Need To Know 2000-12-08

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"Sad people choose an online woman (cue stereotypes of air hostess, barmaid and school teacher) and then exchange flirtatious emails with what is really a computer program. Alan Turing, where are you when we need you?" - "Heroes and Zeroes" column, MACUSER, Friday 2000-12-08 ...actually, Turing kind of preferred the motorcycle cop, the American Indian, and the construction worker... >> HARD NEWS << up the wazoo The Sexual Offences Amendment, introduced to bring the gay age of consent in line with those notorious heterosexuals, is now law, but the riveting Lords debate on the topic continues at the very home of frank sexual argy-bargy - THE WEB! Welcome to www.ageofconsent.org.uk, our favourite Baroness Thornton's own exercise in on-line democracy, where you too can vote on the controversial topic of what is scaring the peer's horses these days. There are, we should say, something a bit skewiff here. The explanation of exactly what you're voting for on the site is very confusing, with strong encouragements to vote with the good Baroness, whatever you originally thought. Also, they keep on saying the word "buggery", to the point where we began to forget what it meant. Finally, details of the individuals behind the site are strangely vague, apart from the credit to "the group who voted in favour of the House of Lords amendment". Although it would be nice to imagine that it's actually the Baroness who wrote the ColdFusion back-end (oops-la!), this does make it tricky to discover who to contact - should, say, you wish to query about the use of the site's personal data under the Data Protection Act (helpfully linked from their homepage in place of a proper privacy statement). That's certainly pertinent, given that in order to vote, you have to give your name, postcode - and your sexual orientation. Those of us who are a mite concerned about handing over a lucrative, geographically-detailed, pink pound marketing database to the Baroness shouldn't worry: One call to the Lords later, and we find it was the oddly reticent INTERACTIVE BUREAU who manage the site. Unfortunately, as of "press send" time, they hadn't given us the precise details of the fat "data controller" contact required by law. So, in accordance with the data registrar's own recommendations, do send your firm, manly, request to have your most private recesses unhanded this instant to IAB's chief exec: RODNEY TYLER, INTERACTIVE BUREAU LONDON, HOLBORN GATE, 26 SOUTHAMPTON BUILDINGS, LONDON WC2A 1PJ. We'll update that address as soon as they pull their finger out. Ahem. http://www.ageofconsent.org.uk/ - notice our restrained use of double-entendre here http://wood.ccta.gov.uk/dpr/dpdoc.nsf - form letter under Your Rights http://194.128.65.4/pa/ld199900/ldhansrd/pdvn/lds00/text/01113-06.htm - "the position is quite different for girls" Surprises came thick and fast at this year's BIG BROTHER AWARDS: the absence of Mark Thomas (on "a sting" somewhere); Simon Davies and David Shayler taking the stage as "Men In Black"; endearingly amateurish home movies of Privacy International delivering awards to winners who couldn't make the ceremony. But the biggest turn-up for the bookies came when out-of-nowhere outsiders ENVISION TV LICENSING swept ahead of established favourites - including 192.com/ InfoDisc proprietors i-CD Publishing, automated face-recognition pioneers Visionics and, of course, Amazon.co.uk - to take "Most Invasive Company", thanks to their national database of 26 million addresses plus what Davies described as "constantly hounding TV-free households to explain why they don't have a TV". To which we'd add: and requiring retailers, by law, to provide them with the names and addresses of anyone buying or renting a TV, digital set-top box, VCR, PC tuner card or "TV-enabled computer" in the UK, making the sale of Orwell's "telescreens" more strictly regulated here than, say, rifles and shotguns in the state of Florida. Now, we don't recall ever explicitly handing over these details when buying a telly (unless they get them direct from your credit card or bank), but if you're purchasing some TV-enabled consumer goods this Christmas, why not take along a large sum of cash and perhaps a "new" address as well, and do let us know how you get on... http://www.privacyinternational.org/bigbrother/uk2000/ - Jack Straw re-nominated "for the astonishing achievement of being consistently more authoritarian than Michael Howard" http://www.tv-l.co.uk/retailers/retailers.html - TVs, rifles, shotguns: which "urban pacifier" is next? Celebrity gossip time: WHICH spicy