Need To Know 2003-05-16

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"Every talk, keynote, informal session, water-cooler conversation, party and failed sexual encounter was extensively covered, in real time, by bloggers who would rather write 'I am sitting here' than sit there..." - Bill Thompson bemoans ETCON coverage complexity http://www.spiked-online.com/articles/00000006DDA4.htm ...or endlessly dissected later on by people who weren't >> HARD NEWS << crying to Hughes "Well, I think I've found your problem", replied fistfuls of concerned readers after getting bounced last week from the published email of Beverley Hughes, Minister of Counting ID Consultation Entries. Fortunately, during the consultation, STAND didn't relay the thousands of comments we received directly to her. No, we sent them to the swanky "we're so wired" official consultation email address. Word has it that they did get them okay, but that the entire STAND-relayed wodge is now assumed to be one ginormous Internet "petition", rather than a bunch of individual statements. We'd still like that confirmed in writing, though. Or an email would do. Apparently, the best way to pry an explanation from a Minister is to get an MP to ask questions in the house. Given that Ms Hughes isn't easily contactable, maybe you'd like to contact yours? Duplicate questions won't be a problem: if they squint, we're sure the government can can just collapse them into one giant MP. With just one big voter standing behind them, glowering. http://makeashorterlink.com/?M46652084 - here we go again http://www.faxyourmp.com/ - feel free to send us a copy You call things names, you end up being called names: that's just the way these things go. First there was the hyper-active farce of Firebird (the Mozilla browser) versus Firebird (the database). For those of you not bothering to keep up, Firebird the database was a fork of software that was called Interbase which was owned by Borland a company which used to be called Inprise and before that used to be called Borland, deep breath. You'd think the Firebird developers would by now be accustomed to the transitory nature of names, but nooo. They were *shocked* when Mozilla started using the term Firebird, and insisted they were the *only* Firebird on the block, even though a) there were dozens of software Firebirds before them (including BT's short-lived games division) and b) the only thing anyone can remember about Firebird the DB was that it had massive security hole wired into it by Borland^WInprise^W Borland that took them six months to find. Dire threats were hurled, until Mozilla pointed out that the Firebird name was just the semi-internal *project* name, and since no-one calls the current browser "Seamonkey" (*its* project name), they should calm the motherfirebird down. http://firebird.sourceforge.net/ - nobody cares about you or your weirdo legacy software... http://www.mozilla.org/ - err... Readers with long memories may recall Carl Sagan getting into a similar tizzy about an internal Apple project that shared his name - until he threatened to sue. Apple's coders renamed the project's title to "Butthead Astronomer", which strangely failed to mollify him. Perhaps that explains some of the background of the next naming war: Apple asking the FreeBSD hackers to change the #definition of one of their error codes. Apparently, EDOOFUS has "raised eyebrows" at the corporation, and they've refused to accept the merge into Darwin ("a little more in-your-face than ... 'die_you_gravy_sucking_pigdog()'", apparently). Among the suggested replacements in the subsequent bikeshed discussion was EBUTTHEAD, and a note that in an old Apple II incarnation, STUPID stood for "Student Programmer ID". They settled on EDONTPANIC. At least, until the Estate of Douglas Adams puts up a fight. http://docs.freebsd.org/cgi/getmsg.cgi?fetch=86207+0+current/freebsd-hackers - CORPORATE CENSORSHIP! Put EDOOFUS on bittorrent! http://docs.freebsd.org/mail/current/freebsd-hackers.html - and other Apple titbits >> ANTI-NEWS << berating the obvious certainly gives impression it's still at quite an early stage: http://www.mod.uk/dpa/projects/digitization_stage_1.htm ... typical - they've limited the $3m money-back offer to "1 per customer": http://www.ntk.net/2003/05/16/dohfry.jpg ... JACK SCHOFIELD corrects himself, 80 gig drive should cost up to 80,000 pounds: http://www.ntk.net/2003/05/16/dohjack.gif ... guess it might help IBM superserver process its 11,000 daily transactions: http://www.ntk.net/2003/05/16/dohibm.gif ... man imitates Mark Leyner's "Et