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         "Users in the survey who spend more time online were found to
         be more likely to provide information about themselves, the
         study found. However, users who expressed 'little to no
         concern' for Internet privacy were less likely to provide
         details than those who were 'somewhat concerned.'"
                       - REUTERS, on new Andersen Consulting report
               http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,38766,00.html
                              ...and just how did they find this out?


                                >> HARD NEWS <<
                                 fossil fuels

         Crisis? Which crisis? Locally, we share subscriber CAM
         WINSTANLEY's analysis that there's nothing useful petrol can
         do that "two part epoxy glue with industrial floor wax in a
         shopping bag, inhaled deeply" won't replace. However, your
         local apocalypse may be trickier to evade. En France, they'd
         moved on from the Europe-wide MadMax style armageddon to the
         Waterworld-themed Mac Expo, where an unfortunate sprinkler
         mishap drowned most of the exhibitors stalls. Like everyone
         else, we're assuming this was last week's Apple rebels [NTK
         2000-09-08] commenting on the premature release of Aqua. And
         in Australia, riot police fenced off the streets around the
         Crown Casino to prevent suspicious crowds of scruffy-looking
         weirdoes from disrupting the World Economic Forum. Or
         administering their co-loc boxes, as the sysadmins running
         boxes at the nearby Globalcenter DCO discovered. Hey, let us
         in! We're fascists too!
    http://www.theage.com.au/news/gallery/20000911/I58810-2000Sep11.html
                           - Nice LART, man! Where'd you get it?
         http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,2628268,00.html
                                      - oh yeah. that'll work, Apple.
         http://www.planetvom.co.uk/petrol/
                               - oh, and that BP "Fuc You All" pic...
         http://www.ntk.net/2000/09/15/dohitn.gif
                  - ...is from a) Australia (natch), and b) weeks old

         Windows Me: but not *you*, PAUL MARITZ, who resigned from
         Microsoft this week on the eve of the new product launch to
         spend some quality time down at The Village. Maritz, who
         according to himself *didn't* say "We are going to cut off
         [Netscape's] air supply. Everything they're selling, we're
         going to give away for free", no matter what the DOJ, the
         New York Times and an  Intel Vice Prez claimed, was a senior
         VP in charge of Visual C++ and Handing Out Crates of New
         APIs to Goggle-Eyed Developers. Now he's just a regular
         seventy-millionaire Joe. So, who's next? JIM ALLCHIN,
         mild-mannered janitor, who is due to return from a two-month
         "vacation" any day soon? Could be...
         http://biz.yahoo.com/t/81/2872.html
                               - like you wouldn't quit at this point
         http://linuxtoday.com/stories/2699.html
                        - son is a Redhat user, a dismissable offence

         Seems no-one watches, or cares about, the MERCURY MUSIC PRIZE
         any more - or, at the very least, can be bothered to keep an
         eye on its website. Consequently it provided visitors with
         surreal updates throughout the evening, courtesy of some
         "security enthusiasts" off IRC, who managed to award the
         honours to "Toby Slater" (believed friend of Daniel Pemberton
         - see NTKs passim), "Purple Munkie" (sic) and "Badly Drawn
         Boy's hat", before the site was eventually fixed at 10am the
         following morning. Kudos, however, to LEGOLAND UK who have
         stood firm on their company policy of "encouraging youthful
         curiosity" and, at time of writing, are still hosting both the
         DeCSS source code and step-by-step instructions on how to own
         their SQL server, after originally being hacked on Monday.
         http://www.ntk.net/2000/09/15/dohmercury.html
                 - Nitin Sawhney admits "not even he knows who he is"
         http://www.legoland.co.uk/css-descramble.c
         http://www.legoland.co.uk/explain.txt
            - hey, trust a Lego fan to give detailed cutaway diagrams


