"We will be looking at how we can move large data files
around this year... The aim is to find golden nuggets of
technology that may have been developed by someone else.
We are taking lots of commercially available off-the-shelf
equipment and seeing what it has to offer."
- British Army Officer, Joint Warrior Interoperability Demo '97
announcing: the world's first military warez site
>> HARD NEWS <<
soft heads
Capturing the spirit of the classic APPLE 1984 advert,
Steve Jobs announced to a rapt MacWorld Expo that MICROSOFT
was investing $150 million in Apple, that Microsoft had
always been Apple's friend, and that Apple was now at war
with Eurasia. Proles and Apple Developers alike then
chanted at a huge telecast image of "Uncle" Bill Gates
(Bill has not been seen outside his Seattle bunker since
the attempted Netscape putsch of 1995). Evangelists from
the Ministry of Truth later enthused about how Microsoft
had agreed at the last minute to a) invest in a company
whose share price was at an all-time low, b) make its
browser the default on all new Macs, and c) get out of any
outstanding Apple patent suits for a widely-assumed
pittance. It was also revealed that Lawrence Tesler was
never chief technical officer for Apple, and Mike Makkula
had never been a board member since the old garage days.
Victory to Apple! Down with Emmanuel Andreessen!
http://www.apple.com
- if you want to see an image of the future, Winston,
http://www.microsoft.com imagine a boot taking forever
MICROSOFT'S new policy of evading anti-trust actions by
throwing money at the competition (just how *does* that
work?) continued in the streaming Net video market. A few
weeks ago, Microsoft bought 10% of PROGRESSIVE "RealAudio/
RealVideo" TECHNOLOGIES. Now they've bought out
Progressive's main competitor, VXTREME, the people whose
plug-in crashed when you were trying to watch the CNN
coverage of the Mars landing. Both companies have now
decided to support Microsoft's own streamed video client,
claiming that it is the industry standard. Well, it is now.
http://www.vxtreme.com oh, and Bill holds a board seat
http://www.real.com at VDOnet. No monopoly here, uh uh.
UUNET, the granddaddy of PIPEX, received the Dreaded Usenet
Death Penalty last Friday. Following the D-UDP, all UUNET
users' postings to newsgroups were automatically cancelled
by a diddy 78-line bots put in place by a worldwide
alliance of vigilante newserver operators (scary, huh?).
The lynch-team had good cause - at one stage, one
administrator reported, only 20% of the newsgroup postings
emanating from UUNET were "legitimate" (people asking for
warez or porn on just the one newsgroup). The death penalty
was lifted Wednesday when UUNET announced anti-spam
measures - ie, blamed its resellers. Meanwhile, in the
darker waters of Usenet, a more pro-active hacker released
the complete password files for top spammer SANFORD
WALLACE's machine. "His userid is wallace,", the bad hacker
reports, "with a [crypted] password of 'sTUv6x8r.' Guessed
the root password yet?" Err... god? Err... sex? Ummm...
http://www.usa.uu.net/ hilariously, uu.net want to sue
http://cyberwerks.com:70/cyberwire/howto.html
- Brock Meek's mailing list, where we stole the Spamford tale
http://www.intraday.com/spam/spam/spam/
- unrelated, but still the most annoying page on the Web
A British judge refused to comment on a fight over the
ownership of the 'PRINCE.COM' domain name, effectively
passing .com battles back to the US courts who, it's
suspected, may favour US-based companies. The two litigants
were the PRINCE SPORTS GROUP, a US firm, and PRINCE PLC, a
Brit computer services company who we'd describe as
'plucky' if they'd actually done more with the domain than
point it at the Pipex Worldserver Website, the wimps. The
judge, Justice Neuberger, went against the precedent set by
a previous UK case, which determined that the singer-
songwriter "Prince" was not a member of the British Royal
Family, and could not use the title on UK soil. Prince
complied by adopting an obscure Zapf Dingbats character as
his moniker.
http://www.prince.com
relax - we're just trying to freak out the US readership
>> ANTI-NEWS <<
berating the obvious
Music videos glamorise tobacco and alcohol use, reports
study... 30% of City execs use "a sexual position or
abusive name for the boss" as password... AMAZON/Updike
story "not very good"... Pathfinder has problems, fix is to
upgrade software (uh-uh)... UFOs were secret plane project,
"reveal" CIA... 16% of City execs use their partners' name
or nickname as password ... WIRED designers, faced with
major overhaul, losses, decide mag is "basically fine"...
Excite looks for "the real Dorothy Com!" (or failing that,
some tacky brand publicity)... automatic docking system on
Mir fails... Could *any more* film mags put MEN IN BLACK on
the cover?... Internet "creating computer junkies" - THE
GUARDIAN... NEWTON 130 price drops to #299... 8% of City
execs use whatever they first saw on their desk...
