Crazy Tech News Countdown: Linux for students, Newton OS on the iPhone and more

Welcome once again to Crazy Tech News Countdown, the weekly column where we count down the craziest, silliest or just plain insane tech stories. If you’re into OS’es, you’ll like this one. So without further ado, let’s count ‘em down.

5- Captcha is cool again – Captcha is probably the biggest hassle you have to go through in order to register on a website, I think we can all agree with that, and still, it’s not that effective anymore. But what if you had to write down the contents of an ad instead? The site publisher would earn more money and bots would still be kept away. Sounds nice to me.

4- Moral search engines – Information in the civilized world is pretty unfiltered nowadays. Yet, many still want some of it filtered out as they might find it immoral or just inappropriate. Now, thanks to the powers of online democracy, some “moral” search engines are popping up, which aim to filter out immoral content for a specific religion. Jewogle, for example, is a search engine aimed at Jewish people, while SeekFind only indexes Christian biblical content.

3- Ubuntu for students? – Ubuntu is probably the most popular Linux distro among human beings. Yet, some have created more nichy distributions. This new one, named UberStudent, is an enhanced version of Ubuntu aimed at students. It includes enhanced research and text editing tools that might make a difference to some students. What do you think? Would you use it?

2- Political campaign turns to casual games – A Democratic congressman from Missouri’s third district has turned to casual games to disarm his opponent. This Pac-Man-like game seems like a cool attempt to point out the opponent’s alleged flaws and catch people’s attention at the same time. Feel free to play the game here.

1- Newon OS runs on the iPhone – Before the iPods and the iPhone, there was the Newton, an old Apple PDA that never really caught on. Yet, some have figured out how to run the OS on a modern iPhone.