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Dozens of devastated gamers have swamped the official GTA forums with complaints of repeated freezing when playing the much-hyped Grand Theft Auto IV. Most of the complaints are from PS3 users, though some Xbox 360s are also involved.

An Australian gamer was the first to post, stating: “I got GTA on Sunday and it freezes and I have to restart the console it happens every hour or so, I thought it may be a dodgy disc, so I took the disc back to the shop and got a new one.”

The post continues to say that the second disc also froze after just 40 minutes. One regular Xbox 360 user said that the problem comes from Rockstar programming the game so that it has no loading times. This overloads a console’s cache.
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A pirated copy of the soon-to-be-released Grand Theft Auto IV has been leaked onto torrent sites. The version is reportedly the PAL copy available for Microsoft’s Xbox 360 console.

However, it is not clear whether or not the download is the whole game, as it is only 6.32GB. Speculation is also abound that an NTSC version of the game will be released as a torrent over the next couple of days.

Downloaders are being warned not to play the game on Xbox Live until next week. The game’s official launch is Tuesday, the 29th of April.
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Microsoft has completed the final service pack, Service Pack 3, for its Windows XP operating system. It will be available for download for the general public on April 29th.

It will not be an automatic update until the early summer, but can be manually downloaded through Windows Update or Microsoft’s Download Center. The size ranges from 70MB to 320MB.

This will be the final service pack release for Windows XP, however critical updates will still continue to be released at least until 2014.
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A woman from Texas is suing Blockbuster if she claimed the firm breached her privacy rights when her personal details appeared on Facebook.com’s Beacon feature. She said that the Beacon service was able to access her information without permission.

Beacon is an optional Facebook feature launched last November. It allows a user’s friends to track their online purchases. Users complained when they realised the exact use of the Beacon feature, and now must opt out of it.

The suit states: “To this day, however, Facebook still receives personal identifiable information from participating Web sites … whether the Facebook member has chosen to distribute their information or not.”
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JERSEY CITY, NJ - Computer programmer Bernie Peng has put in some serious work to propose to his girlfriend Tammy Li. Tammy’s favorite game is Bejeweled and Peng has spent a month reprogramming the game so that it could be played on her Nintendo DS.

He also added a little spin to the game. When a certain score is reached the screen clears and an image of a ring appears along with a marriage proposal. Li reached that score, and she also said yes. “It was pretty cool, in a nerdy way” Peng said.

A spokesman for PopCap, the company that created Bejewled, said “Most video game companies would frown on people manipulating their games… But it won him a woman. As a bunch of geeks we have to say, ‘Bernie, hats off to you.”
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Google Indexers Jayant Madhavan and Alon Halevy announced a method Google will employ to explore “deep web” sites which haven’t been indexed by the site.

The method involves entering text on web site forms to see what results appear. These text queries are based on words which exist on the web site Google is trying to data mine.

Madhavan and Halevy wrote: “This experiment is part of Google’s broader effort to increase its coverage of the Web. In fact, HTML forms have long been thought to be the gateway to large volumes of data beyond the normal scope of search engines.”
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A study by Oxford University has shown that some 20% of married couples read their partner’s emails and text messages without their partner’s knowledge. 10% spy on their partner’s visited sites history, motivated by suspicion of “online infidelity”.

6,012 married couples were polled by the university, with 97% saying they disapproved of their partners falling in love with someone online, and 85% said they didn’t like their partner flirting online.

Study author Ellen Helsper said: “We found it quite surprising how many couples check up on each other online. However, snooping on each other was not necessarily about… cheating. It could also be to keep an eye on spending.”
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European Parliament members have voted against legislation which threatened to disconnect people from the Internet if they were persistently sharing files on p2p networks illegally.

A spokeswoman for the European Parliament said “The vote shows that MEPs want to strike a balance between the interests of rights holders and those of consumers, and that big measures like cutting off internet access shouldn’t be used.”

The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry said they looked forward to further discussions on how to tackle web piracy, though it said the amendment which was approved today was “badly drafted”.
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eBay Australia has announced that all items will have to be paid for using a Paypal account. Alastair MacGibbon, the trust & safety director at eBay said: “You’re four times less likely to have a problem on eBay if you pay with PayPal”

Paypal, an eBay subsidiary, will charge between 1.1% and 2.4% for each mandated credit card payment. The changes come into effect in June, from May 21st all sellers must offer Paypal. MacGibbon expects a “small but vocal minority” to oppose the changes.

He said, “eBay is no longer willing to stand aside and allow payment methods on the site that are proven to be less safe for consumers.” Other eBay sites will evaluate the changes and make their own choice on whether use the new system.
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Yahoo! has announced that it will begin testing Google’s AdSense advertising service, despite the two companies being rivals for online advertising. The test drew criticism from software giant Microsoft.

Should Yahoo! decide to use Google AdSense permanently, it would give the two companies some 90% of online advertising, creating a monopoly. AdSense will only be applied to Yahoo’s business in the United States.

A spokesperson for the company said testing didn’t mean Yahoo will “join the AdSense for Search program or that any further commercial relationship with Google will result.”
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