Need To Know 2001-03-30

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"Who ever thought that sending encrypted streams of data across the Internet could produce a map on the other end saying 'this is where your target is' or 'here's how to kill them'?" - PAUL BEAVER, of Jane's Defense Weekly, helps the NSA explain all the porn sites in their logfiles ( http://www.usatoday.com/life/cyber/tech/2001-02-05-binladen.htm ) ...because ICBM co-ordinates in your .sig never went out of style >> HARD NEWS << next: barcode tattoos More cut-and-pasting from ukcrypto, Britain's last remaining form of parliamentary oversight. This week: the government's plans to require all security consultants to register with the authorities, and be strictly licensed afore passing on their forbidden, arcane wisdom. First the bad news: the bill in question, the PRIVATE SECURITY INDUSTRY BILL, is already at its Commons' Second Reading, and is set to be law in two months (barring those pesky elections). Now, the good news: at the reading, HO minister Charles "RIP" Clarke said it's mainly aimed at security guards and bouncers, not IT security consultants. Now, the bad news: he added the word "currently" - and, "currently", the Home Office says it *does* apply to computer consultants, but they won't get around to enforcing that until 2005. Now the good news: the main restriction on the license is that you mustn't have a serious criminal record. The bad news: hasn't *every* security consultant got at least a "Teenage Cyberthief Was Threat To World Security" headline under their belt? And if these badly-phrased tech laws keep on at this rate, we'll all be criminals by 2005. http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/psib/ - that BOFH license in detail http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/pipermail/ukcrypto/2001-March/015267.html - best read the whole thread, because we're sensationalising like crazy here http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/50/17971.html - we should point out that Mr Kuji was not convicted of any crime It's a publicity-garnering April-Fools-style prank which we never quite got round to: announcing that NTK was splitting into two rival sarcastic technology newsletters, largely identical to each other (except one would have slightly more emphasis on confectionery reviews), and promising the irresistible spectacle of former friends and colleagues jovially slagging each other off in public. Annoyingly, as is so often the case nowadays, THE REGISTER has beaten us to it, with company figurehead Mike Magee's embryonic launch of THE INQUIRER, a somewhat similarly hardware-oriented news site. We believe (and, to be honest, fervently hope) that the imminent settlement between the two parties is more amicable than recent Silicon Investor postings imply: then again, given The Reg's long-standing hard-drinking two-fisted publish-and-be- damned reputation, would you really want it any other way? http://www.siliconinvestor.com/stocktalk/msg_multireplies.gsp?msgid=15555885 - leave it Mike, it's not worth it... http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/5/17918.html - Reg writers still nursing nasty CeBIT "Hanover" http://www.theinquirer.org/ - not quite "The Register" spoof site we were hoping for News update time, this week cunningly combined with addenda to last week's "Huh?" feebdack. The mysterious Zeddust, whose true identity was revealed in court [NTK 2001-03-16] after he slagged off the ISP Totalise, wrote to us, claiming that there were *others* posting mysterious *positive* defences of Totalise to the board. Follow the money, we thought. Yeah, until we realised: how do we know this is the *real* Zeddust? At that point, we started to get a headache. Proper journalists: get to work. In similiar "Deep Throat" fashion, we were urged, following our report on the feud between Bishop Sean "Vampire Hunter" Manchester and the Rev. Joe "Forteana" McNally, to find out "ALL the facts" - on an URL conveniently held on the Bishop's own organisation's Website. Happy to uncritically oblige. Warning: some readers may find the choice of font size both eldritch and uncanny. http://www.gothicpress.freeserve.co.uk/Sean%20Manchester.htm - remember: vampires have hypnotic powers http://www.ntk.net/index.cgi?b=2001/now0302.txt&line=22#HARD_NEWS - get back from whence you came! http://www.ntk.net/index.cgi?b=2001/now0316.txt#HARD_NEWS - it's as much of a hint as we can afford, Zeddust >> ANTI-NEWS << berating the obvious JULIE MEYER speaks for "under UKP5,000" - how much to get her to shut up again? http://www.sfb.co.uk/speakers/juliemeyer/ ... making you work harder to get your hard-working money back: http://www.ntk.net/2001/03/30/dohbos.gif ... RANDAL SCHWARTZ slams London.pm's "Perl is my bitch" T-Shirt - odd, considering: http://www.stonehenge.com/perl/amihooternot/ ... LASTMINUTE.COM soon to announce departures from Kingston, Surrey... disproving the myth that old people can't HTML: http://www.thegreyparty.co.uk ... they're using JAVASCRIPT ENCRYPTION (phew!): http://www.biemme.co.uk/order.htm ... "blah blah blah blah blah blah blah", reports THE OBSERVER: http://www.local-government.net/lganet.htm ... "INTERNET" not recognised by http://www.worktrain.gov.uk/ "Find a job" search - "It may be mis-typed or not in our dictionary. Please type in a different job title"... COLT site powered by Matt's Script Archive: http://www.ntk.net/2001/03/30/doh-colt.png ... Carl Sagan's CONTACT now part of Diana/ Morrissey conspiracy: http://members.home.net/veganmozfan/part3 ... PEPSI.au site features "prominent tit" (Robbie Williams not available?): http://www.pepsi.com.au/v1/background/bluesun_1024.jpg ... >> EVENT QUEUE << goto's considered non-harmful The UK's INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON COLLABORATION AND OWNERSHIP IN THE DIGITAL ECONOMY kicks off this week in London and Cambridge with, irony of ironies, a book launch: a talk and a film and some music from Belgrade's B92 radio station to celebrate the publication of "This Is Serbia Calling" (Tue 2001-04-03, The Foundry, maybe you should RSVP to make sure). Obviously the usual Nathan Barley warnings apply, though frankly it sounds a lot more palatable than the rantings of those "BACK THE NET" DAY clowns (also 2001-04-03), whose recipe to "help the Net regain its respect" includes spamming "this letter to 10 other people, or as many as you can" - somewhat akin to running a Reclaim The Streets event that also offers valet parking. http://www.ellipsis.com/foundry/b92/ - maybe they transmitted pirate Spectrum games or something http://www.iconocast.com/crusade/ - "Imagine the net without Yahoo or Amazon.com" (ie, 1993) On the subject of direct (or should that be "pie-rect"?) action, April 1st also marks the start of pie-throwing month, at least according to zany culture-jammers DESSERT STORM. Exactly how flinging flans at public figures helps undermine global capitalism isn't made entirely clear, but it sounds like fun - NTK, of course, regards the choice of target and associated legal risk a matter for the personal conscience of indvidual readers. http://www.dessertstorm.org/legal.html - thanks guys, that ought to do it Oh, and ex-Wired supremos Louis Rossetto, Jane Metcalfe and John Battelle are attending NEW MEDIA PUBLISHING STRATEGIES 2001 at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism next Friday. http://www.journalism.berkeley.edu/events/conference2001/ - raising the question: what *are* L&J up to nowadays? >> TRACKING << sufficiently advanced technology : the gathering Mozilla's birthday this Sunday: time for our annual slagging! Except, after three years' coding, it looks like bits stop rotting into Wordperfect-shaped silhouettes of corpse fat, and start going all... well, all NASAish. No, we don't know whether that's good or bad, and we'll admit that this week's 0.8.1 release is still embarassingly buggy. But the emerging 0.9 - with its rewritten-from-scratch image library, rewritten-from-scratch caching system, and rewritten-from-scratch-*again* renderer, is actually looking pretty tough. Everybody sees Mozilla as the testcase Open Source project, but it's turning out to be a demo of something quite different. Namely: what happens if you stop giving coders realistic deadlines, and let them actually follow the spec that they so naively believed themselves capable of at the start? And then, when they go "Ohhh... we messed up. Can we have another year to fix it?" - what happens if you let them? The answer isn't Navigator, and it isn't IE, and, no matter what Netscape management read into the Cathedral and the Bazaar in '98, it ain't ESR's fetchmail either. To be honest with you, we don't know what it is. But, come June, maybe we'll have an idea. http://www.mozillazine.org/articles/article1884.html - stick to the nightlies http://www.pigdog.org/auto/software_jihad/link/2044.html - stick to the purties! >> MEMEPOOL << hasta la altavista JAMIE OLIVER HATING is new "All Your Base Are Belong To Us": http://www.hairytongue.com/gallery/fattongue.shtml ... rugby ANAL PROBE http://www.sportal.com.au/league.asp?i=news&id=9703 controversy incorporates nightmarish ZAPRUDER-style footage: http://www.foxsports.com.au/common/imagedata/0,5001,136894,00.gif ... UK forced to import American FOOT AND MOUTH gags, after concerns over local quality control: http://www.manbeef.com/ , http://www.satirewire.com/news/0103/outlook.shtml ... MR BEAN saves plane: http://allafrica.com/stories/200103240069.html ... MICROSOFT is suspicious beneficiary of dot-com crash: http://www.forbes.com/2001/03/19/0319karlgaard.html ... JESUS starts dating: http://www.jesus.com/ ... lamb born with HUMAN FACE: http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_253620.html ... greedy CORPORATES imitate http://rtmark.com/fundhigh.html#BABY : http://www.abcnews.go.com/sections/sports/DailyNews/tattoos_010321.html ...dance, you DOGS! http://aibohack.com/movies/apv_dances2b.mov vs http://lambdadance.spacebar.org/ ... and, rounding off this week's omens of the imminent apocalypse, BLAKE'S 7 - THE TV MOVIE: http://www.blakes7.com/ ... >> GEEK MEDIA << get out less TV>> as if it wasn't obvious from the title, SEX BAR (1am, Fri, C4) is a one-off follow-up to previous CGI-satire show "Pen Monkeys", featuring giant mutated pop-offspring Lennon Gallagher and Brooklyn Beckham rampaging around London, in a tribute to The Goodies' "Kitten Kong"... after being trailed in last week's "Top Ten Guitar Heroes" on C4 comes arguably the funniest movie of all time, THIS IS SPINAL TAP (9.05pm, Sat, BBC2)... up against the usual suspects - Madonna, The Prodigy - and, more promisingly, 2 Live Crew and NWA, in TOP TEN: X-RATED (10pm, Sat, C4)... Iain Lee's "lost" video games docu THUMB CANDY (11.35pm, Sat, C4) hits terrestrial at last, with Matt "Manic Miner" Smith and Sir Clive Sinclair holding the legendary "White Spectrum"... while C5's especially poor "Savage Nature Weekend" line-up includes ARACHNOPHOBIA (9pm, Sat), Ally Sheedy dog-monster MAN'S BEST FRIEND (11.05pm, Sat), THE BEVERLY HILLBILLIES (6pm, Sat), plus CLASH OF THE TITANS (5.20pm, Sun)... SON OF GOD (9.10pm, Sun, BBC1) controversially reveals that Jesus looked like George Michael, or, from certain angles, Dom DeLuise... a Julia Roberts season begins with her likely career high, FLATLINERS (10pm, Mon, C4)... DOT-COM AND KOSHER (11.15pm, Mon, BBC1) is presumably the out-takes from that Ben Cohen "Trouble At The Top" of 3 weeks ago... and David "Pitch Black" Twohy's sci-fi back catalogue throws up temporal tourist treat TIMESCAPE (11.50pm, Mon, BBC1)... following idle NTK speculation [2000-11-10] about KELLY'S HEROES (9pm, Tue, C5), reader Ian Watters recommended a book called "Nazi Gold" for the "real" story behind the Eastwood WW2 tank epic... it's not all stuffed toys, proves THE ADAM AND JOE SHOW (11.05pm, Wed, C4) spoofing new formats like "People Place", "The South Bank Show" and, later in the series, a hideously accurate MTV VJ... C5's indefinite Rutger Hauer season continues with BLIND FURY (10.15pm, Wed)... and if Travolta's PHENOMENON (9pm, Thu, C5) actually *is* supposed to be an ad for Scientology, surely he could have done a better job of it... FILM>> Robert De Niro fortnight continues with robust Cuba Gooding Jr WW2-era biopic MEN OF HONOR (imdb: african-american / hero / institutional-discrimination / navy / instructor / prejudice / rescue / racism / training / alcohol / submarine / amputee / amputation / bigotry / courtroom / biographical / deep-sea-diving / disabled-person / determination / disabled) ... similar themes - the racism, we mean, not the