Ryan Fitzgerald is unemployed, lives with his father and has a little bit of time on his hands.
So, he decided to offer his ear, to anyone who wants to call. After posting a video with his cell phone number on YouTube on Friday, the 20-year-old told The Boston Globe he has received more than 5,000 calls and text messages.
Fitzgerald said he wanted to "be there," for anyone who needed to talk. "I never met you, but I do care," a spiky-haired Fitzgerald said into the camera on his YouTube posting. Yahoo has more.

Malaysian movie pirates have put a bounty on the heads of two sniffer dogs who busted a fake DVD ring with a seizure of discs worth about $3 million, media and officials said on Thursday.
Lucky and Flo, two female black Labradors deployed by Malaysian authorities in their crackdown on pirated movie DVDs and music CDs, carried out their first major successful operation in Johor state on Tuesday. ExtremeTech

Nice fun read found by the Inq 3. Has your child asked for new hardware? If your son has requested a new "processor" from a company called "AMD", this is genuine cause for alarm. AMD is a third-world based company who make inferior, "knock-off" copies of American processor chips. They use child labor extensively in their third world sweatshops, and they deliberately disable the security features that American processor makers, such as Intel, use to prevent hacking. AMD chips are never sold in stores, and you will most likely be told that you have to order them from internet sites. Do not buy this chip! This is one request that you must refuse your son, if you are to have any hope of raising him well. Whole story here

Purdue University researchers have demonstrated a portable instrument that they claim can identify any substance in less than a second, much like the "tricorders" used by the crew of the Enterprise in the Star Trek series. The 20-pound, battery-powered unit combines a mass spectrometer with a desorption electrospray ionization (DESI) source.
"The detection is done in an ion trap?an RF device that traps ions, then lets them out on the basis of their masses, enabling you to be exactly sure what compound you are sensing," said Graham Cooks, Henry Bohn Hass distinguished professor of analytical chemistry at Purdue's College of Science EE-Times

A US citizen is suing Microsoft for $200,000 after Internet Explorer failed to delete his history of pornography sites.
Michael Alan Crooker bought an HP computer running Windows XP and Internet Explorer from retailer Circuit City, and said that he was assured it would protect his privacy.
But when he was arrested on firearms charges, police cracked the PC's security and found his internet surfing history, along with videos of himself and his girlfriend engaged in sexual acts. More of this at Vnunet

Would like to see more and detailed R600 pictures? See them here

Found it on Slashdot.org Why pay $20,000 for a commercial link to run your television station when a $10 kitchen wok from the Warehouse is just as effective?
This is exactly how North Otago's newest television station 45 South is transmitting its signal from its studio to the top of Cape Wanbrow, in a bid to keep costs down.
45 South volunteer Ken Jones designed the wok transmitter in his spare time last year when he wanted to provide wireless broadband to his Ardgowan home. Read on

On Boincstats a new CPU has been discovered which is much faster than anything else which is listed with 2 cores.
The web rumours that this CPU could be the new Barcelona CPU from AMD.
It´s listed as following: AMD Athlon(tm)/Opteron(tm) CPU-model unknown Who knows who knows...............(maybe it´s an alien CPU ?)

I just got a message from SourceForge informing me that they were issued a DMCA takedown notice for BackupHDDVD and have complied. I'm pretty sure BackupHDDVD doesn't violate much of anything so any info (NO legal advice) as to what exactly my options are would be much appreciated...... More: doom9

An open letter to Steve Ballmer Your repeated claims that Linux violates Microsoft's intellectual property has come to the attention of the Linux community. Not only that, but it's been reported Microsoft has convinced businesses to pay for a Linux patent that you can't provide.
Therefore, this website will serve as a response to this accusation, and within it, a request. The request is simple, since you, Microsoft, claim to be so sure of yourself: Show Us the Code. Show us the Code and Show Us the Patents. Lets make this crystal clear. The whole letter at ShowUsTheCode

We?ve teamed up with PowerColor to bring you a fun new contest. This month, thanks to PowerColor, we?re giving away a PowerColor X1650XT Graphic card! This card has some firepower and we don?t want it to reach to the wrong hands, so you will have to prove that you deserve it.

