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Cook County Sheriff Thomas Dart. (credit: Cook County Sheriff's Office)

In a sharply worded opinion (PDF), a panel of appeals judges has ordered Cook County Sheriff Thomas Dart to stop his campaign seeking to "crush" Backpage.com's adult advertisement section.

Ars last wrote about the dispute between Dart and Backpage in July, when US District Judge John Tharp Jr. issued a temporary restraining order stopping some of Dart's pushier behavior, when he confronted Visa and Mastercard over their relationships with Backpage. But Tharp changed his tune the following month, denying Backpage a preliminary injunction that would have stopped Dart from trying to "coerce, threaten, or intimate repercussions" to card companies or other financial institutions. The credit card companies stayed away from Backpage.

US Circuit Judge Richard Posner, writing for a unanimous three-judge panel, writes today that the district court judge was wrong, and he grants Backpage the injunction it sought. In Posner's view, Dart was using his power as sheriff of a populous county to bully payment processors into backing away from a site that hosted ads he didn't like, a clear violation of the First Amendment. It's telling, Posner writes, that Dart didn't just sue Backpage.com. Dart had already tried that strategy against Craigslist, and lost.

(credit: Motherboard)

VTech, the hacked maker of electronic toys and apps that leaked the data of 4.8 million customers, including hundreds of thousands of children, exposed gigabytes' worth of pictures and chat histories on the same compromised servers, according to an article published on Motherboard, the website that first broke news of the breach.

The news website said a hacker who asked to remain anonymous was able to download almost 200 gigabytes' worth of photos of both parents and children who had registered with the site. The hacker also obtained logs of chats conducted between parents and their kids and in some cases recordings of conversations. VTech encouraged parents to take the headshots and use them with apps that allow them to interact with children. The hacker, who said he didn't intend to publish or sell the data, provided Motherboard with 3,832 image files and at least one audio recording for verification purposes.

It's not clear why VTech stored the data on its servers in the first place. The article reported:

Rico's wingsuit is the game's best method of travel.

Every time I boot up Just Cause 3, there are a few minutes of absolute brilliance. An average in-game journey might begin by catapulting via grappling hook into a perfect backflip before soaring into the atmosphere on an indestructible parachute. Properly alternating between grappling hook, parachute, and wingsuit keeps my momentum going. Before I realize it, I've reached my target: a red and silver depot filled with papier-mâché gas tanks and fascists.

Just as I un-sling the ironically indiscriminate grenade launcher at my side, the game stalls. I groan because this has happened before, and it will happen over and over before I’m done with the game.

Weapons of interactive destruction

Just Cause 3 on the PC is a fireball, digitally and metaphorically. In the third entry in the series, pseudo-protagonist Rico Rodriguez has returned to the land where he was raised. His mission: to indiscriminately lay waste to its state-run infrastructure by means that, while maybe not strictly necessary, are certainly many and varied.

Greetings, Arsians! Thanks to our partners at TechBargains, we have a ton of Cyber Monday deals to share. Many retailers have upped the ante from Black Friday, including Amazon which now offers 50 percent off a one-year subscription to Playstation Plus when you purchase the Playstation 4 Uncharted: Nathan Drake bundle. That gaming bundle has also received a $50 price cut, bringing it down to $299. Anyone with a Dell credit should take a look at the company's website, as they are offering the same Playstation bundle for $299 as well.

As usual, we have a bunch of other deals on laptops, TVs, accessories, and more below.

Featured Deals

In response to a demand for backdoor access to its enterprise messaging products, BlackBerry is completely pulling out of the Pakistan market. The announcement comes as a ban on providing BlackBerry Enterprise Services over mobile networks in Pakistan was due to take effect today.

The Pakistan Telecommunications Authority's ban on BlackBerry Enterprise Services (BES) was issued this summer, and it was planned to become effective on November 30, as Ars reported in July. "Security reasons" were cited as the cause of the ban. But just before the restriction was announced, Privacy International issued a report that warned of the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency's efforts to gain network surveillance capabilities within the country that rival those of the National Security Agency.

While the government has pushed back the effective date of that order to December 30, BlackBerry COO Marty Beard announced today that the company would exit the Pakistani market completely rather than meet government demands for unfettered access to the service's message traffic.

On November 25, General John F. Campbell, the commander of US Forces in Afghanistan, announced the findings of an initial investigation into the air strike by an Air Force AC-130 gunship that hit a Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF, or Doctors Without Borders) trauma center in Kunduz, Afghanistan on October 3. The strike—in which the AC-130 attacked using its onboard cannon, killing 30 patients and members of the MSF hospital staff and injuring another 34—lasted nearly a half-hour.

Campbell called the strike "a tragic, but avoidable accident caused primarily by human error." But among the secondary factors cited in the report, he noted, there were several contributing technical failures, including a networking failure that could have provided information that would have prevented the mistaken targeting of the hospital. Furthermore, information systems available to the command responsible for the aircraft failed to alert those on duty in the operations center that the target selected by the aircraft was on a no-strike list.

Spooky action at a distance

The sensor suite of an AC-130U "Spooky" operating at night. Infrared cameras are a primary part of the targeting system.

4 more images in gallery

The aircraft responsible for the errant attack on the hospital was an AC-130U "Spooky" gunship, a 20-year-old aircraft that carries a five-barreled 25 millimeter Gatling gun, a 40mm Bofors cannon, and a 105mm howitzer. The airplane is a veritable flying artillery battery that "orbits" its targets while firing upon them with high-explosive rounds. (The Air Force has also deployed the AC-130W "Stinger," a modified version of the special operations transport the MC-130W "Dragon Spear," to Afghanistan. These aircraft carry a 30mm automatic cannon and launch tubes for Griffin and Hellfire missiles and laser-guided glide bombs.)