Fun_People Archive
19 May
NTK Bits, 2000-05-19
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From: Peter Langston <psl>
Date: Fri, 19 May 100 16:09:24 -0700
To: Fun_People
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Subject: NTK Bits, 2000-05-19
X-Lib-of-Cong-ISSN: 1098-7649 -=[ Fun_People ]=-
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Excerpted-from: NTK now, 2000-05-19
From: "Danny O'Brien" <danny@spesh.com>
_ _ _____ _ __ <*the* weekly high-tech sarcastic update for the uk>
| \ | |_ _| |/ / _ __ __2000-05-19_ o join! mail an empty message to
| \| | | | | ' / | '_ \ / _ \ \ /\ / / o ntknow-subscribe@lists.ntk.net
| |\ | | | | . \ | | | | (_) \ v v / o website (+ archive) lives at:
|_| \_| |_| |_|\_\|_| |_|\___/ \_/\_/ o http://www.ntk.net/
"Like many things in life, you can do exactly what you were going
to do in the first place and change the names."
- STEVE JOBS
http://www.mercurycenter.com/svtech/news/top/docs/apple051600.htm
...or have them sacked and erased from the record, anyway
>> HARD NEWS <<
hitting the boos
If you gaze for long into the abyss, right, then doesn't the abyss
gaze also into you, yeah? So spake the critics of the ORBS spam
database, who have often suggested that the ORBS's vigilante
techniques for tracking down open mail relays (by scanning the smtp
ports of remote machines, and putting them on a public blacklist
- not only if they do relay, but also if they refuse to be scanned)
is as bad an abuse of Net trust as the spammers themselves. That's
certainly what the above.net sysadmins felt when they decided to
block access to ORBS to and from their network following a rude
probing. But now it looks like AboveNet have become more than a
little thuggish themselves. In the last few weeks, above.net have
been externally advertising their own unique route to the ORBS
machines: a route that leads straight into a black hole. That means
that not only can above.net customers not see the New Zealand site,
but anyone who transits with above.net also loses access. Which,
by a quirk of LINX's peering arrangements, includes all of JANET.
No, JANET's not happy: and there's even been mutterings of a
threatened suit against above.net for computer abuse. Maybe the
first person to complain to would be Paul Vixie, Senior VP at
AboveNet's parent company, Metromedia. He should be sympathetic:
after all, in his copious spare time he runs the other spam
blackholing service, RBL: maybe he should look into this abyss,
too.
http://www.deja.com/threadmsg_ct.xp?AN=623215811&fmt=text
- more irony: the Vienna Internet Exchange (VIX) affected too
http://www.computerworld.com/home/print.nsf/CWFlash/000427D962
- "unique methods"
Thanks to everyone who didn't e-mail us over the last year to falco
BOO.COM. Everyone else: no shit, Sherlocks. And we know that we
should be revelling in those rumours of corporate excess, the
Flash-driven horrors spooned out of Organic's arse into gaping
mouths of usability experts the globe over, the vision of Miss Boo
being dragged in chains through the streets of London. But sod it,
kids: there but for the grace of God go all of us in six months.
And maybe it's time you looked your boardroom pals that talk so
confidently of their plans at your startup, and wonder whether
they'd take as much care of you when the whole thing takes off like
a concrete rowing-boat. As it will. Oh yes. For the bell, it tolls
for boo. I mean you.
http://www.wehaveinformation.com/
- ahh. you weren't expecting that were you? ahhh.
http://www.ntk.net/2000/05/19/caboom.gif
- others tho
http://www.waz.easynet.co.uk/boo/
- not so
http://apache.mirror.boo.com/
- charitable
>> EVENT QUEUE <<
goto's considered non-harmful
OK, so Oxford University won't let you hyperlink to DeCSS (full
story at http://cryptome.org/ox-chill.htm ), but they're happy to
welcome the (potential) harbinger of humanity's future
extermination, KEVIN "THE CYBERNATOR" WARWICK, who continues touring
his "Will it be Super Intelligent Machines or Cyborgs?" show around
potential hotbeds of mechanoid uprising. "This time, OU AI society
have been subverted," writes OPERATIVE TOM (5.30pm, Mon 2000-05-22),
"This may be my last transmission as an organic life-form."
http://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~aisoc/warwick.html
- yeah, KevinWarwickWatch needs updating, but whenever we
try and automate it, things go mysteriously wrong...
http://www.undercurrents.org/piratetv.htm
- for those that survive: a resistance movement
>> TRACKING <<
sufficiently advanced technology : the gathering
They're going to get you eventually, UNIX boy. You keep teasing
the NT weenies long enough about these ILOVEYOU viruses, and they're
going to brew up some mother of a MUA buffer overflow, and then
who you gonna blame? Certainly not ANONY MAIL, Bjarni R. Einarsson's
script to filter out any dangerous looking HTML or MIME attachments
received by your machine. Okay, so it's in Perl, making it
unsuitable for heavy mail flow. But that does mean that you can
stick in your own quick fixes for any novel weirdnesses, and tweak
it to fit your own paranoia. And thanks to its own one-pass MIME
parser, it's not too heavy on the cycles. Unlike STRIPMIME, which
is a slow, resource heavy monster for people who want any
attachments automatically stripped and saved before their email
gets to the mailbox. Great for anyone wishing a slim text only mbox
to archive, hates having their POP or IMAP session sabotaged by
huge attachments, and likes code hacked up in a hurry last week by
bored newsletter writers after a string of monster DOH images.
Please improve on it, and send your sarky coding critiques to the
usual address. And remember: always try beta mail tools out on
somebody else's account first.
http://mailtools.anomy.net/
- probably best used in conjunction
http://www.ntk.net/2000/05/19/stripmime.txt
- not that i've tested that (or anything)
>> 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
"Valkommen till Umea naturvetar- och teknologkar!"
http://www.ntk.umu.se/
NEED TO KNOW
THEY STOLE OUR REVOLUTION. NOW WE'RE STEALING IT BACK.
Archive - http://www.ntk.net/
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