The Chicago Sun-Times posted a remarkable blurb this week, one in which a man from Naperville, Illinois was conned out of $200,000 by his "online girlfriend."

Last week, the 48-year old man called Naperville police because he believed his girlfriend had been kidnapped somewhere around London.

In explaining the situation, the man told police that he started the online relationship 2.5 years ago, and over the course of the relationship he wired over $200,000 to the woman's bank accounts.

The bank accounts were in England, the U.S., Malaysia, and you guessed it, Nigeria.

When the police asked for any pictures or ID to help them find her, the copy of a driver's license he produced turned out to be a sample ID from Florida.

When officers told him he had been conned and his girlfriend did not really exist he "was in disbelief."

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Oodle, the company behind the popular Facebook app Marketplace has released a study this week, one that shows Craigslist is really a "a cesspool of crime."

The report links Craigslist to 330 crimes and 12 deaths in the U.S. in 2010, and a total of 20 deaths since the classified's launch in 1995.

After Oodle released the study, Craigslist CEO went ballistic on the report, slamming it, and with good reason.

The study has the incredibly sensationalist title "Crime and Craigslist: A sad tale of murders and more" and starts like this:

"Craigslist: A site of murder and mayhem":

Sadly, Craigslist has become a cesspool of crime. Murders. Rapes. Robberies. Hitman-for-hire. Assault. Fraud. Rental rip-offs. Unfortunately, these are everyday occurrences involving people who use Craigslist to buy or sell, or for worse. And the old rules — "meet in public;" "always tell someone where you're going;" "know who you're dealing with" — often don't work on Craigslist.

Oodle says it is different from Craigslist due to accountability. All transactions are tied to a user's Facebook account, whereas on Craigslist all accounts and emails are anonymous. The Marketplace app has moved to 14 million unique users.

Adds Oodle CEO Craig Donato:

We were doing some focus groups, how they used online classifieds and it was pretty clear that interactions that began anonymously led to face-to-face encounters, and flaky behavior. What really struck us in all the focus groups was that everyone cited a close call, or where they felt really scared. We just asked [AIM, the research group] to look at problems and crimes associated with online classifieds, and it quickly zoned in on Craigslist, which has the lion's share.

In the report, AIM noted the following, which then caused Buckmaster's largest outburst:

To be absolutely fair, Craigslist as an entity can't be blamed for the things that happen among its users. It's merely a facilitator of commerce, after all. And we understand thousands or even tens of thousands of transactions happen safely between Craigslist aficionados. Long before Craigslist, even, robberies were linked to newspaper classifieds from time to time. But that's no longer an excuse that Craigslist can hide behind.

Buckmaster, defending his company snapped back:

Classified listings scraper/aggregator and CL wannabe Oodle has paid AIM Group to falsely portray Craigslist as fraught with criminal activity. If you strip away the false (and defamatory) paid-for editorial however, and look at the numbers AIM uses, a very different story emerges.

Sounds scary until you compare that number to the 570 million classified ads posted by 100 million or more U.S. Craigslist users during that same time span, generating literally BILLIONS of human interactions, many involving face-to-face meetings between users who do not know one another. AIM Group facetiously writes 'we understand thousands or even tens of thousands of transactions happen safely between Craigslist aficionados.'
THOUSANDS??? Shame on you AIM Group (and Oodle). You know better. Try HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS or BILLIONS of safe transactions.

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FileSoup admins 'TheGeeker' and 'Snookered' are now free, after the prosecution in their file-sharing case dropped the charges.

The site was founded in 2003 in the UK, and remains one of the longest standing torrent communities. With the decision, it is now the second time UK-based torrent site admins have walked free, following the case of OiNK owner Alan Ellis last year.

In 2009, UK authorities and the anti-piracy outfit Federation Against Copyright Theft (FACT) raided the homes of the admins, and both were eventually arrested.

The following summer, both were charged with conspiracy to infringe copyright.

Just like in the Ellis case, the evidence was collected only by FACT, with the police not carrying out any independent investigations. The solicitors for the new case were the same from the OiNK trial and they brought up the lack of independent investigation to the Court, which agreed with them on at least two issues.

TorrentFreak says those issues were "whether to prosecute FileSoup as a business or not and whether the copyright holder had caused prejudice."

Because those questions could not be answered the prosecution decided to drop the criminal case. There may be a civil suit coming, however.

FACT is said to have spent almost 50,000 pounds on the case.

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Mozilla has introduced the latest (and possibly final) beta for Firefox 4, with beta 12 now available for download and testing.

Says the browser company (via ZD):

The latest Mozilla Firefox 4 Beta is now available to download and test. This release delivers improved performance and responsiveness when watching videos on your favorite video websites. We are in the final stages of the Firefox 4 Beta cycle. The team has fixed more than 7,000 bugs since the first beta release.

Additionally, Mozilla is asking plug-in developers to begin finalizing their respective plug-ins for the release:

We are working closely with the community of add-on developers to ensure their Firefox Add-ons are ready to customize the features, look and functionality of Firefox 4 Beta. For more details on how to make your add-ons compatible with Firefox 4 Beta.

Firefox 4 Beta 12 adds increased performance with Flash content, improved compatibility when hardware acceleration is enabled, "hovering over links now displays the URL at the bottom of the window rather than in the location bar" and overall stability improvements.

Download Firefox 4 Beta 12 here: Latest FF4 Beta at AfterDawn

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The Nintendo 3DS has barely been out for 24 hours in Japan and it has already been hacked to run flash carts like the infamous R4.

R4 cards allow gamers to run homebrew, play DS games, and even run older games, like those from the GameBoy Color.

Two hackers have posted their videos on YouTube, one showing a much older game (Zelda) being played back on the device with the other showing off the DS version of New Super Mario Bros. running from R4 cards.

It is important to note that while flash carts can apparently be used on the device already, 3DS-only games are still secure and have not been cracked, although there are likely teams out there already trying to do so, as with every new console.

The news is likely rough for Nintendo, which boasted of the 3DS' increased anti-piracy measures.

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