>> HARD NEWS <<
unlimited to-do's
Is it some coded message between the busy bees of MySociety
and the (comparatively) slow-moving Open Rights Group (the
latter steadily nearing some way that you can actually send
them the money that you may have pledged them last year)?
Anyway, MySociety have turned their internal-nagging email bot
*inside out* and converted it to an outward-facing web site
which will regularly remind you about anything you were
planning to do but keep forgetting. Like a cron job for the
rest of your life, the site promises to "hassle you roughly"
every X days according to what you specify, and even utilises
"semi-unpredictable" intervals to prevent you anticipating
(and attempting to avoid?) its relentless good intentions.
Still, we always like to show some editorial impartiality on
MySociety issues - and in this case maintain that the project
would be slightly, but significantly, improved if it was
renamed "David Hasslebot", in tribute to the calm, slightly
camp conscience of the computerised car in "Knight Rider".
http://www.hassleme.co.uk/
- no pressure or anything
http://www.openrightsgroup.org/
- yeah, yeah, says distracted NTK editor, peering at Congressional notices
http://qwer.org/DeptForConstitutionalAffairsOffering.html
- get yer UKP10K funds to "facilitate democratic engagement" here
>> EVENT QUEUE <<
GOTOs considered non-harmful
You know, we've always wanted to hold an event that Joshua
"del.icio.us" Schachter was speaking at - largely so we could
introduce him with the Shampoo track of the same name ("You're
so old and we're so young/ We're gonna have some fun/ 'cause
we want to! [...] Del-icio-us/ Running wild in the city, late
at night!"). Sadly, next month's CARSON WORKSHOPS SUMMIT: THE
FUTURE OF WEB APPS (10am, Wed 2006-02-08, Kensington Town
Hall, London, W8 7NX, UKP75 + VAT) has a slightly more
conventional pretext for making him the keynote, commencing a
day of mid-priced Web 2.0 cheerleading that also includes Eric
"Flickr" Costello, furious Brit blogging apologist Tom Coates,
plus a couple of guys from Google. Negotiations are afoot to
snag one or more of them for another London GEEK DINNER,
though in the meantime Ian Forrester is trying out a slightly
more upmarket venue for January's soiree with DAVE "CSS Zen
Garden" SHEA (7pm, Mon 2006-01-23, The Crown and Anchor, 22
Neal St, London WC2H 9PS, UKP6 for buffet). And for anyone who
considers an evening discussing web standards "not quite geeky
enough", a new pub night for "computer security enthusiasts"
continues at 8pm, next Thu 2006-01-19, upstairs at The Hand
And Flower, 1 Hammersmith Road, London W14 8XJ, under the name
of DC4420 - seemingly implying it's exactly 1.7 times more
hardcore than London 2600?
http://www.carsonworkshops.com/summit/
- and for David Heinemeier Hansson...
http://www.geekdinner.co.uk/
- ..."Ruby, Don't Take Your Love To Town"
http://www.flat3.org/web2.0/
- vs: always someone trying to spoil it for everybody else
http://www.dc4420.org/
- just across the road from the Olympia Exhibition halls
http://www.dorkbot.org/dorkbotlondon/
- James "prawn sandwich" Larsson at Dorkbot London, Wed Jan 18
>> ANTI-MEMES <<
there's smoke, flames, http://dohthehumanity.com/
mind the upholstery, would you?: http://LastRetch.co.uk/ ...
not much use, but perhaps needs to be "saved for the nation":
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=7581176936
... slightly geographically-themed Google goofs o' the month:
http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=%22united+kingdong%22 ,
http://www.google.com/search?q=%22has+a+population+of+0%22 ,
http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=%22circumvent+the+earth%22 ,
http://www.google.com/search?&q=%22developing+counties%22 ,
http://google.com/search?q=%22onanic+farm%22 (/"chemistry"
etc), http://google.com/search?q=ultrapotable - and for you
Narnia fans: http://google.com/search?q=%22fauning+acolytes%22
... interesting-sounding event, ad copy by Nathan Barley?:
http://refusingstructures.net/future.html ... odd signage from
our Flickr streams: http://flickr.com/photos/dob/60255361/ ,
http://www.flickr.com/photos/gwire/83958331/ ...
