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         "This is primarily an investigative unit and I don't think
         we should get sidetracked into the finer details of technology"
- CHIEF SUPERINTENDENT LEN HYNDS, new head of the National Hi-Tech Crime Unit
         http://www.telegraph.co.uk/connected?pg=/et/01/7/19/ecfcrim19.html
   ...I won't have to use a computer or anything in this job, will I?


                                >> HARD NEWS <<
                              qba'g qrpbqr gurfr

         "You'll ROT-13 in jail for this!" Some assorted facts that
         you may not have heard (yet) regarding the arrest by the FBI
         of DMITRY SKLYAROV, for daring to break Adobe's eBook copy
         protection. Fact Bar: According to spirits channelled by
         Mystic Mike Magee at the INQUIRER, one of biggest buyers of
         Sklyarov employers Elcomsoft's cracking software is,
         weirdly, the FBI. But that's okay, because the Digital
         Millennium Copyright Act *does* allow US government agents
         use of decryption programs like Dmitry's (DMCA 1201(e)),
         just as it bans any other American from using them (DMCA
         1201(a)). Cool. Fact Gjb: lead on the case is director of US
         Attorney's Office of Northern California, Robert S. Mueller.
         Fact Guerr: He's President Bush's nomination to be the new
         head of the FBI. Fact Sbhe: Mueller is meeting the US
         Attorney General (the modern-day equivalent of Chief Judge
         Fargo) today at NSI/Verisign, just a few miles from where
         Dmitry will shortly be incarcerated. There, we fondly
         imagine, both politicians will cavort naked in piles of
         Verisign monopoly money and bathe in the blood of innocent
         reverse-engineers, before scaring up more tax money for a
         fake "war on cybercrime". Fact Svir: protests are planned,
         kids. If you're in the general area of the USA or Moscow on
         Monday, see the EFF's alert page. If not, why not plan your
         own, or phone Adobe on 020 8 606 4000 to register your
         thinly-disguised nasal disdain.
         http://www.boycottadobe.com/pages/rallies.html 
                                             - it's like the old days 
         http://www.theinquirer.net/19070104.htm
                                      - Magee provides sober analysis
         http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/cpquery/z?cp105:hr796:
                 - URL for the DMCA surprisingly not ROT-13ed at all
         "Winning at all costs is not the most important thing. I
         think you need to win in the context of the society of which
         you are a part." - John Warnock, founder, Adobe.
         http://www.bsa.org/usa/policy/events_awards/warnock_c.phtml
         - ahaha! off the *BSA* site! ahahah! extra irony points!

         We're in the spam-relay blacklist ORBS! And look - so's
         everyone else! The message for those still checking orbs.org
         on the off-chance it'll magically reappear: "Quit living in
         the past, man. Uninstall that copy of Napster and get on
         with your lives". And under a hail of new DNS traffic, one
         of the orbs.org nameserver operators provided additional
         encouragement by configuring his server to always return a
         positive result - thus bouncing mails at random while
         postmasters remained oblivious. This wasn't completely out
         of the blue: Ron Guilmette did post a warning to NANAE...
         where it was promptly buried in the usual storm of
         HipCrime's ascii aphasia, hidden to all but those with the
         most fascistic filtering. In other RBL^W DNSBL news (not to
         be confused with RBL[sm], natch) MAPS[sm] announced its new
         pricing structure, prompting many a sysadmin to ask:
         wouldn't it be cheaper just to pay a large man to visit
         Michigan with a very large hammer?
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=tks98qske8acbd%40corp.supernews.com
             - by the time you read this, your mailspool will be dead
http://www.mail-abuse.org/feestructure.html
                                                      - make $$$, etc
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=3B50CE49.1645AE6A%40osirusoft.com
                                                           - TLA (TM)

