🎬 Disney+ is raising prices for the fourth time in four years

$6.99 in 2019, $21.49 in 2026 — 207% in seven years. Disney+ and Hulu are hiking again, and the real question is what you're getting for it.

Netflix makes originals, Apple TV+ wins awards, Hulu has The Bear and Shogun. Disney+ is mostly running on Marvel, Star Wars, and nostalgia. The ad-supported bundle at $12.49 is the only offer that feels honest.

Raising prices while subscribers cut back on everything else is a bet that habit beats a calculator. Sometimes it does. It's still a risky bet.

Someone in your group chat thinks streaming killed the cable bill. Show them the math.

Collider

📌 Daily Recap · Oct 04

🤖 AI fools half of callers into thinking it's human
🗡️ Nine million Brits glued to celebrity backstabbing TV
🩸 Mike Flanagan finally makes a Carrie adaptation worth watching
💸 Disney+ costs 207% more than it did in 2019

Somebody near you was heads-down all day — this is their five-second catch-up

CHEATKOTT - Your Daily News

🪙 Crypto check
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😨/🤑 Fear & Greed: 70 — Greed

🎬 Elizabeth Holmes let them in — 34 days before prison

Holmes founded Theranos, once valued at $9 billion, on a blood-testing technology that didn't work. Convicted of fraud in 2022, she's now serving an 11-year sentence.

Before it started, she let Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim film her at home. Seven crew members, three cameras, 16-hour days. One wide lens to cover the whole house; two 25–250mm zooms locked on faces. A 4:3 aspect ratio — classic reality-TV throwback — to catch every reaction the moment something landed.

Fielder meant to stay behind the camera. Holmes kept talking to him anyway, so the operators kept panning over. Accidental subject.

"The face is the ultimate landscape," Oppenheim said. When you're trying to decide if someone is telling the truth — and she's a month from prison — that framing earns its keep. Variety has the story.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HvW_N5p1q44

💸 The $300 million hair-dryer heist

US export controls made NVIDIA's AI chips so valuable in China that an entire smuggling industry grew up around them. Officials now say NVIDIA had chances to notice — and didn't.

Federal prosecutors arrested Greg Lui for moving servers with $300M in restricted chips to China. Bloomberg reports it's part of a $2.5B scheme: Super Micro co-founder "Wally" Liaw allegedly sold servers to a Bangkok front company, ostensibly for Thailand — they went straight to China, serial numbers stripped with a red hair dryer.

NVIDIA disputes any negligence. CEO Jensen Huang declined Congress's invitation to testify; Senator Warren's reply was short: "If he has time for a $1M-a-head dinner at Mar-a-Lago, he can find time for us."

The hair dryer is still plugged in.

Engadget

💸 Trump's third meme coin dinner

On November 22, the top 185 holders of TRUMP will gather for a gala dinner with President Trump at his Virginia golf club — the same venue as the first dinner in May, where VIP guests averaged $4.8 million spent on tokens and Trump stayed about an hour.

🔸 Top 29 — VIP reception with the president
🔸 Top 4 — an 18-karat gold Trump watch
🔸 Private meeting — not on offer for anyone

The timing stings a little. Two weeks ago, the Clarity Act — crypto's big legislative push — failed in the Senate, with Trump's personal holdings the main sticking point. His latest disclosure shows he earned over $635 million from the coin in 2025, almost entirely in royalties. The coin itself trades around $2.04, down 97% since launch. Someone's paying more for that dinner than the menu suggests.

Via Decrypt.

☀️ California legalized balcony solar — with a catch

Governor Newsom signed the Plug and Play Solar Act on September 30th; it takes effect January 2027. The idea: renters finally get a cheap, self-installed path to lower electricity bills.

The catch is UL3700 certification — which requires a non-standard plug and socket, often meaning a licensed electrician. Not exactly plug-and-play. Certified products are limited to a handful: Hoymiles, APsystems, Mango. Power cap sits at 1,200W, well below a rooftop system's 6,000W+.

Utilities PG&E and SDG&E opposed the bill and are already hinting at passing costs to non-solar customers. Solidarity.

Via The Verge.

Engadget

📌 Daily Recap · Oct 05

🎬 Holmes let cameras in 34 days before prison
💸 Man smuggled $300M in AI chips through hair-dryer loophole
🍽️ Trump's third meme coin dinner already has 185 guests
☀️ California okayed balcony solar — but the plug doesn't exist yet

Tag whoever was heads-down today — they missed a weird one

CHEATKOTT - Your Daily News

🪙 Crypto check
₿ BTC $85,318 📉 -1.1% (24h)
Ξ ETH $2,696 📉 -1.1% (24h)

😨/🤑 Fear & Greed: 73 — Greed

🔸 Operation KillSwitch

KillSec is a ransomware group active since 2024, running a double-extortion scheme: encrypt the servers, then threaten to leak the data anyway — even if the victim had backups. Around 1,000 suspected attacks globally, ~500 confirmed successful.

On September 30, a coordinated sweep across Europe and the U.S. brought it down. The suspected administrator: a 16-year-old Romanian national, arrested in Alicante. Two more in their twenties picked up in Britain and Romania. Dutch national Fouad Eltibrizi, living in the UK as *Archduke*, was indicted in Puerto Rico — up to 10 years if convicted.

Seized: five servers, the dark-web leak site, and 110 TB of stolen data. Investigators also found the group had used AI to build its infrastructure and scout new targets.

A teenager ran the operation. AI helped him find the next victim. Europol has the details.