                                >> ANTI-NEWS <<
                             berating the obvious

         so, just how long did it take the security geniuses reading
         SF-NEWS@SECURITYFOCUS.COM to spot it was an open listserv?
         ... RADIO TIMES stumbles from Watergate to another "whitewash
         makeover": http://www.ntk.net/2000/09/15/dohradio.jpg ... BT
         suspends service guarantees: no-one notices ... zero-DAILY
         RADAR warez: http://www.ntk.net/2000/09/15/dohradar1.gif ,
         http://www.ntk.net/2000/09/15/dohradar2.gif ... "Defragmenting
         really speeds up Windows NT machines" uncovers the latest
         http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/contents/ ... ah, but what about
         copyrighting all those images in the *current* directory?
         http://www.masterlock.com/general/Legal.html ... formerly free
         movie mag FLICKS http://www.flicks.co.uk/ has yet to master
         directories at all... not to mention the 46% who don't know
         how to use CMS: http://www.ntk.net/2000/09/15/dohcontent.jpg
         ...chiselled from finest FRONTPAGE: http://www.draper.co.uk ...
         NINFOMANIA does "sly dig" at NTK: fails to notice that matching
         self-indulgent retrospective URL doesn't actually work...


                               >> EVENT QUEUE <<
                         goto's considered non-harmful

         No definite date as yet for October's BIG BROTHER AWARDS
         (presumably the ballots have been packed with wags
         nominating "Big Brother", the TV show - ah yes, do you
         see?), but our round-the-clock monitoring of Simon Davis
         indicates he's planning a free, public INTERNATIONAL FORUM
         ON SURVEILLANCE BY DESIGN at London's LSE from 9.30am, Fri
         2000-09-22. With a line-up including the ACLU,
         ZeroKnowledge, and UMTS surveillance techniques, it's
         probably the closest we'll get over here to an all-day RSA
         patent party.
         http://www.privacyinternational.org/bigbrother/
                 - in the US, the show's made by "Orwell Productions"
         http://www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/I.Brown/ifsd.html
         - well, at least he doesn't call himself "Simon Magnum (PI)"

         Next weekend's YAPC::EUROPE (from 2000-09-22) has been sold
         out for months, though there's some consolation to be had
         just going through the list of talks and trying to work out
         which ones were bolted on to make it "arty" for the ICA:
         "Simon Cozens will explain the entirety of the Perl 5
         internals. In 5 minutes. In verse." Somewhat forgiveably, we
         feel, we've also ignored the similarly conflicted CREATING
         SPARKS arts' n' sciences collaboration between The Natural
         History Museum, The Royal College Of Music and all the other
         fancy buildings around South Kensington (continues until
         2000-09-30). At time of going to press, tickets were still
         available to see novelist Stephen Baxter and Blur
         bass-player Alex James discussing Mars (7.30pm, tonight)
         while, on Tue, you can pay 12 quid to hear Richard Dawkins
         reading from his own books, accompanied by "actress and
         artist" Lalla Ward who, for some reason, the site neglects
         to point out, is perhaps best known as "the second Romana"
         from Dr Who.
         http://www.britassoc.org.uk/creatingsparks/cs2.htm
                                - oh, and as alpha-male Dawkins' wife
         http://www.yapc.org/Europe/
              - though we always preferred http://www.marytamm.co.uk/

         And, presumably not timed to coincide with either, there's
         consumer electronics jamboree LIVE 2000 (from Thu
         2000-09-21, Earls Court, London), an event unashamedly aimed
         at readers of the ever-popular publishing genre "this
         attractive young woman on the cover has nothing to do with
         the gadget she's holding". Promising "the latest, sexiest
         kit" ("I don't know how I survived without a WAP phone!",
         says the show's spokeswoman, apparently called Kit), the
         site immediately blows it with a contest to win a Sony
         Memory Stick Walkman featuring "a robust copyright
         protection system" - like *that's* some kind of incentive!
         http://www.live2000.com/comp.asp
       - new addition to the field: Dennis' PC GEAR. Oh, who cares...


                                >> TRACKING <<
               sufficiently advanced technology : the gathering

         The embarassing thing about everyone shifting over to the
         slim GNOME wraparound of Mozilla, GALEON, is that MOZILLA
         itself is finally becoming usable. The new Netscape skin is
         tolerable, there have been leaps in its lizardly speed,
         memory shag is decreasing, and the bugcount looks to be
         finally contained (we think: the Bugzilla chart-drawing page
         broke some time back, ironically). But who cares about that,
         when there's an even *titchier* wraparound for the 10MB
         Mozilla binary. SKIPSTONE spurns all those GNOME libraries
         that Galeon revels in, and remains a raw GTK app that you
         can compile on anything that's got the Moz libraries hanging
         around. It's still relatively cruddy compared to Galeon
         (which is getting damn near to an everyday browser), but we
         like the way it fobs off the downloading to 'wget'. And the
         fact it's only 57K. And that it's already in Debian's
         unstable distribution.
         http://www.muhri.net/skipstone/
                 - and that it's different and new and therefore good