         PERSONAL MESSAGES: PHILIP BUXTON of NETIMPERATIVE. No, you
         were absolutely right to correct our figure of 9 grand a
         year total subscriber income for NETIMPERATIVE. Your
         company, of course, receives 9 grand every *six months*, a
         very different matter. And we really don't mind that the
         first e-mail you sent was titled "FW: YOU ARSE". Please stop
         apologising. MICHAEL "COLIN FROM EASTENDERS" CASHMAN, MEP:
         The Register says that you killed the EU anti-spam bill
         because "Email is the easiest form of communication from
         which to opt out. Recipients need only press reply and type
         'unsubscribe'." Does this mean we can subscribe
         joek@michael-cashman-mep.new.labour.org.uk to all the
         "opt-out" mailing lists we can find now? Ta! And, on a
         closely -related topic, ANONYMOUS: No, of course we can't
         say that http://storm.prohosting.com/~dmachaps/dmaindex.html
         now contains the complete DIRECT MARKETING ASSOCIATION email
         membership list. We still have *no* idea why anyone would
         want a complete list of these junk-mailers' e-mail
         addresses. Other than to offer them further fantastic
         marketing opportunites - and they can always "unsubscribe"
         if those get too annoying, so no harm done, eh Michael?


                                >> ANTI-NEWS <<
                             berating the obvious

         Congressman GARY CONDIT seeks fresh interns, provides handy
         link to "National Center for Missing and Exploited Children":
         http://www.house.gov/gcondit/intern_opportunities.htm ...
         departing FUTURENET employees spell out "Arse Biscuits" in
         news links: http://www.ntk.net/2001/07/20/dohfewtch.gif (the
         rudest word they know?)... life also imitates headlines for
         POPCORN staff: http://www.ntk.net/2001/07/20/dohpop.jpg ...
         PRAVDA blows the whistle on mind-reading laser satellites:
         http://english.pravda.ru/main/2001/07/11/9825.html ... fierce
         London property market encourages "out of the box" solutions:
         http://www.ntk.net/2001/07/20/dohloot.gif ... "Should we
         consider revising the archaeology curriculum?" ponders
         http://www.archaeology.org/ in TOMB RAIDER review... ARNIE's
         "renegade vision" achieves long-overdue arthouse recognition:
         http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/tg/feature/-/96105/ ...
         http://test.drkeyboard.com/ubb/Forum2/HTML/000165.html vs
         http://www.datadocktorn.nu/kortbyte.php ... another broken BT
         status page: http://www.ntk.net/2001/07/20/dohstatus.gif ...
       http://www.scifi.com/scifiwire/art-main.html?2001-07/17/13.00.tv
         imitates Onion's "Star Trek Introduces Alien Character With
         Totally Different Forehead Wrinkles"... truth in search
         engines #3: http://search.yahoo.com/bin/search?p=scout+master
         ... "Other hits" presumably include "War Pigs" and "Paranoid":
         http://www.ntk.net/2001/07/20/dohsister.gif ... ROMERO leaves
         ION STORM, his mission complete... 100 DoS threads? that CODE
         RED VIRUS has launched about a thousand in my bloody inbox...


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

         Typically, we don't approve of any kind of user registration -
         which is presumably why we never make it to groovy events like
         YET ANOTHER PERL CONFERENCE::EUROPE (from Thu 2001-08-02,
         Amsterdam, some tickets still available, 99 Euros each), or
         the 51ST MEETING OF THE INTERNET ENGINEERING TASK FORCE (from
         Sun 2001-08-05, Hilton Metropole, London W2, USD$450.00 before
         next Fri 2001-07-27 - handily the same date as International
         Sysadmin Day). Also next Fri, those painfully mysterious
         "Twentythree" dudes - who we still don't think are anything to
         do with the real KLF - imagine initiates can be bothered to
         send their postal addresses to scribe@twentythree.co.uk with
         the words "23 Live Event" in the subject line to receive
         tickets to a "multi-media hybrid of cutting-edge visual art
         and electronica". But the good news is you can "just drop by"
         at subterranean LAN party CAMDEMNATION 2001 (from noon Sat
         2001-07-21, Stables Market Catacombs, Camden, London) - which,
         considering recent events and their contest to "Win a BB
         Version of Your Favourite Counterstrike Weapon", might even
         culminate in genuine shoot-outs with trained police marksmen.
         http://sparcy.atariuniverse.com/~bredroll/ds/
                       - we're joking of course. That would be awful.
         http://www.sysadminday.com/
            - gives irritatingly precise list of eligible professions
         http://www.ietf.org/meetings/IETF-51.html
                         - does the social event include "RFC Bingo"?
         http://www.yapc.org/Europe/
- OK, so HAL is nowhere near here (though how big is Holland anyway?)
         http://www.spesh.com/ben/super2001page.html
               - back by popular demand: Ben Moor's super string show


