The Federal Trade Commission and Intel have finally settled their antitrust dispute. Even though the parleys proved a bit more protracted than the FTC had originally anticipated – the original deadline had to be extended by two weeks, the settlement was reached with a bit of time to spare before the revised deadline (12:01 a.m. on Friday, August 6) could expire. Intel has lent its assent to provisions that will limit its ability to stifle competition, the FTC said in a release.

The settlement applies to CPUs, GPUs and chipsets and effectively disallows almost every anti-competitive practice the FTC attributed to the chip maker. For instance, Intel was accused of employing a carrot-and-stick policy while dealing with computer makers and stifling the competition in the process. But the terms of the settlement expressly prohibit the Santa Clara chip maker from “conditioning benefits to computer makers in exchange for their promise to buy chips from Intel exclusively or to refuse to buy chips from others; and retaliating against computer makers if they do business with non-Intel suppliers by withholding benefits from them.”

While the world's largest chip maker is not willing to view the settlement as an admission of guilt, it has agreed to adopt a very conciliatory approach towards rivals like AMD, Nvidia, and Via. The settlement requires Intel to support the “PCI Express Bus, for at least six years in a way that will not limit the performance of graphics processing chips.” It has also agreed to extend Via’s x86 licensing agreement by five years after the current one runs out in 2013.

Hackers made a mockery of Twitter's security on a couple of occasions last year – first in January and then in April. The first breach affected 45 accounts, including that of President Barack Obama, and  exposed the micro-blogging site's wafer-thin security. The two incidents were enough to draw the Federal Trade Commission's attention, which launched an investigation into the site's security practices.

Twitter has convinced the FTC to call an early end to the probe, allowing it to escape without a penalty. One of the terms of the settlement requires that the micro-blogging site establish a security program and have it reviewed by a neutral party once every year for the next ten years.

 The hacker responsible for the first breach was assisted by the fact that the site allowed rapid-fire log-in attempts, making it a sitting duck for a dictionary attack. He used this gaping hole in Twitter's security to hack an employee's account with administrative privileges and a lame password.