"We learned of a potential vulnerability in an internal portal in Argentina which was not in any way connected to the cyber-security event that occurred in the United States last week," an Equifax spokeswoman told the BBC.

"[It] was wide open, protected by perhaps the most easy-to-guess password combination ever: admin/admin," wrote Mr Krebs.

A photographer has settled a two-year legal fight against an animal rights group over a "monkey selfie" picture.

"Peta's groundbreaking case sparked a massive international discussion about the need to extend fundamental rights to animals for their own sake, not in relation to how they can be exploited by humans," said Peta lawyer Jeff Kerr.

The admin for a prolific file-sharing site that helped pirates score more than 1 billion tracks now faces five years in prison after pleading guilty to a single count of criminal copyright infringement.

"Through ShareBeast and other related sites, this defendant profited by illegally distributing copyrighted music and albums on a massive scale," Atlanta US Attorney John Horn said. "The collective work of the FBI and our international law enforcement partners have shut down the ShareBeast websites and prevented further economic losses by scores of musicians and artists."

"As best I've been able to ascertain, these builds were available to download by anyone, but they were obscured by long, unguessable URLs [web addresses]," wrote John Gruber, a blogger known for his coverage of Apple.

One company watcher said that the scale of the leak meant Tuesday's launch had lost some of its power to surprise.

Equifax had weeks to prepare for its breach notification, so its decision to do so via a basic Wordpress site (oh, err) using a free shared CloudFlare SSL cert is somewhat puzzling. “For some reason Equifax used the 6 weeks to set up a new domain asking for SSN numbers, with anonymous Whois on Cloudflare,” said security consultant Kevin Beaumont.

The whole approach already seems to have gone awry, with OpenDNS flagging up the site as a potential phishing locale in an apparent false positive.

Shortly before Amazon Prime Day in July, the owner of the Brushes4Less store on Amazon's marketplace received a suspension notice for his best-selling product, a toothbrush head replacement.

"Just five minutes of detective work would have found this website is a fraud, but Amazon doesn't seem to want to do any of that," the owner said. "This is like the Wild Wild West of intellectual property complaints."

He said the issue with Amazon was finally resolved on Tuesday after two months of waiting. Losing his best-selling item — a particular type of toothbrush replacement head — resulted in at least $200,000 in lost sales, he estimates.

The Chaos Computer Club is publishing an analysis of software used for tabulating the German parliamentary elections (Bundestagswahl). The analysis shows a host of problems and security holes, to an extent where public trust in the correct tabulation of votes is at stake.

„Elementary principles of IT-security were not heeded to. The amount of vulnerabilities and their severity exceeded our worst expectations“, says Linus Neumann, a speaker for the CCC that was involved in the study.

„A whole chain of serious flaws, from the update server, via the software itself through to the election results to be exported allows for us to demonstrate three practical attack scenarios in one“, Neumann continues.

A Council of the European Union document leaked by Statewatch on 30 August reveals that during the summer months, that Estonia (current EU Presidency) has been pushing the other Member States to strengthen indiscriminate internet surveillance, and to follow in the footsteps of China regarding online censorship. Standing firmly behind its belief that filtering the uploads is the way to go, the Presidency has worked hard in order to make the proposal for the new copyright Directive even more harmful than the Commission’s original proposal, and pushing it further into the realms of illegality.

Gaia is on a mission to build a 3D map of the Milky Way. The ESA calls it a "billion-star surveyor." The image sequence shows just one small corner of our galaxy, but it's an area densely stuffed with stars.

There are around 100 thousand million stars in the Milky Way, according to the ESA, so looking at just 2.8 million of them shows us just a small fraction of our home galaxy.

0.4.6 is a major step towards real hardware support. Several dual boot issues have been fixed and now partitions are managed in a safer way avoiding corruption of the partition list structures.

General notes, tests, and changelog for the release can be found at their respective links. A less technical community changelog for ReactOS 0.4.6 is also available.