Need To Know 1999-08-13

archive

"GM really gets it. And it's fun to be here. An automobile is just a Java browser with tires." - SCOTT MCNEALY ...and when it goes this slowly, who cares how often it crashes? >> HARD NEWS << loony views Signs and portents, portents and signs. It wasn't the end of the world, but for those who take their miracles seriously, the start of LinuxWorld was damn close enough. Robert Young, CEO of RED HAT, became the first open software advocate to hit 750 million dollars net worth. Accordingly, the skies went dark over Europe. No Mir crashed on Paris, but the Anti-Christ, (either Andy Grove or Jesse Berst depending on how you read your Revelation), did lay down and supped with the penguin. In the Cthulhu country of Massachusetts, Andover.net ate Freshmeat (aliiiiive!), and while the Perseids streamed overhead to signal just how against nature we're taking this, the Linux Fund launched the first Tux Credit Card. Cue thunder on soundtrack. Elsewhere, in the East, the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Peking University began distributing copies of Red Flag Linux. So that'll be the "King of The Mongols" quatrain covered then. These things were NOT MEANT TO BE. http://linuxfund.org/creditcard/ - the mark of the cuddly beast http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/q238/3/28.asp - the end of the world - brought to you by MICROSOFT http://www.zdnet.com/anchordesk/story/story_3723.html - Let me show YOU which SEVEN SEALS mark the TRUE TRIBULATION http://www.lwn.net/1999/0812/a/redflag.html - one simple prophecy: day trading. Chinese day trading. Still, we've still got a few more months before the final unchaining of the Beast. After four and a half years, Kevin Mitnick has received his sentence. The scourge of Christendom received 46 months, and has to pay less than five grand back to the poor corporations who claimed that he'd caused them millions in (unsubstantiated) damages. With good behaviour, Kevin should be out in time for the fall of Babylon at the end of the millennium. Not that he'll be able to have much of a life after that: the judge's release conditions included (from Wired News) a three year ban on "access to computer hardware and software as well as any form of wireless communication... he will also not be permitted to be employed with a company that has computers or computer access on its premises. He is further prohibited from possessing any kind of passwords, cellular phone codes, or data encryption devices. And the conditions of his release ban access to any new or future technology that may act as a computer or provide access to one." Which means by our estimation that about the only job he *could* get is as a high court judge. http://www.wired.com/news/print_version/politics/story/21197.html?wnpg=all - things that have changed since Kevin was imprisoned: wired.com readable http://www.kevinmitnick.com/home.html - ... crackers learn how to craft press releases We don't usually get a peep from BT's MARTLESHAM LABS (it's hard to type when you have one of those Cochrane portable offices hanging manacle-like off your wrist), so we'll run this as "spookily unsubstantiated". An anonymous tipster writes: "300 R&D engineers currently living in the technological Dark Ages at BT Labs are to be dragged kicking and screaming into the exciting 'new' world of... er...TCP/IP." A big chunk of budget and R&D (which whenever we try to find out what they're doing, seems to be MIT Media Lab research with a BT logo stuck on the top) is currently on hold as Britain's greatest minds are dragged kicking and screaming into 1994. Which might, our correspondent says, explain why ADSL is taking so long to deliver. Far be it from us to be so charitable... Oh, and they've renamed it Adastral Park. Well, it worked for Windscale, didn't it? http://www.labs.bt.com/ - remember folks, not from the work e-mail >> ANTI-NEWS << berating the obvious second chance to see: http://www.eclipse99.co.uk/... KANSAS school board drops evolution - cites "all that Kevin Kelly bullshit" as clincher... PACE modems - Falco!... could do better: http://www.openclassroom.org/services/ (and what did they do to Tux's arm?)