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"A case in point is web designer Matt Jones, the man
responsible for how BBC News Online looked when it launched.
Since then, he has invented 'warchalking', which he recently
described as a 'curse'..."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/2210091.stm
- but you cannot turn against me! I... created you!
>> HARD NEWS <<
stiffening sinews
More hot summer days in the mailinglist alleyways,
dangerously empty of sane postings, strewn with the rotting
carcasses of broiling vacation messages. Hacktress and
Silicon Valley's chief rat-keeper LILE ELAM, excitedly posts
about a new open 802.11 network she's found. "I am here at
the police station waiting to see a judge and I thought I
would check to see if there is connectivity", she writes,
somewhat recklessly, to the Bay Area Wireless list. Exit
the rest of the Wifi community through the nearest window
and out into the streets... where, cooling tempers, the
Microsoft Palladium boys are on an endless summer tour,
reassuring the experts that while, hmm, they *suppose* Pd
could *theoretically* be used as a Hollywood DRM system,
they truly have no plans to do any such thing. Cypherpunk
and friend of freedom Lucky Green hears this; thinks up four
or five of the obvious Palladium DRM implementations; sends
them off to be patented in his name. Licensing funds, we
imagine, will go on cracking his own DRMs. And so the mail
loops on.
http://lists.bawug.org/pipermail/wireless/2002-August/008507.html
- administrivia: HI MOM, I'M IN JAIL
http://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography@wasabisystems.com/msg02554.html
- Green/Palladium, like Green Kryptonite
Could Lucky get himself arrested under the DMCA for
distributing a circumvention device? Worse: now we have the
EUCD incoming, could he here in the UK? Will Alan Cox go to
jail for posting detailed Changelogs? Will even the nicest
UK cryptographer (or curious garage tinkerer) find
themselves hauled up under our new and scarily DMCAish
copyright regime? Find out the facts at the free FAIR DEAL
FOR COPYRIGHT conference, organised by the irrepressible
FOUNDATION FOR INFORMATION POLICY RESEARCH for Wednesday
2002-09-18 at the London School of Economics. All the usual
fun from the creators of the Scrambling for Safety crypto
cons: we confidently predict government spokesmen caught in
headlights, wanton Dave Bird heckling, some industry bigwig
fighting off the audience with a broken chairleg, and other
epiphenomena of the interzone between legal minds and hacker
ethics. Oh, and FIPR are still looking for a Programme
Director, so if you're interested, let them know. We
suggested a convention raffle (first prize: the director's
job, second prize: Ross Anderson as your personal slave for
a day). They say there's some rule that would break, though.
http://www.fipr.org/vacancy.html
- doesn't the Foundation use psychohistory for filling these positions?
For those of us who can't read the abbreviation EULA without
thinking of Martian fighting machines and their "deafening
howls... which roared like thunder", we're sorry to report
that this weekend's multimedia performance of Jeff Wayne's WAR
OF THE WORLDS has been postponed due to "health and safety
issues". The event was to feature computer graphics,
fireworks, "60ft-tall Martian fighting machines" wreaking
"havoc and destruction", and - most terrifyingly of all - the
possibility of a David Essex tribute singer performing with
Hawkwind, but UKP18 tickets for the Sat 2002-08-31 show at
Manchester's Heaton Park will still be valid at a range of new
venues next summer. Ironically, the Martians' original
invasion plans were similarly thwarted by health and safety
issues, "slain after all man's devices had failed by the
humblest creatures that God, in his wisdom, has put upon this
earth: bacteria. Minute, invisible, bacteria. For, directly
the invaders arrived and drank and fed, our microscopic allies
attacked them..."
http://www.waroftheworlds.info/postpone.htm
- "...From that moment, they were doomed."
>> ANTI-NEWS <<
berating the obvious
moving on from PUERILE GOOGLE MISSPELLINGS, weird search-and-
replace artefact: http://www.google.com/search?q=consideyellow ,
Japanese fan sites for "plince", "steery dan", "def reppard"
et al, plus the 18,000 or more self-referential Usenet .sigs:
http://groups.google.com/groups?q=%22get+random+signatures%22
...http://www.colocation-network.com/ "Zerodowntime" ad leads
to: http://www.ntk.net/2002/08/30/dohzero.gif ... slightly
harsh alt text: http://www.ntk.net/2002/08/30/dohover.gif ...
