Need To Know 1999-02-05

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"I left my PC on for 30 hours just to download them." - JAIME GORMAN answers the mail for his Cyberstrike campaign in .NET ...which undoes the effect of the 24 hour Internet strike, admittedly >> HARD NEWS << crocodile shoes Anti-trust trial? More like a nasty brawl at a Demo Party. This week, the elite scene team from Microsoft attempted to outhack Princeton prof Edward Felton's demo that removed Internet Explorer from Windows 98. Their own demo showed that, sure, EF may have found and removed some of IE4.0, but we hid another bit in the Windows help system! C00l! The Department of Justice (excellent name for a hacking crew) fought back the traditional way, by claiming MS faked it . As always, it ended it tears, with the Microsoft posse working overnight in a hotel room with their Amigas, err, Thinkpads to fix the bugs, and abandoning the best bits (the much-acclaimed "Win98 runs even *more* like a dog without IE" sequence) in the process. And to think, they might have gotten away with it, had not the DOJ team spotted a tiny change in one of the Windows title bars in the original demo - a subtle indicator that it was a mock-up, but one which passed Microsoft's Jim Allchin's notice entirely. To be fair, it can be difficult to spot subtle changes in the most familiar interfaces. For instance, we're sure the management at http://www.multimap.co.uk/ must have been staring at their homepage's title banner every day this week, without noticing the giveaway change: http://www.multimap.co.uk/ - bet you they'll have fixed it by the time you read this http://www.ntk.net/doh/mmap990205.gif - but we'd like to submit new evidence... http://ojuice.citeweb.net/e/ - by contrast, demo scene not dead shocker http://www.theregister.co.uk/ - meticulous attention to dull trial details We're laying off the Internet Service Providers' Association this week. True, Yaman Akdeniz did did manage to firm up his accusation that they've been having secret meetings (no, say the ISPA, just "private") with the Association of Chief Police Officers, and submitting secret ("private") documents explaining exactly what info on their own subscribers they could hand over to the police. But these days, ISPA seem to be incredibly touchy about any press coverage at all - even taking a break in their e-commerce submission to the DTI select committee to rail at "countless, poorly researched press articles" that suggest they were doing anything untoward. Well, excuuuse us: I mean, we're only the people who pay your *wages*, whiny boy. Tell you what - how about a "private" meeting with your members' subscribers - maybe a note or two in the newsgroups, or a Website to discuss the what *they* want, rather than an ad hoc bunch of of police officers? Okay, okay, just a suggestion. No need to call the cops. http://www.cyber-rights.org/privacy/watchmen-iii.htm - maybe you could hire Yaman to do publicity http://www.ntk.net/ispa/dti.txt - still, can't knock their anti-crypto stance Response to HEATH BUNTING and RACHEL BAKER's SUPERWEED prank ("invulnerable to herbicides", "designed to attack corporate monoculture") was a bit, well, weedy. The hoax managed to hit just the right targets, with a small mention in the Big Issue and gullible anti-GM activists e-mailing us practically in hysterics. And if you are going to launch a media hack, isn't having a press conference at the ICA a bit of a giveaway? The irational kids are going to have to work a bit harder to beat the real-world genetic pranks of MONSANTO: The WASHINGTON POST revealed this week that the Zaibatsu is hiring private detectives to take snippings off Canadian farmers to catch them using unlicensed copies of the company's GE crops. MONSANTO then reads out the names of these seedz pirates on local radio, and encourages other farmers to shop their neighbours using a FAST-like hotline. In this country, FOE reports - improbably - that the government is to use loyalty card stats to trace the long-term effects of GE food - now this sounds like they're actively *baiting* Heath to come up better. One suggestion: given that a recent study showed a quarter of shoppers aren't loyal to their supermarket at