The ShieldBreak Windows zero-day arrived on August 11 and 12, 2026, with no patch waiting for it: a fully working proof-of-concept exploit, published publicly, that Microsoft is now scrambling to address. The vulnerability sits inside Windows Defender itself, the security engine meant to stop exactly this kind of attack. The researcher behind it goes by Nightmare Eclipse, also known as Chaotic Eclipse. ShieldBreak is, by that researcher’s own count, the seventh public zero-day proof-of-concept released since early April 2026, part of what Picus Security describes as an openly adversarial campaign against Microsoft’s disclosure and bug-bounty practices. ShieldBreak Windows Zero-Day: How…
Author: Funke Adeyemi
Funke Adeyemi
Funke Adeyemi spent a decade in corporate banking and fintech before moving to business journalism. She started in trade finance at a major UK bank, moved to a payments company scaling into African markets, and spent her last role leading partnerships at a cross-border remittance platform. She writes about business strategy, fintech, digital banking, and the corporate news that moves markets. She is interested in how companies actually make money rather than how they describe making money in investor presentations. Funke lives in South London. She reads earnings calls the way other people listen to podcasts, and finds them about as reliable.
Goldman Sachs co-head of global banking and markets Ashok Varadhan has made his Ashok Varadhan stay invested case publicly, and the three pillars holding it up are a Fed that stays on the sidelines, crude oil retreating well below $70 a barrel, and an economy increasingly powered by artificial intelligence.Varadhan, who serves as co-head of global banking and markets at Goldman Sachs, laid out his views on the firm’s ‘The Markets’ podcast, recorded on 5 August 2026 with host Mike Washington on the Goldman Sachs equities trading floor. His message was unambiguous: ‘Stay invested would be my advice.’Where Varadhan Parts…
The Yulu Series C funding round, announced at $93 million, is the largest capital raise in the Bengaluru-based electric mobility startup’s history, according to The Pack. The timing is no accident: India’s quick-commerce platforms have spent the past two years in a race to deliver groceries, electronics, and pharmaceuticals in under ten minutes, and that race runs, in large part, on two wheels. Yulu sits at the infrastructure layer of that supply chain. Rather than selling bikes, it rents them to gig workers on weekly subscriptions, letting delivery riders enter the economy without capital outlay. The company reports roughly 1.6…
The Bluesky active user decline has turned into something harder to explain away than a post-election hangover. According to data from digital intelligence provider Similarweb, Bluesky’s mobile app drew 10.4 million monthly active users worldwide in June 2026, down 27.2% year-over-year. Mobile daily active users fell 25.6% year-over-year in July to around 3 million. Those numbers sit a long way from the peak. Bluesky’s quarterly average monthly active users hit around 22.1 million in the fourth quarter of 2024, when the platform rode a wave of discontent from X users following the US elections. By the second quarter of 2026…
The world’s most downloaded game now has a home on Apple Arcade, and for millions of players the Block Blast Apple Arcade arrangement resolves a long-running frustration: the incessant adverts that punctuate every loss. Apple announced on 11 August 2026 that Block Blast!+, an ad-free version of the puzzle game, will join its subscription gaming service on 3 September. The numbers behind the game are difficult to ignore. Block Blast! recorded over 300 million downloads in 2025 alone, according to Business of Apps citing Appfigures and AppMagic data, knocking Roblox (which managed approximately 262 million downloads that year) off the…
The OpenAI employee tender offer has closed at $7 billion, with the company buying back shares from its own workforce at a valuation of $852 billion, matching the figure set during its March 2026 funding round. Bloomberg first reported the completion of the deal. What sets this transaction apart from prior employee liquidity events is how OpenAI funded it: according to CNBC, the company used its own cash rather than bringing in outside investors, keeping its capitalisation table free of new outside shareholders ahead of a potential public listing. The OpenAI Employee Tender Offer in Context This is not OpenAI’s…
Aptoide returns to Google Play for the first time in over a decade, making the Portugal-based app distributor the first rival store to list on Google’s marketplace in the United States under a court-ordered opening of the Android ecosystem.The listing, confirmed in Aptoide’s own press release, covers Aptoide Games, its specialised games store. US users can now install a direct competitor to Google’s own app store from within Google Play itself, without resorting to the manual sideloading that previously limited Aptoide’s reach in its largest market.A Court-Ordered Opening, Years in the MakingThe route here runs through six years of litigation.…
The Sila Pentagon loan commitment, announced in August 2026, arrives as a conditional pledge of $1.4 billion from the US Department of Defense, one of the largest single bets the Pentagon has placed on a domestic battery materials company. The money is not yet in hand: Sila’s press release via Business Wire confirms that the financing is a conditional loan commitment, meaning the Alameda, California-based company must satisfy further requirements before the facility closes.What the commitment signals, conditions aside, is that the Pentagon is willing to write very large cheques to reduce American dependence on Chinese battery supply chains.Why the…
Leopold Aschenbrenner’s Situational Awareness chip bet on semiconductor startup Source Foundry has now reached $500 million, after the AI-focused hedge fund poured a further $400 million into the company this week, days after offloading the bulk of its public equity book to Ken Griffin’s Citadel. The investment values Source Foundry at $5 billion, according to the Wall Street Journal. The startup was co-founded by Stanford University researchers Abdulmalik Obaid and Joe Burg, and its ambition is to make chip manufacturing faster, cheaper, and built on fundamentally different physics than the processes dominant today. Situational Awareness Chip Bet on Source Foundry…
The Zoox commercial robotaxi launch moves from demonstration to revenue on 10 August, after the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) issued an exemption on 6 August covering all purpose-built Zoox vehicles operating on US public roads. For the first time, Amazon’s robotaxi subsidiary can legally charge passengers for rides. The exemption matters because Zoox’s custom vehicles carry none of the traditional controls federal law assumes: no steering wheel, no pedals, no rearview mirror. An earlier exemption let Zoox demonstrate the technology; this one permits a commercial fleet of up to 2,500 vehicles for two years, across Las Vegas and…