                                >> MEMEPOOL <<
                              hasta la altavista

         good precedent for tax-protests on the UK's other favourite
         HYDROCARBONS: http://www.dumpthepubs.com/ ... hacking the
         HUBBLE: http://www.foxnews.com/science/082500/hubble.sml ...
         well, if BRITNEY's diversifying into high-energy physics:
         http://www.mchawking.com/ ... and what's "PERL" a euphemism
         for? http://walkingdead.net/perl/euphemism (as if we didn't
         know)... ANARCHIST COOKBOOK blows up in "author"'s face:
         http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0962303208 ... i feel
         so used: http://www.geekculture.com/culture/erotica/ ... "be"
         KEV SPACEY (no price given; presumably you can "negotiate"):
         http://www.eroi.com/html/negot.htm ... the bulk-buying B2B
         BULL ELECTRICAL: http://www.73.com/a/0012.shtml ... cheer up,
         JESUS!: http://home.earthlink.net/~hainbros/jesusdressup.html
         ... BBC NEWS ONLINE starts imitating ONION "infographics":
      http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_921000/921923.stm


                                >> GEEK MEDIA <<
                                 get out less

         TV>> the process of elimination that's had the entire country
         on tenterhooks reaches its spectacular climax, as we at last
         get to find out whether Bradley and Rachel really *are*
         leaving the band in the second part of S CLUB 7: ARTISTIC
         DIFFERENCES (5.25pm, Sat, ITV)... while tonight's SOUTH PARK
         (11.35pm, Fri, C4) has mysteriously been moved back in the
         schedules, presumably to avoid a clash with excellent CGI
         geek-fest TWISTER (9pm, Fri, ITV) - scripted by Michael
         Crichton and his wife Anne-Marie Martin, formerly the lovely
         assistant to "Sledge Hammer"... the Crichton theme-park re-
         opens later the same night with Westworld sequel FUTUREWORLD
         (1.30am, Fri, ITV) - oh, the hubris of man and his never-
         ending quest for "progress"... a motif continued in what seems
         to be a new run of TEAM KNIGHT RIDER (4.05pm, Sat, ITV), the
         increasingly surreal impersonations of CELEBRITY STARS IN
         THEIR EYES (7.20pm, Sat, ITV), and the triumph of schlocky
         snakes-in-ventilation-shafts chiller VENOM (10.40pm, Sat, C5)
         over John Carpenter's BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA (10.25pm,
         Sat, ITV)... jaded schedulers have now realised, since the
         original event lasted about 5 years, it's *always* some sort
         of WW2 ANNIVERSARY (from 10.30am, Sun, BBC2)... thank heavens
         the title explains MY NAME IS JOE (11pm, Sun, C4) because the
         lead's broad Glasgow accent is otherwise incomprehensible...
         Jean-Claude Van Damme battles himself once again in TIMECOP
         (10pm, Mon, BBC1) - last shown August 1999 ... "not as good as
         the other two" is the Radio Times' sage verdict on RAMBO III
         (10pm, Wed, C5)... and, in a hint of trends to come, Michael
         Caine plays the central "Woody Allen" role in arguably the
         pinnacle of Allen's numerous New York comedy-dramas, HANNAH
         AND HER SISTERS (12.40am, Wed, ITV)...

