Apparently, pedophiles have started using viruses to hide their vile stash on strangers computers. And guess what? Nobody believes that it was a virus that put them there when those pictures are found.

People have ended up going to jail because the exams that courts do on your computer are so expensive, judges don't like paying for them. And people have gone broke clearing their names.

The moral of the story? Use virus-protection software, and don't go to shady sites on the web. Because, yikes. [ABCNews]

Basically, this is opening the flood gates for nickel-and-diming microtransactions from the App Store. Before, when you spent $5 on a game, you knew you were getting the whole game—with free upgrades. Now, you'll spend $5 on a game and you'll need to spend another $5 to unlock all the levels and weapons. And that's on legit apps. Just wait for the novelty fart apps with one fart sound that want you to pay for extras, or a flashlight app that wants you to pay for different colors.

This could easily turn tons and tons of apps into crippled trialware without consumers knowing, and it's going to make developers hungry for the extra cash they can make by charging you for extra feature they would have included in the full version anyways. Like a game charging you $3 for fancy horse armor on the Xbox 360, but without the filter than comes from the huge budgetary requirements of Xbox 360 games, this is going to open the floodgates for the sleaziest app behaviors possible. The worst part of it is, there will be enough people willing to pay a little here and a little there to support this kind of behavior. But I for one, am out. Do not want. [Gizmodo's iPhone 3.0 Coverage]

Well, at least now you have an excuse, both for your lousy performance in the sack and your awesome performance on Xbox Live. The only problem is that now you can expect a whole new barrage of insults coming over your headset every time you take down an opponent.

So what's this mean for you in the long run, my prematurely ejaculating, headshotting friend? Maybe a drug that'll let you last longer without buying those condoms with numbing juice in the tip. However, if you had the option of taking a pill that would make you a stallion in the sack but make you suck at video games, would you do it? Talk about your tough decisions. [BBC]

My second "ooooh" moment was exactly the opposite. I was watching a movie on something like HDnet. And I was worried for a moment—what were all those little spots on my television screen? I looked closer and realized that it was film grain. And then I absolutely knew that my TV had been a good "investment." But not all people feel like I do. And Hollywood is accommodating them for Blu-ray releases.

The Digital Bits reports that to accommodate for those with no taste who hate film grain, studios are doing one of two things to back-catalog Blu-ray rereleases:

1. Sharpening film to death through copious Digital Noise Reduction
2. Simply not releasing especially grainy movies at all

Film grain is not a problem to be eliminated. While sometimes a production limitation altering decisions on film stock and lighting requirements, it's long been seen as another tool in a cinematographer's arsenal. And, ironically enough, it's important enough to the viewing experience that digital productions tend to add the stuff for theater release.

Part of what's amazing about new display and codec technologies is that the consumer can come closer than ever to re-creating the theater experience at home. When I saw film grain so clearly on my screen for the first time, I bought in to that truly incredible and empowering phenomenon, a sort of technological manifestation of divine marketing BS. And I realized that, no matter what better-than-HD technologies were around the corner, we were quickly approaching the point of diminishing returns. Our eyes would be bested by our displays. There'd be more information than we could see.

But if we destroy a by-product so intrinsically (and often artistically) linked to the film medium, our enjoyment of film will become said case of diminishing returns. So let's just not do that. [The Digital Bits via Gadget Lab]

There are enough ifs involved in the situation to make the likelihood pretty slim, but this is definitely one of those situations that astronomers are keeping a careful eye on. It all revolves around WR 104, a humungous star classified as a Wolf Rayet star. Generally, these blow up as a supernova, which is no biggie. But sometimes, they blow up as gamma-ray bursts. What's that mean?

When a very massive star explodes, the inner core collapses, forming a black hole, while the outer layers explode outwards. Due to a complex and fierce collusion of forces in the core, two beams of raw fury can erupt out of the star, mind-numbing in their power. Composed mostly of high-energy gamma rays, they can carry more energy in them than the Sun will put out in its entire lifetime. They are so energetic we can see them clear across the Universe, and having one too close would be bad.

Models of a GRB exploding at roughly the same distance indicate that the immediate impacts are damage to the ozone layer, and the creation of nitrogen dioxide, which is basically smog. Gamma rays emitted by the burst would hit ozone molecules and shatter them, and models indicate that a GRB at this distance could deplete the ozone layer by 30% globally, with local pockets depleted by 50%. It would take years for the ozone to recover from that. Note that the ozone holes we have been dealing with the past few years are actually depletions of less than 5%. Obviously, this is a big deal.

Yes, Lagos Analysis Corporation has "filed a patent infringement lawsuit in the Federal High Court, Lagos Judicial Division holding at Ikoyi, Lagos, Nigeria against Nicholas Negroponte, One Laptop Per Child Association (OLPC) and its enablers in Nigeria." What'd Negroponte do? Well, according to LAC, he reverse engineered and stole their multilingual Shift2 keyboard tech, which features four (count 'em) shift keys to allow for more fancy character typin'. Specifically, we're talking about these KỌnyin keyboards that are available globally.

In fact, Solicitor Ade Adedeji says that "The willful infringement of our client's intellectual property is so blatant and self-evident in the OLPC's XO Laptops. We will have no problem establishing the facts of our client's case against OLPC in any court of law." Yikes, Negroponte. Yikes.

I don't understand the finer subtleties of Nigerian court codes, but one presumes this is more lousy news for the OLPC camp. We'll keep you updated as to the results of this, the trial of the century. [MarketWire]