Need To Know 2001-01-26

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"For programmers and other tech people who work in companies where Microsoft (MSFT) products are the norm, the knowledge base functions as a kind of Yoda, guiding them through their thorniest Windows endeavors." http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,41398,00.html ...unhelpful, defensive, hazy grasp of basic syntax >> HARD NEWS << see if I don't Just when it seemed all was lost for Douglas Adams's Plucky British Startup, H2G2 (hiding behind the banks of servers, being fired at by the intergalactic liquidators), they get sucked through a wormhole and land - back at the BBC, which has that pleasantly English sense of bureacratic circularity that we're sure Hitchhiker fans are already savouring. Not that there isn't a certain amount of hyperspatial disorientation ; half the staff have already left (especially after being encouraged by their editor "not to take the piss" with off-days, during the two-month no-pay period). We see the never-profitable h2g2 community site is putting a very Don't-Panic face on things, considering that nobody's actually sure whether Auntie's interested in keeping it going. In fact, the only real survivors are the now-separate games company, working on the new HHG game, which will be sold in boxes that people pay actual money for. Those old-economy ways... so quaint! http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/hitchhikers/ - "I wonder if it will be friends with me?" http://www.h2g2.com/faq.html - whale meat again Something strange happened up in Redmond shadows this week. MICROSOFT asked for help. While everyone was guffawing at the disappearance of their nameservers, they were quietly calling in all the favours at Cisco and elsewhere. Bad config change Tuesday eve, they pinned it down to, in the end, and after over 22 hours (precious few favours around) Microsoft's domains were back online - only to be minced again in a Denial Of Service attack. But why were router-admins frobnicating things around at 6.30 on a weekday? Was it a hint of the later attack that the impromptu config change was supposed to be protecting Microsoft from? All we know is this: as of today, "nslookup" shows Microsoft (wisely) outsourcing a chunk of its DNS to Akamai; and now they're called in the Feds - the fricking *government* - to check out the DoS. We really don't know what's scarier: paranoid Microsoft against the World, or smart Microsoft getting the World in to help. http://www.microsoft.com/backstage/column_T2_1.htm - Uptime with Wanke and Weeks http://cryptome.org/gates-paupers.htm - uh-oh: turns out Bill Gates *does* run the Internet Our pet theory that Brighton's SCHNEWS is written in a protest tunnel - or maybe up a tree - have been confirmed, albeit at terrible personal cost. The lives of several helpless PCs of that direct action zine have been brutally ended, due they claim, to excessive dampness in their "offices". But what do you care, reading this in your suit and tie and sensible shoes? When you started in this business, you had dreams, didn't you? I remember talking to you about them in that field off the M25. Going to create some sort of artists community Web forum, weren't you? Well, sometime after you've finished that Gantt chart for the new ad sales inventory system, why don't you see if you can send the Justice? kids an old PC or something, and prove you STILL CARE. HUH? +44 (0)1273 685913 And tell them to get their hair cut, while you're at it. http://www.schnews.org.uk/ - they'll kill you last, I'm sure. http://www.weliveinpublic.com/ - otherwise, you're no better than these people http://www.wirednews.com/wired/archive/8.11/luvvy_pr.html - which is pretty damn bad http://www.spy.org.uk - yeah, go on, rub their noses in it >> ANTI-NEWS << berating the obvious dumb American melonfarmers confused by Google ratings, *and* vote for http://www.ntk.net/2001/01/26/whitehouse_doh.gif ... "Asimov is a scientific sci-fi writer and his laws are best known from the film Robocop" reports THE REGISTER's KIEREN MCCARTHY, under influence of OCP... FREEDRIVE shuts down 50MB of public file-sharing, shocked by reports of "software piracy"... "Linux-powered" http://www.sys-con.com/linux/ vs http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph?site=www.sys-con.com ... truth in advertising (for hints, check the seller feedback) http://cgi.ebay.com/aw-cgi/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=1204183251 ... "75% of every person on the internet is paying/looking at porn right now", claims http://www.xsitecreator.com/index5.htm - accurately, if you all go there ... BRUCE STERLING posts attachments to Viridian list using "dead media" Macintosh word processor WriteNow ... Kieren McCarthy now THE REGISTER's chief correspondent in "matters of the heart": http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/16403.html ... no reverse-engineering those PEANUT BUTTER AND JAM SANDWICHES: http://www.mlive.com/news/stories/20010119bpeanut.frm ... http://www.theonion.com/onion3702/infograph_3702.html vs: http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/americas/newsid_1133000/1133743.stm >> EVENT QUEUE << goto's considered non-harmful It's Friday, it's half-past-five: time for those Cambridge college kids to prove they really know how to cut loose and let their hair down - by going to another lecture! Sadly, you've already