Need To Know 1999-09-17

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"The bespoke chip uses full 128-bit architecture throughout, meaning you get not just a four-fold increase in speed, but potentially a 2^96 increase in subtlety..." - king of understatement, STEVE BOXER, explains new Playstation 2 CPU, Telegraph Connected, 1999-09-16 ...yup, 2^96 (=79,228,162,514,264,337,593,543,950,336) is *pretty fucking subtle*... >> HARD NEWS << munching quaaludes One week into his Net adventures, and it's still unclear what kind of newbie TONY BLAIR is going to be. At the launch of the government's new e-commerce push, he tapped mournfully on a PC with just his index finger, spoke of his "sense of humiliation" while watching Cherie use the Web ("who are you talking to, darling?"), and promised the nation he'd take a course. But then, just like a newbie, he immediately started lecturing everyone on how it all should work. Also rather typically, he seems to be trying a *little* too hard to impress the old guard - especially with his choice of the new "E-Envoy", Alex Allan - ex-high commissioner of Australia, ex-Demon user, and continuing Deadhead. Very 1995 - but is he really one of us? Well, if he isn't already, we reckon few blackmail notes regarding the flagrant lyrics copyright violations on his Website could "turn him", easy. Yeah, he's our warez king E-Envoy, baby - and it freaks us out! http://www3.clearlight.com/~acsa/ - oh, my. those Well "pern" are going to lap this up http://www3.clearlight.com/~acsa/songfile/HEYJUDE.HTM - lyrics.gov.uk! lyrics.gov.uk! http://www.deja.com/=dnc/profile.xp?author=alex@acsa.demon.co.uk - Visual Basic on Windows NT? Oh dear. Meanwhile, in the good old Elite universe, it looks like the trading between the systems of BELL (Anarchist, some trade in medicinal plants) and BRABEN (Feudal Capitalist, major export: buggy releases of Elite sequels) has broken down completely. At the alt.fan.elite HQ, just outside Lave, co-creator David Braben has denied that he idly shot down Ian Bell's CIX Web site when he thought no-one was looking. On the contrary, he says, he was on a special mission to *help* Bell by inquiring whether Bell still held his half of Elite's copyright. He innocently asked Cix whether Bell really did have the legal right to offer binaries of the old game on his site, and - booom - suddenly the ISP was sending in the Vipers. Nothing to do with him, honest. So why didn't Braben contact Bell directly, instead of via Cix? Braben reports that Bell could not be reached - he doesn't reply to e-mail hails, apparently, and is currently living in some sort of unnavigable Witchspace where normal contact is impossible. Odd, given that it took us less than two minutes (via Cix's own "show resume" feature) to get Ian's phone number and ask him ourselves. Nope, Bell said, Braben had never e-mailed him about this. And no, as far as he knew, no personal approaches have ever been made. The first he knew about the matter was when "incoming legal missile" sirens started wailing. So, who's the fugitive, and who's the honest trader? Or have they - as it seems to the wailing Elite fanboys - all been replaced by Thargoid agents? http://x24.deja.com/=dnc/viewthread.xp?AN=523059772 - talk very cheap at this station http://www.iancgbell.clara.net/ - Website in exile Nice one BT, for managing to avoid any of those awkward "major site security breach" headlines regarding the WWW-to-SMS gateway at Genie , where for the best part of the week, idle users could check out one another's messages by just fiddling with the message numbers in the URL. You know, you'd think that some of the cooler British cypherpunk companies would be jumping up and down trying to publicise this flaw. Oh, oh - but hold on: weren't those cooler cypherpunk companies actually *working* on the contract? Ooop. http://www.genie.co.uk/ - mentioning no nyms >> ANTI-NEWS << berating the obvious "Can humans create life?" enquires SLASHDOT, apparently unaware of step-by-step instructions on alt.sex.stories... YAHOO ticker makes everything sound like terrific news http://www.ntk.net/doh/990917wahey.gif ... QXL Website announces share offer, falls over... more "accutate" spellchecker needed at http://www.dyslexiauk.com/ ... "the ideal Corporate