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Tips, news & gossip to tips@spesh.com - with NTK in subject line, cheers.
         

        "I remember playing Doom while my teenage son watched over my 
         shoulder and my wife sat quietly reading and drinking tea. 
         A rocket exploding in my face caused both my son and I to 
         simultaneously jump and scream which in turn resulted in the 
         launching of my wife's tea! She is now my ex wife but happily 
         both my son and I still play Doom I and II..."
               - content-sharing agreement between somethingawful.com 
                   and BBC News Online bears its first sinister fruit
                    http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3558248.stm


                               >> HARD NEWS <<
                                market debuts

         GOOGLE is left feeling slightly unlucky (for values of
         unlucky greater than 1.6 billion dollars). Secure hashes
         aren't (but don't be too insecure, say the cryptographers,
         frantically looking around for a new algorithm). Just what
         is going on? We were assuming all that last-minute fumbling
         at Mountain View was just the clever Google maths eggheads
         (etc) carefully manipulating their price to make exactly
         4,285,199,774 dooooooollars. Surely there's easier ways to
         make some spare change? There's this June's "$10,000 for the
         first MD5 hash collision" prize by CertainKey that still
         looks unclaimed - even though they're turfing them out every
         five minutes in China. Why not send them a copy of the
         paper, and pick up your cheque? While you're at it, might it
         be worth getting a bunch of CA certificates signed by
         Verisign for sites like "wwv.paypan.com" - you know, just in
         case you can bitflip it to something a little more lucrative
         when the Chinese publish their results. It's an investment
         in the future! 
         http://www.rtfm.com/movabletype/archives/2004_08.html
                             - the hash market crash explained gently
         http://www.certainkey.com/md5challenge/
- what do you mean, "not in the scientific spirit of the competition"?
         https://www.eff.com/
     - oho! MD5 signed certificate! Maybe we can turn it into egg.com!
         http://www.xcom2002.com/doh/index.php?s=04081615pic
                                                       - Google boner!

         And on the subject of last-minute changes: Wikipedia founder 
         JIMMY WALES is coming to the UK next Tuesday (2004-08-31), and 
         would like to speak to any audience who'll have him in London 
         that evening. Venue details are a little scarce at the moment 
         because the "organisers" are actively still looking for one, 
         though we're entirely confident that something will happen 
         because they have, of course, already set up a wiki.
         http://www.minty.org/cgi-bin/wp/wiki.pl?HomePage
    - considered using Quicktopic, but just didn't seem right somehow


                                >> ANTI-NEWS <<
                             berating the obvious

         will none of the comments stand up for the poor beleaguered 
         music biz? http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/3547788.stm#views - until 
         you get to "Mat Morrisroe", who seems to share the same name 
         as this guy: http://www.uksponsorship.com/music.htm ... all 
         your favourites this week at http://dohthehumanity.com/ (Odeon 
         Cheltenham introduces special "student surcharge" of 40p), 
         culminating in a coldly commercial Google ad on this quite 
         heartbreaking Falco: http://xcom2002.com/doh/?s=04081919apt 
         ... Guardian Online decodes "PDC" in context of digital TV 
         http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/story/0,3605,1285533,00.html 
         as "Primary Domain Controller" ("Programme Delivery Control" 
         not in their acronym dictionary?)... http://www.rejesus.org/ 
         logo vs http://www.alliance-leicester.co.uk/ - by any chance 
         related?... obvious "rollercoaster"-based designs, #252: 
         http://www.gloucestershire.gov.uk/index.cfm?articleid=7425 
         vs http://rctfi.tycoonplanet.com/svenska/rct2.htm ... 


