NIFC warns tax uncertainty, Equinix Cape Town approved for data center

Vint Cerf, who left Google after 21 years as chief internet evangelist, is working on a standard for identifying and coordinating AI agents on the open internet. His core argument: natural language is not a protocol. Treating it like one will not hold as agent-to-agent communication scales, just as TCP/IP formalized how computers talk instead of relying on human-readable commands. For anyone building multi-agent systems or platforms that expose agent endpoints, this could redefine how agents discover, authenticate, and negotiate with each other.

Rime's voice AI platform uses phoneme-based speech models trained on proprietary studio recordings, allowing it to handle complex customer calls in regulated sectors like healthcare and finance. The Series A was led by M13 with participation from Twilio Ventures. The company is already revenue-generating and processing over 100 million calls monthly. For enterprises still relying on clunky IVR systems or outsourced call centers, this represents a viable AI alternative that does not sound robotic.

SLB and Liberty Energy announced a strategic alliance to deliver modular infrastructure and integrated power generation for data center projects globally, targeting the massive electricity demand driven by AI and high-performance computing. The partnership leverages oilfield expertise in modular deployment and gas-fired power to build behind-the-meter solutions that bypass strained grid connections. For data center developers facing multi-year interconnection queues, this offers a faster path to power. For energy companies, it is a hedge as oil demand plateaus while AI electricity demand explodes.

The CMU CERT Coordination Center and CISA have flagged that multiple exploitable versions of the shim binary used to boot Linux on UEFI systems were never added to the revocation list. An attacker with admin access or the ability to modify the boot process can use these vulnerable bootloaders to bypass Secure Boot and deploy bootkits like Bootkitty or BlackLotus. Linux users should verify their distribution ships shim 0.9.1+ and that the SBAT update has been applied. This is not theoretical -- these vulnerabilities are being actively exploited.

Cape Town's Municipal Planning Tribunal approved rezoning for Equinix's two proposed data centers on a 37-acre parcel near the airport, despite residents and housing groups arguing that people cannot eat or drink data. The hyperscale facilities will deliver critical cloud capacity to South Africa, a market hungry for local data residency. For African enterprises and cloud providers, this means lower latency and better data compliance. But the local pushback signals that the data center versus community tension spreading across Europe and the US has now arrived in Africa.