Need To Know 1998-10-23

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"In the end, people on the Net should create their own local content rather than complain about the US's. They don't have to look at it! They could even create US filters if they wanted - a stupid idea, bu-" - ESTHER DYSON http://www.pathfinder.com/fortune/mostpowerful/981014chat.html ...ahhh. That's better. >> HARD NEWS << widespread blues Think you've had a bad week? Allow us to make it worse. DTI civil servants spelt out on Monday the details of the UK's long-awaited crypto legislation. Under the new law, Government-approved encryption authorities will be obliged to keep a copy of your private key, and hand it over to the authorities when requested by a "senior police officer" (as opposed to the Home Secretary, as in phone taps). It will be a criminal act for these authorities to tell you that your key has been revealed. Now, in a better world (such as the one we're just leaving), no-one would use these government authorities because - as every expert in crypto has warned - a key escrow system like this is fundamentally insecure. You're better off with a free copy of PGP (or even your browser's security features). So, to encourage you, the government has declared only digital signatures created by these approved companies will be accepted in law. What's that you say? What have digital signatures and encrypting messages got in common? Well, you're right - nothing. But you can bet the lawmakers won't mention that. This is a piece of legislation that requires an ignorant public to succeed. Talking of which, why haven't you heard of this before? While the government have yet to release any information through official channels, DTI personnel at the ICX conference confirm all of the above, and have declared the basic principles of this regulation "not open for discussion". In this, as so many other matters, they're wrong. DTI officials have their own signing authority - a third party known as Parliament. Next week, in a NTK special, we'll tell you how you can hack into this trusted service provider through a backdoor known as "public accountability", and that way decode what these buffoons are assuming is a secret transmission only they should understand. http://www.liberty.org.uk/cacib/ - once again: why it's bad for civil liberties http://www.crypto.com/key_study/ - and why it's technically incompetent http://www.computerprivacy.org/ - and makes no business sense at all Falco! Awards go to anonymous, anonymous and anonymous for their timely nomination of Soho Web house SUNBATHER, who exit the living this week for the undead-crammed maw of RAZORFISH. Judging by the lack of screams from the previously piranha'd CHBi we're optimistic of their continuing happiness - certainly compared to the uneartly screams we hear the ...thing... which is no longer Online Magic/Agency.com. Expect more US buyouts soon, ending at the precise moment that we get bought up by the boosterish @NY. http://www.atnewyork.com/ - complimentary outlooks http://www.sunbather.co.uk/ - Sunfish? Razorbather? http://www.ntk.net/index.cgi?back=a98/now0213.txt&l=306#l - What is this Falco? And why do you never answer my mail? >> ANTI-NEWS << berating the obvious Time Out's SPYDER so impressed by Macromedia's "Shockrave" software that he devotes whole article to the (non-existent) product... Stalinist BLUE PETER Webmasters work overtime to remove Richard Bacon from BBC Website... MINISTRY OF SOUND to become premium ISP (booming market, we understand)... new WINDOWS NT service pack 88MB, mirrored nowhere: not quite what http://www.eu.microsoft.com/ntserver/nts/downloads/ is saying ... bystanders sickened by images of BBFC/SCi multiple pile-up... INTERNET WATCH FOUNDATION attempts to cancel pornographic news articles by sending out the porn again... OFTEL spokesperson claims "US numbers aren't linked to geography" in defence of the we-all-saw-it-coming, terminally random http://www.numberchange.org/ ... Hollinger "Daily Telegraph" Digital to launch portal... DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF runs back to Mac... and now, one for Martin - http://www.square.co.uk/ ... >> EVENT QUEUE << goto's considered non-harmful Indie dilemma time again, with London's RAINDANCE FILM FESTIVAL (mid-budget stuff, in between Volcano and the LFF?) vying with the CRISP COMIC ART FESTIVAL, which mainly seems to consist of big black-and-white strips above some of the shops on Oxford Street. Raindance highlight