Need To Know 1998-02-27

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"Microsoft doesn't have a drunken captain who ruined the environment. Microsoft doesn't kill people..." - Pam Edstrom, Vice President of Microsoft's PR company http://www.sjmercury.com/business/microsoft/docs/bash022398.htm what's known as "positive spin" >> HARD NEWS << soft wariness Murdoch and BT's British Interactive Broadcasting announced that their set-top boxes are going to be Internet compatible, after all. Well, *that* should be easy to set up in the short months before BIB's premiere. Especially since BIB's boss said at the outset that legally, they couldn't provide Internet access (contravened ITC regulations, he said), and that BIB would actually compete with the Net (numbers would "overtake the Internet" by this time next year, he said). The decision to switch to an IP- friendly format for the joint venture was, no doubt, made easier by a) the threats of legal action from competitors BDB if BIB *did* try and use their proprietary standard, b) the rumoured paucity of content using that format, and c) the increasing fragility of partner BT's interest in their other co-venture, LINEONE.NET. Perhaps Murdoch can pursuade BT to stay a bit longer in that deal if he ports the whole of LineOne across to the set-top boxes? http://www.opentv.com/Access/accessFrms/access3.html - oh, yeah. This should work, no worries mate. Sweet as a nut. http://www.bib.co.uk/ - Guys? Think you missed something. Evil hackers broke into the offices of the DAILY MAIL on Wednesday night, and replaced their science correspondent with a babbling idiot. That's the explanation, claimed self-appointed experts, for that paper's "Anarchist Code Cracker Britons Hack Into Pentagon" front page story on Thursday. The Mail reported a Pentagon source as saying the attack was launched from a "secret convention of computer hackers, probably in New York", in which "there was a contingent from Britain". So secret that no-one in the computer underground knew a thing about it (must have been for the real elite). It's also an odd thing for the Pentagon to be saying, when earlier military reports (like, over two weeks ago) suggested that the hackers were American and Dutch. One thing is for sure - these statements by the Pentagon have nothing to do with its current attempts to secure extra funding for an expanded info-warfare division. Oh no. http://www.ntk.net/hacks/ - maybe it was all those people trying to e-mail back to mlewinsk@pagate.pa.osd.mil When the Trading Standards Officers raided online shop, The Oasis Superstore, on the suspicion that it sold bootleg Gallagher merchandise, someone must have pointed out the disclaimer. "Although ALL staff at THE-OASIS-SUPERSTORE are permanently 'MAD-FOR-IT'," it admits, "the 'oasis- superstore' is not connected in any capacity to Oasis." Unfortunately for them, they *are* connected with Derek Gorman, Oasisnews.com webmaster and scourge of Creation Records' legal department. Young Derek escaped prosecution last August by pointing out that his "pirated" sound samples were freely available on Sony Music Brazil's site. Now, it would be sniffy to suggest that Sony and Creation went for the Superstore after it cheekily sponsored Derek's site. And it would be equally ill-mannered to draw comparisons when the Trading Standards boys had to give back all the seized merchandise, and Sony was forced to back down again. Well, someone's clearly mad about *something*... http://www.oasisinet.com/prstore.htm - the official site's cheerful breaking of the bust news http://www.oasisnews.com/oasis3.html - ...though strangely lacking the end of the story http://www.the-oasis-superstore.com/ - all my products right here, right now >> ANTI-NEWS << berating the obvious NETNAMES sells >1,000 lame .tm domains in first week - sign-ups include Esso, BT - and BP... BT launch "Mill-e- mail" - free e-mail account to everyone in Britain. So how many of these do we *need*?... "Many Could Bank Online, But Don't" uncovers C|NET... GUARDIAN ONLINE plugs Kuji's new security consultancy; claims he owned "a Commodore Omega 500"... failed "WAR MACHINES" cyber-helmet