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Tips, news & gossip to tips@spesh.com - with NTK in subject line, cheers.

         
         "1) We strive to
            a) identify only those people who will be interested in a 
          particular marketing message,
            b) deliver the message to them in a way that makes it an 
          enjoyable or valuable experience,
            c) provide it in a manner that encourages them to share it 
          with others..."
          ...thus effectively invalidating any token effort made in a), 
                                                            of course. 
          - "Manifesto" of the new Viral + Buzz Marketing Association
                                     http://www.vbma.net/mission.html


                               >> HARD NEWS <<
                           persistent "number twos"

          Currently residing in the "Where Are They Now?" file: WEB 
          2.0 was a convention with a disturbing meld of the usual
          suspects and the usual convicts. Spruced geeks failed to
          recognise each other with trimmed hair and proper non-T
          shirts. Previously dapper VCs and analysts either dressed
          down, or were still living in their 2001 suit. Either way,
          they're not aging well - and these Golden Oldie
          Nostalgiafests can't be helping. In the end, gentle shock at
          how long it's been seemed to be the only reason for being
          here. The geeks, in their hearts, know there's no real
          money-making plan in what they're planning next. The VCs,
          deep in their blackened coal-pit guts, know the same. Still,
          didn't stop anyone on the old "Web 1.0", did it? We can't 
          quite believe the entrepreneurs will be able to pull *another*
          blinder on the investing public, but stranger things have
          happened. And there is some hope in all of this: if you
          thought that hell would freeze over before the rich kids of
          tech would pay even lip-service to open licenses, fair use,
          and publicly stabbing Hollywood in the eye over the
          Internet, let alone using their *actual money* to do so, do
          bring a woolly jumper to Web 3.0: Yet More Hell On Earth.
          http://www.transmitmedia.com/svr/vault/polese/
              - what the rigour of ten years hard work do: Polese then
          http://www.gsinstitute.org/about/directors.shtml
            - now. Dave Winer, however, remains scarily well preserved.
          http://www.bowblog.com/archives/000872.html
            - over here: a bit like they wanted to sell you timeshares

          Cyberspace used to be "where you are when you're on the
          phone". Now it appears to be "where your data is when it
          gets handed over to the FBI". When Rackspace, a US company,
          voluntarily handed over Indymedia's UK webserver to the US
          FBI, they were, it appears, indirectly obeying an Italian
          prosecutor's instructions. And if you think that sounds like
          one of those Babelfish chain-of-translation exercises, you'd
          be right: the latest rumour seems to be that the prosecutor
          was just asking for information, and the FBI got the wrong
          end of the big, globalised stick. It's still fuzzy though:
          We're still waiting to hear from the Swiss, the FBI
          themselves, the EFF (who are now pursuing the case in the
          US, due to its similarity to the Steve Jackson deal that
          started the EFF off, as it were), Rackspace, and every other
          mediated body that could possibly be involved in this mess.
          We bet the anti-terrorist people are wishing they had the
          clout of the British Phonographic Industry, and could just get
          the ISPs to hand over names and addresses of people to round up.
          http://docs.indymedia.org/view/Global/WhoTookAhimsa
                                       - shields up! logs to /dev/null!
      http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/10/14/bpi_wins_p2p_court_order/
         - hey, maybe we can find out where all the leechers live, too!


