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We’re your go-to infotainment hub, keeping you updated on everything Web 3.0, business, fashion, lifestyle, and education. @CheatKott_Godfather
🎵 Apple hid a working iPod inside a 404 page
The iPod turns 25 today — the device that made "1,000 songs in your pocket" feel like a magic trick and rewired the music industry in the process.
Apple's quiet tribute: a fully interactive virtual iPod living on the Apple Music 404 page. Click wheel, menus, 1,029 playable tracks — no subscription needed. The library is peak early-2000s: Baha Men, blink-182, Eminem. Hold the center button on the About screen and Brick appears — the hidden Breakout clone from the original hardware.
Best on mobile, where the touchscreen actually feels right. Why Apple engineered something most users will never find — who knows. Legends don't really need a reason.
Via Notebook Check.
Engadget
💙 Mass Effect fans are holding the line — 200,000 signatures in a weekend
EA shut down BioWare and cancelled Mass Effect 5 — the studio behind Shepard and a trilogy people are still replaying today. The #SaveMassEffect petition crossed 200,000 verified signatures in its first weekend.
Both Shepard actors showed up. Jennifer Hale sketched a vision of a fan Kickstarter and investor collective bringing the series back. Mark Meer kept it short: "Hold the line. Go sign that petition."
The Destiny community joined in — fitting, since those players organised earlier this year when Sony froze Destiny 2 content, and Bungie reversed course. Developer Owlcat Games pinned the petition too, noting that *The Expanse* TV show was once saved by fans the same way, per IGN.
Whether lightning strikes twice, nobody knows. But 200,000 people in a weekend is more than nostalgia.
💸 $1.37 billion verdict — and the defendants are gone
NovaTech posed as a licensed hedge fund and promised 2–4% a week. It was a pyramid: payouts came from new deposits. It collapsed in 2023, locking out tens of thousands of investors.
New York AG Letitia James is chasing $1.37 billion from founders Cynthia and Eddy Petion — who fled the U.S. before an August 2025 default judgment and never responded to the suit.
Recruitment ran through Haitian immigrant prayer groups and WhatsApp chats in Creole. Over 11,000 New Yorkers were among the victims worldwide, per Decrypt.
The pitch was faith. The exit was a one-way flight.
📌 Daily Recap · Oct 26
📺 Fire TV Stick 4K hits all-time low at $29.99
🎬 Tom Skerritt, 93 — the face you always knew
🎩 The Gentlemen already greenlit for Season 3
🏆 Zendaya goes for best actress in Dune finale
Someone you know definitely had a screen-free day — send this their way
CHEATKOTT - Your Daily News
🎬 Frodo, Legolas, and Begbie walk into a Guy Ritchie series
The Gentlemen has quietly become one of the more impressive TV reinventions in recent memory — Ritchie adapted his own 2019 film into a Netflix series and landed it squarely. Season 2 isn't even out yet, and Season 3 is already rolling, with filming underway in the UK and Morocco.
Netflix confirmed the new cast wave: Elijah Wood, Orlando Bloom, and Robert Carlyle join returning leads Theo James and Kaya Scodelario. Also incoming — Dexter Fletcher, Bruna Marquezine, Ed Speleers, Saffron Burrows, and Bugzy Malone.
Ritchie, characteristically, kept it grand:
"The ambition of The Gentlemen has accelerated, the world has expanded and the consequences carry weight"
💡 Amazon's new Fire TV Stick 4K just hit half price
Announced just weeks ago, it's already down to $29.99 — a 50% drop at both Amazon and Best Buy, and an all-time low price before most people even knew it existed.
The headline upgrade isn't the discount though: the new Stick finally draws power straight from your TV's USB port, no wall adapter needed. It does 4K/60fps, HDR10 Plus, Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5.3, and comes with a redesigned remote — asymmetrical grip, more tactile buttons.
One catch: sideloading apps, a feature some older models had, is gone. Progress giveth, progress taketh away.
Via The Verge.