all (they said they'd shop elsewhere "given the choice"), maybe he could combine the two - with "treacherous" consumers named and shamed over shop tannoy systems? Or is this just giving Them ideas? http://pages.hotbot.com/politics/superweed/kit.html - bet you fell for that marijuana-in-oranges one too http://www.irational.org/tm/archived/sainsbury/front.html - ah, the good old days http://www.foe.co.uk/pubsinfo/infoteam/pressrel/1999/19990125154458.html - fact genetically engineered to be stranger http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1999-02/03/100l-020399-idx.html http://i.am/jorn - credit: diversions from the meme >> ANTI-NEWS << berating the obvious TESCO.NET go free (in accordance with prophecy - [NTK 1999-01-15]) - penny to drop with BT CLICK in next few days... STEVE CASE nominated as Internet Society Trustee - was Hank, the Angry Drunken Dwarf not available? ... PIPEX nameserver down for three hours; no-one notices... NT servers on the International Space Station - spirit of Mir lives on... LINX down for ten minutes; no-one notices... latest Future Gamer e-mail has "problems" (not leas of which, it's 400KB long)... GAMES DOMAIN lets you find out which swearwords it *will* accept at http://www.gamesdomain.co.uk/cheats/swear.pl (looks like "blow-job" might work)... SKY takes poll on Film of The Millennium: Star Wars wins. Star Wars, Episode I, that is... JESSE BERST now has two million subscribers... BT buy Spanish ISP ARRAKIS - let the spice trading begin!... LOUIS ROSSETTO'S home domain: forca.com (your joke here)... dodgy Aussie "One Nation Party" TV ad based around STARSHIP TROOPERS, as discussed on aus.politics, aus.sf, aus.tv. (Anyone got a video? Anyone? ANYONE?)... http://www.lakota.clara.net links to http://www.reconcile-chile.co.uk - they don't link back... >> EVENT QUEUE << goto's considered non-harmful Yeah, maybe we were a bit cloak-and-dagger about the LSE Security Colloquia, considering there is full schedule on their site after all. But then again, we'd never have found out about Kevin Townsend's upcoming events diary at his ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF COMPUTER SECURITY pages, and anyway, we thought you hacker guys liked a challenge. Thanks also to the guy who mailed to say that the touring IEE Faraday Lecture, as plugged by us last week, was a "banal advert for digital TV and radio", and that he'd rather have spent his UKP2 at Burger King. With that in mind, we'd advise you to resist the lure of 3D Master Backgammon, the "parade of animated characters", Microsoft DirectX "Techno Night" and - of course - Peter Molyneux at MILIA next week, and go directly to the "trade-only" INTERNATIONAL FOOD EXHIBITION Sun 1999-02-07 to Thu 11, Earls Court London, where "Sharing The Stomach" and "Home Meal Replacement" are the order of the day. http://csrc.lse.ac.uk/Colloquia/colloquia1.htm - what do we look like, your mum or something? http://www.itsecurity.com/eventsindex.htm - now featuring Cambridge *and* London! http://www.milia.com - no "demo party" this year; still, more games http://www.ife99.com - "user-friendly" registration, if you know what we mean Oh, and genetic overlord RICHARD DAWKINS ("The Most Dangerous Man In Britain Today", Daily Mail, 1999-02-01, p10) will be wrestling rogue psy-op STEVEN PINKER to establish alpha-male dominance on the question "Is Science Killing The Soul?" in the Guardian Dillons Debate, 7pm, Wed 1999-02-10, Westminster Central Hall, London SW1. Dawkins will no doubt be drawing on his special powers, as detailed by the Mail's Paul Foot, of militant atheism, a willingness to clone his own daughter, and "possible armies of homicidal zombies, churned out of underground factories or - another frightening prospect - squads of identical terrorists, with explosives strapped to their bodies, programmed to carry out suicide missions". We're not making this up you know. We wish we were. Box office: 0171 467 1613. tickets@dillons.org.uk - dillons.co.uk still "finalising its 1999 schedule" >> TRACKING << making good use of the things that we find Hotmail is all very well, but... alright, we lied, Hotmail is an utter pain. You have to clunk through all those forms, mentally tippex out the banner ads, squirm