e-mail newsletter attempts to avoid legal action by keeping its scandalous gossip as "blind items"? BUT is these days getting shopped by its own online FORUM, who insist on putting names to EVEN THE WORST ACCUSATIONS regarding hitherto NAMELESS TV PRESENTERS, to the point where they've had to (temporarily, we hope) shut it down? But who, have nevertheless, pointed their fans to forum on another site, which presumably will have to shut itself down too, and so on infinitum? Hmm? http://www.popbitch.com/ - no, you idiots, not us http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:www.popbitch.com/data/guestbook.html - damn missed it >> ANTI-NEWS << berating the obvious http://www.cokeauctions.co.uk/ doesn't strip HTML from usernames, letting you close </td>'s at will... "By 1988 online porn sites had established themselves as a major presence on the World Wide Web" reveals Sex Industry survey in TIME OUT (p17)... "In engineering terms, IndraNet is a fourth generation wireless broadband multimedia tridimensional fractal communication mesh network technology endowed with advanced computing capabilities" - and in bullshit terms? http://www.indranet-technologies.com/technology/core-technology.asp ... hey, ours works fine: http://df9.clanpages.com/bt-ad[1].gif ... implying the two stories with headlines are completely made up: http://www.gyford.com/images/macweekdoh.gif ... with these salaries, they're going to be searching for some time: http://194.205.126.134/cgi-bin/JobDetails.asp?JobID=445391 ... someone's got have a crack for: http://www.crackzilla.com/ ... view "ideavirus" propagation, live, before your very eyes!: http://www.ideavirus.com/stats/webalizer/ ... after several days of web server downtime, CIX redefine "user support": http://x54.deja.com/getdoc.xp?AN=699574262 ... >> EVENT QUEUE << goto's considered non-harmful OK, so we'll do a big KEVIN WARWICK WATCH update next week, as the Professor appears to be commemorating the start of his Royal Institution Christmas Children's Lectures (from 2000-12- 14, London) with a fresh burst of publicity for bizarre cybersexual experiments involving his wife. (Remember: Watch operatives are forbidden from interfering at this crucial stage of human evolution, in accordance with our First Law: "A operative may not injure Kevin Warwick, or, through inaction, allow Kevin Warwick to come to harm"). Also currently taxing NTK's busy "Operations" division is the imminent prospect of our NEWTONMAS 2000 party, which now seems almost certain to take place on the evening of Saturday 2000-12-23, and to be some kind of tie-in with those groovy VXSLAB guys and LONDON 2600 (who helped choose the date, explaining "Almost none of our lot are likely to be up to their elbows in family Xmas preparations"). Exactly *where* it's going to be - well, that's where you come in: if you know of, frequent, or own any reasonably central London venue that could accommodate up to several hundred geeks singing Cthulhu Christmas carols, do get in touch. Same applies if you have any video projection kit that you'd like to supervise at the event - or it'll be OHP acetates at Webshack or The Foundry again, you Scrooges... http://www.ri.ac.uk/Christmas/details2000.html - soundtrack to TV version composed by... Daniel Pemberton http://www.cnn.com/2000/TECH/computing/12/07/robot.man/ - also guesting on "Start The Week", 9am (&9.30pm), Mon, Radio 4 http://www.nmk.co.uk/events_diary/events.cfm?ItemID=2466 - vs http://www.atheists.org/flash.line/dildo2.htm >> TRACKING << sufficiently advanced technology : the gathering AUDIOGALAXY SATELLITE isn't your standard Napster clone. It's principal advantage is that almost all the UI is run from their own Website; you pick out the tracks you want queued for download, and the stubby little client merely chats occasionally to find out what's to be downloaded, where from, and who wants to upload. There are no permanently open ports, the client automatically auto-resumes downloads, and the CPU usage is miniscule. The Windows version (yes, there's a 200K CLI Linux client) even has bandwidth throttling. Meanwhile, that Audiogalaxy Web UI is *lovely*: it automatically sorts songs by artist, and does its best to eliminate broken files and consolidate good versions. It keeps track of files that have appeared in the past on the network, so you can select and queue them for when they reappear. And because the selection and downloading process are separated, you can pick your tracks away from home, and have them auto-download remotely to your home machine. Heck, as an journalistic experiment, we even managed to set up a public repository of songs using a