"I remember playing Doom while my teenage son watched over my
shoulder and my wife sat quietly reading and drinking tea.
A rocket exploding in my face caused both my son and I to
simultaneously jump and scream which in turn resulted in the
launching of my wife's tea! She is now my ex wife but happily
both my son and I still play Doom I and II..."
- content-sharing agreement between somethingawful.com
and BBC News Online bears its first sinister fruit
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3558248.stm
>> HARD NEWS <<
market debuts
GOOGLE is left feeling slightly unlucky (for values of
unlucky greater than 1.6 billion dollars). Secure hashes
aren't (but don't be too insecure, say the cryptographers,
frantically looking around for a new algorithm). Just what
is going on? We were assuming all that last-minute fumbling
at Mountain View was just the clever Google maths eggheads
(etc) carefully manipulating their price to make exactly
4,285,199,774 dooooooollars. Surely there's easier ways to
make some spare change? There's this June's "$10,000 for the
first MD5 hash collision" prize by CertainKey that still
looks unclaimed - even though they're turfing them out every
five minutes in China. Why not send them a copy of the
paper, and pick up your cheque? While you're at it, might it
be worth getting a bunch of CA certificates signed by
Verisign for sites like "wwv.paypan.com" - you know, just in
case you can bitflip it to something a little more lucrative
when the Chinese publish their results. It's an investment
in the future!
http://www.rtfm.com/movabletype/archives/2004_08.html
- the hash market crash explained gently
http://www.certainkey.com/md5challenge/
- what do you mean, "not in the scientific spirit of the competition"?
https://www.eff.com/
- oho! MD5 signed certificate! Maybe we can turn it into egg.com!
http://www.xcom2002.com/doh/index.php?s=04081615pic
- Google boner!
And on the subject of last-minute changes: Wikipedia founder
JIMMY WALES is coming to the UK next Tuesday (2004-08-31), and
would like to speak to any audience who'll have him in London
that evening. Venue details are a little scarce at the moment
because the "organisers" are actively still looking for one,
though we're entirely confident that something will happen
because they have, of course, already set up a wiki.
http://www.minty.org/cgi-bin/wp/wiki.pl?HomePage
- considered using Quicktopic, but just didn't seem right somehow
>> ANTI-NEWS <<
berating the obvious
will none of the comments stand up for the poor beleaguered
music biz? http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/3547788.stm#views - until
you get to "Mat Morrisroe", who seems to share the same name
as this guy: http://www.uksponsorship.com/music.htm ... all
your favourites this week at http://dohthehumanity.com/ (Odeon
Cheltenham introduces special "student surcharge" of 40p),
culminating in a coldly commercial Google ad on this quite
heartbreaking Falco: http://xcom2002.com/doh/?s=04081919apt
... Guardian Online decodes "PDC" in context of digital TV
http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/story/0,3605,1285533,00.html
as "Primary Domain Controller" ("Programme Delivery Control"
not in their acronym dictionary?)... http://www.rejesus.org/
logo vs http://www.alliance-leicester.co.uk/ - by any chance
related?... obvious "rollercoaster"-based designs, #252:
http://www.gloucestershire.gov.uk/index.cfm?articleid=7425
vs http://rctfi.tycoonplanet.com/svenska/rct2.htm ...
>> EVENT QUEUE <<
GOTOs considered non-harmful
"One to watch", "The coolest thing in the world at the
moment", and "Like a bunch of crazed robots from Westworld
invading your house and getting into your record collection,
then fucking". No, these aren't reviews of skeptic, tech
writer and folksinger WENDY GROSSMAN (playing this Sun, 2004-
08-22, Twickenham Folk Club, Cabbage Patch pub, 67 London
Road, Twickenham TW1 3SZ, UKP7?), but of Bristol's pioneering
circuit bender KID CARPET, currently embarking on a nationwide
tour (see site for dates and venues) to promote his upcoming
"Shit Dope" EP of electronic "toytronica" - and supporting
multimedia whimsy-merchants The Trachtenburg Family Slideshow
Players, with their quirky accompaniments to found photographs
they discovered at jumble sales.
http://www.slowgraffiti.com/
- or elect-*wrong*-ica, as he's also been described
http://obsess.com/blog/000291.html
- hit of the Fringe (we said Ben Moor *above* slide show)
http://www.pelicancrossing.net/folk.htm
- venue site reassuringly horrendous
http://www.burningman.com/
- mail burning@gooby.org to meet other NTKers at Burning Man
http://www.lonix.org.uk/cgi-bin/Lonix?CODE=searchMeeting&CURRENT=YES
- London Linux install fest in Acton next Saturday
>> TRACKING <<
sufficiently advanced technology : the gathering
Last time we mentioned a utility for speedily searching
through your mail backlog, the whole company got bought by
Microsoft the week after. Not sure that will happen with
MAIRIX, given that it's for dirty unshaven mboxen, Maildir,
and MH folders. MAIRIX is damn faster than grep with the
searches, pretty flexible on what it can look for (words,
dates, not regexps), and incrementally adds new messages as
they arrive. It's got no external dependencies, and is as
Unixy as they come, which should keep it away from
Microsoft's mittens. Then again, did Microsoft know when
they bought Lookout they were just getting a wrapper around
Apache's open source Lucene text search engine?
