Florida's Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles "made $77 million in 2017 by selling drivers' personal information to more than 30 private companies, including marketing firms, bill collectors, insurance companies and data brokers..." according to local news site. schwit1 shared this report from WPTV: A Florida woman is blaming the state government for an onslaught of robocalls and direct mail offers â"- accusations that come as the Scripps station WFTS in Tampa uncovered that the DMV makes millions by selling Florida drivers' personal information to outside companies, including marketing firms. WFTS I-Team Investigator Adam Walser obtained records showing the state sold information on Florida drivers and ID cardholders to more than 30 private companies, including marketing firms, bill collectors, insurance companies and data brokers in the business of reselling information. They also report that the woman was illiterate, and "had no digital footprint â" until she got an ID." But within days, her legal guardian reports she was "receiving direct mail offers for lawn service, credit cards, cell phones and insurance. She also now receives constant robocalls and salespeople have even started showing up at her door." And their investigation revealed more damning details. One data broker said their firm "has an agreement with the state to buy driver and ID cardholder data for a penny a record." A promotional video on their web site brags they have "access to 2.5 billion customers and two-thirds of the world's population." Though it may be possible to opt-out of data collection from individual marketing companies, a spokesperson for the state of Florida "said there's no way for drivers to opt out if they don't want their personal information sold."

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US threatens Turkey with sanctions for buying the Russian S-400 anti-missile system.

This week Intel announced two new patches, according to Tom's Hardware: The flaw in the processor diagnostic tool (CVE-2019-11133) is rated 8.2 out 10 on the CVSS 3.0 scale, making it a high-severity vulnerability. The flaw [found by security researcher Jesse Michael from Eclypsium] "may allow an authenticated user to potentially enable escalation of privilege, information disclosure or denial of service via local access," according to Intel's latest security advisory. Versions of the tool that are older than 4.1.2.24 are affected. The second vulnerability, found by Intel's internal team, is a medium-severity vulnerability in Intel's SSD DC S4500/S4600 series sold to data center customers. The flaw found in the SSD firmware versions older than SCV10150 obtained a 5.3 score on the CVSS 3.0 scale, so it was labeled medium-severity. The bug may allow an unprivileged user to enable privilege escalation via physical access. As one of the flaws was uncovered by Intel itself and for the other the Eclypsium research coordinated with Intel for its disclosure, Intel was able to have ready the patches in time for the public announcement.

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Barry was briefly upgraded to a hurricane but weakened to a tropical storm again hours later.

West African leaders in Ivory Coast have agreed to roll out a single shared currency.

Many of America's voting machines are depending on an outdated Microsoft operating system, reports the Associated Press. "The vast majority of 10,000 election jurisdictions nationwide use Windows 7 or an older operating system to create ballots, program voting machines, tally votes and report counts." That's significant because Windows 7 reaches its "end of life" on Jan. 14, meaning Microsoft stops providing technical support and producing "patches" to fix software vulnerabilities, which hackers can exploit. In a statement to the AP, Microsoft said Friday it would offer continued Windows 7 security updates for a fee through 2023. Critics say the situation is an example of what happens when private companies ultimately determine the security level of election systems with a lack of federal requirements or oversight.... It's unclear whether the often hefty expense of security updates would be paid by vendors operating on razor-thin profit margins or cash-strapped jurisdictions. It's also uncertain if a version running on Windows 10, which has more security features, can be certified and rolled out in time for primaries. The Associated Press contacted the Coalition for Good Governance, an election integrity advocacy organization, and received this comment from the group's the executive director. "Is this a bad joke?"

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Turning the tide, concerns that the high seas could become Libya's next front line.

Authorities at Pakistan's largest open-pit coal mine claim Thar Desert coal reserves could be the answer to Pakistan's energy crisis for a 100 years to come.

Algerian authorities hope additional fans for Sunday's semi-final against Nigeria will help boost the team.

