Giuseppe Cannella had a big surprise for his mother-in-law when he put a jet engine on the back of her wheelchair.

Mr Cannella says the chair can now do top speeds of more than 60mph and has proved the star of a model plane championship during the Bank Holiday.

"Originally it was a gimmick. I had a jet engine and I was going to put it on a go cart."

"But the missus says put it on something unusual and so I put it on the mother-in-law's wheelchair," said Mr Cannella, who is from Luton in Bedfordshire.

Her son-in-law has been collecting money for the Parkinson's Disease Society and hopes to collect up to £1,500 during the shows at the British Model Flying Association national championship.

The Fair Trade Commission on Thursday searched the offices of Japan's five major record companies and other firms suspected of monopolizing sales of hit songs as ring tones for mobile phones.

Among the 10 record companies under investigation are Sony Music Entertainment (Japan) Inc., Avex Inc., Victor Entertainment Inc., Toshiba EMI Ltd. and Universal Music K.K.

The companies are suspected of colluding to restrict sales of recordings by their contracted artists as ring tones to one company-Label Mobile-an act that could violate the Anti-Monopoly Law.

Electronic instrumental melodies derived from popular songs are often used as ring tones. While composers and lyricists earn royalties on such cover versions, the record companies do not.

But when a clip from the original hit recording including the vocals is used as a ring tone, record companies can control who has the right to distribute it. The companies also earn income for the use of the music.

The ALA (American Library Association) recently published the new 100 most frequently banned books list of 2003. Of the banned books, Harry Potter was in the number 7th place in the most frequently banned. Also included were 'Where's Waldo' and 'The Giver' along with 'Goosebumps' and 'How to Eat Fried Worms.' These books were banned from various public institutions. This means that they were banned from various public libraries and public schools around the nation. (private schools, libraries, and institutions of higher learning don't count) The ALA encourages the people of the United States to fight against the book bans and read a banned book today!

A group of individual CD buyers in France, combined with a French consumer association, have filed a lawsuit against EMI and a record store for selling copy protected CDs, suggesting there has been "deception over the material qualities of a product," since many copy protected CDs don't work well in car stereos or on computers. The record store in question claims they clearly warn consumers of the possibility and offer to refund money if the CDs don't work. As backwards as the policy of copy protection on CDs is (punishing your legitimate buyers, while doing little to stop actual copying) this case seems fairly weak. While the recording industry is obviously a huge fan of lawsuits, suing them back isn't the answer. Making them realize that copy protection is bad for their business is the only way the industry is going to change.

JibJab, creators of the hilarious parody of Woody Guthrie's 'This Land is Your Land' featuring Pres. Bush and Sen. Kerry, were first threatened with a lawsuit and then, with the help of EFF, went to court first in a pre-emptive strike. Well, EFF discovered that the song has actually been in the public domain since 1973 because it was first published in a songbook [PDF] in 1945 and the copyright was never renewed. The case has now been settled. Here are some addtional links.

Windows XP Service Pack 2 promises to raise the security bar for the sometimes beleaguered operating system. Unfortunately, one of the new features could be spoofed so that it reports misleading information about system security, or worse, lets a malicious program watch for an opportunity to do damage without being detected. The feature is the Windows Security Center (WSC), which displays the status ( (Figure 1) )of the key elements of your defenses: Firewall, Updates, and Antivirus.

Based on an anonymous tip, we looked into the WMI and the Windows Security Center's use of it, and found that it may not only be a security hole, but a crater in the wrong hands. Due to the nature of WMI, the WSC could potentially allow attackers to spoof the state of security on a user's system while accessing data, infecting the system, or turning the PC into a zombie for spam or other purposes.

The representative for Hollywood's major movie studios on Monday said its members have sued two microchip makers, alleging they sold their products to makers of equipment that can be used to illegally copy DVDs.

The MPAA said the suits against Sigma Designs Inc. (SIGM.O: Quote, Profile, Research) and MediaTek Inc. (2454.TW: Quote, Profile, Research) followed testing that it said proved the two were selling microchips to companies, whose DVD players lack what the MPAA called "appropriate security features."

The CSS license pact has aided the success of DVDs because it has provided protection against illegal copying to copyright owners of movies, television shows and other content sold on DVD.

IT administrators and security experts who have had a chance to install, work with and investigate the changes Windows XP Service Pack 2 makes to the operating system said last week the upgrade doesn't live up to the spirit of Microsoft's Trustworthy Computing campaign announced by Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates in January 2002.

Within about a week of its limited release two weeks ago, a German security researcher found two issues with SP2 that changed the way Microsoft products typically warn users about dangerous online content.

One of the added features of SP2 is a default installation of the IIS (Internet Information Services) Web server package, which includes an HTTP server and an SMTP server. Although IIS—which is not known for its security—is not enabled by default, the fact that it is installed as part of a security update worries many in the security community.

Microsoft products have been banned in some of the biggest markets, including India because of eight wrongly colored pixels, a bad choice of music and a bad English-to-Spanish dictionary.

When coloring in 800,000 pixels on a map of India, Microsoft colored eight of them a different shade of green to represent the disputed Kashmiri territory. The difference in greens meant Kashmir was shown as non-Indian, and the product was promptly banned in India.

If this was not enough, Microsoft used chanting of the Koran used as a soundtrack for a computer game, which led to great offence to the Saudi Arabia government.

The software giant managed to further offend the Saudis by creating another game in which Muslim warriors turned churches into mosques. That game was also withdrawn.

Microsoft has also managed to upset women and entire countries. A Spanish-language version of Windows XP, destined for Latin American markets, asked users to select their gender between "not specified," "male" or "bitch," because of an unfortunate error in translation.

Edwards said that staff members are now sent on geography courses to try to avoid such mishaps. "Some of our employees, however bright they may be, have only a hazy idea about the rest of the world," he said.

Alwayson network claims that a recent survey conducted by Online Testing Exchange (OTX) and distributed by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) is crap. The MPAA's summary of the survey claims, among other hard-to-believe assertions, that 'about one in four Internet users have downloaded a movie.' (It turns out this isn't true, but this is the factoid that was heard around the world the following week.) When did you stop trusting sponsored 'research'?