A court in South Korea has sentenced 49-year-old Samsung Electronics vice chairman Lee Jae-yong to five years in prison for corruption.

Lee — who denied all charges — was convicted regarding his role in a bribery scandal involving Park Geun-hye, the former president of South Korea. Prosecutors were seeking a 12-year maximum sentence.

What’s the opposite of an iPad Pro? Presumably it would be an iPad con — and if a new scheme proposed by the U.K.’s Ministry of Justice comes to fruition, there could be a whole lot of them.

The proposed project aims to give prisoners taxpayer-funded iPads so that they can video chat with their families, while also improving their numeracy and literacy skills.

Couldn’t we at least pretend prison is designed as a punishment, and hand convicts cheap Android tablets as a deterrent instead?

Here’s the typical course of a couple of world-changing new technologies:

Printing press. Steve Guttenberg created the moveable type press back in around 1400, shortly after the invention of beatboxing. At first it disrupted the monks' monopoly illuminated manuscripts (books with built-in reading lights), then came the pulp paperback, then comic books, and then people started typing letters to prison inmates.

Postcard. This innocent vacation staple was introduced in the 1800s. It’s a letter without an envelope which can be read by anybody as it travels from sender to recipient, and in this way was the inspiration for the inventors of email. Later, it was used to mail contest answers into Saturday morning TV shows, and in England a smutty variety emerged which is still available today. Then people started sending postcards to prison inmates.

Today, we have the iPhone. I’ll skip the last five years of its history and arrive at today. Now, people can send paper postcards to prison inmates using their iPhones.

Most of us are hopefully unfamiliar with the prison scene, so Gizmodo has taken an interesting look at technology in California’s San Quentin State Prison. The series is called “Lockdown,” and the latest installment focuses on how smartphones are used behind bars.

Phones in prison are a hot item, going for $300 to $700 behind bars. Inmates use them to communicate with the outside world and orchestrate nefarious activities like drug drop-offs. Prisoners will do basically anything to keep an iPhone from being confiscated. And we do mean anything.

Remember the three Foxconn employees arrested back in December for leaking the design of the iPad 2 to third-party case makers? They’ve been found guilty, and they’re going to prison.