Month: December 2015

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.