Need To Know 2003-09-19

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"It's a cool piece of technology but frankly the idea of people wandering around wearing sunglasses photographing me all the time is really disturbing..." - Bill Thompson demands inquiry into "privacy and stuff" http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/3111004.stm ...though if they're all as fetching as http://bill.verity-networks.com/billslog/ then "disturbing" isn't quite the word... >> HARD NEWS << broken taboos Everyone (including us) moans about the uselessness of the new UK anti-spam legislation which is so set about with provisos as to be next to useless. It's not all bad, though. Come December 11th, we can sue spammers for damages, giving the vague possibility of forming a big scary anti-spam posse, demanding our thrupenny SMTP charges en masse. Subscriber James Smith has been practicing his hue and cry on TV company MAST MEDIA. They sent him the world's most cumbersome would-be viral last week: a whole *four megs* of unsolicited attachment. It all seems to be down to optimistic TV micro-producers thrashing in their own Outlook-soaked Barley idiocy: but think of the fun when we can charge them for the dial-up phone call! Yeah, we know it's not a solution. But dreams of revenge may have to do for now. http://www.floppy.org.uk/stuff/mastmedia/ - anyone else "within the media industry" been cc'd with this? http://www.hexkey.co.uk/lee/log/2003/09/18/#1063908000 - deeper analysis, weirdly, in blog form http://www.tropic.org.uk/~crispin/nigeria/ - supporting an entire ancillary industry, you know Though, as Mast Media pointed out, it's sometimes tricky to tell the difference between "viral marketing" and "an attempt to encourage friends and colleagues to watch a preview of our new TV show". In the light of last weekend's revelations about the spoof spam designed to harvest login details of BARCLAYS ONLINE customers, reader ANT MITCHELL was understandably concerned when he received a mail directing him to a non-SSL'd page instructing him to type in details like name, postcode and "the last nine digits of your credit card number" to win "1000 points" on his Goldfish card. The site, with the reassuringly official URL of "goldfish.xdbs.co.uk", appeared to be hosted by easily.co.uk who, nonetheless, didn't take it down - because it was subsequently established to be a genuine offer from the clearly security-conscious Goldfish themselves. Goldfish said they'd "pass on" these comments to whoever's running the site; Ant wonders how many valid credit card numbers could be generated given the last 9 digits and "a bit of Perl". http://goldfish.xdbs.co.uk/apply/mgm.php - just reeks of respectability, doesn't it? http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/3105658.stm - and "legitimate" marketers aren't really helping with this Oh, and that RIP Statutory Instrument we mentioned last week has finally been published. It doesn't get debated until next month, so we'll save boring you with the details until nearer the time - but it's not looking good. No Egg Marketing Board, but the local council still gets a good peek at your phone logs. What's needed, we think, is some extra legislation to provide more accountability and horribly punish the people who misuse this data: either with four megabyte attachments or prison, whichever is worse. http://www.stand.org.uk/HomeOfficeDraftOrders.html - all in DOC format >> ANTI-NEWS << berating the obvious at last, a digital camera with plenty of storage space: http://www.ntk.net/2003/09/12/dohurn.gif ... IBM targeting Japanese market?: http://www.ntk.net/2003/09/12/dohdolph.gif ... David Blaine "looking for love" - in all the wrong places: http://www.ntk.net/2003/09/12/dohblaine.gif ... charity irony: http://lists.samba.org/pipermail/linux/2003-September/017192.html "pakiesRus" not the kind of "Schools and Education" group they had in mind?: http://www.communigate.co.uk/wales/viewall.phtml ... got to pay for all those expensive Premiership players somehow: http://www.ntk.net/2003/09/12/dohspurs.gif ... new Altman film reveals the darker side of New York gallery scene: http://www.ntk.net/2003/09/12/dohultra.gif ... 