To protect copyright and disclose when AI has created an image, Samsung has adopted C2PA cryptography.

One UI 7 emerges from beta

Underneath the hood of the S25 is the One UI 7 OS. Roh said that Samsung is leveraging the operating system to reimagine Android “with AI at the core.” One UI 7, debuting in general availability with the S25 series, enables:

• Expanded writing tools, including call transcripts.
• The “Now Bar,” which includes timely notifications on the lock screen.
• Redesigned camera UX.

Developers and partners will soon have access into the new UI, Roh said.

AI is the new normal on smart phones

The Samsung Galaxy S25 series competes primarily with:

A slim version of the S25 is coming

At the end of the Unpacked presentation, Samsung dropped a tease of Galaxy S25 Edge, the upcoming ultra-slim variant. A release date or details have not yet been announced.

The Mexican government has announced the Mexico Embraces You program, which includes economic and social services for Mexicans deported from the United States. This measure is in response to the strict immigration policy that President Donald Trump announced on January 20, and which has already begun to materialize with the closure of the CBP One app.

CBP One was launched in 2020, allowing foreign vendors to schedule cargo inspections. In 2023 the Biden administration expanded its functions to include unauthorized migrants seeking asylum. This Monday, on Inauguration Day, an order from Donald Trump put an end to the program, and thousands of scheduled appointments were canceled.

Rosa Icela Rodríguez, head of the Ministry of the Interior (SEGOB), unveiled the project during the morning conference of Mexico’s president, Claudia Sheinbaum. Rodríguez explained that the strategy includes economic support of 2,000 pesos (about $100) for Mexican citizens who lack the resources to return to their communities of origin. This support will be delivered through the new Bienestar Paisano Card.

Federal authorities add that the plan is designed to allow Mexican migrants to join existing social programs, which include pensions for senior citizens and people with disabilities, scholarships for elementary and high school students, and the initiatives Sembrando Vida, Mujeres con Bienestar, Jóvenes Construyendo el Futuro, and Salud Casa por Casa.

Repatriated Mexicans will be affiliated with the Mexican Social Security Institute. The program will grant them access to insurance for sickness and maternity, work risks, disability and life, retirement, and for severance in advanced age and old age. They will also be able to enjoy all social benefits and childcare services provided by the Social Security Law. The benefits will extend to the spouses or partners, children, and parents of the deportee.

Rodriguez adds that Mexicans expelled from the United States will also receive legal advice to help them obtain documents of identification, such as birth certificates, voter’s credentials, and the Clave Única de Registro de Población (Unique Population Registry Code). They will also have access to social housing support provided by the Ministry of Agrarian, Territorial, and Urban Development and by the National Workers’ Housing Fund Institute (Instituto del Fondo Nacional de la Vivienda para los Trabajadores).

The SEGOB has trained public servants from the governments of Baja California, Sonora, Chihuahua, Coahuila, Nuevo León, Tamaulipas, Chiapas, Guerrero, Oaxaca, Puebla, Michoacán, Guanajuato, State of Mexico, Sinaloa, and Jalisco for the proper implementation of the Mexico Embraces You plan. It claims to have coordinated efforts with the Human Rights Commission and the Business Coordinating Council.

Trump’s Possible Mass Deportations

Donald Trump confirmed in his inaugural address that he will declare a state of emergency on the Mexican border to stop what he called “an invasion by illegal intruders.” He has promised to act “with historic speed and force.” His statements have begun to take effect.

US Customs and Border Protection has confirmed that features of the CBP One mobile app that allowed undocumented immigrants to submit information in advance and schedule appointments at eight southwest border ports of entry are no longer available. The agency added that appointments scheduled through the app have been canceled.

The app was launched in 2021 to streamline immigration flow and processes in the border region. The tool was designed to serve undocumented migrants from central and northern Mexico and “avoid border pressure from those arriving seeking asylum,” according to Mexican authorities.