under the bright lights of those Microsoft logos, and worst, you're paying to stay online throughout it all. C-WEBMAIL is a Windows 95 app that wraps Hotmail with a POP3 interface - so you can read it with Eudora or Outlook or Netscape Navigator or (if you want to be perverse) ICQ. We imagine that Microsoft will keep jiggling the site designs so as to regularly break the program: but C-Webmail is one of the Crazy Israeli start-ups, and they *never* give up. Thirty days free trial, ten American dollar for the supported version, or several million in mixed currency if you're MSN looking for a buy-out. http://www.cwebmail.com/ - Yahoo Mail and others to come... DirectX 6.1 SDK now out. PROS: New software is always exciting. Contains thrilling new "DirectMusic" feature, aka finally sensible MIDI support under Windows. Only available for a month online - than you'll have to buy a CD (or a game that uses it). PentiumIII support. CONS: File length: 7.2MB. Tendency to crash range of games (Hexen 2, Rogue Squadron, some Quake IIs) of type played by people mad enough to spend years downloading new DirectX drivers. Pentium III not out yet. Conclusion: maybe you should wait a bit. http://www.microsoft.com/directx/default.asp - wait until the video comes out, eh, Microsoft? >> MEMEPOOL << hasta la altavista not your usual bunch of Interrailling backpackers - http://esu.simplenet.com/ ... yes, we should be using http://www.dict.org/ ... Stallone for Boba Fett? Hmmm... and you thought FHM covers were contrived: http://www.lileks.com/institute/frahm/ ... ATARI TEENAGE RIOT's Alec Empire from Germany, but Glasgow (oh, and they use Amigas) ... BA execs really *are* going to be in the air, midnight 2000-01-01 - suckers!... +"y2k virus"... BLONDIE now fronted by MADGE FROM NEIGHBOURS... TV captions positioned for widescreen... DEMON CRYPTO whisperings... get out less: http://www.york.ac.uk/~mpf103/ ... Doncaster man gets *arrested* for SMS SPAMMING: maybe a test case?... producers of new Duke Nukem film say: "We're still on a search for the Duke. We asked the original Duke, John Wayne, but, you know, he couldn't do it."... mixed-up Mac kids: http://w1.1491.telia.com/%7Eu149100079/section6/backtobeige.html ... tattooed Generation Girl Barbie... *naughty* 3Dlabs, cheating on your CDRS benchmarks like that... "Attention webmaster - your trademark hitlersthirdreich.co.uk is unregistered in the following countries..." http://www.hamsterdance.com/ ... more cheating at Channel Four - http://business.virgin.net/edward.parsons/malcolm/howto/shootthehoopnf.html >> GEEK MEDIA << may contain strongly-typed language TV>> oh my sides: the fat one writes all the songs (chortle!) in formula Take That spoofumentary BOYZ UNLIMITED (9.30pm, Fri, C4)... not to be confused with Svengali godfather Ronan Keating imploring amateur wannabes to GET YOUR ACT TOGETHER (6.25pm, Sat, BBC1)... repeated first-series FRIENDS (9pm, Fri, C4) does observational sex novel humour via Chandler's guesting mum... the "giant heads" Jean-Claude Van Damme/ Lance Henriksen face-off is the only bulletproof bit of John Woo's HARD TARGET (10.25pm, Fri, BBC1)... and Roger Corman trash classics resurrected in deserted supermarket time travel romp THE UNDEAD (12.55am, Fri, BBC1), then Vincent Price tinky-winky Poe adaptation THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER (2.10am, Mon, ITV)... war again on Saturday, with THE DIRTY DOZEN (9pm, Sat, BBC2) seeing off FORCE TEN FROM NAVARONE (8.55pm, Sat, C4)... the COLD WAR (8.10pm, Sat, BBC2) goes nuclear... and isn't that an Abrams M1 main battle tank in dire Dudley Moore/ Eddie Murphy DARPA farce BEST DEFENCE (11.50pm, Sat, BBC1)?... Henriksen returns with Natasha "2 Girls And A Guy" Wagner in zany brain-eating Alien knock-off WES CRAVEN'S MIND RIPPER (10.50pm, Sat, C5)... geek movie of the weekend: either Chess prodigy tradegy INNOCENT MOVES (1.15pm, Sat, BBC2)... early Sandra Bullock romp BIONIC SHOWDOWN (3.35pm, Sun, LWT only)... or James "Rockford Files" Garner in true-life Nabisco boardroom drama BARBARIANS AT THE GATE (11.55pm, Sun, BBC1)... no Buffy on Wed, but the young Willow - and her future on-screen beau - pop up in MY STEPMOTHER IS AN ALIEN (10pm, Mon, C4)... should have