Fun_People Archive
14 Jan
NTK Bits, 2000-01-14
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From: Peter Langston <psl>
Date: Fri, 14 Jan 100 14:58:08 -0800
To: Fun_People
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Subject: NTK Bits, 2000-01-14
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Excerpted-from: NTK now, 2000-01-14
Originator: "Danny O'Brien" <danny@plum.flirble.org>
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"I might be threatening to write code."
- BILL GATES, ex-CEO of Microsoft
...or I might not. Get my drift, DOJ?
>> HARD NEWS <<
fernando poos
Plenty of corporomancy in the air this week, as pundits attempted
to guess the future by observing movements in the heavens. AOL
entered into conjunction with the Time Warner constellation,
prompting the prophet of slashdoterati, Jon Katz, to doomsay the
end of the world. Microsoft was occluded by Caldera in a $150
million plus settlement in the DR-DOS case, followed by the
declension of now ex-CEO Bill Gates, to be replaced by a Steve
Ballmer ascendant in the astro-organisational charts. But do
stellar movements like this have any bearing on life in the real
world? After all, there's not much evil AOL Time Warner can wield
that they couldn't have managed in their slightly less fat bastard
previous incarnations. And the Gates/Ballmer shuffle was just the
final precession of Bill's longterm move from daylight operations
at MSFT, all the better to skulk in preparation for the DOJ split.
http://www.earthchangestv.com/breaking/January2000/0110dawn.htm
- so moved with what I experienced today, I will set up a new page
A Damnable Subscriber Loophole: BT Internet's engineers discovered
they weren't the only people fiddling with the settings of their
ADSL set-up this week. In December, the telco had tweaked the
routers to prevent their customers from opening static incoming
ports (and thus preventing such obscure Network services as passive
ftp, online gaming, ICQ etc). Sadly for BT, the customers tweaked
back: prising open the DSL adaptors and re-configuring them to
not only re-instate the services, but also to change the security
passwords so that BT couldn't change them back. In a heart-warming
New Years Message, BT threatened its own users with breach of
contract, and re-asserted its powers to mess about until it gets
a service that keeps pesky consumers where they belong - forking
out extra for anything but the more asymmetric of Internet
services. Expect locked cages for the DSL roll-out next year, kids
http://www.flowpoint.com/support/dsl/dsl_faq.htm
- get it while you can, triallists
Just when you thought the continuiiiiing story of "Mir in Space"
couldn't get any weirder, another Western business partner has
emerged to save Mir and convert it into that anti-news stalwart
"an orbiting space hotel for billionaires". This time, who should
it be but Gold & Appel Transfers, of the Cayman Islands. Yup,
"Gold & Appel Transfers": last observed in Shea and Wilson's
ILLUMINATUS! trilogy as the front organisation for neophile outlaw
Hagbard Celine and his Legion of Dynamic Discord. Terrifyingly
for the few who still believe that book to be fiction, G&A is a
real company with funds of over $300 million. President Walt
Anderson made his money as co-founder of Esprit Telecom, and is
now a major investor in the Space Frontier Foundation and the
Roton, the orbital transfer system that looks like a beanie. G&A
have already offered $21 million to the Russian government to
maintain Mir in a serviceable orbit, with more, they say, to come.
It's unclear whether the group of investors can really rustle up
the huge amounts needed to maintain Mir; but wouldn't it be nice
if, when the ISS finally boots in the 22nd century, NASA found
that a bunch of Discordians had beaten them to it?
http://www.mercurycenter.com/premium/front/docs/mir13.htm
- financier "reclusive"; Cayman Islands last outcropping of Atlantis
http://www.reston.com/nasa/watch.html
- fnord
>> ANTI-NEWS <<
berating the obvious
CEO of Apple now officially Steve ... VIRGIN NET mess up e-mail
passwords: but it could be worse -
http://www.virgin-atlantic.com/emergency/ ... CEO of AOL Time
Warner as of now, a Steve ... from the Millennium Doh!me:
http://www.ntk.net/2000/01/14/doh/dohme1.jpg ,
http://www.ntk.net/2000/01/14/doh/dohme2.jpg ... METACREATIONS
seamlessly erase 100 from staff photo ... CEO of Microsoft - from
this week, a Steve ... "Internet may be crowded". Sure it is,
http://www.ntk.net/2000/01/14/doh/go.jpg ...
http://www.cesg.gov.uk/news/ mildly alarming ...
http://www.aol-girls.com/ now hosting "Street Walking The World
Online Escort Magazine" ... explaining Y2K to any kids you didn't
smother in their beds to save them the horror:
http://www.fema.gov/kids/wytookie1.htm ... so bad it broke the
wankometer: http://www.get-time.org/thinking_article_2.htm ...
>> EVENT QUEUE <<
goto's considered non-harmful
First the mild ripples of netfreedom's Internet Article Of Shame
[see NTK 1999-12-24], and now some shadowy security dudes propose
the "E-nsecure Awards" - this could be the year to redress the
balance of all those backslapping "best of" giveaways. The
"E-nsecures" are aimed at naming and shaming award-winning,
beautifully designed sites that, nonetheless, ignore basic security
precautions, thus exposing their owners to the "e- gnominy" of
receiving an "e-gnoble" E-nsecure Award. We have little to add to
this clearly worthwhile goal, other than maybe they should shorten
the name (in the style of the Oscars, Tonys etc) to "the Ians" -
partly in tribute to BT's Iain Vallance, partly because trying to
read their manifesto is, perhaps intentionally, like that old "Ian
(and Iain) News" sketch by Lee and Herring.
http://www.netfreedom.org/
- No list of nominees? Did they only get 3 or something?
http://www.e-nsecure.net/
- yes, it *does* look a bit like that London 2600 party page...
>> TRACKING <<
making good use of the things that we find
On the happy assumption that everybody else shares the same
obsessions as we do (hey, it's worked so far), here's another
solution to that perennial "trying to log into our shell account
from a cybercafe because we've locked ourselves out of the flat"
issue. MINDTERM is a Java implementation of an ssh client.
Actually, it has been for ages, but it's recently got much much
better (no flickering, signed applets so you can log into arbitrary
machines, very cool scp file-transfer utility). Do remember: you
should assume somebody's sniffing all your keystrokes anyway and
do all your private correspondence by Post Office mail.
http://www.mindbright.se/mindterm/
- from sshweden
http://www.bootlace.co.uk/space/
- Elite: *that's* the Java killer app
If you haven't heard already: MP3.COM, in a Napsterish fit of
legal hubris has created MY.MP3.COM. It's an elegant scam, uh,
customer service, whereby you download an app that checks for the
presence of an audio CD in your drive, cross-references the ID
with MP3.COM's own monster track cache, then creates a streamable
MP3 copy of the album tracks in a mp3.com hosted directory (without
that tedious uploading of the ripped files). Obvious applications:
instantly ripping all your album collection, sneakily ripping
other people's album collections when you go around their house,
publicly putting out your id and password so that everyone can
auto-rip their collections for you, and generally undermining
intellectual property rights in the music industry. Again. Catch
it while it's uninjuncted.
http://my.mp3.com/
- worth checking out, no matter how badly we explained it.
>> 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 "Web Activists"
NEED TO KNOW
THEY STOLE OUR REVOLUTION. NOW WE'RE STEALING IT BACK.
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