UK Foreign Minister Hunt says concern was 'destination not origin' after 'constructive call' with Iranian counterpart.

Four killed in Taliban attack on a hotel in Badghis province, while a US service member died in action in Wardak.

"Starshot wants to build the world's most powerful laser and aim it at the closest star. What could go wrong?" An anonymous reader quotes MIT's Technology Review: In 2015, Philip Lubin, a cosmologist from the University of California, Santa Barbara, took the stage at the 100-Year Starship Symposium in Santa Clara. He outlined his plan to build a laser so powerful that it could accelerate tiny spacecraft to 20% of the speed of light, getting them to Alpha Centauri in just 20 years. We could become interstellar explorers within a single generation. It was quite the hook. Because Lubin is an excellent public speaker, and because the underlying technologies already existed, and because the science was sound, he was mobbed after the talk. He also met Pete Worden, a former research director of NASA's Ames Research Center, for the first time. Worden had recently taken over as head of the Breakthrough Initiatives, a nonprofit program funded by Russian technology billionaire Yuri Milner. Six months later, Lubin's project had $100 million in funding from Breakthrough and the endorsement of Stephen Hawking, who called it the "next great leap into the cosmos." Starshot is straightforward, at least in theory. First, build an enormous array of moderately powerful lasers. Yoke them together—what's called "phase lock"—to create a single beam with up to 100 gigawatts of power. Direct the beam onto highly reflective light sails attached to spacecraft weighing less than a gram and already in orbit. Turn the beam on for a few minutes, and the photon pressure blasts the spacecraft to relativistic speeds. Not only could such a technology be used to send sensors to another star system; it could dispatch larger craft to Earth's neighboring planets and moons. Imagine a package to Mars in a few days, or a crewed mission to Mars in a month. Starshot effectively shrinks the solar system, and ultimately the galaxy. It's fantastic. And also a dream. Or a sales pitch. Or a long-term, far-out project that can't be sustained long enough for the nonexistent technologies it requires to be built.

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Tournament hosts and favourites England will take on Kane Williamson's Black Caps at Lord's on Sunday.

Long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo quotes the Register: An interior design tools startup called Mosss on Wednesday sued Google to get it to restore its data after someone at the startup accidentally deleted the firm's G Suite account. In a pro se lawsuit [PDF] filed in US District Court in Oakland, California, Mosss, under its previous corporate name, Musey Inc., asked Google to help it restore its data... Initially, the filing says, the company believed Google would be able to help because a customer service representative said he'd deal with the issue. But the cavalry did not arrive... "All efforts failed and at the end we received a one-line email that stated our data was lost and couldn't be returned to us." Except perhaps not. According to the complaint, the company was informed – it's not clear whether Google or a third-party advised this – that it could seek a subpoena or file a civil lawsuit to access its data. So that's what it has done.

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diegocg writes: Linux 5.2 has been released. This release includes Sound Open Firmware, a project that brings open source firmware to DSP audio devices; open firmware for many Intel products is also included. This release also improves the Pressure Stall Information resource monitoring to make it usable by Android; the mount API has been redesigned with new syscalls; the BFQ I/O scheduler has gained some performance improvements; a new CLONE_PIDFD flag lets clone(2) return pidfs usable by pidfd_send_signal(2); Ext4 has gained support for case-insensitive name lookups; there is also a new device mapper target that simulates a device that has failing sectors and/or read failures; open source drivers for the ARM Mali t4xx and newer 6xx/7xx have been added. Many other new drivers, features and changes can be found in the changelog. But there's more besides supporting "a handful of extra ARM-powered single-board computers," according to CRN: The biggest feature in 5.2 is probably support for Intel's forthcoming Comet Lake architecture, which will power the tenth generation of its Core desktop and mobile CPUs due. The new silicon is due to ship late in 2019 and appear in products early the next year. Linux 5.2 also includes many tweaks that improve its performance on laptops.

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