Need To Know 2002-08-09

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"We no longer have to grapple with the idea of having two forms of existence - the one that involves breathing, pissing and fucking and the one that involves typing..." - Big Mouth Billy Bass Thompson, The Register http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/26612.html ...lucky we held on to all those rubber Spectrum keyboards >> HARD NEWS << they've come for you The first shoe drops: the proposed UK implementation of the dread EUROPEAN UNION COPYRIGHT DIRECTIVE has been published. Dozens of befuddled geek minds are parsing its hairy spaghetti as we speak. But here's the big picture: when this becomes law, the "contract" you have with a copyright holder will almost completely trump your right as a purchaser of copyrighted material. And your contract is hereby defined by the copy protection technologies the distributors stick on your media. So if that CD doesn't play on your PC - well, that's what you "agreed" to, and there's nothing you can do. If you try and circumvent any the copy protection (or, in the case of computer programs, explain how to do so to anyone else), you can be punished as much as if you were pirating the data yourself (Article 6). Heck, if you even try to remove any of the tracking spyware, you'll be in equal amounts of trouble (Article 7). http://www.patent.gov.uk/about/consultations/eccopyright/ - one day, laws like this will be hyperlinked http://bugbear.blackfish.org.uk/~bruno/2001_29_ec.txt - until that time, the brave will convert them to unprotected text The proposed UK legislation chips away at your ex-rights in bits and pieces; it'll take a while before the complete picture appears. But while the amateur lawyers mull, the "consultation period" starts ticking. Bear in mind that - just like RIP - our poor legislators are hurrying this through by Christmas. They'll consult, but be done by October 31. To save time, they won't listen to any complaints about the original EUCD document. And the raft of provisions that they've chosen to omit (like the generous but eminently ignorable list of fair use rights in the original directive) aren't up for discussion either. Welcome, kids, to the Euro-DMCA: and KNEEL BEFORE ZOD. http://www.xenoclast.org/free-sklyarov-uk/2002-August/002868.html - update next week, until then: keep watching the threads Yes, we laughed along with last month's rec.humor.oracle.d postings on some of the hardest-working printshop staff in the Colorado Springs area, smiling away at these locations: http://www.snappyprint.net/companyinfo/employees.html http://www.graphicsplusco.com/companyinfo/employees.html http://www.copyitonline.com/companyinfo/employees.html ...and subsequently tracked to this website template supplier: http://design4.printerpresence.com/companyinfo/employees.html But spare a thought for the overworked tech-sector employees of Northern Ireland, where cutbacks in BBC stock photography budgets has seen them moonlighting for the likes of "Liberty Information Technology" *and* "Audio Processing Technology": http://www.ntk.net/2002/08/09/dohnimay.gif http://www.ntk.net/2002/08/09/dohnijune.gif It's not all bad news, though. Literally within days of being laid off by Nortel, some workers appear to have been lucky enough to be taken on by trend-bucking IT company Sx3 - to do exactly the same job, in the same factory: http://www.ntk.net/2002/08/09/dohnimay18.gif http://www.ntk.net/2002/08/09/dohnimay22.gif >> ANTI-NEWS << berating the obvious look closely - not the world's best ad for content management: http://images-eu.amazon.com/images/P/076454862X.02.LZZZZZZZ.jpg ... moving on to MILDLY IRONIC PUERILE GOOGLE MISSPELLINGS: http://www.google.com/search?q=perfectionsit , "untied we stand" plus the rather more Freudian "militarty", "your accunt", "pubic