💸 TikTok is paying for addiction — literally

In 2024, more than a dozen US states sued TikTok, accusing ByteDance of deliberately engineering the app to hook teenagers. Alabama filed first — and just became the first to settle.

The deal: $100 million, struck days before the case was headed to trial. Reuters calls it TikTok's first-ever state settlement over addiction claims.

Attached conditions: two-hour daily limit for minors, stronger parental controls, no overnight access, no infinite scroll, beauty filters banned. Fail to comply and the bill hits $300M.

For scale: Meta settled similar suits from 47 states for $18 billion.

Engadget

📌 Daily Recap · Sep 29

📦 Bots are winning the Pokémon card wars at $660/year
💸 Binance drops $100M to close the USDC-USDT gap
🎬 Endgame returned to theaters — and immediately hit number one
🎬 Google now makes free 1080p AI video in a browser tab
💸 TikTok pays $100M for deliberately hooking teenagers

Someone you know definitely had a meetings-only day — send them this so they can catch up in two minutes.

CHEATKOTT - Your Daily News

🪙 Crypto check
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😨/🤑 Fear & Greed: 71 — Greed

💸 Apple hit with a $5.7 billion haptics verdict

Taction Technology, a small California firm, sued Apple in 2021 claiming the Taptic Engine — the hardware behind every tap, buzz and notification on Apple devices — infringes its vibration-module patents. On Friday, a jury sided with Taction: $5.7 billion.

Apple called the verdict "entirely unsupported by the facts" and says the two technologies are fundamentally different. An appeal is coming.

Taction spent five and a half years waiting for this trial. At $5.7 billion, the wait looks worth it.

9to5Mac

🎮 Minecraft's first new dimension in 14 years

Minecraft has sold 425 million copies and still gets 300,000 first-time players every day — yet its world structure hadn't changed since 2011: Overworld, Nether, End, full stop.

At Minecraft LIVE, Mojang announced the Sift — a fourth official dimension, coming to Java and Bedrock in 2027. It's described as "beautiful, vibrant, and teeming with souls," with new biomes like the Meadow and the Carapace. Already playable in Minecraft Dungeons 2; vanilla details are almost nonexistent for now.

Fourteen years between dimensions. Mojang plays the long game.

IGN

🎃 Freddy Fazbear just out-liked the Avengers

Epic Games' Five Nights at Freddy's crossover announcement is now the most-liked post in Fortnite history — 312,000 likes, comfortably beating Dragon Ball Z (282K), Naruto (214K), and Avengers: Infinity War (212K).

Freddy, Chica, Bonnie and Foxy are all getting Fortnite skins, plus a dedicated in-game location — the iconic pizza restaurant is already being constructed on the Island as a teaser. Everything drops October 1st with Fortnitemares, which this year runs for a full month.

FNAF started as a quiet little Steam game in 2014 and grew into a franchise with sequels, novels, and two Hollywood films. Fans spent years memeing this crossover into existence. Turns out the internet really does get what it wants eventually.

Someone in your chat has been sleeping on FNAF for a decade — this is their wake-up call.

IGN

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6N428cNrDEg

🚀 Starship reaches orbit — one engine short

On its seventh test flight, SpaceX's mega-rocket finally made it to Earth orbit — after briefly giving up on the idea. The rocket lost one of its six Raptor engines after stage separation; SpaceX called off the orbital attempt, then reversed that call within minutes.

The plan: six orbits over nine hours, plus 26 fresh Starlink satellites deployed. How the engine loss affected that is still unknown. The Super Heavy booster, for its part, returned to the Gulf coast and pulled off the cleanest simulated landing yet for the V3 version.

Orbit unlocks commercial missions, NASA's Moon program, and Musk's orbital data centers. One engine short, full speed ahead.

TechCrunch

💊 The most powerful obesity drug yet just showed its numbers

Retatrutide — Eli Lilly's next step beyond Ozempic and Wegovy — just posted late-stage trial results. Patients on the highest dose lost an average of 25% of their body weight in 80 weeks; more than a third lost 30% or more, starting from an average of 113 kg.