... FIREFLY Website shut down by MICROSOFT: salt ploughed into soil, wives and sons sold into slavery... the (electromagnetic) force is strong in these ones! http://centres.iee.org.uk/Younger/YMC/challenge.htm ... http://www.netscapeonline.co.uk/ runs AOLServer, exim... textual doh: finger status@gate.demon.co.uk (page down to 15:25 Aug 12)... IRIDIUM defaults on loans - bankers: watch out for those reverse-charge calls... Met Office uses supercomputer capable of "80,000 calculations a second", reports TELEGRAPH... AOL running "No wonder we're number one" TV ads again - "number one" what, exactly?... even "whiny crybabies" use proper capitals for AGENCY.COM: http://209.10.98.26/forumspost/message_board.cfm?cfapp=5&forum_id=6043 >> EVENT QUEUE << goto's considered non-harmful A "computer/communications-related" sandcastle contest and the "Hacker Jeopardy" quiz (finding their own uses for Coronation Street trivia) are the main sideshows tempting us to Blackpool this Saturday for the SECONDARY DNS CON (from Fri evening 1999-08-13/15, Norbrek Castle Hotel) - though their News page reveals that the prizes might just be dusty old DOS books that other delegates are trying to get rid of. Handily, there's a "genuine" computer security conference on at around the same time, with a sliding entrance tariff - newbie, hacker, elite etc - incorporating donations to some sort of charity. *Which* charity, they don't say, but c'mon - if you can't trust this country's brilliant, misguided youth, who can you trust? http://www.dnscon.org/ - so, next year will it be *Tertiary* DNS Con? And having missed last week's Edinburgh Fringe round-up by failing to put risible trigger-words "multimedia", "cyber" or "virtual" in their programme description, Quake movie pioneers STRANGE COMPANY got in touch to plug their "Machinima Showcase" of 3D realtime animations (oh, alright - Quake movies) on every day at 4.30-5.30pm, the Outhouse Cafe Bar, Broughton St Lane, Edinburgh until 1999-09-03, admission free. From the folks who brought you Eschaton: Darkening Twilight and Eschaton: Nightfall comes a demo, a talk, and the world preview of the "Special Edition" of Eschaton: Nightfall, featuring "proper emotions and lip-synching" and a female character who looks "less like a man in drag". T-shirts will also be on sale bearing Strange Company's viral new slogan: "Memes don't exist. Tell your friends." http://www.strangecompany.org/ - hey, it's no "Homosexual Film Reviewers" [NTK 1999-07-31] >> TRACKING << making good use of the things that we find We're sure there's a very good reason why the Independent and Guardian make it so chokingly hard to search through their back-issues online. It's definitely not that if *everyone* could trawl the clippings library, everyone would realise quite how lame those Pass Notes columns were, or you could tabulate the massive inconsistencies of all their columnists . No, no, no: Must be some very complex licensing issue. Which makes it all the odder when the FT opens up their archive - which includes full-text lists of the above papers, plus 3,000 global news sources like Newsbytes, The Economist, Der Spiegel, and the American Paints and Coatings Journal, entirely for free. It's just for the next ten days, and the missing chunks, poor formatting, and typos are a bit distracting (people *pay* for this?) but if you're really handy with your Perl, that should let you pull down the whole of the last three years' news in one gulp. You're supposed to register and give the FT your postcode. Say thank you to Mr Login-Cypherpunk Password-Cypherpunk, everyone. http://www.ft.com/ - more Guardian text than the Guardian's own http://www.independent.co.uk/ - it thinks it's unarchived - do you? >> MEMEPOOL << hasta la altavista FREEEEEEEDOM! http://www.guestdirect.co.uk/sco/ ... One2One: We Have Ways Of Making Your Talktime ... don't stare at http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/data/realtime-update.html ... playing SOUTH PARK at 0.7 speed to hear Matt & Trey's real voices ... ironic "must-see" recommendations http://www.blindsidereviews.com/ ... Check out the titles on http://3626035430/cgi/get?ff_join:!NEW_COOKY*itn/ord=NEWREC,itn/air/unitedair http://mappa.mundi.net/ ... BIG-TRAK gets go-faster stripes http://www.turboz.com/ ... http://www.slashdot.org/favicon.ico - exactly ... "quality alternative to Mountain Dew... superior in taste to Dr Pepper" - shock of the NEW JOLTS http://www.joltcola.com/newflav.html ... Chris Morris+Peter Cook= http://www.geocities.com/SunsetStrip/Street/4229/ ... >> GEEK MEDIA << GM that forms part of your weekly diet TV>> post-Austin Powers, that "Nude Practice" gag is wearing a bit thin in THE ARMSTRONG AND MILLER SHOW (10.30pm, Fri, C4) - Stryka, however, rock... 4Later reshow pop video director profiles MIRRORBALL (1.10am, Fri, C4) - this week, featuring Spike "Sabotage" Jonze... plus an attempt "to unravel mysteries of the human condition" in BLESSING AND CURSE (3.15am, Fri, C4) - via the expert aid of Damon Albarn (a blessing if it stops him singing), and accursed "comedienne" Jenny Eclair... remember, you must "think in Russian" to enjoy Eastwood's lengthy preamble to laserdisc arcade classic FIREFOX (2.45pm, Sat, most ITV)... two "geek" brothers are the enemy of soon-to-be-axed techno tosh BUGS (6.05pm, Sat, BBC1)... not