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😨/🤑 Fear & Greed: 25 — Extreme Fear

🔑 The cold wallet that ran hot

Coldcard is among Bitcoin's most trusted hardware wallets. A March 2021 firmware build hid a quiet catastrophe: seeds were generated by a predictable software randomiser instead of the hardware chip, leaving a bounded key space anyone can reproduce offline.

Galaxy Research has now flagged a third sweep wave. Total across all three: 1,367 BTC (~$89M) from 4,585 addresses. Wave one averaged ~1 coin per victim; wave three is down to ~0.1 BTC. The fat wallets are running out.

The pattern shifted too — no more shared collector addresses, each victim gets a unique destination. One operator adapting, or a second one mining the same flaw? The chain won't say.

"Cold" refers to the internet connection. Not the math.

CoinDesk

🃏 Palworld TCG cards hitting thousands on eBay at launch

Palworld TCG is a trading card game developed in partnership between Pocketpair and Bushiroad. The first set, Dawn of Palpagos, launched July 30, 2026 — and eBay scalper listings followed the same day.

The retailer Lumius priced a booster box case at $499.99. On eBay, comparable cases are selling for around $1,800. A master case containing three standard cases sold for $5,990 within 24 hours of launch.

A rare Cattiva Gold Soul Card sold on July 27 — three days before the official release date — for $3,997.98. A Jormuntide Ignis card moved on July 24 for $1,300. Gold Cattiva cards are currently trading at approximately $1,000 each.

As IGN notes, Pocketpair reported 3.5 million packs ordered as of July 9, three weeks ahead of launch. A second booster set, Legends Awaken, is scheduled for October.

🎮 Xbox price hikes: three rounds and counting

Since May 2025, Microsoft has raised Xbox prices three times. The Series X launched at $499.99 in 2020 — it now costs $300 more, before European markups even enter the picture.

New EU / UK prices, via The Verge:

🔸 Series S 512GB — £299.99 / €349.99 → £429.99 / €499.99 (+43%)
🔸 Series S 1TB — £349.99 / €399.99 → £519.99 / €599.99
🔸 Series X Digital — £449.99 / €549.99 → £619.99 / €749.99
🔸 Series X Disc — £499.99 / €599.99 → £669.99 / €799.99 (+34%)

The 2TB model is being discontinued. AI-driven NAND shortages are pressuring all hardware makers, but no competitor has passed those costs on as sharply. The Series S — once the affordable entry point — now costs more than the Series X did at launch. For a platform already trailing PlayStation in sales, that's a shrinking window for new players to join.

🤨 eBay to pay $55.7M over the cockroaches-and-pig-mask harassment campaign

So there's this couple — David and Ina Steiner from Massachusetts, they ran a newsletter covering eBay. Apparently wrote a bit too critically. And in 2019, company employees decided to "convince" them to stop: live insects in the mail, a bloody pig mask, a funeral wreath. Seven employees were eventually convicted.

The Steiners filed suit in 2021, and now it's settled. eBay pays $46.15M, former CEO Devin Wenig chips in another $2M, former executives a bit less. Plus $6M goes to nonprofits. Total: $55.7M. The company had already paid a $3M criminal fine back in 2024.

eBay's statement calls the whole thing "wrong and reprehensible." Better late than never, I guess.

The Verge has the full story.

🔓 The hardware wallet that wasn't

Coldcard, by Coinkite, was a gold standard for offline Bitcoin storage — until a March 2021 firmware bug left private keys mathematically guessable.

Galaxy Research now tracks $88.6 million gone across 4,585 addresses. Researcher Alex Thorn says the sweeps are automated, likely LLM-driven, and every vulnerable address *will* be drained — stolen coins had averaged 3.18 years of dormancy before vanishing.

Canadian coach Jonathan Goodman lost 18.25 BTC in seven minutes, keys stored in a safety deposit box, never online. "I did everything right," he wrote.

Affected users are fleeing back to exchanges. The industry that spent a decade chanting "not your keys, not your coins" is quietly learning that Coinbase is sometimes the safer bet.

