Six of the craziest moments in tech (2012)

Updated on 03-May-2013
HIGHLIGHTS

The tech world is full of surprises, simultaneously weird and wonderful. Here is our compilation of six of the craziest moments in tech in recent memory.

1.John McAfee: Where do we even begin? First, a man is found dead in Belize, then he spends a night hidden in a cardboard box, then he’s in Guatamela, a photo from there finds its way to the internet.

He apologizes saying the EXIF data was faked and he tampered with it; turns out he was in Guatamela and he apologizes again for apologizing about tampering with the photo.

2.Apple Maps: The maps fiasco of iOS 6 was one of the most unexpected from Apple. What it did was send the entire iWorld back to the Stone Age.

People had to actually talk to strangers (“shudder”) and ask for directions. A dire situation indeed! No matter, Google’s maps soon came along and returned the iFaithfuls to the 21st century.

3.A fresh start. Or not: The disappearance of the Start Menu in Windows 8 was met with much agitation from the Windows community at large.

People were lost without it and the new Metro, or Modern, or New Style or whatever the UI is called now just seems so incomplete without it. It was a sad day indeed when Microsoft finally decided to kill it. R.I.P. Start button.

4.The one, true religion: Isak Gerson is your God and the Missionary Church of Kopimism your place of worship, Kopimism being your new religion. Begone to Sweden ye perfidious pirates. The only country that recognises file-sharing as a true religion.

A religion that holds Ctrl C and Ctrl V as holy symbols demands our attention. The message, “Have internet, will copy.”

5.A second too soon: Time Keepers add an extra second to the world’s atomic clocks and parts of the world grind to a halt.

A minor glitch in the Linux kernel caused many servers (not updated in time) to just crash. The crashed servers include those of Reddit and Mozilla. In a world where every second counts, Time is truly our mistress.

6.Space Age parts: When you are accidentally shipped weird spares with a suitably cryptic id. “Google Planet8541 Pluto switch”, you know that Google’s plans at world domination are grander than you think.

Nobody has yet been able to solve the mystery of the spares and Google has graciously presented T-Shirts to the engineers who received those parts.

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