Need To Know 2003-12-05

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"We are surrounded by so many things that are flippant and trivial. This could have been just another self-important plastic thing..." http://news.google.com/news?q=%22The+Guts+of+a+New+Machine%22 - Jonathan "iPod" Ive, in a 5000 word article on an MP3 player >> HARD NEWS << gattaca's muse If ID Cards are a little like social security licence keys you have to carry around with you, here's the 30-day free beta trial. SchlumbergerSema, natch, will be the lucky company to be scooping up iris, facial and fingerprint biometrics next year for 10,000 passport holders, and eventually reporting how successful this first test of ID Card technology will be. Pollsters MORI will be ensuring that the Digitised 10K will be a representative sample of the UK population: and here's where it gets interesting. MORI are inviting people to apply. Assuming that those most worried about biometrics in society aren't going to leap at the chance to be fingerprinted *in advance* of the giant Orwellian (etc) database, why not help the sample from getting a bit too skewed? Plus who wouldn't want to mess with cool, hackable, potentially dystopian gadgets? Form an orderly line, please, and send your application to Melanie Briere, MORI, on telephone number 020 7347 3023 or email trial@mori.com. And no using other people's disembodied heads and arms! http://www.wired-gov.net/WGLaunch.asp?ARTCL=21356 - "to assess customer perceptions and reactions". Woohoo! http://news.zdnet.co.uk/story/0,,t269-s2129590,00.html - SchlumbergerSema's previous impartial study The Copyright Protection Agency UK (TM) is an intriguing private company. Its premise is simple enough: whenever you have one of your brilliant ideas, stick it into an envelope, date and send it to the Agency, and have them keep it safe in preparation for the inevitable court case when the FILTHY COPYRIGHT THIEVES steal your precious, steal it likes they all wants to. Envelopes cost UKP65, storage costs a small annual fee. The CPA looks set to tap into the growing "I came up with the idea of the moon blowing up before Space: 1999"/ "How can I stop Web pirates downloading my watercolours of cats?" audience, and good on them for that. The CPA's Website, though, does raise a few questions. For instance: after an excellent page on the history of copyright, the CPA states that "there is no official Copyright Register and therefore difficult to do any form of prior art search." Not quite. A little Google search on the very text of their own history reveals that large chunks of it are lifted verbatim from elsewhere. The history occurs variously at the UK government's official "Intellectual Property" website, the Irish Patent Office, *and* the official 2002 draft copyright law for the Crown Dependency of Jersey. What makes this more confusing is they *all* claim copyright. Will the CPA dig out their envelope and show all the other crown copyright organisations to be plagiarists? Or is the CPA cheekily ignoring the British crown's requirement to acknowledge "the sources and copyright status" of the redistributable text? What is the "source and status"? Did the UK Patent Office nick it from the Irish Patent Office, or vice versa? Can you sue Crown Dependency legislatures for the copyright infringement embedded within *their own copyright laws*? Have the pirates won yet? And if so, can we all go home now? http://www.copyrightprotection.com/history.htm - copy http://www.google.com/search?q=%22the+1956+Act+prior%22&filter=0 - riiiight >> ANTI-NEWS << berating the obvious "Thunderbirds" director and production designer clearly agree: http://www.ntk.net/2003/12/05/dohthun.gif ... spammers "less than human" - BBC: http://www.ntk.net/2003/12/05/dohhuman.gif ... maintaining platform announcements' famously high level of intelligibility: http://www.ntk.net/2003/12/05/dohthames.gif ... someone automate "Am I abstract or not?" for news.bbc: http://hello.typepad.com/photos/cnn/ ... other kind of bus: http://www.family-movie-review.com/Computers/Hardware/Buses/ ... ringtone spamdexing = your top Engrish entertainment value: http://www.ringtones-superstore.co.uk/Snn5542a-T2288.htm ... Xmas Amazon special: http://www.ntk.net/2003/12/05/doh2002.gif ... continuing the wide-ranging "Teenage Health Freak" series: http://www.ntk.net/2003/12/05/dohesr.gif ... a brush - with death!: http://www.ntk.net/2003/12/05/dohbrush.gif ... pukka Molotov, mate: http://www.ntk.net/2003/12/05/dohanarc.gif ... >> EVENT QUEUE << goto's considered non-harmful Looks like there are still a few places left on the URBAN TAPESTRIES PUBLIC AUTHORING IN THE WIRELESS CITY LONDON TRIAL (2 hour sessions from 10am-6pm, daily from tomorrow Sat 2003- 12-06 to