transport" - and you love it, you filthy "conslutant": http://www.gojobsite.co.uk/cgi-bin/vacdetails.pl?selection=910731921 ... INAPPROPRIATE BANNER ADS are back again, though of course the really funny bit was watching him jump off the platform: http://www.ntk.net/2002/08/09/dohtax.gif ... sure, the staff are interactive alright - but not too full of original ideas: http://www.interactiveideas.com/com_theteam.php3 ... "Our Eudora Inbox just disappeared", reassure the professionals at http://www.programmersguild.org/american.htm - vs mysterious "hacking incident" suffered by INTERNET SOCIETY OF ENGLAND: http://www.england.isoc.org/newsletter/Issue-03-May-02.rhtm ... YAHOO Darius story wants to link you baby, one more time: http://uk.music.yahoo.com/020804/140/d6oko.html ... "Babies born under water could be at risk of drowning", doctors reveal: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/2173451.stm ... >> EVENT QUEUE << Edsger Dijkstra considered dead Even if you can't make it to DNSCON (this weekend, Imperial Hotel, Blackpool, from UKP15), CLASSIC GAMING EXPO (Sat 2002- 08-10, Las Vegas, from US$15), or indeed QUAKECON (Thu 2002- 08-15, Mesquite, Texas, free), you can still enjoy a spot of urban exploration courtesy of STRANGE ATTRACTOR's "Underground Installations" night (7.30pm, Tue, 2002-08-13, The Horse Hospital, London WC1, UKP6), where a "Matt Williams" will provide admissible video evidence of bunker busting exploits in subterranean UK military facilities like Corsham Computer Centre and RAF Rudloe Manor. The subversion continues on Sat, when NTK reader and "Bizarre" contributor Iain Aitch presents TROUBLE: ART AS A FORM OF CULTURAL RESISTANCE (7.30pm, Sat 2002-08-17, Horse Hospital again, UKP6) - basically a bunch of short films which include the antics of anti-WTO impostors The Yes Men, and that thing with all the drunken Santas that he organised last year. http://www.dnscon.org/ - taking the tube: http://projectz.ath.cx/?id=66 http://www.cgexpo.com/ - new Atari 2600 games, 400 empty boxes of Dig Dug http://www.quakecon.org/ - with added http://machinima.com/ , body-painting http://www.strangeattractor.co.uk/ - hey, isn't that top pic from Metal Gear Solid? http://www.thehorsehospital.com/ - they don't still operate on horses there, disappointingly >> TRACKING << sufficiently advanced technology : the gathering When XML first came out [NTK 1998-02-13], we were sceptical of it replacing HTML, "mostly because in order to do the clever parse-and-display-as-old-fashioned-Webpage stuff right now, you'll need to brush up on your SCHEME". What we *seem* to have meant by that was you'd need to learn XSLT to turn XML into something browsable. Well: four and half years on, and the draft of XHTML 2.0, the first heavily backwards incompatible successor to bog HTML has emerged. The road from old and busted markup to new W3C hotness is laid out, and merely awaits a decade or so of developers grudgingly supporting it, while old browsers that choke even on the XML mimetype refuse to die. Some good, if theoretical stuff in the draft: nav bars get their own tags, Marc Andreessen's IMGs are finally assimiliated into a more generic OBJECT type, and every tag can put on an "href" attribute hat and become a link. But perhaps most exciting: modern browsers have grown so flexible that they can parse and display a XHTML2 page right now! Using XSL! Vindication! http://w3future.com/weblog/2002/08/09.html#a119 - see the future come alive http://www.w3.org/TR/2002/WD-xhtml2-20020805/ - the very far off future indeed http://www.ntk.net/index.cgi?b=01998-02-13&l=169#l - "the object-oriented LISP"? http://www.w3.org/TR/WD-wwwicn - hey we all make mistakes &sadsmiley; >> MEMEPOOL << ceci n'est pas une http://www.gagpipe.com/ http://mdn.mainichi.co.jp/japano/0207/ice-cream/1.html - but do the Japanese have