Long battery life wasn’t exactly a banner feature of iOS 8, but with Apple releasing iOS 9 for download on Wednesday there’s renewed hope that your iPhone might actually last all day.

iOS 9 comes with a few battery-life upgrades—the first proming to be, well, overall improvement. Apple claims that, “apps and key technologies have been made more efficient to trim battery usage wherever possible.” Early reviews are mixed on how effective this effort was. It seems clear that battery life is no worse on iOS 9 than on iOS 8, but beyond that it gets murky. “Most of the iOS 9 results are just a few minutes up or down from the iOS 8 results,” Ars Technica said of its extensive tests. “I get solid battery life, at least on par with iOS 8 if not slightly better,” Romain Dillet wrote on TechCrunch. And the Wall Street Journal notes, “the power-saving benefits of iOS 9 require some explanation.”

Uh, OK. The news gets brighter from there, though. iOS 9 uses the proximity sensors and ambient light instruments on Apple device to determine when they’re face-down on surfaces. Using that information, the operating system knows not to turn on a device’s screen for things like notifications when it’s lying screen-down on a table. Over time this adds up to saved power. iOS 9 also offers even more detailed usage statistics than iOS 8 did, so you can figure out which apps are eating your battery life during active use or even just by running in the background.

Perhaps the most significant new battery feature is what Apple is calling “Low Power” mode. When you want to squeeze out every last drop of battery life, turning this on gives you extra time—Apple claims an extra hour—but for a price. Low Power reduces the phone’s performance, dims the display, and reduces background activity. But when you get that “10 percent left” notification, you’ll probably take it. Ars Technica points out that it’s hard to measure the effectiveness of Low Power mode, since most tests are designed to push a battery as hard as it can go, but evaluations so far from multiple sources seem to show that it helps buy time.

iOS 9 isn’t going to solve every battery problem—the things you probably like best about your iDevice like a fast processor and pretty screen are what use up all the juice in the first place—and Apple is certainly not the first tech company to develop these types of features. But if you have an iPhone that’s ever been dead when you needed it, it can’t hurt to run iOS 9.

Board meetings of the Lebanon Libraries in the small town of Lebanon, New Hampshire, don’t normally include signs that read “Down with Big Brother” and “DHS is not the boss of my library.” But Tuesday night’s meeting was special: Dozens of community members voted unanimously to reinstate the library's Tor relay, a project that had been suspended after law enforcement intervention. When library director Sean Fleming declared that the relay would go back online, a huge round of applause rang out. The citizens of Lebanon fought to protect privacy and intellectual freedom from the Department of Homeland Security’s intimidation tactics—and they won.

Earlier this summer, Library Freedom Project, an initiative that brings anti-surveillance trainings and technologies to libraries and their local communities, announced the pilot of a new project aimed at installing Tor exit relays in libraries. We’re hardly neutral observers here: We are both activists with the Library Freedom Project, and one of us—Alison—helped craft the plan for Tor exits in libraries. So we’re both familiar with the occasional clashes between the government and libraries—for instance, librarians were at the fore of public opposition to the USA PATRIOT Act’s expansion of federal surveillance powers, particularly when a group of Connecticut librarians sued the U.S. government for the right to disclose to patrons that the feds demanded the library share private patron information. But what happened in New Hampshire was particularly bizarre and frustrating.

Tor is a service that helps protect your anonymity online by obfuscating your identity from other users, governments, or corporations. Domestic violence survivors use Tor to hide their online lives from their abusers. Journalists reporting on repressive conditions depend on it. Activists fighting against everything from police brutality to environmental collapse use Tor for blogging, organizing, and mobilizing. And people who simply want to opt out of mass surveillance or corporate tracking use it, too.

This powerful piece of technology relies on volunteer-run relays; the more people who host a relay in diverse locations worldwide, the stronger and safer the network becomes. Libraries are ideal locations to host these relays: Not only do they typically have fast and reliable Internet connections, but they have a long legacy of protecting anonymity and access to information.

