News 

1. Linux felon must learn to love Windows
Some argue that the criminal justice system has gone soft, but Linux lover Scott McCausland would probably disagree. After being convicted of software piracy, he was instructed to install monitoring software on his computer to track his online activity. The thing was, the software only ran on Windows. Last we heard, he was banging on the doors of the jail, begging to be let back in.

2. Man jailed for adding wife to Facebook friends
Husband sends "friends request" to wife on Facebook and promptly ends up in jail. It sounds harsh, but the couple were estranged, he was banned from contacting her by the courts, and Facebook isn't exactly known for respecting people's privacy. A cautionary tale for all would-be stalkers.

3. Developers tidy up forums with "StupidFilter"
Sick to death of unintelligible forum posts, a team of US developers created a "StupidFilter" to block them from appearing. The filter scans every potential post and if it finds too many OMGs, LOLs, exclamation marks or nonsense words, it asks the poster to retype it. We've got it on order.

4. Roll up, roll up for the $1,500 keyboard
The keyboard for the man who has everything, except common sense. This extravagance contains a small OLED screen behind each key allowing you to change the "j" key to a picture of a champagne-filled swimming pool say, or perhaps a gold plated toilet roll holder. Form an orderly queue please.

5. Excel 2007 gets its sums wrong
Believe it or not, not every Microsoft release is the flawless masterpiece Vista is. Just take Excel 2007 and the catastrophic bug which caused it to return the answer 100,000 when asked to multiply 850 x 77.1, which is wrong. By quite a margin. A sheepish Microsoft quickly fixed it... but then it's not like it's got anything else to be getting on with.

6. Staples slammed over £44 USB cable
Staples found itself in hot water after a <

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customer complained to the Advertising Standards Authority that the shop had tried to charge her a staggering £44 for a printer cable. Staples denied the accusation, rather reasonably pointing out that it didn't actually sell £44 printer cables and never had. That didn't wash with the ASA though, which agreed with the woman that she'd been misled, though she admitted to being very happy with her £10,000 printer.

7. Road signs warn drivers to ignore sat nav
Sat navs may be excellent at getting us from A to B, but apparently they also have a wicked sense of humour: wedging trucks on roads too narrow for them for example, or sending one ambulance driver hundreds of miles in the wrong direction. To combat this, a village in Wales posted signs telling drivers not to trust their sat navs. So there you have it; back to maps everybody.

8. The truth behind the million dollar laptop
It's the old, old story; a firm nobody's ever heard of claims to be building a jewel encrusted laptop packed with bleeding-edge technology at its state-of-the-art manufacturing premises in London. PC Pro investigates and finds what looks like a three-bedroom terrace just off the Fulham Road. How many times have we heard that old chestnut?

9. Hackers "nuke" Czech beauty spot
In a protest against.. erm... something, Czech hackers hijacked a webcast showing off local beauty spots and inserted images of them being nuked. Unfortunately the webcast was subsequently relayed to national television, leading to no little confusion among the lovely folk of the Czech Republic. What happened to marches and placards, eh?

10. Kazakhstan: home of £11,000 broadband
If you thought you were paying over the odds for a decent broadband connection spare a thought for the citizens of Kazakhstan who pay £1,600 a month for their 1.5Mb/sec connections, and a whopping £11,000 for a 6Mb/sec connection. That's right 6Mb/sec, a speed we'll be seeing in the UK shortly after hell freezes over and pigs don jetpacks.

11. Lords considered rewriting internet
In an effort to prove they weren't completely out of touch with reality, The House of Lords Science and Technology Committee seriously considered fixing the internet by throwing the old one away and building a new one. Unsurprisingly, once their grandchildren had shown them how to switch their computers on and order their medication online, they dismissed the idea as a bad job.