Need To Know 1998-09-11

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"Gates had told [DEC CEO] Palmer 'You have to decide if you're Larry's friend or my friend'" http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/yr/mo/biztech/articles/10digital.html - DAVID CHAIKEN, ex-Digital researcher and playground snitch >> HARD NEWS << click-throughs Who said de facto monopolies were slow to respond? On Tuesday, Oftel gave BT's CLICK! Internet service the nod, despite the fears of independent ISPs that BT would use its existing customer database to poach their users. Within hours, BT was... well, using its existing customer database to poach independent ISPs' users. BT telesales, the good Rupert Goodwins reveals, have been cold-calling customers who named ISP dial-up numbers as "Friends & Family" (hey, we've all been there) and asking them if they'd be interested in this *fascinating* new service. Of course, if they'd really sorted this data-mining stuff, they'd have had a big light that flashed whenever they got a Cix user on the line. Warning! Suspicious of Unsolicited Calls! Knows Loads of Journalists! Unlikely To Change ISP At This Late, Late, Stage! And ... Probably Recording This Call! http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/1998/36/ns-5454.html - finally, reading 1000 cix conferences pays off for Mr Goodwins http://www.homehighway.bt.com/ - also in the self-defeating promotions stakes, this is where BT's extensive banner ad campaign for ISDN points to... http://www.ntk.net/doh/bt981109.gif - and this is what it was telling us yesterday If Newt Gingrich wasn't already the pointy-haired boss of the US legislature, his spur-of-the-moment decision to put the Starr report on the Net (giving the sysadmins hours to sort out bandwidth, and the librarians minutes to OCR the thing) now confirms it. Aww, like we care. As far as we can see, this is going to be about as exciting as last week's chance to see Americans learning how to count, slowly, to 63. What are people expecting - animated GIFs? It could all go horribly wrong, we guess/hope/predict: at time of going to press, one train had already derailed in the excitement, snipping through a bunch of Atlanta fibre-optics and taking out a chunk of service in the south-east. And I'd watch out for conclusive proof of terrorist camps around MAE-East, if I were you, guys. http://thomas.loc.gov/icreport/ - go for those XXX banner ads http://www.adobe.com/ - or worse, it could be in PDF format http://www.internetweatherreport.com/ - this is just like that movie "Flap the Route", isn't it? http://www.cctec.com/maillists/nanog/current/msg00241.html - give that man a cigar, too! Coincidentally (or was it), one anonymous tipster writes in to suggest a suitable cover story. As regular NTK tipsters will be aware, middle-class people all over the world have been desktop fighting for the Mexican Zapatistas, this week by participating in Ricardo Dominguez' and Stefan Wray's "Electronic Civil Disobedience Campaign". Broadly translated, this has involved a mass pinging of the Mexican President's site, the Frankfurt Stock Exchange, and the Pentagon. Upshot: little press, flames from techies, a death threat from a mysterious Mexican when Ricardo set out to speak at Ars Electronica (yes, yes, they're artists, how did you guess?), "ingenious" Blitzkrieg-style Java ICE counterattacks, and, from our correspondent at least, a patronising tip on how to *actually* crash their target sites (word to your subcommandante: it's running NT). But, you know, denial of service at the Pentagon is technically infowar, it's election year in Germany - and the milindustrial complex's got to use up those Cruises before the GPS bug kicks in. Also, see above. http://www.nyu.edu/projects/wray/ecd.html - "The HEART says good idea Bad Code!" >> ANTI-NEWS << berating the obvious like every fanboy always knew - it's official: GALACTUS destroyed Krypton... SUNDAY TIMES INNOVATION headline "Face Muscles Could Control Wheelchairs"... MSN.CO.UK relaunches *again*... NCR offers combined microwave/PC/TV - and it still doesn't work as a cash register... ADOBE's profits collapse - hint they're dropping Apple (clever: Apple'll pay *anything* to shut that talk up)... Mormon video store to edit out TITANIC nude footage for customers... to everyone who sent us the e-mail: there *is* no Walt Disney, Jr... NETWORK SOLUTIONS launch new London rootserver - forget to reverse DNS it... AUTISM more common in males: getting the hint yet? ... CARMACK finally busted for card counting in casino... HMSO put UK pharmocopoeia online for 30 day trial - downloaded and printed by 100s of chem geeks... >> EVENT QUEUE << goto's considered non-harmful How could we resist the combination of an e-commerce