                                >> TRACKING <<
               sufficiently advanced technology : the gathering

         MINDTERM, the Java ssh client you can stick somewhere for
         when you need ssh in a cybercafe, reached 2.0 last month.
         It's taken us this long to work out why: the code's changed
         a lot, and there's plenty of bug fixes and rewriting, but
         nowhere does this version wave a fistful of extra features
         at us and dare us not to update our old "This applet is 576
         days old" version. For the record: it's ssh2; there's a
         ftp->sftp proxy that's a bit useful; you can run it as a
         standalone application; it doesn't say "This applet is 576
         days old" anymore; there's a global password keyring;
         there's a funny "babblebabble" translation of the host
         fingerprint. But mainly, it's 2.0 because Mindterm was
         bought up by a new company, and I think they wanted
         something impressive on the press release. Oh, and it's no
         longer GPLed. Time for a fork.
         http://www.isnetworks.net/ssh/
                   - and as if by magic, a forked GPL version appears
         http://www.appgate.com/products/mindterm/
                             - Mindterm Public Source License, wahay
         http://www.appgate.com/products/mindterm/demo/
                              - still a very cool applet demo, though


                                >> MEMEPOOL <<
                                oogle la google

         BLOGS, without all that tedious "personal commentary" stuff
         http://blogdex.media.mit.edu (which includes ourselves, of
         course)... another EBAY business model escapes into the wild:
         http://www.monkeyphonecall.com/ ...NAPSTER song topical again:
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=96cb0p$rc7$1%40news.creativelabs.com
         ... at last, a TVGH ripoff that might run the lame ones *you*
         send in: http://www.geocities.com/theexpressway/tvgth.html
         ... obviously the subtext of all "choose your own adventure"
         experiences: http://www.jerking.com/ ... LEGO PALM casing:
         http://www.beanos.com/~tsoutij/legopalm.php vs DIY HELLO KITTY
         laptop: http://spdcc.com/~fj/phkl/ ... CHRISTIANS devise
         complex rationale for dealing with poor deluded cult-members:
         http://www.theway.co.uk/cults/part1/botherwithcults_page1.htm
         ... time to roll out the "Tolkien Ring Network" gags already:
     http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/newsbursts/0,7407,2787361,00.html
         ... maybe not enough broken GIFs to pass for the real thing:
         http://www.new-tube.co.uk ... generic "MR T" construction kit:
         http://members.aol.com/Sucka000/T1.html - and its nightmarish
         consequences: http://www.autofish.net/clysm/mrtvs/v/ ...
         reasonably well-adjusted, by the standards of BIG BROTHER
         viewers: http://www.geocities.com/paullovesjo/ ... we're
         really hoping this was some sort of misguided foot and mouth
         spoof: http://web.ukonline.co.uk/gypsy-ham/welcome.htm - and
         if it wasn't, then what the hell...?