📌 Daily Recap · Oct 25
🕵️ OpenAI exec room had a secret USB spy
🚗 Tesla Roadster showed up nine years late
🎬 GTA 6 trailer finally gives Jason a voice
🌽 Chinese rocket debris lands in a Minnesota cornfield
Someone you know definitely missed at least three of these today — pass it along
CHEATKOTT - Your Daily News
🎬 GTA 6 has a launch trailer — and it has actual story weight
November 19 is locked, and Rockstar's launch trailer finally gives the game a face: Jason, bearded, buffing a boat, narrating that he left the army badly and nobody gives loans to people like him. Then special-forces flashbacks, Lucia in an ankle monitor under a running shower, Vice City in pieces.
🔸 Captured on PS5 — "Plays Best on PS5" opens the trailer
🔸 Score by Justice, with Tame Impala, SZA and King Gizzard
🔸 The sweat system yes, really makes its cinematic debut
No gameplay yet, just cinematics. IGN confirms GTA 6 is already eligible for The Game Awards 2026 — someone is very confident about that date.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rz1B4B2yBZY
🕵️ Toilet-paper tradecraft at OpenAI
Abdulrahman Alfozan, a 35-year-old Saudi engineer, spent over a year at OpenAI before allegedly planting a USB recording device in its badge-access executive conference room — the one used for discussions on government deals, technical roadmaps, and commercial partnerships. He wrapped it in toilet paper and tucked it behind the TV. OpenAI found it two days later.
The company didn't fire him immediately. It quietly cut his system access while the FBI built a case. On October 5, a newly installed camera caught Alfozan returning to retrieve the bug. Arrest and dismissal were timed to the same Friday. He faces up to five years and a $250,000 fine, per Ars Technica.
Toilet paper. At a company teaching machines to think.
📌 Daily Recap · Oct 24
💸 Billion phishing messages sent via one scam marketplace
🎬 Villeneuve wraps Dune trilogy after five desert years
🎭 Depp's Scrooge prosthetics fooled his own co-star
🎮 GTA VI trailer drops a full month early
Someone in your life just surfaced from a long meeting — send them this
CHEATKOTT - Your Daily News
🎬 Johnny Depp's own co-star didn't recognize him on set
Depp has built a career on disappearing into characters — Jack Sparrow, the Mad Hatter — and Ebenezer looks like no exception. IGN has an exclusive look at the prosthetic work for his take on Scrooge, and co-star Trammell Tillman puts it plainly:
"The first time I saw him in full makeup, I did not recognize him."
💸 A billion phishing messages — just since January
YAM Store was a full-blown scam marketplace: buy hijacked Microsoft and Google accounts, pick from 2,300+ impersonation templates for banks and police departments, hit send. Since January 2026, the operation pushed over a billion malicious messages to 75,000 organizations in 150 countries — 750 million targeting Microsoft customers alone.
Microsoft and Japan's National Police Agency traced it all back to YAM Store and two phishing kits, CoGUI and Iron Man. Result: 20,000+ accounts disabled, 100,000+ domains blocked, core infrastructure seized.
Those texts about a fake parking ticket or a missing parcel? Came from exactly this place. The Verge reports the factory is now shut down.
📌 Daily Recap · Oct 23
🎵 Sony's gold Walkman costs as much as a car
💸 Scammers hit victims twice — fraud, then fake recovery
🎮 GTA 6 goes gold, November 19 is locked in
🍎 A 1976 Apple I with Jobs' handwriting fetched $1.1M
🐦 Kelly Clarkson's snubbed bird is now a Halloween costume
Tag whoever was heads-down in meetings all day — they missed a lot.
CHEATKOTT - Your Daily News
💡 Jobs' handwriting included
The Apple I "Hatfield" — one of 74 verified surviving units from 1976, still in working condition — sold at Bonhams for $1,148,200, well past the expected ceiling of $800,000.
The lot includes Woz's signature and a letter from Steve Jobs personally asking the original owner to send in his motherboard for an Apple II upgrade. Hatfield declined, later sold the machine for $40,000, and spent it on dinners in New Orleans.
The same computer fetched $671,400 in 2013. Apple's 50th anniversary year, per Apple Insider, clearly added a premium.
Engadget
💸 The factory that recycled its own victims
The scheme ran in two acts: lure Russian-speaking Americans into a fake investment platform, then approach the same victims again — this time selling fake "recovery" services. Tens of millions extracted that way.