client running on a Webserver. It's exactly how Napster should be done - and there's even a potential revenue model for AG with banner ads and CD purchases. If wasn't for the fact that it's slightly more centralised than the Nap (making for some scaling issues), non-free (natch), and fucking doomed to be smashed into pieces by those RIAA folk, we'd say it's the future of MP3 distribution. As it is, we'll say that it's the all-too-brief present, and wait for the writs to fly. http://www.audiogalaxy.com/satellite/ - very tempted to keep quiet about this one http://ultimate.infopop.com/~rageagainst/ubb/Forum19/HTML/000009.html - raging with the help of some machines >> MEMEPOOL << hasta la altavista "I am sorry, but as of November 2000, I will no longer respond to questions about the U.P.C and the New Testamant" - due presumably to the forthcoming BARCODE ARMAGEDDON - http://members.aol.com/productupc/666quest.html ... REBOOT: THE MUSICAL? ... http://www.wherearethetoonsnow.com/ ... who's your fave HAYEK? http://www.csun.edu/~dgw61315/dgwhayek.html ... tetanizing beam weapons ... http://www.nic.mu versus http://www.hot.mu ... help spammers: change your name to <subst string=first_name> ... they can't *all* be bots, surely? http://www.attrition.org/hosted/sexchart/current.txt ... http://www.quintessentially.com/guest/ - oh, fuck *off* ... http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2000/11/21/virtual_suicide/index3.html - pulled out a gun from where? ... traumatised by CALL ME KENNETH: http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/zd/20001120/tc/death_by_robot_1.html ... nope, i we think *this* has to be THE WEAKEST LINK: http://www.diffusionuk.freeserve.co.uk/weakest.htm ... re-record, not fade away: http://www.studio2.freeserve.co.uk/tapes/tapes.htm ... BBC ims TVGH: http://www.bbc.co.uk/choice/microtv/fifteen/15films3.shtml >> GEEK MEDIA << get out less TV>> the Liberal Democrats present their reactions to THE QUEEN'S SPEECH (10.35pm, Fri, BBC1) - not to be confused with FREDDIE MERCURY: THE UNTOLD STORY immediately after (10.40pm) - that's "Untold to anyone who hasn't watched any TV for the last 9 years", presumably... itself followed by unpretentious giant-worm movie followup TREMORS 2: AFTERSHOCKS (11.40pm, Fri, BBC1)... Saturday sees a long-overdue tribute to a much- loved entertainer whose image is constantly being reinvented to consistently challenge the status quo. But enough about DAVID FROST NIGHT (from 8.10pm, BBC2; likely highlight WHEN FROST MET MUHAMMAD ALI, 11.35pm) - C4 are also celebrating ailing pop has-been MADONNA (from 9pm, supposed "highlight" DESPERATELY SEEKING SUSAN, 11.20pm)... we suspect that COMIC TALES WITH ALAN MOORE (2.55am, Sat, C4) may be an extended profile from 4later's upcoming history of Brit sci-fi - rather than our dream "bearded Alan" line-up of getting him and Alan Cox to interview each other... we still maintain that "Life Of Brian" is the only watchable Python film, as opposed to Spectrum-game adaptation MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL http://www.theonion.com/onion3636/holy_grail_quotes.html , http://www.geocities.co.jp/Hollywood/9060/holye.html (9pm, Sun, BBC2)... and the Sunday night movie ratings battle continues with Ang Lee's Oscar-winning kung-fu-free SENSE AND SENSIBILITY (9pm, Sun, C4) up against Molly Ringwald/ Michael Ironside '80s trash SPACEHUNTER: ADVENTURES IN THE FORBIDDEN ZONE (9pm, Sun, C5) - launching a perfect run of terrible C5 films which include ROBIN HOOD: MEN IN TIGHTS (9pm, Mon); Kevin Spacey disability comedy SEE NO EVIL, HEAR NO EVIL (9pm, Tue - "and try not to set yourself on fire, Mr Pryor"); plus Phil Collins' train robber romance BUSTER (9pm, Wed), which "competes" with Spielberg's appalling THE LOST WORLD: JURASSIC PARK (8pm, Wed, ITV)... the big beneficiary of the dot.com bust, as covered in CUTTING EDGE (9pm, Tue, C4) seems to be Daniel Pemberton, who does the soundtrack music for all of them... C4's Graham Hancock gets some sort of comeback among the widespread debunking of his preposterous "lost mysteries of the ancients" theories in HORIZON: ATLANTIS REBORN AGAIN (9pm, Thu, BBC2) http://www.grahamhancock.com/intro.php ... not quite as plausible as alien global-warming sub-They-Live- alike sci-fi THE ARRIVAL (12.10am, Thu, BBC1), which shares the intriguing premise, general menace, and shoddy special effects of director David Twohy's subsequent "Pitch Black"... FILM>> "Charlie's Angels" still the best thing out there, unless you're at all tempted by yet another superformulaic Wesley Snipes actioner in the form of THE ART OF WAR (imdb trivia: [co-star] Michael Biehn