>> CULTURE <<
it's what separates us from the controls
Not much going on at the moment - possibly because everybody
(including NTK) is off to HIP '97, Amsterdam's open air, 100
Megabit-networked hacking, phreaking, singing, political agit-
propping and all the trimmings show. In a brave show of idiocy,
NTK has sent its least-travelled editor along, possibly in a
deliberate attempt to kill him. You can check his daily (ha!)
reports via our special site, or try and track him down
yourself. Danny says "Yes. Come and chat about NTK, or just say
hello to me. I'll be the one wearing a 'STAY ASLEEP' T-shirt;
or I will if I remember to wash it." Eww.
http://www.spesh.com/hip97/
- please don't let him come back
http://www.hip97.nl excess for all
>> TRACKING <<
something "wicked" this way comes
Waiting eagerly for the Mac port of Quake? Want to
download it right now? Want to strangle us when we tell you
that LION ENTERTAINMENT, who were porting (by all accounts
rather successfully) Quake to the Mac, went bust on
Wednesday? The MacQuake project is now very much up in the
air, although it's assumed that MacSoft will be able to
pick up the pieces. Sorry about that. God, we're cruel.
http://www.grayphics.com/3dmacgames/macquake/about.html
- Didn't you Mac people have enough good news this week?
Techno toymakers TIGER have at last trotted out GAME.COM,
their new 80 quid hand-held personal organiser/game system
that (with a modem and net cartridge out next month) also
reads email and browses (text) web pages - via Dircon, of
all people. The games (Virtua Fighters, Duke Nukem, William
Arcade Classics) ought to freak out anyone still trying to
play on a PalmPilot, Psion or Newton, though may suffer a
little from translation to an 8-bit CPU and B&W (stylus-
sensitive) screen. That other sound you hear is Nintendo
audibly kicking themselves for never pushing the
productivity apps or doing a TCP/IP stack for the world's
top-selling portable computer, the equally shockingly
underpowered Z80-based Game Boy. Anyway, how much is a
VT100 and 1200/75 modem nowadays?
http://165.247.176.184/tigertoys/gamecom.htm
- counter seems to be *way* off
http://www.mitt.demon.co.uk/tiger.html
- Moose, as usual, is spot on
http://www.game.com but... there's nothing there!
Dynamic HTML. Oh god. It's a mess, no browser supports the
same standard, there's no clear use for it, and it's got
"Microsoft Crack Cocaine" written all over it (no
development tools FOR AT LEAST SIX MOMTHS?) - but, dammit,
every geek instinct in your body is telling you to snort it
up. Then may we suggest you visit Macromedia "w-w-we're d-
d-doing ok-k-kay" Incorporated's Dynamic HTML site, and do
your wallowing somewhere vaguely civilised?
http://www.dhtmlzone.com/
- oh, if *only* we could make that URL fly around your desktop
>> MEMEPOOL <<
hasta la altavista
relationshippers... www.theobvious.com/wired... laser
pointers with programmable X-Y modulation (like K-9)...
dies BURROUGHS eighty-three, WILLIAM aged... CD players
that can read MPEG3 files... Quake Rally... Ecstasy hits
Japan... BBC clamp down on Teletubbie pages for
"compromising the programme's intentions" (and we went to
all that trouble, too)... MacDonalds accidentally use Nazi
map of Austria on Austrian placemaps... Tamagotchi
movies... mini-beasts... Tomb Raider single delayed *again*
- what, is it rubbish or something?... Bus plunges!
www.users.interport.net/~tcs/... ICQ to charge?... file
directory exploring converted to shoot-'em-up (we're not
kidding)... Pentium 133 what people want; shame Intel
stopped making them... VR hardware as fomite... Industrial
Ship Printers... www.spesh.com/louis/ - it's funky disco
ex-CEO of Wired, Louis Rossetto!...