missed Warwick-apologist SUSAN GREENFIELD's appearance at the DARWIN COLLEGE LECTURES 2001, but there's still about 6 or 7 left in the run, all loosely themed around the word "Space" from the looks of it: "Virtual Space", "Exploring Space", "Trying To Find A Parking Space", and so on. "Get there early", our tipster advises, as the events, evidently a social highlight in this quiet market town, draw mobs of up to 600 people - possibly under the impression that the series has something to do with the Darwin _Awards_, and that the lecturers conclude each performance by killing themselves in the stupidest manner possible. http://www.dar.cam.ac.uk/lecture01.html - yes, a college named after the dolphin in "Seaquest: DSV" http://www.computing.surrey.ac.uk/personal/st/I.Kuscu/present.html - catch lastminute.com, while you still can >> TRACKING << sufficiently advanced technology : the gathering Ah, Alphaworks! Every few seconds, it seems, IBM's R&D labs wheel another crashed-saucer-technology there, be it "Speech for Embedded Noses", or "StudlyCaps for Java in XML". And it's mostly there they stay, languishing in pre-development hell, no matter how cool. Take EASYCONNECT, a "simplified connection management for the mobile 'road warrior'" that's been smiling hopefully at visitors since August 2000. Ignore the Mad Max imagery and instead think of MacOS's Location Manager, that genuinely useful connection-settings-chooser that Microsoft have stubbornly refused to rip off and thus condemning every poor sucker moving between two offices with a Windows laptop to hours of fiddling with the Network settings. EasyConnect manages all that, and it does file and email synchronisation too, and it schedules web caching for offline reading, and the interface is lovely, and it actually works, and on top of all that the help file has a list of phone numbers for hotels and car rental places in the US. Bless. http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/easyconnect - no bumper-mounted machine-guns, though >> MEMEPOOL << gesundheit the "excite" when they're weakened by their attempts to contact us, we will ATTACK: http://www.tidbits.com/tb-issues/TidBITS-564.html#lnk2 ... forget Tomlinson's MI6 book, maybe only FREENET can save: http://cruel.com/sub/bonsai.shtml ... searching Napster for BRITNEY SWEARS (sic)... 'cos, to scale, the walls really *are* that thin: http://www.marscenter.it/iss/paper_iss_model.html ... EA "Director of Front End Dev" imitates rubberburner: http://www.stimulus.com/members/msl/msl.html ... wasabi TOOTHPASTE... http://www.ai.mit.edu/~vona/xtal/ vs http://www.stellar.demon.co.uk/ ... a more philosophical review of Apple's writable DVD drive than you'd expected: http://cryptome.org/jg-wwwcp.htm ... PLANET OF THE BELGIANS: http://www.timburtoncollective.com/pota_offsumm.shtml ... http://www.hugeglobalnet.dial.pipex.com/orgchart.shtml vs http://www.buymybook.co.uk/altubemap.jpg ... DINNER in disguise: http://minidisco.com/minispecs/lunchbots.html ... "BILL JOY complains about the collapse of humanity? He started it with that fucking editor"... and "must look good in khaki"? http://www.efashionshowjobs.com/careers/softwareengr/index.html ... am I partying hard at RIPE38 or not? http://photos.jml.net/ ... tolerate this, and your kids' school photos will be next: http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/uk/wales/newsid%5F1129000/1129197.stm >> GEEK MEDIA << the less rude http://www.tvgohome.com/ TV>> of course, when the guy says "We've never lost an American in space" in APOLLO 13 (7.50pm, Fri, BBC1), he's carefully omitting the three Apollo 1 astronauts who burned to death while sitting on the launchpad... co-written by "a secret person from a secret celeb gossip website" (no, not us), PEN MONKEYS (1am, Fri, C4) is the world's first CGI- animated (ie: poorly lip-synched?) topical sketch show... then, on Saturday, there's a choice between commemorating the liberation of Auschwitz, in REFLECTIONS ON THE HOLOCAUST (from 5.35pm, Sat, BBC2), or the death of Buddy Holly, in THE DAY THE MUSIC DIED (11.50pm, Sat, C4)... filling out the weekend's tech-entertainment quota, there's CD-ROM clean-room drama DISCLOSURE (10.30pm, Sat, ITV), Hitchcock-in-space knock-off LIFEPOD (12.50pm, Sat, ITV), and little-known black-and-white identity-crisis sci-fi SECONDS (1am, Fri, BBC2) - not based on the Human League song of the same name... the dabbling with black hole-science, the robotic monotone, the whole exoskeleton thing - maybe someone's not as defenceless as he makes out, argues THE REAL STEPHEN HAWKING (9pm, Mon, C4)... the current series of LIVING BY THE BOOK (9pm, Wed, C4) concludes without even mentioning some of the classic self- help/ managerial manuals, like "The Bible", Nietzsche's "Also Sprach Zarathustra", and Mark Leyner's "Et Tu, Babe"... subtle pro-Glock product-placement enlivens lacklustre "The Fugitive" followup US MARSHALS (9pm, Tue, C5)... DISINFO NATION (1.05am, Thu, C4) talks to Grant Morrison about "The Invisibles" - hopefully not overlooking his excellent work on "Animal Man"... and Amanda "Max Headroom" Pays shows up in SOLITAIRE FOR TWO (11.40pm, Thu, BBC1) - yet another wacky romantic comedy featuring a body language expert and a palaeontologist who can read men's minds (oh, can't they all?)