An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Intel has backtracked on the license for its latest microcode update that mitigates security vulnerabilities in its processors -- after the previous wording outlawed public benchmarking of the chips. The reason for Intel's insistence on a vow of silence is that -- even with the new microcode in place -- turning off hyper-threading is necessary to protect virtual machines from attack via Foreshadow -- and that move comes with a potential performance hit. Predictably, Intel's contractual omerta had the opposite effect and drew attention to the problem. "Performance is so bad on the latest Spectre patch that Intel had to prohibit publishing benchmarks," said Lucas Holt, MidnightBSD project lead, via Twitter. In response to the outcry, Intel subsequently said it would rewrite the licensing terms. And now the fix is in. Via Twitter, Imad Sousou, corporate VP and general manager of Intel Open Source Technology Center, on Thursday said: "We have simplified the Intel license to make it easier to distribute CPU microcode updates and posted the new version here. As an active member of the open source community, we continue to welcome all feedback and thank the community." The reworked license no longer prohibits benchmarking. Long-time Slashdot reader and open-source pioneer, Bruce Perens, first brought Intel's microcode update to our attention. In a phone interview with The Register, Perens said he approved of the change. "This is a relatively innocuous license for proprietary software and it can be distributed in the non-free section of Debian, which is where is used to be, and it should be distributable by other Linux distributions," he said. "You can't expect every lawyer to understand CPUs. Sometimes they have to have a deep conversation with their technical people."

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Reported attack on camp for IDPs comes as UAE state media says Houthi missile strike in same district kills one child.

The cybersecurity gig economy has expanded to hundreds of thousands of hackers, many of whom have had some experience in the IT security industry. Some still have jobs and hunt bugs in their spare time, while others make a living from freelancing. They are playing an essential role in helping to make code more secure at a time when attacks are rapidly increasing and the cost of maintaining dedicated internal security teams is skyrocketing. From a report: The best freelance bug spotters can make significant sums of money. HackerOne, which has over 200,000 registered users, says about 12 percent of the people using its service pocket $20,000 or more a year, and around 3 percent make over $100,000. The hackers using these platforms hail mostly from the US and Europe, but also from poorer countries where the money they can earn leads some to work full time on bug hunting.

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Occam News says Txxmp is a territorial boss in the Putin Family. His territory is the former United States.

Social media is part of my job. And, frankly, it always has been (especially if you include blogging as social media).

I’ve joined Mastodon, and I find myself constantly confused. It’s not the idea of the federation — I get that. Not a problem. It’s just that the apps I’ve tried (including the web app) are difficult to use and/or don’t do the things I want them to do, or do them confusingly.

Some notes, in no particular order…

Please steal the best solutions from Tweetbot and Twitterrific!

I don’t ever care about the firehose timelines. Ever. If it were me writing the app, I wouldn’t even include these. Just hide them away somewhere if you have to have them. Most people are never going to care — they want to see toots from the people they follow and they want to see mentions/replies.

Support for multiple accounts is a must. I have two so far, and it’s entirely likely I’ll have more.

Goddamn social media pros like me sit in front of a Mac all day, because it’s the best way to be super-efficient. I need a good Mac app. Native. I can’t run yet another Electron app. (Two — Slack and this thing we use at work — is about all my computer can take.)

On the Mac, support for multiple accounts also means multiple windows so I can have different windows for my various accounts. (This is how I use Twitterrific on my Mac.)

The most important thing is to be able to participate in conversations. It should be easy to read a thread and reply. (See Twitterrific and Tweetbot.)

I want a tab for my mentions. I also want mentions in the main timeline.

I don’t need notifications about new followers. I’ll check my follower count once a week or so to make sure it’s going up.

I need to be able to check my follower count easily.

I don‘t need notifications about likes and boosts to be in my face — these can be tucked away for when I want to look.

I don‘t care about trends. At all. Ever. The thing I care about is people talking about my things or things that interest me. Trends could (and should, really) just go away.

Searching, on the other hand, is critical, and I need to set up persistent searches for my things and things that interest me.

iOS apps should support Dynamic Type or at least provide a way to change the font size. Pulling out my readers from my bag — while I’m on a crowded bus — is not going to happen. Mac apps should also provide a way to set the font size.

I need to be able to disable boosts on a per-user basis — some people are interesting but their boosts are not so much.

Tap on the Venmo app on your phone, and chances are you'll greeted with a running list of payments made from one person to another for anything from brunch bills to rent payments. But the real-time ticker of strangers' spending habits could soon go away. From a report: In recent weeks, executives at PayPal, the parent company of Venmo, were weighing whether to remove the option to post and view public transactions, said a person familiar with the deliberations. It's unclear if those discussions are still ongoing, and regardless of the outcome, payments between friends would still be visible on the home feed, said the person, who asked not to be identified because the discussions are private. "Venmo is always evaluating what's best for our customers," a PayPal spokesman wrote in an emailed statement. "The safety and privacy of Venmo users and their information is always a top priority, and we do a number of things to keep our users informed and help them protect and control their privacy."