4th paragraph "royalty" link - music industry take credit for everything: http://www.newmusicbox.org/news/nov00/fasttrack.html ... double-URLtendres of the world: http://dvdcollectorshaven.ca/ http://www.bum.it/ , http://www.MerdeSable.fr/ ... >> EVENT QUEUE << goto's considered non-harmful It's aimless-queueing architecture-extravaganza LONDON OPEN HOUSE this weekend (various London venues, all free), but if that doesn't offer quite enough goatee-stroking potential for your liking, you may also appreciate advance warning of the LUMEN INTERNATIONAL MEDIA ARTS EVOLUTION (various venues around Leeds, from Thu 2003-10-09 to Sat 2003-10-11, day passes from UKP18.00) - an event which unselfconsciously describes one of its "highlights" as a chat between "leading postmodern sociologist Zygmunt Bauman and artistic activist Gustav Metzger, two of the most uncompromising thinkers of the twentieth century". And, if you left early, you could still get to London in time for CYBERSALON's dinner with high- pitched hype-monger DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF (7pm, Sat 2003-10-11, London Sketch Club SW3, "donations from UKP35.00"). The online menu whets your appetite with "Vegetable and gruyere gallette served with oyster mushrooms, asparagus, and salsa verdi", but you can of course always rely on Rushkoff to serve up his own generous helpings of half-baked techno bollocks, marinated in new-age emergent optimism, with a choice of vasopressin or LSD dressings. http://www.londonopenhouse.org/OHevent.html - "you might deem [emailing your credit card info] risky" http://www.lumen.net/evolution2003/about.html - "video works by Nam June Paik, Dan Graham and Ant Farm" http://www.cybersalon.org/ - includes half a bottle of wine, source code to Judaism http://www.royalsoc.ac.uk/live/ - plus: Tim Berners-Lee live online on Monday >> TRACKING << sufficiently advanced technology : the gathering A-A-P is all wrong. Worse, the more you use it, the more you like how wrong it is. It's a generic package configuration, compiler and installer (yeah, another one) which uses Python (huh?) and runs on Windows and Unix. It has enough smart defaults so you can create multi-platform installable packages almost instantly. It has a UI element (what?) called "Agile" that helps you build and test your install recipes. Agile is fairly minimal - to begin with. But as you use it, all your other favourite packages begin to pop in and say hello. Gdb and gcc seemlessly appear when you try to execute debug code. Look twice at an editable file, and Vim pops up, and starts listing code - with breakpoints, and watch variables. We still have no idea how it does that. Boa Constructor, the Python IDE, also introduces itself. It's as if someone - say, Bram Moolenaar, author of Vim and A-A-P, was smuggling his Vim cohorts into the world of fully-featured IDEs, and getting away with it. A-A-P's still in development, but is already very useable. And Bram's got some big Euro prize money for folk who want to extend it in interesting ways. God knows if it will get enough followers to gain traction in the world of package systems: but it's sufficiently exotic and fiddleable to be worth a look. http://www.a-a-p.org/ - try the tutorials http://www.a-a-p.org/zimbu_award.html - all hail zimbu! >> MEMEPOOL << contains a source of http://snackspot.org/ this week's token Japlish - the "Mysterious Fly-off Incident": http://www.mars.dti.ne.jp/~ateban/eng_tng.html (NB: Next Gen - TOS, DS9, Voyager links at top of page)... libertarian "Angle Grinder Man" http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/3112670.stm neglects to conceal website-creating sidekick's secret civilian identity: http://195.66.240.211/cgi-bin/whois.cgi?query=anglegrinderman.co.uk ... and just in time, too: http://www.hutton.softblade.com/ ... SUN Microsystems threaten entire IT-headline writing industry with edict that trademark "should never be used as a pun": http://www.sun.com/policies/trademarks/#10b ... civilisation that gave the world democracy, philosophy, geometry, etc - yet to master web design: http://www.greekpride.co.uk/ ... rave star Guru Josh not doing much better: http://www.gurujosh.com/ ... open-minded Aussies take a much more responsible attitude to "dogging" craze: http://www.easyguides.com.au/Dogging.htm (vs http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/3119024.stm )... >> GEEK MEDIA << get out less TV>> OK, so maybe a 5-minute puberty "would require a power source of 5 million watts, the equivalent of about 4000 toasters" http://www.intuitor.com/moviephysics/6thday.html , but Arnie cloning nonsense THE 6TH DAY (9pm, Fri, C5) is still more entertaining than, say, "Minority Report"... most of the cast of BBC2's "Bruiser" reunite for "dark" internal-monologue Brit-com PEEP SHOW (10.35pm, Fri, C4)... as Sky tries to fill that "Buffy" gap with sarcastic swearing junior Grim Reaper DEAD LIKE ME (9pm, Fri, Sky 1)... the unquiet spirit of "Tiswas" is once again disturbed from its rest by "irreverent" Saturday show DICK AND DOM IN DA BUNGALOW (9am, Sat, BBC1)... ARENA (9.05pm, Sat, BBC2) is a 90-minute hagiography of John Lennon's "Imagine", hopefully concluding with Moped's more contemporary version: "Imagine all the people - raving in the place!" http://www.emmetonline.co.uk/moped/music.htm ... and you thought Channel 4 would be *against* globalisation, but Johan Norberg argues - ahhh, do you see? - that actually GLOBALISATION IS GOOD (9pm, Sun, C4)... Vin Diesel, Radha "Neighbours" Mitchell and her off of Farscape are all way better than you'd expect in genius minimalist sci-fi PITCH BLACK (9pm, Sun, C4) ... Dominic "director of Swordfish" Sena week sees KALIFORNIA (10.55pm, Sun, C4) hotly pursued by the intentionally hilarious GONE IN 60 SECONDS (9pm, Wed, ITV), the latter featuring too much of the Crystal Method's overused "Busy Child", yet never enough of BT/ M Doughty's inspired stream-of-consciousness big-beat "Never Gonna Come Back Down" http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1426640/07052000/dj_rap.jhtml ... and BREAKING THE SILENCE (10.45pm, Mon, ITV) sees John Pilger pointing the finger for the evidently fictitious "war on terror" at Bush's military-industrial complex, aka THE USUAL SUSPECTS (10pm, Mon, C4)... "The Day Today" director and NTK reader Andrew Gillman has mailed to confirm that TERRI MCINTYRE (9.30pm, Mon, BBC3) comprises new 30-min episodes of the 15-min Glaswegian tanning sitcom previously known as "Terry McIntyre - Classy Bitch"... and hopefully THE DARK SIDE OF STAGE HYPNOTISM (10pm, Tue, C4) will touch on the inability of hypnotists to make people do anything they can't do when not "in a trance" anyway... FILM>> sure, they've thoughtfully added a plot, some character motivation, Seth Green as XFM's James Hyman, endless close-ups of Charlize Theron, plus Shawn "Napster" Fanning - as himself - but the car chase is still the saving grace of THE ITALIAN JOB ( http://www.intuitor.com/moviephysics/ItalJob.html : at this pressure, assuming the door is roughly 2 ft wide by 4 ft high the force holding the door shut would have been around 3500 lbs (15000 Newtons))... almost certainly the first of Kate Beckinsale's movies to ship with its own Half-Life mod http://www.sonypictures.com/movies/underworld/site/game/game.html it's vampires vs werewolves in goth Romeo and Juliet "Blade" knockoff UNDERWORLD ( http://www.bbfc.co.uk/ : contains strong violence and language)... Naomi "Jet Girl" Watts seems as bemused as anyone by Gallic chick-flick frolic LE DIVORCE ( http://www.screenit.com/movies/2003/le_divorce.html : we later see [Kate Hudson] in a bra, panties and garters (in an open robe that shows cleavage, part of the side of her bare butt and lots of leg) and sex is then implied)... or it's Steven Berkoff, Fish from Marillion, and Carol Decker from T'Pau - together at last! - in limited-release Brit caper NINE DEAD GAY GUYS (imdb: independent/ gay-interest/ hustler/ gay- stereotype/ first-gay-sexual-experience)... >> 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 "impenetrable... tat" http://www.jimcromwell.demon.co.uk/general.html NEED TO KNOW THEY STOLE OUR REVOLUTION. NOW WE'RE STEALING IT BACK. Archive - http://www.ntk.net/ Unsubscribe or subscribe at http://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. 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.