Need To Know 1998-02-13

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"Purple Moon isn't a Web company or a CD-ROM company. It's a girls' company." - Brenda Laurel, Vice President, Purple Moon ...you calling my startup A GIRL? >> HARD NEWS << no excuse Maybe if they knew more about encrypting their e-mails, there wouldn't be so many leaks about this. Yes, it sounds like the British government really are going to choose the path of maximum stupidity and announce a KEY ESCROW POLICY in the next couple of weeks. Without getting too technical (as if we would), this is ... a bad thing. Bad for civil liberties, bad for business. It will be as if you'll be forced to loan someone else your PIN, or your signature. Britain's booming crypto industries - particularly the ones being eyed up by Bill Gates in Cambridge - will be zapped at birth. At worst - if key escrow is made mandatory - you'll be criminalised simply for owning a copy of Pretty Good Privacy, while the real outlaws will simply move onto undetectable crypto systems. Almost all the security experts are against it - all, except the ones at GCHQ, who rather like the idea of being able to break into anyone's private communications at the drop of a hat. "Attempts to control the use of encryption technology are wrong in principle, unworkable in practice, and damaging to the long-term economic value of the information networks.", said the Labour Party's manifesto, signed and pledged by Tony Blair himself. Or perhaps he gave away his signature for someone else to use? Gosh, wouldn't *that* be a terrible thing to happen? http://www.labour.org.uk/views/info%2Dhighway/content.html - on message? But which message exactly? http://www.pgpi.com/ - get it before it's hot http://www.crypto.com/key_study/report.shtml - the big guns come out against key escrow http://www.ntk.net/gordon/ - Gordon Brown's signature. If we trust them with ours they should trust you with theirs. Right? [ If the announcement comes, as some suggest, next Tuesday, we'll post a special announcement. There's still time to stop this. Hey, it's a democracy, right? ] Mind you, it's not all doom and gloom down in spookland. NTK's favourite crypto expert, Ross Anderson, has been hard at work, as the WASHINGTON POST - somewhat inaccurately - reported this week. After giving a $20 million grant by Microsoft to his Cambridge department, Bill asked Ross and his team to see if they couldn't invent an unbreakable copy-protection system. Taking advantage of their studies into TEMPEST technologies (readily available spy equipment that lets anyone see what's on your monitor from outside your building), the group suggested a method that would broadcast license numbers via the VDU, so that special "Microsoft software piracy vans" could drive around and scan buildings for unregistered software. Strangely, Microsoft weren't so keen on this. No matter. As part of the same study, Ross' group went on to develop a method for protecting *any* user from covert surveillance by using a special "anti-Tempest" font. A problem solved, before you even knew it was there... http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ih98-tempest.pdf - memo to self: send out NTK this way? http://www.ntk.net/icecreamvan/ - they could play the Microsoft boot-up tune as they went past It looks like INTEL'S StrongARM tactics didn't quite come off as expected. Many commentators thought that Intel would be happy to keep the plucky British processor going when the company bought it in a job lot with a bunch of chip fabrication plants from Digital. But the team who actually developed the processor have now all jumped ship to a cushy consultancy afterlife at Cadence. Whether they did this out of anti-Intel sentiment(come on, these are ARM users - they're *all* religious fanatics), or just because they could sense a distinct lack of a "to do" list in their future Psion diaries at Intel is uncertain. But most pundits now agree that, what with ARM owning the trademark, Intel owning the Hudson chip plant, and Cadence owning the brains, StrongARM development is on the road to nowhere. Us - we still hold out hope. After all, the Beatles reformed didn't they? Oh, ah. Maybe