Right, so this is a weird one: gismodo getting tons of reports—tons—about failing Zune 30s. Apparently, the players began freezing at about midnight last night, becoming totally unresponsive and practically useless. Updated 12:00PM

The crisis has been dubbed by Zune users ‘Z2K9′, due to the apparently synchronized faceplantings across the country. According to tipster Michael, the Zune users experienced something like this:

Apparently, around 2:00 AM today, the Zune models either reset, or were already off. Upon when turning on, the thing loads up and… freezes with a full loading bar (as pictured above). I thought my brother was the only one with it, but then it happened to my Zune. Then I checked out the forums and it seems everyone with a 30GB HDD model has had this happen to them

This report is consistently corroborated by literally hundreds of others across the various Zune support and fan forums.

Microsoft in response: We are aware that customers with the Zune 30GB are experiencing issues with their Zune device. We are actively working now to isolate the issue and develop a solution to address it. We will keep customers informed on next steps via the support page on zune.net

Are photographs of a mother breast-feeding her child indecent? The social networking site Facebook has sparked a massive online debate — and protests — and after removing photos that expose too much of a mother’s breast.

Facebook spokesman Barry Schnitt said the website takes no action over most breast-feeding photos because they follow the site’s terms of use but others are removed to ensure the site remains safe and secure for all users, including children.

“Photos containing a fully exposed breast (as defined by showing the nipple or areola) do violate those terms (on obscene, pornographic or sexually explicit material) and may be removed,” he said in a statement.

“The photos we act upon are almost exclusively brought to our attention by other users who complain.”

But Facebook’s decision to ban some breast-feeding photos has angered some users, including U.S. mother Kelli Roman whose photograph of her feeding her daughter was removed by Facebook.

Hewlett-Packard Co. could be breaking U.S. trade sanctions by using a third-party distributor to sell printers in Iran, The Boston Globe reported Monday.

According to the newspaper, HP signed a distribution deal with a Dubai-based company called Redington Gulf in 1997, two years after the Clinton administration put sanctions on Iran.

And while Redington, as a foreign company, falls outside U.S. regulations, the Globe reported that there is evidence HP knew its equipment would end up circumventing U.S. law. For example, in 1999, HP’s Middle East manager at the time, Albrecht Ferling, was quoted as estimating that sales in Iran would grow 50 percent a year, the Globe reported.

David Shane, a spokesman for the company, would not say whether HP plans to stop sales of its printers in Iran. He said Monday that “HP has a policy of complete compliance with all U.S. export laws.”

Sales of printers and ink are critical for HP, contributing about half of the Palo Alto-based company’s operating profit.

According to the Globe, Redington has helped make HP’s printers extremely popular in Iran. The newspaper cited a 2007 poll conducted by a local news organization that estimated HP printers had captured 41 percent of the market there.

Microsoft’s vision of your computing future is on display in its just-published patent application for the Metered Pay-As-You-Go Computing Experience. The plan, as Microsoft explains it, involves charging students $1.15 an hour to do their homework, making an Office bundle available for $1/hour, and billing gamers $1.25 for each hour of fun. In addition to your PC, Microsoft also discloses plans to bring the chargeback scheme to your cellphone and automobile — GPS, satellite radio, backseat video entertainment system.

Online retailer Amazon.com Inc on Friday reported its best holiday sales season yet, even as sales and traffic at U.S. store chains were the weakest in decades, sending its shares up nearly 4 percent.

Analysts have pointed to Amazon as a rare bright spot in this year’s holiday shopping season due to its scale and flexibility, as retailers try to outdo each other with deep discounts to lure consumers during a recession.

Online sales were also helped by winter storms that hit large sections of the United States on the last major shopping weekend before Christmas.

In a release titled “Amazon.com’s 14th holiday season is best ever,” the company said more than 6.3 million items were ordered on its site worldwide for the peak shopping day of December 15, amounting to 72.9 items ordered per second. On its peak day, it shipped more than 5.6 million units.

However, the company gave no financial details regarding the sales, such as how its margins fared with the discounts seen across the retail sector.