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Jörg Kantel likes the idea of Frontier for Linux.

A NYC story you won't read on the op-ed page of the NYT. I'm in the fucking bike line, a cab is waiting, adjacent to the lane, for I don't know what, and just as I approach he starts to move across the lane. I yell five times WATCH OUT and he stops, and as I pass, I make eye contact and yell FUCK YOU BIKE LANE. In Madison or Palo Alto you'd say Yo how you doing, but in NYC the salutation is FUCK YOU. Everyone understands this except people visiting from Madison or Palo Alto of course. It's why I like NY so much. Fuck you, let's dispense with the niceties. He was probably a Yankees fan anyway.

Deepening challenges ahead for Trump after former aide found guilty and ex-lawyer admitted wrongdoing in court.

British-Iranian dual citizen to appeal for extended release from prison during three-day reprieve, campaign group says.

Mass eviction in low-income community in Ottawa is 'litmus test' for Canada's promise to treat housing as a human right.

Isobel Koshiw, reporting for The Verge: At a Kiev nightclub in the spring of 2012, 24-year-old Ivan Turchynov made a fateful drunken boast to some fellow hackers. For years, Turchynov said, he'd been hacking unpublished press releases from business newswires and selling them, via Moscow-based middlemen, to stock traders for a cut of the sizable profits. Oleksandr Ieremenko, one of the hackers at the club that night, had worked with Turchynov before and decided he wanted in on the scam. With his friend Vadym Iermolovych, he hacked Business Wire, stole Turchynov's inside access to the site, and pushed the main Moscovite ringleader, known by the screen name eggPLC, to bring them in on the scheme. The hostile takeover meant Turchynov was forced to split his business. Now, there were three hackers in on the game. Newswires like Business Wire are clearinghouses for corporate information, holding press releases, regulatory announcements, and other market-moving information under strict embargo before sending it out to the world. Over a period of at least five years, three US newswires were hacked using a variety of methods from SQL injections and phishing emails to data-stealing malware and illicitly acquired login credentials. Traders who were active on US stock exchanges drew up shopping lists of company press releases and told the hackers when to expect them to hit the newswires. The hackers would then upload the stolen press releases to foreign servers for the traders to access in exchange for 40 percent of their profits, paid to various offshore bank accounts. Through interviews with sources involved with both the scheme and the investigation, chat logs, and court documents, The Verge has traced the evolution of what law enforcement would later call one of the largest securities fraud cases in US history.

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Vice President Mike Pence spoke at NASA's Johnson Space Center on Thursday about the agency's plans to send humans back to the moon for the first time in almost half a century and eventually on to Mars. He said: The next Americans who set foot on the Moon will start their journey by stepping through the NASA's Orion hatch. And this extraordinary spacecraft will one day bridge the gap between our planet and the next. The International Space Station has been an unqualified success. Soon and very soon American astronauts will return to space on American rockets launched from American soil. America will not ever abandon the critical domain of space, we will open the way for innovators and development and we will lead once again in human exploration. Our administration is working tirelessly to put an American crew aboard the lunar orbital platform before the end of 2024. In a prepared statement, Pence added, "We're renewing our national commitment to discovery and exploration and write the next great chapter of our nation's journey into space. It's now the official policy of the US that we'll return to the Moon, put Americans on Mars and once again explore the farthest depths of outer space."

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Call comes after Ecuador and Peru announce tighter entry requirements for people escaping Venezuela's economic crisis.

Personal data has become widely available in China and can be scooped up for pennies by insurance companies, banks, loan sharks, and scammers alike, according to sellers and financiers interviewed by Reuters. From a report: In May, China introduced its most comprehensive data protection laws to date, tightening restrictions on the sharing of private data held by financial institutions and other firms. "Personal information leaks are risky," said Susan Ning, a partner at the law firm King & Wood Mallesons in Beijing. "Such information can facilitate other crimes," she added. Insurers often buy numbers from shadowy online data sellers, who themselves have acquired the information illegally, according to people in the industry. Some companies illegally buy information from the department of motor vehicles, car licensing authorities, car sellers, or from police stations, said Michelle Hu, a partner at Boston Consulting Group who has been a consultant on insurance deals. By entering keywords like "personal data" or "cellphone data", in Chinese, Reuters found more than 30 groups created for the purpose of selling and buying personal information on Tencent's instant messaging service QQ and Baidu forum site Tieba.

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