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Daily News Digest — 2026-10-20

Each morning's new stories from Slashdot, Digg, and BleepingComputer — a digest of the day on top, then every story summarized with a link to the original.AI-written summaries, not individually fact-checked by us. The linked story is the source.
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Today's digest

Cybersecurity and infrastructure dominated the day. Revolut suffered a worldwide outage on Tuesday morning that BleepingComputer covered, while Digg tracked a parallel Google Cloud disruption in western Europe and London that reportedly hit banks, delivery sites and other services. Supply-chain and credential-based attacks ran through several stories: a trojanized Rank Math PRO WordPress plugin, hijacked AOMEI update servers, the OpenCode API-key exposure, Nikkei's third breach in a month, and a Florida DMV breach traced to improperly stored police credentials. Slashdot also highlighted a hacker using an army of AI agents to break into more than 100 websites.

Power and AI were the other big threads. Amazon announced funding for 12 small modular reactors in Indiana, and a separate Slashdot item covered efforts to restart three shuttered US nuclear plants partly to feed data centers. On the AI side, Anthropic's 5% Public Benefit Fund prompted Elon Musk to promise a SpaceX share to every American child, DeepSeek open-sourced an inference framework, and Chinese tech giants reportedly ordered over 3 million Nvidia RTX PRO 5500 GPUs. Apple's October 28 event and the Elizabeth Holmes documentary's record opening rounded out the tech and culture news.

Covered by more than one site: the Revolut/Google Cloud outage (BleepingComputer and Digg) and the "You Can See Everything" Elizabeth Holmes documentary (Slashdot and Digg).

Must-read stories:

Slashdot

Summaries for this section are from the feed excerpts, which quote the linked source reports (from feed excerpt).

Amazon To Fund 12 Small Nuclear Reactors At Former Indiana Coal Plant

Amazon is funding a proposed 960-megawatt nuclear plant near Terre Haute, Indiana, and would be the first customer for its power, per TechCrunch. AEP would operate the plant, which would use 12 X-energy Xe-100 small modular reactors on the site of a demolished coal plant. It is the second Amazon and X-energy deal and three times larger than the first; the plant would connect to the public grid while also serving Amazon data centers (from feed excerpt).

Professor Calls To Abolish Business Schools For Failing Society

Professor Christopher Marquis, a business educator at Harvard, Cornell and Cambridge, argues in The New York Times that business schools should be abolished because they reward dealmaking and financial optimization at the expense of workers and communities. He cites research suggesting wages fall and labor's share of income drops when a business-school-trained CEO takes over, with no productivity gain (from feed excerpt).

TP-Link Moves to Assemble Routers In the US Following Import Ban

After the FCC banned imports of new foreign-made consumer routers over security concerns, TP-Link signed a letter of intent with manufacturer Key Tronic to assemble routers in Mississippi, possibly starting in early 2027 pending regulatory approval. Wi-Fi 8 routers are expected to be among the first products, and TP-Link says many components must still be sourced abroad (from feed excerpt).

Trump DHS Officials Asked CISA To Secretly Aquire and Hack a Voting Machine

ProPublica reports that a few months into Trump's second term, DHS political appointees wanted CISA to secretly acquire a voting machine, hack it and report findings for the White House. CISA was reportedly told not to alert the vendor to any flaws, contrary to normal practice, and career staff feared it amounted to political interference, according to two former officials (from feed excerpt).

A Hacker Broke Into John Deere, SharkNinja With an Army of AI Agents

AI security firm Norforge found that a hacker used mostly autonomous AI agents, run through the open-source Cairn platform, to break into more than 100 websites. Reuters reports victims included John Deere, SharkNinja and Cummins, across the US, Canada, Australia and Japan; the attacker's intrusion instructions ran fewer than 100 Chinese characters (from feed excerpt).

Apple Announces October 28 'Pro and Tell' Event

Apple will hold a Los Angeles event on October 28 titled "Pro and tell." Bloomberg's Mark Gurman expects touchscreen OLED 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pros with M5 Pro and M5 Max chips, an OLED iPad mini, and an iMac and entry-level 14-inch MacBook Pro with the M6 chip (from feed excerpt).

Florida DMV Hacked After Police Dept Insecurely Stored Login Info

Florida's DMV says a September 4 breach exposed driver's license and motor vehicle records, including document images, after attackers used credentials a local law-enforcement employee had improperly stored on a device. The ShinyHunters group has been linked to the intrusion, and the department says there is no evidence yet of misuse (from feed excerpt).