Some think that libraries are less important in a world of Google and Kindles, but the truth is that they are more important than ever. Lebanon, New Hampshire has a population of about 13,000 and two libraries. The median income is less than $30,000 a year, and more than 13 percent of those under the age of 18 live below the poverty line. Many residents of Lebanon who cannot afford a reliable Internet connection at home depend on the library’s technology services.

Kilton Library, a branch of the Lebanon Libraries, hosted the pilot.  Soon after the pilot began, it received media coverage from Vice and Ars Technica. That generated enough attention, apparently, to warrant concern from the Boston division of the Department of Homeland Security. Boston DHS then contacted the local police in New Hampshire to warn library staff that Tor is used for criminal activity. Yes, sometimes Tor is used for crime—but so are cars, and kitchen knives, and lots of other things. Nevertheless, the library director made the decision to suspend the relay project.

In response to this law enforcement pressure, the Library Freedom Project, the Massachusetts and New Hampshire affiliates of the ACLU, and the Tor Project drafted an open letter urging the Kilton Library community to put the relay back online. As soon as Kilton Library and the Library Freedom Project went public about DHS’s fear-mongering, the outpour of support for the library exploded. The Electronic Frontier Foundation even launched a petition to help people rally behind the effort to defend Kilton Library's participation in the Tor network. Supportive calls and emails poured in. Particularly exciting for us was that dozens of libraries and their community members also contacted Library Freedom Project, hoping to set up their own Tor exit nodes, and a number of technologists spun up new relays in solidarity, and a flurry of media attention followed. The local newspaper wrote an editorial in support of Kilton’s Tor setup.

DHS’s confrontation with the Kilton Library comes at a time when technology companies are increasingly unwilling to comply with the federal government’s surveillance demands, and the federal government has been increasingly vocal about their adversarial relationship to online privacy. FBI Director James Comey has been pleading with tech firms for backdoor access into encrypted communications, a move that technologists and lawyers say would violate the Fourth Amendment and make our technologies more vulnerable to malicious hacking.

Many of the Snowden leaks contained specific information about efforts to crack Tor’s encryption and undermine user attempts at protecting their online privacy—even going so far as to naming one of the leaked presentations “Tor Stinks.”

It’s unclear why the Department of Homeland Security, a federal agency tasked with responding to terrorist attacks that was created in the wake of 9/11, is concerned with libraries popularizing and providing tools for patrons to stay safe online. We hope to find out soon: Muckrock, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the ACLU have all filed Freedom of Information Act and Right to Know requests to try to understand more about the government’s motivation in discouraging the small New Hampshire library to support privacy-enhancing software.

This week’s victory for Lebanon Libraries is a sign of hope in a post-Snowden world. ”Our community has spoken loudly in favor of intellectual freedom and free speech, and we're pleased to be able to support them by reinstating our Tor relay,” said Chuck McAndrew, IT librarian for Lebanon Libraries, told us.

If you want to take a stand for privacy, you could start by asking your local library to set up a Tor exit node. Because even if you haven’t checked out a physical book in years, your community still needs libraries to provide information—and the global Internet community needs libraries to stand up for people’s rights.

On Monday, 14-year-old Ahmed Mohamed was arrested in Irving, Texas, for bringing a homemade clock to school to show his engineering teacher. Because it was not a polished consumer product and instead had visible electronic components, school officials and police feared that it was a bomb or model of a bomb. And having a name like “Ahmed Mohamed” doesn't seem to have helped. (The good news is that police dropped the case Wednesday.)

For the maker and hacker communities, the incident demonstrates ongoing tension between hobbyists and those who fear independent, unchecked research. Hackers and makers particularly intersect with this issue because of their desires to take both physical and digital devices apart, learn how they work, learn how to break them, and then build new things.

Blogger and CEO of app database Makerbase Anil Dash showed strong support for Mohamed on Twitter, as did others.

