🚗 GM quietly sold driver data to insurers for eight years

$220 million — that's what General Motors will pay to settle a lawsuit filed by 35 US states and DC.

From 2016 through 2024, GM enrolled millions of customers in its OnStar Smart Driver program, tracked hard braking, speeding and late-night trips, then sold the data to brokers who fed it to insurance companies. Premiums rose. Drivers noticed on their bills.

One detail stands out: over 370,000 people were explicitly told they weren't enrolled. They were. Their data was sold anyway.

Under the settlement, GM must limit data collection and submit to privacy audits. The FTC had already banned the company from sharing consumer data with third parties for five years; a separate California settlement added $12.75M in May.

Asking permission would have been cheaper.

Engadget

🎬 27 slaps. Zero seconds of screen time.

Dustin Hoffman has written a candid piece for The New Yorker about making *The Graduate* — the film that launched his career — calling it, without hesitation, a "terrible experience."

The detail that sticks: director Mike Nichols made Katharine Ross slap Hoffman 27 times for a single scene. She worried about hurting him; his one request was "don't hit my ear." She missed a few times. The next day, during an underwater shoot, blood trickled from his ear — a punctured eardrum. Nichols cut the slap entirely.

Seven Oscar nominations. One of the defining American films of the 20th century. Built, apparently, on genuine dread.

Variety

💸 North Korea just walked off with $6.3 billion. Literally.

The FBI has attributed the $6.3 billion Binance hack — pulled off on October 29th — to North Korea, tagging the operation under its tracked campaign TraderTraitor.

The playbook: stolen tokens get swapped into ETH, then cycled through DeFi protocols and instant swap services, layer after layer, until the trail goes cold. The FBI is working the case alongside the USSS and IRS-CI, though it's offered little in the way of technical evidence or arrests so far.

Binance has since reopened customer withdrawals, lifted after a brief freeze while the exchange figured out what it was dealing with. It was dealing with the biggest crypto heist on record.

North Korea has spent years turning cyberattacks into a revenue stream. At $6.3 billion, this one likely outpaces their entire annual export income.

The Verge

🎸 Twenty years late, right on time

The Black Parade peaked at No. 2 on the Billboard 200 back in 2006 — and stayed there, frozen, for two decades.

The 20th-anniversary deluxe reissue just fixed that. My Chemical Romance climbed from No. 139 to No. 1 with 78,000 equivalent album units — the longest wait for a chart-topper in Billboard history, and the first anniversary album ever to debut at the summit.

Five sold-out nights at the Hollywood Bowl, performing the record front to back, probably didn't hurt.

The teenagers who put this on repeat in 2006 are closer to 35 now. Turns out they bought it again — and finally gave it the number it never got, according to Billboard.

Отправь тому, кто в 2006-м слушал это на CD и думал, что альбом точно на первом месте.

Variety

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRKJiM9Njr8

📌 Daily Recap · Nov 04

👗 Elie Saab couture hits H&M starting at $39
🚗 GM secretly sold your driving data for eight years
🎬 Dustin Hoffman got slapped 27 times for The Graduate
💸 North Korea quietly pocketed $6.3 billion from Binance
🎸 My Chemical Romance finally hits No. 1 — twenty years late

Someone you know definitely had a chaotic day and missed all of this — pass it along.

CHEATKOTT - Your Daily News

🪙 Crypto check
₿ BTC $80,643 📈 +3.4% (24h)
Ξ ETH $2,428 📈 +5.6% (24h)

😨/🤑 Fear & Greed: 50 — Neutral

🔫 Duck Hunt, but make it 2027

Arkade Gaming Gun — a wireless gun controller for PC — just debuted at Gamescom Asia x Thailand Game Show 2026. The idea: point it at your screen and any modern shooter becomes a light-gun arcade game. No webcam, no sensor bar; the USB-C dock doubles as the wireless receiver.

Aiming works through a capacitive trigger — finger on, crosshair follows the barrel; finger off, view locks. Briefly weird, then second nature, per IGN's hands-on.

Supports FPS, third-person shooters, and GTA 5 paired with a racing wheel. Drive-bys with one hand on the wheel: apparently a legitimate playstyle now.

Out in 2027 for PC, Mac, and Steam OS. $399, with a preorder discount. A lot for nostalgia — unless Time Crisis in every game was always the dream.