anything to match ICE-T's POSSE POPS?: http://www.virginmegamagazine.com/default.asp?aid=8C6 ... Chechnyan independence movement apparently supported by DEBIAN: http://www.taliban-news.com/topics.php ... BELKIN http://catalog.belkin.com/IWCatProductPage.process?Product_Id=65997 imitates product descriptions at http://www.jpeterman.com/ ... isn't this just a homophobic French Flash version of SABRE WULF?: http://www.ournet.md/~igan/ ... more pointless 8-bit nostalgia: http://www.monkeon.co.uk/moviechallenge/ ... When Audiophiles Attack #4: http://www.belt.demon.co.uk/ (search FAQ for "morphic resonance")... alarming "meme on the rise": http://www.google.com/search?q=blogadelic ... not "dumbing down": http://www.bbc.co.uk/info/report2002/pdf/simplified.pdf ... one of these set members is not like the others, one of these set members is: http://labs.google.com/sets?q1=wanking , and http://labs.google.com/sets?hl=en&q1=shit&q2=fuck ... sharing the common values of "openness, curiosity, honesty, tolerance, passion" - and having $4000 to throw around: http://www.ted.com/theconference/2003/registration.html ... >> GEEK MEDIA << get out less TV>> "You've been X'ed!" chortle the protagonists, before inevitably having to explain that they're talking about patchily amusing "that Scream guy" candid camera show THE JAMIE KENNEDY EXPERIMENT (11.40pm, Fri, C4)... the CGIs are really starting to show their age in VR nonsense THE LAWNMOWER MAN (11.10pm, Fri, BBC1)... so, if you want to, you can just go ahead and watch oddly paced coding classic OFFICE SPACE (1am, Fri, BBC2): http://www.virtualstapler.com/office_space/ ... among a somewhat random selection of grown-up relationship movies - Harrison Ford place crash romance RANDOM HEARTS (10.15pm, Sat, BBC1), Tom Hanks AIDS weepie PHILADELPHIA (11.15pm, Sat, ITV), Jane "Je t'aime" Birkin nudity arthouser BLOW UP (1.10am, Sat, BBC2) - and horror repeats - CARRIE (12.20am, Sat, BBC1), DAMIEN: OMEN II (1.35am, Sat, ITV), plus CANDYMAN (1.30am, Sat, C4) - don't overlook magnificent Letterman vs Leno contractual shenangigans docudrama THE LATE SHIFT (12.30am, Sat, C5)... hopefully CONSPIRACY THEORY: DID WE LAND ON THE MOON? (8.05pm, Sun, C5) will consider "Maybe we did land on the moon, but NASA touched up the pictures?"... David "Friends" Schwimmer *is* Adolf Hitler in sedentary Stephen King adaptation APT PUPIL (10pm, Sun, C4)... Kirstin "Sex And The City" Davis still can't find a decent man on board Rob Lowe's ATOMIC TRAIN (11.30pm, Sun, BBC1)... while the once-raunchy BARBARELLA (11.30pm, Sun, BBC2) now appears to be a pointless Euro-remake of "Flash Gordon"... DECISIVE WEAPONS (8.35pm, Mon, BBC2) looks at 'Nam-movie staple the Bell-Huey UH-1 helicopter... BBC Choice misses the ultimate realtime opportunity by showing every episode of 24 (from 9pm, Mon, BBC Choice) at different times on weekday evenings... if there's any justice, WHO GOT BENNY HILL'S MILLIONS? (9pm, Tue, C4) will feature sped-up footage of his would-be heirs chasing each other around a park... just as Freestyle IIS-Patching really ought to be among the charity sporting events televised in the MICROSOFT CHALLENGE (7am, Sat; 2.30am, Thu, C4)... FILM>> one theory suggests the special effects are *supposed* to look fake - as part of the whole cheesy Tremors-style self- parody of smalltown giant spider romp EIGHT LEGGED FREAKS ( http://www.screenit.com/movies/2002/eight_legged_freaks.html We see [Scarlett "Ghost World" Johansson] with just a bath towel around her body; We see a male mannequin in a department store that falls with its head landing in the crotch of a female mannequin; The film could inspire some kids to go on a spider and insect killing spree)... "[Robert] Rodriguez's best film" is filmthreat.com's surprising verdict on as-you'd- expect juvenile sequel SPY KIDS 2: THE ISLAND OF LOST