Geek Weekly: Our top weird tech stories for 2 April

Technology Decisions’ weekly wrap of IT fails, latest tech, new must-have gadgets, ‘computer says no’ moments and more.

April fool. Your editor has to confess he fell for this one. SportsBet put out a release yesterday announcing the launch of LadyBet, the world’s first online betting app specifically designed for women. In my defence, it was early in the morning, I wasn’t fully awake, I’d forgotten that the date was 1 April and it did seem like the sort of thing a company such as SportsBet would do. But I’m not ashamed to admit to being tripped up by it. However, once reminded that it was the 1st of April, I didn’t fall for the next one - Kogan’s announcement that it would be opening a bricks-and-mortar store. Neither did we fall for the NSW’s government’s plans to sell off all the playgrounds in the state, with the premier ‘claiming’ that kids didn’t play outside anymore anyway.

Bureaucrat fool. Unfortunately, this one was all too real. Last year, just prior to the G20 meetings in Queensland, an officer in the Department of Immigration and Border Protection accidentally emailed the private details of world leaders to soccer officials. The mistake is being blamed on the person not noticing that autofill had incorrectly inserted the soccer email address. The data sent included the “name, date of birth, title, position nationality, passport number, visa grant number and visa subclass held relating to 31 international leaders (ie, prime ministers, presidents and their equivalents) attending the G20 leaders summit”. How would Sir Humphrey handle this?

Spam escapes from a fridge. In a sign of things to come, a refrigerator and other devices have been used in an Internet of Things botnet scheme to send out over 750,000 spam emails. Security provider Proofpoint says that more than “100,000 everyday consumer gadgets such as home-networking routers, connected multimedia centres, televisions and at least one refrigerator” have been implicated in the scheme. Taking advantage of a fridge? That’s not cool.

Making the switch… back. Your editor is a bit of a laughing stock around the Technology Decisions office, for he still uses an ancient Nokia ‘dumb phone’. None of this smartphone stuff for me. And it seems I’m not the only one.

Coin invaders. Now this is a good idea - what to do with all those foreign coins that end up weighing you down when you travel overseas? Use them to play games. An airport in Sweden has installed retro arcade games that accept all sorts of coins. Passengers get to kill some time, and the money is donated to charity.

Coin dispenser. Apple’s boss, Tim Cook, has announced that he’s joining the likes of Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg by vowing to give away pretty much his entire fortune to charitable causes. Very noble indeed. Would buying a hard-working editor a new smartphone qualify?

Just what we’ve always wanted. And finally, given the time of the year, we’ll let this video speak for itself: