Need To Know 2000-03-17

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"This web site violates all the Internet rules. It is all text. More material is available this way. The MIDI file 'Oh The Blood Of Jesus' plays continuously on every page. Demons hate this." - online exorcist Stanley Madrak at http://www.demonbuster.com/ ...especially if they're browsing in a work environment >> HARD NEWS << and blue goo Tip to Lastminute: the trick with these flotations is to give a chance for your original investors to sell out before the hoi-polloi take a look at the long-term prospects, then run out of the market screaming. Indeed, the biggest problem with lastminute's punt was that just how obviously they were putting the boat out too early (obvious, except for maybe hacks blinded by the instant human interest appeal of Martha Lane Fox). For one thing, it was painted all over the prospectus. As NTK subscriber Alex Balfour writes: "from the prospectus details, and my calculations, at a minimal budget of 5.5 million, Lastminute needs to make around 403,500 sales a year to make ends meet. Judging by their current subscriber/purchase ratio, that requires 207,000 paying users - or 15.8 million subscribers overall. If they carry on spending 25 million a year, they need to sell 2 million items. Which requires 78 million subscribers - or more than the entire population of the UK." Actually, we're not too worried about Lastminute surviving: but it's hardly the ideal poster child for the British Net boom. And what makes that scary is that it's the only UK floated Website that we remember any of us actually *visiting*. http://www.lastminute.com/ - poster child, like in that Vietnam napalm pic http://www.ntk.net/2000/03/17/lastminute.gif - mind you, there's overpriced and overpriced St Patrick's Day, and a fitting time to answer a few mails we've had regarding the RIP Bill. Given, say our correspondents, the new insecurities installed into ISPs by the Bill would a solution be to log onto Irish ISPs, given their government's more enlightened approach to preserving privacy? Well, sadly no: thanks to a separate section of the same bill, the Home Secretary has the right to request mass monitoring of any "external communications", which is to say, any packet passing over UK borders. So, unless you have encryption on the phone line itself, this would actually make it *easier* to loosen your own security. However, we should point out that RIP might well be the perfect moment for Dutch or Irish entrepreneurs to introduce a Freedom server - which *does* provide point-to-point encryption - in their own country, and then charge a modest fee for UK users. Given that this is an area which, by RIP law, is now a proscribed practice in this country, feel free to take over this market. Emphasis on the word "free", there. http://www.freedom.net/ - there we go, affecting the "economic well-being of the UK" again http://www.statewatch.org/secreteurope.html - on the other hand, we're all Europeans now, unfortunately http://www.online.ie/technology/technoculture/index.adp?id=5916 - last bastion of free speech. And weird HTMLification. The latest Biblical curse to hit the racks at TELEHOUSE EAST: showers of goo. A fault in what appears to be the fire supressant system means that blue glycol has been dripping from the ceiling onto the servers at TFM40. Fortunately, the company was quick to alleviate the problem - by throwing over bits of plastic sheeting. We should point out that co-location centers other than Telehouse suffer problems; we only report Telehouse's because, well, they always seem to be more amusing. For instance: what happens when there really *is* a fire? Do the servers get instantly drenched in this stuff? http://www.telehouse.net/english/index_english.htm - don't look up! >> ANTI-NEWS << berating the obvious MICROSOFT team up with REALNAMES, ANDERSEN CONSULTING: DOJ fears Net monopoly of stupidity ... unfortunate banner ad placements, pt. 256: http://www.ntk.net/2000/03/17/beastwars.jpg ... "Sun Microsystems, the Silicon Valley company that