To put on the Lingo, you unwrap it and place the carton in the dispenser. Clicking the dispenser on your arm, which sends the filament under your skin, stings only faintly. It feels like getting flicked with a finger. It is way less painful than pricking your finger with a needle until you bleed, many times a day, and I was an idiot and should have done this before.

The sensor itself is fine. I don’t feel it most of the time, unless I change my clothes with much vigor and abandon, in which case I do have to be careful. You can pick where you put the sensor; most people pick their non-dominant arm. It’s water-resistant, so you can swim and shower with it, and you don’t have to charge it.

Once I had the sensor on, I opened the Lingo app, registered, and waved my phone next to it. Done! I was ready to start monitoring.

Sugar Rush

If you’ve never monitored your blood glucose continuously, you’re probably in for a few surprises. Eating in a way that makes sense to a glucose monitor does not always mean eating healthier, objectively. For example, consider a typical lunch for me, which is a bowl of homemade pureed carrot soup and whole wheat bread. Because carrots and bread are carbs, this spikes my blood sugar to an alarming extent. An ultra-processed protein peanut butter bar, however, barely moves my blood sugar at all, even though if you’re healthy, one is not necessarily better than the other.

If you reduce the number of carbs you consume, you will reach ketosis, which is when your body starts burning your body fat instead of your readily available blood glucose for energy, because you have none. This is different, and less dangerous, than getting ketosis as a diabetes complication, but I still hate it.

I put the Lingo on during CES, where I did make one alarming discovery—I was walking around way too much for the amount of food that I was eating, and I was going hypoglycemic during the night. I thought my sleep disturbances were just due to work, stress, and being away from my family, but no, I was totally bottoming out.

First revealed last December through a Chinese retailer, Sharge’s new 65W GaN charger is now available globally. As the name implies, the Retractable 65 features an integrated USB-C cable that fully retracts when not in use so you won’t be scrambling to find one when a device is about to die. It’s available in white or black for $39.90 and while it comes with US style folding prongs it can be ordered with EU and UK outlet adapters.

The Retractable 65 can deliver up to a maximum of 65W of power with a single device connected, so you can use it to charge larger devices like laptops. In addition to the retractable USC-cable that’s just over 27 inches in length, the charger includes an additional USB-C port. Two devices can be charged simultaneously, but while Sharge hasn’t detailed how power is split between the two ports, the charger’s maximum output drops to 60W while both are in use.

The Retractable 65 joins a growing number of chargers and portable power solutions featuring retractable cables, thanks in part to most devices now supporting USB-C so companies like Sharge don’t have to accommodate several different charging ports.

The big question with this trend is how durable are the internal mechanisms used to retract integrated cables? As someone who likes to fidget with gadgets all day (and who broke the spring-loaded memory card eject mechanism on a Sony camera while fidgeting with it) I will undoubtedly be doing the same with chargers like this.

Will it survive someone mindlessly yanking out the cable and watching it go flying back into the charger all day like a tape measure? On its website Sharge claims the mechanism can survive “10,000+ stretch cycles” without breaking, but we’ve reached out to the company for more details about the charger’s durability — including if a broken retraction mechanism is covered under warranty — and will update this story when it responds.

U.S. government contractor Conduent, which provides technology to support services such as child support and food assistance, has confirmed that a recent outage was caused by a cybersecurity incident. 

Conduent confirmed the disruption, which left some U.S. residents without access to support payments, to TechCrunch on Tuesday but declined to say whether the outage was related to a compromise of its systems. 

In an updated statement sent to TechCrunch on Wednesday, Conduent spokesperson Sean Collins confirmed that the disruption was due to a “due to a cybersecurity incident”, the nature of which was not confirmed. 

“This incident was contained and all systems have been restored,” Collins said. “Maintaining system integrity and functionality is as important to us as it is to our clients.”

Collins declined to share any further details about the incident, including whether the company was aware of any data exfiltration.

Almost four years to the day since his father was taken into custody for his part in the January 6 Capitol riot, Jackson Reffitt watched in complete shock as President Donald Trump signed an executive order that pardoned and commuted sentences for his father and some 1,500 other insurrectionists.