should be post-apoc rock epic SIX STRING SAMURAI (Fri 30/10/98, Prince Charles Cinema, Leicester Sq), and we don't actually know if the Roobarb / Henry's Cat BOB GODFREY RETROSPECTIVE (London Cartoon Gallery, 44 Museum St, WC1A tel: 0171 242 5335) is officially part of that Comic Art thing, but it ought to be. http://www.potus.demon.co.uk/index.htm - dner ner ner, dner ner ner, dner ner ner de de... oh dear http://www.raindance.co.uk/filmshowcase/index.htm - also features "The Independant Film Awards" (sic) >> TRACKING << making good use of the things that we find Hmmm... MACOS 8.5 or NETSCAPE 4.5? Well, MacOS's Sherlock thing isn't quite as lame as it sounds. By contrast, the Related Sites button on Netscape is is much lamer than you can imagine, and they haven't done much to speed up the page rendering as far as we can see. MacOS *is* noticeably faster, but the full text search eats up hard drive space. At 13 megs, the Netscape download only takes one meg more than the 4.0. At 58UKP, the MacOS isn't cheap. Netscape's free, but we might wait for the stable - and really free - Mozilla. Ah, hell, we give up. Which one will run on our Acorn Archimedes? http://home.netscape.com/eng/mozilla/4.5/relnotes/ - roaming with Netscape good, while http://filedb.euro.apple.com/uk/pressreleases/macos.html - iMacs are bloody heavy, and the handle's too small >> MEMEPOOL << hasta la altavista Roger Corman to film Asimov's NIGHTFALL ("Your favourite stars - like you've never seen them before!")... WINDAES 98... PATRICK STEWART to play Professor X: Reboot guys to adapt RODDENBERRY pitch... one more time around the memepool for http://web.wwa.com/~xene/cantina.html ... Paramount sponsoring SETI@HOME for Trek tie-in... new about:jwz ... Onion goes US-wide... scan your arse and send it to http://www.my-mug.com/ ... all marketing resolves to http://www.sixsides.com/ ... pro-Microsoft fans show their great sense of humour: http://www.brokenwindows.net/ ... unusual paper "Doh" - http://www.ntk.net/doh/cis981023.jpg >> GEEK MEDIA << may contain strongly-typed language TV>> comedy horror extravaganza tonight, with Brian De Palma's typically understated PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE rock opera (12.30am, BBC1, Fri) rounding off the terror of THE BBC NEW COMEDY AWARDS 1998 (11.45pm, BBC1, Fri) and a "new" (but not so you'd notice) series of HAVE I GOT NEWS FOR YOU (10pm, BBC2, Fri)... while C4 expertly fields the especially poignant age-difference romance episode of FRASIER (10pm, Fri, C4)... clocks go back on Saturday - right back to the late '80s, apparently, during Prince theme evening A NIGHT FOR THE ARTIST (11.45pm-2.50am GMT, Sat, C4)... or a different brand of semi-surreal, much-quoted, sex-obsessed performers on MONTY PYTHON WEEKEND (from 8pm, Sat, Paramount)... for once, a perfect cult movie changeover with John Waters' SERIAL MOM (10pm, Sun, C4) ending just in time for Jonathan "Silence Of The Lambs" Demme's lesbian prison trash debut, CAGED HEAT (11.50pm, Sun, BBC2)... you can already imagine what a speeded-up Victor Lewis-Smith commentating on old TV commercials would be like, so no need to watch ADS INFINITUM (9.50pm, Mon, BBC2)... students compete in Will McDonald's zany Uni quiz CARRY ON CAMPUS (6.45pm, Mon, BBC2) - but how would they fare against the rather more exacting criteria posed by Rutger Hauer in THE HITCHER (9pm, Mon, C5)?... it can't/doesn't get any better, so feel free to turn over after the "Skeet Surfing" bit of post-Airplane goof-off TOP SECRET (11.10pm, Tue, BBC1)... especially as they're once again taunting us with traditional - and how temporary? - double-bill THE LARRY SEINFELD SHOW (11.10pm, Tue, BBC2)... BLACK BRITAIN (7.30pm, Wed, BBC2) profiles Mekon-like Jamaican government tech adviser 13-year-old... while IS IT LEGAL? (9.30pm, Wed, C4) battles for title of dullest office sitcom with final - they've promised - series of DROP THE DEAD DONKEY (9pm, Wed, C4)... and finally, "Wouldn't it be a great front organisation for showbiz homosexuals?" is just one of the questions Jon Ronson won't be asking his Scientologist guests on the new religion-oriented run of FOR THE LOVE OF (12.25am, Thu, C4)... FILM>> Roger Ebert, again on fine form, asks "How does Michael Myers support himself" in the long years between his last film and post-Scream self-referential Psycho in-joke HALLOWEEN H20: TWENTY YEARS LATER (imdb: road-stop / alcoolism / drugs / traumatism / private-college / truck / elevator / pumpkin / fire-extinguisher / ax / halloween / boarding-school / serial-killer / heroine / throwing-knives): "I picture him working in a fast-food joint. 