that's a bad comparison. http://techweb.cmp.com/eet/news/98/992news/cadence.html - they could do a re-union tour in 2020 >> ANTI-NEWS << berating the obvious PLAYSTATION POWER "relaunching"... BT profits up again - to UKP 734m... T3 magazine "redesigned"... man behind "biggest known case of alleged domestic piracy in Western Europe" was Alan Watkins of CD manufacturer PC Wise... AOL sacks nearly 2/3rds of the US Compuserve staff one week into ownership ... "almost half British games companies failed to make a profit last year" tiptoes PLIMSOLL PUBLISHING... "Clothing, Physical Activity And Heating Can Prevent Excess Winter Mortality" reveals BRITISH MEDICAL JOURNAL... C|Net lists top search engines as "Alta Vista, Excite and Hot Bod"... PETER COCHRANE emphatically denies answering "What do you say to the elderly who can't get grip with these newfangled contraptions?" with "Don't worry -- you're going to die soon."... Even ALTAVISTA offering free e-mail now (despite uniquely awkward URL)... JOHN CARMACK wins $20,000 at Blackjack by making himself "consistently behave like a robot" (donates it to Free Software Foundation)... BT "slashes" price on Webserving - to 200UKP a month, plus 200UKP set-up fee... >> EVENT QUEUE << adventures in the real world Sounding just a little like The Royal Institution Christmas Lectures - but for Mondo 2000 readers - THE EYE OF THE STORM is yet another "International Art and Science Conference" held at The Royal Institution (natch), Piccadilly, London next Thurs/Fri (19/02/98-20/02/98). It's the usual roll-call of nutty telly pundits - Melvyn Bragg, Susan Greenfield, quantum-hippy AI critic Roger Penrose - plus "artists" (and we use the term loosely) including VR was-prodigy Jaron Lanier, child-trainer pervs Jake & Dinos Chapman, and half-man, half-cyborg, all-Aussie Stelarc. Still, it's only UKP45 (UKP25 concessions), though - perhaps reassuringly for anyone who's seen Stelarc stick a webcam down his gullet - "lunch", we learn, "is not provided". http://www.artscat.demon.co.uk/eye.htm - "the first artist to work in zero gravity" (we expect they mean "free fall") The final part in our "plug our friends'" trilogy: NTK's much put-upon Webcasting guru, GAVIN STARKS,is appearing in a "multi-media entertainment", MORE, at the Gate Theatre on Wednesday 18/2/98. He'll be premiering his new computer- generated musical composition. Your geek attractor: it really is computer generated, via approximately 9,000 lines of C++ and 3 gigs of collected audio data. Gavin says to say "frequency-domain morphing". Tickets are UKP5, show starts at 7.30PM. Box office: 0171 995 6035. Meanwhile, fans of TV'S LIGHT LUNCH might like to pop down to a VALENTINE'S CABARET on Sunday 15/2/98, where those Aphrodites of daytime TV, SUE PERKINS AND MEL GIEDROYC, will be entertaining the troops, assisted by Venus the Goddess of Love, R.D. Laing and usual Special Project suspects. Tickets are UKP10. The show starts at 7.30pm at the October Gallery, Old Gloucester Road, near Russell Square tube. NTK offers its traditional "pint in the bar and a chat about Linux afterwards if not fully satisfied" lifetime guarantee. http://www.tir-nan-og.demon.co.uk/ - he also insists MORE is named after the Unix utility http://www.channel4.com/entertainment/lunch/ urlarious >> TRACKING << Big Chief I-Spy reports The XML standard is out, and all the tech papers are talking about how it's going to be the new HTML. They're wrong, we think, partly because it seems *much* more useful as generic file-format thing, partly because that whole "it's going to make searching so much easier by creating tags like <SARCASTIC> and <CAT-FOR-SALE>" clearly hasn't got a chance in hell of working. But mostly because in order to do the clever parse-and-display-as-old-fashioned- Webpage stuff right now, you'll need to brush up on your SCHEME. Yup, the object-oriented LISP. Runawayscaredrunaway! http://www.w3.org/XML/ - you leave academics alone for 10 minutes and they have to stick LISP into it Uma Thurman's English accent! Sean Connery as a Scottish separatist in full national costume! Big Ben blowing up! Not much to go on in the AVENGERS download trailer, admittedly, but already enough