Month: December 2015

Enlarge

UK police said they have arrested a 21-year-old man in connection to the November breach of electronic toymaker VTech, a hack that exposed personal data of almost 12 million people, including gigabytes worth of headshot photos and chat logs for millions of kids and parents.

The unnamed man was arrested in Bracknell, about 30 miles west of London, it was widely reported Tuesday by news outlets citing a statement released by police. He was detained on suspicion of two offenses under the Computer Misuse Act, including unauthorized access to a computer and causing a computer to enable unauthorized access to data. Police also seized electronic devices during the arrest. No more details were provided.

The breach ultimately exposed data for 11.6 million people, 6.4 million of whom were minors. Personal information for children included their names, gender and birthdates, while details for parents included mailing and e-mail addresses, security questions used for password resets, IP addresses, password data, and download histories. The trove also included headshots and logs of chats between parents and their children. The information was stored in a database for VTech's Learning Lodge app store, which is used by the company's electronic toys. Almost half the compromised accounts belonged to people in North America, VTech’s top market.

The release of the next Magic: The Gathering set, Oath of the Gatewatch is fast approaching, and thus spoiler season has officially begun! Ars Technica has a few exclusive cards to show off, starting with a new Expedition—one of the new set of twenty super-rare full-art foil lands.

Dust Bowl, from the Oath of the Gatewatch Expeditions sub-set. (credit: Wizards of the Coast / Florian de Gesincourt)

Dust Bowl was last printed more than fifteen years ago in Mercadian Masques. Wasteland’s little brother has turned up in tournament lists occasionally, and is especially appropriate in the Zendikar block where your opponents have access to all sorts of special lands. Unlike Wasteland, Dust Bowl can be used over and over at the low cost of sacrificing your own basic lands.

Looking closely you’ll see something strange about the mana produced by Dust Bowl: it’s not any of the five cardinal colours, but it’s not the generic mana symbol number either. The difference is obvious if you take a look at the original Dust Bowl card:

(credit: Lamro/Wikimedia)

There’s no accounting for taste, but it may be a good thing that some microbes are cadaver connoisseurs—their picky palates for flesh, aged to their exacting preferences, may help forensic detectives call a time of death in unsolved murders, a new study suggests.

Regardless of season, surroundings, and the species of the dead, communities of flesh-eating microbes seem to have a predictable timetable for when they dine on corpses, researchers report in Science. The new data allowed researchers to accurately estimate the time of death of mice and human corpses to within a two-to-four-day window, even after the bodies had decomposed for weeks.

Forensic scientists are eager to have new methods to determine time of death, Jessica Metcalf, lead study author and an ecologist and evolutionary biologist at the University of Colorado, Boulder, told Ars. Currently, there are no precise ways to determine how long ago a person died just given the corpse, she said. Some forensic scientists use the life cycle of blow flies, which seek out and lay eggs on corpses. But there’s a lot of variability between fly species and seasonal effects, she said.