Tu, Babe", seeks "very special lady who's potbellied, flat chested, left handed, and a smoker": http://www.wifeodyssey.com/type.html - what do you want to bet that this guy gets a couple of hundred responses?... this week's unfortunate company acronym: http://www.cum.co.za/ ... and if you don't want to know this week's GOOGLE GOOFS, please look away now - http://www.google.com/search?q=competant , "chocolate moose", "tate modem", "causal clothes"... >> EVENT QUEUE << goto's considered non-harmful Of course, with an event like "digital moving image festival" ONEDOTZERO (from today Fri 2003-05-16 to Sun 2003-05-25, the ICA, London, from UKP5.50/session), we're lucky that there's even a non-Flash version of the site at all. But it would have killed them to put dates and times on the actual listings and to have used a more readable font size? Anyway, as well as the event's now-traditional Japanimation and FMV sequences (include Dead Or Alive: Xtreme Beach Volleyball), you may be able to find sessions on the work of NTK faves Tim "The Pod" Hope and Michel Gondry, who we'd describe as the inventor of "bullet time" if that wasn't to completely understate the extraordinary synthesis of analogue and digital effects in all his other work. Further computer-generated utopian fantasies will also be on show at the ASSOCIATION FOR FREE SOFTWARE ANNUAL CONFERENCE (from 10am, tomorrow Sat 2003-05-17, Aston University, Birmingham, free to members or UKP10 to join on the day), with talks from controversial free-software ISP CEO JASON CLIFFORD, Campaign for Digital Rights stalwart MARTIN KEEGAN, and two sessions on open source audio applications chaired by AFFS treasurer MJ "VOODOO" RAY. http://www.affs.org.uk/affsac.html - like anyone ever paid for their copy of "Acid Pro" http://www.onedotzero.org/new/onedotzero7/ - nothing says "cutting-edge" like horizontal scrolling http://www.museumoftechno.org/collections/franklin/extract_01.html - "likened [it] to being submerged in a child's kaleidoscope" >> TRACKING << sufficiently advanced technology : the gathering Can you still be anonymous online? Why yes you can, Mr JAMES BOND, of 999 Letsby Avenue, Afghanistan 90210. Like all crypto-wankery, doing so mostly involves ploughing through 18 or so HOWTOs written in one overexcited night by a tripping and cypherpunk in 1995, then extrapolating from there. But it's getting easier. That stalwart of anonymous remailing, MIXMASTER, has been stealthily getting more user-friendly over the last couple of years. Nowadays there's a text-menuing system for sending out anonymous mails (and Usenet postings) that's almost intuitive. There are emacs and mutt interfaces. And provisionally you can also create nyms that can receive and send anonymous mail too (although that seems to segfault in the Debian version and we're far too anonymous to find out why). Of course, to continue the crypto-wankery theme, alt.privacy.anon-server is now a market-mandated mess of mutual recrimination, spams and hoaxery, but it all seems to work, mostly. So you can stop sending us mutually-incriminating mail from work accounts now can't you... Mr Bond? http://groups.google.com/groups?group=alt.privacy.anon-server - So we meet again, Frog; I might have known it was you. http://mixmaster.sourceforge.net/ - God knows what state Private Idaho is in these days >> MEMEPOOL << ceci n'est pas une http://www.gagpipe.com/ http://lists.insecure.org/lists/nmap-hackers/2003/Apr-Jun/0010.html , http://www.insecure.org/ - perfect excuse if you're caught for http://film.guardian.co.uk/cannes/story/0,13266,957079,00.html ... what you missed at this Wednesday's SCRAMBLING FOR SAFETY: http://plum.flirble.org/~owen/SfS6.txt ... Dave Gorman takes on board criticism that "any idiot with a search engine could do that": http://www.davegorman.com/dggwa.html ... not quite the critical deconstruction of post-modern sexuality you might have hoped for: http://www.noapologiespress.com/pbs/ ... a trap?: http://www.af.mil/stories/123004851.shtml ... religious action figure n+1 - Catholic School Girls, in "crisp new school uniform": http://blessings-catalog.com/schoolgirl3.html ... http://www.newsmaxstore.com/nms/showdetl.cfm?