Need To Know 1999-07-16

archive

"For the next couple of weeks, I am reduced to typing with one hand." - PETER COCHRANE, BT RESEARCH LABS, Daily Telegraph ...good to see a writer enjoying his work >> HARD NEWS << an obvious ruse To read the Proper Media, you'd assume that DEFCON 7.0 consisted exclusively of the Cult Of The Dead Cow rerouting the Hoover Dam through Vegas, releasing the infamous "trojan/virus/powerful remote administration utility" Back Orifice 2000 ("Anyone curious enough to log on to their website will find their computer automatically infected with a virus." - The Guardian), then shooting each other. Allow us to inject a few genuine highlights. Best quotes: BRUCE SCHNEIER, who noted that "128 bits of symmetric key is probably good enough 'for ever'", while BT's quantum key exchange over ten miles of cable will be useful "approximately never". The con's most cutting criticism came from those fleeing STEVE "wearable computing" MANN's demo: "Let's blow this shit - who wants to see some robot guy?". Research Least Likely To Be Covered In The Mainstream Media: ANGUS BLITTER's AFIRM - a hacker classification system based, it appears, on AD&D character sheets. What was that? Real hacks? Oh, okay - for that, we choose L0PHT's exploit-in-progress against Intel's Nightshade/Nightlight motherboards' Board Management Controller. Due to flaws in their (plaintext) authentication system, L0pht has been shutting down these babies with 50 bytes up the ethernet. Not crash, not hang: but gracefully power down. As our correspondent writes - fun to see that scale with broadcast packets in a server farm. Did Intel learn nothing from the Borg? http://www.defcon.org/ - fear my weather fu http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,2294628,00.html - that said, the BO2K CD-ROM does have CIH on it... doh! http://www.bo2k.com/ - pronounced "botty kay" http://www.afirm.org/ - chaotic lawful +4 bullshit In the US, they have a gameshow called WIN BEN STEIN'S MONEY, starring the teacher from Ferris Bueller's Day Off. But in the UK, the alternative challenge is to Win MARK BERNSTEIN'S Money, following news that lamer-loving BT call-generator WIREPLAY has been sold to the never-say-Falco Net.speculator who, regular readers will recall, was also involved with VR-losers Virtuality, ill-judged online games-monger E-ON, and the European version of GeoCities (what does that require, exactly - making the "Athens" subdir world-readable?). Wireplay went for "around UKP5.5m" though, of course, if BT were to, say, introduce free local weekend calls any time soon, that's hardly going to improve those ping-times. http://www.midnight.co.uk/entline/new.htm - Bernstein's online gaming empire, circa 1996 http://www.ntk.net/index.cgi?back=archive97/now1107.txt&line=19#l - and you thought your CV made gripping reading http://www.comcentral.com/bstein/index.shtml - UK version actually called "Win *Beadle's* Money". Christ. SNAPPY QUESTIONS FOR DUMB ANSWERS>> (being an occasional series encouraging readers to ruin press conferences by asking smart-arse questions): ALISTAIR DABBS wins this week, with his query at the Acrobat 4.0 launch earlier this year. When Adobe's CHUCK GESCHKE demonstrated how the whole of Apple UK's Website could be converted into a PDF, Alistair asked if Chuck could see the irony of choosing the Apple site for the demo, since this feature is only available in the Windows version. Chuck's instant comeback: Adobe will have added this function to Mac Acrobat 4.0 by launch date. Impressive comeback? "I learnt fifteen minutes later from a whispering Adobe product manager", reveals Alistair, "that this was total bollocks, invented off the cuff by Chuck in order to shut me up." Okay, folks: now it's up to you to remind Chuck of his promise at every public appearance. And remember: the demo is only over when you're forced to leave the building. - Had a cutting, sarcastic brush with the great? mail: cuttysark@spesh.com >> ANTI-NEWS << berating the obvious 7 days before the E-COMMERCE BILL gets canned... IRA to replace Man Utd in FA Cup: http://www.ntk.net/990716arse.gif ... forget DECLAN MCCULLAGH'S teenage hacker years - is NetGravity's JOHN DANNER the former Apple ][ warez king? ... "Unfortunatily you have a browser that is not Y2k compatibale or 4.x or above. This will be a site that will allow people with ghetto browser can see" explains (surely not *the*) http://www.iso.org ... beats scratching on the desk with a compass: http://www.schools-directory.co.uk/ ... CHANNEL 4 SITCOM FESTIVAL idea: oops vicar, aren't all these people clients of the organiser's agent wife?... WIRED NEWS excitedly discusses Robin Hood gay anti-news from "England's Cardiff University"... "By not presenting any menuing options until this page, and not requiring