Continuing an aggressive campaign to defend his copyrights, pop star Prince is preparing to file lawsuits in three countries--including the United States--against The Pirate Bay, CNET News.com has learned.

The Pirate Bay does not host any unauthorized movie files, but the service is internationally famous for being a highly effective pirate tool.

Within the next few days, Prince will file similar suits against The Pirate Bay in the U.S., France, a country with laws favorable to copyright owners, and Sweden, where The Pirate Bay is based.

Prince has hired Giacobbi and Web Sheriff, a service that protects copyright materials from Internet piracy, to coordinate the legal challenges against The Pirate Bay and others who the singer believes has violated his copyright.

In September, the singer said he planned to take legal action against The Pirate Bay, YouTube, and eBay. As of Friday, Prince's lawsuits appeared to be solely targeted at The Pirate Bay.

By suing The Pirate Bay in three different countries, Prince is hoping to put financial pressure on the service, Giacobbi said. Copyright laws in the United States and France would make it nearly impossible for a site like The Pirate Bay to triumph, he claimed.

After 18 year-old Pekka-Eric Auvinen killed seven students and his principal at a Finnish high school Wednesday in an attack eerily similar to Columbine, media outlets reported that Auvinen had posted a YouTube video describing the shooting before he launched the attack, leading pundits to question why no one had noticed it in time to prevent the massacre.

But months before the fateful video was posted, one prolific YouTube user known as TheAmazingAtheist called for the police to investigate Auvinen and others who had been posting videos glorifying the Columbine shooters and Timothy McVeigh, saying they were showing warning signs of being more than simply infatuated or interested in violence.

A woman whose toddler son ingested a popular toy that contains a chemical that turns into a powerful "date rape" drug when eaten said Thursday she knew he was ill when he began to stumble, seemed drunk and started vomiting.

Aqua Dots, a highly popular holiday toy sold by Australia-based Moose Enterprises, are beads that can be arranged into designs and fused when sprayed with water. The toy was pulled from shelves in North American and Australia after scientists found they contain a chemical that converts into a dangerous drug when eaten.

Scientists say a chemical coating on the beads, when ingested, metabolizes into the so-called date rape drug gamma hydroxy butyrate. When eaten, the compound - made from common and easily available ingredients - can induce unconsciousness, seizures, drowsiness, coma and death.

A veteran Austrian burglar was acquitted after a court agreed he was too experienced to have committed the crime was accused of.

Roland Friis, Stummer's lawyer, said: "He is experienced enough to never break into a building secured by an alarm."

"Also, no halfway reasonable burglar would use such needle nose pliers for a job, and my client would have surely worn gloves. In fact it is almost an insult to accuse him of such a dilettante approach."

It will probably come as little surprise, but the Justice Depatment has now made it official that it plans to appeal the ruling that found that the parts of the Patriot Act that expanded the power of so-called "National Security Letters" was unconstitutional. The issue here is that the Justice Department has been using these letters to get private info from telcos, ISPs and others without any oversight. Beyond not even needing to get a judge's approval, the FBI has apparently been so disorganized that it tracks the use of these NSLs on index cards and has had trouble keeping track of how often they're used.

It's yet to be explained why there isn't any oversight here at all. Given the opportunity for abuse when there's no oversight, can someone give a good reason why these things should be allowed? They can be just as effective with a judge approving them. However, with no oversight and the corresponding gag order, it seems like an open playing field for abuse of the system. Given that the FBI can't even track how they're using these tools, it seems even more dangerous.

I'll begin by pointing out a basic fact: A lot of teenage kids out there play dozens of hours of multiplayer Halo a week. They thus become insanely good at the game: They can kill me with a single head shot from halfway across a map -- or expertly circle me while jumping around, making it impossible for me to land a shot, while they pulverize me with bullets.

Whenever I find myself under attack by a wildly superior player, I stop trying to duck and avoid their fire. Instead, I turn around and run straight at them.

But at the last second, before I die, I'll whip out a sticky plasma grenade -- and throw it at them. Because I've run up so close, I almost always hit my opponent successfully. I'll die -- but he'll die too, a few seconds later when the grenade goes off.

The structure of Xbox Live creates a world composed of two classes -- haves and have-nots. And, just as in the real world, some of the disgruntled have-nots are all too willing to toss their lives away -- just for the satisfaction of momentarily halting the progress of the haves.

Bill Buzbee offered the first public demonstration of the open-source Minix OS — a cousin of Linux — running on his homebrew minicomputer, the Magic-1, at the Vintage Computer Festival in Mountain View, Calif. The Magic-1 minicomputer is built with 74-series TTL ICs using wire-wrap construction, and implements a homebrew, 8086-like ISA. Rather than using a commercial microprocessor, Buzbee created his own microcoded CPU that runs at 4.09 MHz, and is in the same ballpark as an old 8086 in performance and capabilities. The CPU has a 22-bit physical address bus and an 8-bit data bus.

A newly study commissioned by Industry Canada, which includes some of the most extensive surveying to date of the Canadian population on music purchasing habits, finds what many have long suspected (though CRIA has denied) - there is a positive correlation between peer-to-peer downloading and CD purchasing.

When assessing the P2P downloading population, there was "a strong positive relationship between P2P file sharing and CD purchasing. That is, among Canadians actually engaged in it, P2P file sharing increases CD purchases."

The results of that research, consistent with earlier Canadian Heritage sponsored study by Shelley Stein-Sacks that refused to blame P2P for the industry's problems, is that P2P actually increases CD sales since those that download also tend to buy more music.

Almost exactly a month after we learnt that drinking beer makes you clever, a Spanish boffin has proved that the golden grog is also better at rehydrating the human body after excercise.

Manuel J Castillo Garzón, Professor of Human Physiology from Spain's University of Granada, got a bunch of students to run around in temperatures of 40°C then gave half of them a half-pint of beer while the rest got the same amount of water.

The Spanish prof reckons the bubbles and carbohydrates in beer help quench the thirst and replace lost calories, according to The Telegraph.

When the file sharing system OiNK was shut down last week, we pointed out how silly it was for the recording industry to go after such a site. The RIAA has been shutting down sites like that regularly for years, each time claiming that it was a significant blow against piracy... but then many more new services would pop up, each one more underground than the last, and the amount of file sharing would increase.

The simple fact that every time these sites get shut down more open up and more people use them shows pretty conclusively that it's never been a deterrent before, so why would it start this time? In fact, as TorrentFreak is monitoring, a bunch of new sites have quickly sprung up, attempting to replace OiNK. In other words, by taking down this one site, the recording industry has just helped create a bunch more, many of which will build up pretty strong followings.