                               >> EVENT QUEUE <<
                         GOTOs considered non-harmful

          So, it looks like the "Spot The Fed" contest will have 
          greater-than-usual resonance at the Indymedia fringe spinoff 
          to this weekend's EUROPEAN SOCIAL FORUM festivities (from 
          yesterday until Sunday 2004-10-17, various venues around 
          London including Alexandra Palace, Bloomsbury and the 
          Millennium Dome, though the Indymedia/ "Communications Rights 
          and Tactical Media Production" bit is at the Camden Centre, 
          London WC1, and is free but "donations encouraged"). Equally 
          opposed to the spectres of war, globalisation, racism etc - 
          but tackling them via an ingenious mix of PHP scripts and SQL 
          queries are shadowy social-software funders MYSOCIETY who, 
          along with acclaimed democracy-scrapers PublicWhip.org.uk and 
          TheyWorkForYou.com, are hoping to recruit further "volunteers" 
          at their London drinks evening the Thursday after next (Thu 
          2004-10-28, Old Queen's Head, Essex Road, London N1, free but 
          you must RSVP them to find out when it actually starts). 
          Annoyingly, this is the same night as the inaugural CLUB LE 
          STRANGE, a "hastily thrown together" evening of music and 
          performance curated by the "New New Romantic" comedy throwback 
          Gary Le Strange (8pm, Thu 2004-10-28, The Albany, 240 Great 
          Portland St, London W1, UKP7), though rest assured that there 
          should be a lot less naive 1980s-style idealism about the 
          social impact of technology... at the Gary Le Strange show.
          http://docs.indymedia.org/view/Local/ImcUkEsfCamdenFlyer
                                        - vs http://www.fse-esf.org/en/
          http://www.mysociety.org/cgi-bin/moin.cgi/OctoberEvent
             - we are warriors, woh-o-oh, and webpages are our weapons!
          http://homepage.ntlworld.com/kate.darby/page9.html
            - influence on new Robbie Williams single is plain to hear
          http://www.dorkbot.org/dorkbotlondon/
               - "Turbo Twins" robots at Dorkbot London this Wednesday
          http://www.ifiwatch.tv/
        - plus Gavin, who runs exequo.org, who stream - radical movies!


                                >> ANTI-MEMES <<
               there's smoke, flames, http://dohthehumanity.com/

          ultra-enticing job ad - also, between 10pm and 7am you will 
          sleep in a cold dank cell with 15 of your fellow developers: 
      http://www.freelancers.net/freelance-jobs-creative/200410/9596.html
          ... retroactive BBC Reeve censorship - "View cache" on: 
      http://www.google.com/search?q=%22foetuses+being+delivered+to+Reeve%22
          - vs http://www.bbc.co.uk/ouch/weblog/archive/0403.shtml now 
          ... http://qwer.org/AvatarIsOnTheRight.html imitates UK 
          Resistance: http://qwer.org/ScrollDownOrSearchForTron.html ... 
          Apple owners - smarter than the average loser who buys a PC: 
          http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=86816 ... token 
          stationery double-URLtendre roundup: http://penisland.net/ , 
          http://www.fukhing.com.hk/ ... spirit of experimentation alive 
          at: http://www.ica.org.uk/index.cfm?articleid=13566 ... damned 
          when he talks: http://bush.carlcarter.com/ - and when he 
          doesn't: http://www.looptvandfilm.com/client/bush/bush.html 
          ... "Little Britain" fansites really getting into the 
          characters' back-stories: http://www.emilyhoward.com/ ... 
          

                                >> TRACKING <<
               sufficiently advanced technology : the gathering

          Kids today have it easy. In our day, when you wanted to send
          a monochrome picture of your hastily-sketched out superhero
          idea to 2000AD, you had to do it yourself, with a black biro
          and some scrap paper. These days, all you need is the
          INKULATOR9000, a GPLed degree project that takes polygonal
          meshes and turns them into seemingly amateurishly inked
          illustrations. Yeah, yeah, we know that non-photorealistic
          rendering is old hat, but there's something in particular
          about the combination of fan-constructed fantasy 3D models
          and a program that simulates what those fans would have done
          before Poser that just seems... right.
          http://inkulator.sourceforge.net/
                                                            - "heh heh"
          http://www.red3d.com/cwr/npr/#sketching
                                            - if you want to get fancy
         

                                >> GEEK MEDIA <<
                                  get out less

          TV>> the self-consciously inept movie parodies of FRENCH AND 
          SAUNDERS (9pm, Fri, BBC1) are firmly - but politely - shown 
          the door by the new maestro of "alternative mainsteam", in AN 
          AUDIENCE WITH HARRY HILL (9.10pm, Sat, ITV), shortly before 
          his triumphant return to a primetime slot with HARRY HILL'S TV 
          BURP (5.30pm, next Sat, ITV)... and, as we said before, J-Lo 
          discovers the nightmarish inner thoughts of a serial killer 
          resemble nothing so much as "bad 1980s pop videos" in daft VR 
          knockoff THE CELL (10.15pm, Sat, C4)... "spacecraft explode 
          with muffled thuds, not the usual ka-booms that, in the real 
          world, the vacuum of space would render impossible" notes The 
          Independent re the new BATTLESTAR GALACTICA (8pm, Mon, Sky1) 
          http://news.independent.co.uk/media/story.jsp?story=571071 ... 
          the new series of LITTLE BRITAIN (9pm, Tue, BBC3) remains the 
          only thing BBC3 seems likely to be remembered for, while MY 
          LIFE IN FILM (9.30pm, Tue, BBC3) combines the tiresome media-
          referencing of "Spaced" with the ongoing life-commentary of 
          "Dream On" - and not in a good way... we must admit to having 
          a soft spot for Zeppotron's hilariously old-lady-fronted 
          nudity roundup BAN THIS FILTH (11.05pm, Tue, C4)... terrorist-
          myth-exposing docu THE POWER OF NIGHTMARES (9pm, Wed, BBC2) 
          may just make you more worried about what unsubstantiated 
          anxiety-inducing nonsense the media are going to perpetrate 
          next... and, with the Cassini Huygens probe heading for Titan 
          on December 25th, HORIZON (9pm, Thu, BBC2) asks: have we 
          learned nothing from the "Beagle 2" debacle - that delicate 
          planetary manoeuvres and Christmas celebrations don't mix?...
          