you to scroll pages, we can try to ensure that you read all the content of the site" says http://www.websitedesign.co.uk/ - for anyone who gets that far... BBC ALERT alert... Babelfish, without the fish: http://www.gabby.net/expo/us-venture98/back/0630/0630-e.html ... LONDON UNDERGROUND stored the year in 2 bits? Doh! http://www.yahoo.co.uk/headlines/19990709/london/newsstory154274.html ... excellent DORLING KINDERSLEY warez from - uh oh: http://www.dk.com/uk/shared/product_m_spread.asp?isbn=0751370584&pid=1 >> EVENT QUEUE << goto's considered non-harmful Peer across a desolate grey landscape, abandoned by humans since the mid-Seventies. And once you've made it to the South Bank, why not drop into the Hayward Gallery, and check out FULL MOON: APOLLO MISSION PHOTOGRAPHS OF THE LUNAR LANDSCAPE? (1999-07-22 - 1999-09-19) Photographic artist Michael "Earth" Light's prints are digitally scanned and blown up from the original masters - not the third to fifth generation Athena wall poster tat you're used to. The selection is unique, too, from the 32,000 snaps taken, the press release boasts, "by the astronauts themselves". And if you fancy taking a sample or two home with you, the accompanying coffee-table books aren't bad either: apparently they developed a new ink to show off that, well, inky blackness of space. After all, how much more black can you get? http://www.sbc.org.uk/hayward/h_exh.htm - None more. http://www.geocities.com/Pentagon/2666/MoonHoax2.html - bet Light had to airbrush out the helicopters Sadly, ill-health is preventing fantasy author Mary Gentle from attending BAROQUON, the British Roleplaying Society Convention at New Hall, Cambridge University, 1999-07-16/18 (there's more to life than d20s and "saving throws", you know). Equally gothic are the plans of VOCALTEL agitators to organise a mass coach trip to the offices of semi- medieval ISP Localtel / Screaming.net next Fri (1999-07-23) - details are currently sketchy (ie the old message archive appears to be down); we thought advance warning was best as it's taking them a week to get a working dial-up connection... http://members.tripod.com/vocaltel/ - if you can read this, what are you complaining about? http://www.ntk.net/ads/coach.txt - STOP PRESS: info rescued from regularly shut-down site http://www.philm.demon.co.uk/Baroquon/Main.html - they do have NTK's James Wallis, of whom more later >> TRACKING << making good use of the things that we find We do grind on about Windows replacement shells, don't we? So what are our excuses for plugging GEOSHELL, Yet Another Explorer for Win9x/NT? It's only 80KB? Yawn. It's GPL'd? Yawny yawn yawn yawn. It's written by a Microsoft engineer, whose day job still maintaining the original Explorer.exe? W-wha-wh-ha-hoo-wha? http://www.cybersnot.com/geosh/ - W-wha-wh-ha-hoo-wha indeed. There's something quintessentially UNIXique about NGREP. It's a stubby, simple tool, with thousands of potential (but as yet unforeseen) uses. Also - and this has to be the best indicator of a perfect CLI tool - you've already guessed what it does from the name. Yes, it's a packet sniffer which can pluck out regular expressions from network traffic and pipe them to STDOUT. Like all things UNIX (including UNIX), we expect someone will eventually pervert this beautiful, theoretically and malicious tool for non-evil and practical purposes. In the meantime - have fun. http://www.packetfactory.net/ngrep/ - we reckon grep the word preceded grep the acronym >> MEMEPOOL << hasta la altavista APACHE 10x speedup patch?... all natural FULLERENE... "How do I sue ASK JEEVES for http://www.ntk.net/doh/jeeves.html ?" (also quite helpful on RICKY MARTIN)... E-BAY auctions own server: http://www.bobsfridge.com/skew.htm ... beware! CEO Chan has AGENCY.COM root access... Rock, Paper, Scissors - FRAGS: http://www.planetquake.com/axis/projects/rps/ ... AD-BLOCKER-BLOCKER-BLOCKERS ... EMPIRE Pre-Emptively Strikes Back: http://www.usatoday.com/life/cyber/tech/ctf596.htm - probably keeping an eye on PHANTOM PULP MENACE FICTION: http://users.vei.net/jng/fcp/sw/sw1.html ... they're always the best bits: http://www.adcritic.com ... leaves real JAPANESE names untouched: http://www.stupid.com/japanese.htm ... last day of UKP29.99 PLAYSTATION games, console to go 69.99 in Sept?... and you think this description is obscure: http://www.itknowledge.com/tpj/obfusc-4.html ... at last, a doctoral student in "hyphal tensile strength" reviews http://sun1.bham.ac.uk/s.m.stocks.cen/potnoodle/PotNoodleNav.htm - a vital part of http://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/www/hackdietf.html >> GEEK MEDIA << get out less TV>> the Star Wars/ moon landing alignment prompts some remarkable theming, with ITV's "futuristic" (ie Logan's Run- inspired?) DIAL A DATE SPECIAL (12.40am, Fri, ITV), plus 4Later's double-buffering of classic queue docus STAR WARS - or TATOOINE - OR BUST (12.05am, Fri, C4)... gorge yourself on the feast of Kubrick/ Trumbull eco-weepie 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (2.15pm, Sun, ITV) plus Trumbull/ R2D2 eco-weepie SILENT RUNNING (2.55pm, Sat, BBC2) - who could forget that moving end sequence when the dome-ships join Battlestar Galactica's rag-tag fleet?... attempts continue to revive Gerry Anderson live-actioner UFO (4.20pm, Sat, BBC2), and - of course - elderly car-chase caper THE DUKES OF HAZZARD: REUNION! (5.50pm, Sun, C5)... then the whole thing explosively decompresses in lame Sean Connery space Western OUTLAND (10pm, Sat, C4)... rather than Lucas or Spielberg, HOLLYWOOD'S MASTER OF MYTH (11.10pm, Sun, BBC2) is actually Joseph Campbell - the man who pioneered the revolutionary "character goes somewhere, does something" school of screenwriting... but a quick reminder of how good Spielberg used to be in JAWS (9pm, Sat, BBC1) - the character had "evolved considerably" by the time he re-appeared in THE SPY WHO LOVED ME (8pm, Wed, ITV)... fucking HACKERS (10pm, Mon, C5)... another fly-by for dull-ish FOR THE LOVE OF - LUNAR CONSPIRACY (4am, Tue, C4)... and, in what seems to be a new "chick TV" strand on Weds, C4 have somehow resisted the temptation to combine adjacent shows LOVE IN LEEDS (9pm, Wed, C4) and LOVE IN THE 21ST CENTURY (9.30pm, Wed, C4) to create LOVE IN 21ST CENTURY LEEDS... FILM>> There *is* no "film". There is only STAR WARS - whose box office, MCV reports, may receive a boost from Sega fans keen to see the debut of the UK Dreamcast ads. Oh, and in case anyone's still puzzling over last week's wildly enthusiastic mystery review, it was of course SOUTH PARK: BIGGER, LONGER AND UNCUT - as featured at http://www.capalert.com/capreports/southpark.htm - and not, as many of you thought, "Eyes Wide Shut" after all. South Park *was* linked off their front page when we sent out last week's issue, but subsequently disappeared - disappointingly, not to rise again on the third day. We're all going to burn in hell for this, you know... SHINY ENTERTAINMENT>> many mags trying to boost summer sales with either Star Wars covers or extra nudity (SKY's "The Naked Issue", ESQUIRE's "Gail Porter: The Last Ever Naked Pictures"), yet no-one's dared for the obvious double- whammy: the cast of Star Wars, au naturel... still, admittedly, the Adam & Joe SW bit in THE FACE isn't *too* bad... we never read the media sections, so this may be widely known; some anonymous tipster believes that EMAP has bought ailing Face, Arena, Frank-publishers Wagadon for "16 million quid"... and good to see issue 3 of IPC's LATER is saving cash by running exactly the same cover image as the previous 2... isn't it about time you gave SFX another chance, especially now they - and "Tomorrow's Technology Today" stablemate, T3 - are touting their thrilling, revolutionary web presences - clearly accustomed to the far-off sciences of the future, it's taken them this long to master basic tech of 3-4 years ago... someone involved in new Haymarket rag THE NET complains that we didn't diss its trade ads ("the worst I've ever seen"); his claim that the mag "treats the net as a media, rather than a computer related exercise" should, surely, speak for itself... hopefully a bit more cutting-edge attitude from upcoming CRAZYNET (due September from Freeway - not to be confused with Fleetway), helmed by former "Bizarre" managing ed and RPG self-publisher James Wallis. "Don't describe it as 'BIZARRE about the net'", advises James, "or I'll kill you". Bring it on, big guy... oh, and this section just wouldn't feel complete without slagging the latest OFFICIAL PLAYSTATION MAGAZINE (UKP4.99), this month complementing its shit reviews of shit games and cod Chris Morris-isms with a dire "Analysis" piece on London's Namco World - ie tests of up-to-the-minute coin-ops Alpine Racer 2, Time Crisis 2, Tokyo Wars, and Prop Cycle. And what hard-hitting revelations forced them to tear page 91 out of every issue? Apparently, a Computer Exchange ad that offered a UKP99.99 Dreamcast if you trade in your Playstation. Let's not take that "editorial independence" too far, eh?... >> 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 "who are you calling hermetic?" http://www.bowbrick.com/ntk.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 supported by UNFORTU.NET, and by you: http://www.ntk.net/books (K) 1999 Special Projects. Copying is fine, but include URL: http://www.ntk.net/ Tips, news and gossip to tips@spesh.com - remember your work email may be monitored if sending sensitive material. Caution: Sending >500KB attachments is forbidden by the Geneva Convention. Your country may be at risk if you fail to comply.