used Windows 3.1... LEMMINGS *don't* hurl themselves off cliffs, British naturalists said Tuesday... WWW.GREENWICH2000.CO.UK uses client-side clocks... CHEMICAL BROTHERS get Grammy nomination for "Best Rock Instrumental"... JAVA NAVIGATOR "on hold"... Net hackers cost UK businesses over one billion pounds in 1997 alone, says KEVIN BLACK - manager of "Internet Security Systems"... HATE Comic collaborates with Alan Moore: goes on "permanent hiatus"... NETLY NEWS collaborates with NTK; Netly News rumoured to close... COMPUTER ACTIVE may be "worst magazine ever", contains headline "Science Fiction Becomes Fact"... >> EVENT QUEUE << goto's considered non-harmful This one's a bit spurious, but there ain't nothing out there but Titanic right now. Monday 2/3/98 is your last chance to pre-book for UKCAC, the UK comic art convention. This year, it's in Manchester (21/3/98 - 22/3/98), which means that we may still be able to talk our geekier pals out of going. A shame for them, because they'll be missing visits from Alex "Marvels" Ross, Eddie "Bacchus" Campbell, Alan Grant (promoting his new title "Shit The Dog"), Dave Taylor etc. etc. Great for us, because we'll be able to avoid the insanity that is the UKCAC Fancy Dress contest. Original artwork for sale, a chance to purchase rare and valuable comics, and a must for field anthropologists looking for a project. http://www.ukcac.digitalalba.com/ - so suddenly we're anti-geek >> TRACKING << grep goodies ftp://* Fortify, the patch that provides UK users of Netscape 4.04 with full-blown security (rather than the crippled, 40-bit security that the American government forces on foreign browser users), has been upgraded. You now get strong S/MIME email encryption, and 1024 RSA keys. It's all freeware, and the patch is only 350KB for the Windows download. Not quite as short, mind, as this: #!/usr/bin/perl -0777pi s/(KEY-BITS:.*?\0)/($_=$1)=~s,[a-z], ,g;s, $,true,gm;s, 512,2048,;$_/es; which we're told, hacks the Unix 4.04 executable. http://www.fortify.net/ - play safe now Quake II's "point release" is out. Somebody'll write in and tell us point release means when you pressed the CDs for the commercial version months ago, and you carry on sending out patches hours after the point release went out. In the meantime, though, we'll sit back and enjoy the bugfixes, co-operative play for four players, and extra deathplay maps. And, yes, we know you already found this out off bluesnews, slashdot, news.com, and your nan. But think of the poor lost ones, reader. The poor lost ones. http://www.idsoftware.com/hot/index.html - and capture the flag for Quake II. Too. >> MEMEPOOL << hasta la altavista bad Mickey! - www.negia.net/~issachar/secret/mickey.html ... DESIGNERS REPUBLIC sent a bomb... www.sex-on-a- stick.com/ ... "Po stared at the long, thick, hard, green furry rod that had emerged" - TELETUBBIES slash... he's baaack: www.mediabiz.co.uk/team/people/nickr.html ... looking for PURPLE 3s... www.webleyweb.com/tle/index.html ... "The Collected .plans Of J Carmack" ... Millennium Dome - designed by CHRIS MORRIS?... 192.246.40.37:27912 for "Team iD" ... www.bushido-dojo.com/vdx/ ... Film Threat's review of TITANIC? "Star Wars for chicks"... spammers with weapons of mass destruction: http://www.strathuranium.com/ ... following last week's superhero outing, STAR FLEET ACADEMY #17 introduces the homosexual side of Decker's pal Yoshi... AUCKLAND shut down by power-cut: who will be next? >> GEEK MEDIA << all screens are constantly refreshing TV>> animated white trash-com KING OF THE HILL (10.30pm, Fri, C4) is back, and so is Have I Got News For You, albeit disguised as yet another interminably smug panel game called IF I RULED THE WORLD (10pm, Fri, BBC2). But will they have just a captain and guest per team, like Have I Got, or try the 3-1-3 line-up of NEVER MIND THE BUZZCOCKS (9.30pm, Fri, BBC2) etc - and so end up with 7 celebs who can't get a word in edgeways?... POWER RANGERS CLASSICS (8.25am, Sat, ITV) is an hour of "selected episodes from the first series", in case you were wondering... did Tony Hart deliberately borrow the theme from THE DEER HUNTER (10pm, Sun, C4) to highlight