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        "One relatively mild step, Friedman explains, is to force you 
         to reboot your computer. Since the fastest reboot is about 
         six minutes, he says, this defense alone creates a serious 
         obstacle for most automated, so-called brute-force hacking tools..."
         - INSIDE.COM unveils terrifying new military anti-piracy tech
                   ( http://www.inside.com/jcs/Story?article_id=25476 )
     ...*six minutes* to reboot your machine? How many DLLs does it install?
         

                                >> HARD NEWS <<
                             who's watching youse

         Some more facts of British Net life just got "clarified" by
         the courts. Witness TOTALISE vs Motley Fool and Interactive
         Investor a case decided this Feb, but only out in the law 
         reports last week. It was here that a court decided that the
         full details of an anonymous poster (who was slagging off
         the ISP) should be handed over to the court for a civil
         libel case. A few matters of interest to the average
         ISP-slagging NTK reader (especially the anonymous ones: you
         know who you are). First: the court decided that Motley and
         II could not protect their sources as newspapers can,
         because they imposed no editorial control over their forums.
         So British law now says UK Websites can be sued for libel
         (because they are publishers) and be compelled to hand over
         personal details (because they aren't). Nice. Also, this
         decision should apply to ISPs as well as Websites. So in
         winning this battle, Totalise will have opened itself and
         other ISPs to endless fishing by libel litigants attempting
         to track down whistle-blowers by looking up their dial-up 
         details. Well done. And finally, as UKCRYPTO regular Donald
         Ramsbottom noted, if the courts have this much power to
         compel disclosure: why did they ever need RIP in the first
         place?
         http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/0,,12-99112,00.html
- whenever anyone asks us why we never pursued that Falco deadpool thing
         http://www.kaplanindex.com/fsearch/commerce/purchase_form.php
                          - blame the local hostile legal environment

         After watching Thursday's TONIGHT show on ITV, it's hard not 
         to sympathise with Carol Vorderman's single-handed crusade 
         against poorly labelled chatrooms, a shadowy world where 
         children using yahoo.com, apparently "the second most popular 
         web provider in Britain", are just "three clicks of the 
         computer mouse away" from predatory paedophiles. In fact, it's 
         no longer just Carol on the case, angrily waving her notes and 
         yelling "It's not good enough!" as Roland Perry tried to 
         explain that pesky American obsession with "free speech", and 
         indignantly concluding "So, it's *your* responsibility as a 
         parent to be educated about the net and then constantly check 
         every site your child will visit [...] - not [the Internet 
         industry's] responsibility to censor, but yours." Of course, 
         you never know who you're talking to in online chats - it 
         might even be "brilliant technology journalist" Richard Barry, 
         who's been helping Carol out the past few weeks by posing as a 
         naive 12-year-old girl. Barry may be best known to NTK readers 
         as the guy who, writing a games round-up for The Guardian in 
         1998, reported without question a week-old April Fool about a 
         Star Wars/ Star Trek crossover - exactly the sort of thing 
         which might indeed be believed by a naive 12-year-old girl.
         http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/2001/10/ns-21591.html 
         - now only two clicks away! What are ZDNet trying to tell us?
         http://www.ntk.net/index.cgi?back=archive98/now0410.txt&line=92#l
          - yeah, we're just jealous of Barry's male-model good looks

         Meanwhile, the cognitive distance between the free Net and
         the "free press" stretches further. Following a bit of 
         entrapment by the Harrow Trading Standards crew in June, 
         WHSmith recently got fined six grand for selling a copy of 
         PC Zone with a "grossly violent" KINGPIN demo on it.
         WHSmith has now, in a characteristically brave stance,
         demanded that all magazine CD covermounts be ELSPA-rated. No
         exceptions. Given that ELSPA ratings were originally
         invented to *prevent* software having to pass obligatory
         BBFC ratings, this looks like feeping creaturism to us - but
         whatever we think, they should have some highly weird
         side-effects. Apart from the terrifying onus now on
         publishers to actually discover what's on their free CDs
         (see NTKs passim on the STUART CAMPBELL vs EMAP affair), we
         look set for some amusing badging of serious tech journals.
         Mags like PCW and MacUser, for instance, will now be obliged
         to appear with a "Suitable for Ages 3+" ELSPA label. Always
         assuming an Office XP demo won't include depictions of
         "humiliation", "offensive gestures" and "death or injury to
         human-like or animal-like characters".
         http://www.tradingstandards.gov.uk/brent&harrow/news5.htm#whsmith
                                 - no, no, they dropped the Paperclip
         http://www.videostandards.org.uk/games.htm
 - remember: "VIEWING SUITABILITY, NOT ITS PLAYABILITY OR DIFFICULTY"
         http://members.boardhost.com/ukresistance/msg/19457.html
        - looks like "Bloody Roar 3" may have dodged the censors, tho

