Need To Know 2000-03-03

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"We do more for our Mac customers because Mac customers appreciate that." - MICROSOFT's Irving Kwong http://www.independent.co.uk/news/Digital/Features/2000-02/design280200.shtml ... PC users, on the other hand, take the most amazing amount of wait, is this microphone on? >> HARD NEWS << zarro boogs On Monday, the REGULATION OF INVESTIGATORY POWERS BILL will get its second reading in the Commons. Then it goes to committee, then it becomes law, and then you'll never hear from it again, because talking about most of its powers will get you five years in prison. So, when the police ask your ISP to put a tap on your mail, you won't hear about it. When your local trades and standards officer decides to take a look at your browser log for the last month, you won't hear about it. And when they come and get your private encryption key so that can read your friend's mails, you won't be able to tell your friend - or us - that it happened. Hell, you won't even be able to change your key if that might give us a clue. Given that it's all going to get so quiet so soon, STAND thought it might be an idea to let our MPs know that we're still here. So, with mild and belated fanfare, please welcome - STAND's Open Web to MP fax gateway. Peruse the bloody-long-but-not-as-long-as-the-bill STAND Guide to RIP, then send your comments on the Bill direct to your constituency MP's office with just a few clicks. But please be quick - MPs have only ten days from Monday to propose their amendments. At the very least, we should get an anti-spam statute out of it. http://www.stand.org.uk/ - may be a few bugs. but, hey, there's bugs everywhere these days http://www.stand.org.uk/ripnotes/ - liberty requires eternal vigilance (and magnifying glass) The CONSUMER PROJECT ON TECHNOLOGY's proposal to ICANN that the .union top level domain be introduced, as well as .isnotfair, .isnotgreen, and .sucks (for official AOL-haters sites, and the like) sounds like a joke. Well, that's because it is. Or at least, its serious intent is mainly in seeing what ICANN's response will be. Previously, ICANN has insisted that its function was principally technical: the anti-corporate stand taken by these domains is partially an attempt to see just how far ICANN can toe the line before throwing up their hands and going "Okay, we're molls of the international business community, what can we say?". Of course, what *might* happen is they'll create those domains, AOL et al will buy them all up and then we'll have to pay them millions to slag off their own companies. This would fit the pattern we're seeing. http://www.cptech.org/ecom/icann/tlds-march1-2000.html - would Esther sue over dyson.sucks - even if www.dyson.com owned it? So what's the latest group to fell afoul of the US government's still-twitching export controls on downloading 128-bit secure browsers? Might it have been - the US government, whose own justice department had to obtain a sworn affidavit that they weren't Iraq or something before they could ftp Netscape's domestic browser across? A lot of effort for a few bits: especially when, in a parallel mess-up, MICROSOFT were offering the same product for download at www.microsoft.com. A 19.7MB installation guide for Exchange 2000 released this week included 1.7 megs of documents - and 18 megs of Netscape 4.7. Taunt that DOJ with your warez pr0w3ss, Bill! http://www.microsoft.com/exchange/prodinfo/2000/PlanInstall.htm - fixed now. still, nice to know they use it in-house >> ANTI-NEWS << berating the obvious whois format changes *again* ... used NEWTONs cost more than they did new - say Newton users ... unfortunate ticker truths: http://www.ntk.net/2000/03/03/bbcdoh.gif ... sure, save the water-based lifeforms on Europa, but does anyone care about the sentient gas-bags in Jupiter's atmosphere? Nooooo ... Falco! Oracle's NETWORK COMPUTER ARCHITECTURE site: http://www.oracle.com/nca/ ... a little too late for literacy tests: http://www.ntk.net/2000/03/03/abcdoh.gif ... "interactive pizza" fails to show: geeks starve in their thousands http://www.ntk.net/2000/03/03/domindoh.gif ... NEGROPONTE says he chose Ireland for the new media lab because "the Irish are mad": mad enough to give him money, certainly ... "'The message is clear.' The judge tells everybody, 'Don't go too far with the Internet, because you are going to pass Go and go to jail,'", reports WIRED, showing judges misunderstand both the Net and Monopoly ... 2099 proving to be quite a year for album releases: http://www.audiostreet.infront.co.uk/cgi-bin/show?Key=audio-4321360392 >> EVENT QUEUE << goto's considered non-harmful If we've timed this right, you'll already have missed the new media rubbish at onedotzero's retrospective at the Lux Cinema in Hoxton Square, London tonight - but you can still tag along for 2100GMT's cinema showing of videos by Spike Jonze, Hexstatic and Chris Cunningham. And if you really are the sort of person who thinks the FMV inserts in games are "the best bit", the whole shebang is showing again at, inevitably, Brighton's Cinematheque on March 16th. http:///www.onedotzero.com/ - "as close to the future as you're likely to get" says the Guardian, threateningly. >> TRACKING << sufficiently advanced technology : the gathering For those of you who have waited an eponymous duration for the Eternity network, FREENET may provide some solace. Both have similar aims: a network of machines that provide permanent access to anonymously-uploaded documents which might otherwise be censored by having servers shut down, or the original source traced. Freenet works using a genuinely non-hierachical set of nodes which have limited knowledge about each other. Send your file to one of them, and eventually most of the nodes will be able to relay your file to anyone who knows its name. Once the