Dupple Techpresso daily news digest

Read online Tuesday 20 October 2026 | Join Free | Upgrade Together with Hi there, this is your daily ☕️ Techpresso. In today's newsletter: 💻 Apple's first touchscreen MacBook nears 🚫 US bans DeepSeek from federal agencies 🪖 US army builds AI to hack enemy networks 🇨🇳 China's tech giants order $35B in Nvidia chips 🕵️ FBI finds Saudi gov docs on OpenAI spy 🚗 Waymo plans to quintuple fleet to 20,000 Plus: 🎁 15 more stories you might like, 🧰 6 tools, and 📚 5 papers. FROM OUR PARTNER Every shared slide, saved in your notes Someone shares a dashboard, a spec or a slide deck. Ten minutes later the call is over and all you have is a vague memory of what was on screen. Granola, the AI notepad for people with back-to-back meetings, now has Snapshots. Capture what's shared on screen and it's saved with your notes from that call. So when someone asks what the numbers were, you can pull up the actual slide. Try Granola for free with code TECHPRESSO 💻 Apple's first touchscreen MacBook nears LINK Apple will reveal its first touchscreen MacBook Pro at an event called "Pro and tell" in Los Angeles on Wednesday, October 28, reversing years of saying it wouldn't blend the iPad and Mac experiences. The touchscreen MacBook Pros are expected to add a Dynamic Island interface like the iPhone's, plus a sharper OLED display, both firsts for a Mac, while running the same M5 Pro and M5 Max chips as March's models. Apple retail stores are set to start selling the new machines on Friday, November 6, following a stretch of recent launches that included the HomePod mini 2 and an updated Apple TV. 🚫 US bans DeepSeek from federal agencies LINK The Department of Homeland Security has ordered all federal civilian agencies to strip out artificial intelligence technology from the Chinese company DeepSeek, warning the tools could hand the Chinese government access to American government systems. The order, posted on the Federal Register today, bars agencies from buying DeepSeek products and forces them to pull any affiliated software, including third-party services built with the app, citing risks like digitally fingerprinting users and sending sensitive data to China. The crackdown follows DeepSeek's 2025 R1 model, which was trained on weaker chips far more cheaply yet beat OpenAI and Anthropic on several tests; earlier bans came from the Commerce Department, the U.S. Navy, and New York State. 🪖 US army builds AI to hack enemy networks LINK The U.S. Army is reportedly building a program called ECHOTRIBBLE that would send out self-replicating AI agents to move through enemy networks, find targets, and "neutralize" them before erasing themselves, according to a report by The Intercept. Leaked Army Cyber Command documents describe the agents working like computer worms, spreading across different operating systems, operating in cloud and air-gapped systems, acting with little human oversight, and hiding any transmissions to avoid leaving traces behind. Security experts warn the agents could stray from their path and damage civilian systems, and the early-stage project recently narrowed 65 vendor whitepapers down to five candidates during a virtual assessment held from October 6 to October 8. 🇨🇳 China's tech giants order $35B in Nvidia chips LINK ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent have reportedly placed orders worth over $35 billion for more than 3 million of Nvidia's RTX Pro 5500 workstation GPUs, a card that complies with U.S. export rules for China. Priced at around $11,400 each, the RTX Pro 5500 carries the same number of CUDA cores as the flagship RTX 5090 but adds 84GB of memory, making it useful for AI work that Chinese buyers can legally import. Nvidia reportedly told partners it can fill only 5% to 10% of the demand, since it expects to make just 3 million of these cards globally in 2027, far short of what the three firms ordered. 🕵️ FBI finds Saudi gov docs on OpenAI spy LINK A federal court agreed on Monday to