Need To Know 1999-05-07

archive

"Smart-gun technology uses either magnetic coding, fingerprints, or radio signals to allow only the registered owner of the gun to shoot." - POLLY SPRENGER, Wired News ...but only the Chief Judge knows about the DNA imprint on the bullets! [ http://www.wired.com/news/news/politics/story/19421.html ] >> HARD NEWS << worn with use So now we're being stampeded by ISP gift horses, all hiding their mouths behind dainty little hankies. Just a week after Tempo's revenue-defying free calls service, AOL "accidentally" leaks news that they, too, are trialling a flat-rate 0800 Internet service. An incredible money vacuum if implemented - but who needs to do that when just the rumour is keeping AOLers from bucking off to the freebie ISPs? Sneaky? Even AOL can't compete on those stakes with Freecall UK, who've been spamming their 0800 net access offer across the uk.* newsgroups. A special, high-cost kind of "free", this: in order to access the service, you have to register four friends. Who, naturally, have to register four of their friends who... Yes, it's nothing more than a pyramid scheme for sucking up e-mail addresses. Well, at least they've got a business plan. http://www.freecall-uk.com/ - although they nicked it off sixdegrees.com http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/1999/17/ns-8008.html - they'll limit the hours. Won't they? http://www.vfree.com/ - no such thing as a free school lunch Meanwhile, as the BT ADSL trial grinds on (latest excuse: "we haven't got enough people"), those little guinea-pigs are beginning to squeal. These days BT are spending so much time tweaking their firewall to prevent home owners setting up their own Web sites, they've seemingly forgotten a firewall's original purpose: to protect its users. So as their experimental subjects are raked by port scans and exploits from the .edu e1eet cr3wz, so BT's competitors quietly announce *their* full commercial rollout. As of this week, you should be able to pick up a 512KB cable modem ISP connection in Guildford for around 50UKP a month, courtesy of cableco NTL. The company plans similar deals in the rest of its franchise areas. Sure, we know they're just charging people to trial their hardware (an extra 130UKP - no Sky deals here) - but at least they're not actively trying to shoot themselves in the foot. http://www.ntl.com/cablemodems/qanda.htm - Northern Ireland to get flat rates before London. Chortle! http://www.singnet.com.sg/news/pscanning.html - hey, maybe it's the Home Office doing the hacking UNCLE CLIVE says he wants to create a portable Linux machine to take on the Microsoft hegemony, and who are we to stand in his way? But don't get too excited too soon. Firstly, despite all the excitement, Mr Sinclair (aged 58) is still keeping an eye on his other, equally viable developments: a new kind of folding bicycle and an idea for a personal flying machine. Also, as Clive did not know that Linux existed until a few weeks ago, he does have some catching up to do. But mainly, we'll wait because the man who told him about Linux was reputedly Chris Bidmead, veteran tech journo and - more importantly, author of Logopolis, the Dr Who episode that killed off Tom Baker. And if he can do that for one geek hero... http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/kw/diaries/11121998c.html - "This is the end, but the moment has been prepared for" http://www.ntk.net/linuzx/ - our artist's impression of the new machine http://www.wired.com/news/news/technology/story/19502.html - Microdrive finally working >> ANTI-NEWS << berating the obvious US "TACO BELL locations will be transformed into Tatooine, PIZZA HUT will be turned into Coruscant, and each KFC will turn into Naboo"... TV ad for ROVER 400 claims car is "catecholamine" agonist - what, like amphetamines and cocaine?... SHAMIR beats own 512 bit crypto... AUSTRALIAN phone-in sick day calls in a month