&DID=6&Product_ID=1294 vs http://www.chickenhawkcards.com/ ... looks like a spoof of http://www.commercialbreaksandbeats.co.uk/ , but a bit more interesting: http://www.busstation.net/screen/screenad.htm ... >> GEEK MEDIA << get out less TV>> CAMBRIDGE SPIES (9pm, Fri, BBC2) harks back to a time when Cambridge graduates would be recruited by the KGB rather than Demon Internet... ALI G IN DA USAIII (10.40pm, Fri, C4) appears to be screening the Naomi Wolf interview deemed "too hot for HBO" http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_758839.html ... and Channel4 joins the human reproductive cloning race in THE FIRST HUMAN CLONE: CONCEPTION (8.05pm, Sat, C4)... "Harry Potter and The Lord Of The Rings" sweeps the board in THE BIG READ TOP 100 (9.05pm, Sat, BBC2), up against the isolated island entertainments of ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK (9.05pm, Sat, C4) and KEVIN AND PERRY GO LARGE (9.05pm, Sat, BBC1)... Drew Barrymore goes back to school in NEVER BEEN KISSED (10.05pm, Sat, ITV)... and ALIENS (10pm, Sun, C4) now resembles "Halo: The Movie", and is followed by Mark Kermode's ALIEN EVOLUTION (12.50am, Sun, C4) then, later in the week, ALIEN 3 (10.40pm, Thu, C4)... on the subject of suspiciously well-documented Marines rescue missions, Private Jessica Lynch is the topic of WAR SPIN (7.15pm, Sun, BBC2)... Nick "Spaced" Frost looks at MOVIE MISTAKES UNCOVERED UNCUT (8.30pm, Sun, C5)... Woody Allen finally admits he's actually playing "Himself" in 1930s jazz odyssey SWEET AND LOWDOWN (11.25pm, Sun, BBC2)... and didn't Alexandra Aitken shower with a rugby team in the last series of 99 THINGS TO DO BEFORE YOU DIE (11.05pm, Mon, C5)? (And if not, why not?)... CRASH OF AN INTERNET PORN KING: OPERATION LANDSLIDE (9pm, Tue, BBC2) seems unlikely to explore the conspiracy theory that "Operation Ore" was named after the FBI's "Carnivore" program... expect plenty of ads for cleaning products in borderline-obsessive-compulsive makeover HOW CLEAN IS YOUR HOUSE? (8.30pm, Wed, C4)... Wednesday is Matrix night, with a direct-from-the-premiere LIVE WITH CHRISTIAN O'CONNELLL (7.30pm, Wed, C5); the original THE MATRIX (9pm, Wed, C5) - last shown last October; plot-free CGI showcase ANIMATRIX: FINAL FLIGHT OF THE OSIRIS (11.35pm, Wed, C5); THE MAKING OF THE MATRIX RELOADED (11.50pm, Wed, C5); plus the moderately influential Keanu clunker JOHNNY MNEMONIC (11.15pm, Wed, BBC1) ... while Thursday's theme appears to be "Fame, and its aftermath", with a triple bill of THE CURSE OF BIG BROTHER (9pm, Thu, C5), CELEBRITY DETOX CAMP (10pm, Thu, C5) as well as X-RATED AMBITION: THE TRACI LORDS STORY (11pm, Thu, C5) - the tragic tale of an adult movie star ultimately forced to appear in a Manic Street Preachers video... FILM>> "Wonderful... Jane Austen in bondage gear" was the verdict of NTK reader MIKE TAYLOR on controversial limited- release psychosexual James Spader S&M office romance SECRETARY ( http://www.cndb.com/movie.html?title=Secretary : lots of spanking and [Maggie "Donnie Darko" Gyllenhaal's] bare butt and thigh during the mid point of the movie) - so please write in with your one-sentence reviews if you go and see any of the previews of THE MATRIX RELOADED this Wednesday or Thursday... straight in at number 22 in the IMDB's Worst 100 Movies Of All Time is puerile Bruckheimer urban-legend-remake KANGAROO JACK ( http://www.screenit.com/movies/2003/kangaroo_jack.html : the camera briefly focuses on [Estella "Planet of the Apes" Warren's] shapely body in wet, clingy clothes)... Denzel Washington sticks somewhat closer to reality for "inspired by a true story" grown-up-victim-of-child-abuse fable ANTWONE FISHER ( http://www.capalert.com/capreports/antwonefisher.htm : accusation of homosexual practices; offscreen intercourse; mockery of faith-related excitement)... Tim Roth *is* Oliver Cromwell in period thrill TO KILL A KING ( www.bbfc.co.uk : contains infrequent moderate violence)... and rounding off the rogue's gallery of this week's releases, the "Ops" in question turn out not to be heart-lung transplants or female-to-male transsexuals during anti-Serbian snowboard nonsense EXTREME OPS ( http://www.cndb.com/movie.html?title=Extreme+Ops : the girls dare [Joe "Servants" Absolom] to roll around in the snow and climb up a rope fully naked)... >> 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 "the real Dave Green would use Gifs for this" http://antics.org.uk/tea/tead.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) 2003 Special Projects. Copying is fine, but include URL: http://www.ntk.net/ Full license at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/1.0 Tips, news and gossip to tips@spesh.com All communication is for publication, unless you beg. Press releases from naive PR people to pr@spesh.com Remember: Your work email may be monitored if sending sensitive material. Sending >500KB attachments is forbidden by the Geneva Convention. 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