Techy

The new edition of computer game "Grand Theft Auto IV, The Ballad of Gay Tony" has received an 18 certificate from the UK censors , the BBFC, on the basis of the episode's sexual content.

Gay Tony is the latest 360-exclusive add-on for GTA IV, these slices of fresh content bundled under the Episodes from Liberty City name.

In addition to 'strong' sexual content, the game includes very strong language and hard drug use - according the ratings agency , BBFC.

The BBFC have commented, "The sex is quite strong, but always masked and the characters concerned are invariably fully clothed (no nudity),". It is unclear if the sex scenes described will involve the Gay Tony character or any other man on man pixel action.

This new episode will be launched on the 29th of October.

Ever wanted to locate unidentified gay men on Facebook? Now there's an application for that. It was created by two students at MIT in America. They discovered that gay men tend to have more male Facebook friends of their own orientation.

The students, Carter Jernigan and Behram Mistree, ran the program on 10 men who were gay, but didn't reveal that information on their profiles. The software predicted that all ten were gay.

The survey indicates that people who believe they are discreet online may still be making personal information about themselves public.

In total the MIT students ran the software on 947 people who did not disclose their sexual orientation on their profiles, but it failed to accurately identify lesbians or bisexuals of either gender.

Jernigan and Mistree say they are attempting to get their study, titled Gaydar, published in a scientific journal.

Rockstar Games have unveiled The Ballad of Gay Tony, the latest slice of downloadable content for the award-winning computer game Grand Theft Auto IV.

The official Rockstar Games site describes the game as placing the player into the role of Luis Lopez, a “part-time hoodlum and full-time assistant to nightclub impresario Tony Prince (a.k.a. Gay Tony).”

The Ballad of Gay Tony is still some months away and very little known about its core content, the underlying  controversy that seems to follow Rockstar from game to game could grow progressively more pungent as the detail get revelaed.

XBox 360 players will be able to download the episode using XBox Live or purchase it as a DVD disc that will also contain the first GTA IV episode, "The Lost and the Damned,".

The revamped Gay UK News (www.gayuknews.com) has been launched with a host of great new features and a new look.

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Gay UK News is fully integrated with Twitter, all our news stories appear instantly on Twitter and now any comments added to our news stories, by you, also get Twittered. Give it a try. You can follow us at www.twitter.com/gayuknews or click on the link at the top right of the page.

Pride Listings
We have the most complete UK pride listings on the web. With over 30 Pride and Mardi Gras events going on in 2009 there is no reason not to party. We also have a fabulous new Pride Shop with rainbow t shirts, hats, badges and other stuff to get you in the mood.

Read more: New Gay UK News Site Launched

Amazon has been blasted by gay-rights groups after gay and lesbian book titles were delisted from its site. Yet while Amazon claims it was an internal glitch, a blogger with a vendetta has claimed he is responsible.

Amazon spokeswoman Patty Smith told CNET News.com that the "glitch" was being fixed, but declined to elaborate. "This is an embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloguing error for a company that prides itself on offering complete selection," she wrote in an email statement.

"It has been misreported that the issue was limited to Gay & Lesbian themed titles — in fact, it impacted 57,310 books in a number of broad categories such as Health, Mind & Body, Reproductive & Sexual Medicine, and Erotica," the statement said. "This problem impacted books not just in the United States but globally. It affected not just sales rank but also had the effect of removing the books from Amazon's main product search."

However, a Live Journal blogger with the alias 'weev' claims he did it to cause an outrage among the gay community, which he alleges has repeatedly flagged his online ads on Craigslist as inappropriate.

Read more: Amazon's Gay Problem Caused by Blogger?