If you've been following technology at all, then you've probably heard at least one or two crazy stories. Technology can be used in all kinds of crazy and fun ways, and the internet is a great medium to share information about it. These are 20 of the craziest tech stories that you may never have heard of or you may not remember.

9 Apple Maps kept sending people to the Australian desert

Apple Maps was really, really bad once upon a time

Back in 2012 when Apple Maps first launched, if you wanted to go to the Australian city of Mildura, you were likely to end up in an Australian desert 40 miles away. Entering Mildura into Apple Maps sent drivers to the middle of Murray Sunset National Park, where local police were called to assist motorists who were stranded without food or water in the Australian summer heat.

While Apple Maps is significantly better now than it was back then, it became such a problem that local police had to warn people to stop relying on Apple Maps in the area for fear of more people becoming stranded in a location that had no food, water, or even cell service.

8 The iPhone 4 bar story

Have you ever lost something really important?

In a bar in 2010, an iPhone 4 prototype was found and handed over to news site Gizmodo where it was disassembled and shown off in all of its prototype glory. All of the changes, everything was new, and how it was lost were all revealed in a major tell-all that shook the mobile industry for years to come. While devices being seen out and about is nothing new (Google's Pixel phones keep showing up in the wild ahead of their launches, for example), Apple hasn't had anything as big as this since then.

At the time, this story made international news, and Gizmodo managed to avoid a significant amount of potential legal backlash from Apple. While Gizmodo editor Jason Chen was raided by deputies from the San Mateo County Sheriff's office, nothing really came of it, and two men accused of selling the device to the site were sentenced to a year probation, 40 hours of public service, and a $250 payment to be made to Apple in restitution.

7 The fish tank casino hack

Aquarium's 11?

In 2017, a casino was hacked thanks to a smart fish tank that was connected to a PC regulating food, temperature, and cleanliness of the tank. By gaining access to the fish tank, the attackers were then able to move around the casino's network and access other data on other machines, eventually exfiltrating 10GB of data. While the casino and the nature of the data weren't disclosed due to security concerns, the report was released by security firm Darktrace as a warning against the usage of unsecured IoT devices on a network.

Next time you use a smart device in your home, remember to be careful about what you connect to the internet. You never know how it might be exploited. Not even the brand of fish tank was revealed.

6 Tay Tweets

Tay probably shouldn't tweet

So before the advent of LLMs, Microsoft actually worked on a very similar technology that it launched as Tay Tweets. Tay was a chatbot that Microsoft unleashed on the internet. It was designed to learn from the internet and figure out how to interact with humans, and it was supposed to imitate a 19-year-old American girl. It did just fine... at first.

As time went on, people abused the fact that Tay would learn from other users, and soon Tay became more and more inflammatory. While it started off very harmless (and even seemed to give canned answers to potentially controversial topics), the internet was too much for Tay as it started to share racist, homophobic, and sexist tweets. Microsoft quickly shut it down 16 hours after its launch.

While Tay made a return a few days later, it immediately started rambling about drugs, started repetitively tweeting "You are too fast, please take a rest" several times a second, and then was killed off by Microsoft a second time. This time, it did not make a return.

5 The Bitcoin Pizza guy

How much would you spend on a pizza?

Pizza has gotten pretty expensive, but would you pay half a million dollars for one? What about half a million dollars for two pizzas?

We didn't think so either.

On May 22, 2010, Florida resident Laszlo Hanyecz paid 10,000 Bitcoin for two pizzas from Papa John's, widely regarded as the first usage of cryptocurrency for a legitimate purchase. At the time, Bitcoin wasn't worth any significant value, so it only made sense that for a small purchase like that, you may as well buy a couple of pizzas with it. Now, though, 10,000 Bitcoin is worth over $600,000.

Arguably, the worst part about this story is that it wasn't even good pizza. It was Papa John's. Poor guy.

To Hanyecz's credit, he's actually pretty happy about it, as he was also the writer of the first program that allowed for mining Bitcoin on a GPU. He once said in an interview that he “got pizza for contributing to an open-source project. Usually hobbies are a time sink and money sink, and in this case, my hobby bought me dinner." Not a bad outlook to have!

4 Twitch Plays Pokémon

A worldwide phenomenon for a brief period of time

Back in 2014, in a simpler time, Twitch Plays Pokémon was a phenomenon where viewers could type commands in a stream chat that would then be passed to an emulator. You could type commands like “up,” “down,” “left,” “right,” “A,” “B,” or “start” into the Twitch chat, and the game would process these commands in real-time, with the delay between typing and action making coordination difficult.