>> MO' MEDIA <<
as if your social life wasn't busy enough as it is
TV >> Maximum US comedy tonight with an extra-special
flashback-funnies FRIENDS (9pm, Fri, C4), nutty younger
brother Niles stepping up to the mic in FRASIER (10pm, Fri,
C4), and sex ed southern-style in KING OF THE HILL
(10.30pm, Fri, C4)... apparently this series of BUGS
(8.10pm, Sat, BBC1) is concentrating more on
"relationships" than on high-tech thrills (god help us
all); stick with the true horror of THE OMEN (10pm, Sat,
C4)... it's "primates perplexed by 20th century customs"
when they somehow ESCAPE FROM THE PLANET OF THE APES
(5.45pm, Sun, C4), not to be confused with dark incest
comedy SPANKING THE MONKEY (10pm, Sun, BBC2)... HARD DRIVE
(11pm, Mon, C4) hopes to avoid scaring America's top
luddites with its infernal TV camera contraption... Shatner
returns triumphant, with new guests including Angela Rippon
and Bruce "Iron Maiden" Dickinson, in the cleverly can't-
decide-if-I-hate-this-or-is-it-actually-alright SPACE
CADETS (6pm, Tue, & 10.15pm, Wed, C4)... compellingly dull
Jon Ronson chat show FOR THE LOVE OF (12.25am, Thu, C4) is
back with 65 minutes on "Trees", but probably won't get the
same ratings as 22 topless women engaging in an hour-long
philsophical discussion of BREASTS (10pm, Tue, C4)... a
young girl struggles to come to terms with her geekiness in
one of the better repeats of SABRINA - THE TEENAGE WITCH
(4.45pm, Wed, ITV)... no, we can never remember the diff
between Cutting Edge, Modern Times and INSIDE STORY (10pm,
Wed, BBC1), this week examining the best temperature (and
chefs) for serving revenge... Special Projects co-founder
Ben Moor had to leave the country before the first episode,
while co-editor Danny O'Brien fought to get his name
removed from the credits of new sci-fi sketch show PLANET
MIRTH (12.40am, Thu, Carlton + some regions) - tune in and
find out why...
MOVIES >> GROSSE POINTE BLANK (John Cusack, Minnie Driver,
and a remarkably good Dan Aykroyd) is a quirky, indie-ish,
black comedy (aren't they all?) about a hitman going to his
school reunion; lots of good moments (including a Doom
arcade machine?!) but never quite as funny as it wants to
be... on the other hand, ROSEANNA'S GRAVE (Mercedes Ruehl,
Jean Reno) is a quirky, indie-ish, black comedy about a
terminally ill woman hoping for a graveyard reunion with
her dead daughter; some funny scenes (Reno tries to stop
other townsfolk from dying and taking her plot) but much
more sentimental than it should have been... perhaps
unsurprisingly, BEAN (Rowan Atkinson, John Mills, Burt
Reynolds) is just like three episodes of Mr Bean joined
together, so depending if you like the show or not, either
a huge laugh, or simply 90 long, long minutes of hell...
SIGGRAPH >> The opening party was held at night in the LA
Zoo - where an interesting mixture of Hollywood movie types
and heavily bearded academics were entertained by DJs
and transsexual go-go dancers, as the elephants looked
on.... The rest was as per - more high volume bad-Prodigy-
imitation techno and fast-cut "flying camera" CGI than most
sane people can handle... NewTek refugee Kiki Stockhammer
was enthusiastically demonstrating PLAY INC's 8-years in
development son-of-Video Toaster product, TRINITY, which
seems to provide everything you need to make bad cable TV
shows for $5000... No one was surprised by the large amount
of WINDOWS NT graphics products on the floor, but despite
buying most of the big names (Jim Blinn, Andrew Glassner)
there was still little evidence that Microsoft really knows
what they're talking about... Much more interesting was the
"Electric Garden" which featured a bunch of pretentious
video art and hacked together student projects, including
an image processing interface for the PLAYSTATION, allowing
2 people to fight on TEKKEN 2 by actually jumping around in
front of a screen, and an innovative 360 degree virtual
display made from a giant paper dodecahedron and 12 video
projectors that the participant was actually sealed into...
Showcases at the ELECTRONIC THEATRE included the most
impressive impromptu audience-generated laser pointer show
I've ever seen, and the new TOY STORY shorts showing were
the highlight for the many (at least those who don't get
excited by scientific visualisation), but the unforgiving
audience actually booed at the MICROSOFT and INTEL
sponsored films - si@spesh.com
>> SMALL PRINT <<
Need to Know Now is a useful and interesting UK digest of things that
happened last week or might happen next week. You can read it
on Friday afternoon or print it out then take it home if you have
nothing better to do. It is compiled by NTK from stuff they get sent.
It is registered at the Post Office as "creating Internet junkies".
"I am going off to join the wild boys.
When you read this I will be far away."
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS
1914-1997
NEED TO KNOW
THEY STOLE OUR REVOLUTION. NOW WE'RE STEALING IT BACK.
Archive - http://www.spesh.com/cgi-bin/now
Excuses - http://www.spesh.com/ntk
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NTK now is helped by VIRGIN MEDIA, VENUS INTERNET and UNFORTU.NET.
They worry about us, but we don't worry about them.
(K) 1997 Special Projects. Non-biz copying ok, but retain SMALL PRINT.
Tips, news and gossip to tips@spesh.com.