called the "race to clone first human" edition of PANORAMA (10pm, Mon, BBC1) "The Clone Wars"... and, despite the BT-bashing trail for IF I RULED THE WORLD (10pm, Mon, BBC2), we are contractually obliged not to recommend anything with Tony Hawks in it... at least the computer salesman in WORKERS AT WAR (9.30pm, Tue, BBC1) ain't got problems like League Of Gentlemen inspiration THE WICKER MAN (12.40am, Tue, C4)... the "true love dating ageny" (sic) who own LOVE.CO.UK (10.30pm, Wed, C4) haven't even put up a page to exploit the free plug - and we bet it's announced as "Love - Dot. Co - Dot. Uk" instead of "Love. Dot-co. Dot-uk"... Jack "City Slickers" Palance, Keir "2001" Dullea, Barry "1999" Morse shoot it out in '70s cowboy mind MUD nonsense WELCOME TO BLOOD CITY (12.05am, Thu, BBC1)... and swiftly cancelled mock-Darwinist sci-fi cult PREY (12.05am, Thu, C4) promises to be the new Tomorrow People for the serial killer in us all... FILM>> evidence that Antz was rush-released to punish Jobs/ Apple/ Pixar? Well, compared to the the full-rendered gorgeousness of A BUG'S LIFE (imdb: food / computer-animation / kids-and-family / circus / ants / insect / inventor), Antz had those terrible *painted backgrounds*. A Bug's Life lacks the big-name voices, but it tackles Antz's third-act problems (or "thoract", if you will) with startling action scenes - plus too many characters (natch), but when they look this good, who cares?... John "Hairspray" Waters seems to have calmed down a little for photofit Henry Fool comedy PECKER (imdb: satire / stripper / sugar-addiction / thief / ventriloquist / art-gallery / art / baltimore / blasphemy / exploitation / gay / homeless / laundromat / miracle / perversion / photography) - which, in the dogshit-eating department, can only be a good thing. Still likes Ricki Lake-style stunt casting though, hence Edward "Terminator 2" Furlong and the - perhaps ironic? - presence of Christina "ubiquitous" Ricci... elsewhere, it's all middle-aged women recapturing their youth, either through straightahead Angela Bassett wish fulfilment HOW STELLA GOT HER GROOVE BACK (imdb: romance)... all-out weird parallel-reality romance with Danny DeVito, as in LIVING OUT LOUD (imdb: comedy / drama / romance) - the "Liz Bailey" character (played by Queen Latifah) is *not* based on net journo Liz Bailey... or hippy chick flick travelogue HIDEOUS KINKY (MPAA: Rated R for some sexuality and language) - the title derived from the adjectives most often used to describe Kate Winslet fans... COMIC BOOK CONFRONTATIONAL>> STAR WARS: PRELUDE TO REBELLION (Dark Horse) leads into some film or other that's coming out in the summer. Good thing: it's canonical; bad thing: it therefore has to be set in some far-off galactic backwater so it won't affect the main plot anyway. To be honest, this is sub-Dune galactic economics, enlivened only by cute-looking aliens who haven't mastered basic English sentence structure (a common SW universe failing, we find)... PLANETARY (Wildstorm) launches with a superstrong first issue, featuring a cameo by an evil JLA in a gentle dig at Grant Morrison... but not as excellent as Alan Moore's THE LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN (America's Best Comics) starring all the 19th century adventure fiction greats - Capt Nemo, The Invisible Man - as rendered by Kevin "Marshal Law" O'Neill, the only artist to have his entire *style* banned by the Comics Code Authority. Good to see Moore back with the big companies again - his America's Best Comics is a subline of Wildstorm, itself now a subline of DC, so we should get good runs of all his new books - as hilariously previewed in this month's WIZARD... and finally, sticking with the O'Neil(l)s, we are assured that the "Bill O'Neil" credited as writer on the record-breaking good-girl-art fest WITCHBLADE/ TOMB RAIDER is *no relation* to the "Bill O'Neill" who runs that other action-packed high-tech tit-thrills rollercoaster, the "Online" section in The Guardian... >> 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 "Y0Ua00YOua-00Y00Aa0000e"" http://www.cityline.ru/paravozov-news/23jan99.html 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) 1999 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.