to be confused with a mother's struggle to educate her two autistic sons in VIDEO DIARIES (11.55pm, Sun, BBC2)... David Duchovny shows more than just his admiration in the last ever LARRY SANDERS (10.55pm, Sun, BBC2)... followed by the underrated second part of Kevin Smith's "New Jersey" trilogy, MALLRATS (11.55pm, Sun, BBC2)... and while it's good to have POP-UP VIDEO back (10.30am, Mon, C4), half the captions are now obscured by "The Bigger Breakfast" logo... former BT ad girl "No Dad I want to talk to you!" is buried alive in clearly-commissioned-last-summer road-protester drama UNDERGROUND (10.40pm, Mon, C4)... the Soundgarden title sequence is the most exciting bit of well-meaning slacker media satire SFW (11.45pm, Mon, C4)... and does Paula Yates think her "auto-erotic asphyxiation, not suicide" theory will somehow enhance her ex's reputation in IN EXCESS: DEATH OF MICHAEL HUTCHENCE (10pm, Tue, C4)?... in Japan, leisurely Robert Redford pseudo-clipper chip hacker romp SNEAKERS (10.20pm, Wed, BBC1) is known as "Cybernet", while their late-night low-budget video games round-up is called "Sneakers"... and what are the chances that they can't afford any lengthy "Indiana Jones And The Raiders Of The Lost Ark" (sic) clips for the "real" backstory in SECRET HISTORY SPECIAL: HITLER'S SEARCH FOR THE HOLY GRAIL (8.30pm, Thu, C4)?... FILM>> oddly, intentionally unpleasant juvenile steampunk Bond spoof WILD WILD WEST (http://www.capalert.com/ : a realistic self stab with a knife to deflate a prosthetic device; talk of slaughtering women and children for target practice; normally fatal fall; implied nudity; fight while nude; sequence of homosexual suggestion; discussion of how false breasts can be made to feel more realistic) isn't *too* bad - at least by the paltry standards of Warner blockbuster TV remakes (The Avengers, Batman And Robin) and Barry Sonnenfeld (Men In Black, The Addams Family, Get Shorty). Plus, it gets a comprehensive entry at the "Celebrity Nudity Database" http://cndb.com/ , while Entertainment Weekly makes the pertinent point about the poster: who the hell is going to go see it because they *think it's a Kevin Kline movie?*... otherwise it's a choice between Larry "Kids" Clark's competent James Woods/ Melanie Griffith drug-odyssey ANOTHER DAY IN PARADISE (http://www.bbfc.co.uk/ : uncut, passed '18' for coarse language, sex, drug use and gory violence) - not, it appears, based around the Phil Collins song of the same name... or Sean Connery/ Gillian Anderson / Angelina "Hackers" Jolie in luvvie-duvvie yuppie ensemble drama PLAYING BY HEART (imdb: previously called "Dancing About Architecture" till they got warned off by recent Irish non-starter "Dancing At Lufthansa"). And anyway, the quote is "writing about music" is like "dancing about architecture", not "talking about love". Isn't it?... BUMPER "BONERS" SUMMER SPECIAL>> well done to all of you who pointed out minor errors in our traditionally lackadaisical silly season issues, with the share-the-schadenfreude award going to JIM HUGUELET, the only person to spot that NTK 1999-07-30's mention of "Imprise" should - of course - been "Inprise". "Long live Delphi!" Jim concludes - and we're sure he means the programming language, not the short-lived pseudo-ISP... erstwhile "Internet Weatherman" JAMES COATES clarified our "Orange Wildfire Easter Eggs" coverage [also NTK 1999-07-30] by emphasising that you need to say "Do me a favour" before "I'm depressed". The fact that responses include "When that happens to me I just break out my William Shatner album" has been drawn to the attention of the LA County Coroner's office... PHILIP CORNER was justly aggrieved over our butchery of his World Of Amiga report [NTK 1999-07-30 - look, it was a busy week, OK?], fearing some readers would think the "new" Amiga was still 18 months away. Hey, 5 months, 18 months - what's a year or so when you've already waited nearly a decade?... and, finally, no less than two readers leapt to the defence of QNX, following our reporting of a claim in - you guessed it - NTK 1999-07-30 that it "has less of an industry profile today than the Atari ST". MALCOLM PACK asserts it to be indispensable for "real-time data capture and manipulation in the power generation industry", while swelling, perky tipster king LLOYD WOOD chipped in with: "All but one of our orbiting satellites run QNX. UoSAT-2 runs Forth." NTK regrets that this correspondence is now closed... >> 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 "no joke here - we just liked the URL" http://www.doh.gov.uk/ 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. Remember: Sending >500KB attachments is forbidden by the Geneva Convention. Your country may be at risk if you fail to comply.