US military discovers the only "translator" those bastards
seem to understand: http://www.ntk.net/2002/08/30/dohgun.gif
... scary blue men herald return of the bizarre BBC hacking
pics: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/1494091.stm ... reporter RYAN
DILLEY http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/2202552.stm pulls his
http://starwars.org.pl/galeria/e2/char/anakin/t001.jpg face
... banjo maestro GEORGE FORMBY still alive, cooking, black:
http://www.readersheds.co.uk/readersheds/shop.cfm?WOSNAMES=Wosnames
... thanks guys, that ought to do it: http://www.eap.ca/ ...
>> EVENT QUEUE <<
goto's considered non-harmful
Controversially, we're all in favour of THE GUARDIAN GREAT
BRITISH BLOG COMPETITION (closing date next Fri 2002-09-06,
first prize UKP1000, entry free), in that any initiative that
encourages this notoriously primadonna-ish "community" to try
and engage with real-world notions of editorial quality surely
has to be a good thing. Our only disappointment is that The
Guardian appears to be focussing on the "best" of the entries,
when everyone knows the real fun is to be had cruising the
truly terrible examples that the genre has to offer, mentally
allocating points for "Most Depressing Recycling Of Daypop Top
40 URLs", "Most Unsettling Revelations About Personal Life",
plus of course "Most Tedious Linking/Reciprocal Linking To Other
Bloggers In Absence Of Having Anything Interesting To Say".
http://www.guardian.co.uk/weblog/bestbritishblog/
- "A strange game, Professor Falken..."
http://media.guardian.co.uk/newmedia/comment/0,7496,765161,00.html
- "...the only winning move is not to play."
>> TRACKING <<
sufficiently advanced technology : the gathering
The respective trademark holders will hate this, but
Windows really *is* like the Sun. You have this big hulking
mass of concentrated power in the middle, with a few small
orbiting utilities - like WinZip, and PuTTY, and VNC.
Occasionally one will get a bit too close to the OS, and
Microsoft will suck it down and turn it into fuel for the
System. One such discrete satellite remains FILEZILLA, the
still-necessary ftp gui client for Windows. Those who know
it won't need the introduction, although they might
appreciate the note that it's getting close to v2.0 time.
For dogged WS_FTP users, though, it's got multiple
downloads, auto-restart of interrupted 'loads, queuing, and
sftp and Kerberos support. It's also GPL'd which makes it a
nice bit of source for anyone wanting to grok Win32
networking from something that works.
http://filezilla.sf.net/
- talking of trademarks, will the Godzilla people strike before MS?
>> MEMEPOOL <<
ceci n'est pas une http://www.gagpipe.com/
(Not safe for work) next year's RED NOSE DAY looks more fun
than usual: http://www.threepillows.com/tour2.htm ... Mirrored
Disaster Recovery Suite - to go with mirrored bathroom etc?:
http://www.dovebid.com/Auctions/AuctionDetail.asp?AuctionID=1450
... and then the kid can take you to court for mental cruelty:
http://www.cnn.com/2002/TECH/ptech/08/27/turok.baby.reut/ ...
"funny" prefixes in front of "chalking" #n+1 - the actually
quite pragmatic: http://www.pinkbunny.co.uk/poochalking/ ...
no longer knowing - or caring - if these are prank AMAZON
reviews or not, for Potter's ever-popular "vibrating" broom:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/stores/detail/-/toys/B00005NEBW/
... ditto "Use This Software At Your Own Risk" disclaimer for:
http://www.palmgear.com/software/showsoftware.cfm?prodID=41030
... DAFFY DUCK appears in dock - accused of "dethpicable"
behaviour?: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/2223065.stm ,
http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_659889.html ...
