Just when you thought it was all iPhone-related hysteria doing the rounds in the past week, along comes Weird Tech with a healthy collection of the more unusual tech stories from the last seven days. We've even got 'PlayStation' and 'attempted murder' in the same sentence...
When 16-year-old Cory Ryder had his Sony PlayStation confiscated after getting into trouble at school, he did what any normal teenager would do and hired a hitman to bump off his parents. Sadly the plan backfired - even though the boy offered his stepdad's pickup as payment - when the man he contacted turned out to be an undercover policeman, tipped off by his mother. He is currently awaiting trial.
Meanwhile, a hacker broke into Chile's presidential website on Sunday and planted the flag of neighbouring Peru , accompanied by the message "Long live Peru " and a token expletive. The Santiago daily El Mercurio reported that officials believe the hacker was - shock, horror - a Peruvian. Good work lads.
Cheers Airtel!
You faithfully pay your bills every month and what happens? You end up behind bars. That's exactly what happened to a Bangalore man, who was wrongfully arrested and detained for 50 days after internet service provider Airtel falsely identified him as the person who had uploaded disrespectful images of Chhatrapati Shivaji - the Indian equivalent of George Washington.
According to Cnet, authorities discovered the poster's IP address through Google and then interrogated Airtel to find out who the owner was. The man was only released three weeks after police apprehended the real person responsible for the posting.
The week's news in brief
Work has commenced in Beijing on the Great Wheel of China - a £47 million Ferris wheel that will span a massive 680 feet (making it the world's tallest Ferris wheel) when it's up and running in 2009. A Chinese lottery ticket seller was jailed for life for taking advantage of a flaw in the system which allowed him to illegally cash £1.8m in tickets. And Kylie Minogue launched her own social networking site, ingeniously named KylieKonnect.
Oh, and this week's Gadget of the Week? Without doubt: the Water Pistol Umbrella. OK, it's hardly cutting edge tech, but it looks like loads of fun. Sony's rather tasteful Leopard skin laptop came in at second place...
And finally...
One of the world's oldest bloggers has overcome web-illiteracy to achieve widespread fame as a cybercelebrity. Despite having over 60,000 regular readers so far, until very recently 95-year-old Maria Amelia Lopez was still under the impression that "a blog was just a type of paper notebook". Ah, bless.