A man who was fired by IBM for visiting an adult chat room at work is suing the company for $5 million, claiming he is an Internet addict who deserves treatment and sympathy rather than dismissal.
James Pacenza, 58, of Montgomery, says he visits chat rooms to treat traumatic stress incurred in 1969 when he saw his best friend killed during an Army patrol in Vietnam..... Read the whole story at

Interesting question...As the music industry transforms and ultimately ditches DRM?and it will happen probably sooner than we think?one question is left hanging: What happens to the tunes you bought already with DRM restrictions?
On a feature at RealMoney (subscription required) called Columnist Conversation Michael Comeau asks an interesting question:
"If DRM gets abolished, I wonder if Apple (AAPL) will allow people to download songs they've already purchased in the unrestricted mp3 format." Read the answer here

Nvidia inadvertently - we hope - yesterday told its customers they will have to wait until 6PM Pacific Time on 30 December for a crucial Windows Vista driver update for its GeForce line of GPUs. Reg Hardware readers looking for the software last night were presented with the following screen... Reg has more

The latest rumor out there revealed that R600 is 80nm process technology and is entering mass production soon . R600's Z no-AA performance is 2.5x, FP16 blending & filtering performance is 2.7x, FP32 blending & filtering performance is 3.9x, FP16 filtering performance is 8x of R580. R600 final clocks could be at 814MHz and has 64 unified shaders. [This could imply 32 ROPs]. According to the rumor, it seems that low end RV610 will be on 65nm process, Digital PWM, 8 layers PCB, 256MB/128MB 64bit DDR2. For the mainstream RV630, it will be on 65nm process, bi-directional PWM for GPU and uni-directional PWM for memories, support 2x256MB 128bit GDDR4. Source: VR-Zone

Elite Bastards send some words about new Ruby Demo informations.
Here´s what they saying: The only real news here (which will undoubtedly spark off all kinds of inappropriate fantasies) is that Ruby in fact has a younger sister - Jade. To tie in with the whole AMD/ATI acquisition, Jade will be dressed in green compared to Ruby's red. It appears that the plot of this demo will involve Jade being kidnapped to lure Ruby into action to save her sister. Cliched perhaps, but are you really looking forward to watching a DirectX 10 technology demo for the plot?! Sadly, there is really nothing new in the way of technical details about the demo (nor of course R600 itself), but at the moment we're grateful to grab any tidbit we can about ATI's next-generation plans. Elitebastards has more.

Hi

Just found this in my event-log after starting emule:
"EventID 4226
TCP/IP has reached the security limit imposed on the number of concurrent TCP connect attempts"

This is what I get from a M$-Guy when i asked him why XPSP2 slows down programs like emule which open many connections to different destinations:

"Thanks very much for responding. This new feature is one of the stack's
"springboards", security features designed to proactively reduce the
future threat from attacks like blaster and Sasser that typically spread
by opening connections to random addresses. In fact, if this feature had
already been deployed, Sasser would have taken much longer to spread.

It's not likely to help stop the spread of spam unless spammers are
trying to reach open email relays in the same way, by opening
connections on smtp ports of random IP addresses.
This is new with XP SP2 and we're trying to get it right so that it does
not interfere with normal system operation or performance of normal,
legitimate applications, but does slow the spread of viral code. New
connection attempts over the limit for half-open connections get queued
and worked off at a certain (limited rate)."

If anyone knows how to switch it off please leave a comment...

Some people wishes to stop the release of doom 3 since it contains satanistic symbols. There has started an online petition containg the following text...
Read more.

Tweaknews.net has caught yet another person posing as a hardware reviewer and trying to obtain expensive hardware illegally. This time the young man was trying to get some expensive Twinx 1024-3200ll Pro modules from Corsair.

Here is the forum topic where I lay out all the information on what happened.

Please only read on if you understand satire Another great idea from the RIAA:

The Recording Industry Association of America announced today it would be expanding its crackdown on copyright infringement by suing family members, hitchhikers and carpoolers.