late... "OVERWEIGHT children can shed pounds by watching less television" reports study... SKY giving away "free digibox" - which secretly "phones home" at night... FUTURE PUBLISHING buys bit of itself back from own founder - hope someone got a good deal... "PALMPILOT damages handwriting" myth spread by orange-containing-THC hoaxsters, SOUTH TO THE FUTURE: http://www.sfbg.com/wire/ ... guardians of the future, REGISTER.COM offering $299 per "medical" .md domain... www8.org Website - done in PAGEMILL... tip to JONATHAN ROSS: plugging the Mac in helps... who *are* these people? http://www.marketingcomputers.com/issue/june98/mediarep/q2904.asp ... WIPO defends the helpless victims of cybersquatting: global multinationals... FALCO! http://www.britstuff.com ... EXPLOSION ravages heart of Soho, net obviously to blame: http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/uk/newsid_330000/330357.stm ... >> EVENT QUEUE << goto's considered non-harmful From the looks of things, it's a *different* Peter Molyneux who wrote to the Telegraph Connected section this week bemoaning videogames' implicit message that "you will solve any problem and obtain quick justice with a bullet" - fans of Populous, Magic Carpet, and Dungeon Keeper will know that real long-term solutions lie in accumulating "mana" and ruling your village like a ruthless god. The "real" ex-Bullfrog MD meanwhile continues his non-stop world tour of any remotely game-related event at next week's E3 EXPO (from Thu 1999-05- 13, Los Angeles Convention Center), thrilling to such ground- breaking treats as Star Wars Epsisode 1 games, Grand Turismo 2, a Dreamcast with a built-in modem, plus the narcoleptic unveiling of not just Tomb Raider 4, but also the latest dead-eyed non-entity to play the role of Lara Croft at public functions. http://www.e3expo.com/ - Tomb Raider/Witchblade reprints now UKP1.99. Phwoar, eh? And if you can't afford the UKP300 entry fee for NetProject's Nuremberg-style rally LINUX: THE WAY FORWARD (Tue 1999-05-11), why not do what we do, and simply hide under the seats at the end of each previous Linux gig at the Commonwealth Institute, to emerge, blinking in the daylight, at the start of the next one - usually not more than two or three weeks later? Luring us out from our new-found troglodyte civilisation this time are Mexican GNOME hacker Miguel de Icanza, the UK's Alan Cox lecturing on e-commerce (what the!?! d'y'think he'll wear a suit?), plus one of the few forms of popular entertainment that can truly be said to be Open Source: a - hopefully improvisational - jazz band. http://www.netproject.com/Linux_Conf_Agenda_May99.html - "MS", Riversoft: "The Jazz band was pretty good too" >> TRACKING << making good use of the things that we find You see, he *has* been busy. Jwz's definitive eye-candy, XSCREENSAVER just hit its own little milestone: at last it can do a mock green-screen terminal with phosphor-fade and clunky fonts. Your choice of text, naturally. Plee-us: a rendition of the latest HollywoodOS, using the effects implemented by whoever's *really* Keanu Reeves' sysadmin in The Matrix. http://www.jwz.org/xscreensaver/ - good to see him getting back to the important stuff >> MEMEPOOL << hasta la altavista court throws out CRYPTO EXPORT LAW: deep cracks appear at http://www.shmoo.com/~pablos/Cracking_DES/ ... MEP CHRISTINE "Oddy Report" ODDY mysteriously resigns... http://www.alltheweb.com/ run by http://www.fast.no/ , which doesn't bode well for their scalability... hacking the OpenGL driver to play QUAKE3 in wireframe... this "ripped, hung and gay-curious" STEVE AUSTIN site *seems* unofficial: http://www.majorrepairjob.com ... rips off NATIONAL LAMPOON too: http://www.theweekly.co.uk ... DAVID BRAKE recommends http://www.denizine.com/features/wank/intro.htm ... *compelled* to do a tribute site (complete with link to parent company): http://www.jilldando.co.uk/ ... ABANDONWARE... POEMS from the revolution: http://artcontext.com/activism/linux.html ... COMPUTATIONAL MATTER... this ain't going to help the IPO: http://ph1sh.fsn.net/antionline-mini-howto.txt ... PIXAR to do TRON sequel?... whatever happened to OGGSQUISH?... >> GEEK MEDIA << get out less TV>> Richard Nixon, Nicolai Ceaucescu, and now Noel Edmonds joins the ranks of evil power-mongers who've used advanced surveillance to monitor their subjects in THE WORLD OF THE HIDDEN CAMERA (8.30pm, Fri, BBC1)... SOUTH PARK series 2 (9.30pm, Fri, C4) returns with "Cartman's Mom Is *Still* A Dirty Slut"... and the instant-gratification society of Logan's Run gets a little closer now you can phone in and bid to go out with the individuals parading themselves on DIAL A DATE (12.30am, Fri, most ITV as far as we can see)... the US version of WHOSE LINE IS IT ANYWAY? (10.03pm, Sat, C4) is apparently the same show but with more Americans in it - like you'd notice... here's hoping the first, ever-pertinent ROBOCOP (10pm, Sat, ITV) isn't also the last big-budget hard s/f film ever made... and "speed is just a question of money - how fast do you want to go?" inquires first-and-best aimless Scalextric smash-up MAD MAX (11.55pm, Sat, ITV)... the "evil supernatural force" battling Greg Evigan in ESCAPE TO NOWHERE (9pm, Sun, C5) turns out not to be gravity after all... Mad Max director George Miller edges closer to the Babe franchise in the form of THE NEVERENDING STORY II: THE NEXT CHAPTER (5.55pm, Sun, C5)... or maybe he could do a more action-packed sequel to Cronenberg's new one, and call it Existenz II: Beyond VIDEODROME (10.30pm, Sun, BBC2)... EQUINOX (9pm, Mon, C4) investigates sensitives who can detect earthquakes many miles away - and not by tuning to CNN... one assumes that the hopefuls in Cannes indie-doc WAITING FOR HARVEY (9.30pm, Tue, BBC2) are anticipating Miramax exec Harvey Weinstein, not the giant invisible rabbit of the same name... and the MAKING OUT (11.30pm, Tue, C4) aspired to by 7 Nottingham 20somethings is "making their mark on the world", rather than - say - copping off with each other... Louis Theroux returns for another run of WEIRD WEEKENDS (9.30pm, Wed, BBC2)... someone please stop giving Matt "George Dawes" Lucas cack-handed comedy commissions like SIR BERNARD'S STATELY HOMES (10.20pm, Wed, BBC2)... and after this week's "Last Rites", Wednesday is clearly Tom Berenger night on C5, with the B-list beefcake stumbling through the endless spotlights and dry ice brought in by Ridley Scott to justify Mimi Rogers hiring SOMEONE TO WATCH OVER ME (9pm, Wed, C5)... FILM>> this year, Danny "Young Americans / Judge Dredd" Cannon is mainly watching his career go down the pan, in the form of uninspired Jennifer Love Hewitt slasher yawn I STILL KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER (imdb: island / hook / storm / sequel / teen / karaoke). Of course, the "What You Did" refers to the same thing as the first film, but this takes place a year later, so they should really have stuck with the more technically correct "I Know What You Did Two Summers Ago"... together at last: Ben Affleck, bonkers Sandra Bullock, and the director of "Harriet The Spy", making FORCES OF NATURE (MPAA: Rated PG-13 for sensuality, language and a scene of drug use) not a major improvement on those other extreme-metreology / romantic comedy road-movies like Twister or Trains, Planes And Automobiles (that's assuming the film doesn't get pulled 'cos of those people getting killed in that hurricane)... disappointingly, Alexei Sayle / Lisa Stansfield sax 'n' violence saga SWING (imdb: comedy) doesn't seem to be a sequel to 1993's notoriously poor "Swing Kids" about jazz dancers vs the Nazis... the current imdb "comment of choice" describes Peter Mullan's Glaswegian bereavement-farce ORPHANS as "Another Scottish wee-drama" - unintentionally giving the impression it's a drama about "wee"...so, on video: continuing the straight-to-tape tradition of Robot