reads a copy of Sun Tzu's "Art of War" in the film "K2"; Wesley Snipes' character was reading "The Art of War" on the plane in "Passenger 57")... otherwise it's a kids' version of the behavioural modification therapy of "A Clockwork Orange" in uninspired sequel 102 DALMATIANS (http://www.capalert.com/capreports/102dalmatians.htm : use of "6660"; reckless vehicular endangerment; human sent into baking oven; serving as cause for adding the reminder of our God-ordained superiority over animals in Gen. 1:26, one of the characters says "Dogs are people, too")... or Liza "Teenage Health Freak" Walker, Stuart "Shooting Fish" Townsend, and Keith "sodding" Allen - together at last! - in Hanif Kureishi's mid-life fantasy THE ESCORT (imdb: also known as "Mauvaise Passe", "The Wrong Blonde")... while John Waters takes "guerrilla film-making" to its natural conclusion in amateurishly scattershot Hollywood satire CECIL B DEMENTED (http://www.screenit.com/movies/2000/cecil_b_demented.html : the theater manager is looking through a porno magazine with the title, "Hershey Highway" and then gets [Alicia "Dune, Cybill" Witt] to sign a box of "Sticky Bunz" - a sex toy presumably molded after her rear end [...] Back in the porno movie, she suggestively asks, "Why is it that men only want my ass?" She then kisses a gerbil that she's holding, but it gets away and it's implied that it then crawls up her butt [...] Meanwhile, there's more masturbatory behavior from the viewers in the audience)... TRANSATLANTIC T-SHIRT TERROR>> OK, just one more week of this ceaseless corporate merchandising, then we'll shut up about it (for a start, if you haven't ordered your NTK T-shirts from http://www.ntkmart.com by midnight Monday 2000-12-11, then you might not get them before Christmas, assuming that was what you had in mind in the first place). Anyway, we've had reassuringly few complaints so far, all of which have been from either Americans or women. A "surprised and disgruntled" BRUCE STERLING led the US delegation, moaning that the "USA isn't even afforded on the pull-down menu!", while another citizen confessed to concerns about ordering via a proxy in the UK, that proxy being his "mother's septugenarian penpal from before the war". Sorry guys, this wasn't meant as a slur on your fine young nation; we genuinely thought you might have had enough of consumer items on that extensive landmass of yours. We did look into some lame cafepress.com alternative, but their print area is only 8" by 10", and our logos are all about 11" square. But we will let you know if we secure some sort US distributor and, if you are female, see if any of http://www.linkz.freeserve.co.uk/Babeshirts.htm look like your kind of size. Take as long as you like - we'll be in Dixons... thanks also for the exceptional entries which readers have continued to mail us, often in clear violation of one or more of our most basic rules. As a reminder: 1. Be careful with images that are copyrighted or of unknown provenance - eg: http://www.gyford.com/images/ntk_shirt.jpg , to avoid nasty http://www.mememachine.net/ -style litigation. However, clearing your parody with the copyright-holders first, as at http://bofhcam.org/images/NTK.tif shows admirable initiative (though does anyone have any ideas for funny animals that we could use instead of the crowbar?)... and 2. Try and put the images on your own site, then send us the URLs, instead of just mailing us gigantic BMP files, which, if we didn't know someone who had a Windows machine, we wouldn't be able to read. Though some of the "4K and under" ones have been so good http://www.ntk.net/2000/12/08/small.html - that we'll let them off (just this once)... and finally, after NTK 2000-09-01's iconoclastic http://www.cafepress.com/moose2000/ , TIM AIDLEY corrected his friend's oversight with the more (or less?) Stallman-friendly http://www.cafepress.com/fuckgnulinux/ . NTK fervently hopes that opportunities for sending us further variations on this particular theme are now closed... >> 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 "like Christmas (1997) all over again" http://ccmail.freemans.com/samples/isapi/drop.htm NEED TO KNOW THEY STOLE OUR REVOLUTION. NOW WE'RE STEALING IT BACK. Archive - http://www.ntk.net/ Unsubscribe? Mail ntknow-unsubscribe@lists.ntk.net Subscribe? Mail ntknow-subscribe@lists.ntk.net NTK now is supported by UNFORTU.NET, and by you: http://www.ntkmart.com/ (K) 2000 Special Projects. Copying is fine, but include URL: http://www.ntk.net/ Tips, news and gossip to tips@spesh.com All communication is for publication, unless you beg. 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