Last week, Brooklyn prosecutors and the FBI dismantled the backbone: 241 websites shut down, 112 servers seized. No arrests — but the goal was never that. As long as the servers ran, new domains could be spun up overnight. Now they can't.
The backdrop, per Bloomberg: Americans reported $11.4 billion in crypto fraud losses in 2024 — up 22% year-on-year. No product required, just persuasion.
Cointelegraph
💸 $1.37 billion, raised through prayer groups and WhatsApp
NovaTech sold itself as a crypto and forex trading platform — and collected $1.16 billion from investors between 2019 and 2023. About $26 million ever reached an actual trading desk. The rest disappeared.
New York AG Letitia James is asking a court to order founders Cynthia and Eddy Petion to repay $1.37 billion in funds and interest. They were found liable by default in August 2025 after simply not showing up. Four recruiters separately settled for nearly $6 million.
The scheme ran through Haitian and other immigrant communities via prayer circles and WhatsApp, promising high returns. Over 11,000 New Yorkers lost tens of millions, per Cointelegraph.
Prayer raised a billion. The courts will try to return it.
🚗 One color to rule the robocar
The industry spent years arguing over how a driverless car should signal there's no one at the wheel. NHTSA just picked an answer: cyan.
The agency is proposing cyan marker lamps as the universal "ADS is driving" signal. Red, amber, white, and flashing blue are already claimed by brakes, turn signals, and emergency vehicles — cyan is the one gap left. The lights would be optional, but any manufacturer adding them must follow identical rules on color, brightness, and placement.
As The Verge notes, this lands while NHTSA is simultaneously auditing the Tesla Cybercab for missing mirrors, pedals, and a steering wheel — all still required today. The rules are catching up. Just not at the same speed.
🪙 Crypto check
₿ BTC $79,512 📉 -0.6% (24h)
Ξ ETH $2,301 📉 -0.6% (24h)
😨/🤑 Fear & Greed: 48 — Neutral
🎬 Zendaya is going for lead — and going big
In the first two *Dune* films, Zendaya's Chani was a supporting actress campaign. For Villeneuve's finale, per Variety, the bid moves to best actress — because Chani is now at the center of the story, not its edges.
Set two decades after Paul Atreides seized the Imperium, *Part Three* puts Chani inside a sprawling conspiracy rather than watching from the margins. The role grew; the category followed.
The curious part: she's running three films this season simultaneously — *The Drama* (lead), Nolan's *The Odyssey* (supporting), and *Dune*. Two Emmys, a Golden Globe — and zero Oscar nominations yet. Interesting arithmetic.
In theaters and IMAX December 18.
🎬 Tom Skerritt. 93. End of watch.
Commander Viper in *Top Gun*, Captain Dallas in *Alien*, Emmy-winning Sheriff Brock in *Picket Fences* — the actor you always recognized before you remembered his name. Skerritt died Wednesday of natural causes.
"The world knew him through his acting. We knew him for his humor, wisdom and love," his family told The Hollywood Reporter.
🪙 Crypto check
₿ BTC $80,054 📉 -0.6% (24h)
Ξ ETH $2,318 📉 -1.2% (24h)
😨/🤑 Fear & Greed: 50 — Neutral
🌽 Surprise in the cornfield
A Minnesota farmer combining his harvest found a circular metal object 11 feet across sitting among the stalks. The county sheriff called in federal agencies. It's debris from a Chinese rocket.
LandSpace's Zhuque-2E launched from the Gobi Desert on September 15, deployed 10 satellites, then reignited its engine and sent the stage arcing over the American Midwest. Witnesses across three states filmed streaks of fire in the night sky. Six weeks later — hello from the cornfield.
Nobody was hurt. No international rule penalises dropping hardware in a foreign field. Someone will probably send a harvest bill, though.
Ars Technica has the details.
🚗 Tesla's Roadster finally arrived — nine years and four delays later
In 2017, Tesla took $50,000 deposits on a Roadster it promised "in a few years." It delayed in 2020, 2021, 2023, and 2024. Last night in Waco, Texas, the car finally showed up.