the Russian Roulette-like gamble of entering his Take Hart Gallery, with its sinister disclaimer: "We cannot return your pictures - but there is a prize for *all the ones we show*"?... Monday is wild boffin night again, with a new run for cycling invention historian Adam Hart-Davis in LOCAL HEROES (8pm, Mon, BBC2)... plus the new, "funny" series of previously arty/ worthy tech show THE NET (11.15pm, Mon, BBC2) - in which NTK staff advocate Betamax as "the new DVD"... annoyingly, they then *didn't* ask us onto FOR THE LOVE OF (12mid, Mon, C4) to discuss Diana Conspiracy Theories... Jodie Foster isn't so multi-talented that she actually plays the child- prodigy of the title in cool geek fable LITTLE MAN TATE (10pm, Tue, C4)... but the heavy-handed presidential satire of Tim Robbins - aka BOB ROBERTS (12.25am, Tue, C4) - is way too smart for his own good. Or indeed anyone else's... "Wellington invents a machine for catching ghosts" in new adventures of THE WOMBLES (4.05pm, ITV, Wed) - oh, and Alderney *isn't* a new Womble, as anyone who's read the books would know... plus: Alien corpse found! It's all a hoax! Mulder dead?! It's (yawn) another cliffhanger climax to probably the penultimate season of THE X FILES (10pm, Wed, BBC1)... FILM>> another special double-bill week, first for fans of Anthony Hopkins, as he grizzles through a script by David "House Of Games" Mamet - with Alec Baldwin and Elle Macpherson - in survivalist romp THE EDGE (imdb: thriller / survival / wilderness / bear)... or as a courtroom battler vs the historical inaccuracy and liberal self-flagellation of Spielberg's free-the-slaves drama AMISTAD (MPAA: rated R for "some scenes of strong brutal violence and some related nudity")... the title doesn't seem to refer to the casting of Michael Keaton and Andy Garcia (almost an honorary Baldwin brother himself), but DESPERATE MEASURES (MPAA: rated R for "violence and language") has an OK twist to its Silence Of The Die Hards manhunt, and also references both Star Trek: TNG and The Wrath Of Khan... which gives it a small edge over this week's other terrifying glimpse "inside the mind of a murderer", stylised New Zealand low- budgeter THE UGLY (imdb: horror) SKIENCE>> top title from this week's NATURE magazine:"A time- resolved glimpse of the terahertz glory"... first they found out how to make you laugh with an electrode in the brain - now there's a test to measure your sense of humour: not "Do you find Have I Got News for You funny?" but a 19-point questionnaire assessing your "NEED FOR LEVITY" - considerable, after filling it in, we should think... Skience Antinews: "Multiple Factors Contribute To Death In Men And Women Over Age 65" reveals the JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN MEDICAL ASSOCIATION... if NURBS and b-splines mean anything to you, visit http://www.cs.jhu.edu/~subodh/research/software.html - although, of course, subdivision surfaces are where it's really at... a watched ELECTRON never interferes, as old uncle Erwin used to say, and there's finally experimental proof; expect quantum cryptography any day now... you knew there was a reason for supercomputers, and "simulating the evolution of a large fraction of the whole observable Universe" was probably it, right? Top news is that it looks like the patterns on the bottom of a sunlit swimming pool. So now you know... skience@spesh.com >> CORRIGENDA << hubris, man, hubris We rejigged the mailserver last week. Turned a four hour wait into three-minutes turbonutter majordomo nukefest. Along the way, we somehow lost about n^2 NTKs, so that's why you didn't get it. E-mail <oops@ntk.net> with a blank message to get your replacement copy, with our most abject, pitiful apologies. Also, the URL should have been http://american-computer.com/Transcap.htm , and Carl Steadman's www.dianabear.com is down, and, yes, StrongARM *is* going to be saved by Intel, so we got that wrong too. We're sorry, we've learnt our lesson, and we're never going to be horrible to anyone ever again. Promise. >> 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 "read between the lines". 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.