diving - resurface in Julia "10 Things I Hate About You" Stiles' smart teen romance SAVE THE LAST DANCE (http://www.capalert.com : arrogance against a father; dutiful homosexual mentions; God separated the races for a reason; vulgar dance, repeatedly)... of course, if Kate Hudson had won Best Supporting Actress as planned, crowds would be queuing up to go see her and Stuart "Shooting Fish" Townsend in quirky Oirish human chameleon rom-com ABOUT ADAM (http://www.bbfc.co.uk : strong language, moderate sex)... which is still a better bet than Simon "The Full Monty, that Cisco ad" Beaufoy's zany hairdressing farce BLOW DRY (http://www.screenit.com/ : several views of [Rachel "Hilary And Jackie" Griffiths'] bare breasts covered in paint and glitter; Heidi ["Spin City"] Klum plays a model who fools around with her brother-in-law and has him cut and dye her pubic hair)... FROZEN WITH FEAR>> in accordance with NTK prophecy [2000-10- 06] MARS have at last diversified into SKITTLES MINTS (29p), though, as reader BEN JEFFREYS points out, they've "been in Italy for a while", and "come in a lovely uber-Poppets-style box". Ben's verdict on the coolmint, peppermint, toffeemint, spearmint and sweetmint flavours? "Pretty nice - you can tell what flavour they're meant to be without looking at the colours first, which sets them apart from Fruit Skittles." "[The Italians] also have Liquorice Skittles," he concludes, "which I didn't try as I don't know what kind of variety that could offer"... continuing the continental theme, MARTYN WILKINSON claims that he "picked up some KIT-KAT BALLS" in France recently - small, dark chocolate spheres filled with "something which isn't quite wafer" which "pop when you put them in your mouth [...] utterly delicious"... and, to prove that we're not overly biased towards the exotic imports of http://www.cybercandy.co.uk/ (get your combined sweets and T-shirt orders in now by the way, as we'll be switching to a different shopping cart soon), CHRIS HEATHCOTE boasted that he'd bought "a tequila-flavoured lollipop, with a real tequila worm embedded in it, and a white chocolate covered scorpion" from http://www.todd-design.com/edible/ , though at time of writing he couldn't quite bring himself to eat the scorpion... not much other ambient-temperature action to report - no sign of KRAFT FOODS' COLA DIME BAR yet, though it should have been around for a week; KIT KAT CHUNKY ORANGE (30p) is due April 9 - though we are looking forward to the UK arrival of Spanish popcorn-style microwaveable crisp snack import POP CRACKS (79p) http://www.nuevo-nuevo.com/product.php3?NumProd=878 (available in "Classic crust, Star with flavor to Bacon and Parrilla with flavor to Species", Babelfish reveals)... so, it's fortunate that it's time for the ceremonial unveiling of the summer ice-cream line-ups, kicking off with MARS, taking on CADBURY'S poorly distributed range of luxury tubs with 500ml versions of TWIX, SNICKERS, M&M, MARS, and BOUNTY ice- cream, plus SNICKERS CONE (90p), JOOSTERS LOLLY (60p) and now discontinued Winner-Taco-alike M&M COOKIE (85p)... CADBURY TREBOR BASSETT hit back with their own hand-held CARAMEL ice- cream (UKP1) and JELLY BABIES ICE LOLLIES, while NESTLE are launching the SMARTIES POP-UP (vanilla ice-cream with Smartie pieces and a mini-Smarties stick, 80p)... but, as ever, BIRDS EYE WALLS wear the new product development crown, with SOLERO TROPICAL SHOTS, the "tangerine and cranberry" SOLERO TRIBE, a fruity water ice called FRUIT 5, plus "a major technical breakthrough" in the form of CORNETTO WHIPPY, a soft-ice- cream-style cone dispensed by a special machine "adapted so that only Cornetto products can work in it". We await your sightings of this unholy apparatus - and also of BRITVIC'S TANGO FISH vending machine, which apparently "mimics a fish tank" in some enticingly unspecified way... >> 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 "a bit more supportive, this time around" http://www.lwn.net/2001/0329/ 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 is supported by UNFORTU.NET, and by you: http://www.ntkmart.com/ (last chance to buy sweets and t-shirts at the same time!) (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.