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Enlarge / If you haven't changed your password for Last.fm since 2012, it's long past time—the passwords are now easily grabbed from the Internet.

The contents of a March 2012 breach of the music tracking website Last.fm have surfaced on the Internet, joining a collection of other recently leaked "mega-breaches" from Tumblr, LinkedIn, and MySpace. The Last.fm breach differs from the Tumblr breach, however, in that Last.fm knew about the breach when it happened and informed users in June of 2012. But more than 43 million user accounts were exposed, including weakly encrypted passwords—96 percent of which were cracked within two hours by researchers associated with the data breach detection site LeakedSource.

Last.fm is a music-centered social media platform—it tracks the music its members play, aggregating the information to provide a worldwide "trending" board for music, letting users learn about new music and share playlists, among other things. The 2012 database breach contained usernames, passwords, the date each member joined the service, and internal data associated with the account. The passwords were encrypted with an unsalted MD5 hash.

"This algorithm is so insecure it took us two hours to crack and convert over 96 percent of them to visible passwords, a sizable increase from prior mega breaches," a member of LeakedSource wrote in a post about the data. Ars confirmed the LeakedSource data using our own Last.fm account information.

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A new Wall Street Journal report adds credence to previous rumors that Nintendo is planning to use cartridges, rather than optical discs, for its still-shadowy NX console.

The report, which cites unnamed "people familiar with the matter," suggests that advances in flash memory production have made cartridge media closer to cost-competitive with the standard optical discs. The report also suggests that cartridges "load faster, are harder to copy, and can be mass-produced faster than discs," statements that we'd rate as true, plausible, and confusing, respectively.

More importantly, though, using cartridges would be key for a system that can be used as both a TV-based console and a portable game system, as has been rumored numerous times in the past year. Housing an optical drive in a portable system adds significantly to its size and bulk, and the motor to spin the disc can be a significant power drain. Sony's did manage to squeeze a proprietary disc drive into its PlayStation Portable, but decided to shift back to flash-based cards for the PlayStation Vita.

Enlarge / This Galaxy Note 7 is too hot, send it back. (credit: Ron Amadeo)

Looks like Samsung's Galaxy Note 7 can give you some bang for your buck after all—Samsung will be issuing a global recall for all 2.5 million of the phones it has shipped so far, says Reuters. Some of the phones shipped with faulty batteries that could catch on fire. Details of the recall program will be available as soon as Samsung works out the details with different carriers in different countries, and customers will be able to exchange their phones for models with non-faulty batteries or get their money back entirely.

Samsung provided the following statement to Ars and other publications:

"In response to recently reported cases of the new Galaxy Note 7, we conducted a thorough investigation and found a battery cell issue. To date (as of September 1) there have been 35 cases that have been reported globally and we are currently conducting a thorough inspection with our suppliers to identify possible affected batteries in the market. However, because our customers’ safety is an absolute priority at Samsung, we have stopped sales of the Galaxy Note 7. For customers who already have Galaxy Note 7 devices, we will voluntarily replace their current device with a new one over the coming weeks."

The percentage of affected phones is small—estimated at 24 out of every 1,000,000 phones—but Samsung only has one battery supplier in each of the countries in which the phone has shipped. All units could potentially be affected, though the models sold in China apparently include batteries that are unaffected by the flaw.