conference, sponsorship from The Grocer magazine, *and* a logical paradox, all under one roof? That's the promise from NON-SHOP SHOPPING, all day Thu 17/09/98 at the Commonwealth Institute, London W8. Radio 4's Sue McGregor will be "chairing" and "facilitating" the sessions on digital TV, the EMU, home shopping revolution etc etc, and among those paying the UKP365 + VAT fees are delegates from Boots, Coca Cola, Iceland (the shop), and United Biscuits. Hey, now those biscuits have put together a united front, I bet the cakes are worried... http://www.foodanddrink.co.uk/future_shopping.html - no online event registration, natch Looking for a holiday that challenges your mind *and* your body? How about 240 days sealed in an 3,500 cubic ft chamber with 69 other people, testing out biosystems for the INTERNATIONAL SPACE STATION? Interested parties should contact Yevgeny Dyomin, at the non-too-reassuringly-named Institute of Biomedical Problems, Moscow. You must be between 30 and 50 years old at the time of the test, fluent in English, and clearly bonkers. The alternative is to win this "Design A Web Page - Go And See the Leonids Meteor Shower In China", but you've got to be under 19 for that one. A challenge to most of our reader's bodies, that's for sure. http://cnn.com/TECH/space/9809/09/holliman/index.html#isolation - anything to get away from this news coverage http://homepages.nildram.co.uk/~sproston/sstar3c.htm - it'll be dark, no-one'll notice. http://www.theonion.com/onion3124/mir.html - life imitates Onion once more time >> TRACKING << making good use of the things that we find While, with most of the so-called "impartial" media busy brainwashing the public into believing that there is only one serious OS choice for PCs, we'd like to put in a brief word for Windows 95 software, which is easily as good as Linux in certain niche areas. This week, our token Win app is SCRAMDISK 2.02, a very satisfactory on-the-fly file encrypter that allows you to use any of your favourite encryption algorithms on a mock mounted drive. It's small enough to fit on a floppy, and also features a neat hide-data-in-a-WAV-file steganography mode. Author's anonymous, but the source code *is* available. And the crypto resource pages are some of the best we've seen coming from the UK. http://www.hertreg.ac.uk/ss/ - yeah, we know, Linux has cfs -- give a poor OS a break >> MEMEPOOL << hasta la altavista so, who'd win in a mailing list slanging match between Haddock and THE FILTHY TRUTH?... TTYQUAKE? when we see it working on a *real* teletype, then we'll be impressed... C&W going for cheapo ADSL?... was the BLUE PETER Garden incident really an inside job?... PYTHON fans seize the Perl Homeworld - http://www.tpj.com/tpj/rules/ ... well, *that's* not full disclosure: http://www.ntk.net/doh/ms980911.gif ... MP3ed nostalgia at http://www.c64audio.com/ ... the return of FIRESIDE THEATRE... omigod, they killed KENOBI: http://www.citysun.ac.uk/klawler/sp.htm http://www.conavigator.com/main.jhtml vs the MODEL RAILROAD at http://onion-router.nrl.navy.mil/Tests.html ... build a better one: http://ww.docfizzix.com ... GNU CPU design - yah, right... FANTASY NOVELISTS demand Realism in Movies: http://www.sff.net/people/doylemacdonald/r_godzilla.htp ... spot the irony in *this* anti-MS toon collection URL: http://www.cagle.com/microsoft/gates1.asp ... >> GEEK MEDIA << may contain strongly-typed language TV>> lame new cop thing DANGERFIELD (9.30pm, Fri, BBC1) takes the mickey with a crime scene in a (presumably dangerous) field... the Black Sabbath branch of ROCK FAMILY TREES (11.15pm, Fri, BBC2) hopefully solves the mystery of why rockers no longer have cool names like "Ozzy Osbourne", "Ian Gillan", and "Ronnie James Dio"... and can new star Julian Barratt monkey around with the peridontal atrium of COMEDY NATION (12.05am, Fri, BBC2) to stop it becoming the sci-fi-free Planet Mirth?... the synthetic fabrics of '70s nostalgia stray near to the 2-bar electric fire of desperate C4 theme nights, causing an avoidable DISCO INFERNO (from 9pm, Sat, C4)... and Sat's only bright spot - repeats of the US extreme-cyberpunk spin-off series of MAX HEADROOM (7pm, Sat, Sci-Fi cable only) - are dimmed by slow plotting and this first one being just a shorter remake of the original Blipverts movie (*plus* Bryce is no longer evil!)