The Beijing Times is reporting on a shocking court case involving Asus and a young female customer named Huang Jing. It all started back in 2006 when Huang bought a V6800V model ASUS laptop from a Beijing retailer and quickly discovered it to be defective. She sent the computer back to Asus several times for repairs, but the problems persisted. Upon further examination, one of the replacement CPUs used to "fix" the computer was actually an Intel "engineering sample" and therefore unlawful to sell. Now here is where things get really crazy.

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Los Angeles mail order catalog Pack Central may have found the last untapped pocket of consumers willing to pay retail for their music on physical formats--the cellblocks of our great nation's prisons. And not just any format--turns out, music on cassette is the only way to get tunes that isn't screened out as a potential deadly weapon. Wait, they still sell new music on cassettes?

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Genilson Lins da Silva was arrested an thrown in prison after being sentenced to 28 years for robbery and murder. However, it appears that some of the prisons in Brazil aren't as bad as they are made out to be considering the fact that a plasma TV, refrigerator, gym equipment, two .38-calibre pistols and $173,000 in cash was recently discovered in da Silva's cell. The items were uncovered during a raid that was part of a statewide crackdown on drug trafficking, and they are now investigating how he managed to live the high life while being incarcerated. Uh...bribes maybe?[Star Telegram]

In order to combat the rising number of mobile phones smuggled into prisons, the UK Government is considering installing the Boss II scanner chair in every jail in England and Wales. The Boss makes every inmate its bitch thanks to three sensitive sensors that can detect internally hidden metal items as small as a pin or a sim card. Two Boss chairs are already being used in local prisons and have helped detect 21 mobile phones since April.

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If you have criminal persuasions in life, whatever they may be, might we suggest you relocate your place of residence to Austria? The reason for this; Austria happens to be the geographic location of the most awesome (to our knowledge) prison in the world. Check out The Leoben Justice Centre, Steiermark, in the gallery below.

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Trevor Michael Karney, or the make-believe Dietrich of Gizmondo fame, has just been sentenced to 30 days in prison plus 3 years probation for giving false information to the popos. Bo Stefan Eriksson, the other man in the car at the time of the 162mph Ferrari Enzo crash, is still serving his 3-year prison sentence—undoubtedly making shivs and other self- defence weaponry as opposed to lousy handheld consoles. [Boston]

WARNING NOT FOR SQUEAMISH I love Gizmodo, but when Mark said, 'Do the rectum,' I thought it was asking a little too much. Thank the heavens above he was referring to this story. It is common knowledge that prison would be a bitchin' hang out if: 1). There were no criminals about and 2). There were no rectal violations going on. Unfortunately, most prisons are founded on the above two tenets and Big Sandy penitentiary, in Kentucky, is no different. Thus, when an unidentified inmate's partner paid him a visit with an iPhone, our man was overwhelmed. He was so excited he probably did a sissy punch the air gesture and the like. However, after realising the law enforcement would confiscate his new toy, he did what any man would do: He shoved it up his ass.

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Not being well-versed in the areas of our penal system...our collective penal system... we had no idea that the N64 rumble pack was huge with prison tattoo artists. A maximum security prison guard recently wrote our sister site Kotaku, and here's what he had to say:

It is actually pretty easy. There are no workshops in maximum security. They do it in their rooms with a battery(power) taped to a tube(could be a pen or a tightly wound piece of paper). The motor from the rumble pack is taken out and attached to the top of the tube. A needle or pin is run down the middle of the tube. when "on" the needle will move up and down like a sewing machine. The needle is then dipped in "ink." This is made a number of ways the easiest is to use ball point pen ink, but they could use other items to get different colors or looks.

There's been some pretty hardcore pirate bashing lately, and I don't mean the bad reviews for that latest Caribbean movie (take THAT, Disney!) They're worse than real world thieves, apparently, because the dollar value of 'goods' stolen runs to billions of dollars! These guys are the Dr. Evil of thievery... if only they could work out how to turn it into cash like those pirates that make and sell actual discs in Asia, huh?

Anyway, seems one of our own bad guys, Hew Raymond Griffiths, formerly of Bateau Bay on the NSW Central Coast, has now met his match in the form of a US prison cell where he'll spend the next 15 months of a 51 month sentence (he earned time served after spending years in a local cell while fighting extradition).

Well, there's falling in with a bad crowd, and then there is getting involved with a Russian warez crew (the notorious DOD). If I lived on the Central Coast, I'd probably take up surfing. -Seamus Byrne

US gaols Aussie piracy kingpin [SMH]
Thanks M0les for the tip. Don't visit his blog. It's crap. His words, not mine.