Sheinbaum anticipated its closure in a statement from the SEGOB, published before Trump’s inauguration. She said that “this application has helped migrants not have to go to the northern border to wait for asylum. We are going to propose that this application or other related ones be allowed.”

Juan Ramón de la Fuente, secretary of foreign affairs, announced the creation of the ConsulApp platform. The system will have three essential functions: alerting the nearest Mexican consulate to initiate legal assistance in real time, notifying family members or trusted contacts selected by the migrant about his or her legal situation, and directly warning the Foreign Ministry, which will supervise compliance with due process.

The Mexican president emphasized that migrants are essential to the economy, and reaffirmed her support to Mexican nationals through the 53 consulates throughout the United States.

This story originally appeared on WIRED en Español and has been translated from Spanish.

Xbox has a new beta software update rolling out today for Insiders in the Alpha Skip-Ahead ring that enables Series X and S systems to support much larger external hard disks. Previously, the Xbox could only support up to 16TB of space on a single USB-connected drive.

With the new update, Xbox systems can now partition hard disks larger than 16TB into segments to use the full physical storage space. A single 24TB hard disk can now be formatted into multiple partitions (the largest still being 16TB) so you can archive more games, apps, and media than ever — if that’s something you’ve wanted to do.

However, if you have already been using a hard disk greater than 16TB with Xbox, the company says you’ll need to erase it first to take full advantage:

Drives greater than 16TB that have already been formatted will be unaffected by this change and would need to be reformatted to take advantage of the updated support for larger drives.

Although you still can’t play current generation games directly off an external drive, it can be useful to back up all of your installs anyway, or games made for older systems. You won’t need to redownload entire titles such as the 300GB-plus Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 using an internet connection when you feel like playing it again after a hiatus, unless they need an equally-sizable update.

Xbox is also releasing an update that enables new network quality indicators for cloud gaming sessions to tell you if your connection is slow and affecting your gameplay. They will appear in red bubbles on the upper right side of the screen, telling you what is happening, such as packet loss or increased ping, which can help you troubleshoot your connection.

Crypto is making such a big comeback that AngelList and CoinList are launching a way to help raise capital for crypto-specific founders using crypto coins.

They are teaming up to launch Crypto special purpose vehicles  (SPVs) and Crypto roll-up vehicles (RUVs), the companies shared with TechCrunch exclusively on Wednesday.

The partnership, they said, will give users a way “to raise with syndicates and manage crypto startup investments the crypto way.” Syndicates are a group of companies or individuals that work together to jointly manage a large financial transaction.

AngelList said the users will be able to fund Crypto SPVs (Special Purpose Vehicles) in stablecoins – currently for a $0 fee. 

“Investors can fund with USDC, which is easier for crypto investors who don’t operate via banks,” said CoinList CEO Raghav Gulati. USDC is the term for a digital dollar, also known as a stablecoin, that can be redeemed 1:1 for US dollars as it is pegged to the dollar.

Tokens can be distributed in kind to LPs and are compatible with “many non-US token issuers and investors.” An integration with CoinList’s software is “coming soon,” the companies said.

“The model is significant because investors receive tokens once they are available, instead of receiving cash returns, which is aligned with the crypto ethos of stakeholder participation and self-ownership of assets,” Gulati told TechCrunch.

The Crypto Roll-Up Vehicles are designed to collect investments that a founder has raised for a particular round. The advantage, the companies said, is that startups don’t have to worry about “managing compliance for many stakeholders” at an early stage.

“Crypto startups often seek to bring on many angel investors. With RUVs, dozens of angels who need to sign paperwork, send money, and get proper reporting on an ongoing basis can do so with AngelList Crypto RUVs,” Gulati said.

Crypto’s acceptance in the mainstream investor world where AngelList belongs, wavered during crypto winter. That’s when all things Web3 fell out of favor and industry bigwigs like Sam Bankman-Fried and Binance founder Changpeng Zhao were sentenced to jail.

But between bitcoin hitting record highs and the Trump administration’s clear interest in it, crypto is poised to come back in vogue in broader tech circles.