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(credit: Lifeboat)

As security breaches go, they don't get more vexing than this: 7 million compromised accounts that protected passwords using woefully weak unsalted MD5 hashes, and the outfit responsible, still hadn't disclosed the hack three months after it came to light. And as if that wasn't enough, the service recommended the use of short passwords. That's what Motherboard reported Tuesday about Lifeboat, a service that provides custom, multiplayer environments to gamers who use the Minecraft mobile app.

The data circulating online included the e-mail addresses and hashed passwords for 7 million Lifeboat accounts. The mass compromise was discovered by Troy Hunt, the security researcher behind the Have I been pwned? breach notification site. Hunt said he had acquired the data from someone actively involved in trading hacked login credentials who has provided similar data in the past.

Hunt reported that some of the plaintext passwords users had chosen were so weak that he was able to discover them simply by posting the corresponding MD5 hash into Google. As if many users' approach to passwords were lackadaisical itself, Lifeboat's own Getting started guide recommended "short, but difficult to guess passwords" because "This is not online banking."

(credit: Mike Mozart)

AT&T started the year with a mix of subscriber gains and losses in its core businesses, with losses in TV and postpaid phone customers to go along with increases in DirecTV and its overall total of wireless subscriptions.

In wireless, AT&T ended the quarter with 363,000 fewer postpaid phone subscribers, the company said yesterday. This loss coincided with T-Mobile USA adding 877,000 postpaid phone customers, mostly at the expense of AT&T. "According to [T-Mobile CEO John] Legere, approximately 80 percent of postpaid port-ins come from rival carriers AT&T and Verizon, with the lion’s share coming from AT&T," Wireless Week reported yesterday. (Verizon Wireless lost 8,000 postpaid phone customers in the quarter, though it added 640,000 retail postpaid customers overall.)

On the plus side for AT&T, most of its postpaid phone losses came from customers with feature phones. The average smartphone subscriber pays AT&T twice as much as a feature phone user. Overall, AT&T has 58.3 million postpaid smartphone subscribers, accounting for 88 percent of its postpaid phone customers. That proportion is growing, as smartphones accounted for 97 percent of AT&T's new phone sales in the quarter.

(credit: Aleksander Markin)

Google has yet another enemy in Europe, after Getty Images formally complained to Brussels' antitrust officials about the multinational's alleged anti-competitive behaviour.

Getty has flagged up concerns about Google's use of "scraped third party imagery" on its search engine.

A spokesperson at competition commissioner Margrethe Vestager's office told Ars: "The commission has received a complaint, which it will assess."

(credit: Twitter: EvLeaks)

It has been a while since we've seen a new Gear Fit wearable from Samsung, but new leaks suggest that another model is right around the corner. Tweeted by EvLeaks and reported by Venturebeat, the supposed Samsung Gear Fit 2 is slightly curvier than the original, and it may make its debut with a new pair of wireless earbuds dubbed the Gear IconX.

The Gear Fit 2 doesn't look too different from the original. Samsung appears to have redesigned it a bit so it fits easier around your wrist, similarly to how Microsoft rounded-out its Band fitness tracker for comfort. The device also seems to have two release notches on its underside, meaning you may be able to use multiple bands with the Gear Fit 2.

Reports suggest that the new model will have a GPS chipset as well, which would allow it to better track and monitor outdoor activities. However, that addition will likely increase the price (the original started at $199) while also decreasing the tracker's battery life. Otherwise, the device appears to have the same super-AMOLED display and optical heart rate monitor as the first tracker.