The situation is sadly familiar. Gizmodo editor-in-chief Annalee Newitz remembered a story from 2008 about a Canadian college chemistry student building a workshop in his parents garage and getting arrested on accusations of running a meth lab. And there was an incident in 2013 where a Florida high schooler was arrested for testing out an aluminum foil and toilet bowl cleaner volcano.

Edward Felten, the director of the Princeton Center for Information Technology Policy and the founder of the "Freedom to Tinker" blog, wrote in 2013 that:

The biggest enemy of the freedom to tinker is the “permission culture” in which anything we want to do requires permission from some powerful entity. Permission culture punishes us not for crossing boundaries or causing damage, but for acting “without authorization”—and it cranks up the penalties to make sure we get the message.

Gotta get approval before you bring a project to school!

At the Blackhat hacker conference in Las Vegas last month, keynote speaker Jennifer Granick, the director of civil liberties at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society and a defense lawyer who frequently represents hackers, talked about “Freedom to Tinker.” She concluded, “Today we’ve reached an inflection point. If we change paths, it is still possible that the Dream of Internet Freedom can become true. But if we don’t, it won’t. The Internet will continue to evolve into a slick, stiff, controlled and closed thing.”

And that's before we can even begin to start talking about clock freedom.

The release of Apple's new mobile operating system has become a major annual event for the company's loyal iPhone and iPad users, who waited anxiously Wednesday for the clock to strike 1 p.m. ET so they could download iOS 9.

A lot of them were in for a disappointment.

For me, several of my colleagues, and numerous people I follow on Twitter, the attempt to download iOS 9 led only to the following error message:

It's an embarrassing snafu for Apple, which prides itself on technology that "just works." Whether it will set back the company's efforts to get users to quickly upgrade to the new OS will depend on how widespread the bug is and how long it lasts. I've reached out to Apple for comment and will update if the company replies.

To make matters worse, the iOS 9 download glitch comes on the heels of Apple's admission earlier Wednesday that it will delay the release of its new Apple Watch operating system, WatchOS 2, due to "a bug ... that is taking a bit longer to fix than we expected," as a company spokesperson told TechCrunch. That release was also expected to be available today.

As any IT professional will tell you, bugs are inevitable in any software development project of significant complexity. That said, you'd think the world's most valuable company might manage to ship at least one of its two major mobile operating systems on time.  

Update, Wednesday, Sept. 16, 1:45 p.m.: Folks on Twitter are reporting that they've been able to work around the problem by plugging their devices into their computers and downloading the software update via iTunes.

Meanwhile, Apple appears to have replaced the error message with a more subtle notice that says, "Update Requested ... ."

If it had simply said that from the start, Apple would have saved its users some frustration and itself some embarrassment. It would have conveyed the message that this was not a bug but simply a delay in the software's availability and that users should wait patiently. That would not be an unreasonable request, given the incredible number of people around the world who were all trying to download the same thing at the same time.

Instead, the original "software update failed" notice conveyed the impression that something had gone awry, without any promise that it would be fixed soon. It also gave users two options—"close" and "settings"—that, awkwardly, both led to the same place, which was nowhere.

The good news for impatient types is that at least some users who initially got the error message, including me, are now able to download the update directly to their devices without issue.

Facebook is building a dislike button, CEO Mark Zuckerberg almost-said in a public question-and-answer session on Tuesday. What he actually said is that the company is working on something along the lines of a dislike button, although it won’t be nearly that simple.

“People have asked about the dislike button for many years,” he said, as quoted by Wired. “We’ve finally heard you and we’re working on this and we will deliver something that meets the needs of the larger community.”

Predictably, this sent the tech press into a frenzy. Nothing brings in Facebook likes and shares—the new currency of online media—like a story about, well, Facebook likes and shares. Business Insider led the charge with a typically breathless headline and post: “FINALLY: You’ll soon be able to ‘dislike’ things on Facebook, says Mark Zuckerberg.” Pretty much every other publication on the planet scrambled to reap its own share of the social traffic pie.