          FILM>> Dreamworks' CGI division "jumps the shark" with an 
          upsetting CGI caricature of Will Smith and a "Finding Nemo" 
          knockoff that *doesn't even look like it's underwater* in 
          SHARK TALE ( http://www.capalert.com/capreports/sharktale.htm :
          game violence, including eating of live characters; body 
          exudate/ function humor; Lenny didn't [have] a "girlfriend" 
          and showed no interest in the opposite gender; implications of 
          diverse lifestyle)... sadly, they haven't used the popular 
          headline pun for overviews of the field of cellular automata 
          http://www.google.com/search?q=%22it+all+about+Alife%3F%22 to 
          update the theme tune of Jude Law talking-to-camera remake 
          ALFIE ( http://www.bbfc.co.uk/ : Contains strong language and 
          moderate nudity and sex references)... though also out next 
          week is the inevitable "whoever wins - cinemagoers lose" 
          franchise-flogging of comic/game adaptation ALIEN VS PREDATOR 
          ( http://www.capalert.com/capreports/alienvspredator.htm : 
          many alien attacks, some quite graphic; two uses of the most 
          foul of the foul words which is likely the reason for the PG-
          13 rating, none of which were needed in any way; only one 
          sacrificial suicide) - it's hardly going to have the laughs of 
          http://alienlovespredator.com/ , is it?...
          
          BONERS: CORRECTIONS, CLARIFICATIONS, AND "INCORRECTLY REGARDED 
          AS GOOFS">> "ATDT www.ntk.net: Hey, this is your old Hayes 
          Modem talking", began one of the reader emails that we've 
          never fully understood, before continuing "Yeah, the one you 
          threw away to get a USR V.42bis so you could zmodem Ultima IV 
          in a mere day", and concluding: "This is almost as much fun as 
          the times we used to turn Tradewars movies into N0rp with The 
          Draw instead of hax0ring your WWWIV BBS that nobody visited. 
          Keep up the good work ATH0"... on a similar note, TONY FINCH 
          suggested the obvious approach to the Amstrad E3 stinging you 
          for making data calls down your own phone line [NTK 2004-09-
          17], asking "What happens if you unplug it overnight?". Well, 
          the bad news is: they've thought of that, Tony - it stops 
          working if it can't communicate with the Amstrad number coded 
          into the hardware (also the only reason you can't currently 
          use it outside the UK)... in other updates, we'll omit the 
          identity of the reader who pointed out that the Westminster 
          Council gimp [also NTK 2004-09-17] also has "his own 
          animation, which us lucky people who work for the council were 
          forwarded in one of many spam e-mails from our 'internal 
          communications' team", leading him to suspect that some of 
          them "are clearly on drugs of some kind". You can "enjoy" the 
          full gimp-abusing Flash toon at http://www.rubber-trouble.com/ 
          - our source particularly relished the slightly sinister 
          "...sometimes too efficient!" at the end... and just to close 
          on our traditionally unsavoury note, comiserations to the 
          (again unnamed) individual who emailed breathlessly comparing 
          two celebrities' genitalia to "a button mushroom" and "a 
          baby's arm holding an orange", shortly followed by another 
          message announcing: "Gnngh. You're not Popbitch. Please ignore 
          previous email, obviously"... 


                               >> 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
               "proud sponsors of Tygerberg College Rugby squad"
              http://special.time.net.my/cobra/team-tygerberg.cfm

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