Viral media is all the rage these days, and Bauman runs one of the few viral sites actually making money. Without spending a penny on direct advertising, he's turned the high school hobby he ran out of his bedroom into one of the Internet's top-ranked humor sites, getting 1.2 million hits a day. There's a television pilot in the can, a book deal in negotiation, and a potential pact to bring eBaum content to cell phones. Annual ad revenue has doubled over the past year to $10 million, and the only overhead is bandwidth and salaries: Bauman is becoming a rich man.

Detractors say Bauman built his empire on stolen goods – snatching obscure media from around the Web, erasing or denying credits, slapping on the eBaum watermark, then selling millions of dollars' worth of ads around the purloined content. "He steals work and makes all the money," says Kevin Flynn, an animator who is considering joining a class-action suit against eBaum's World.

Bauman is fighting back. "We try to let everyone know this is crap," he says. "We try to clear our name, but it's fucking impossible."

Asked where he got the video, he shrugs between laughs. "I don't know," he says. "I stole it from someplace."

A man was convicted of various theft charges, after prosecutors say he stole computers from the courthouse while he was on trial for computer theft.

"It just amazed me that someone could be in the middle of a jury trial for a burglary involving computers and immediately get involved in another burglary at the Civic Center," said sheriff's Sgt. Jerry Niess.

Jon Houston Eipp, 39, of Novato pleaded guilty Monday in three separate cases involving 10 different charges, including burglary, theft, drug possession, attempted auto theft and more.

In an interview Monday night at the county jail, Eipp said he stole the computers "for personal reasons."

A Dutch gravedigger had a lucky escape after he accidentally buried himself.

The 62-year-old man, from Nieuwleusen, was digging a grave in Zwolle cemetery when it happened, reports Gva.be.

A trailer containing the earth he had removed tipped over and fell into the grave, knocking over the man and covering him completely.

Luckily, a workmate was able to move the trailer and uncover the gravedigger's face to let him breathe.

He called the fire brigade who managed to free the man after an hour. He was unhurt apart from a bump on the head.

It might have been a scene out of some movie about the Great Depression. Hundreds of frantic people tearing their hair out as they mob the doors to a bank, only to realize that the bank's owners, along with their money, had vanished into thin air.

This scene, however, took place not in some seemingly distant historical period, but much closer to home (for some of us). The location was EVE Online—a science-fiction-based MMORPG, and the bank was the Eve Intergalactic Bank—a privately run in-game institution that for several months convinced EVE Online players to deposit their spare "money" into accounts with the enticement of accruing several points of interest per month. That seemingly virtuous idea came to a crashing halt when the proprietor of the EIB, known to the game universe as "Cally," absconded with around 790 billion ISK-the currency of the EVE Online world.

EIB was supposed to function much as a real bank would, turning its assets into investment capital, then using the returns to pay interest to bank clients and provide a tidy profit to the bank itself. Instead, it functioned more like a 1980s-era savings and loan, with no FSLIC to protect the clients.

Mardin Amin, 29, was en route to Turkey on 16 August with his dear old ma and two small children when a female security operative extracted a "small, black, squeezable rubber object" from his backpack. Since he was standing next to his mum, Amin decided to whisper out of the corner of his mouth that it was a "pump". The guard misheard it as "bomb", with inevitable consequences.

That, at least, was the version offered yesterday by Amin's defense attorney, Eileen O'Neill-Burke, in the Cook County courtroom where the pneumatic defendant sought to clarify the misunderstanding. As "snickering police officers watched the court proceedings", O'Neill-Burke explained: "He told her it's a pump. He's standing with his mother. Of course he's not going to shout this out."

Quite what's left of the promised features in Vista, is hard to list. But speech recognition is one of the components that's expected to launch with the product in January. Probably.

Unfortunately not all has gone well with recent press preview's of the new recognition technology, with Vista being unable to cope with the majority of the speech and commands by a Microsoft PR man. Check out this video for another laugh at the expense of Microsoft.

Microsoft was allegedly unhappy with the video's airing, citing background ambient noise, which the reporter's expensive sensitive camera mics didn't seem to pick up.

For six months a website called eon8 (probably down) has carried a countdown to July 1, along with vague and mysterious codes. In addition, strange code-bearing posts associated with the site were made in various webforums, and the site carried a map of the world marked by spots of "deployment". All of this, along with some apparent recorded visits by US military and intelligence computers, led many people to believe this was an imminent terrorist operation or a massive virus to be unleashed on the web-surfing public. Turns out, it was just an experiment by a 23-year-old guy named Chris from Florida who wanted to see how people would react to an absence of information, and he was disappointed that people expected the worst -- even going to so far as to attempt to hack his webserver and make phone calls to anyone with any perceived tangential connection to the site or its host. A mirror of the site in its current state is available with an explanation added by the site owner after the countdown expired.

A man shouting that God would keep him safe was mauled to death by a lioness in the Kiev Zoo after he crept into an enclosure, a zoo official said Monday.

"The man shouted 'God will save me, if he exists,' lowered himself by a rope into the enclosure, took his shoes off and went up to the lions," the official said.

"A lioness went straight for him, knocked him down and severed his carotid artery."

Here's a cautionary tale for all those eBayers among you: if a Nigerian contacts you claiming to have stumped up for a successful auction bid and demands that you ship goods forthwith to Lagos, you'd better jump to it.

Otherwise, you might end up on the Metropolitan Police's "most wanted fugitives of the week" list, with your name shamefully plastered across the UK press.

Absolutely classic. God alone knows how long the Met have had an office in Australia, but it's reassuring to know the long arm of UK law extends across the globe in the international fight against eBay scammers.

The shipment address seems real enough, but Mr Ibajesomo doesn't appear in the University of Lagos's staff listing and a couple of calls to said institution turned up a blank.

Italy's most famous porn star Cicciolina has offered herself to Osama Bin Laden.

The 55-year-old actress said it was about time somebody tackled the terrorist and claimed she could be just the woman for the job.

"I am ready to make a deal, he can have me in exchange for an end to his tyranny. My breasts have only ever helped people while Bin Laden has killed thousands of innocent victims."

The blonde porn star, whose real name is Anna Ilona Staller, pointed out that Bin Laden could learn from Saddam Hussein's mistakes.