I dislike being the bearer of bad news, but whatever Facebook is building, it probably won’t be quite the dislike button its more jaded users have been clamoring for.

Zuckerberg has been teasing us about a dislike button for years—and reaping a wave of free publicity each time—but he has always couched his statements carefully. In December 2014, he flat-out stated that the company will not build a “dislike” button that gives people a way to disapprove of one another’s posts. (I explained in some depth at the time why Facebook wouldn’t want that.) Rather, he said, Facebook was exploring ways to allow users to convey fuzzy sentiments like surprise, laughter, or empathy.

That’s very similar to what he said Tuesday, when he asserted that “what they really want is an ability to express empathy. If you’re expressing something sad … it may not feel comfortable to ‘like’ that post, but your friends and people want to be able to express that they understand.”

What that will actually look like remains unclear. A Facebook spokesperson on Tuesday declined to offer specifics on the company’s plans for new buttons beyond what Zuckerberg himself said. But it almost certainly won’t be as simple as adding a dislike button beside the like button, so that people can upvote and downvote one another’s posts, Reddit-style.

If I had to guess, I’d say the most likely possibility is this: Facebook will give you the option, when you post something, to enable your friends and followers to respond with a button other than “like,” such as “sympathize,” or “agree,” or, I don’t know, “hug”—but only for that specific post. It’s possible the word “dislike” will be among those options, although I still think that’s unlikely.

If I’m right, then users will not have the option to “dislike” or even “sympathize” with posts that haven’t been set up by their authors to enable those responses. So you won’t be able to “dislike” your uncle’s polemical political posts unless he’s gone out of his way to allow you to do so.

My colleague Torie Bosch has argued, rather persuasively, that Facebook doesn’t really need a dislike button, because its like button has already taken on a more flexible meaning than simple approval. Nonetheless, it makes sense for Facebook to consider some alternatives, because understanding when users are expressing things like sympathy, outrage, or laughter rather than approval will help Facebook fine-tune its news-feed algorithms. More nuanced responses means more data for Facebook to mine and monetize—and if you dislike that, then you’re on the wrong social network.  

Previously in Slate:

• The Real Reason Facebook Will Never Have a “Dislike” Button

On Tuesday, BuzzFeed published details from a 20-minute interview (the length of a car ride through Manhattan) with Apple CEO Tim Cook. But the highlight of the whole conversation isn’t the latest news on Live Photos or iMacs vs. iPad Pros. It’s something iPhone users actually already wanted to know.

When asked about the un-deletable default apps that plague Apple’s mobile devices, likes Stocks and Tips, Cook said:

This is a more complex issue than it first appears. ... There are some apps that are linked to something else on the iPhone. If they were to be removed they might cause issues elsewhere on the phone. There are other apps that aren’t like that. So over time, I think with the ones that aren’t like that, we’ll figure out a way [for you to remove them].

We’ll figure out a way. That sounds promising! The Voice Memos app is probably not central to the core of what allows an iPhone to function, but you could imagine a scenario where an app like iMessage sometimes talks to one of the other default apps like Notes or Calendar, and eliminating one would break some functionality in the other. (This could get especially complicated on the new iPhone 6S and 6S Plus, because 3D Touch allows you to "peek" between apps without actually switching between them.)

Cook also addressed another criticism of iOS’s un-deletable default apps. “It’s not that we want to suck up your real estate,” he said. “We’re not motivated to do that. We want you to be happy. So I recognize that some people want to do this, and it’s something we’re looking at.”

He’s probably speaking to a critique that I and others have made about default apps taking up precious space on low-end 16GB devices, thus pressuring users to pay for iCloud. This would be a good capitalist motivation whether or not Cook wants to admit it, but it’s refreshing to hear him address the topic directly.

Cook didn’t definitively promise that default apps will become deletable, but we all know that he (and Apple in general) is comfortable declining to comment or just staying silent when he doesn’t want to talk about something, so this could actually mean something.