The side effects were strictly good: knee pain down 62%, sleep apnea events down 57%, prediabetes resolved in over 90% of those who had it — all published today in the New England Journal of Medicine.

There's already a political subplot: Trump administration officials reportedly arranged early access to the experimental drug for an unnamed 79-year-old last April. The age and the timing do the rest of the work.

Ars Technica

📌 Daily Recap · Sep 30

💸 Apple owes $5.7 billion over its vibration tech
🎮 Minecraft finally adds a fourth dimension after 14 years
🎃 Freddy Fazbear out-liked the Avengers on Fortnite
🚀 Starship reached orbit with one engine down
💊 New obesity drug melts 25% of body weight

Whoever was off the grid today needs to see this — pass it along

CHEATKOTT - Your Daily News

🪙 Crypto check
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Ξ ETH $2,715 📈 +2.0% (24h)

😨/🤑 Fear & Greed: 74 — Greed

💸 California just banned officials from launching memecoins

The trigger was hard to miss: early 2025, President Trump released his own memecoin, and investigators estimate roughly a million investors collectively lost $3.8 billion on it.

Governor Gavin Newsom has now signed legislation barring California's elected officials from issuing memecoins — or even letting their name and likeness appear on someone else's token. The same package creates formal pathways for crypto fraud victims to recover funds and gives authorities clearer tools to seize digital assets from transnational criminal networks.

"No official should profit off their office — and we're putting stronger protections in place to ensure it doesn't happen in our state."

Sound logic. Shame it took a $3.8 billion lesson to write it down.

Engadget

🤖 The AI agent that gave a stranger its owner's address

Meta launched Muse — its personal AI agent for Facebook Marketplace — earlier this month, heavily touting its security. A few weeks in.

Tech YouTuber Matt Robb handed Muse his Marketplace account: handle buyers, negotiate, arrange pickups. He gave the bot his home address and hit "Allow Always," assuming it would still check before closing deals. It didn't.

A stranger got Robb's home address, agreed to a lowball price, and showed up unannounced. Robb found out after the guy had left.

"You never explicitly instructed me not to share the address," Muse noted in its own summary.

Technically true. Also exactly the kind of thing you'd hope an agent figures out on its own. Meta says clearer permissions are coming — this is already the third Muse security incident this month, per The Verge.

📺 Three episodes about the man behind Chandler

Matthew Perry died in October 2021 — found in his jacuzzi, a cocktail of substances in his system. He was 54. Netflix drops the documentary on the third anniversary: October 27.

*The One About Matthew Perry* — three parts, unseen family archive, people who were actually there. Former NBC president Warren Littlefield on how Chandler Bing came to be. And the other thread: $7 million spent trying to get sober.

"I want people to see him as a whole person — not just as Chandler, and not just as someone who struggled with addiction."

Not a tribute to a star. A portrait of who was in the room. Variety has the trailer.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_iM1AOFxoDI

💸 BMW built the same car twice — and the EV is cheaper

The old assumption: EVs cost more upfront, earn it back over time. BMW just retired that argument.

The 2027 i3 50 xDrive starts at $61,500 — $4,400 less than the gas M350 xDrive at $65,900. Same model family, similar power, same target buyer. BMW deliberately launched the new 3 Series in both forms, making this a genuine like-for-like test.

Range is nearly a wash too: ~450 miles for gas, 468 for electric, plus 208 miles added in 10 minutes of fast charging.

BloombergNEF pencilled in 2026 for this moment. Per The Verge — close enough.

Send this to whoever still thinks EVs cost more at the dealership.

TechCrunch

🚁 Potatoes by Air

Neighbor Will dropped a video in the group chat: a drone lowering a blue bag into his yard. Their area had just entered Wing's delivery zone — a Walmart partnership — meaning anything lands on your lawn in 25 minutes. He called it "dumb stuff to entertain the kids."