server numbers have reached a critical mass over a number of political domains, it'll be almost impossible to censor anyone. Server numbers is, naturally, where you come in. The first version of the GPL'd software is now available for beta-testing: if you have a machine permanently connected to the Net and running Java 1.1, you too can take place in the first network trials. Obligatory strong crypto is to come shortly. And not a moment too soon, it would seem. http://freenet.sourceforge.net/ - you just know it's going to filled with Gilmore dox for the first month or two http://www.kolej.mff.cuni.cz/~eternity/ - your very own home from cryptome http://www.gotlinux.org/~jasta/gnapster.html - not putting ideas into your head or anything >> MEMEPOOL << hasta la altavista cannabis destroys brain tumours: MO MOWLAM vindicated ... no catch caches at http://proxys4all.cgi.net/ ... pope vs pope: http://www.truecatholic.org/ ... spams from Evel Knieval ... DAVE WINER patents anti-patent rhetoric ... Clinton imitates Onion: http://news.excite.com/news/r/000301/10/odd-computers ... "Not that we're bitter" vs "Life imitates Onion" - http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/health/newsid_659000/659685.stm ... GPL RPGs ... Mecha no! http://www.earleshouse.com/mps.html ... much more interesting when you can't see the ad campaign: http://www.ilovecheese.com/ ... are these people on *drugs*? http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/story/99.html ... http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/aw-cgi/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=269771110 vs http://www.deja.com/getdoc.xp?AN=590984602 ... expedite *this*! http://www.sentient.com/%7Epcm2/action_item.gif ... when Denial Of Service gets really harsh: http://www.af.mil/news/Feb2000/n20000229_000305.html ... JWZ + MP3 = GRONK : http://www.jwz.org/gronk/ ... >> GEEK MEDIA << get out less FILMS>> Dave's still away, and our deeply held beliefs prevent us from staring too long at Satan's Lantern, so not much in the way of films this week. Still, in case you didn't already know, director du jour Spike Jonze is the serf erased from the publicity for THREE KINGS (http://www.capalert.com/capreports/ : Wanton Violence/Crime - field impalement to relieve collapsed lung) - what appears to be an unnecessary field upgrade of the old Clint Eastwood comedy "Kelly's Heroes", sending the message to America's "CNN generation" that the Gulf War wasn't just about that one laser guided missile zooming down a chimney. No, there were the soldiers on the ground doing the real dirty work - like performing rectal searches on POWs... TV>> those bastards finally did it - they scheduled a widescreen run for THE PLANET OF THE APES movies. But, since you already know the twist, we advise that the only way to watch "the Apes" is in chronological order - so tape the original (Sat, 20:05, C4) and "BENEATH THE" (Sat, 23:10, C4) then watch pseudo-prequel "ESCAPE FROM" (Sun night, 00:00, C4) and wait for C4 to schedule "BATTLE FOR" and "CONQUEST OF" first... it's fairly obvious that scripts for the "classics" of TWILIGHT ZONE: ROD STERLING'S LOST CLASSICS (Sat night, 00:20, BBC1) were probably "lost" in the conical metal "Twilight Zone" in Rod's office... continuing Channel 5's perpetual bullshit season: Gilliam's THE ADVENTURES OF BARON MUNCHAUSEN (Sun, 16:40, C5) another movie cursed by evil, clean-shaven Robin Williams - set loose yet again for period stand-up routine GOOD MORNING VIETNAM (Mon, 22:00, C4) ... CLONED (Mon, 21:00, C5) is not quite the hilarious sci-fi comedy you might have expected from the name, then again neither is the similarly titled SNL-spinoff CONEHEADS (Tue, 23:55, BBC1) nor indeed the hideously misleading FUNNY GAMES (Tue, 23:00, C4) ... and more scheduling hilarity as THE X-FILES (Wed, 22:20, BBC1) airs against decidedly non-paranormal relationship-docu THE EX-FILES (Wed, 22:30, C4) possibly in a bid for that coveted "got confused when setting the video-timer" audience-share... BOOKZ>> With our Uncharacteristically Generous Literary Correspondent, Mr Ben Moor: "Toby Litt has written a cracking thriller in CORPSING. Anything that opens in an editing suite for the Discovery Channel's Shark Week knows from cool. Contains: the best descriptions of bullet trajectories since the heyday of Kennedy Assassination literature, and great tips on how to ruin Shakespeare at the Barbican... Dave Egger's impressively self aware memoir of bringing up his 8 year old brother after both his parents died is called A HEARTBREAKING WORK OF STAGGERING GENIUS and you kind of feel obliged to make some funny comment on the title. He's the guy behind Might magazine (which for us defined the midearly and then the earlymid nineties) and McSweeneys ( http://www.mcsweeneys.net/ ) and could be the Tom Wolfe of the 21st century if he feels like it. But he probably won't. Whatever. Contains: a great stapler drawing... knowing a new book by Douglas Coupland is on the way is like being about to win at pass the parcel. You're enjoying the suspense of waiting, but what if the thing is rubbish? MISS WYOMING luckily is very not. There's a very neatly structured story that takes you from the madness of child beauty pageants to the relative sanity of a movie executive who decides to 'walk the earth.'... and Dave Barry's BIG TROUBLE is a total hoot. If PG Wodehouse had used more and bigger weapons in his stories, they'd still only be about half as funny as this. Psychedelic toads, water pistols, former Soviet armaments, it's got everything a Miami novel needs. Plus snakes..." >> 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 "DIY" http://www.brunching.com/cgi/toy-acronymer.cgi?acronym=NTK 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.ntk.net/books (K) 2000 Special Projects. 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