Decrypt has the full breakdown.

🕶️ Apple's smart glasses are stuck on one question

Meta is already selling Ray-Ban cameras and collecting lawsuits — while Apple watches and thinks. Carefully.

The holdup, per Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, isn't hardware or price: it's privacy, internally ranked "priority No. 1." Three options are on the table — no camera at all, a camera that can't record, or full hardware with new protections that don't exist in any current product.

The launch slipped from this year to late 2027. Meanwhile, Meta just got hit with a class action over its AI glasses. Sometimes it pays to watch the neighbor's house catch fire first.

Engadget

📌 Daily Recap · Aug 04

🔑 Coldcard's 2021 firmware made Bitcoin keys guessable
🃏 Palworld cards hit thousands on eBay at launch
🎮 Xbox has gotten $300 pricier since 2020
🤨 eBay pays $55.7M for mailing cockroaches to critics
🔓 Coldcard bug drained $88.6M across 4,585 wallets
🕶️ Apple's smart glasses stalled over privacy concerns

Somebody in your life spent today completely offline — this is their homework now

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😨/🤑 Fear & Greed: 27 — Fear

🤖 Making robots as easy to control as a volume knob

Enigma has come out of stealth with a $70 million seed round from Index Ventures and Ribbit Capital. Founders Jonathan Jacobi — once Microsoft's youngest-ever employee — and Gal Niv had no robotics background. They built their team from math Olympiad winners and PhD dropouts anyway.

The bet isn't on a smarter robot — it's on a better interface. Spend 15 minutes explaining where the plates go and everyone reaches the same point: forget it, I'll just do it myself. To find out how people actually want to talk to machines, Enigma is opening online access to 100+ of its robots in Israel and California.

Partners in healthcare, logistics, and entertainment already exist. A business model remains, per TechCrunch, an open question — fitting for a company called Enigma.

💡 A $300 QD-OLED monitor — not a typo

Samsung's G50SF, a 27-inch 1440p QD-OLED panel, just dropped to $299.99 on Amazon. It launched at $499.99 and spent six months bouncing between $350 and $450, so this is a genuine low.

Finding QD-OLED under $500 is easy now. Under $300 is still rare.

The panel holds its own against Alienware's $350 AW2726DM — same .03ms response, VRR support, 180Hz over DisplayPort. The one real trade-off: a single HDMI port where rivals usually offer two, a mild annoyance for multi-console setups.

A panel type once reserved for big-budget builds just crashed the $300 tier. The market, apparently, didn't get that memo. (The Verge did, though.)

🎮 STALKER 2 is getting a big double update

GSC Game World announced two things at once — the first story expansion and a free 2.0 update, both dropping August 20, 2026 on PC, Xbox Series X/S, and PS5.

The expansion, *Cost of Hope*, brings Skif back into a Zone torn apart by the Duty vs Freedom conflict, pulled in by a mystery PDA signal. Dozens of hours of content promised.

The 2.0 update moves the engine from UE 5.1 to 5.5.4 — specifics coming later.

For context: the game launched in November 2024, reached PS5 a year after, and has crossed 6 million players. Per IGN.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XGG-Okh7NDw

🛰️ Amazon wants to run your phone signal from orbit

Amazon bought Globalstar's network and its Apple services deal earlier this year. Now it has filed with the FCC to launch 5,105 more LEO satellites for direct-to-device voice, messaging, and emergency calls — no cell towers. Deployment from 2028, per Advanced Television.

🔸 Nearly double the size of its Kuiper broadband fleet, which has only launched "over 375" of ~3,200 planned satellites as of July
🔸 Also seeking Iridium's spectrum outside the US — a friction point with Rocket Lab, currently acquiring Iridium
🔸 Signals processed on-orbit, not just relayed

Kuiper for broadband, this for cellular, Apple as a named partner — mobile operators are quietly being repositioned from partners to infrastructure tenants.