>> GEEK MEDIA <<
get out less
TV>> celebrity cameo night tonight, with Brad Pitt in FRIENDS
(9pm, Fri, C4), Sydney Pollack in WILL AND GRACE (9.30pm, Fri,
C4), Dustin Hoffman in V GRAHAM NORTON (10.30pm, Fri, C4), and
a singing, dancing peanut in globalised trade documentary ALT-
TV (7.30pm, Fri, C4)... the BBC have kept McEnroe and the
heart monitor, got rid of the live crocodiles in gimmicky
quizshow THE CHAIR (6.40pm, Sat, BBC1)... and a month of
"September 11th" specials kicks off with AVENGING TERROR (8pm,
Sat & Sun, C4) - yet those responsible for BOWFINGER (9pm,
Sat, C4) and NOTTING HILL (9pm, Sun, C4) still remain
unpunished... John "The Last Seduction" Dahl's ROUNDERS (11pm,
Sat, BBC2) turns out to be about high-stakes poker, rather
than the girls' version of baseball... in the wake of DAVE
GORMAN'S IMPORTANT ASTROLOGY EXPERIMENT (10.40pm, Sun, BBC2),
how about a three-way challenge where he, Tony Hawks and Pete
McCarthy battle to come up with the most lucrative pointless
pretext for a book and TV show?... but we still have a soft
spot for Ron "Alien: Resurrection" Perlman liberal self-
flagellation THE LAST SUPPER (11.20pm, Sun, C4)... 9/11 CLEAR
THE SKIES (9pm, Sun, BBC2) is a presumably uneventful account
of "how US air defence systems responded to the events of
September 11th"... inexplicably, the three finalists in THE
TARTIEST MEN IN BRITAIN (10.30pm, Mon, ITV) all come from
Leeds... Larry Clark takes a somewhat indirect approach to
conveying his safe-sex message in New York filth-fest KIDS
(1.15am, Tue, C4)... and the September 11th build-up continues
with HOW THE TWIN TOWERS COLLAPSED (8pm, Mon, C4), LET'S ROLL:
THE STORY OF FLIGHT 93 (10.30pm, Wed, ITV), plus THE MEYSSAN
CONSPIRACY (11.05pm, Tue, C4) - ie the French guy behind:
http://www.asile.org/citoyens/numero13/pentagone/erreurs_en.htm
... away from the polluted nightmare of modern living, a
family seek out a new way of life in Earth Summit tie-in A
LAND WORTH LOVING (7pm, Wed, BBC1)... which coincidentally
also forms the plot of this week's second Heather "Bowfinger"
Graham turkey, LOST IN SPACE (7.55pm, Wed, BBC1) - not to be
confused with the return of those annoying posh women in
WORLD'S WORST DRESSED (8pm, Wed, BBC2), who have at least shut
up about their always-doomed hideously purple e-commerce
site: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/712188.stm ...
FILM>> the comic skills of Cameron Diaz, Christina Applegate
and Parker Posey combine in a cross between a teen smut comedy
and an episode of "Sex And The City", THE SWEETEST THING
( http://www.screenit.com/movies/2002/the_sweetest_thing.html :
As [Diaz] and [Applegate] drive down the road still dressed in
just their bras and underwear, [Applegate] drops her bottle of
fingernail polish. [Diaz] then goes over to get it, with
her panty-covered butt in the air and her head down toward
[Applegate]'s legs and crotch; [Selma Blair] [has] her mouth
stuck around a man's privates after apparently performing oral
sex on him)... Robin Williams plays a surprisingly convincing
Hannibal Lecter in morally complicated Alaskan Al Pacino
murder madness INSOMNIA ( http://www.cndb.com/ : You can see
[Crystal Lowe's] tits in autopsy photos and again - along with
bush - when she's seen on a autopsy table. Nice boobs but
she's dead)... it's Eddie Murphy, Randy Quaid, Jay "Jerry
Maguire" Mohr, John Cleese and Pam Grier - together at last! -
in blaxploitation sci-fi spoof THE ADVENTURES OF PLUTO NASH
( http://www.screenit.com/movies/2002/the_adventures_of_pluto_nash.html :
the woman then causes the image of [Rosario "Kids" Dawson] to
suddenly have much larger breasts and an exaggeratedly large
rear end)... all of which, shockingly, are an improvement on
John Woo interspersing lame battle scenes with agonising anti-
racist philosophising in WW2 Navajo crypto clunker WINDTALKERS
( http://www.capalert.com/capreports/windtalkers.htm :
gambling; beheading; brief partial nudity of a Japanese
soldier; I have no doubt that such gore is present in war but
must it be regurgitated in and 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
"yeah, but bet we were banned first"
http://www.b3ta.com/newsletter/issue54/
NEED TO KNOW
THEY STOLE OUR REVOLUTION. NOW WE'RE STEALING IT BACK.
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