There is amazing work going right now with computerized prosthetic limbs that are controlled through inputs from an amputee's muscles or even nerves. There are also advances in the sophistication of humanoid robots in real-world conditions. But at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's aptly named "Wait, What?" conference last week, program manager Justin Sanchez presented some staggering next-gen neurotechnology research.

Sanchez's project uses a brain-computer interface to allow paralysis patients to nimbly manipulate a robotic arm and hand with their minds, moving it in 3-D space, shaking hands, fist bumping, etc. DARPA sponsored surgeries on two patients, Nathan and Jan, to implant microelectrode arrays in the parts of the brain involved with sense and movement. Sanchez explains in the presentation that the research team was investigating "the brain's role in the generation of movement and sensation as demonstrated by some of the very first people to ever be fitted with a direct brain interface."

And that's exactly where this demonstration gets really amazing. Not only is there video of Jan controlling the limb with her mind; there is a whole other component where we see Nathan receiving sensory information from the robotic hand. (Update, Sep. 15: Jan only has implants for movement control, while Nathan has implants for both movement and pressure sensation.) Even when blindfolded he can feel and accurately report which finger someone is touching—even two fingers at once. "We took the next step and we asked the question can we run the experiment in reverse and do for sensation what we did for the motor system?" Sanchez says. Sensors on the robotic hand's fingertips measure forces and convert them into electrical signals that go to Nathan's brain and allow him to feel.

It's not that there is no precedent or context for this research. For example, my colleague Will Oremus reported on Slate in 2013 about a rhesus macaque named Oscar who was controlling the movements of a digital ball on a computer screen through a brain-computer interface. As Oremus wrote at the time, "The computer isn’t reading his mind, exactly—Oscar’s own brain is doing a lot of the lifting, adapting itself by trial and error to the delicate task of accurately communicating its intentions to the machine."

This is true of Jan and Nathan as well, but watching the progress of this technology, you might actually start feeling giddy. There are the usual caveats that progress is slow and soldiers aren't going to be controlling drones with their thoughts any time soon, but come on. Nathan can feel the robotic hand. That's pretty legit.

The ongoing battle between researchers and vendors over the public disclosure of security vulnerabilities in vendor products took a bizarre turn last week in a new case involving two security firms, FireEye and ERNW. In a blog post published September 10, ERNW revealed that FireEye had obtained a court injunction to prevent its researchers from publicly disclosing certain information around three vulnerabilities they discovered in a security product made by FireEye.

Although FireEye agreed that ERNW could disclose the vulnerabilities themselves in a report they planned to publish and present at a conference, the firm took issue with the amount of information the researchers planned to reveal—information ERNW says was required to fully understand the context for the vulnerabilities, but that FireEye says was proprietary source code and would have exposed its product and customers to risk.

The FireEye case is unique because it's a face off between two security firms, both of whom understand the importance that security research plays in securing computer users. FireEye says it saw legal action as the only way to protect its interests and its customers.

Enno Rey, founder of ERNW, wrote a lengthy blog post describing his disappointment in how FireEye strong-armed them with a legal threat. “I don’t think [legal action is] appropriate in this specific case, I don’t think it’s appropriate in the vast majority of other cases of responsible disclosure and I think it eventually sends the wrong signal to the research community,” he wrote. Others in the security community agree with him.

The battle, first reported by the German publication Süddeutschen Zeitung, marks a new twist in the decades-long saga over vulnerability disclosure.

There has long been tension between security researchers who uncover vulnerabilities in a software vendor’s product and the vendors who don’t want the researchers to publicly disclose these holes. In 2005, for example, technology giant Cisco hit researcher Mike Lynn with a court injunction and threat of lawsuit to prevent him from revealing information about a serious security flaw he discovered in its routers. Lynn also faced an FBI probe over his disclosure.

In 2008, Boston subway officials obtained an injunction against three MIT students to prevent them from presenting a talk about security vulnerabilities they found in payment systems used in the Massachusetts mass transit system.