to earn it a mention in the "Worst of '98" predictions at THE STINKERS - "The Ultimate Bad Movie Awards". Votes for the worst of 1997 close 21/02/98. Also now available for your postage-stamp-sized perusal: deep-sixed Sharon Stone sci-fi SPHERE, Sundance-wowing Elvis kung-fu apocalypse SIX STRING SAMURAI and, from the soundtrack of The Wedding Singer, the now-deceased Presidents Of The USA doing quite a faithful version of VIDEO KILLED THE RADIO STAR. http://www.thestinkers.com - Snailmail voting! I'd buy that for a dollar! http://members.tripod.com/~amith/film972.html - and we're still waiting for Waiting For Guffman http://www.canoe.com/JamMusicAntihit/home_jan27.html - Real Audio argues it was justifiable homicide >> MEMEPOOL << hasta la altavista Postscript DES/RC5 clients... HASBRO buy TIGER ELECTRONICS - expect an exo-skeleton for Action Man shortly... BeOS for Intel next week... they're not 56Kbps modems, they're "v.90"... *exactly* as horrifying as you'd expect: www.nickross.co.uk/ ... www.digicrime.com ... Pinball: The Next Generation - www.interplay.com/stpinball/index.html ... NYTSYN's greatest headline yet: "Dr Bombay: That Porno Wallpaper Has Got to Go"... SOUTH PARK creators working on Dumb and Dumber sequel, Channel 4 "considering" showing SP after King of The Hill run... a MILIA-winner worthy of the name www.baguette.com/cur/strongman/004/english/ ... Bill gets half: www.vcnet.com/bms/departments/catalog1.html ... Quake II interface developed for Perl : World Ends - www.jump.net/~dctank/q2/perlq2.txt ... What Fred Fish is up to: www.ninemoons.com/ ... Teletubbies in their native tongue www.kiirtee.ee/~ain/teletupsud/ ... >> GEEK MEDIA << why don't you turn in and do something less interesting? TV >> ITV takes on C4's US sitcoms with some - unusual - imports of its own: Mad-About-Phoebe cute-fest DHARMA AND GREG (10.30pm, Fri, LWT + regions), and eyeless Dilbert- alike THE DREW CAREY SHOW (11.40pm, Mon, ITV)... isn't there actually a Red Dwarf episode where the crew are forced to sit down and watch nearly three hours of themselves on RED DWARF NIGHT (9pm, Sat, BBC2) - surreally introduced by Jean-Luc Picard and Stephen Hawking? well, if there isn't, there should be... LWT "celebrates" Valentine's Day with a very special movie double-bill: Meg Ryan alcoholism tragedy WHEN A MAN LOVES A WOMAN (9pm, Sat, LWT) and adulterous Gene Wilder comedy THE WOMAN IN RED (11.25pm, Sat, LWT) - and, before you ask, no, neither of them are anything like the songs... http://mudhole.spodnet.uk.com/fist/ will tell you far more about LEE AND HERRING IN THIS MORNING WITH RICHARD NOT JUDY (12.15pm, Sun, BBC2) than we could ever dare to (NB: it's also repeated - in sinisterly "revised" form - later next Fri)... not entirely clear what the "extreme" in the new, animated EXTREME GHOSTBUSTERS (4.15pm, Tue, ITV) refers to - though one is vaguely Hispanic, one rides a wheelchair, and the only remaining member of the original cast (Egon - Slimer doesn't count) is now mysteriously blonde... PREDATOR 2 (10.40pm, Wed, Carlton + regions) is that rare sequel that's almost as good as the original, though surely a couple of snipers would have sorted it out a bit quicker... and it's a (repeated) flashback to the surprisingly good "One With The Flashback" when Janice asks if any of the gang were ever more than just FRIENDS (10.30pm, Wed, C4)... FILMS>> in the nightmarish face off with Abel "Driller Killer" Ferrara's THE BLACKOUT (imdb: thriller / erotica), we'd - unfortunately - have to bet on MORTAL KOMBAT 2: ANNIHILATION (imdb : action / adventure / monster / alternate-dimension / based-on-video-game / fantasy / transformation / game / martial-arts) - if only because the Motion Picture Association of America gave MK2 a PG-13 rating for "non-stop martial arts violence", thus, once again, confusing certification with recommendation... otherwise a good week for fans of Brit-made whimsy featuring Paul McGann, with another Conan-Doyle-at-the- bottom-of-garden frolic in FAIRYTALE: A TRUE STORY (imdb: photography / family / drama / fairy-tale / fantasy / period), plus DOWNTIME (imdb: thriller), which scores points for setting a gritty social-comment action movie *in a lift!