http://www.cookcomputing.com/blog/archives/000386.html
- it would appear so
http://www.rc0.org.uk/mairix/
- someone should do a Squirrelmail plugin and take on GMail
>> MEMEPOOL <<
contains a source of http://snackspot.org/
one for the International UseCrimes Tribunal - "Relive the
emotion of previous Games by selecting a date or host city
below": http://www.olympic.org/uk/games/index_uk.asp (bottom
of page) - except the "year" and "city" timelines whizz past
at different speeds, out of synchronisation, and occasionally
in different directions... the return of "not that I'm
bitter": http://www.v-2.org/displayArticle.php?article_num=790
... photoshop cover horror of the week (like being held at
gunpoint by MC Escher): http://www.infernalaffairs.co.uk/ ...
surfing http://mirrors.playboy.com "for the articles"... so
far, no "Wanton Violence", "Impudence" or "Offense to God"
categories: http://interglacial.com/rss/capalert_movies.rss
... by juxtaposing HP Lovecraft with the mundanity of everyday
life, your expectations will be confounded; hilarity ensues:
http://www.arthurwyatt.co.uk/comics/hplwct1.html ...
>> GEEK MEDIA <<
get out less
TV>> it's "ageing thieves try to pull off one last job" week,
with David Mamet directing Danny DeVito in HEIST (9pm, next
Fri, C5) and Ed Norton's terrible "disabled" routine being the
most heinous crime in THE SCORE (9.05pm, Sat, C4)... Kim
Newman borrows the title of an old Ian Livingstone book for UK
D&D commemoration DICING WITH DRAGONS (3.30pm, Sat, Radio4) -
vs http://www.npr.org/features/feature.php?wfId=3858560 ...
and backwoods horror JEEPERS CREEPERS (9pm, Sun, C4) appears
only loosely based on the 1938 Harry Warren/ Johnny Mercer
song of the same name... it's a shame they never made a "Not
Safe For Work" sequel to Stephen Dorff slacker flop SFW
(3.20am, Mon, C4)... 40 years on, C4 predicts we'll be
futuristically referring to the planet Earth as TERRA 2050
(7.55pm, Mon-Fri, C4)... while favourable-exchange-rate-
fuelled New York-London romance NY-LON (10pm, Tue, C4) raises
the possibility of future episodes involving lovers from
Marseilles in France (Mar-Lon), Pyatigorsk in Russia (Py-Lon),
or a complex menage-a-quatre involving residents of Seville,
Miami and Copenhagen (SeMi-CoLon)...
FILM>> the whole red/ yellow colour scheme seems to be a
thinly-designed metaphor for the US Homeland Security threat
level indicator, though that's not the only "surprise!" twist
in the latest semi-scary M Night Shyamalan ding-dong THE
VILLAGE ( http://www.capalert.com/capreports/village_the.htm :
mischievous invasion of privacy; explosive startles, three;
"Those we don't speak of", meaning the creatures in the
forbidden forest, would be more correctly stated "Those of
which we don't speak")... and the XBox tie-in first-person-
shooter has a few cheesy moments, but nothing like the
rambling planet-hopping tedium of next week's fantastic-
looking CGI fest THE CHRONICLES OF RIDDICK (imdb: sequel/
prison-planet/ dagger/ fight/ gunfight/ leader/ planet/
spaceship/ space/ sunglasses/ sun)...
BONERS: CORRECTIONS, CLARIFICATIONS, AND "INCORRECTLY REGARDED
AS GOOFS">> thanks to everyone who wrote in alerting us to
this new-fangled musical trend of "sampling", with KASS
SCHMITT, DAVE HAYDEN, MATT PETTY - and many, many more -
pointing out that NTK 2004-07-23's "It's better to regret
something you have done than to regret something that you
haven't" quote from Orbital's "Satan" (as an ad for "Soltan")
is actually "a sample from Sweat Loaf by the Butthole Surfers"
- a fact we were dimly aware of, or assumed that they'd both
sampled the same film or something. Disappointingly, no-one
felt the need to comment on what terrible advice it is, given
the wide range of viable counterexamples (ie, sticking your
face in a fan)... still, to our credit, JUSTIN CORMACK seemed
even more out of touch than we are, claiming The Orb "ripped
off" the tune of "Little Fluffy Clouds" (as heard on the Shape
yoghurt ad, ibid.) from Steve Reich's "Electric Counterpoint",
musing "perhaps Danone is playing the original". In summary,
Justin: it's just a sample of the guitar part and, no, that
didn't seem to be what Danone were doing... DAVE HEMMING was
amused to discover that NTK 2004-08-06's sophisticated web CV
generator "works on fictional people, too", listing antichrist
Damien Thorn as Head of Thorn Corporation and "Trusted Advisor
To the President": http://qwer.org/DamienThornCV.html ...
while IAN DOUGLAS possibly drew a line under the whole cinema
listings controversy (for the moment), with the news that NTK
2004-04-30 double-URLtendre the Labia Cinema "was named after
some Princess Labia (from Latvia or wherever) who officially
opened the place", adding that he gets "a lot of hits" on his
page http://www.moviesite.co.za/ "from people searching for
labia, since I carry their schedules on my site"...
>> 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
"You know, just 'thanks for the t-shirt royalties' would have sufficed"
http://www.antics.org.uk/
NEED TO KNOW
THEY STOLE OUR REVOLUTION. NOW WE'RE STEALING IT BACK.
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