DREAMS ( http://www.bbfc.co.uk/ : Distributor chose to remove dangerous imitable technique (head butt) in order to achieve a U)... it's the combined acting skills of Dr Dre, Snoop Dogg, Eminem and "DJ Pooh" - together at last - in 1976 "Car Wash" remake THE WASH (imdb: african-american/ car-wash/ kidnapping/ poverty) - not to be confused with genre classics such as "The Bikini Car Wash Company" I and II... and, despite it being the best bit of "Run Lola Run", Tom Tykwer appears to have stopped putting thumping techno soundtracks on his films, arguably to the detriment of his latest dreamlike meditation on the redemptiveness of love, HEAVEN (imdb: ascension/ bed-wetting/ bomb/ coincidence/ corrupt-police/ corruption/ dictaphone/ drugs/ english-teacher/ escalator/ prison-escape/ flight- simulator/ guilt/ head-shaving/ helicopter/ innocence/ justice/ love/ murder/ on-the-run/ police/ redemption/ soul- mates/ stylization/ widow/ carabineer)... PHEAR, BEER, AND OTHER PEOPLE'S ROOT PASSWORDS with NTK's "My first DEFCON" correspondent, "Crash Override", in Las Vegas>> yeah, they say that DEFCON is now merely an adjunct to the BlackHat Briefings, there to scare potential customers into buying vendors' firewalls and IDS's as they gaze on the assembled drunken freakery. And, sure, it has its moments, from the remarkably impressive looking Capture The Flag contest http://geeksyndicate.net/manic/dcx/Pages/52.html to the unimaginably chaotic Hacker Jeopardy drinking quiz, ably helped on its descent by the haphazard compering of poor old WINN SCHWARTAU... true sportmanship triumphed here when the rival strategies of SETEC (low alcohol drinks), 504 (sneaking extra empties onto the table), and RRR (use of feminine wiles: http://geeksyndicate.net/manic/dcx/Pages/183.html ) all lost out to the cheating skillz of the DETROIT CREW (allegedly photographed the slide showing the final answer during rehearsals). And let's not forget the ongoing wireless network sniffing challenge, where non-SSH-using lamers could find their email/IM username plus password up on the WALL OF SHAME for all to enjoy: http://www.techfreakz.org/defcon10/?slide=30 ... more serious highlights included: "Attacking Printers" by DENNIS MATTISON - an often overlooked and surprisingly useful target, some frankly shocking ways to treat networks in DAN KAMINSKY's "Black Ops TCP/IP" http://www.doxpara.com/ , and JOHN Q NEWMAN's counterarguments to the "Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse", with pertinent advice to British attendees on the weaknesses of National ID cards (hope David Blunkett's son was listening carefully)... a couple of "miscellaneous" sessions from the Sunday haven't received the post-Gweeds coverage they deserve: hellNbak on how to, and how not to, "sell out", featuring a quick plug for the new Open Source Vulnerability Database http://www.osvdb.org - stressed to be "Never For Profit" (a comment on the recent acquisition of SecurityFocus?). Then GOBBLES' "Security Wolves Among Us" took an erratic and amusing swipe at the likes of cDc, 2600, w00w00, Snosoft, Theo De Raadt and OpenBSD, proposed a reverse Honeynet Defacement Challenge, and speculated over new vulnerabilities in ngrep and WU-FTP... so: going from reports of other years, fewer projectile-vomiting teenagers than I'd expected, probably due to the $75 entrance fee: maybe not quite the reputation and tradition of previous events, but for all the right reasons. And this year was, of course, the last ever DefCon - though I thoroughly recommend that you attend next year's last ever DefCon, which should be even better... >> 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 "c'mon Edge, you must have a less flattering pic of us than that" http://www.everyonelovesjohnnettles.co.uk/graphics/edge_ntk.jpg 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.