It drove up an inverted ramp, spun around, landed softly, then leapt over a moving lineup of Cybertruck, Semi, and Model 3 — SpaceX thrusters and fans doing the work. Zero to 60 mph: one second.
Musk on safety: "If safety is your number one goal, do not buy the Roadster."
He called it "the best of the last of the human-driven cars." From the guy staking Tesla's future on full self-driving, that's somewhere between a toast and a eulogy.
TechCrunch
🪙 Crypto check
₿ BTC $80,534 📉 -0.3% (24h)
Ξ ETH $2,346 📉 -1.4% (24h)
😨/🤑 Fear & Greed: 54 — Neutral
🎮 One last look before Vice City opens
Rockstar just dropped a "launch" trailer for GTA VI — a full month before the actual launch. Unconventional timing, but 90 seconds of neon-soaked Vice City running on PS5 makes a solid case.
The notable addition: French electronic duo Justice is scoring the game. If the trailer is any indication, they nailed the vibe. Rockstar has always treated its soundtracks as events in their own right, and this one is no different.
The official story summary, for the uninitiated:
Jason and Lucia have always known the deck is stacked against them. But when an easy score goes wrong, they find themselves on the darkest side of the sunniest place in America.
🎬 Arrakis as a prison sentence
Denis Villeneuve has spent the last five years living on Arrakis — *Dune: Part One* in 2021, *Part Two* in 2024, and the trilogy closer landing December 18, 2026. At some point the desert becomes the walls.
He told Empire he came back for the finale not out of nostalgia but exhaustion — precisely so he wouldn't go soft on the material. And to actually escape once it's done, he needed something drastic.
"When I was asked to do the next Bond, I said: 'OK, this is what I need.'"
🪙 Crypto check
₿ BTC $80,740 📉 -1.2% (24h)
Ξ ETH $2,378 📉 -1.1% (24h)
😨/🤑 Fear & Greed: 51 — Neutral
🎬 The bird that wasn't for sale is now a Halloween costume
Quick backstory: Kelly Clarkson walked into Brooklyn shop Art of Play, tried to buy Molly — a singing, dancing wooden bird automaton — and says a staffer implied she couldn't afford the $15,000 price tag. She invoked *Pretty Woman*. The store said Molly was never for sale. The co-owner jokingly relisted her at $15 million. The internet did the rest.
Amazon caught up within days. The Clarkson costume: yellow crewneck, baseball cap, baggy jeans, backpack, phone mid-rage-post. The Molly costume: bird suit, beak, cardboard branch, handwritten "$15 MILLION" tag. Works as a couple or solo — add a "NOT FOR SALE" sign and even the chronically offline will get it.
The bird stays in Brooklyn. The costume ships to your door, per Variety.
🎮 GTA 6 is no longer a horizon
Thirteen years is a long time to live off one trailer. GTA VI has officially gone gold — Rockstar dropped the launch trailer on October 15, locking in November 19 for PS5 and Xbox Series X|S. No more "coming soon."
The trailer centers on Jason and Lucia, a partnership that starts with a job and ends up somewhere considerably more complicated. Leonida — think Miami with extra consequences — is the backdrop. Getting rich is the goal. Getting out is the plan.
One detail worth noting: the original score was composed by French electronic duo Justice, debuting with a track called "Flower in a Hurricane." Rockstar has always known how to pick its collaborators.
Via Collider.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qqzj-j4qk0E
💡 Sony's new Walkman costs as much as a used car
The company that invented the portable music player has no interest in making it affordable. The NW-WM1ZM3 is built around a 99.99% pure oxygen-free copper chassis — gold-plated, and Sony insists that's not just flex. The official line: the gold treatment ensures a stable ground connection, delivering powerful bass and "smooth, extended high frequencies."
It also packs 35 hours of battery life and a 5.5-inch screen. Preorders are open now; units ship in January.
For context: Sony's previous gold Walkman, the NW-WM1ZM2, launched in 2022 at $3,200 — and now trades on eBay for around $1,500. The audiophile market is remarkable in that "used gold media player" reads as a perfectly reasonable product category.
IGN