Elon Musk Vows To Give a SpaceX Share To 'Every Kid In America'

Musk wrote on X that next year he will give one SpaceX share to every child in America. With roughly 73 million Americans under 18 and shares near $146, CNN estimates the giveaway at about $10.7 billion, though distribution details are unclear. It followed Anthropic's announcement of a Public Benefit Fund committing at least 5% of its shares (from feed excerpt).

Wine Ported to OpenBSD

OpenBSD developer Thomas Frohwein reports Wine now runs on OpenBSD, with dozens of 64-bit Windows applications working, including the Witcher 3 remaster. The main limitation is the lack of WoW64 support, so 32-bit Windows software does not run (from feed excerpt).

Elizabeth Holmes Doc 'You Can See Everything' Shocks With Massive Opening

Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim's Elizabeth Holmes documentary earned over $15 million in a limited opening on fewer than 900 screens, the strongest opening for a film on that few screens since Borat in 2006. A24 called it one of the largest limited-release openings of the 21st century (from feed excerpt).

America Tries Reviving Shuttered Nuclear Plants - Partly to Help Power Data Centers

The Los Angeles Times reports an unprecedented US effort to revive three shuttered nuclear plants: Palisades in Michigan, Crane (Three Mile Island) in Pennsylvania and Duane Arnold in Iowa. The Department of Energy is lending up to $4.4 billion to restore a combined 2.25 gigawatts, and two of the plants have contracts with Big Tech companies for data-center power (from feed excerpt).

Digg

Digg publishes no timestamps, so these are the current front-page stories. Summaries come from Digg's story descriptions (from feed excerpt).

DeepSeek Open-Sources DeepInfer Inference Framework

DeepSeek says DeepInfer includes optimized kernels, distributed inference and speculative decoding to help lower compute costs and energy use (from feed excerpt).

Rays beat Guardians 7-3 in Game 6 to reach World Series against Brewers

Sportsnet reports Junior Caminero and Yandy Díaz homered late in Tampa Bay's pennant-clinching win. The Rays advance to face the Brewers in the World Series.

OpenAI releases coding test results for 20 languages and COBOL migration

In OpenAI's evaluations, newer models scored higher across the languages tested, but the company cautions that production migrations need expert review (from feed excerpt).

'You Can See Everything' reportedly set for best picture and supporting actress Oscar campaigns

Variety lists seven planned craft-category submissions, including cinematography and original score, alongside the film's best picture bid (from feed excerpt).

Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave Expansion Pass adds four Three Houses-inspired weapons

Nintendo lists four Heroes' Relics-inspired weapons in Part 1 and schedules two more parts for later (from feed excerpt).

Google Cloud service issues in western Europe amid reported problems at banks and delivery sites on October 20

Sky News says Revolut reported an outage, while users flagged problems with NHS England, Gov.UK and Asda (from feed excerpt).

Gwyneth Paltrow Set for First Lead TV Role in 'The Apology,' Reportedly Ordered by Netflix

Deadline reports Netflix gave the A24 and Cut To thriller a two-season straight-to-series order (from feed excerpt).

Angel Reese scores 30 as Dream win their first WNBA Finals game, tie series 1-1

The WNBA says Atlanta beat Golden State 79-65, with Reese adding 16 rebounds, three assists and two blocks, to even the Finals at 1-1.

Blackwall reportedly raises $100 million in Series C at $2.2 billion valuation

TechCrunch reports the Estonia-based company lets hosting providers sell customizable traffic-security tools under their own brands (from feed excerpt).

Sakana AI releases open-source Agentic Scientist workflow for computational research

Sakana AI says a human-steered early version aided an Error Diffusion study accepted for an ALIFE 2026 oral presentation (from feed excerpt).

Erik ten Hag reportedly opposed Scott McTominay's sale and was disappointed when it went ahead

The Athletic reports ten Hag felt the Manchester United hierarchy broke promises, particularly over McTominay's sale to Napoli (from feed excerpt).

ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent reportedly ordered 3 million-plus Nvidia RTX PRO 5500 GPUs

Techmeme, citing Reuters, says the orders are worth $35 billion-plus amid a rush for less powerful, export-compliant chips (from feed excerpt).

Star Wars Funday Football planned as animated Super Bowl LXI alternate telecast

The Hollywood Reporter says Anthony Daniels will voice C-3PO in the animated presentation (from feed excerpt).

Surprise Cyberpunk 2077 update reportedly due the week of Oct. 19, 2026

IGN's Oct. 20 post credits CD Projekt with the announcement but gives no specific release day or changes (from feed excerpt).

Trump announces $8 billion harvest fuel relief program for farmers

Reuters reports USDA plans one-time payments covering part of farmers' modeled 2026 crop-year losses (from feed excerpt).

