Need To Know 1999-11-26

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"We would like to remind our visitors that all information found on this website is strictly confidential and not to be made public. Media/ Journalists/ Reporters needs a written permission before writing or mentioning any of the information found on InternetHyperGate.com... Hyperlinks without remarks are allowed without prior permission. Other links are not allowed without prior written permission." http://www.internethypergate.com/whoweare.htm ... remarks? we needs a no steenking remarks! (warning: embedded MIDI) >> HARD NEWS << ongoing feuds Right on, Commander! The ongoing dog-fight between Elite co-authors BRABEN and BELL moved to "Dangerous" rating this week: fugitive Bell, whose previous Web site releases of the Elite binaries had been nuked from orbit by Frontier wildsman Braben's military-grade laser, has fought back with a full source release of the original BBC Micro version: all 20KB of glorious retro myth. The site's just a pile of interplanetary scrap metal now, presumably due to the return of Braben's legal Vipers, but not before hundreds of fans had snatched the illegal goods, and Ctrl-H'd out into untraceable hyperspace. Will Braben turn against his fans? Will the rebels of the Reverse-Engineered Elite Source Project receive an unexpected fillup? Keep watching the monochrome starfield, traders! http://home.clara.net/cjpinder/elite.html - longest cheat sheet ever http://www.deja.com/threadmsg_ct.xp?AN=552921070 - Braben decloaking! Red Alert! Aiieeeee! http://www.bigfoot.com/~elite0/ - site of ex-Bell pages. God, I love writing these stories Rumours of hackers breaking into the Tory party's private accounts. The Jeffrey Archer site discussion forum closed following the posting of hundreds of abusive messages. Delays and chaos regarding Ken Livingstone's nomination. Who could possibly be organising such a high-tech assault on Her Majesty's Government and Opposition? Maybe the new Bond film has twisted our perceptions, but we do not deem it unrelated that CLIVE SINCLAIR chose this moment to reveal his candidature for Mayor of London. Zikes for public transport policy; Mensa members placed in all positions of power; and a threat to sabotage every nuclear power station running on a ZX81. Ah, yes, under the leadership of our own uncle Clive, we shall be avenged! WE SHALL BE AVENGED! http://www.nvg.ntnu.no/sinclair/index2.htm - 16K and a mule http://www.ntk.net/doh/19991126arch.jpg - the ad banner oracle speaks Finally: as some of you might have noticed, while the Queen's speech killed the weird "guilty until proven innocent" clauses in the Electronic Communications (nee E-Commerce) Bill, we're expecting them to emerge in the Home Office's interception of communications re-think later this parliament. Due to an unfortunate tendency on behalf of our readers (and ourselves) to interpret anything we say as sarcastic, we can't tell you outright what the impact of those clauses would be on personal liberty. But that's okay, because RMS is far better at this than we'll ever be. We'll keep an eye on the legislation if you do too. And if we both end up in prison because of it, we'll help with the tunnelling too. http://linuxtoday.com/story.php3?sn=12846 - of course, this is the fault of our restrictive gun laws http://www.abc.net.au/news/1999/11/item19991125231757_1.htm - and then they came for you, Australia... >> ANTI-NEWS << berating the obvious "cable porn" as altavista search entry ... VIRGIN NET send out the Perl source to their What's New bulkmailer - as the What's New bulk mail ... the Wu Tang name for "Dave Whiner" more accurate ... HOWARD STERN tries to close down www.howardsterndivorce.com ... strange URLs afoot at Compaq: http://vcmproapp04.compaq.com/falco/ ... Irish government refuses access to files on MIT Media Lab's Dublin campus, on grounds that it would be "contrary to public interest" - Jesus, what is Negroponte *doing* out there? ... LABOUR PARTY "stockpiling millions of e-mail addresses" to fight election: hope they're fakemailing them from the Conservatives ... hope it wasn't too urgent - http://www.ntk.net/doh/19991126urg.gif ... not quite the "Hardknox artist's Website" they were expecting: http://music.tucows.com/artists/hardknox/ ... innovative new turntable "follows the laws of physics" http://www.d-bell.dircon.co.uk/pink/anniver.htm ... a little haXXor help from the Halifax: http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/business/newsid_538000/538285.stm ... O'Reilly publications: good, but not *that* good: http://www.ntk.net/doh/19991126ora.gif ... >> EVENT QUEUE << goto's considered non-harmful Yeah, we forgot it was Buy Nothing day today too, but never mind, once you've wolfed down that McDonalds, why not splash out on some [INCITEMENT TO VIOLENCE DELETED] and pop on your [PROVOCATION TO CIVIL UNREST REMOVED] to celebrate next Tuesday's November 30 protests, which include ... well, not much, actually, despite the Proper Media's best attempts to claim that protesters are "massing on the Internet". Although we're intrigued by the Reclaim The Railways protest at Euston. What does this mean? Reclaim it from the *trains*? Make it safe for pedestrians and people with those manual-powered trolleys you see in cartoons? http://www.gn.apc.org/rts/9911lies.htm - "maintaining the anarchist namespace" http://www.tao.ca/~lombrenoire/ - you see? you're cooler than you thought. http://www.guardianunlimited.co.uk/eventsandoffers/article/0,5992,100170,00.html - doing our bit to smash the capitalist scum Remember: 1999-12-01 is A DAY WITHOUT DAVE WINER ((DW)^2) Please help: http://www.bradlands.com/dww/about.html >> TRACKING << making good use of the things that we find When people ask us what our favourite OS is, we like to say "we hate them all equally". But sometimes, an amazing