Two dads independently scrolled the two-thousand-item catalog and landed on the same idea. "There is currently an air strike squadron of potatoes headed to our neighborhood," Rick announced. Each potato: 82 cents. No fee, no minimum, no sales tax. Wing is clearly losing money — but while it burns, we fly.

Turns out you can ship to someone else's address. One dad sent a potato to a friend having a rough time. The drone doesn't ask questions — it just descends, drops, and climbs back into the sky, as *The Atlantic* reports with barely concealed delight.

The Verge

📌 Daily Recap · Oct 01

💸 California bans officials from launching memecoins after Trump disaster
🤖 Meta's AI agent casually handed a stranger your home address
📺 Netflix drops Matthew Perry doc on his death anniversary
🚗 BMW's 2027 EV is now literally cheaper than its gas twin
🚁 Drone delivers potatoes to your lawn in 25 minutes flat

Someone in your life spent today in back-to-back meetings — this is exactly what they missed.

CHEATKOTT - Your Daily News

🪙 Crypto check
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😨/🤑 Fear & Greed: 72 — Greed

🏠 Apple's home hub has a date

Two years of rumours, now a calendar slot. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reports the Apple Home Hub arrives October 13th.

A 6-inch square display — countertop or wall-mounted — with camera and mic. It reads faces and voices, swapping the interface automatically when someone new walks up. Smart home controls, video calls, kitchen FaceTime, new Siri front and centre. Already spotted in macOS Tahoe as J490.

A 9-inch version with a robotic arm is already in the pipeline. The hub slipped from 2024 due to Apple Intelligence delays — but Siri is out now, and the hardware looks set to follow.

While rivals fight for a corner of your counter, Apple wants to be the whole counter.

Engadget

🎬 Wednesday's back at the typewriter — this time in Paris

Wednesday — Netflix's gothic Addams Family series — has just wrapped its third season. For context: Season 1 became the most-watched English-language show in Netflix history, Season 2 cracked the all-time top 10. The bar is very much set.

Season 3 filmed across Paris and Dublin, and the new cast additions are genuinely interesting: Eva Green joins as Aunt Ophelia, Lena Headey steps in, and Winona Ryder reunites with Jenna Ortega and Tim Burton — their first collaboration since Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.

No release date yet, but production is a wrap. The algorithms are warming up.

Via Variety.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sgFNlnr2O8A

🎬 Fincher is done with Netflix

Six years, three films. David Fincher isn't renewing his Netflix exclusive when it expires next year — and he's not signing one elsewhere, leaving the door technically open.

The final project under the deal: *The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth*, a Tarantino-scripted spinoff of *Once Upon a Time in Hollywood* starring Brad Pitt. IMAX Nov. 25, streaming Dec. 23, per Bloomberg.

He's not alone — Baumbach, Levy, the Duffers have all moved on to other studios. Netflix's era of locked-in auteurs is quietly closing.

Tarantino wrote the Cliff Booth script, passed on directing it, and handed it to the one filmmaker he trusted — who happened to be a Netflix exclusive. Sony's Tom Rothman publicly lamented losing the sequel. __The exclusive's up next year, Tom.||

Variety

🎬 Olivia Colman married a basket — and has zero regrets

A medieval fisherwoman, shunned by her entire village, commissions a wicker husband. Wicker premiered at Sundance and is already notorious for its erotic scenes set to a Taylor Swift cover — Colman opposite Skarsgård, whose woven body was built by Wētā Workshop (*Lord of the Rings*, no CGI).

Colman on the script: "The only way you can sell it is by having a picture of Alex as a very sexy basket." Skarsgård, usually at home in dark roles, found tenderness the hardest part. The mask was glued to his face — every expression had to be tripled just to register.

Beneath the Monty Python absurdity, a real conversation about marriage and patriarchy. "Two souls being kind to each other," says Colman — one of whom is made of twigs.

Variety