Someone who managed to get their hands on an Xbox 720 'Durango' development machine took a big risk by throwing it on Ebay. Turns out that the big risk was seemingly worth it as the auction has now ended with the sales price being just a bit north of $20,000. But don't worry as "All proceeds go to charity. And by charity, I[he] mean my[his] new car."

Posted by user SuperDaE, this was the latest move in a series of leaks that were sure to be angering Microsoft. Prior to this auction, DaE had been leaking images of the tower. This tower is nowhere near what the final version of the product will look like. It is just the hardware so that game developers can start making games ahead of launch.

Since the appearance of the development kit isn't known by anyone except for those who have it, it's a bit difficult to say if this is the real deal. The case looks like a standard computer case and could easily house standard PC components. We will have to wait until the purchaser goes public with the details.

It looks like Samsung's T-Mobile-branded phone, now known officially as the Galaxy S Blaze Q is nearly here. The image below is thanks to TmoNews, and its showing off that it's a slider, and sports a full QWERTY keyboard.

The Galaxy A Blaze Q comes out on August 15, and Samsung had already stated they would be announcing a new Galaxy on this date. How does the Blaze Q spec against its other Galaxy brothers? Well, we're looking at a 1.5GHz dual-core Snapdragon S4 processor, 1GB of RAM and 16GB of internal storage.

Display-wise, it reportedly contains a 720p display, and a rear camera capable of taking 1080p video. It should arrive with Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, but it might come with an schedule for an upgrade to Android 4.1 Jelly Bean.

Samsung's first dedicated gaming notebook has come and gone, and the refresh is just pulling up on the finishing line. Samsung's Series 7 Gamer notebook has been refreshed, with the company using their Samsung Tomorrow blog to tell the world.

The new build is called Series 7 Gamer Yellow 3D, and if the 'yellow' and '3D' weren't strong enough hints, we're looking at the GPU being upgraded, the screen is 3D-capable, and it comes in yellow. The GPU in question is AMD's Radeon HD 7870M, and the screen is a 14.3-inch SuperBright (400 nit) 3D LED display.

The refreshed Series 7 Gamer comes with an 128GB SSD and a 1TB HDD for storage. Availability isn't known just yet, but those in Samsung's homeland can grab one of these bad boys for 2.99 million Won, which is around $2,643 US.

It looks as though the MegaUpload problems aren't stopping founder Kim Dotcom from getting right back into work, with the biggest hint that his new music program has not been delayed and will arrived later this year. The new hint comes from a tweet from the man himself, and is talking about Megabox.

I'm sure you've heard of it, but if you haven't, Megabox will be a music service that allows artists to sell music directly to its users. The last time Dotcom talked of Megabox was back in June, where he told Torrent Freak that:

You can expect several Megabox announcements [in 2012] including exclusive deals with artists who are eager to depart from outdated business models.

Demonoid was taken down by a DDoS attack on July 24, with early reports suggesting that the site's downtime was temporary. But, it has gotten a lot worse: Ukranian authorities have announced they ordered ColoCall, the nation's largest datacenter and host of Demonoid, to disable to site and hand over data.

This would've been a coordinated, international effort, but it wasn't clear if Demonoid was being used as a "gift" from the Ukraine to the US. We've seen how the US wants to play dirty against MegaUpload, and founder Kim Dotcom, but this is crazy. London-based international record label consortium, IFPI, and INTERPOL have since revealed they were involved in organizing the strike, which wasn't limited to Ukraine.

It seems as though Mexican authorities are involved, too, as they have reportedly made more than one arrest as well as seizing assets. IFPI anti-piracy director, Jeremy Banks has said:

It looks like Microsoft is going all-in with their Surface-branded tablets, with the company looking for more people to work for company in the form of hardware and software engineers that will have the tak of working on the next generation Surface tablets.

The first Surface, due out in two or so months, should be Microsoft's biggest fight against Apple, ever. Since the Redmond-based company is looking for people for the next Surface, before the original has even been released, we know that the fight is going to be epic. One of the job listings seems to be on the request for a senior electrical engineer who would be working on "the electrical design and qualification of AC-DC power supplies and adapters", so it looks like we should expect battery-powered devices, too.

Something else worth pointing out is that the company is looking for engineers to work on "alternative power sources", meaning we could see fuel cell-based power (or similar tech) in future Surface devices.

uTorrent user? You'll soon be eye balling ads, as the creators of the torrent program have announced that the upcoming version of the popular torrent software will sport "in-client offers". In-client offers is just some fancy translation of ads.

uTorrent Plus users won't have to experience the ads, but you'll be coughing up USD $24.95 for the privilege. Considering that uTorrent features over 125 million active users each month, it shouldn't come as a surprise. uTorrent's parent company, BitTorrent Inc., has made some nice spare money from their optional tool bar, seeing between $15 to $20 million from the tool bar alone. The ad-supported client should make the wallets of uTorrent that little bit bigger.

What is changing with µTorrent offers?

TechPowerUp has updated GPU-Z to version 0.6.4 and with it brought some interesting changes. According to TechPowerUp, "version 0.6.4 adds/refines support for several upcoming NVIDIA GPUs, such as GeForce GTX 660 Ti, GeForce GTX 660, GeForce GTX/S 650, GeForce 610, and GeForce GTX 680M; Intel GMA 3600 (ROP count); AMD "Trinity" APUs (clock reading accuracy) and AMD FirePro 2270."

Usually software like this is updated shortly before the release of a new product, such as the NVIDIA GTX 660 Ti, rumored to be launching soon. Support for the NVIDIA 650 also shows that the September launch period is likely an accurate rumor. TechPowerUp also instituted several other changes in the newest version:

You can pick up the latest version of the software from TechPowerUp's website.

Continuing with a theme of science and space Friday, we would like to give you something to do over the weekend. It's time for the yearly Perseid meteor shower in the northern hemisphere and it promises to be a good one. NASA has called it the "best meteor shower of the year" so you really don't want to miss it.

The shower will run from August 11 to 13, with the night of August 12 expected to be the best. NASA is predicting that at its peak rate people could be making 100 wishes an hour. In other words, NASA expects it to peak at 100 shooting stars an hour. "We expect to see meteor rates as high as a hundred per hour," NASA's Bill Cooke says.

Heading to the countryside away from city lights is usually advisable. According to NASA, "a visit to the countryside will typically triple the number of meteors you see." The best viewing time will be in the early morning darkness just before dawn. The show should start sometime after 10PM. I'll be heading to a remote location in the Northern California Sierra Nevadas to escape the Sacramento city light pollution.

It would appear that Google has partially caved to the music and movie industry. An update to the way search results are ranked will see pirate sites and other illegitimate content sources showing up lower in the results. As you may or may not know, Google looks at around 200 different signals to rank pages and the newest one is directly tied to piracy.

The latest signal to be used in ranking pages will be directly related to "the number of valid copyright removal notices" received for a given site. This means that sites which receive a large number of valid removal notices may appear lower in Google's search results. Google explains why this is a good thing:

This ranking change should help users find legitimate, quality sources of content more easily-whether it's a song previewed on NPR's music website, a TV show on Hulu or new music streamed from Spotify.