Microsoft is calling all UK kids aged 14-17 to enter its Thought Thieves Competition. Remember kids, finalists must agree to formally license all intellectual property rights in their film on terms acceptable to Microsoft. And don't forget to download your free Thought Thieves Poster!

Smelling a male pheromone prompts the same brain activity in homosexual men as it does in heterosexual women, a new study has found. It did not excite the sex-related region in the brains of heterosexual males, although an oestrogen-derived compound found in female urine did.

The team observed 36 healthy men and women, who were exposed in turn to AND, the oestrogen-derived compound EST and other odours, including lavender oil, cedar oil, eugenol and butanol.

PET and MRI scans revealed that the ordinary odours activated parts of the brain associated with smelling in all test subjects. But in addition to that activation, AND excited the brain areas associated with sexual behaviour for female and gay male participants, as did the EST for straight men.

Okay, the world title for fastest text messaging is still raging in the streets. The victor in the most recent contest was a bit of a dark horse - 93-year-old telegraph operator Gordon Hill delivered a resounding ass-whoopin' to his rival, 13-year-old Brittany Devlin, using Morse Code. Of course, Mr. Hill does have nigh on 80 years of practice under his belt, which was enough to help him triumph even despite Brittany's liberal use of texting slang (Mr. Hill transmitted the chosen phrase verbatim). The showdown was sponsored by the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, Australia, and the rivals had to transmit the following message: "Hey, girlfriend, you can text all your best pals to tell them where you are going and what you are wearing." Damn straight! Screw the T9, Engadget's switching over to Morse from now on.

Now here's a nice wrinkle of the laws governing this place that Tony Blair wanted to be "the best place for ecommerce anywhere in the world". If you send commercial data by email or over the Web, it's liable for VAT (17.5 per cent value-added tax, imposed in the UK on services) on the value of the data. Which of course with commercial data can be quite high.

But if you print that same data out and send it on paper, by post or fax, it is not liable for VAT.

This peculiar aspect of the UK's arcane tax laws was pointed out to us by Paul Redfern, who has a business offering data analysis services, crunching numbers for social survey data.

The reason? Apparently it's down to an EEC Directive of 1977, subsequently amended (many times), which aims to harmonise VAT on communications, including electronic communications. What the VAT is actually levied on depends on the means of communication, Dr Redfern was told. "If I post or fax data to you, the VAT is either included in the price of the postage stamp or the cost of the phone call. If I email the data, however, the VAT is levied on the value of the data I send you, not on the cost of communicating it."

The WebAppSec mailing list at SecurityFocus is currently having an interesting discussion on how to force users to use cryptographically strong passwords. The original poster suggested displaying a list of randomly generated password for the user to choose from. Two issues pointed with this concept, were Shoulder surfing and the fact that a bunch of randomly generated passwords are hard to remember. A counter proposal was to use pronounceable but randomly generated password. A full summary of this discussion is available.

Long before Napster existed, the music industry condemned itself to a broken sales model. It guaranteed piracy, huge online song swaps and declining revenue. Luckily, none of this has much to do with the health of music. Music is thriving like never before. It's the moguls and not the musicians who are hurting.

The record labels have gotten off pretty light in the P2P debate by making curious children seem like immoral thugs destined for a life of crime. Downloading that U2 song is the first step toward shoplifting and eventually clubbing grandmothers. It's easy to forget the CD price-fixing, scandalous use of sex, drugs and violence as promotional tools and total disregard for the technology landscape as drivers of the record labels' own failure.

Today, the artist gets 8 percent of the average CD sale with the label taking 49 percent, the retailer taking 30 percent, manufacturing taking 8 percent and shipping taking 5 percent.

Instead of looking at P2P users as dissatisfied, disgruntled customers and trying to make life better for them, the record labels saw criminals harming their bottom line. They chose to sue their customers and to lock down already digitized and wild music. The Future of Music explains why this was the worst of all possible reactions and why the record labels simply can't win this fight.

"An interesting discussion has surfaced on the Scribus mailing list. Simply stated, it appears that using GPL-licensed fonts in a document makes your document subject to the GPL. There are a lot of consequences here, such as internal corporate communications. It appears to make the use of GPL fonts undesirable in almost any document." Yes, it sounds crazy, but the experimental font-exception addition to the GPL (linked from the discussion) lends the idea some credence.

An enterprising surfer has found a way to harness Google's new mapping facility to uncover the secrets of Area 51.

The American military base, in the Nevada desert, is steeped in history and rumour - allegedly being the place where all of Uncle Sam's work with extra-terrestrials and physics-defying technology takes place. The place is so heavily guarded, it's almost impossible to get within miles of it.

However, with satellite map technology, you can uncover some pretty spectacular pictures of the base, including some interesting structures in and around it that can't quite be identified.

US Attorney General and former White House torture apologist Alberto Gonzales warned the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday that certain temporary provisions of the so-called "Patriot" Act must not be allowed to expire as scheduled later this year.

"Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups still pose a grave threat to the security of the American people, and now is not the time to relinquish some of our most effective tools in this fight," Gonzales explained.

However, since terrorists will always pose a risk, Gonzales's argument is a slick way of admitting that the Feds have grown accustomed to the powers that Congress intended as temporary, and are determined to keep them. Which, of course, everyone has known from day one.

He has indicated that the Bush Administration might compromise slightly on some of the most objectionable permanent provisions, such as so-called "sneak and peek" warrants, or, as the Justice Department prefers to call them, "delayed notification" warrants, that allow the Feds to break into your house secretly, execute a search, and not tell you about it until they wish to.

If reinventing the wheel is ridiculous, being able to patent such a device is even more so. Yet that is what happened in 2001 when patent attorney John Keogh won a patent for a "circular transportation facilitation device" from the patent office in Australia. He did this to flag up deficiencies in the country’s new patenting system.

To qualify for a patent, an invention is supposed to be new, useful and non-obvious. Patent examiners establish novelty by making sure the invention is not either already patented, or in use commercially without patent protection.

They do this by checking for so-called "prior art" in existing patent applications and granted patents, as well as looking for non-patent prior art in sources such as trade magazines, websites and journals. However, examiners – particularly in the US – are often criticised for not checking thoroughly enough for non-patent prior art.

Univentio, the patent-information company he runs in the Netherlands, has discovered that Espacenet, the European online patent database, is missing 322,000 UK Patent Office documents, plus 186,000 and 17,000 patents respectively from the French and German offices.

The Leeds Patent Information Unit, the largest regional library of its type in the UK, was unable to relocate a large percentage of its hard-copy collection when it moved offices in 2004, says Lagemaat, while the Dutch patent office has already begun disposing of its hard copies of patents.