• Netflix has released the first five minutes of The Night Agent season 2
• They show Peter Sutherland running for his life when a mission goes wrong
• The hugely popular spy thriller returns on our screens on January 23

The Night Agent season 2 is almost here – and, to celebrate its forthcoming launch, Netflix has released its first five minutes early.

Two years after the spy thriller series became the latest TV Original to enjoy smash hit status on Netflix, its second season is due to make its debut on the streaming giant this Thursday (January 23). Understandably, excitement is growing ahead of The Night Agent‘s return, and in a bid to tap into that growing fan fervor, Netflix has dropped an extended look at the season 2 premiere’s opening sequence.

The price of Worldcoin token WLD surged nearly 20% to reach a high of $2.30, as the biometric crypto project reacted to the latest AI-related developments.

On Jan. 21, CBS News reported that U.S. President Donald Trump is set to announce a new AI initiative backed by private sector heavyweights OpenAI, SoftBank, and Oracle. The AI infrastructure investment project, reportedly named Stargate, will focus on advancing artificial intelligence in the U.S. and globally.

The news appears to have jolted World (WLD), formerly Worldcoin, token holders, with the cryptocurrency jumping from lows of $1.90 to an intraday high of $2.30. This rally briefly pushed WLD to the top of the rankings for biggest gainers among the top 200 coins by market cap. 

However, the token quickly pared some of these gains and was trading around $2.12 at the time of writing.

World, developed with contributions from Tools for Humanity, is a crypto project co-founded in 2019 by OpenAI’s Sam Altman. The venture capital-backed proof-of-humanity project has previously rallied on news tied to OpenAI. 

According to CBS News, Stargate will see OpenAI, SoftBank, and Oracle collectively invest an initial $100 billion into the project, with the first major milestone being a state-of-the-art data center in Texas.

The report also stated that Masayoshi Son (SoftBank CEO), Sam Altman (OpenAI CEO), and Larry Ellison (Oracle CEO) are expected to join President Trump at the White House for the official announcement.

In the video, the trigger is pressed down a tad before a final push releases it from the console. As the Joy-Con moves away, you can also see a small cylinder receding back into the top part of the inside of the controller; to me, that indicates that when you push the trigger, you’re actually pushing out that cylinder to help bump the Joy-Con out.

Here’s a GIF of the relevant part of the video:

The mechanism to remove the Joy-Con controllers looks similar to what was included in a 3D-printed mockup that accessories-maker Genki brought to CES.

A significant SOL options block trade crossed the tape on Deribit via the OTC network Paradigm late Monday, suggesting expectations for a price rally to $400 by the end of February.

The trade, structured as a bull call spread, involved a long position in the $280 call and a simultaneous short position in the $400 call, with 10,000 contracts for each leg and both legs set to expire on Feb. 28, according to block flows tracked by Amberdata. Block trades are large orders usually placed by institutions executed over-the-counter (OTC), outside the exchange’s order book.

A bull call spread achieves its maximum profit when the underlying asset’s price is at or above the short call’s strike price, which is $400 in this case. The buyer is betting that the spread will move past $280, reaching up to $400 with a breakeven around $300, according to Amberdata’s Director of Derivatives, Greg Magadini.

Importantly, the downside risk in a bull call spread is limited to the total premium paid to establish the strategy, protecting the trader from larger losses if the market declines. Currently, SOL is trading at $254 after hitting record highs above $290 over the weekend, as per CoinDesk data.

Donald Trump relished the thought that his return to the White House would give him the power to take down the “deep state” actors who once opposed him — and almost sent him to prison.

Just hours after he was sworn in as America’s 47th president, his vengeance campaign was under way.

Among the early targets was John Bolton, Trump’s former national security adviser and one of the president’s harshest critics. First Bolton’s security clearance was revoked. Then Trump ordered the removal of the protective detail assigned to Bolton in 2019 after threats to his life from Iran.

“We’re not going to have security detail on people for the rest of their lives — why should we? I thought he was a very dumb person,” said Trump on Tuesday.

Bolton said he was “disappointed but not surprised”.

That may just be the beginning as Trump moves to crush perceived opponents in government, homing in on targets from intelligence agencies to the military, financial and business regulators, and within the law enforcement apparatus itself.

It could mark a new era for the US — and the way it is ruled, with favour and punishment dispensed according to the whims of a leader, not the judgments of career officials guided by the long-agreed rules of their institutions.

For Trump, it is a moment of vindication as he roots out the officials who thwarted his agenda during his first term or deepened his legal jeopardy as federal criminal cases mounted against him in 2023.

“Never again will the immense power of the state be weaponised to persecute political opponents,” he said in his inaugural address at the Capitol on Monday.

Hours later, he signed an executive order on the “weaponisation” of government, authorising sweeping reviews of US intelligence and other agencies to correct “past misconduct” through “appropriate action”.

“It’s an open-ended, anti-resistance move,” said Yuval Levin, a senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, referring to the order.

He said it was “too early to tell” whether Trump was simply sending a message for civil servants to “stay out of the way” of his radical agenda or “to rearrange the bureaucracy so that it’s more completely at the service of the president”.

Intelligence agencies are a particular focus for Trump. In another of the executive orders signed during Monday’s night’s blitz, Trump stripped the security clearances of 50 former intelligence officials, claiming that they co-ordinated with former president Joe Biden’s campaign to discredit reporting about his scandal-prone son Hunter Biden.

The order echoed language used by Kash Patel, Trump’s controversial pick to head the FBI who is awaiting Senate confirmation.