At the time, there were two modes of input. To handle the sheer volume of inputs being sent, the developer introduced a voting system where viewers could vote to enable "Anarchy" or "Democracy" mode. Anarchy was where every command was executed, and democracy was where commands were voted on and the most popular was executed. There was a constant chaos versus order struggle, leading to some very entertaining scenarios.

On top of that, it had a pretty large influence on the wider internet for a good few months. If you ever remember reading about "Lord Helix" or "Praise the Helix", it was because players kept accessing the Helix item, positioning it as a divine object. The Dome Fossil was seen as a false prophet who went against the will of Lord Helix. When the Helix was eventually resurrected as Omanyte, it was treated as if it were a legitimate resurrection.

3 Atari video game burial

E.T. was in New Mexico all this time

Atari was widely rumored to have made a mass grave of old Atari game stock in 1983, most notably E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial, a game still criticized to this day as one of the biggest commercial failures. It was frequently said to be an urban legend, potentially more than a dozen semi-truckloads of Atari cartridges and boxes had been seen crushed and buried in a landfill in Alamogordo, New Mexico. News site UPI said at the time that "people watching the operation said it included cassettes [sic] of the popular video games E.T., Pac-Man, Ms. Pac-Man, the consoles used to convey the games to television screens, and high-priced personal computers."

To make matters even more confusing, a few days later, a layer of concrete was then poured over the landfill, making it harder to retrieve its contents and find out what had actually been buried. With excavation eventually taking place in 2014 after access was granted to a Candian documentary company in 2013, James Heller, the former Atari manager in charge of the original burial, revealed that he had ordered the concrete to be poured over the burial. He also revealed that "only" 728,000 cartridges had been buried, a far cry from the potential millions that were speculated at the time.

While only around 1300 cartridges were retrieved from the landfill, it's still a pretty funny story that this urban legend turned out to be closer to the truth than a lot of people realized.

2 Facebook's AI bots made their own language

Facebook/Meta has been working on AI for years

Meta has loved AI for a long time, and in 2017, the company revealed that it had been dealing with two bots, Alice and Bob, that had made their own language to communicate. In a multi-agent system like this, "agents" are essentially decision-making AI that can communicate with each other and process the world around them in order to come to conclusion. These two chatbot agents were made to barter and negotiate with each other while learning to improve as they went along.

At the time, they were challenged to swap hats, balls, and books, where they all had differing values. Eventually, their language became incomprehensible to a reader, as while they were instructed to negotiate and barter, they weren't told to use comprehensible English. This meant they ended up making their own English dialect of sorts, which they understood, but researchers did not.

Here is an example transcript:

Bob: i can i i everything else . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Alice: balls have zero to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to

Bob: you i everything else . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Alice: balls have a ball to me to me to me to me to me to me to me

Bob: i i can i i i everything else . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Alice: balls have a ball to me to me to me to me to me to me to me

Bob: i . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Alice: balls have zero to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to

Bob: you i i i i i everything else . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Alice: balls have 0 to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to

Bob: you i i i everything else . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Alice: balls have zero to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to

Of course, there's nothing actually scary about this exchange. These agents were working in the confines of the rules they were given, and the conversation between the two of them appeared to make sense to each of them. Researchers eventually shut it down and started it again so that they would use comprehensible English that could be observed with ease.

“Agents will drift off understandable language and invent codewords for themselves,” Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research division's visiting researcher at the time Dhruv Batra said. “Like if I say ‘the’ five times, you interpret that to mean I want five copies of this item. This isn’t so different from the way communities of humans create shorthands.”

While a fun and bizarre story, there was nothing malicious going on here, and the research continued but with a focus on making sure the bots would learn so that they were actually understood by humans.

1 A PlayStation 3 supercomputer

This one's pretty cool

Did you know that the U.S. Air Force once bought 1760 PlayStation 3s and merged them together to make a supercomputer? We covered it recently, but it's a remarkable feat in engineering, both in a hardware and a software sense. By utilizing the powerful processing chops of Sony's console, it made for a pretty apt supercomputer capable of processing satellite imagery for significantly cheaper than it would have cost for a conventional supercomputer.

While it's unlikely to ever happen again, it's a testament to human ingenuity that something like this was even possible. It's a fun read to see how it was done, and it can even teach you a thing or two about high-performance computing as well!