The physical principle of magnifying sunlight is ancient, but apparently the materials here, combined with the size, make the 17"-tall snowman-shaped 2008 Jumbo Snow Globe one of the deadliest ever. The allegation leading to the recall was definitely by the book:

When exposed to sunlight, the snow globes can act as a magnifying glass and ignite nearby combustible materials, posing a fire hazard.

Hallmark, which is offering refunds on the $100 decoration at its Gold Crown stores, says it's heard at least two reports of snow-globe related fires, though fortunately no one was injured. Our advice: If you or anyone you love is admiring an impressive snow globe collection when someone says "Do you smell something burning?" be sure to evacuate the home in an orderly manner. Taking the giant snowman snow globe with you of course—that thing's gonna be valuable on eBay pretty soon. [US CPSC via Reuters]

The offending evidence was metadata found in the images of the PC user featured on the “I’m a PC” web site. The data exposed the fact that the images were produced using Macs running Adobe Creative Suite 3.

Microsoft has since responded to the controversy, saying in a statement that "as is common in almost all campaign workflow, agencies and production houses use a wide variety of software and hardware to create, edit and distribute content, including both Macs and PCs."

They then scrubbed the metadata from the imagery.

We recently asked you guys and gals if advertising could make Microsoft "hip." The answer, it appears, is yes—so long as Redmond is creating said advertising on a Mac. [Digital Daily]

Ad work and post processing are more often than not done on Macs, so this is nothing special. Just a footnote in the campaign that could have been one more notch on Microsoft's side had they been able to claim that these ads were made on Windows. – JC

Yeah, not only did this thing not keep sharks away, but it actually attracted the attention of a 12-foot great white enough that it mistook it for a tasty snack. Luckily, it was on a buoy and not a surfboard at the time.

The device uses electrical waves to give sharks some uncomfortable muscle contractions, at least in theory. The problem is, there's speculation afoot that the electrical waves designed to repel sharks actually attract them. Yeah, that's no good. The manufacturer claims that it'll work just fine as long as you aren't surfing, paddling, or moving at all, however. Uh, sold? [The Australian via Uberreview]

As you pirating assholes know, DVD screeners sent to Oscar voters is a nice source of ones littered on BitTorrent. A lot of 'em are watermarked to curb leaks, but a more pro-active measure started in 2004 is encrypted disks that only play on the S-View DVD player made by Cinea. But lugging it around during the holidays—prime screener season—is a totally unrighteous pain in the ass, so the program has been killed this year. But it worked so well to keep screeners off the internet! Oh wait. [Torrentfreak]

Product Page [Via Red Ferret]