*, but then plummets weirdly out of control... sadly, the I/O configuration of popular hardware platforms are not the subject matter of IN AND OUT (imdb: school- teacher / gay / comedy / oscars / wedding / small-town), as it's actually an extended rework of the "gay" Seinfeld episode, though - in this case - there *is* something wrong with that... oh, and the Motion Picture Association of America don't yet seem to have made it through a showing of SICK: THE LIFE AND DEATH OF BOB FLANAGAN, SUPERMASOCHIST (various reviewers: "contains explicit scenes of mutilation... extreme pain and sexual perversion; intended for adults") so we'll just hand you over to Bob himself: www.mindspring.com/~sagriffin/FlanaganManifesto.html ... FEEBDACK>> It's always the food columns that get the letters in: Chris Locke berated our omission of Boots' edible Subbuteo in our "food based on board games" round-up - the chocolate version of the popular table sport,he reports, included 20 footballs and a reassurance that "the winner is allowed to eat the FA Cup"... Patrick Smith meanwhile sided against "The Fabulous Bakin' Boys" in the muffin wars (ibid.), arguing that their "Ballistic Blueberry" flavour labelling was only accurate if "they threw one at you" ... hundreds sent us the www.legomindstorms.com URL for our SKIENCE column (NTK 30/1/98), but only "JTR" spotted the real use for the www.speechmachines.com CyberTranscriber : stealing voice biometrics, for resale to the security services. Very cunning... an anonymous tipster reports that our favourite cyberpunk mag 21C is not dead (NTK 6/2/98), but "de- animated", and will return in book form shortly... oh, and thanks for everyone who sent sound files, gifs, and hqx's for the Royal Festival talk - a howdy-doody to you too! >> OPERATION FALCO! << the anti-news dead pool Two or three times a week, these days, we get tips along the lines of "You know **** Digital? Going bust. And *** Networks? They're toilet-bound too, you know". When we get these, we're torn. Should we print them, and risk really annoying the supposedly-doomed companies? What if they sue us? What if they're not as weak as the tipster claims, and they come around and kick us in? On the other hand (this being the booming world of plucky UK start-ups), our tipsters are almost always right. It seems a shame not to give such perspicacious souls credit. To cope with this, we're introducing a new NTK feature. Simply send us, now, a list of companies that you think are going to go bust in the next year. When they *do* go bust, we'll announce it - as ever - in Anti-News, but follow it with a FALCO!, together with the names of those who successfully predicted their demise. So, for instance, we might say "Intel calls in receiver (Davy Winder, Vint Cerf - FALCO!)". You can, of course, choose to remain anonymous. The Falco competition is so named in honour of Falco, the prominent Austria techno-rap artist, who passed away earlier this week. The winner of the most FALCO!s by the time we do the .NOT Awards (almost there now), will receive our special commemorative "Rock of Amadeus" statuette. You may nominate up to five technology-based companies. You can change your list whenever you see a FALCO! in NTK. We reserve the right to abandon this competition if it turns out not to be funny, but actually a bit sick. Or too much like hard work. We'll try and automate this sometime, but in the meanwhile, send your selection to falco@spesh.com . And thanks for your caring input. >> SMALL PRINT << Need to Know 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 "your unlucky valentine". ( http://www.99secrets.com ) NEED TO KNOW THEY STOLE OUR REVOLUTION. NOW WE'RE STEALING IT BACK. Archive - http://www.ntk.net/ Excuses - http://www.spesh.com/ntk/ Unsubscribe? Mail majordomo@unfortu.net with 'unsubscribe ntknow'. Subscribe? Mail majordomo@unfortu.net with 'subscribe ntknow'. NTK now is helped by VIRGIN NET, VENUS INTERNET and UNFORTU.NET. They worry about us, but we don't worry about them. (K) 1998 Special Projects. Non-business copying is fine, but retain SMALL PRINT. Contact terry@spesh.com for commercial license details. Tips, news and gossip to tips@spesh.com.