Stranger things have happened.

The new cheaper, slimmer PS3 has made many consumers more attracted to and willing to buy it. But if police reports are to be believed, one teen was kidnapped at gunpoint and forced to purchase one for his assailant.

Naples Daily News reports that Kyle Yarkosky, 18, alleged that David Daniels, 18, along with another "Asian-looking man," whom were supposedly both armed with assault rifles, kidnapped him.

The two men hit Yarkosky over the head and demanded he hand over his money. Yarkosky was then taken to his home where he was forced to take his stepfather's credit card and jewellery, then driven to Wal-Mart where he was to buy his kidnappers a shotgun.

When the men found out that the gun counter was closed, Yarkosky was forced to buy a PS3 Slim instead. After the console was purchase, Yarkosky was free to go.

Surveillance video from Wal-Mart showed Yarkosky and Daniels walking through the store together and later video taken from outside showed Yarkosky seeking help from strangers after Daniels left. Read more here.

Old PS3 Phat has skills to catch child predators.

Over the past week, most PlayStation 3 consoles have been chugging along playing Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. But all the while, some other PS3 consoles have been helping to stop child predators.

The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Cyber Crimes Center, also known as C3, is now using the computational power of the PlayStation 3 to crack the computer passwords of suspected child pornographers.

"Bad guys are encrypting their stuff now, so we need a methodology of hacking on that to try to break passwords," said Claude E. Davenport, a senior special agent at C3. "The Playstation 3 - its processing component - is perfect for large-scale library attacks."

Prior to the PS3, the team was using a Tableau/Dell server combination that cost more than $8000. Clearly a group of networked PS3s is far more cost effective.

Naturally, cracking a child predator's password requires software that's more specialized than what's found on the PlayStation Store. C3 uses Linux on the PlayStation 3 to run its cracking software. Sadly, the newer PS3 Slims do not support the installation of Linux, so the enforcement body is now looking to buy 40 more original PS3s to add to the 20 it already has.

Might these agents be playing a skirmish round on their breaks, or perhaps pull a Wii Bowling drug bust event? Not likely.

"There's no controllers hooked up," Davenport said.

Verizon's early termination fee has officially been hiked up to $350 and, as of this weekend, it's live, people.

News of Verizon's plans to jack up its early termination fee first hit at the beginning of the month. An internal document obtained by Boy Genius Report detailed that the new ETF policy would apply to both one and two year contracts and would come into effect on November 15.

The $350 ETF will decrease by $10 for each month of service completed, which is nice until you do the math and figure out that for a customer ditching their contract in the twentieth month of a 24-month contract, it's still a $150 ETF.

Image via engadget

Hot item.

Without a doubt, Modern Warfare 2 is the hottest item over the last week, literally, as someone robbed 100 copies of the game on the day of launch.

According to the AP, a man walked inside a GameStop at around 7 p.m. on November 10 and told clerks that he has a friend waiting outside who would shoot them if they called the police.

The man then stole 100 copies of Modern Warfare 2 and some other items with a total retail value of $6,900.

Modern Warfare 2's launch was the biggest in game history with an estimated 4.7 million sold on the first day in North America and UK.

Pitchford has moved his criticizing eyes from Valve and has now focused on id and Crytek.

Gearbox Software president Randy Pitchford seems to be in the mood to bash a few of his peers. Recently he lashed out at Valve Software, making wishy-washy comments that on a personal level, he trusts the company, but as a competitor, he doesn't see any trust whatsoever. Now Pitchford is attacking id Software and Crytek, emphasizing that eventually they may utterly fail.

The comment stems around id and Crytek's current approach to consoles, and how they really haven't prepared for this generation. To give an example, he offers up Crysis, a game he claims that many people couldn't play on the PC due to hardware requirements, thus it was difficult to market. He also said that Crytek couldn't bring it to the consoles because of hardware restrictions.

According to OXM, he moves on to id's shortcomings. "We see the id guys talking continuously about this, [with Rage] - 'well, Sony will have a Blu-Ray and I don't know what we'll do on the 360, maybe we'll have three DVD's... if the publisher will let us do that, maybe we'll errrrahh I dunno.' Because they're in this kind of "generation plus" mode, and like nobody knows what the generation beyond this one is going to look like," he told the magazine.

With all that said, it's expected that gamers will have to endure the longest console generation thus far. In addition to id and Crytek, he said that developers who built their strategies around the last generation timing--and are using those methods today--will need to adapt quickly or suffer failure.

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Switzerland is suing Google because of the company's Street View mapping application.

Over the last year, Google Street View has come under fire in countries all around the globe. Japan, Greece, Germany and the UK have all aired their grievances in one way or another. In September, the Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner of Switzerland, Hanspeter Thür, requested Google be more stringent about blurring faces and license plates before images appeared online.