... FILM>> acclaimed for daring to suggest that the drugs issue is "quite complicated", Steven sodding Soderbergh wrecks a perfectly good Mexican cop thriller with endless hand-wringing by Michael and Catherine Zeta-Jones, who should go play in the TRAFFIC (imdb: drugs / helicopter / addiction / assassination / assassin / attorney / based-on-tv-series / car-bomb / cellular-phone / cocaine / corrupt-official / courtroom / crack-house / desert / drug-abuse / drug-war / epic / father- daughter-relationship / food-poisoning / ghetto / heroin / informant / kidnapping / kids-and-family / mexico / murder / organized-crime / plastic-surgery / poisoning / police- corruption / prostitution / rehabilitation / remuneration / runaway-child / runaway / san-diego / sexual-favor / sniper / stolen-car / suburbia / surveillance / teenage-prostitution / tijuana / torture / twist-in-the-end / vulgarity / white-house / wiretapping) - not a biopic of the Steve Winwood "Hole In My Shoe" rock band of the same name... all it takes is for you to stop three other people (then they stop three more, and so on) from going to see Kevin Spacey memetic weepie PAY IT FORWARD (http://www.cndb.com : Nothing really. Although [Helen Hunt] does go around in a bra a lot and at one point you can see a bit of her nipple) - it could be just us, but maybe random acts of kindness just aren't going to do the trick in a world of systematic exploitation... and, in ongoing attempts to assuage the complaints we've received recently about quoting the "Celebrity Nudity Database", we're pleased to report that only mild nakedness mars the magical-realism sex=cookery nonsense of WOMAN ON TOP (http://www.cndb.com : I think I saw the side of [Penelope Cruz's] ass but it's too quick to really dwell on)... oh and some British movies are once again confounding the multiplexes, with straight "Queer As Folk"- alike THE LOW DOWN (http://www.bbfc.co.uk : contains coarse language, drugs and sexual references)... and Redbus' latest crowd-pleaser, DEAD BABIES (http://www.bbfc.co.uk : passed '18' for drugs, sex, violence and coarse language). Joe from "Killer Net", Katy "Spaced" Carmichael (also credited as "Mad Puppet Woman" in 1996's "A Midwinter's Tale"), and a story by Martin Amis - together at last!... NASTY, BRITISH, AND SHIRTS>> (being a suggested T-shirt slogan from reader JOHN CHRISTIAN - thanks for that, John, we'll put it with the others, which have recently included BERNIE ROBINSON's "Why not print a shirt with a picture of sick or spilt food down the front especially for wannabe slobs?"). On a brighter note, in response to your pleas, we're pleased to report that http://www.ntkmart.com/ should be back up by now, featuring new stock of those old favourites "I got UKP80 million in venture capital for my blah blah blah" and "Viral marketing doesn't work - but at least you save on the ad spend". Plus: a special topical addition to our usual line-up - yes, make Valentine's Day unusually poignant this year with a bittersweet reminder of the ultimately destructive nature of all interpersonal relationships, the ILOVEYOU.VBS T-shirt... created by Modesty B Catt - who, reassuringly, seems to be something to do with "Illuminati Online" http://www.io.com - the design consist of the words "I love you" in an emotive handwritten font, with ".vbs" a bit lower down, against a background of the source code to the notorious macro virus of the same name, arranged in the form of a big soppy heart. It's sensuously printed on a sumptuous burgundy shirt, and Modesty (and the "in-jokes for outcasts" guy) have generously asked for all its royalties to go to Sheffield-based pro-Linux computer recycling nuts the Redundant Technology Initiative http://www.lowtech.org . Let's face it, it's the perfect (sarcastic) way to show someone how you really feel... oh, and there's also a really basic "They Stole Our Revolution" one (in blue) that we did last year for a laugh but turned out better than we expected. And we'll be doing a proper "Spring Collection" in February as well. And we're making a few concessions to everyone who wrote in saying XL was "like a tent" ("Yesyesyes! Banish that annoying ridge around arses worldwide which is caused by tucking outsize T-shirts into stretch jeans! Let me buy sarcastic torso coverings that don't reach my knees!", deadpanned VICKY CLARKE). Most designs are now available in "Large", and we're even trialling "iloveyou" in "Medium", though AIDAN WARNER wins the no-prize for taking matters into his own hands, reporting that "Washing the garment [an orange "80 million" XL] at 50 degrees c, rather than the recommended 40, shrunk it by about 15 percent (that's a very rough guess) (though oddly it appears to shrink slightly more vertically than horizontally, though that might just be me)". NTK regrets that such DIY modifications (by non- qualified service personnel) do invalidate your warranty - but, that aside, let us know how you get on... >> 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 "stalking the wily editor" http://website.lineone.net/~enigma23/echelon/danny.html 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.ntkmart.com/ (K) 2001 Special Projects. Copying is fine, but include URL: http://www.ntk.net/ Tips, news and gossip to tips@spesh.com All communication is for publication, unless you beg. Press releases from naive PR people to pr@spesh.com Remember: Your work email may be monitored if sending sensitive material. Sending >500KB attachments is forbidden by the Geneva Convention. Your country may be at risk if you fail to comply.