>> TRACKING <<
sufficiently advanced technology : the gathering
Despite the naysayers in the recent "My key size is more
enormous than yours" mini-discussion on Slashdot, the
(heavily concealed) truth is that TRUECRYPT is probably the
most actively developed storage encryption system - this
week at least. Based on the old Encryption For The Masses
Windows program, it's recently been ported to Linux, and can
Mac OS X be far away? It has a nice line in "false-bottomed"
volumes, which means that you can give the password to one
encrypted volume without revealing the existence of another,
giving rubber-hosed attackers an excuse to torture you two or
three times. It can sit around on USB keys and, despite the
usual cryptowonktastic choice of cyphers, is actually
reasonably straightforward to use, leaving you time to
actively do something subversive enough to fill more than
a GPGed textfile.
http://www.truecrypt.org/
- snuff movies are *so* cheating
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=05/12/28/1256244&cid=14351388
- worth it for the "I'm coauthor on the proof" smackdown
http://www.m-o-o-t.org/
- still waiting for the Day of M-O-O-T
>> GEEK MEDIA <<
get out less
BONERS: CORRECTIONS, CLARIFICATIONS, AND "INCORRECTLY REGARDED
AS GOOFS">> With the possible exception of "Stealth", "Hotel
Rwanda" and "The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou", last year's
film were so uniformly poor they've almost put us off buying
pirate DVDs altogether. And yes, MARK CARROLL and SAL TATION,
that includes the shameless fan-pandering of Joss Whedon's
"Serenity", despite your protests that it even appeared in the
IMDB's "top 250 movies as judged by their regular voters", or
that viewers who didn't jump, wince or laugh were "not paying
attention" http://qwer.org/RidiculouslyComplexPermalink.html .
Inexplicably, this $39m triumph only took about $25m at the US
box office: http://boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=serenity.htm -
in contrast to, say, the much more cinematic "Pitch Black",
whose budget and domestic takings were exactly the other way
around: http://boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=pitchblack.htm ...
On a related note, "[I] humbly suggest that if you need to
explain phrases like phony war [NTK 2004-11-12], you're not
doing a good enough job of driving away a wider readership",
was just one of several reader comments we neglected to
mention for the whole of last year. More recently, "Where did
you get that from? Nobody I've shown it to believes that BT
actually produced it", contested MATTHEW GILLIARD, regarding
NTK 2005-08-05's BT Technology Timeline - now nominally
accessible at http://btplc.com/Innovation/News/timeline/ ;
while "Marillion fan, by any chance?" accused MATT GIBSON,
following NTK 2004-10-15's use of "Currently residing in the
'Where Are They Now?' file", apparently unaware that its
appearance in Marillion's 1987 "Incommunicado" is itself a
quote from - of course - 1984's "This Is Spinal Tap" ...
In a similarly nostalgic mood (and apparently apropos of
nothing in particular), "What happened to all the kids in the
videos such as Madness' 'Baggy Trousers', the little girl in
the Smiths' 'Stop Me If You Think You've Heard This One
Before', and suchlike?", mused ELIZABETH BROWN. "I've always
wanted to know where are they now." More practically, "Are
you still in touch with anyone like Chuffy! or Snark from
[defunct 2002 NTK spin-off] EveryoneHatesAttachments.com?",
inquired WOODEN SPOON - well, the simple answer is no, but
they (or anyone bizarrely pretending to be them) can always
contact us at tips@spesh.com if they'd like to be reunited,
using the subject line "NTK - I am someone who used to use
EveryoneHatesAttachments.com (or bizarrely pretending to be
them)"...
>> SMALL PRINT <<
Need to Know is a useful and interesting UK digest of things that
happened last month or might happen next month. 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
"just too hard to read stuffs here"
http://o-turn.blogspot.com/2005/12/begin-at-beginnings.html
NEED TO KNOW
THEY STOLE OUR REVOLUTION. NOW WE'RE STEALING IT BACK.
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