         FILM>> it's Samuel L Jackson vs American Psycho - nice touch
         getting Chef from "South Park" to do the theme tune, though -
         for competent but uninspired cop-show retread SHAFT (imdb:
         basketball / limousine / murder / witness-protection / mugger
         / racism / desert-eagle / sequel / racial-slur / chrysler-
         building / racial-injustice / crooked-cop / professional-hit /
         urban / foot-pursuit / violence / car-wash / undercover /
         cocaine / new-york-city / defenestration / police-brutality /
         drug-dealer / new-york / chase / hitman / uncle-nephew /
         media-coverage / revenge / twist-in-the-end / detective /
         brother-sister / drugs / private-detective / vengeance)...
         lovely Jennifer Lopez borrows "Dreamscape", "Coma" movie-tech
         to find that the nightmarish inner thoughts of a serial killer
         resemble nothing so much as bad 1980s pop videos, in stylishly
         daft psychoanalysis nonsense THE CELL (http://www.capalert.com
         : using [child] for an ironing board; corpses "dolled up like
         dolls"; spooling of intestines on to a "rotisserie" as it is
         pulled from the gut of a live man)... in the arthouse ghetto:
         critics'll love it, but not even a gurning George Clooney can
         generate any box-office for yet another self-consciously wacky
         Coen effort O BROTHER WHERE ART THOU? (imdb: crime / adventure
         / comedy / musical)... or it's Bjork and Lars Von Trier -
         together at last! - in harrowing mental torture singalong
         DANCER IN THE DARK (imdb: drama / musical) - not based around
         the Bruce Springsteen song of nearly the same name... so our
         surprise, low-expectation recommendation goes to Ben Stiller /
         Edward Norton/ Jenna Elfman religious There's Something About
         Mary-alike KEEPING THE FAITH (http://www.capalert.com : sexual
         drawing; crotch hit; crotch kick; cohabitation; sex song) -
         not based around the Bon Jovi track of nearly the same name...

         FEEBDACK>> in accordance with prophecy [NTK 2000-09-01],
         response to our exciting website redesign has been
         overwhelmingly negative, with a lone voice ("FWIW *Love* the
         new look!") swiftly drowned out by a combination of ALAN
         CONNOR ("I think I'll find it 'virtually unreadable' and
         suggest 'you may as well go and write for Wired or
         something'"); PETER J SMITH ("OK apart from the BODY tag which
         uses marginwidth and marginheight instead of leftmargin and
         topmargin"); and, of course, a hail of invective from self-
         appointed compliance officer LLOYD WOOD, who slammed us for
         *not* having changed many of the expiry date, doctype and
         table problems he first pointed out in Christmas 1997. It's
         heart-warming pedantry from readers like this that really
         makes doing NTK worthwhile - keep it coming!... thanks to all
         of you who submitted your own suggestions for the Kabalarian's
         "Choose The Ideal Name For Your Child" generator [NTK 2000-08-
         18], including YOG-SOTHOTH and CHEWBACCA... and to the totally
         unalarming number of readers who, after our sex offenders gag
         [2000-08-18], felt we'd also enjoy ALIEN VERSUS CHILD PREDATOR
         http://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/avcp/page1.shtml ...
         while a clearly-chastened CHET from the nearby "Portal Of
         Evil" was prompted by numerous responses to the same issue's
         http://www.portalofevil.com/eatme.shtml link to politely
         inquire "You guys know we are just playing over at POE, right?
         Some of your countrymen have sent me some crazy misguided
         emails, what can I say... I am bound to respond publicly".
         Hey, c'mon Chet - maybe they're just "playing" too? Where's
         that famous American sense of humour?... NICOLA PEARCE, after
         reading NTK 2000-08-04, claimed she'd "have to wash [her] hard
         disk out with soap and water. First we have a German guy being
         Hitler. Then we have the BNP. And lastly we have Rec.Guns.
         Have you been infiltrated by gun-worshipping fascists?" Ho ho
         Nicola, of course not - links from NTK, particularly to
         extremists such as the BNP, or Mac users, are often satirical
         in intent and should not be taken as endorsements. You should
         see the links we *don't* run, like this charmingly Freudian
         refugee from alt.sex.stories.catfights.sex.with.your.mother :
         http://www.seakingsfemfight.com/storymikejv1.html ... and
         finally, to the anonymous tipster who commented "Why have you
         taken to saying 'fricking' you fucking pussies? Cancel my
         subscription etc", can you please supply quantitative evidence
         (a la http://www.ntk.net/?back=archive98/now0522.txt&line=314#l )
         - but wait until we've done our next expletive-packed "Cunt"
         round-up in two weeks time!...


                               >> 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
         "yet another media outlet falls for the 'Dave Green' hoax"
            http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,38467,00.html

                                 NEED TO KNOW
            THEY STOLE OUR REVOLUTION. NOW WE'RE STEALING IT BACK.
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