devised JavaScript", reports THE INDEPENDENT, putting the doh into dot com ... TELEGRAPH runs old Salon "haiku error messages" story, believes it to be true ... GAMESPOT GDC coverage reveals Gates to be Darth Sidious: http://www.ntk.net/2000/03/17/sithgates.jpg ... the importance of correct spelling in search terms demonstrated by: http://ads.freshmeat.net/spra0003en.gif ... use country code "999" at http://www.primeris.com/fonefind/ for instant slack ... PENTHOUSE goes after the anonymous coward market: http://www.ntk.net/2000/03/17/slashhouse.jpg ... we hope this *isn't* a doh: http://www.ntk.net/2000/03/17/dohinfront.jpg >> EVENT QUEUE << goto's considered non-harmful A far-flung nation of rugged, but cheery, salt-of-the-earth individuals, riven by sectarian divides, nonetheless come together on one special day to raise a glass to their patron saint - St Clive of Sinclair - to celebrate the 20TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE ZX80. In fact, the only organised event seems to be in Germany, where the ZX-TEAM will be partying all weekend in Fulda (near Frankfurt) - but don't let that stop you hosting your own, or perhaps just wearing your "lucky" 4-MHz CPU. (Also, we've neglected to obtain precise details of tomorrow's Kevin Warwick public lecture at Reading Uni - if you're going, remember: Kevin Warwick Watch's mission is only to *observe* this vital stage in human history - never to interfere...) http://home.t-online.de/home/p.liebert/zx-team.htm - we know, it was 3.something MHz, so don't write in, OK? http://www.home-micros.freeserve.co.uk/zx80/zx80.html - or build your own and overclock it... Quickie reminder: Scrambling for Safety 2000, the gathering of great, the good, and the government to discuss the ramifications of the RIP Bill, is happening on Wednesday, 2000-03-22, at the New Theatre, LSE, from 13:30 to 17:45GMT. Be there, and we'll promise to shut up about it for a bit. http://www.fipr.org/sfs2000/ - say, seven days or Ro? http://www.stand.org.uk/ - a thousand faxes served We hit 10,000 official mail subscribers this week. In the original NTK "business" "plan", this signals the beginning of Phase II, which involved shutting the whole thing down and moving to California. We've had to tweak this slightly, as a) most of you don't subscribe now but read this on the Website (can't you even take our terrible URL-to-HTML parser as a hint?), and b) we're beginning to enjoy the bribes. This week, it was a $20 dollar gift voucher from Amazon, which guarantees our continuing use of their associate program in the face of the ongoing anti-patent blockade. A little out of character, perhaps, but easily remedied by *EITHER* Tim O'Reilly sending us a complimentary copy of Unix Power Tools, *OR* Dave Winer posting a hundred-"o" Cooool to his front page. Your move, compadres. But never let it be said that we don't stand by our principles. Danny *is* moving to California, albeit in pursuit of some tryst with a cute UI designer rather than the assassination of entire Wired/Lycos board of directors, as expected. Farewell party/lynch mob forms at the Mitre Pub, on Craven Terrace, near Lancaster Gate tube, London at 7pm today. Free "lucky dip" of his broken PDA collection for early attendees. http://www.streetmap.co.uk/streetmap.dll?grid2map?X=526466&Y=180901&arrow=Y - always assuming we get this out before midnight http://www.ntk.net/books/ - look, we're just too lazy right now, okay? http://slashdot.org/index.pl?section=books - and not the only ones, it seems. >> TRACKING << sufficiently advanced technology : the gathering Napster, Napster, Napster, Nullsoft's GNUTELLA, and then (shortly after AOL's management find out what their subsidiary is doing) just Napster again. Do the guys from Northeastern Uni have a monopoly on MP3 tradez? Maybe: but at least their protocol is now open enough for other interfaces to spring up. From the grabbag sent to us by - oh we don't know, but his Napster handle appears to be y0z: the Perl module for automated searching, written by Lincoln "CGI.pm" Stein lets you cope with those