         
                                >> ANTI-NEWS <<
                             berating the obvious

         no indication of how frequently they ANSWER them, though: 
         http://www.aten-usa.com/support/faq/uc232.htm ... BAFTA-award-
         winning wireless site generously open-sources authentication 
         scripts: http://supedo.co.uk/sketchaphone/cftags/ ... IC24? 
         "IC Dead People", more like... http://010101.sfmoma.org/ 
         SHOCKWAVE requires "Windows(tm), Pentium 500MHz or higher, 
         128Mb RAM" - at least they still support Win3.1 on a P500... 
         why FOOT AND MOUTH only affects those Satanic, cloven-hooved 
         animals: http://www.thescotsman.co.uk/index.cfm?id=53657 ... 
         DISCLAIMER so powerful it threatens to disclaim own existence: 
         http://www.ntk.net/2001/03/16/dohcorrect.gif ... jump! JUMP! 
         http://www.ntk.net/2001/03/16/dohgrav.png ... NOOOO! Oh, wait: 
       http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/ap/20010306/ts/un_ambassador_1.html 
         ... "All Your Base Are Belong To" - the CHEADLE LABOUR PARTY:
 www.cheadlelabour.org.uk/cgi-bin/newspro/viewnews.cgi?newsid984421617,17653,
         ... "I'm not just an eid number, I'm a customer of MCAFEE UK": 
         http://mcafee.econtactor.co.uk/e50/index.cfm?eid=25740 ... 
         WIRED e-mail addresses now "wiredmag.com" - ahaha... mildly 
         preferable to his BOOKS: http://www.jeffreyarcher.co.uk/ , 
         http://www.jeffreyarcher.org.uk/ ... 


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

         We're not sure whether there's any central organisation behind 
         the moderately well-publicised SCIENCE WEEK 2001 (various 
         venues, from today, 2001-03-16) or whether it's just relying 
         on a fashionable "distributed networking approach" and 
         spontaneous outbreaks of objective empirical research breaking 
         out across the country. Or perhaps it's been absorbed into the 
         clearly more ambitious SCIENCE YEAR 2001, exhibiting a long-
         term perspective absent from previous versions of the Science 
         Week site - http://www.nationalscienceweek.org.uk/ - which, 
         the Google cache reveals, appears to have been built using a 
         30-day trial version of Claris Home Page. 
         http://www.bbsrc.ac.uk/society/exhibitions/sciweek/
         - vs http://www.google.com/search?q=uk+%22science+week%22+2001
         http://www.scienceyear.co.uk/forms/pack.html
              - learn how to crash Netscape with a giant Flash intro!
         
         In order "to introduce a younger generation to the high 
         quality artwork and ethos of the original Eagle" - just think, 
         there are kids today who've never even heard of "Doomlord"! - 
         the roving EAGLE EXHIBITION: DAN DARE GOT THERE FIRST comes to 
         Croydon Clocktower every day from now until June (free). Or, 
         for those of you yearning for some rather less utopian visions 
         of the future, consider this advance warning of: Sheffield's 
         digi-arts LOVEBYTES FESTIVAL (from Thu 2001-03-22, Sheffield); 
         the annual UKUUG LINUX DEVELOPERS' CONFERENCE (from 2001-06-
         29, UMIST in Manchester); and HIP'97 / CCC '99 follow-up 
         HACKERS AT LARGE - aka HAL 2001 (from 2001-08-10, University 
         of Twente, the Netherlands). Those long summer evenings are 
         going to just fly by...
         http://members.aol.com/nicholashl/exhib.htm
                               - ah, an AOL members page. Tres retro!
         http://www.lovebytes.org.uk/2001/
                      - "Star Wars Fan Films" might be OK, we suppose
         http://www.ukuug.org/events/linux2001/CFP.shtml
          - maybe running the kernel in "The Baby's" 2048 bits of RAM 
         http://www.hal2001.org/
                 - may affect scheduling of NTK's vapourware "GeekCon"
         

                                >> TRACKING <<
               sufficiently advanced technology : the gathering

         Three arenas you don't expect free software to shine at: 1)
         Java client-server 2) Nice GUI 'n' shit 3) Dangerously
         complex multi-user interactions, and 4) MP3 ripping and
         burning. Okay, so we lied about 4) - nonetheless the
         generically-named WEBCDWRITER/WEBCDCREATOR is definitely a
         rare treat, even in that domain. The WebCDwriter bit runs as
         a daemon on a Linux box with a CD writer attached, and
         allows remote users (using their Java-y browsers) to copy
         files, stack up MP3s and wavs, and transfer whole ISOs from
         their own machines to the central CD-burning factory. The
         java client is particularly impressive (demo available on
         the site). While you'll still need someone to pull the CD's
         out of the server box when they're cooked, it seems a great
         way to run a "voluntary backup" system for offices.
         http://www.uni-bielefeld.de/~jhaeger/webCDwriter/
   - is it us, or is everybody involved in Linux CD-RW called "Jorg"?


                                >> MEMEPOOL <<
                              hasta la altavista

         WENDY GROSSMAN reported "playing banjo" on Paramount Comedy 
         Channel - stay tuned for JACK SCHOFIELD on "Stars in Their 
         Eyes"... RIP protester imitates SUBGENIUS leaflet design: 
       http://www.darwinwars.com/lunatic/scans/rip_nutter_pamphlet.jpg
         ... life tries to avoid imitating popular DAVID BOWIE song: 
         http://www.123petitions.com/sign.cgi?id=porca_dio@hotmail.com$2 
         ... "let's just stick in the PRIME DIRECTIVE as well while 
         we're at it": http://www.u-aizu.ac.jp/~vilb/gnup.html ... 
         cuh, STUDENTS: http://www.thepolosofdeath.com/ ... "probably 
         more of us have the neurological talent for MUSIC to begin 
         with" - http://tuxedo.org/~esr/writings/sextips/sexy.html vs 
         http://www.ampcast.com/search/band.php?id=7785 (because we've 
         linked to STALLMAN's "singing" once too many times already)... 
         http://bettybowers.com/ vs http://www.anti-gay.com/closure.htm 
         ... GRANADA pays Nick Rosen UKP100,000 for itv.com - take him 
         to WIPO, you loons!... MPAA now forced to ban certain PRIMES: 
         http://www.utm.edu/research/primes//curios/48565...29443.html 
         ... need bootlegs of OKI corporate song... first DREAMCAST, now: 
         http://www2.cex.co.uk/gaming/cex_feature.asp?ct=1&id=4187 ... 


                                >> GEEK MEDIA <<
                                  get out less

         TV>> "There's a look at the frightening reality of child 
         prostitution, before Alan Partridge broadcasts live from 
         Manchester" quips the Radio Times of tonight's COMIC RELIEF 
         (from 7pm, Fri, BBC1) - looks like that Ali G transcript was 
         "for real" after all: http://www.ntk.net/2001/02/09/ali.html 
         ... up against the powerful lure of Ant, Dec and numerous 
         dead/ believed dead formats - "The Fast Show", "My Hero", "One 
         Foot In The Grave" and, at 12.15am, the unquiet spirit of 
         "dotcomedy" in OUTRAGEOUS M-PEGS AND J-PEGS - Channel 4 fields 
         Hugh Grant's anaesthetisingly dull "Coma" knock-off EXTREME 
         MEASURES (9pm, Fri, C4)... C5 edges further into self-parody 
         with Rutger Hauer last-shown-Jan-2000 sci-fi CROSSWORLDS (9pm, 
         Fri, C5)... though there are some laughs in John Hurt's gay 
         90210 cross-cultural chuckle LOVE AND DEATH ON LONG ISLAND 
         (11.35pm, Fri, BBC2)... teaming up to take down the ratings 
         juggernaut that is I LOVE THE EIGHTIES (9.05pm, Sat, BBC2) - 
         this week covering, though not showing, "Bill And Ted's 
         Excellent Adventure" - comes: Luc Besson's good-looking space 
         junk THE FIFTH ELEMENT (10pm, Sat, ITV); the original GREMLINS 
         (9pm, Sat, C5) - itself part of C5's "Eighties Weekend"; a 
         repeat of Iain Lee's retro-gaming docu THUMB CANDY (8pm & 1am, 
         Sat, E4); plus the uncut (?) THE EXORCIST (10.30pm, Sat, C4) - 
         still one of the most upsetting horror films of all time... 
         followed by Matthew De "The Idler" Abaitua's promising Brit 
         sci-fi series SF:UK (12.50am, Sat, C4) - music (of course) by 
         Daniel Pemberton... inexplicably, they then skip the hilarious 
         "Exorcist II" in favour of plotless trick-shot pharmacoepia 
         HUMAN TRAFFIC (10pm, Sun, C4) to go straight to THE EXORCIST 
         III (10pm, Mon, C4)... and, finally, science week is duly 
         commemorated with: one-off DOTCOM DIARIES (4.05am, Sun, C4); 
         American "Robot Wars" reverse-import BATTLEBOTS (7.10pm, Mon, 
         BBC2); typically even-handed new series SCIENCE AND THE 
         SWASTIKA (9pm, Mon, C4); plus the even more disturbing PETSWAP 
         (4.10pm, Wed & Fri, ITV) in which "animal-loving children 
         change places with their pets" - which surely constitutes more 
         of an unfair challenge for the pets... 
         