                                >> GEEK MEDIA <<
                        the less rude www.tvgohome.com

         TV>> after battling Homo Superior in the sci-fi series "Prey",
         Debra Messing takes on a homo flatmate in James "Cheers"
         Burrows' gay sitcom WILL AND GRACE (9pm, Fri, C4)... Mimi "X
         Files" Rogers squints through the dry ice and searchlights of
         1980s Ridley Scott romance SOMEONE TO WATCH OVER ME (9pm, Fri,
         C5)... and it's a 3-way pile up later between Luc Besson car-
         crash carnage TAXI (12.35am, Fri, C4), Terminator knock-off
         ASSASSIN (1.25am, Fri, C5), and Chesney Hawkes' "One and Only"
         starring film role BUDDY'S SONG (1.25am, Fri, BBC1)... all
         together now: "It's a UNIX system! I know this!" - though why
         are there progress bars at the bottom of the surveillance
         footage in CGI kiddy-ride JURASSIC PARK (8.15pm, Sat, BBC1)?
         ... other web user portrayals this week include the astral-
         projecting designer in I BELIEVE I CAN FLY (7.55pm, Tue, C4),
         ebay-baby-buyers MEET THE KILSHAWS (9pm, Wed, C4) and the
         will-they-won't-they-show-it BRASS EYE vapourware special
         (10.35pm, Thu, C4) - "If you think kiddie porn is funny, you
         should have a good laugh" advises Richard Blackwood, comedian:
       http://media.guardian.co.uk/broadcast/story/0,7493,524045,00.html
         ... Channel 5's straight-to-video season continues with late
         '90s botched heister TRUTH OR CONSEQUENCES, NM (10pm, Sat,
         C5), Jon Lovitz "Dangerous Minds" parody HIGH SCHOOL HIGH
         (9pm, Sun, C5), and Chris Farley's dumb-but-funny BEVERLY
         HILLS NINJA (8pm, Wed, C5)... BBC1 desperately tries to keep
         up with future-prison tosh NEW EDEN (12.35am, Sat, BBC1), plus
         a double bill of genre-defining Arnie death-quip actioner
         COMMANDO (9.10pm, Tue, BBC1) and Dave "Kids In The Hall" Foley
         "The Fugitive" spoof THE WRONG GUY (11.40pm, Tue, BBC1)...
         SPACE (8.30pm, Sun, BBC1), BEAGLE 2 - A MISSION TO MARS
         (11.20pm), and ANCIENT APOCALYPSE (9pm, Thu, BBC2) set an
         exciting precedent for remaking all genres of documentary
         programmes with loads of computer graphics in, including the
         WW2 and serial killer ones... while C4 appears to eschew the
         more conventional "Bluff" spelling in favour of something with
         a hint of nudity in Gail Porter sightless gameshow CELEBRITY
         BLIND MAN'S BUFF (9pm, Thu, C4)...

         FILM>> arguably the best "Jurassic Park" movie so far - for
         what that's worth - as the usual indie actors run around Tron-
         style soundstages and CGI backgrounds in JURASSIC PARK III
         (http://www.screenit.com/movies/2001/jurassic_park_III.html :
         we briefly see part of [Tea Leoni] in her bra - and a full
         view of her back)... the TV ad has, for weeks, featured a
         bloke remarking the cinema was "full of women" which, since
         it's only just been released, was presumably a pre-selected
         test audience for Brit crime caper HIGH HEELS AND LOWLIFES
         (imdb: Mary "Murder One, Deep Impact" McCormack, Kevin "Simon
         Quinlank" Eldon, Minnie Driver, plus the writer of "Spice
         World" and "LA7" - together at last!)... based on the chick-
         novel "Animal Husbandry", it was renamed "Someone Like You"
         for the US, but this "Bridget Jones" rom-com is now called
         ANIMAL ATTRACTION again (http://www.cndb.com/ : Ashley [Judd]
         is clearly naked for her love scene with Greg Kinnear but she
         generally hugs him close to her not allowing for much breast
         exposure [...] the side of her breasts come briefly into view
         but it's very quick and there probably isn't even any nipple.
         Later, she does a cheerleading routine for Hugh Jackman in
         just a tight tank top and very skimpy panties) - great news
         for anyone who wants to see Hugh "X Men" Jackman in just a
         tight tank top and very skimpy panties...