🤖 Meta's home robot already has a sequel

According to The Information, Meta has a humanoid robot prototype codenamed Max — built in roughly three months alongside Chinese robotics firm Fourier. It stands 1.5 m tall, weighs about 48 kg, shows facial expressions on a built-in display, and runs on NVIDIA's Jetson Thor chips.

And since September, the company has quietly been working on Max 2 — updated torso, redesigned hands, a projector, and better sensors for navigating stairs.

No launch date, no mass-market version yet. But there's already an acquired AI-for-robots startup, a dedicated hardware team, and a second prototype in the pipeline — which is a lot of momentum for a company most people still associate with a news feed.

Engadget

🎃 A Halloween drop from Derry

No announcement — HBO just quietly slipped a surprise episode of *It: Welcome to Derry* onto the platform on Halloween night.

The special "A Story of Derry" runs 30 minutes and is set hundreds of years before the show's timeline — long before Pennywise, just the town doing what Derry does.

The series launched October 26 as a prequel to Muschietti's two-film *It* reboot and was renewed for Season 2 in August. That one travels to 1935 and the Great Depression, where a gang of bank robbers makes the mistake of stopping in Derry for ammo. Muschietti calls it "a graveyard almost — a carcass of something."

Pennywise *and* the Great Depression. Some towns you really shouldn't visit.

Variety

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKa6u7LT0qE

🌊 Seabirds get jet-lagged — and it physically warps their compass

The Manx shearwater — a pigeon-sized seabird, long-winged and distantly related to the albatross — can cover hundreds of kilometres a day over the North Atlantic. To find its way home, it reads the Sun: different angles at dawn, noon, and dusk. That only works if your internal clock is accurate.

Turns out it isn't.

A new Science study from Oxford shows that shearwaters flying far east or west build up a mismatch between their body clock and the Sun's actual position — textbook jet lag. And because their compass runs on that same Sun, the confusion becomes literal: their heading drifts by a measurable degree.

A jet-lagged human just feels groggy at the wrong hour. A jet-lagged shearwater flies the wrong way.

Ars Technica

💡 The first new fiber in 25 years — made from trash

The US FTC, which governs fabric labeling, just approved its first new fiber classification in 25 years: renoa, by startup Everbloom. The origin story cuts against every luxury-material instinct.

It's made from waste — cashmere scraps, wool offcuts, feather dust from bedding factories — ground into powder, blended with a biopolymer, extruded into fiber that mimics natural materials.

The Verge went hands-on: a scarf the CEO had worn and machine-washed for months showed no pilling, no shrinkage. An 80/20 cashmere-renoa blend was indistinguishable by touch.

First products expected around 2027. For an industry where cashmere fears the washing machine at any price, that's an actual fix.

TechCrunch

📌 Daily Recap · Nov 05

🔫 This wireless gun turns any shooter into arcade
🤖 Meta built a humanoid robot in three months flat
🎃 HBO dropped a surprise Derry episode on Halloween night
🌊 Jet lag literally breaks a seabird's internal compass
💡 First new fabric fiber in 25 years is made from trash

Someone spent today in back-to-back meetings and missed all of this — you know what to do.

CHEATKOTT - Your Daily News

🪙 Crypto check
₿ BTC $75,378 📉 -6.5% (24h)
Ξ ETH $2,220 📉 -8.5% (24h)

😨/🤑 Fear & Greed: 28 — Fear

🎬 Daniel Craig killed M. Quite literally.

Dame Judi Dench played MI6's boss across eight Bond films. Her new memoir finally names who signed the death warrant.

Producers and Sam Mendes took her to lunch, explained the *Skyfall* plot. Craig wasn't there — but the idea was his.

"It was Daniel's idea to have me killed. But first I had to suffer the indignity of being sacked by Ralph Fiennes. Arsehole" — she adds, laughing.

Dench notes she only has herself to blame: she'd spent years begging them to let her out from behind the desk. They did. Then they shot her.

🎮 Chinese action game, straight into the record books

4 million copies in 72 hours — that's the opening number for Phantom Blade Zero, S-Game's wuxia action title. Black Myth: Wukong did 10 million in three days, but that was a different kind of moment. Four million is still a serious statement.

Steam peaked at 833,921 concurrent players. On launch day it topped PUBG, Dota 2, and Modern Warfare 4 by revenue. IGN gave it 9/10: "unbelievably smooth, limitless swagger."

Nearly two thirds of pre-launch sales came from China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. The centre of gravity in gaming might be shifting — quietly, and fast.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cr5y9l0Wje8