         FILM>> it's pointless pseudo-historical reconstruction week at 
         the movies, with the always-lethal Rachel Weisz picking off 
         otherwise entertaining Ed Harris sniper duel ENEMY AT THE 
         GATES (http://www.screenit.com : we briefly see [Weisz's] bare 
         butt; [Jude Law] smokes a few times, uses a bit of profanity 
         and has sex with [Weisz] all while having to deal with 
         [Harris's] efforts to find and kill him). "Saving Private 
         Shakespeare In Love", more like... Kevin Costner continues his 
         Kennedy-contemporary-playing craze with preposterous schools-
         programme-style quote-a-minute THIRTEEN DAYS (imdb: helicopter 
         / mushroom-cloud / statue-of-liberty / cuban-missile-crisis / 
         1960s / cold-war / diplomacy / intelligence-service / missile 
         / nuclear-weapons / white-house / nuclear-threat) - also 
         perpetuates the "WarGames" myth that "Defcon 1" means all-out 
         war when, in reality, "Defcon 5" does... or, for those of us 
         who have - or haven't - yet memorised the 16 lines of Arnie's 
         dialogue, 6502 assembler and all, there's the DVD-promoting 
         limited release of THE TERMINATOR (http://www.cndb.com : 
         [despite] having a nasty mullet haircut, Linda Hamilton has 
         a most excellent rack [...] you can see her mug and jugs; 
         normally, I only review female nudity but [...] you can 
         definitely see [Schwarzenegger's] massive penis and balls 
         flopping around)... 
         
         MUSIC TO WATCH LOGS BY>> is it just us, or does anyone else 
         keep mishearing WESTLIFE's current number one as "Uptime 
         Girl... she's been living in her uptime world"? Oh alright 
         then - top of our MP3 hotlist this month is of course the new 
         DAFT PUNK longplayer "Discovery", which truly does sound like 
         ELO's long-awaited Squarepusher tribute album - but in a good 
         way. And, if your filenames have all been scrambled by the 
         likes of http://www.geocities.com/catnaproxy/ , you could 
         always download the theme song of NY tech artists DORKBOTNYC 
         http://www.music.columbia.edu/cmc/dorkbotnyc/ , and play it 10 
         or 12 times in a row instead... it's been a busy time for pop 
         soundalikes, with U2's Bono - not previously known as an NTK 
         subscriber - acknowledging last year's CRAIG DAVID allegations 
         http://www.ntk.net/index.cgi?back=2000/now1222.txt&line=278#l 
         by singing "I'm Walking Away" over the backing for "One" at 
         the Brit awards - though we maintain that, more impressively, 
         you can also do this with the lyrics to "The Bad Touch" by THE 
         BLOODHOUND GANG... reader MARTIN FROST "was struck by the 
         resemblance" between LEANN RIMES' "Can't Fight The Moonlight" 
         (from the Coyote Ugly soundtrack) and AQUA'S "Barbie Girl", 
         and contends that the theme tune to TV's "One Foot in the 
         Grave" is "almost identical" to "Did You Ever Have To Make Up 
         Your Mind?" by the LOVIN' SPOONFUL - the only difference being 
         "the bit where Eric Idle sings the words 'one foot in the 
         grave'"... while repeat offender ADRIAN MOULDER "genuinely 
         believed" that the new song from AT THE DRIVE-IN constituted 
         the return of '90s shouters CARTER USM, and that he'd heard 
         JONATHAN WILKES' "Just Another Day" - lyrics include "You're 
         not alone we're all together / Night and day, sunshine and 
         rain" - as the backing music for a Mars Bar ad "about 20 years 
         ago"... which just leaves the homebrew big-beats of the 
         groovily named SHELDON SOUTHWORTH, who did the "Eminem vs Bob 
         The Builder" and "Weakest Link" tracks, but tragically fell 
         foul of our near-total "All Your Bases" blackout when he tried 
         to draw our attention to his "trance mix" of this once 
         fashionable meme. Fortunately he's now redesigned his site in 
         such a way that you can actually find his previous TV theme 
         remixes http://www.diffusionuk.freeserve.co.uk/tvthemes.htm , 
         including his Fatboy Slim-esque "147 Lockdown" rework of the 
         BBC2 Snooker tune, and a drum and bass "Dad's Army". Please 
         note that NTK remains wildly uninterested in any other "All 
         Your Base" material at this time - please forward this 
         correspondence to http://www.amiallyourbaseornot.com/ , where 
         you might find someone who cares...


                               >> 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
   "they stole our slogan, now we're ... well, we're a bit stuck, aren't we?"
                    http://roguemoon.manilasites.com/soap      

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