Fun_People Archive
18 Jun
NTK Bits, 1999-06-18
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From: Peter Langston <psl>
Date: Fri, 18 Jun 99 10:37:52 -0700
To: Fun_People
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Subject: NTK Bits, 1999-06-18
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Excerpted-from: __ <*the* weekly high-tech sarcastic update for the uk>
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>> HARD NEWS <<
us versus you
Volume XXVII of that endless Dianetics saga, BATTLEFIELD:
ALT.RELIGION.SCIENTOLOGY. In the last fortnight: Scientologists
cheered a Dutch court's ruling that hyperlinking to a pirated doc
is itself an infringement of copyright. But some pretty bad engrams
must have clouded the rest of that decision - those leaked Church
docs they'd sought to ban online *weren't* copyright, and so stay
up and linked - including the scurrilous (and yet oddly dull)
Fishman Affidavit. Not so good news in the States, where a.r.s
litigant KEITH HENSON (ex-husband of happy hacker hate figure
CAROLINE MEINEL, obscure gossip fans) did indeed lose his appeal
against the Scientologists in a case that suggests (in the US) that
copyright can protect even alleged criminal material...
http://www.xenu.net/
- all the clams you can eat
http://www.demon.co.uk/castle/woods.html
- interesting blind-spot in the Bonnie Woods press release too
...but not, it seems, the other way around. We covered the
BUSINESS SOFTWARE ALLIANCE's tactics of "opt-out" piracy
investigations back in NTK 1999-06-11. The routine then was - you
reply to the BSA's unsolicited spam asking nosy questions about your
business, or they put you on their suspected pirate list. The
follow-up mailing was apparently even cheerier - "imprisonment...
prosecution... damage to an organisation's reputation can also be
irreparable ... It is highly advisable for companies to return the
duplicate form enclosed within the next 7 days, or we'll have to
break your legs..." The Advertising Standards Authority have upheld
the complaint, saying that business circulars generally don't
"warrant this tone of fear". Whose fear, though? The small
companies, or the increasingly desperate BSA?
http://www.ntk.net/index.cgi?back=a98/now1106.txt&l=62#l
- imagine if RMS had these people on his side
http://www.asa.org.uk/adj/adj_3637.htm
- ok, we lied about the broken legs. so who you gonna call?
Consider it a Falco across the bows. The omphalos of high weirdness,
Austin's FringeWare store, is beeping a quiet SOS. We can't tell
from here whether they're genuinely closing down, or if the 75% OFF
- EVERYTHING MUST GO signs, and a unusually coherent plea for help
from certified cyber- psycho Don Webb is just an ingeniously direct
media hack to up sales. We can't test either theory though, because
their online catalog is on the fritz, and their website's got bad
links hanging off it like an explosion in a frankfurter factory.
Nonetheless, you should know that FringeWare has been, if not the
home, then the battered half-way house for half of the memage in
your head. Schwa, SubGenius, the FringeWare review, BoingBoing, them
Bots which win the Turing Contest, the Dead Media Project. I'm sure
they'd consider it an honour if you were in the area and find out
- as was always FringeWare's creed - WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON.
http://www.cyberpsychos.netonecom.net/fringe/185th.html
- oh, what do we look like, journalists? Find out for yourself
>> EVENT QUEUE <<
goto's considered non-harmful
Borrowing both Access All Areas' acronym and venue, THE ASSOCIATION
OF AUTONOMOUS ASTRONAUTS begin a 10-day festival of pie-in-the-sky
amateur spaceflight antics with an "Intergalactic Conference" at
London's University of Westminster, from noon tomorrow 1999-06-19.
We don't know whether to be pleased or disappointed since one of
them discreetly explained that they *know* they don't have a chance
of reaching space in the forseeable future; they're just a bunch of
like-minded ne'er-do-wells having some sort of art-hippy
pseudo-sci-fi laugh. Still, sufficiently "autonomous", we note, to
pick a launch window when many of their core audience will be at
Glastonbury. Had they scheduled it a month later, it would have been
the 30th anniversary of Apollo 11's landing on the moon, arguably
the most visible achievement of the military-industrial complex in
this particular field.
http://www.deepdisc.com/space1999/
- see this week's "The Onion" for Space: 1999 '99...