Web Site usually contains approximately 6 pages, although this will differ according to the corporations specific needs" reveals (page 3) of http://www.weirperf.com/webdesi3.htm ... a little SIMPLER than expected http://www.simple.net/ ... Pseuds Corner-ish Wankometer-fodder http://www.augustone.com/company.htm ... http://www.plagiarism.org/ steals cheat site meta-tags... Amiga MCC FALCO - CEO Tom Schmidt explains: "Amiga was never about a box. It was never about an operating system" http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1006-200-120890.html - was never "about to ship" either... >> EVENT QUEUE << goto's considered non-harmful You don't think that the SCRAMBLING FOR SAFETY folks had a tip-off about the new Blair-led e-commerce publicity drive, do you? No, we imagine there must be entirely different reasons for dropping a new conference (Scrambling for Safety 3.5) straight into the path of the government. Thursday morning, 1999-09-23 is the date: Whit Diffie, Nicholas Bohm, Ross Anderson, as ever, are on the side of anarchist dystopian crypto terrorists, while Patricia Hewitt MP and Steven Pride of the DTI take the side of pseudo-fascist privacy-smashing US-funded spooks. http://www.fipr.org/sfs35.html - must be a maintenance release >> TRACKING << making good use of the things that we find W3M is the rotationally palindromic acronym for text Web browser "WWW-to-Miru" - Japanese for "See The Web". It looks like a spankier Lynx (colourful, and with smarter frames and tables rendering), but its history is as a HTML pager, so it's trim enough to use as a file reader even when you're not browsing remote machines. It starts quickly and with just a few lost features (cookies, internationalisation) works out at about half the size of Lynx, too. The mouse handling is better too, with a useful right-hand-click menu, and - OH COME *ON*, Lynx people! You were going to have to try another browser EVENTUALLY. Quit bawling. http://ei5nazha.yz.yamagata-u.ac.jp/~aito/w3m/eng/ - oh, yeah: and what's your Japanese like, gaijin? >> MEMEPOOL << hasta la altavista ANGER leads to: http://www.daveprowse.com/editorial.htm - no comeback as yet from http://www.vader.org/ ... as distasteful as it sounds http://www.bbcworldwide.com/smeg/ ... stick a few trumpeter swans in it, and it becomes a http://www.betterstarwars.com ... many PLAYSTATION 2 releases to be cheaply recompiled "upgrades" of Playstation Classic games... see, they don't *all* have to be ONION rip-offs: http://members.tripod.co.uk/cgreview/ ... "livin la video card loca" http://www.bxboards.com/bitchin.jpg ... Britain's THE QUEEN just switched from Solaris to Red Hat: http://www.netcraft.com/whats/?host=www.royal.gov.uk ... and doesn't the BEAST OF REVELATIONS hold "prior art" on http://www.patents.ibm.com/cgi-bin/viewpat.cmd/US05878155__ >> GEEK MEDIA << the less rude http://www.ntk.net/tvgohome/ TV>> OK, so it's Chris "Aphex Twin, Neuromancer" Cunningham on MIRRORBALL (12.40am, Fri, C4) *this* week... one of Whoopi Goldberg's less irritating IRC action romances in JUMPIN' JACK FLASH (11.05pm, Fri, BBC1) - followed by the intriguingly renamed spag-bollocks Western A TOWN CALLED HELL (aka "A Town Called Bastard")... while, sadly, C5's late-night 1958 movie AUNTIE MAME (2.10am, Fri, C5) is not about the various "offspring" of the Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator... "You want the shouting? YOU CAN'T HANDLE THE SHOUTING!" implies Jack Nicholson of Tom Cruise in mildly unpleasant military courtroomer A FEW GOOD MEN (10.10pm, Sat, ITV)... launching a brief season of cult Saturday night dress-up-in-a-trenchcoat-and-gun-down-your-classmates films, Leo DiCaprio shoots more than just hoops and heroin in THE BASKETBALL DIARIES (10pm, Sat, C4)... and those lamers from Trainspotting could have tried to make A LIFE LESS ORDINARY (10pm, Sun, C4) a bit more watchable - at least compared to the unauthorised biography of webdesign playboy Matt Jones, as depicted in Greg Egan fave YOUNG EINSTEIN (5.50pm, Sun, C5)... oddly, two separate docus on "birth order" on consecutive days: EQUINOX (9pm, Mon, C4) and the defensively-titled ME FIRST (9pm, Tue, BBC2)... don't know what kind of trade descriptions made them take the "Comedy" out of THE MARK THOMAS PRODUCT (11.05pm, Tue, C4)... and Sky subscribers will already be setting aside midweek quality time for not just the UK debut of FUTURAMA (8pm, Tue, Sky1), but also series 3 of STARGATE SG-1 (8pm, Wed, Sky1) *and* short-lived movie spinoff TOTAL RECALL 2070 (9pm, Wed, Sky1), in which presumably the lead character goes on a different memory- wiping adventure each week, but every time it all turns out to be - a dream!... FILM>> presumably it's the backs of Kirsten Dunst, Kirstie Alley and Denise "Starship Troopers" Richards on the poster for erratic bad-taste beauty-pageant mockumentary DROP DEAD GORGEOUS (http://www.capalert.com/capreports/: vulgar gesture; teen underwear; long series of camera angle to focus viewer on private regions of teen females; strong thread of likening "Christian" to guns; many subtle and disguised comments regarding superficial and off-target love for the Savior). It does include the monologue from Soylent Green, yet does not appear to be based around the Republica song of the same name... still, probably more (intentional) laughs than distasteful Travolta army thriller THE GENERAL'S DAUGHTER (imdb: rape / military) - repeated shots of naked corpse staked to ground may "attract wrong element"... or Anthony Hopkins going native/ to jail in Cuba Gooding derivative monkey weepie INSTINCT (http://www.capalert.com/capreports/: prison ugliness; violent beatings to escape lawful custody; nudity of a third-world child; party drinking ; muffled words of foul language; dog threat)... otherwise there's the usual limited release arthouse efforts: non Star Wars spinoff THE TRENCH (imdb: English), Charlotte "Marmalade Atkins" Coleman politico-romance BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE (imdb: comedy), plus Van Damme redux in UNIVERSAL SOLDIER: THE RETURN (http://www.capalert.com/capreports/: human form on fire; punk music and dress; changing clothes in a car; nude bar brawl scene with multiple full nudity; murder by gunfire to head and body; murder by strangulation; murder by electrocution; murder by explosion; murder by fire; murder by neck break). Apparently, not as good as the first one... BUMPER BONERZ BONANZA>> thanks to everyone who realised that we meant *Simon* Singh's THE CODE BOOK [NTK 1999-09-10] rather than "David Singh's THE CODE", though only regular steampunk correspondent, TOM STANDAGE (ESQ.), appeared to have actually read it, commenting "very good - even if it does get Babbage's Analytical Engine and Difference Engine No.2 in a twist"... in that same paragraph, we also gave the date of Birkbeck lecture "Renaissance Cryptography and Johannes Trithemius" as 6pm, 1999-09-10 - as keen-eyed ROGER BURTON WEST pointed out, allowing readers a "generous 43 minutes to get there". In fact it's on at 6pm today; the clock is ticking... NIAMH FOLEY objected mildly to our "WANKOMETER needs upgrading for these guys" comment re http://www.labyrinth.ie/approach.asp [NTK 1999-09-10], revealing that she was a) a "gal", and b) on a "coffee high" when she wrote it... SCRIPT_KIDDY makes a rather more urgent observation, requesting "Please append ::$DATA to all URLs you publish ending in .asp", believing that we have some sort of knack for "for picking just the vulnerable ones" - http://www.labyrinth.ie/login.asp::$DATA , say. If you, the readers, agree, then why not start a petition on your website (or someone else's)?... EMAP's ROGER GREEN (rightly) questioned what evidence we had linking EMAP to Freenetnames owner ITG [NTK 1999-09-03] - will http://www.itg.co.uk/new/emapmetro.htm do?... and finally, JOHN HARTNUP argues that "only the chorus" of S Club 7's new single sounds like The Spice Girls' "Say You'll Be There", advising that "The verse sounds like 'Check It Out' by the Stereo MCs". ANTONY ESPINDOLA went on to list 3 more points of similarity between the bands: they've got the same manager (Simon Fuller); the video's the same; and they're "doing a film" which "[quote] 'will be about us as a gang and what we get up to'". NTK regrets that this correspondence is 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. It is registered at the Post Office as "Mini-NTK postponed due to too much time" 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. 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