Need To Know 2002-06-14

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"Suppose you find yourself somehow trapped, as I once was, in a website called "Boobtropolis", which blurts an embarrassing welcoming song. Does anyone, apart from the indulgent readers of this newspaper, have a right to know that?" - BORIS JOHNSON, TELEGRAPH 2002-06-13, sharing "too much information" >> HARD NEWS << ghosts spooks and ghouls It's not often you catch Slashdot, Kuro5hin, Newsnight and BBC's Question Time covering the same story. And while we still await the day Jeremy Paxman screams "MOD THE PARENT UP!" at a ashen-faced spokesman, one topic bound them all this week: the insane new RIP STATUTORY INSTRUMENT. This piece of pseudo-legislation, which the government clearly hoped to sneak past parliament next Tuesday, extends the list of authorities able tap everyone's traffic data without a warrant. In the original RIP bill, only coppers, customs and the secret services could obtain phone numbers, Web addresses, and cellphone positions willy-nilly. With the new instrument, anyone from a local councillor to the Office of Fair Trading, down to the Post Office^W^WConsignia^Wthe Royal Mail can stalk you without judicial oversight. Over twenty new government departments are listed, with no explanation or justification (the Department of Work and Pensions is fighting terrorism how exactly?). It really is a "shopping" list in every sense but the car-jacking one. As with so much of the original RIP bill, *nobody* thinks this is a good idea. Councillors we've spoken with are worried about the abuse potential, other departments are freaking out at the cost of overseeing the new powers. Already the hundreds of faxes sent to MPs and messages to the news media have secured one concession: our gracious leaders have postponed the debate until next Monday, 2002-06-24. If we keep the pressure up, they may be obliged to withdraw it completely. Check out STAND for more info on what the Blunt Instrument means, and what to do about it. http://www.stand.org.uk/ - looks like we chose a good week to relaunch STAND (and give up glue-sniffing) mailto:stand@ntk.net - mail here to get regular updates Don't expect to see those Radio Four Ogg streams for much longer. News arrives that the oldest and most deeply Unixy wing of the BBC, the bunnies at Kingswood Warren, have been summarily merged with Streaming Media Services, some quasi-commercial bit of Intel tat the Beeb bought back in the day. SMS is a Windows shop and does such cutting-edge work as providing KPMG with videofeeds, and signing "significant" content deals with 3G companies. You get the idea. Kingswood, for all its paranoia and somewhat BOFHish reputation, does things like set up public peering arrangements (and publishes the statistics for everyone to see), experiments with aforementioned patent-free Ogg Vorbis technology (can't see the Windows Media fans at SMS going for that), and otherwise handles the deep research that the BBC needs in these winnowing times. With heavy muttering coming from the beards about a lousy relocation package and a prospective two hour commute to Maidenhead, is this the Beeb's deliberate attempt to ditch anyone with a clue? http://support.bbc.co.uk/support/ - this kind of BBC, versus http://www.bbctechnology.com/ - this kind of BBC. http://support.bbc.co.uk/ogg/ - activate the Stallman bomb! http://www.bbc.co.uk/jobs/e55850.shtml - still, if you think you can fix it We had a couple of excuses lined up in case the weekend's EXTREME COMPUTING festival didn't come off - that it was inherently experimental, that we didn't know how many people were going to turn up, that no-one else had ever tried to combine semi-scientific seminars with the ambience of a Scandinavian demo party. Of course, the one thing we weren't prepared for was it turning out to be so much of a success - we won't single anyone out for particular thanks, because everyone did such a great job, making it the best fifth birthday party any sarcastic technology newsletter could ask for. Sure, it wasn't perfect - apologies to the ZX Spectrum panel for making them beta-test the PA system, and a few signs here and there wouldn't have gone amiss either. But there were almost 1200 visitors