Month: December 2015

Ars Technica has taken pains not to reveal major and even minor spoilers in our review of The Force Awakens. Still, please note that our review does touch upon a few basic and previously revealed plot points and details

Rey on a scavenger mission.

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One of the most memorable scenes in the Star Wars film series is from Episode IV: A New Hope. Luke Skywalker, then just a farmer, looks out onto the horizon as two suns set on the planet of Tatooine. There is the feeling of hope, and a sense that an adventure is about to begin.

We know what happens from there. Luke begins a journey with Obi-Wan Kenobi, saves his sister, Leia, and becomes a Jedi Knight. He fights in the Battle of Endor and his father, Darth Vader, saves him from the Emperor. Return of the Jedi, the last film, chronologically, neatly ties up Luke’s story and all other subplots. Everyone is happy, dancing on Endor with Ewoks (no Ewoks in the new film, promise). It was a solid ending to the series, but where do you go from there after 32 years?

(credit: Ken Conley)

The "credible" threat that caused the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) to close all schools on Tuesday was sent from cock.li, the "meme" e-mail host that also provides e-mail services for 8chan, the 4chan splinter site.

School officials in New York and Los Angeles reportedly both received threats from madbomber@cock.li but only LAUSD took it seriously. All 640,000 LAUSD students were unable to attend classes on Tuesday.

Vincent Canfield, the founder of cock.li, posted a copy of the subpoena he received from a New York detective on his own website and included audio recordings of polite but brief conversations with two officials from the New York Police Department (NYPD) Intelligence Bureau.

(credit: Chris)

The next time a friend or family member asks you to install a gift-registry app, remember this: the app is almost certainly soaking up lots of your personal details. In the case of one such app from retailing giant Target, it's more than happy to make those details public. Witness the following:

(credit: Avast)

According to researchers from security firm Avast, the database storing the names, e-mail addresses, home addresses, phone numbers, and wish lists of Target customers is available to anyone who figures out the app's publicly available programming interface. In a blog post published Tuesday, they wrote:

If you created a Christmas wish list using the Target app, it might be accessible to more people than you want to actually receive gifts from. The Target app keeps a database of users’ wish lists, names, addresses, and e-mail addresses. But your closest family and friends may not be the only ones who know you want a new suitcase for your upcoming cruise!

To our surprise, we discovered that the Target app’s Application Program Interface (API) is easily accessible over the Internet. An API is a set of conditions where if you ask a question it sends the answer. Also, the Target API does not require any authentication. The only thing you need in order to parse all of the data automatically is to figure out how the user ID is generated. Once you have that figured out, all the data is served to you on a silver platter in a JSON file.

The JSON file we requested from Target’s API contained interesting data, like users’ names, e-mail addresses, shipping addresses, phone numbers, the type of registries, and the items on the registries. We did not store any personal information, but we did aggregate data from 5,000 inputs, enough for statistical analysis.

Officials for Target weren't immediately available for comment. This post will be updated if they respond later.