JADE reacts to 'Angel of My Dreams' being used for Kylie Jenner's Victoria's Secret walk

PopBase says JADE reacted to her single being used for Jenner's walk at the fashion show (from feed excerpt).

Mike Evans reportedly out for rest of 49ers-Commanders game with Achilles issue

Adam Schefter and Ian Rapoport reported the receiver was out after leaving San Francisco's home game before halftime (from feed excerpt).

Google Cloud's London-region services reportedly disrupted

The Register quoted Google's regional error notice; Emma and Synapse attributed their downtime to the London outage (from feed excerpt).

An AI system is claimed to beat Kimi-K3, GLM-5.3 Flash and Grok-4.7

A user calls the result impressive but says the system is multiple times less efficient than Sol (from feed excerpt).

Commanders receiver Terry McLaurin carted off with knee injury, ruled out for game

Nicki Jhabvala reported McLaurin grabbed his left knee after a tackle and later wore an air cast.

BleepingComputer

Revolut outage disrupts online banking operations worldwide

Revolut is working to resolve a worldwide outage that began Tuesday morning, with thousands of Downdetector reports of problems with the app, banking and transfers. Its status page listed 28 affected services, including sign-ins, card payments, transfers and trading, and the company says customer money and data are safe. The root cause was not yet disclosed; Revolut serves more than 80 million customers and disclosed a data breach last month.

Nikkei discloses third data breach in a month, 1.8M records exposed

Nikkei says hackers used stolen credentials to access a development system on October 7, exposing 1.83 million records. About 150,000 records contained names, emails, addresses, phone numbers or birth dates, and the rest had no identifiers; no credit card data was exposed. Nikkei revoked the credentials, notified Japan's privacy regulator on October 11 and is still determining the scope.

WordPress SEO plugin Rank Math compromised to backdoor websites

Rank Math PRO version 3.0.123, downloaded from the vendor's site between October 15 20:02 UTC and October 16 07:12 UTC, contained malware that plants persistent hidden backdoors. Users who installed it should treat their sites as compromised and update to the clean 3.0.124. The free Rank Math SEO plugin, active on over 4 million sites, was unaffected.

Hackers hijack AOMEI update servers to secretly spread malware

Between April and July 2026, a threat actor tracked as UNC7017 compromised AOMEI Backupper's update and promotional systems to deliver a downloader called CROSSROAD and a backdoor called SHINYROAD. ManageEngine, Google's Threat Intelligence Group and Mandiant found victims in the US, Australia, India, Singapore, Spain and Switzerland. The attackers briefly tampered with configuration files and restored them to hide the activity.

Bullhorn takes staffing platform offline to contain cyberattack

Staffing software provider Bullhorn, with over 10,000 customers, disabled platform access after a cyberattack caused a system-wide outage that began Friday. The company says it has eradicated the immediate threat with help from CrowdStrike and is restoring services. It has not yet determined whether customer data was exfiltrated.

OpenCode hack exposes API keys amid AI distillation attacks

OpenCode says a large distillation attack exposed stored API keys for 1.4% of OpenCode Console users who had linked external providers such as Anthropic, OpenAI and Google. Some users reported unauthorized charges above $1,700 overnight and suspended Google Cloud projects. Co-founder Dax Raad said attackers had been targeting the systems with AI agents for at least 48 hours.

Microsoft fixes game, app crashes caused by recent Windows update

Microsoft fixed a known issue where games and Windows 11 apps using AC-3 (Dolby Digital) decoding crashed after the optional September preview update KB5124010. The October Patch Tuesday update KB5127648 resolves it for Windows 11 24H2 and later.

Inside the Underground Market for Know Your Client Services

A Flare analysis of underground markets from March to September 2026 describes sales of forged ID documents, manipulated photos and videos, help with live identity checks, and pre-verified accounts used to bypass KYC at banks and crypto exchanges. It cites the OnlyFake operator's February 2026 guilty plea over more than 10,000 fraudulent identity documents.

F5 releases out-of-band patches for critical NGINX vulnerabilities

F5 patched three critical NGINX flaws (CVE-2026-15176, CVE-2026-97205 and CVE-2026-93479) that can let unauthenticated remote attackers cause denial of service or, with ASLR disabled or bypassed, execute code on non-default configurations. Fixes cover NGINX Plus, Open Source, Ingress Controller, Gateway Fabric and Instance Manager. F5 has not flagged exploitation in the wild.

Microsoft fixes classic Outlook bug that hid Copilot buttons

Microsoft fixed a bug that removed Copilot and Copilot Chat buttons in classic Outlook for some licensed users, caused by Outlook failing to retrieve account information from the user's profile. A fix announced in June had resurfaced after recent updates; a workaround is enabling "Show Apps in Outlook" in Advanced options.

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