Reffitt has spent most of the last four years in hiding, constantly on the move every few months. He was the person who tipped off the FBI about his father’s involvement in the insurrection. Jackson’s father, Guy Reffitt, was a member of the Texas Three Percenter group when he stormed the Capitol wearing body armor and carrying a pistol and zip ties. He was caught on camera urging other rioters to storm the Capitol building and told members of his militia group that he intended to drag House Speaker Nancy Pelosi out of the building by her ankles, “with her head hitting every step on the way down.”

“Trump himself has given him a presidential pardon to let him be free. That validation is a once-in-a-lifetime kind of experience that he’s never going to get again,” Reffitt tells WIRED. “I can’t imagine what he’s going to be willing to do now. It could get a whole hell of a lot worse.”

Reffitt is “terrified” about what is going to happen next, and has armed himself with a handgun and a rifle to protect himself and his boyfriend. Over the last few years, he has been targeted, harassed and threatened online.

Since Trump pardoned everyone, the threats are becoming even more intense.

“[In the last 24 hours] it’s gotten worse than ever,” Reffitt tells WIRED. “I think just because, yet again, the validation that Trump is bringing is just making people a whole lot more emboldened to just say some vile, disgusting shit.”

Reffitt is not the only family member of a released January 6 prisoner who is concerned about the fallout from Trump’s blanket pardons. Tasha Adams, the ex-wife of Oath Keeper leader Stewart Rhodes who had his 22-year sentence for seditious conspiracy commuted by Trump, is also worried about what might happen. “Stewart is out of prison now and, frankly, I could really use a bit of a run fund, in case it comes to that,” Adams wrote on her GoFundMe page on Tuesday, hours after her ex-husband was released from prison.

The investigation into the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol became the biggest in Justice Department history, and left many far-right militia groups in the country in ruins. But with a single pen stroke on Monday night, Trump has reinvigorated the militia movement, freeing their most prominent figures, including Rhodes and Proud Boy leader Enrique Tarrio.

“One of things I’m most concerned about is the risk of groups that were decimated after J6 coming back stronger, especially since many of them had their sentences commuted or were outright pardoned,” says Luke Baumgartner, a research fellow at George Washington University’s Program on Extremism. “I wouldn’t be shocked if the Oath Keepers began making more appearances, and seeing the Proud Boys accelerate their culture war tactics, especially against the LGBTQ community, like we’ve seen before. Their leaders are free, they have a lot to catch up on, and they are likely feeling vindicated.”

Got a Tip?

Are you a family member of a January 6 prisoner who is being released? We’d like to hear from you. Using a nonwork phone or computer, contact David Gilbert at david.gilbert@wired.com or securely on Signal on DavidGilbert.01

Guy Reffitt was the first rioter to go on trial for his actions on January 6 and initially received a sentence of seven years and three months, which was reduced by seven months in December after a Supreme Court ruling that led to the dismissal of an obstruction charge against him.

“I’m a very strong Patriot, with fabulous support from Patriot Warriors, as we navigate troubled waters,” Reffitt wrote to one acquaintance from jail in a text message submitted by the prosecution at his December resentencing.

A plan to build a system of data centers for artificial intelligence has been revealed in a White House press conference, with Masayoshi Son, Sam Altman, and Larry Ellison joining Donald Trump to announce The Stargate Project. Their companies, Softbank, OpenAI, and Oracle (respectively), along with MGX are listed as “initial equity funders” for $500 billion in investments over the next four years, “building new AI infrastructure for OpenAI in the United States.”

According to a statement from OpenAI, “Arm, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Oracle, and OpenAI” are the initial tech partners, with a buildout “currently underway” starting in Texas as other sites across the country are evaluated. It also says that “Oracle, NVIDIA, and OpenAI will closely collaborate to build and operate this computing system.”

It’s only January, but the recent hack of U.S. edtech giant PowerSchool has the potential to be one of the biggest breaches of the year. 

PowerSchool, which provides K-12 software to more than 18,000 schools to support some 60 million students in the United States, confirmed the breach in early January. The California-based company, which Bain Capital acquired for $5.6 billion in 2024, said at the time that hackers used compromised credentials to breach its customer support portal, allowing further access to the company’s school information system, PowerSchool SIS, which schools use to manage student records, grades, attendance, and enrollment. 