... former "Kryten" Robert Llewellyn finds himself on the SCRAPHEAP (6.20pm, Sun, C4) - when they asked us about helming this Mad-Max Great Egg Race-style face-off, we said that difficulty playtesting would be a problem. Based on the flop of their Easter hovercraft-building pilot, they didn't listen... more stomach-churning than Saving Private Ryan's depiction of D-Day: Mark "Moviedrome" Cousins fawns over Spielberg in WAR STORIES (8.40pm, Sun, BBC2)... and some say the anti-Nazi message of SCHINDLER'S LIST (9.30pm, Sun, BBC2) is so powerful that *everyone should be forced to watch it*... hey, if you were responsible for both Mrs Merton and laugh-free class-tourism sitcom THE ROYLE FAMILY (10pm, Mon, BBC2), maybe you'd try to kill yourself too... Martin Clunes returns as Man Shagging Unconvincingly in uninspired marriage drama TOUCH AND GO (9pm, Tue, BBC2)... the "This Life" bloke chases undead semi-believable vampires afraid of the ULTRAVIOLET (10pm, Tue, C4)... and decontaminate the deadly dull Michael Crichton double bill of CONGO (9.30pm, Thu, BBC1) and THE ANDROMEDA STRAIN (11.25pm, Thu, BBC1), for C4's ongoing "Renegade TV" efforts, including the "uncompromising" Newcastle-based ZINE (1.10am, Thu, C4), repeats of Ken Campbell's BRAINSPOTTING (2.35am, Thu, C4), and the non-confrontational but no less entertaining repeated Cringely fest TRIUMPH OF THE NERDS (3.35am, Thu, C4)... FILM>> disgusted by redesign of Amazon-owned IMDB? Well, fortunately, they haven't reached all the mirrors yet ( http://virgin-net.imdb.com/search )... fans of nasal Tom Hanks see him kill for the first time (and be killed?, detractors may hope), in widely hyped "war unpleasant, cruel" shocker SAVING PRIVATE RYAN (imdb: drama / war / action / rescue / military / wwii / historical / d-day / normandy / violence / blood / gore / controversial / tragedy / blockbuster / omaha-beach / epic / cult-favorites / based-on-true-story / brothers / bravery / army-life / heroism / weapons / vomit / 1940s / tank / flashback / soldier / aviation / _horror_ / brother / death / guns / machine-gun / tearjerker / anti-war / stabbing / translator / bridge / machine-gun-nest). The apparently entirely serious http://www.hollywoodjesus.com highlights the film's Christian message - at least it's not Schindler's List 2: Nazis On The Run... so, god knows what they'd make of LA VIE DE JESUS (imdb: French), an oddly non-Biblical countryside version of La Haine, though not from the immigrants' point of view... even the official URL - http://babymother.channel4.com - doesn't seem to work for Hackney-set "Ragga to riches" musical BABYMOTHER (imdb: yeah, right)... so, this week's surprise tip: raunchy revenge-fuelled OTT costume antics for people who don't like costume dramas in Balzac's COUSIN BETTE (imdb: comedy / 1800s / based-on-novel / drama / period), including "Elisabeth Shue writhing naked in chocolate"... PRO-CELEBRITY FEEBDACK>> "Are contributors still being named and shamed?" inquires privacy activist MARK DZIECIELEWSKI, after inadvertently being credited with a tip he sent in two weeks ago [see NTK 28/08/98]. Yeah, sorry Mark - NTK policy is to keep all contributions anonymous, unless they specifically request a credit (in which case we usually keep them anonymous), or they're clearly doing something (like a whois lookup) that no-one is going to get too annoyed about... rather less playfully, cult author MARTIN MILLAR was "extremely unhappy" about the mention we gave to his book Love And Peace With Melody Paradise [also NTK 28/08/98], objecting to the phrase "after bundles of rejection notes, Millar would be the first to concede that it might not be any good", and instead pointing out that he tried to get it published "for several years", because he likes it "so much". There we are then - the author himself recommends his own work. Now go buy it... sticking with lit, Surfing On The Internet author JC HERZ complimented us on last week's NTK, with the precise words "God, this issue was the best ever (love the beauty notes)", followed by the enigmatic postscript "I'm making Joystick Nation into a two-hour documentary for PBS". Cheers JC, though apparently the youngsters are all calling them "joypads" nowadays... again with the personal grooming: CONRAD HUGHES queried our description of Wilkinson Sword as Gillette's "rivals", being "under the impression that Gillette own 20% of WS, so it's a bit of a weird rivalry". Well, now that http://www.wilkinson-sword.co.uk/ is up, that's clearly not their only identity crisis: the "male/ female" select option suggests that the big 5 items in every bloke's gym bag include a copy of Cosmopolitan and a "spare lipstick"... and finally, prolific tipster LLOYD WOOD couldn't stop chuckling over the odd juxtaposition in the job ad where we advised applicants to hack the homepage of a "major UK web design agency". You're right Lloyd, we didn't mean "major", we meant "still going"... >> 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 "picking one from column A". http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/1388/zwhofuck.html NEED TO KNOW THEY STOLE OUR REVOLUTION. NOW WE'RE STEALING IT BACK. 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