'He never spoke much, but boy, could he dice those onions!'"... Todd Haynes, whose debut was retelling The Karen Carpenter Story with Barbie Dolls, disproves his poster slogan "the secret of becoming a star is knowing to behave like one" by producing something that looks like an entertainingly arty '70s version of Citizen Kane, but is actually just a disappointing Bowie-bio cover version recorded down a VELVET GOLDMINE (imdb: bisexual / glam-rock / music / gay / 1970s)... Dreamworks' other fx-heavy war romp of this summer, Joe Dante's sub-standard SMALL SOLDIERS (imdb: part-animated / artificial-intelligence / part-computer-animation / intelligence / animatronics) pits Spinal Tap voices against The Dirty Dozen; the US cut was so violent that the age-group the merchandise was aimed at couldn't get in to see it... in another bittersweet tribute to a deceased star (a la Small Soldiers' Phil Hartman), the canine lead in kiddie feelgood sports nonsense AIR BUD (imdb: basketball / dog) has subsequently died of cancer... a national roll-out for supposedly action-packed pseudo-Shakespeare yawn EL1ZABETH (imdb: historical / period) - imagine a non-sci-fi version of Dune, with Kathy "Waynetta Slob" Burke as Baron Harkonnen... and the worst line in Minnie Driver costume race drama romance THE GOVERNESS? (imdb: period / sephardic / judaism / victorian / consumption / 1800s / photography) Either "I used to think that a changeling would come and eat my kidneys" or "I could drown in your hair - it's like treacle"... MAGS>> new PSX demodisc mag STATION (UKP3.95, out now) is, as feared, simultaneously more offensive yet more boring than the OFFICIAL PLAYSTATION MAGAZINE to which it obviously aspires (although, unlike the latter, it doesn't - yet - seem to be under the misapprehension that a few photos of a PR party that the staff went to somehow constitutes a "news item"). Howlers include: god-awful coverdisc (non-playable Tomb Raider 3 - wahey!), *two* terrible Lara Croft pieces, excessive use of exclamation marks, a reviewer under the impression that Command And Conquer was based on "Dune 2000" (p60), and a media pack that's even more illiterate than the editorial: http://www.rapide.co.uk/station.html ... Russian-Doll-style, Station #1 even includes a preview of Rapide's new multi-format TOTAL CONTROL (UKP1.50, out today). Presumably targeted at the same market as Future's ARCADE (still due Nov we think - and no longer called "Arcadia" due to confusion with the Duran Duran spin-off of the same name), the thoroughly dull TC #1 does seem to avoid the trap of other Edge-wannabes: Dave Perry's previous X-Gen, the appalling Ultimate Future Gaming, and (of course), Edge itself... "just for fun" deadpool - who'll tank first: FRANK, DELUXE or UNCUT? (Hint: Uncut publishers IPC look after their own)... new TIME OUT website terrible, seems to avoid useful listings information for lame student features... "email deliverable" http://www.futuregamer.com (free, due Thu 05/11/98) promises to be "less than 256K" - but will unzipping the weekly HTML be just one click too far?... NTK completists will of course already have the new INTERZONE (UKP3), containing a blistering behind-the-scenes expose of our low-budget TV show (p30)... Bizarre, described by its assistant editor as "Fortean Times's slutty little sister", produces a trampy sibling of its own: one-off showbiztastic CREAM, in three weeks' time... yet most predictable content of the month goes to FRONT (right down to the UKP1 launch price, out now) - it's "FHM for teenagers", though some readers may find that tautology excessive. Designed like Escape (confusingly) without all the unconvincing PC bits, it's got semi-celebrity semi-nudity, a distributor-scaring obsession with criminals and corpses, Adam "Local Heroes" Hart-Davis, "what makes a spot appear" (p95), and is hopefully as doomed as predecessors LM ("Leisure Monthly", late '80s, not Living Marxism) and vastly superior Sassy spin-off, Dirt... >> 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 "message returned to sender" http://sunsite.cnlab-switch.ch/ftp/doc/standard/rfc/24xx/2468 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@lists.ntk.net with 'unsubscribe ntknow'. Subscribe? Mail majordomo@lists.ntk.net with 'subscribe ntknow'. NTK now is helped by THE ILLUMINATI 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.