Weird Tech: Stupid crooks caught by Xbox 360

Xbox 360s, deadly love triangles and 10,000 gallons of urine. As usual, it's been a brilliant week for weird happenings in the world of tech....

US Marshals managed to lure over 100 crooks out of hiding to a crackdown location in Texas with the false promise of a free Xbox 360. A total of 115 criminals, mainly wanted on drug or violent crime charges, were arrested when they turned up to collect their winnings, CVG reports.

Mobile phone cleared of murder

Good news for the mobile phone camp this week. It seems that a South Korean quarry worker found dead with "his mobile phone battery... melted in his shirt pocket" was not killed by the battery exploding as initially suspected.

Rather, it transpires, a co-worker attempted to frame the victim's mobile phone as the cause of death after he accidentally pinned the man "to a rock face while backing up a construction vehicle", Reuters reports.

As if to reinforce the good image of the trusty mobile phone, an excellent new function was launched this week. Introducing SatLav, a text-based toilet-finding service for those caught short on the streets of London. It's been launched in an effort to help reduce the estimated 10,000 gallons of urine which end up in local alleyways each year.

News in brief

A blog promoting former US Vice President Al Gore's film An Inconvenient Truth was hacked. The site is now hosting links to websites hawking online pharmaceuticals with titles including "Xanax On Line," "Viagra," and "Buy Valium Online".

Meanwhile, a 48-year-old man (who posed as an 18-year-old Marine) entangled in an online love triangle was sentenced to 20 years in jail for shooting his competitor after being dumped by a middle-aged woman posing as her 18-year-old daughter.

Invention of the week? Easily the Bar of Soap - a gadget that can work out precisely what it is depending on how it's held. Hold it like a mobile phone... and it makes calls; hold it like a camera...and it'll take photos. The world's smallest indoor radio-controlled aeroplane also deserves a mention.

And finally...

A man in Florida met an unlikely end after being electrocuted while trying to extract his car from a ditch early on Thursday morning. Having already stalled one tractor borrowed from a nearby farm, the man proceeded to borrow a second before promptly driving it straight into low-hanging power lines (that he himself had loosened after crashing into them), causing the tractor to catch fire and leading to his subsequent electrocution.

The Wayne County Sheriff's Department is still trying to determine exactly how the incident happened. Good luck with that one.