                               >> EVENT QUEUE <<
                         GOTOs considered non-harmful

         "One to watch", "The coolest thing in the world at the 
         moment", and "Like a bunch of crazed robots from Westworld 
         invading your house and getting into your record collection, 
         then fucking". No, these aren't reviews of skeptic, tech 
         writer and folksinger WENDY GROSSMAN (playing this Sun, 2004-
         08-22, Twickenham Folk Club, Cabbage Patch pub, 67 London 
         Road, Twickenham TW1 3SZ, UKP7?), but of Bristol's pioneering 
         circuit bender KID CARPET, currently embarking on a nationwide 
         tour (see site for dates and venues) to promote his upcoming 
         "Shit Dope" EP of electronic "toytronica" - and supporting 
         multimedia whimsy-merchants The Trachtenburg Family Slideshow 
         Players, with their quirky accompaniments to found photographs 
         they discovered at jumble sales. 
         http://www.slowgraffiti.com/
                  - or elect-*wrong*-ica, as he's also been described
         http://obsess.com/blog/000291.html 
             - hit of the Fringe (we said Ben Moor *above* slide show)
         http://www.pelicancrossing.net/folk.htm
                                 - venue site reassuringly horrendous
         http://www.burningman.com/
         - mail burning@gooby.org to meet other NTKers at Burning Man
 http://www.lonix.org.uk/cgi-bin/Lonix?CODE=searchMeeting&CURRENT=YES
                   - London Linux install fest in Acton next Saturday
          

                                >> TRACKING <<
               sufficiently advanced technology : the gathering

         Last time we mentioned a utility for speedily searching
         through your mail backlog, the whole company got bought by
         Microsoft the week after. Not sure that will happen with
         MAIRIX, given that it's for dirty unshaven mboxen, Maildir,
         and MH folders. MAIRIX is damn faster than grep with the
         searches, pretty flexible on what it can look for (words,
         dates, not regexps), and incrementally adds new messages as
         they arrive. It's got no external dependencies, and is as
         Unixy as they come, which should keep it away from
         Microsoft's mittens. Then again, did Microsoft know when
         they bought Lookout they were just getting a wrapper around
         Apache's open source Lucene text search engine?
         http://www.cookcomputing.com/blog/archives/000386.html
                                                 - it would appear so
         http://www.rc0.org.uk/mairix/
          - someone should do a Squirrelmail plugin and take on GMail


                                >> MEMEPOOL <<
                contains a source of http://snackspot.org/

         one for the International UseCrimes Tribunal - "Relive the 
         emotion of previous Games by selecting a date or host city 
         below": http://www.olympic.org/uk/games/index_uk.asp (bottom 
         of page) - except the "year" and "city" timelines whizz past 
         at different speeds, out of synchronisation, and occasionally 
         in different directions... the return of "not that I'm 
         bitter": http://www.v-2.org/displayArticle.php?article_num=790 
         ... photoshop cover horror of the week (like being held at 
         gunpoint by MC Escher): http://www.infernalaffairs.co.uk/ ... 
         surfing http://mirrors.playboy.com "for the articles"... so 
         far, no "Wanton Violence", "Impudence" or "Offense to God" 
         categories: http://interglacial.com/rss/capalert_movies.rss 
         ... by juxtaposing HP Lovecraft with the mundanity of everyday 
         life, your expectations will be confounded; hilarity ensues: 
         http://www.arthurwyatt.co.uk/comics/hplwct1.html ... 
         