automatic mass gets. NapAmp is a WinAmp plugin to save you that tiring Alt-Tabbing between applications. INapster lets you create a Web interface to RIAA's most wanted (useful for dodging those college firewalls). And finally, Nap, which is a text only interface which - unlike the others we tried - appears to actually work. No source though. Boo! http://search.cpan.org/doc/LDS/MP3-Napster-0.96/Napster.pm - "hard coded to search for Beatles songs" http://members.optusnet.com.au/~iwade/inapster/ - Australian. Lot of experience with evading filters there. http://www.gis.net/~nite/ - it's a shame "we want our nap" isn't so MTV-catchy http://napamp.cjb.net/ - written by somebody from off ITV's Magpie, by the look of it >> MEMEPOOL << hasta la altavista No-Archive-Not: http://archives.mfn.org/ ... DANCE, DOC-TOR! http://rtf.kracked.com/drwho/ ... troll central: http://www.baiting.org/ ... http://www.advogato.org/ ... http://interactive.wsj.com/articles/SB953147051874046328.htm vs http://www.blowthedotoutyourass.com/ ... THE SIMS movies: http://www.wrongwaygoback.com/thesims/ ... ROBERT AXELROD's next book covers LINUX ... searching for "cunt" at another.com , while http://i.am/a.cunt points to ... http://www.microsoft.eu.org ... http://www.dullmen.com/ vs http://www.mundanebehavior.org/ ... disgruntled Webmaster strikes back at cow orkers: http://www.cwp.org/staff.htm ... probably not the best way to spread your revolutionary theory: http://www.earthnewtheory.com.br ... CNN imitates Onion http://www.cnn.com/2000/FOOD/news/03/13/got.beer.ap/ ... "The Backstreet Boys quickly learn that the curvaceous interstellar visitor is on a dire mission to protect the Earth from an approaching alien invasion. " - dire indeed, Stan: http://www.backstreetproject.com/ ... life imitates Stephen King : http://www.bergenrecord.com/news/dente200003154.htm >> GEEK MEDIA << get out less TV>> expensive digital effects and dire sub-60s scripting take Reeves and Mortimer further into that yawning middle-ground between funny *ideas* and funny *shows*, in inexplicably remade RANDALL AND HOPKIRK (DECEASED) (8.55pm, Sat, BBC1)... Sandra Bullock's kooky charms fail to keep anyone awake in soporific rom-com WHILE YOU WERE SLEEPING (9.55pm, Sat, ITV)... and Total Film's Cam Winstanley blabs about filmstars' porno pasts in Graham Norton's HOLLYWOOD UNZIPPED (10.30pm, Sat, C4) - part of a "harrowing viewing" theme night which includes THE RETURN OF A CLOCKWORK ORANGE (11.30pm, Sat, C4) plus Aussie skinhead beat-em-up ROMPER STOMPER (12.40pm, Sat, C4)... Howard Stern shows Chris Evans how zoo radio *should* be done in PRIVATE PARTS (10pm, Sun, C4)... only the third opportunity for Kevin Warwick to grace our screens in as many days - see also CYBERWAR (9.30am, Sat, BBC2) and FUTURE WARS (5.55pm, Sun, BBC2) - TECHNO GAMES (6ish, Mon-Fri, BBC2) is actually a Robot Wars/ Great Egg Race hybrid, not a Gladiators-style face-off between techno acts like 2 Unlimited and ATB ... while "typically overlong misogynist Harrier ad" is what we usually say about Jim Cameron Arnie actioner TRUE LIES (9.35pm, Wed, BBC1) - and we see no reason to change it now... Philippa Forrester presides over two possible Kevin Warwick windows - Science Week's TOMORROW'S WORLD LIVE LAB (8pm, Wed, BBC1) and the more promising ROBOCRITTERS (9.30pm, Thu, BBC2)... DISPATCHES (9pm, Thu, C4) risks annoying ELSPA and Quake players alike by claiming Doom-inspired Columbine- style massacres "could soon happen here"... while that Chris Morris dude drops the "Blue" element - and the post-midnight timeslot - for the rather more prosaically titled "surreal sketch show" JAM (10.30pm, Thu, C4)... FILM>> another week of overrated arthouse bullshit, we're afraid, dominated largely by Kubrick's stylish but vacuous CLOCKWORK ORANGE (imdb: cult-favorite / based-on-novel / psychological / futuristic / controversial / satire / music / time-lapse-photography / eye / nazi / violence / rape / william-tell-overture / writing / brainwash / stylization / sexuality / juvenile-delinquent / surreal / black-comedy / milk) - hey, it