         DO NOT IRON DECORATION>> OK, so we rarely meet our optimistic
         "new T-shirt design every month" quota - but we've spent the
         intervening period redesigning our e-commerce site, giving it
         a new name that no-one's quite sure about, and (apparently)
         making it less compatible with Opera. Oh, and there's some new
         t-shirts over at http://www.geekstyle.co.uk/ as well, most
         notably a tribute to retro Spectrum classic 3D ANT ATTACK,
         designed by MODESTY B CATT (of http://www.phink.net/elite/
         fame) and approved by "Ant Attack" author Sandy White (UKP2
         from each sale goes to a charity of his choosing). This month
         also marks the launch of our "Premium Classics" range: shirts
         which cost UKP12.50 (instead of UKP10) because they have more
         than one ink colour, or a back print, or slightly thicker
         cotton (or all three): designs here include the notorious
         ADMINSPOTTING (from http://www.adminspotting.org/ ), a couple
         of apparently unofficial "They Live" tie-ins - "STAY ASLEEP"
         and "OBEY" - which http://www.toxico.co.uk don't seem to sell
         direct any more, and the original MEMES DON'T EXIST - TELL
         YOUR FRIENDS... but no, we haven't "sold out", we are still
         enthusiastically accepting designs from talented NTK readers
         (especially if they happen to be in touch with the author of
         a well-known retro video game) - despite, or perhaps because
         of, their increasing trends towards the upsetting and bizarre.
         JOSH ROULSTON continued the musical parody theme with his
         http://paradroid.com/junk/ntk-nin-shirt.gif logo, which we
         thought might look good on a hat (how about "ATDT", but in the
         style of the band "AC/DC"?), HENRY BLOOMFIELD plumped for
         http://www.bloomfieldpottery.com/bloomfield/ntk/ntk.gif , and
         TARAS YOUNG astonished us all with this elaborate Absolute/
         XHTML parody http://www.snowblind.net/taras/ntk3.jpg which,
         even now, we're not sure if we fully understand... of course,
         you don't have to use NTK as part of the design, as shown by
         CHRIS BARNES' subtle "Unicode" translation of the word "FUCK"
         http://ntk.doonkay.net/ , the eternal truths of VICKY CLARKE's
         poignant http://www.tartarus.org/~vicky/stuff/lart.png , the
         unarguably direct http://www.gotmatches.com/tshirt.html from
         MICHAEL HALMINEN, and the startlingly Scandinavian portfolio
         http://www.artistic.no/plan1/portfolio/tshirt.html submitted
         by MORTEN TORNES. "PETE's" http://www.nepalesetemple.com/ntk/
         sadly fell victim to recent cabinet reshuffles, though IAN
         "ELITE" BELL maintains "A plain tombstone marked: Privacy RIP
         seems more powerful to me. One could bastardise the classic
         Meatloaf 'Bat out of Hell' album cover putting Privacy RIP on
         the tombstone and Steganography (or similar countermeasure) as
         the motorbike logo". We have so far failed to come up with an
         artist's impression that satisfactorily reflects this brief,
         so if anyone out there reckons they're up to it... typically,
         we've been too slack to implement any proper online voting
         (somehow http://www.iamcal.com/ami/ isn't quite what we're
         looking for), so mail NTK if you absolutely *must* have one of
         the above designs for your wardrobe - or indeed, if you'd like
         one of our current designs, but in a different size or colour
         configuration. We're currently considering doing some special
         requests for the upcoming reprint run of "I Got UKP80 Million
         For My Dot-Com Idea" (possibly even including "Skinni Fit" for
         women), as suggested by MATT RUTHERFORD ("XL? Give me a break
         - no self respecting geek can get into an XL. How about XX or
         even XXXL for the king geeks out there?") and CLIVE JONES
         (orange is, apparently, *so* "not [his] colour")...


                               >> 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
                            "intrigued and bemused"
http://www.opendemocracy.net/forum/document_details.asp?CatID=87&DocID=490

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