But the FireEye case is unique in that it’s a face off between two security firms, both of whom understand the importance that security research plays in securing computer users. ERNW is a security consulting company based in Germany, and FireEye is a large security firm based in California that is often in the news over its investigation of security breaches. FireEye’s Mandiant forensic unit was hired by Sony last year to investigate its massive breach and has investigated most of the high-profile breaches of the last decade.

FireEye has also been on the discovery end of vulnerabilities in other vendors’ products. Last month, for example, researchers with FireEye Labs presented information about security flaws in the fingerprint scanners of Android phones.

A FireEye spokesman told Wired that his firm fully supported the ERNW researchers disclosing the vulnerabilities in his company’s product but tried to negotiate with them for more than a month about removing sensitive information they didn’t think was necessary for the disclosure. After failing to obtain assurances that the information would be removed, FireEye lost confidence in the negotiations.

He notes that FireEye works with a lot of researchers and vendors about security flaws, but those negotiations never involve the degree of information ERNW planned to disclose. In addition to information about the vulnerabilities, he says they also planned to disclose source code and information about the software architecture and design of FireEye’s security product.

“You’re giving attackers the upper hand, which is against responsible disclosure,” FireEye spokesman Vitor De Souza told Wired. “When we saw what they had in their [initial] report we were like holy shit. We had a lot of questions about how they obtained that… We deal with hundreds of researchers and we had never seen that before. What they included in their report crossed the line. No one was comfortable with that information being disclosed to the public.”

The company has posted a blog entry explaining its stance.

In the two accounts involving the incident, it’s not surprising that the two companies diverge in their interpretation of what occurred. Both agree, however, on some of the basic facts.

The issue between ERNW and FireEye began in April when the German firm contacted FireEye about five vulnerabilities its researcher Felix Wilhelm had found in FireEye’s Malware Protection System version 7.5.1. FireEye says it was already aware of two of the vulnerabilities, but was happy to receive information about the other three from Wilhelm.

One of the most serious would allow an attacker to take control of the MPS appliance simply by sending two emails to any employee at a targeted company—one containing a ZIP attachment with malware and a second containing another ZIP attachment designed to trigger the malware to launch and install a backdoor on the customer’s MPS system. The attack would work even if the recipient didn’t open the initial malicious attachment or even the email in which it was sent, according to a presentation Wilhelm prepared about the vulnerabilities. “Just transferring it is enough,” he wrote in his slides.

Over several weeks beginning in May, FireEye worked with ERNW to understand the vulnerabilities and devise fixes for the main vulnerabilities by the end of June. Some time in June, ERNW provided FireEye with a draft document of a report they planned to release about their findings, following a 90-day period to allow for the disclosure and fixing process to be completed.

FireEye objected to the extensive technical details that described the inner workings of the MPS. “No other software company would allow their source code and design trade secrets be revealed to the public,” De Souza told Wired. ERNW's founder Enno Rey writes that he 'never had the intention to violate' FireEye’s desire to protect its intellectual property.

Rey, who did not respond to Wired's request for comment, saw it otherwise. “We… were of the opinion,” he wrote in his blog post, “that some level of contextual detail would be necessary to understand the nature of the vulnerabilities which in turn would subsequently serve the objective of education that is inherent to any responsible disclosure process.” Nonetheless, Rey asserts that his researchers “removed stuff” from the document “at several occasions during this phase” and that they also complied when FireEye asked several times that they postpone publication of their report, in order to ensure that more customers were upgraded with the fixes.

De Souza maintains, however, that none of the objectionable information they had asked to be removed was deleted from subsequent versions of the report ERNW sent them. “We had multiple discussions with them throughout month of July, and in all the versions of the draft they sent they kept putting IP information in it,” he says.

So FireEye sought a face-to-face meeting to discuss the matter. All the parties met in person on August 5th at the BlackHat security conference in Las Vegas. At the end of that meeting, Rey says they had all come to an agreement about the document.