innovation in computer science occurs which changes, well, everything. Announcing NTK's official operating system for the new millennium: HARRIXOS. Harrixos is everything we'd ever want from a kernel and more: great UI, incredibly structured architecture, with future support for DVD, USB, Firewire and as the self-effacing author Harris notes, "all the kinds of things that make an OS ROCK!". Originally designed for the Atari800XL, HARRIXOS would surely have smashed Microsoft's monopoly on the OS market years ago, were it not for a few inevitable delays in shipping, and dare we say it, an element of Redmond-driven sabotage during the 3.08 beta trials. But, like OS fanatics everywhere, we won't let these petty set-backs defeat us. Ladies and gentleman, the most significant pre-announcement you will ever see. We give you: HARRIXOS. http://www.harrixos.co.uk/ - and best of all, it's British! >> MEMEPOOL << hasta la altavista great idea for new Apple campaign: http://europe.cnn.com/ASIANOW/east/9911/22/taiwan.hitler.ap/ ... ... Playing Soul Calibur with the Bass Fishing Rod controller ... sending messages via error logs ... MONKEY on video by 1Q2000! ... those crazy voidstrs: http://www.slab.org/void/music/ (thanks for the party, guys) ... new TERMINATOR films (3 & 4) feature "next generation" cyber-assassin, able to assume the form of *any* member of The Village People ... satire that's worth it: http://www.ms-monopoly.com/monopoly.php3 ... Description: Floating Nun with gentle gliding action - http://www.electromics.com/Floating_Nun/Floating_Nun.html ... "We do not discuss it with outsiders": http://www.geocities.com/Area51/6559/klingon.html ... http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/talking_point/newsid_533000/533336.stm vs http://www.theonion.com/onion3542/wdyt_3542.html ... recipe for scholastic disaster: http://ojps.aip.org/journal_cgi/dbt?KEY=AJPIAS&Volume=CURVOL&Issue=CURISS#MAJOR4 ... hey nonny-nonny noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo! http://artists.mp3s.com/artists/60/johnny_morris_.html >> GEEK MEDIA << the less rude http://www.tvgohome.com/ FILM>> yeah, we'd be interested in seeing Kevin Williamson or Michael Bay direct a Bond movie, but unfortunately the 37th in the series of "action films for people who don't normally go to action films" TOMORROW'S WORLD NEVER SAYS DIE ENOUGH AGAIN (imdb: promotional abbreviation - TWINE) merely recycles the usual boat chases, ski chases and dreadful walk-ons by British character actors, in a thrillingly tortuous storyline involving - get this! - an *international oil pipeline*! Still, at least Denise "Starship Troopers" Richards dresses up as Lara Croft for no readily apparent reason... less plot, more stunts in rip-roaringly Gallic comic-book auto pursuit no-brainer TAXI (imdb: taxi / car / chase / hold-up / motorcycle / police) - apparently not up to Luc Besson's usual standards, but when that includes The Fifth Element, god help us all. Oh, and it's not particularly closely based around the 1980s Charles/ Burrows/ Charles sitcom of the same name (they haven't even kept the theme tune!)... "Charlize Theron is not even naked in it" complains one imdb user of sci-fi yawnathon THE ASTRONAUT'S WIFE (http://www.capalert.com/capreports/ : doom violence; death after self-inflicted facial injury; fall down stairs by pregnant woman; leaving a cab without paying the fare; hateful shouting; man giving a woman a bath and flashes of it) - imagine an upmarket Johnny Depp "Rosemary's Baby" remake of "Species", a film whose only merits lie in its trashy B-movie (lack of) aspirations... TV>> BBC CHILDREN IN NEED eats Friday night's BBC1 schedule. Featuring no Dr Who, but time-travel of a sort in "Eastenders 1666" and "Riverdance - Dancing on Dangerous Ground" - hopefully some kind of minefield... Satellite viewers can take two fistfulls of the controversial post-Columbine BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER (Fri, 20:00, Sky1) season finale "Graduation Day"... Another chance to catch "Dune Guy" in TWIN PEAKS: FIRE WALK WITH ME (Sun, 23:20, BBC2) which Lynch apparently filmed, frame for frame, in reverse order, with the actors delivering their lines in reverse phonetics... if you're asking yourself if the basketball being dribbled by Jim Carrey in black-comedy THE CABLE GUY (Sun, 22:00, C4) is real or computer generated, you've probably missed the film's satirical point about television culture - and we don't blame you... "From the creator of seaQuest DSV" trumpets the publicity FARSCAPE (Mon, 18:20, BBC2): a family-friendly Muppet Lexx-a-like... An evening of malformed URLS is promised by C5's INTERNET NIGHT wherein the mysterious chaotic forces of scheduling have managed to clash "The Fugitive - but with a PowerBook" movie spin-off THE NET (Wed, 21:00, C5) with "IRL" cases of women harrassed on the net in 21ST CENTURY STALKING (Wed, 22:15, BBC1). Later, C5 offers its own perspective on the issue of WOMEN ON THE WEB, (Web, 23:20, C5) - profiling the girls who strip for webcams... GOOFLET>> A little birdie (and some further research in the ICANN minutes) showed that NSI wanted to keep the old whois format, despite our claims last week, but were overruled by the other registrars. And they've set up an Old Skool whois at whois.networksolutions.com to help folk with broken scripts. NTK regrets the slur. Not much, because it's NSI. But a bit. >> 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 "free from luser sub-editors" NEED TO KNOW THEY STOLE OUR REVOLUTION. NOW WE'RE STEALING IT BACK. Archive - http://www.ntk.net/ Unsubscribe? Mail ntknow-unsubscribe@lists.ntk.net Subscribe? Mail ntknow-subscribe@lists.ntk.net NTK now is supported by UNFORTU.NET, and by you: http://www.ntk.net/books NTK IS WRITTEN USING HARRIXOS: OS OF THE NEW MILLENNIUM (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.