takes a real maestro to make a film about ultra-violence this dull... yet another late-night 6th-form conversation - "Yeah, what if you could climb inside someone else's head? Yeah, think about it" - masquerading as a plot in Spike "spoilt rich kid" Jonze's inventively disappointing BEING JOHN MALKOVICH (imdb: body-swap / surreal / possession / puppet-master / puppet-show / satire / adultery / independent- film / chimpanzee / celebrity / identity-swap) - based on the fallacious assumption that it's tough to make a living as a puppeteer nowadays, when in fact the continued success of Sooty, the Muppets and the Hula Hoop ad proves *they've never had it so good*... that said, either of the above is probably a better bet than Michael Caine/ Charlize Theron's worthy historo-issues-drama Oscar-bait THE CIDER HOUSE RULES (http://www.capalert.com/capreports/ : knife attack with injuries; a child kicking a man's car because of sadness; promotion of sexual independence and autonomy; offering abortion as a "cure" to the consequences of incest; intercourse and other nudity with and by the "Mighty Joe Young" girl - I don't care what her name is; the male version of "Titanic"), which currently features the poster-quote "Makes Going To The Movies A Joy!" (The Today Show) - as opposed to the fricking chore it usually is, we imagine... MILD DISTORTION AND HEAVY FEEBDACK>> constituting our largest single-issue postbag since the time we (wrongly) claimed that Jamie Lee Curtis was married to John Carpenter [NTK 2000-02- 05], thanks to the (almost 100) of you who indignantly wrote to say that "Joan Of Arc" was of course recorded by OMD, rather than Ultravox [NTK 2000-03-10] - or "fugging Ultravox ... FAGS" as one (anonymous) reader felt the need to clarify. "While the two are not always easy to distinguish," elaborated harvard.edu's AARON MANDEL, "I've never had a prison inmate call my radio show collect demanding to hear OMD, while Ultravox received that honor sometime last year." NTK regrets the error, though largely for the demographic insights it inadvertently provided... still on Jamie Lee Curtis, IAN WATTERS then accused the 'score' original soundtrack for Beverly Hills Cop II of being "staggeringly similar to the wonderful Escape From New York score", though unfortunately we may have to drop that thread, Ian, after an anonymous tipster advised "do not even think about trying to do music reviews again", following NTK 2000-02-04's Ultravox-heavy round-up... fear not, "Red Book Audio" will return when circumstances warrant; meanwhile, just to clear up a couple of legacy queries: "NICK DRAGE was not hallucinating about the Daphne and Celeste video," confided another anonymous source [re NTK 2000-02-04], "it's just that after its third expected release they really wanted to get the video right and decided to throw more cash at it. Not that it came out any better", before going on to warn the world that Billie "is about to start recording her own TV show, in a similar vein to the 'Cleopatra' one. Same production team, same crew, same scripts, still unfunny"... and finally, a better-than-usual crop of reader's MP3s arrived this month, including: Alec "Atari Teenage Riot" Empire meets Philip Glass on the set of Police Squad megamix http://www.stub.org/mix1.html ; comedy Spice race http://artists.mp3s.com/artists/93/jimmy_2000.html ; plus industrial mac-users http://www.smallcreep.com . But pick of the lot - if only because it follows *to the letter* the spec for our Christmas Jingle compo [NTK 1899-12-31 - sic] - is http://www.ntk.net/2000/03/17/ntk-jingle-long.mp3 from JOSH ROULSTON. Well done, Josh, your obedience will be rewarded - when your tune plays as NTK triumphantly takes the stage at Boston's GEEK PRIDE http://www.geekpride.org/ at the end of the month... >> 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. Registered at the Post Office as "Now That's Knowledge!" http://tv.cream.org/gorilla/dg.htm 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 (K) 2000 Special Projects. 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