“We went through the document draft, section by section, and discussed wordings and (level of) technical details,” Rey notes in his blog post. “All three of us had the strong impression that a preliminary consensus was reached during that meeting, and a number of hands were shaken at parting. We think it was agreed upon that we would send the next, mostly final iteration in the following week.”

Rey notes that he fully understood FireEye’s desire to protect its intellectual property and “never had the intention to violate that.” He adds: “[W]e had abided by (both virtual and physical) handshake several times that nothing would be published without mutual agreement. We thought we were on the same track.”

De Souza, however, says that the FireEye team still did not feel re-assured that ERNW would remove the material. That concern was reinforced, he says, when FireEye discovered an abstract for a talk ERNW planned to give about the vulnerabilities in September at a conference in London. The abstract, which is no longer available online, said “they would reveal how the FireEye engine works,” says De Souza. FireEye had known that ERNW planned to present their findings at a later conference in Singapore in October, but the discovery that an earlier talk was also planned—that ERNW had not disclosed to them—and that it appeared the talk would contain proprietary information set FireEye over the edge.

After all of this, De Souza says, “Our confidence level that they were going to adhere [to our request to remove the information] was low. We’d been talking for nearly three months. After multiple conversations and multiple iterations [of their report], and they’re still not adhering to what we discussed.”

FireEye felt it was running out of time before the September conference, so it sent a cease-and-desist letter to ERNW within 24 hours after the Las Vegas meeting as well as a document ERNW was to sign to provide assurance that its researchers would not disclose proprietary information in their talk.

ERNW consulted with a lawyer and told FireEye they would respond to the letter by August 17. But FireEye wasn’t prepared to wait. On August 13th, the company went to court to obtain an injunction to prevent ERNW from disclosing proprietary information about the company’s product, while still allowing the researchers to publicly discuss the vulnerabilities themselves. ERNW received that injunction on September 2.

Rey insists that in the meantime ERNW had already sent a new draft of their report to FireEye on August 11 with all of the objectionable material removed. De Souza says, however, that the company never received it. He says it wasn’t until September 2, the day that ERNW received the court injunction, that ERNW finally sent a new draft of the report with the objectionable material removed.

Eventually, the company released an announcement on September 8 noting the vulnerabilities, and giving ERNW credit for discovering them. This week Wilhelm gave his presentation at the London conference, while noting that he was prevented from disclosing some of the information he had planned to discuss, due to the injunction from FireEye.

Many people in the security community feel burned over the incident. And De Souza says he understands the displeasure with his company. “The court order, I understand that may have rubbed them in the wrong direction, as it would to anyone who received a legal letter,” he says. In the end, though, FireEye was trying to protect its intellectual property the way any other company would.

He adds that it’s important to remember that FireEye never sought to prevent ERNW from disclosing the vulnerabilities themselves.

For his part, Rey wrote that he would “be really happy if our case contributes to evolving the understanding, procedures and maturity of vulnerability disclosure in certain circles. If nothing else it would then have been worth the effort and energy spent so far on all this.”

Also in Wired:

Technology Is Really Starting to Creep Us Out

Porsche Takes Aim at Tesla With a Stunning Electric Concept

Why WhatsApp Only Needs 50 Engineers for Its 900M Users

California’s Katrina Is Coming

The Dismal State of America’s Decade-Old Voting Machines

Social media have changed how we experience earth-shaking events. Facebook and Twitter are first stops for the media, newshounds, people trying to connect with loved ones who might be affected, and people on the ground reporting what they see. The patterns by which information, misinformation, analysis, shock, and grief spread on social networks are by now so familiar that it’s easy to forget how recent the phenomenon is.

On Sept. 11, 2001, there was no Facebook, no Twitter, not even a MySpace. There was barely a Wikipedia. Googling was not yet a familiar verb. Web 2.0 was not yet a buzzword, let alone a cliché.

