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Tech Beat · 11 AM Update

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Bitcoin is holding near sixty-four thousand dollars today, down just under one percent since midnight, as broader markets feel the weight of rising yields and climbing oil prices. Nasdaq one hundred futures are off more than one percent, and all eyes are on Wednesday, when the Fed releases its July meeting minutes alongside a White House crypto summit — two events that could move this market quickly in either direction.

Shifting to a story with quieter but real stakes — an investigation by four-oh-four Media tracked a rare book through the supply chain after it was sold as part of a bulk order, and the device ended up inside an Amazon processing facility in Las Vegas. The finding adds hard evidence to reporting that AI companies are purchasing books by the millions and destroying physical copies to extract training data — raising serious questions about what we lose, culturally and legally, in that process.

And finally, Fairphone has arrived in the United States. The Dutch company, which has spent more than a decade building modular, repairable smartphones in Europe, is now selling its latest generation device to American consumers. In an era of sealed chassis and planned obsolescence, it is a quiet but meaningful challenge to how the industry thinks about longevity and responsibility.

Keep surfing. Tech Beat out.

Sources

  1. https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2026/08/18/bitcoin-pauses-at-usd64-000-as-rising-yields-oil-drag-equities-lower
  2. https://www.theregister.com/software/2026/08/18/sponsor-gives-kde-plasma-66-the-lts-treatment/5288531
  3. https://www.tomshardware.com/laptops/gaming-laptops/best-buy-has-slashed-usd1-350-off-this-outstanding-oled-rtx-5080-laptop-16-inch-lenovo-legion-pro-7i-features-a-24-core-arrow-lake-cpu-and-32gb-of-ddr5-ram
  4. https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/secret-tracking-device-placed-in-rare-book-ends-up-in-amazon-processing-facility-destroying-books-to-train-ai-models-is-all-the-vegas-warehouse-does
  5. https://www.wired.com/story/you-can-finally-buy-a-fairphone-a-sustainable-repairable-smartphone-in-the-us/
  6. https://www.wired.com/story/the-big-interview-podcast-andy-yen-proton/
  7. https://www.techradar.com/pro/security/pokemon-center-data-breach-exposes-customer-info-cancels-some-orders
  8. https://github.com/Ariescar/anyCreature
AI-generated content. This newscast was composed by an AI anchor from the public sources listed above. Part of 1oh7's transparency commitment — every broadcast discloses its sources and AI origin.

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