Top selling author Terry Pratchett could be coming to the big screen, as rumour has it that his hit book the Wee Free Men is being made into a film.

The book tells the story of a girl who has to rescue her brother from fairies with the help of brawling pixies.

However this project looks like having a lot of Hollywood cash behind it, and with a big name like Sam Raimi linked to it, it could be a whole lot bigger than anything Pratchett fans have seen before.

Global court action against music file-sharers has not reduced illegal downloading, an industry report says.

The level of file-sharing has remained the same for two years despite 20,000 legal cases in 17 countries.

Music piracy could be "dramatically reduced within a very short period of time" if ISPs took action against their law-breaking customers, Mr Kennedy said.

And Mr Kennedy backed the continuing use of Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology, which controls what consumers can do with their music once it has been purchased - either online or on CD.

Mr Kennedy, writing in the report, said DRM "helps get music to consumers in new and flexible ways".

The US Department of Justice has taken Google to court, demanding it hand over all searches made in a one week period. It's a fishing expedition, unconnected with any ongoing criminal prosecution. The DOJ wants the information to back up its attempt to revive an anti-pornography law derailed by the Supreme Court two years ago.

The subpoena was issued last year, and Google refused the request - but we only learn of the case week, via a San Jose Mercury News report. The DoJ has now ordered a Federal Judge to force Google to comply.

Google sets its cookies to expire in 2038, and launched products and services which make that cookie personally identifiable with a user, such as GMail, and a "personalized" search page.

"We are moving to a Google that knows more about you," Google CEO Eric Schmidt promised last year.

If, as looks likely, the DoJ succeeds, then surfers worldwide will have a US Attorney General who knows a lot more about you, too.

A German Court has ordered the German-language version of Wikipedia shut down after the family of deceased phreaker/hacker "Tron" sued Wikimedia Deutschland e.V. for using the deceased's full name in an entry. Currently, visitors to wikipedia.de are greeted with a notice that the site has been taken offline as the result of a provisional court order.

He had spent much of his teen years working on hacking and at one point, produced working clones of German phone cards. He also created a working prototype for a phone that could handle voice encryption on its own. In October 1998, he was reported missing, and his body was found a few days later in a Berlin park. The official verdict was suicide, but his family and some of his associates harbor suspicions that he was the victim of foul play.

When the existence of the article-which appeared on wikipedia.de on May 31, 2005-became known to the family, they responded with a lawsuit. On Tuesday, a judge sided with the family and ordered wikipedia.de be taken down until the offending content was removed.

The W32/Nyxem-D worm (also known as Email-Worm.Win32.VB.bi or W32.Blackmal.E@mm) can spread via email using a variety of pornographic disguises, in an attempt to disable security software. If launched it tries to disable a number of anti-virus and firewall products, and attempts to harvest other email addresses from the infected computer, in an effort to spread itself further.

"Companies should educate their users to practise safe computing - that includes never opening unsolicited email attachments and discouraging the sending and receiving of joke files, pornography and funny photographs and screensavers," said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for Sophos. "This worm feeds on people's willingness to receive salacious content on their desktop computer, but they could be putting their entire company's data at risk."

A 53-year-old woman was so depressed and desperate to end her life that she agreed to pay a friend to arrange for a hitman to kill her, a court heard.

Christine Ryder ended up handing over a total of £20,000 to Kevin Reeves after he agreed to murder her himself.

But Reeves, 40, of Saltings Road, Snodland, near Rochester, failed to keep his side of the bargain and she shopped him to the police.

Now he has been jailed for 15 months after being convicted of deception.

"He simply had the money for his own purposes and had no intention of using it for the purpose she directed – to have her killed or kill her himself," said Miss Moore-Graham.

A Croatia lumberjack claims he started 'enjoying housework and knitting' after he was given a female kidney.

"I have developed a strange passion for female jobs like ironing, sewing, washing dishes, sorting clothes in wardrobes and even knitting."

He pointed out that before the kidney transplant he would not have been seen dead doing the housework, and expected his wife to do it all, but now found it both relaxing and fulfilling.

He said: "My wife is the only one that is pleased. I do most of the housework now, and I blame the hospital that transplanted me the kidney of a 50-year-old woman instead of a man's kidney."

The entry of satellite and digital radio into the technological mainstream is increasing tension with the record industry, which wants new rules governing how consumers can make digital copies of songs from the airwaves.

At issue are new devices that can record and save high-quality digital copies of tunes as they're being broadcast by these new networks. Recording executives are worried that consumers might increasingly opt to make such copies instead of purchasing the music on a commercial CD or from a download store like Apple Computer's iTunes.

Congress has historically come down on the side of the broadcasters in this debate, saying that radio stations can play whatever music they want while paying only a relatively small amount of money to songwriters and publishers for the right to "perform" the song on-air--and not paying record companies at all.

"Our concern remains that this is an effort to stifle technology before it has a chance to grow," said Consumer Electronics Association spokesman Jeff Joseph. "It has never been illegal to record a song off the radio in the context of fair use."

A missile strike apparently targeting al-Qaeda's deputy leader in a village in Pakistan has prompted Islamabad to protest to its American allies.

Ayman al-Zawahiri was not in the village on the border with Afghanistan, Pakistan officials said. But the attack left at least 18 local people dead.

The US military has denied knowledge of the attack, which US media reported had been carried out by the CIA.

Steve Gibson alleges that the WMF vulnerability in Windows was neither a bug, nor a feature designed without security in mind, but was actually an intentionally placed backdoor. In a more detailed explanation, Gibson explains that the way SetAbortProc works in metafiles does not bear even the slightest resemblance to the way it works when used by a program while printing. Based on the information presented, it really does look like an intentional backdoor.