Decrypt

🦾 The exoskeleton has left the cinema

Powered exoskeletons spent decades as a Hollywood prop. The real thing arrived quieter — and went straight to IKEA warehouses, Ford assembly lines, and Ukrainian front-line positions.

In early 2026, Ukrainian soldiers were confirmed to be using Hypershell exoskeletons to carry artillery shells. "Less fatigued, work faster, maintain combat effectiveness for longer," Colonel Serdiuk told *Ukrainska Pravda*. Seattle Mountain Rescue is field-testing similar devices in the wilderness; Boeing and Ford have them on assembly lines.

The sector sits at around $500 million today, with a two-to-threefold jump projected by the mid-2030s.

Science fiction's favourite gadget showed up — and its first job was moving pallets.

Ars Technica

🎬 Tom Cruise, meet the box office floor

Warner Bros. bet on a seemingly foolproof combo — Cruise plus Iñárritu ("Birdman," "The Revenant") — and got $8M on a $160–180M budget. The film needed ~$40M opening weekend just to justify its cost. A "decide for yourself" ad campaign and claims that only Americans disliked it didn't help; $12M from 73 international markets confirmed it wasn't a cultural misunderstanding.

Projected losses: $150–200M, with Cruise contractually paid before Warner recoups a cent — one week before the Paramount acquisition closes.

First place: "Verity," Amazon MGM's Colleen Hoover adaptation with Hathaway and Dakota Johnson — $32.6M on a $40M budget, 34% on Rotten Tomatoes. Per Variety, Tom Cruise lost the weekend to a pregnant Anne Hathaway. You couldn't write it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nxLG_PFlFo

🎸 A statement in Kraft's own house

Last month, Gillette Stadium owner Robert Kraft pushed rapper Macklemore off Ed Sheeran's tour after two "Free Palestine" outbursts from that same stage. The message to future acts was plain.

On Friday, country superstar Zach Bryan walked out wearing a "Free Palestine" shirt. Drummer Nate Head wore a jersey reading "Hind Rajab, 5" — honoring a five-year-old Gaza girl killed in January 2024 while trapped in a disabled car. The guitarist posed backstage directly in front of a Kraft Sports and Entertainment sign.

Bryan is a Navy vet with sold-out stadiums. Not the easiest artist to boycott. Macklemore was removed through official channels — Bryan just used the front door, per Variety.

🔗 Stocks on-chain, open around the clock

OKX and ICE — owner of the New York Stock Exchange — formed a joint venture in June. Now OKXICE has notified the SEC of plans to launch a regulated, U.S.-based tokenized stock venue: the first of its kind actually open to American investors.

The plan starts with over 60 listed companies, trading 24/7, with faster settlement — and full dividend and voting rights intact. It leans on a new five-year SEC "Innovation Exemption" from September, though each company gets 30 days to object before its shares go on-chain.

The market is already moving: tokenized stocks hit $3.2B, up 15% in a month, per RWA.xyz — almost entirely in offshore products U.S. investors couldn't touch.

A stock market open at 3 a.m. Sunday used to be a punchline. The punchline just filed with the SEC.

CoinDesk

📌 Daily Recap · Oct 06

🔒 KillSec ransomware crew got 500 confirmed hits before takedown
🦾 Exoskeletons skipped sci-fi and went straight to war
🎬 Cruise and Iñárritu bombed harder than expected — $8M open
🎸 Zach Bryan wore 'Free Palestine' at Kraft's own stadium
📈 OKX and NYSE owner are launching tokenized stocks for Americans

Someone on your feed definitely missed at least three of these — pass it along

CHEATKOTT - Your Daily News

🪙 Crypto check
₿ BTC $84,211 📉 -1.3% (24h)
Ξ ETH $2,618 📉 -2.9% (24h)

😨/🤑 Fear & Greed: 71 — Greed

🪙 Crypto check
₿ BTC $82,949 📉 -1.5% (24h)
Ξ ETH $2,568 📉 -1.9% (24h)

😨/🤑 Fear & Greed: 64 — Greed

💸 Crypto stolen, gold grills purchased, Dubai visited — man jailed

SIM-swap fraud: criminals transfer a victim's phone number to their own SIM and intercept every one-time passcode their bank or crypto exchange sends. By the time anyone notices, the wallet is empty.

Ajay Shinjin, 25, helped drain nearly £200,000 in crypto from four victims. His £44,000 cut went on Dubai trips, a Canary Wharf apartment and gold-plated teeth grills. Arrested at his flat in 2021, then caught again at Heathrow in 2023 returning from — yes — Dubai. Said nothing to investigators either time.

Inner London Crown Court handed him two and a half years. The backdrop, per Decrypt: SIM-swap cases on the UK's National Fraud Database rose 402% in the first half of 2026. An SMS code is no longer a lock — it's an invitation.

💡 Margaret Hamilton (1936–2025)

She coined the term "software engineering" when the profession had no name yet. She wrote the flight code for Apollo 11. She earned the Presidential Medal of Freedom — and later became a LEGO minifig in the "Women of NASA" set.

Last week, Margaret Hamilton died at 90.

Before Apollo, she was programming Edward Lorenz's computer — the one whose 1961 experiments accidentally invented chaos theory. That code was hers too.

Mathematics degree, philosophy minor, a career that took humans to the Moon. Not a bad arc — *Ars Technica* reports her passing.

🪙 Crypto check
₿ BTC $83,057 📈 +0.5% (24h)
Ξ ETH $2,503 📈 +0.5% (24h)

😨/🤑 Fear & Greed: 61 — Greed