Patel has long argued for the removal of security clearances to eradicate the “deep state”.

A former US intelligence official said the measure would have a “chilling effect” in the agencies. “This is a clear sign that Trump will use clearances for political reasons. That will make people wary to speak their minds.”

“Anything that suggests clearances are being manipulated for political purposes will hurt trust with the intelligence community,” said Emily Harding, director of the intelligence, national security and technology programme at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Trump has also sent a clear message to the Pentagon, where just minutes after his inauguration officials removed a portrait of his former top military adviser — and eventually arch critic — retired General Mark Milley. On Monday, Trump also fired Linda Fagan, the commandant of the coastguard, with a senior official saying she had “excessive focus on diversity, equity and inclusion” and mishandled border security.

But Trump’s plans go far beyond America’s security apparatus. The executive order on “weaponisation” called for more scrutiny of the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Trade Commission, along with other enforcement agencies such as the justice department.

Pam Bondi, Trump’s pick for attorney-general, has vowed that the “investigators will be investigated” and “the bad” prosecutors would be prosecuted.

“I am concerned that this authorises the very weaponisation itself of the government against perceived enemies,” said Ryan Goodman, professor at the New York University School of Law.

“Ordinarily there may be nothing wrong with retrospective investigations into potential government wrongdoing,” he added. But this order “has been teed up with nominees in mind who would come into the government with an enemies list. That is a very worrisome combination for the state of democracy in the country.”

Trump previously called for the prosecution of opponents, including Nancy Pelosi, former Democratic Speaker of the House, and former vice-president Kamala Harris, whom he defeated in the 2024 general election. He has also threatened to appoint a special prosecutor to “go after” Joe Biden.

Biden himself took this threat — and others — seriously enough to issue pre-emptive pardons to members of his own family and top potential targets such as Milley and members of the panel that probed the January 6 2021 attack on the Capitol Building, including former congresswoman Liz Cheney, just before he left office.

Trump is also taking aim at federal workers, vowing to strip employment protections, which were strengthened under Biden, for tens of thousands of career civil servants in “policy-related” jobs — a way to easily fire government workers who balk at his agenda. 

Meanwhile, as he was stripping security clearances from his perceived foes, he issued a separate executive order to immediately grant temporary clearances to “ qualified and trusted personnel” of his choosing.

“Our foreign adversaries are salivating at this Trump Executive Order that grants immediate Top Secret clearances to individuals without the proper vetting and background checks,” Olivia Troye, a former Trump administration official turned critic of the president, wrote on X.

Popular caller ID app Truecaller has long left iPhone users at a disadvantage by not offering the caller information in real-time — a feature its Android users have enjoyed for some time. Today, that changes as the company is rolling out an update that brings real-time caller ID support to its iOS subscribers.

The company was able to implement the feature because Apple introduced Live Caller ID Lookup in iOS 18, allowing third-party caller ID apps to securely make a call to their server to get information about the caller. Notably, this is also the first major release from the Swedish company after the co-founders Alan Mamedi and Nami Zarringhalam stepped down from the day-to-day operations in November 2024.

Today, Truecaller has more than 2.6 million paying subscribers, of which only around 750,000 of them are on iOS. However, 40% of Truecaller’s revenue is from iOS subscriptions. The company also gets a 5X conversation rate to its premium tier on iOS compared to Android as well as 80% higher revenue from an iPhone subscriber.

Considering the importance of the iPhone to Truecaller’s bottom line, the company continues to develop its iOS app.

In 2022, Truecaller relaunched the iOS app to focus on better spam detection, thanks to Apple allowing the app to store a larger set of numbers locally.

“It did improve the overall call identification. But that wasn’t enough because in countries like India, there is a huge calling activity, and not all this would be available in the offline database,” Truecaller Product Director Nakul Kabra told TechCrunch in an interview.

India presents other challenges for the company, as well, including the arrival of a service, Calling Name Presentation (commonly called CNAP, designed to curb spam. The service, currently being rolled out by local telcos, could eventually emerge as a competitor to Truecaller.

Truecaller also updated its iOS app in 2023 with a live caller ID experience, but that involved a step requiring interaction with Siri and also wasn’t real-time.

Until iOS 18’s release, Truecaller had to rely on a locally saved dictionary of limited phone numbers on iOS.

To enable the new feature, Truecaller built a new server architecture and created a separate, encrypted database for iOS, alongside its existing larger database for Android users. Apple’s Phone app makes encrypted requests to this database and gets encrypted responses that are only decrypted on the client (iPhone) to show the caller ID in real time. This process is called “homomorphic encryption,” as the computations use encrypted data instead of decrypting them first, while decryption happens on the client to display caller information if it matches with the data stored on the server.

Kabra told TechCrunch that Truecaller had built a way to sync two databases to keep the data synced between them.

“At the moment, there might be a bit of a delay because these requests get queued up, and the encryption that we do is very time-consuming — and very expensive… But it should not be more than a few hours,” he said.

TechCrunch tested live caller ID under Truecaller’s beta program last week and noticed that the feature does provide caller information in real-time in most cases, though it sometimes misses.

Truecaller’s premium tier on iOS starts at $9.99 a month, per individual, or $74.99/year. The company also offers its family plan on iOS starting at $14.99/month or $99.99/year and the top-end Gold subscription at $249 a year.

Users can enable the Live Caller ID Lookup feature through iPhone Settings > Apps > Phone > Call Blocking & Identification.

On iOS 18, Truecaller also updated its interface with the caller’s name appearing in bold over their number. Now, Truecaller is working on support for images to show up in the caller ID for its iOS users.