Instead, the world watched the events and their aftermath unfold on television and exchanged personal news by telephone, email, and word of mouth. For better or worse, most of the platforms that today lend public megaphones to private individuals were absent on the day that shaped history more fatefully than any other in the 21^st century so far. Most—but not all.

As journalist and author Steve Silberman reminded us Friday on Twitter, there was at least one prominent online forum that lit up 14 years ago in ways that presaged the social media explosion to come.

“Exactly” might be an overstatement: The Metafilter thread that took shape in the minutes and hours after the first plane hit the World Trade Center was drawing, at its peak, a few comments a minute. In contrast, global news events today can spark upwards of 500,000 tweets per minute.

Still, to reread this thread today—matter-of-factly titled “Plane crashes into the world trade center.”—is to relive the events of Sept. 11, 2001, in a fresh way, at once more raw and detached than archival news footage, photo galleries, or newspaper stories. It’s a document that tell us as much about the way social media color our experience of world events as it does about the fateful day in question.

Jumbled facts, disbelief at the truth, credulous reporting of false rumors, commiseration, wild speculation, ill-timed political commentary, and partisan name-calling: It’s all recorded there for posterity, just as it is today on Twitter every time something terrible happens in the world.

“New news… there was a car bomb outside the state department,” a user with the handle “dogmatic” reported at 7:36 a.m. “ABC is denying the car bomb at the state dept.,” a user named “bison” corrected nine minutes later. If Twitter is a hoax factory or a truth machine, then so was Metafilter. And if Metafilter was, then surely, so was whatever media we used to share news online before that (Email chains? Phone trees?), and offline before that (word of mouth). And if today’s social media highlight the worst and best of human responses to tragedy and triumph, it isn’t because they’ve altered human nature. They’ve just made it more searchable.

Hat tip: Steve Silberman

Semiconductor chip maker Intel has been having some problems lately. Revenue is down and the company has even done some layoffs. But things aren't all bad. In January, Intel committed $300 million to a five-year plan for improving racial and gender diversity in its workforce. Unfortunately, though, high school student enrichment is coming down on the wrong side of the situation. The New York Times broke news Wednesday that Intel isn't going to fund the prestigious Science Talent Search research competition anymore.

Any U.S. high school senior can submit an independent research project to Science Talent Search. Out of thousands of entries, the competition chooses 300 semifinalists and then 40 finalists. Past finalists and winners, known as "alumni," have gone on to win eight Nobel Prizes and numerous other accolades. They include researchers like futurist Ray Kurzweil (1965) and even actor Natalie Portman (1998).

The nonprofit that runs the research competition, the Society for Science & the Public in Washington, D.C., confirmed that Intel won't be the sponsor after 2017. The competition started in 1942 and was sponsored by Westinghouse Electric until 1998, when Intel took over. The Times reports that Intel was spending about $6 million a year on the contest, and the new sponsor will have a similar annual obligation for at least five years.

The budget includes about $1.6 million in prizes for excellence in high school science and math research, including three $150,000 first-place awards. “We are thrilled for the opportunity to welcome a new sponsor as a partner – only the third in the 75-year history of the Science Talent Search,” Society president and CEO Maya Ajmera said in a statement. “They will play an integral role in informing, educating, and inspiring students across the nation, while reaping the benefits associated with this extraordinary competition.”

It's unclear why exactly Intel is no longer interested in reaping these benefits. The Times called it "a puzzling decision," noting that the sponsorship commitment would have been 0.01 percent of Intel’s $55.6 billion revenue last year. Intel said in a statement to NBC News that it is "proud of the legacy we have helped create around the Science Talent Search in partnership with the Society for Science & the Public." It did not elaborate on the reasons for its decision, and has not responded to a request from Slate (or other publications) for comment so far.

Craig Barrett, the former Intel CEO who initiated the company's Science Talent Search sponsorship, told the San Jose Mercury News, "It's almost like losing your baby to see it disappear. ... It's kind of sad to see Intel drop away. It'll go on. Somebody else will pick up the sponsorship."