during the course of the day, the feedback has been almost embarrassingly positive, and we'll definitely do something similar again next year. It only remains to say: would the owners of the POP logins "steve", "e.tedeschi", and "olly" please change their email passwords? They showed up unencrypted in the wireless network traffic logs and - if you hadn't noticed - we're trying to campaign quite hard against this kind of thing. http://www.xcom2002.com/ - now with pics, written reports, William Shatner videos >> ANTI-NEWS << berating the obvious sneak preview: http://www.olympiapark-muenchen.de/english/ - vs "it's never too late": http://www.the2002worldcup.com/ ... yes, in response to everyone who's written in, this *is* "getting too easy": http://www.google.com/search?q=acocunts , http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22world+wankings%22 , http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22accunt+manager%22 , - though, if you're lucky, you can get login details too: http://www.google.com/search?q=%22Tcl+Error+During+Template+Execution%22 ... gave up ages ago: http://www.bigbrother-online.co.uk/ ... is that the London Eye Millennium Wheel Jigsaw in your pants: http://www.politicos.co.uk/acatalog/Politicos_Online_Jigsaw_Puzzles_1480.html - or are you just pleased to see me?... missing gay millions: http://www.coronaproductions.com/tp/scoops/scoops.html#queerasfolk2 >> EVENT QUEUE << proudly "sponsoring": http://www.ukuug.org/events/linux2002/ Perversely, one of our favourite pieces of Xcom feedback was the guy who said it was "full of people getting far too much satisfaction out of playing C64 games". Assuming such a thing is even possible, that's one person who almost certainly will not enjoy BACK IN TIME LIVE LONDON 2002 (7.30pm-3am, next Fri 2002-06-21, Gossips Nightclub, London W1, UKP5.00, pre- registrations now closed). Billing itself as "the first 8-bit rock concert outside of Japan", it features performances from demo musicians, C64 remixers and live bands, plus Jon "Sensi Soccer" Hare, Bjorn "Dr Awesome" Lynne, and Jeff "Llamasoft" Minter. And hints of an appearance by Emily "Bouff" Booth, from that "Bits" videogame show on Channel 4. Look, it's effectively sold out already, so don't start scalping on eBay. http://www.c64audio.com/bitlive/london_2002/ - and there weren't any C64 games at Xcom, were there? http://bobzilla.ohskylab.com/weblog/00000127.htm - "overwhelmed by the excess of geek": oh boo hoo hoo http://www.southern.com/southern/band/CRASS/ - Crass at the NFT on Sat: subversive enough for you? http://www.hackmeeting.org/ - also next Fri: looks like big hacker fest in Bologna, Italy >> TRACKING << sufficiently advanced technology : the gathering If Perl is the Swiss Army chainsaw of programming languages, then SOCAT is the Swiss Army chainsaw of, uh, shell/networking tools. Socat works by connecting the input and output of two files together - where file can be a socket, or a pipe, or any number of other filish mutants that Unix has spawned. Need to connect to your SMTP server to do some manual diagnostics, a la netcat or telnet? Sure. Feel like wrapping readline around that to get command history? No problem. You can connect an IPV6 address to a chrooted shell script, run ssh with its controlling tty connected to stdin so it'll accept the password from something other than the keyboard, or attach a Unix socket to an inet socket. You can tunnel a local Unix socket through someone's socks server to an unprotected internal X server, using a source port of 20 to slip by a poorly-configured firewall. And that's just the manpage examples! It's available as a Debian unstable package and FreeBSD port, and v1.2 (due this month) has a pile of extra goodies to anticipate, including fake pseudo terminals, and ssl support. I can't believe I just wrote "fake pseudo terminals". http://www.dest-unreach.org/socat/ - ironically unreachable for most of yesterday >> MEMEPOOL << ceci n'est pas une http://www.gagpipe.com/ the cards don't lie: http://www.geocities.com/metatarot/ata.html ... companies you didn't expect to have corporate anthems, #1: http://www.acetaxisyork.com/song.htm ... should be able to offer integrated targeting with their Trident and Patriot missile systems: http://www.lockheedmartin.co.uk/news/109.htm ... http://www.travisa.com/ vs http://www.amazon.com/ ... JILL DANDO shooting threatens to affect home insurance premiums: http://www.norwich-union.co.uk/products/insurance/home/filter.htm ... usability gurus on toilet #2 - terrible interfaces on trains: http://www.sumption.org/lifeless/2002_01_01_archive.php#9090576 ... "throbbyness" etc an improvement on boring old "osc/dis": http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=881711449 ... though haven't we been LEGO CONDITIONED all our lives?: http://qwer.org/20020614skinner.html ... >> GEEK MEDIA << get out less TV>>> Dolph Lundgren Week gets off to a flying start in his long-awaited collaboration with Russell "Highlander" Mulcahy and Gina "Coupling" Bellman: flashy sniper thriller SILENT TRIGGER (11.20pm, Fri, BBC1)... then he's back in C5's annual showing of UNIVERSAL SOLDIER (9pm, Sun, C5), but not UNIVERSAL SOLDIER: THE RETURN (9pm, Tue, C5)... Susan "The Partridge Family" Dey scans her ass into a computer in overlooked Michael Crichton 1980s synthespian romp LOOKER (2.40am, Fri, C5)... and there's more stuff the DVD director's commentary doesn't tell you when THE HOLLYWOOD MACHINE (8.20pm, Sat, BBC2) takes a long, hard look at "Charlie's Angels"... Vince "Swingers" Vaughn puts the "master" back into "Norman Bates" in unnecessary remake PSYCHO (9.10pm, Sat, BBC1)... Sam "Spider-Man" Raimi redoes "Fargo", but from the criminals' point of view in A SIMPLE PLAN (10.35pm, Sat, BBC2)... and Jonathan Ross once again maintains he's laughing *with* - not at - the wacky foreign culture in JAPANORAMA (11pm, Sat; 10pm, Sun, BBC Choice)... BITTER HARVEST (8pm, Sun, BBC2) sounds like a promisingly non-partisan look at the history of GM food... Robin Wright Penn falls for Kevin Costner in overlong nautical-metaphor closure-weepie MESSAGE IN A BOTTLE (9pm, Mon, C5) - as we said back in 1999, not based around the Police song of the same name, though the soundtrack does occasionally break into the opening line of Queen's "We Are The Champions"... and Mike Myers presents another of his famously understated characterisations in 1970s Neve Campbell nightclub nonsense 54 (12.15am, Mon, C4)... C4 takes a timely look at the relevance of reality TV in what is basically a rebranded "Right To Reply", THINK TV (7.55pm, Tue-Thu, C4)... "Tomorrow's World" maintains its academic credentials with a look at THE SCIENCE OF SPIDER-MAN (7pm, Wed, BBC1), including "a real-life gene-transferring technique that could explain how Peter Parker got his amazing abilities"... Michael Douglas finds the frustrations of even an imaginary job too much to bear in FALLING DOWN (10.35pm, Wed, BBC1)... as Pauline "Birds Of A Feather" Quirke ingeniously sidesteps being typecast as a middle-aged fat woman in what appears to be a sequel to that Liza Tarbuck drama, BEING APRIL (9pm, Thu, BBC1)... FILM>> so it's not as bad as "Attack Of The Clones" - and it has Kirsten Dunst in it - but if Jon Katz likes it this much: http://features.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/05/08/1353236 http://features.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/05/25/0125219 - then just watch out for appalling acting and dialogue in SPIDER-MAN ( http://www.capalert.com/capreports/spiderman.htm : promotion of evolution; ghosting of [Kirsten Dunst's] anatomy through "wet T-shirt" clothing; corporate brutality)... alternatively: you wait 7 or 8 years for a Philip K Dick adaptation, then two come along at once - the first of which being expanded-from-short-feature exploding-replicants-with- implanted-memories "Blade Runner"-lite chase-fest IMPOSTOR ( http://www.capalert.com/capreports/impostor.htm : [Madeline Stowe] in bed in underwear; inappropriate touch; nursing a baby in public - though a beautiful and indeed necessary thing, do you do it for display as entertainment?)... >> 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 "doing it for the kittens" http://rikrose.net/lbk/tn/mvc-684f.jpg.html 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.geekstyle.co.uk/ (K) 2002 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. 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. Your country may be at risk if you fail to comply.