The FDPIC had several problems with Street View. The Commissioner was particularly concerned the inadequate blurring of faces and license plates in photographs taken outside sensitive locations like hospitals, schools and prisons. The Commissioner also had an issue with the height of the cameras. Similar to Google's plight in Japan, the FDPIC argued that the height of the cameras allowed people using Street View to see more than if they were just walking down the road, namely, into people's backyards or gardens.

A statement released on Friday said that Google "for the most part declined to comply with requests" and revealed that the FDPIC felt it had no choice but to pursue the matter further by taking legal action against Google.

Water, ahoy!

At the beginning of October, NASA crashed an empty rocket into a 13-foot-deep crater at the moon's south pole. The LCROSS spacecraft analyzed the resulting cloud of moon dust for water and ice. Once its analytical duties were fulfilled, LCROSS was also crashed into the moon.

Everything went off without a hitch. The moon bombing itself was actually pretty uneventful with viewers around the globe not seeing much of anything. However, the mission was a success and NASA did manage to create a big enough plume of smoke for LCROSS to analyze. This past weekend, the results came in: yes folks, there is water on the moon and last month's mission yielded nearly 25 gallons of it.

"We are ecstatic," said Anthony Colaprete, LCROSS project scientist and principal investigator at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif. "Multiple lines of evidence show water was present in both the high angle vapor plume and the ejecta curtain created by the LCROSS Centaur impact. The concentration and distribution of water and other substances requires further analysis, but it is safe to say Cabeus holds water."

This is, without a doubt, exciting news. That said, not everyone is as pumped about the discovery as NASA is. The Guardian cites Robert Park, a physicist at the University of Maryland and prominent skeptic of manned space flight, as saying the discovery of the water means "practically nothing" to future hopes of a base or colony on the lunar surface.

"They've haven't found a big reservoir of it," said Parks, according to The Guardian, adding that the water is of no value at all. "I suspect this is just water clinging to the soil particles. It's of almost no value at all. The amount of machinery you'd have to move up there to try to recover it – you'd have to do a lot before you could pay for the cost of that."

What do you think of the discovery? Let us know in the comments below!

Verizon Communications is now sending MPAA notices to accused pirates.

Last week Verizon Communications began forwarding copyright notices to music pirates, originally generated by the Recording Industry Association of America. As with noticies previously sent through AT&T and Cox Communications, they inform the accused that the activity is illegal, and that the files must be deleted immediately.

Now Verizon is forwarding similar notices from the Motion Picture Association of America and NBC Universal. According to CNET, the film studios and copyright owners were not revealed, and Verizon refused to issue a statement regarding the notices. However, NBC Universal had no problem making its involvement known.

"We are happy to be working with the ISP community to raise awareness about inappropriate online activity," the company said. "The notice from NBCU that accompanies the ISP's letter includes a link through which consumers can learn about legitimate content online, and provides a number to call if consumers feel they have been contacted in error. We note, however, that virtually no users have contested the accuracy of the notices."

CNET theorizes that broadband companies are now jumping on the anti-piracy bandwagon in order to get in good graces with the television and movie industry. This love affair may ultimately give ISPs access to premium TV shows and feature films. Of course, broadband providers also want to stop piracy because the hefty downloads are clogging the pipes.

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Looks as though the Internet is reducing our attention span to just 140 characters.

Parents raising children diagnosed with some kind of attention deficit disorder (ADD) already know that television and video games are the biggest pacifiers you can find. But now some mental health experts are claiming that technology and its addictive properties may be a contributing factor to developing ADD thanks to a breakdown of interpersonal relationships.

According to an article in the San Francisco Chronicle, Dr. Elias Aboujaoude, director of Stanford University's Impulse Control Disorders Clinic at Stanford University, is worried about the future, saying that we're heading down a dark path if our attention span decreases to a point where we can only take in 140 characters at a time.

"The more we become used to just sound bites and tweets," Aboujaoude said, "the less patient we will be with more complex, more meaningful information. And I do think we might lose the ability to analyze things with any depth and nuance. Like any skill, if you don't use it, you lose it."

Another health expert calls the problem "acquired attention deficit disorder" because technology is rewiring the modern brain. He even added that we're short-circuiting our brains by using spell-checkers or contact lists that sore telephone numbers.

The article even goes on to describe one woman who must drink a glass a wine to ease her anxiety from being away from the computer. Manish Rathi, co-founder of Retrevo.com conducted a survey and discovered that many people also jump onto Facebook and Twitter after sex. "It's the new cigarette," Rathi said.

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