                                >> GEEK MEDIA <<
                                  get out less

         TV>> it's "ageing thieves try to pull off one last job" week, 
         with David Mamet directing Danny DeVito in HEIST (9pm, next 
         Fri, C5) and Ed Norton's terrible "disabled" routine being the 
         most heinous crime in THE SCORE (9.05pm, Sat, C4)... Kim 
         Newman borrows the title of an old Ian Livingstone book for UK 
         D&D commemoration DICING WITH DRAGONS (3.30pm, Sat, Radio4) - 
         vs http://www.npr.org/features/feature.php?wfId=3858560 ... 
         and backwoods horror JEEPERS CREEPERS (9pm, Sun, C4) appears 
         only loosely based on the 1938 Harry Warren/ Johnny Mercer 
         song of the same name... it's a shame they never made a "Not 
         Safe For Work" sequel to Stephen Dorff slacker flop SFW 
         (3.20am, Mon, C4)... 40 years on, C4 predicts we'll be 
         futuristically referring to the planet Earth as TERRA 2050 
         (7.55pm, Mon-Fri, C4)... while favourable-exchange-rate-
         fuelled New York-London romance NY-LON (10pm, Tue, C4) raises 
         the possibility of future episodes involving lovers from 
         Marseilles in France (Mar-Lon), Pyatigorsk in Russia (Py-Lon), 
         or a complex menage-a-quatre involving residents of Seville, 
         Miami and Copenhagen (SeMi-CoLon)... 
         
         FILM>> the whole red/ yellow colour scheme seems to be a 
         thinly-designed metaphor for the US Homeland Security threat 
         level indicator, though that's not the only "surprise!" twist 
         in the latest semi-scary M Night Shyamalan ding-dong THE 
         VILLAGE ( http://www.capalert.com/capreports/village_the.htm : 
         mischievous invasion of privacy; explosive startles, three; 
         "Those we don't speak of", meaning the creatures in the 
         forbidden forest, would be more correctly stated "Those of 
         which we don't speak")... and the XBox tie-in first-person-
         shooter has a few cheesy moments, but nothing like the 
         rambling planet-hopping tedium of next week's fantastic-
         looking CGI fest THE CHRONICLES OF RIDDICK (imdb: sequel/ 
         prison-planet/ dagger/ fight/ gunfight/ leader/ planet/ 
         spaceship/ space/ sunglasses/ sun)...

         BONERS: CORRECTIONS, CLARIFICATIONS, AND "INCORRECTLY REGARDED 
         AS GOOFS">> thanks to everyone who wrote in alerting us to 
         this new-fangled musical trend of "sampling", with KASS 
         SCHMITT, DAVE HAYDEN, MATT PETTY - and many, many more - 
         pointing out that NTK 2004-07-23's "It's better to regret 
         something you have done than to regret something that you 
         haven't" quote from Orbital's "Satan" (as an ad for "Soltan") 
         is actually "a sample from Sweat Loaf by the Butthole Surfers" 
         - a fact we were dimly aware of, or assumed that they'd both 
         sampled the same film or something. Disappointingly, no-one 
         felt the need to comment on what terrible advice it is, given 
         the wide range of viable counterexamples (ie, sticking your 
         face in a fan)... still, to our credit, JUSTIN CORMACK seemed 
         even more out of touch than we are, claiming The Orb "ripped 
         off" the tune of "Little Fluffy Clouds" (as heard on the Shape 
         yoghurt ad, ibid.) from Steve Reich's "Electric Counterpoint", 
         musing "perhaps Danone is playing the original". In summary, 
         Justin: it's just a sample of the guitar part and, no, that 
         didn't seem to be what Danone were doing... DAVE HEMMING was 
         amused to discover that NTK 2004-08-06's sophisticated web CV 
         generator "works on fictional people, too", listing antichrist 
         Damien Thorn as Head of Thorn Corporation and "Trusted Advisor 
         To the President": http://qwer.org/DamienThornCV.html ... 
         while IAN DOUGLAS possibly drew a line under the whole cinema 
         listings controversy (for the moment), with the news that NTK 
         2004-04-30 double-URLtendre the Labia Cinema "was named after 
         some Princess Labia (from Latvia or wherever) who officially 
         opened the place", adding that he gets "a lot of hits" on his 
         page http://www.moviesite.co.za/ "from people searching for 
         labia, since I carry their schedules on my site"...


                               >> 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
    "You know, just 'thanks for the t-shirt royalties' would have sufficed"
                           http://www.antics.org.uk/


                                 NEED TO KNOW
            THEY STOLE OUR REVOLUTION. NOW WE'RE STEALING IT BACK.
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