“On December 28, 2024, we became aware of a potential cybersecurity incident involving unauthorized access to certain PowerSchool SIS information through one of our community-focused customer portals, PowerSource,” PowerSchool spokesperson Beth Keebler told TechCrunch. 

PowerSchool has been open about certain aspects of the breach. Keebler told TechCrunch that the PowerSource portal, for example, did not support MFA at the time of the incident, while PowerSchool did. But a number of important questions remain unanswered.

This week, TechCrunch sent PowerSchool a list of outstanding questions about the incident, which has the potential to impact millions of students in the U.S. Keebler declined to answer our questions, saying that all updates related to the breach would be posted on the company’s SIS incident page, which hasn’t been updated since January 17.

PowerSchool told customers it would share an incident report from cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, which the company hired to investigate the breach, on January 17. But several sources who work at schools impacted by the breach told TechCrunch that they have yet to receive it.

The company’s customers also have lots of unanswered questions, forcing those impacted by the breach to work together to investigate the hack. 

Here are some of the questions that remain unanswered. 

It’s not known how many schools, or students, are affected

TechCrunch has heard from schools affected by the PowerSchool breach that the impact could be “massive.” However, PowerSchool’s incident page makes no mention of the scale of the breach, and the company has repeatedly declined to say how many schools and individuals are affected. 

In a statement sent to TechCrunch last week, Keebler said PowerSchool had “identified the schools and districts whose data was involved in this incident,” but would not be sharing the names of those involved. 

However, communications from impacted school districts give a general idea of the size of the breach. The Toronto District School Board (TDSB), Canada’s largest school board that serves approximately 240,000 students each year, said this week that hackers may have accessed some 40 years’ worth of student data. Similarly, California’s Menlo Park City School District confirmed that hackers accessed information on all current students and staff — which respectively number around 2,700 students and 400 staff — as well as students and staff dating back to the start of the 2009-10 school year.

The scale of the data theft is also unknown. PowerSchool also hasn’t said how much data was accessed during the cyberattack, but in a communication shared with its customers earlier this month, seen by TechCrunch, the company confirmed that hackers stole “sensitive personal information” on students and teachers, including some students’ Social Security numbers, grades, demographics, and medical information. TechCrunch has also heard from multiple schools affected by the incident that “all” of their historical student and teacher data was accessed. 

One person who works at an affected school district told TechCrunch that the stolen data includes highly sensitive student data, including information about parental access rights to their children, including restraining orders, and information about when certain students need to take their medications. 

PowerSchool hasn’t said how much it paid the hackers responsible for the breach

PowerSchool told TechCrunch that the organization had taken “appropriate steps” to prevent the stolen data from being published. In the communication shared with customers, the company confirmed that it worked with a cyber-extortion incident response company to negotiate with the threat actors responsible for the breach. 

This all but confirms that PowerSchool paid a ransom to the attackers that breached its systems. However, when asked by TechCrunch, the company refused to say how much it paid, nor how much the hackers demanded.

We don’t know what evidence PowerSchool received that the stolen data has been deleted

In a statement shared with TechCrunch earlier this month, PowerSchool’s Keebler said the organization “does not anticipate the data being shared or made public” and that it “believes the data has been deleted without any further replication or dissemination.”

However, the company has repeatedly declined to say what evidence it has received to suggest that the stolen data had been deleted. Early reports said the company received video proof, but PowerSchool wouldn’t confirm or deny when asked by TechCrunch. 

Even then, proof of deletion is by no means a guarantee that the hackers are still not in possession of the data; the U.K.’s recent takedown of the LockBit ransomware gang unearthed evidence that the gang still had data belonging to victims who had paid a ransom demand. 

We don’t yet know who was behind the attack

One of the biggest unknowns about the PowerSchool cyberattack is who was responsible. The company has been in communication with the hackers but has refused to reveal their identities. CyberSteward, the Canadian incident response organization that PowerSchool worked with to negotiate, did not respond to TechCrunch’s questions.

Do you have more information about the PowerSchool data breach? We’d love to hear from you. From a non-work device, you can contact Carly Page securely on Signal at +44 1536 853968 or via email at carly.page@techcrunch.com.