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AleRunner writes: "China is helping Cuba race to capture renewable solar energy as the United States imposes an effective oil blockade on the Caribbean island, creating its worst energy crisis in decades," reports The Washington Post. Later in the article, it states that "China's decades-long push into clean energy technology is now helping to protect it from the soaring oil and gas crisis spurred by Trump's war against Iran," and that "Chinese exports of solar equipment to Cuba skyrocketed fro…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: A lobbying trade body for smaller cloud providers is asking the European Commission to impose interim measures blocking Broadcom from terminating the VMware Cloud Service Provider program, calling the decision a death sentence for some tech suppliers and an illegal squeeze on customer choice. As The Reg revealed in January, Broadcom shuttered the scheme, a move sources claimed affects hundreds of CSPs across Europe and curtails options for …

Cloudflare's CEO predicts AI-driven bot traffic will surpass human internet traffic by 2027, as AI agents generate vastly more web requests than people. "If a human were doing a task -- let's say you were shopping for a digital camera -- and you might go to five websites. Your agent or the bot that's doing that will often go to 1,000 times the number of sites that an actual human would visit," Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince said in an interview at SXSW this week. "So it might go to 5,000 sites. …

The UK regulator Ofcom fined 4chan nearly $700,000 (520,000 pounds) for failing to implement age checks and address illegal content risks under the Online Safety Act, but the platform mocked the penalty and signaled it won't pay. A lawyer representing the company responded with an AI-generated cartoon image of a hamster, writing in a follow-up post on X: "In the only country in which 4chan operates, the United States, it is breaking no law and indeed its conduct is expressly protected by the Fi…

For the second time in the past month, an AI agent went rogue at Meta -- this time giving an engineer incorrect advice that briefly exposed sensitive data. The Verge reports: A Meta engineer was using an internal AI agent, which Clayton described as "similar in nature to OpenClaw within a secure development environment," to analyze a technical question another employee posted on an internal company forum. But the agent also independently publicly replied to the question after analyzing it, with…

Longtime Slashdot reader UnknowingFool writes: Rapper Afroman, born Joseph Edgar Foreman, famous for his 2000 hit "Because I Got High", has won a defamation lawsuit that seven Ohio police offers filed against him. A jury found he did not defame the officers in music videos he made about a 2022 police raid of his home. In August 2022, Adams County Sheriff's Department raided Afroman's home on suspicion of drug trafficking and kidnapping. Neither drugs nor kidnapping victims were found, and charg…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Google is planning big changes for Android in 2026 aimed at combating malware across the entire device ecosystem. Starting in September, Google will begin restricting application sideloading with its developer verification program, but not everyone is on board. Android Ecosystem President Sameer Samat tells Ars that the company has been listening to feedback, and the result is the newly unveiled advanced flow, which will allow power users t…

Meta is partially reversing its decision to drop VR support for Horizon Worlds, keeping VR access for existing Unity-based games while shifting future development to a new flatscreen-focused Horizon Engine. UploadVR reports: If you somehow missed it, on Tuesday Meta officially announced that its Horizon Worlds "metaverse" platform would drop VR support in June, meaning it would only be available as a flatscreen experience for the web and smartphones. But now, in an "ask me anything" session on …

OpenAI announced it's acquiring developer tooling startup Astral to strengthen its Codex AI coding assistant, which has over 2 million weekly users and has seen a three-fold increase in user growth since the start of the year. CNBC reports: "Through it all, though, our goal remains the same: to make programming more productive. To build tools that radically change what it feels like to build software," Astral's founder and CEO Charlie Marsh wrote in a blog post. The company's acquisition of Ast…

Walmart has secured patents for systems that use machine learning to forecast demand and automate pricing decisions, "pushing the U.S. retail behemoth into a debate over the use of algorithms to adjust product costs," reports the Financial Times. From the report: In January Walmart obtained a U.S. patent for a "system and method for dynamically and automatically updating item prices" to carry out markdowns in its ecommerce unit, a rapidly growing division that generated more than $150 billion i…

BrianFagioli writes: A new iOS exploit chain called DarkSword shows how attackers can break into certain iPhones, grab sensitive data like messages, credentials, and even crypto wallets, and then disappear without leaving obvious traces. It targets older iOS 18 builds using Safari and WebGPU flaws to escape Apple's sandbox, which is pretty wild on its own, but what really stands out is how fast it works and how financially motivated these attacks have become. The takeaway is simple but importan…

Trevor Milton, the pardoned founder of Nikola, is seeking $1 billion for AI-powered autonomous planes through a new venture called SyberJet. The Tech Buzz reports: "Autonomous planes will be 10 times harder than Nikola ever was," Milton told the Wall Street Journal in a rare interview. It's a remarkable admission from someone whose last venture collapsed under the weight of securities fraud charges after he overstated the capabilities of Nikola's electric and hydrogen-powered trucks. Milton was…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: The FBI has resumed purchasing reams of Americans' data and location histories to aid federal investigations, the agency's director, Kash Patel, testified to lawmakers on Wednesday. This is the first time since 2023 that the FBI has confirmed it was buying access to people's data collected from data brokers, who source much of their information -- including location data -- from ordinary consumer phone apps and games, per Politico. At the tim…

Cloudflare is appealing a 14.2 million-euro fine from Italy for refusing to comply with its "Piracy Shield" law, which requires blocking access to websites on its 1.1.1.1 DNS service within 30 minutes. The company argues the system lacks oversight, risks widespread overblocking, and could undermine core Internet infrastructure. Ars Technica's Jon Brodkin reports: Piracy Shield is "a misguided Italian regulatory scheme designed to protect large rightsholder interests at the expense of the broade…