The Homeland Security Department has announced plans to expand its biometric data collection program to include foreign permanent residents and refugees. Almost all noncitizens will be required to provide digital fingerprints and a photograph upon entry into the United States as of Jan. 18.

A notice in Friday’s Federal Register, said expansion of the U.S. Visitor and Immigrant Status Indicator Technology Program (US VISIT) will include “nearly all aliens,” except Canadian citizens on brief visits. Those categories include permanent residents with green cards, individuals seeking to enter on immigrant visas, and potential refugees.

The US VISIT program was developed after the Sept.11, 2001, terrorist attacks to collect fingerprints from foreign visitors and run them against the FBI’s terrorist watch list and other criminal databases. Another phase of the project, to develop an exit system to track foreign nationals leaving the country, has run into repeated setbacks.

A federal court in Northern California has awarded Verizon $33.15 million in what the company is calling the largest cybersquatting judgment ever, Verizon announced Wednesday.

Verizon filed the case against OnlineNIC, a San Francisco-based Internet domain registration company, claiming it used Internet names–663 to be exact–that were chosen to be easily confused with legitimate Verizon names, according to Verizon.

It might hard, however, for Verizon to actually collect on the judgment, which was a default ruling, or one entered against a defendant who fails to answer a summons. No one appeared in court on OnlineNIC’s behalf or in its defense, Verizon said.

The award amount was calculated based on $50,000 per domain name, Verizon said.

Dentsu Inc, Japan’s largest ad agency, said it would team up with game maker Nintendo Co Ltd to launch a video distribution service on Nintendo’s wildly popular Wii console.

The two companies plan to offer programmes created for the service, a Dentsu spokesman said, in contrast to most online channels, which tend to carry existing TV shows and movies.

Viewers will need to pay to see some of the new programmes, while others will be offered free of charge and accompanied by advertisements, the spokesman said on Thursday.

Mozilla CEO John Lilly has admitted the Firefox maker’s relationship with Google has become “more complicated” since the company launched its own browser.

Mozilla is dependent on Google for the vast majority of its revenue and has previously worked closely with the search king’s engineers on the development of Firefox.

But that relationship appears to have cooled since Google released Chrome in the summer. “We have a fine and reasonable relationship,” John Lilly, Mozilla’s CEO, said in an interview with Computerworld. “But I’d be lying if I said that things weren’t more complicated than they used to be.”

Following closely behind the mid-November 2.06 release of VirtualBox, Sun Microsystems has released version 2.1. This has a number of new features, but one of the most interesting is the ability to run a 64-bit VM inside a 32-bit host. Another useful feature is integrated host-based networking; no more fiddling around with network bridges. Sun is really giving VMWare a run for their money.

A trio of Massachusetts Institute of Technology students who found a way to hack into the Boston subway system’s payment cards have agreed to partner with transit officials there to make the system more secure.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation announced the agreement Monday, two months after the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority dropped a lawsuit against the students, who were represented for free by the EFF, a civil-liberties group that frequently takes up cases involving security researchers and computer hackers.

Microsoft has once again put Windows XP on life support, extending the OS’s death date to May 30, 2009. This reprieve comes two months after rumors swirled about another potential bail out.

In the new agreement — first discovered by ChannelWeb — distributors can purchase XP licenses until January 31, 2009, the original date in which XP was supposed to turn to dust, but take delivery against those orders through May 30.

Windows XP was supposed to stop shipping on January 30, 2008, but that date has been extended several times. It will live on Netbooks until 2010. XP is also still a booming business: Dell started charging $150 per Vista downgrade — three times as much as the original fee.

Meanwhile, Windows 7’s rumored release date hovers around October 2009. With each extension of Windows XP’s death, Microsoft inches closer to Windows 7’s release, thereby sublimating Vista and its skimpy chances at some kind of late-blooming success. Given the market’s resistance to Vista — and Microsoft’s own perceived uncertainty — we should expect Windows 7 to arrive sooner rather than later so the monstrous software company can save face.