>> TRACKING <<
making good use of the things that we find
Flash! We love you! But we only have fourteen hours to download this
page! Macromedia Flash 4 - both the editing software and the plugin
everyone will have upgraded to by about year 2015 - are now
officially available. On the whoop-de-fucking-doo list:
now-mandatory MP3 audio support, forms, importable palettes, and
some kind of admittedly cool state persistence that lasts between
sessions. Available now for Windows 95/NT, MacOS and oh. Sorry,
Linux users - oh *dear*. Did we forget about you again?
http://www.macromedia.com/software/flash/
- and here it is all "free sourced" as well
>> MEMEPOOL <<
hasta la altavista
UK public not buying PHANTOM MENACE games to "avoid spoiling the
film"... hmm: BT INTERNET doesn't stop simultaneous logins... CHRIS
MORRIS re-appears: as Observer's suicidal RICHARD GEEFE... Citizens
of KAMCHATKA OBLAST *ask* to be UN protectorate... this explains *a
lot* about JAVASCRIPT http://people.netscape.com/brendan/ ...
http://slashnull.org - it's like an alternate universe SLASHDOT.
Oh, wait - it is ... the "ANSWER ME" games news has been waiting
for http://www.oldmanmurray.com/realnews.wc ... fog in a bottle,
cloud chamber, TESLA COIL, toast: things you can make in a kitchen
at http://freeweb.pdq.net/headstrong/Index.htm ... 3D sculptures
of CGI classics - gloriously missing the point
http://www.xs4all.nl/~notnot/ ... well, here we go again:
http://www.irishnews.com/k_archive/180699/nnews1.html ...
sub-"Thrift Score" zine CHEAP DATE falls in with bad crowd:
http://www.observer.com/cgi-win/homepage.exe?nyo1/sd062199 ... looks
like ADAM AND JOE got out just in time:
http://www.geocities.com/~bjruef/Action/icepicktures.htm ... and
find out who really would win in a fight:
http://www.the-movie-times.com/thrsdir/titanicVSmenace.html ...
FEEBDACK>> following those "One Year On" flashbacks we ran a couple
of weeks ago, TAMSIN HUGHES asserts: "this Belgian dioxin scare: it
struck me that chlorine is proving to be a problem in all these
products - including chicken". Is this perhaps what we meant by
our Nostradamusly-cryptic warning in NTK 1997-06-27: "next food
scare: chlorinated chicken"? Well, this happens to be one of those
memes where a) we can no longer remember what we meant by it and b)
we're not even sure we understood it at the time. So, to sum up:
yes, we did... on a more serious note, a tipster asks: are the
"Bindman & Partners" acting for online libel- winner LAURENCE
GODFREY [NTK 1999-06-04] the same ones as behind this stirring
Charter 88 free-speech declaration
http://www.charter88.org.uk/pubs/violations/bindm.html ? (in fact
those weren't his exact words, but obviously we're treading *very*
carefully here)... echoing NTK 1999-05-07, the excellently-named
ALAN MOUNTAIN describes The Weekly as "a fair attempt at an English
Onion", though his favourite page
http://www.theweekly.co.uk/further_purchases.html is of course much
more closely "borrowed" from the National Lampoon, which - in its
turn - clearly influenced The Onion. In response, The Weekly this
week chose to go "on holiday"... keen to see us resume our
temporarily-truced vendetta against OFFICIAL PLAYSTATION MAGAZINE
[NTK 1999-05-28], ADRIAN MOULDER remarks: "That largely uncritical
review of Star Wars: Episode 1 in the last issue - I wonder if it
was 'approved' by Lucasarts?"... PAUL RANDALL reckons that last
week's "Spectrum techno" [NTK 1999-06-11] sounds "an awful lot more
like an Amstrad CPC. Especially the repeated short/long two tone
burst, which sounds a lot like the initial burst that the CPC used
to gauge motor speed, and hence the following data frequencies".
Lay off Paul, you're scaring the straights... and finally, after
our claim that DESERT EAGLE DISCS are "the only upcoming hip- hop
act to combine the name of a popular Radio 4 show with that of an
Israeli firearm" [NTK 1999-05-28], reader AQUARIUS adds: "apart from
'I'm Sorry I Haven't An Uzi'". Well *done*, Aquarius - a phrase we
love typing because it makes us feel like the boss-character from
a 1980s Glen A Larson action series...
>> 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.
It is registered at the Post Office as
"often, or at least sometimes know what they're talking about."
- John Browning, First Tuesday Forum (no figures available)
NEED TO KNOW
THEY STOLE OUR REVOLUTION. NOW WE'RE STEALING IT BACK.
(K) 1999 Special Projects.
Copying is fine, but include URL: http://www.ntk.net/
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© 1999 Peter Langston
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