Jox, Salute Of The Jugger - and the still quite good Rollerball and Death Race 2000 - comes generically named-after-2000AD-voting-category FUTURE SPORT (imdb: made for TV) - featuring usual high-quality hallmarks Vanessa Williams, Wesley Snipes, Dean "New Adventures Of Superman" Cain... and finally, not a wide cinema release for untimely Yugoslav gypsy slapstick BLACK CAT, WHITE CAT, but how could we resist imdb keywords like: nouveaux-riches / train-robbery / train / pig / arranged-marriage / river / drugs / cocaine / wedding / love-at-first-sight / corruption / grotesque / shit-house / sun-flower / body / money / geese / danube / cat / gypsy?... HARD LIT [ "buy now" links at http://www.ntk.net/books/ ]>> just to flaunt our revenue-busting editorial integrity, this month: books we've previously recommended now available at knock-down remainder prices (specifically at London's "BookHouse" - branches in Charing Cross, Islington, Greenwich)... I AM SPOCK (RRP 5.99, Amazon 4.79, Now 3.99) is of course Leonard Nimoy's dialectical rebuke to his earlier, better-known "I Am Not Spock". Comprehensive on Nimoy's post- ST:TOS career, contains many alarming internal monologues between him and the fictional character he played, fatal flaw: constant repetition of the word "Spock" every other sentence like some sacred Vulcan mantra... movie ubercritic Joe Queenan plunges deep into pop culture's deepest cesspools in AMERICA (RRP 6.99, Amazon 5.59, Now 1.99) - relentless one-note misanthropy for anyone who loved The Unkindest Cut or If You're Talking To Me Your Career Must Be In Trouble... and, according to NTK 1997-07-25, "we didn't hate digital travelogue HARD SOFT & WET (RRP 7.99, Amazon 6.39, Now 3.99) anywhere near as much as we wanted to". Mildly overwritten tell-all tales of the young Daniel Pemberton from occasional Independent Network contributor Melanie McGrath - not as terrible as journo Indra Sinha's surf-the-net, leave-your-wife chronicle, THE CYBERGYPSIES (RRP 9.99, Amazon 7.99, not remaindered yet - give it a while)... back with full price, Freeman Dyson's THE SUN, THE GENOME AND THE INTERNET (RRP 15.99, Amazon 12.24) has the Old Man showing George and Esther how futurism's done: Fluff adroitly switches gear from the old space evangelism, and sticks the boot into biotech: quit whining about grants, he chides, and get hacking DNA sequencers out of cheap household appliances... and finally, you gotta love the fair-use-emphasising title of THE SCIENCE OF STAR WARS: AN ASTROPHYSICIST'S INDEPENDENT EXAMINATION OF SPACE TRAVEL, ALIENS, PLANETS AND ROBOTS AS PORTRAYED IN THE STAR WARS FILMS (RRP $22, Amazon 12.24), but you could probably cobble the content together yourself from fan sites... which can't be said of the envelope-pushing new edition of THE STAR TREK COOKBOOK (RRP 12.99, Amazon 10.39) - mouth-watering Federation, Klingon (and Borg?) recipes from TOS, TNG, DS9... >> 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. It is registered at the Post Office as "Britain's primary source of anagram poetry about queueing for 'The Phantom Menace': Cheap Anthem To Men ------------------- Month men ate cheap. Epoch at the Mann? Me? Ah, netcam. Open them Then encamp at home! Chant the name! Poem! The canon. The map. Me. Match teen hope, man! " NEED TO KNOW THEY STOLE OUR REVOLUTION. NOW WE'RE STEALING IT BACK. Archive - http://www.ntk.net/ Excuses - http://www.spesh.com/ntk/ Unsubscribe? Mail majordomo@lists.ntk.net with 'unsubscribe ntknow'. Subscribe? Mail majordomo@lists.ntk.net with 'subscribe ntknow'. NTK now is supported by UNFORTU.NET, and by you: http://www.ntk.net/books/ (K) 1999 Special Projects. Copying is fine, but include URL: http://www.ntk.net/ Tips, news and gossip to tips@spesh.com - remember your work email may be monitored if sending sensitive material. Sending >500KB attachments is forbidden by the Geneva Convention. Your country may be at risk if you fail to comply.