The Verge

⚽ Infantino backs down — and the timing matters

Gianni Infantino has run FIFA since 2016 and is seeking a fourth term. His headline initiative: a $20 billion private investment vehicle that would have taken control of FIFA's commercial rights, World Cup included.

On Friday he pulled the plug. UEFA had threatened a full boycott of FIFA events if the plan moved forward; Concacaf and the Asian Football Confederation lined up behind them. Faced with a coalition covering most of world football, Infantino folded.

The FIFA Congress votes on his re-election in March. Walking back a flagship project under coordinated pressure from major confederations sends a readable signal — that he can be moved. Whether he rebuilds a working coalition before then remains to be seen, per Variety.

📌 Daily Recap · Aug 05

🤖 Ex-Microsoft kid raises $70M to simplify robotics
🖥️ Samsung's QD-OLED monitor just broke the $300 barrier
🎮 STALKER 2 drops expansion and free 2.0 update August 2026
🛰️ Amazon filing to beam 5,000 satellites at your phone
⚽ Infantino quietly kills his $20B FIFA power grab

Someone you know definitely had meetings all day — pass this along

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😨/🤑 Fear & Greed: 25 — Extreme Fear

🍎 Apple's biggest September in years is one month away

According to 9to5Mac, five devices are expected at next month's event — and the iPhone lineup is unusually slim.

🔸 iPhone 18 Pro — camera upgrades, smaller Dynamic Island
🔸 iPhone 18 Pro Max — same, plus major battery gains
🔸 iPhone Ultra — Apple's first foldable, all-new form factor

Analysts put starting prices at $1,399 for the Pro and $1,999 for the Ultra. The base iPhone 18 and Air 2 are pushed to 2027.

Also expected: Apple Watch Ultra 4, Series 12, and possible wildcards including AirPods Pro with cameras and a screen-equipped HomePod. MacBooks and an OLED iPad mini are slated for October.

⚽ First Filipino. First title. Two days to get there.

Alexandra Eala made history at the Washington Open — the first Filipino ever to win a WTA singles title. The final got rained out mid-second-set on Sunday, with Eala leading, and finished Monday.

The rest was swift. Two-time champion Jessica Pegula took the opener 6-4, then conceded the next two sets 6-4, 6-0 to Eala's left-handed serve and zero visible nerves.

Pegula had called her "the future of the tour" before the match. Five consecutive wins over top-10 players later — Rybakina, Svitolina (twice), Swiatek, Pegula — the future seems to be running ahead of schedule, per BBC Sport.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yxXiOeGvlE

🎮 MS Paint is now a monitor

Doom — the 1993 shooter that became the internet's universal test for "can this thing compute?" — has run on lawnmowers, printers, and gut bacteria. The bacteria managed, but a full playthrough would take 600 years.

New entry: MS Paint. Every frame is pasted onto the canvas as a genuine document edit, the original shareware runs at up to 35 FPS, sound and music included. The author is Mark Russinovich, CTO of Microsoft Azure — the man running planetary cloud infrastructure who, in his spare time, taught Paint to run a thirty-year-old shooter, per Tom's Hardware.

Corporate boredom at Microsoft seems to be greatly exaggerated.

Engadget

🤖 AI proctoring at Mexico's biggest university ends in a redo

16.3% of applicants scored 100 or above on the 120-question entrance exam this year — versus a 3.5% average from 2021 to 2025. A panel of experts found the results unreliable and recommended a new in-person test. Around 58,000 students, including those who already secured places, will have to sit it again, according to Gaceta UNAM.

Ars Technica

💸 An RTX 5090 PC for almost the same price as the GPU alone

Okay, this one is genuinely strange. Dell has the Alienware Area-51 with an RTX 5090 on sale for $4,780 — that's a full system, $1,550 off.

A standalone 5090 right now runs $4,500+ new, or around $4,000 used on eBay with real risk attached. For a few hundred more you also get a Core Ultra 7 265K, 32GB DDR5-7200 RAM, 1TB SSD, 360mm liquid cooling, and a 1,500W PSU.

If you were already eyeing a 5090, buying just the GPU right now is a hard sell, IGN reports.