Foreign Hackers Exploited Office Document System.
Also, the cloud made your bed uncomfortable.

The Critical Infrastructure Runs On The Intern's Old Laptop

A foreign threat actor managed to breach a United States nuclear weapons manufacturing site, the Kansas City National Security Campus, not through some sophisticated cinematic laser grid, but by exploiting unpatched flaws in Microsoft's document management software. The entire operation relied on vulnerabilities in the ubiquitous workplace staple, SharePoint.

The breach leveraged a remote code execution bug and a spoofing flaw, both of which had patches available from Microsoft prior to the July incident, proving once again that the most significant vulnerabilities in national security are not found in the missile silo, but in the internal IT department's patch management schedule. The National Nuclear Security Administration, a semi-autonomous agency within the Department of Energy, confirmed the incident, stating that the breach was confined to their corporate IT side and did not compromise any operational technology, which means the nuclear supply chain is fine; only the document sharing for the nuclear supply chain was compromised. It is just a routine systems audit failure at a critical infrastructure site; please update your firmware and file a ticket.

Someone Finally Found The Receipts

A non-profit organization named Idealist.org achieved the unthinkable, a feat of heroism that will not be acknowledged on any performance review. The organization managed to successfully replace a $3,000 per month Heroku bill with a $55 per month self-hosted server setup, achieving a 98 percent savings on hosting costs.

This is the inevitable cycle of the cloud economy. The system architect finds the simple elegant solution, a director hears the word "scalable," and two years later the organization is spending more money to do the same thing, only with more vendor lock-in and a higher-octane buzzword. An engineer eventually gets tired of signing the expense report for a database instance the size of an aircraft carrier and just buys a box; the true value in the tech industry is not innovation, but the courage to tell the director that a smaller bill is better.

The Cloud Goes Down, Your Mattress Becomes A Bad Roommate

Amazon Web Services experienced a widespread outage in the US-EAST-1 region, which is the electronic equivalent of the global stapler falling behind the filing cabinet. The fallout was the usual chaos of banking apps and fitness trackers flatlining, but the most deeply personal inconvenience fell upon owners of Eight Sleep's smart mattresses.

The cloud-connected beds, which manage temperature and position, lacked a robust offline mode, causing them to go haywire during the AWS disruption. Users reported their expensive sleep-optimizing devices overheating or becoming stuck at extreme inclines, a reminder that the world's most critical infrastructure will always be an over-engineered $5,000 product that is completely useless without a DNS lookup. The CEO, Matteo Franceschetti, immediately promised to "outage-proof" the product, a phrase which must be an executive-level euphemism for "we will add a physical off switch."

Briefs

• AI Development Woes: Research indicates that Large Language Models can suffer from something called "brain rot," which happens when the model is trained too much on synthetic or machine-generated data. LLMs are getting dumber, just like the rest of us.
• Knowledge Base Depreciation: Wikipedia reports its traffic is falling because AI search summaries and social video are giving people the answers before they even need to click a link. The encyclopedia is now a back-of-the-napkin reference for the machine.
• Aerospace Contract Delays: NASA Administrator Bill Nelson suggested that SpaceX may be kicked off a moon mission contract due to performance and schedule concerns. This is just an executive-level performance improvement plan for a spaceship; the paperwork should be interesting.