Sun 2003-12-14, Bloomsbury area of London, free but requires a credit or debit card "to be left as security at the Trial HQ") - still no clearer on what this actually is though, other than another of those frameworks "for understanding the social, cultural, economic and political implications of pervasive location-based mobile and wireless systems". Sounds like it might not be completely incompatible with next weekend's drunken Santa rampage SANTACON 2003 (mystery start location, probably London's West End, Sat 2003-12-13, mail them for details), which you may consider merely a warmup for either all-day wargame-bash DRAGONMEET 2003 (10am-11pm, Sat 2003-12-13, Kensington Town Hall, London, UKP7 on the door), or the DORKBOT LONDON CHRISTMAS PARTY (7pm, Sat 2003-12-13, Limehouse Town Hall, London, free but RSVP). http://www.proboscis.org.uk/urbantapestries/london_trial.html - vs http://www.adgame-wonderland.de/community_tools/htck/bayeux.php http://www.santacon.co.uk/ - "NOT a Flash Mob", in some intriguingly unspecified way http://www.dragonmeet.com/ - character stats t-shirt to go with Christie's Roman d20 http://www.dorkbot.org/dorkbotlondon/ - actually not too sure about that "Christmas Song" http://www.cybersalon.org/web_of_intrigue/ - next Thu: Doug Rushkoff, Sandy Spiked, Hunt the Boeing guy! >> TRACKING << sufficiently advanced technology : the gathering The best thing about a minimal "link log" that runs in the corner of a real blog is that, with luck, it kills the main blog stone dead. Linklogs perform all the old school functions that make blogs most useful - providing a permanent store for interesting URLs, hideously distorting Google searches to favour people's real preferences, etc - while dispensing with that DJish slice o' life chit-chat in between. Now Joshua "the other memepool" Schachter has created the blogspot of linklogs. DEL.ICIO.US is a centralised Web service for dumping links, generating feeds and resucking an HTMLised list of your most recent choices back into your own Website. His brand of bitterness-driven perfectionism grants a bit more confidence that the del.icio.us setup will stay up a little longer than other blog servers. And the open API and ongoing experimentation already hints at wider possibilities for a lightly metadata-ed, collectively edited URL-bank. As it is, it's mostly just nice to have someone else write the bookmarklet and keep up with whatever the hell RSS format people are using these days. http://del.icio.us/ - there goes the neighbourhood http://www.blogshares.com/ - Falcooooo! (and jennicam.org too) >> MEMEPOOL << contains a source of http://snackspot.org/ especially if you overlook that she wrote the first one on state benefits: http://www.lp.org/lpnews/0309/harrypotter.html ... Research And Education wing inc. "Bass in battle" display: http://www.museumoftechno.org/resedu/perfect_techno.html ... taking this whole "digital convergence hub" idea slightly too far: http://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1068165679&count=1#alarmclock ... one of these pics is not like the others, no. M6-A38(M): http://images.google.com/images?q=Spaghetti+Junction ... what do you mean, you're not bored of UK's Most Boring Amazon title yet?: http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/186181075X/ ... new thrill - quest for most hideously photoshopped cover art: http://images-eu.amazon.com/images/P/B0000BZND5.02.LZZZZZZZ.jpg ... www.bigconservation.org.uk/ vs http://www.bigcon.co.uk/ ... Mr Winder's referring to stumbleupon.com (hey, what did you think?): http://www.stumbleupon.com/url/autopr0n.com/ ... >> GEEK MEDIA << get out less TV>> "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" rap innovator GIL SCOTT HERON (10pm, Fri, BBC4) even inspired Google-goof-alike band http://www.google.com/search?q=%22gil+scott+heroin%22 ... Michael Moore maintains that they actually *were* giving away guns in that bank that time, as shown in his gripping, albeit mildly self-aggrandising BOWLING FOR COLUMBINE (9pm, Sat, C4) http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/wackoattacko/ ... and no doubt the Black Eyed Peas will win RECORD OF THE YEAR 2003 (9.30pm, Sat, ITV), though the best song was clearly Busted's anti-futurism anthem "Year 3000"... it's all small arms, all the time, in Sunday night docus GUN TRAFFIC (7pm, Sun, BBC2) and TERROR TOURIST (9pm, Sun, BBC2)... "Fertility Studies" Professor Dr Robert Winston appears to perpetuate the myth that "Frankenstein" is the name of the creature rather than the doctor, in dramatised recreation FRANKENSTEIN: BIRTH OF A MONSTER (8pm, Sun, BBC1)... and Robert A Heinlein's to blame for cheesy catchphrase PAY IT FORWARD (10.15pm, Sun, BBC1) http://www.heinleinsociety.org/rah/FAQrah.html#payitforward ... BODYSHOCK: THE BOY WHO GAVE BIRTH TO HIS TWIN (9pm, Mon, C4) suggests a no-less-controversial way of growing rejection- free back-up organs than designer-baby debate A BABY TO SAVE OUR SON (9pm, Tue, BBC1)... the production company behind the excellent "Psychic Secrets Revealed" and PEEP SHOW (11.45pm, Wed-Fri, C4) sadly seem to have lost the plot in semi-scripted pseudo-reality CCTV show BEDSITCOM (10.40pm, Mon-Thu, C4)... IMAGINE (10.35pm, Wed, BBC1) profiles Pixar Studios... and here's hoping the "Could the English have been the first to fly?" enthusiasm of HORIZON (9pm, Thu, BBC2) won't overlook the fact that pretty much anyone could have built a decent glider before the Wright brothers, except that they were all obsessed with replicating the flapping action of birds... FILM>> it's Michael "Jurassic Park" Crichton, Paul "The Fast And The Furious" Walker, Anna "Brookside" Friel and Billy Connolly - together at last! - in tame temporal travesty TIMELINE ( http://www.capalert.com/capreports/timeline.htm : if the complete lack of any sexual immorality or vulgarity except for one innuendo makes Timeline lame and made-for-TV, [then] fine)... assuming you haven't already seen it on import DVD, a slightly more upmarket cast blow stuff up in average actioner SWAT ( http://www.screenit.com/movies/2003/swat.html : All of the fighting and gunplay might be enticing for some kids to imitate; We see [Michelle "Resident Evil" Rodriguez] in her sports bra)... its 18 certificate would presumably prevent its adolescent co-writer from going to see her own gritty tempestuous mother-daughter relationship drama THIRTEEN ( http://www.cndb.com/movie.html?title=Thirteen+%282003%29 : [Holly Hunter's] nude scene comes an hour into the movie. Just like in "The Piano", Holly manages to suck the eroticism out of the scene)... still, she can always catch Disney's latest U-certificate anthropomorphic animated adventure BROTHER BEAR ( http://www.screenit.com/movies/2003/brother_bear.html : Some kids might want to imitate the Canadian accents of Rutt and Tuke; Some kids may get the idea that it's okay to play with bears)... THE "VICTORIAN AFFECTATION">> yes, it has been a while since our last dead-tree publishing round-up - long enough, at least, for CORY DOCTOROW to publish new short story collection A PLACE SO FOREIGN AND EIGHT MORE (UKP 7.40 via Amazon.co.uk) http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/1568582862/needtoknow0e - and upload two-thirds of it under a Creative Commons licence http://craphound.com/place/download.php . Other NTK readers have chosen to pursue more conventional routes: BBC science correspondent SUE NELSON has clearly been inspired by "The Science Of Star Trek" to co-write self-consciously zany "the pop-sci of sci-fi" HOW TO CLONE THE PERFECT BLONDE (UKP 10.39) http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0091892287/needtoknow0e - while trained psycholinguist DR K wants *your* help to put together his "Complete Hacker's Handbook" followup, HACKERS' TALES https://www.fastweb.co.uk/spy.org/cgi-bin/HackerTales.pl ... amid the ever-shrinking constituency of publications that *haven't* been written by NTK readers, we did enjoy the tone - but not the mysterious lack of plot - of autistic-perspective THE CURIOUS INCIDENT OF THE DOG IN THE NIGHT-TIME (UKP 5.59) http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0099456761/needtoknow0e (hey, it's no "Flowers For Algernon") - and speaking of faux- naif writing styles, reader INTERNETSDAIRY came up with the ingenious portability solution of chopping Neal Stephenson's 948-page QUICKSILVER (Amazon UKP 11.89) into 5 easy sections http://www.livejournal.com/users/internetsdairy/28752.html ... back with reader-published magazines, and KEITH JEFFREY claims to have invented rock'n'noir - "the first new literary genre of the 21st Century" - in his http://www.bulletmagazine.co.uk/ (from UKP 1.50 for "digital version"), though of course it's up against the totally free Christmas special of UGVM: The uk. games.video.misc Magazine http://www.ugvm.org.uk/ . And finally, in accordance with previous NTK scepticism, it turns out there hasn't been a proper first issue (or a launch party) of The Friday Thing's "40,000 circulation weekly, launches Aug '03" THE LONDON NEWS REVIEW yet, just in case you missed their big announcement about this in the comments section of a post on somebody's blog all about working for London Underground: http://qwer.org/apparentlyreadslikeastudentmagazine.html ... >> 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 "owners of a stupid arse" http://2lmc.org/spool/date/2003/11/29/ NEED TO KNOW THEY STOLE OUR REVOLUTION. NOW WE'RE STEALING IT BACK. 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