The Phantom Menace!!!!!

Mills & Boon watch out!!!!

Have you ever seen those crappy romance books by Mills & Boon or Barbra Cartland, and thought "Flippin' Eck!!! The way they're churning that old tripe out, you'd think they're computers or something!!!!!!" Well, they're not!!!!! Because here's a *real* computer romance book writer!!!! Personal Passions, some wacky US Internet service thingy, have gone one step better than wedding videos, and have invented *personalised romance novels*!!! Apparently if you give them some money, they feed the details of you and your partner into some computer thingy, which then goes away and writes a romance novel!!!!! So now you can give your friends something that'll really make them vomit!!!!! (If they ever read it!!!!!)

http://www.personal-passions.com/

John Katz- watch out for the Trolls!!!!

Well as we said before (See issue 8...) one of the annoying things about the re-launch of Hotwired was Jon Katz getting the order of the Shanks pony!!! So it's good to see he's got a little spot on the steadily improving Newstrolls site (See issue 6...) !!!!

http://datanation.com/news/dev/katz/archive/

He's also regularly on the Freedom Forum site, where he keeps going on about the reporting of that Clinton business...

http://www.freedomforum.org/

Say hello to your new dental assistant- R2D2!!!!!!

You might remember Robbie the robot in the file "Forbidden Planet" being delayed because he needed an "oil change"!!!! Well, if the film was made today, he would be delayed because he needed to reboot Windows!!!!! This is because there are now apparently a new generation of robots controlled by PCs!!!!!!!! They can do things like "serve you drinks, set a VCR, even vacuum your apartment. " I don't know if I like the last idea tho!!! I mean, if a robot was to race all round the house with my Dyson, whilst still connected to the PC, it would cause a lot of damage!!!!!!!!!!

It's not all housework tho... "One dentist in St. Clair Shores, Michigan uses robots to talk to children when they arrive for dental work. " Just as well they didn't use real people- that would just be too sinister!!!!!!!

http://www.wired.com/news/news/technology/story/15192.html

Hornet archive shutting down!!!!

This is a real bummer!!!!!! The biggest PC demo scene archive, and probably the biggest demo scene archive of all is shutting down!!!!!! Apparently the organisers are all tired or something like that... No doubt there will be someone coming along to do something similar, because at the moment there isn't any comparable resource for the PC demo scene...

ftp://ftp.hornet.org/pub/demos/goodbye.txt

Jeremy Clarkson will be pleased!!!

Have you ever been in the car driving down the road and thought: "Oh I'm bored looking at this road, I wish I could watch Countdown instead!!!! But I can't watch TV in the car beacuse the metal frame in conjunction with interference generated by the engine jams any TV signals coming in!!!!!" Well, don't worry, now thanks to the miracle of digital TV some bods have worked out how to correct for the interference, and now you can watch TV in a car!!!! It'll certainly be an interesting experience to watch "Police! Stop!" on TV whilst you're driving down the motorway at 100 miles an hour!!!!!!!!!!!!!

http://www.yahoo.co.uk/headlines/19980929/newscien/907027260-3557613570.html

Six hours- that's a long sandwich!!!!!!

But not just any sandwich- a DVD sandwich!!! No, this not some strange nouvelle cuisine as you might think!!!! It's actually a way to solve the problem of the length of storage in DVD disks!!! At the moment the DVD disks haven't been long enough on either side for a full movie, and so halfway through, you would have to flip over to the other side of the disk, just like on a gramaphone!!!!! But now they've worked out how to "sandwich" two sides onto the same side, and they apparently have increased the length on the single side to 6 hours!!!! (Yes, I know that makes it sound as though one normal DVD side has 3 hours and so is long enough for most movies- don't ask me why!!!!!!)

http://www.yahoo.co.uk/headlines/19980923/newscien/906508860-1141407790.html

Heavy metal trees!!!!!

Can you imagine hybrid Poplar trees going to a Metallica concert!!!! Well that might not be so far from the truth, as these hybrid Poplar trees suck out heavy metals form the soil!!!! They're being used to combat pollution or something....

http://cnn.com/TECH/science/9809/28/super.trees.ap/index.html

Make your own radio news!!!!!

Have you ever wanted to follow the great example set by Bruno Brookes and Gary Davies!??!?!?! Well, now you can, as some combo called SkyTel are offering subscribers the opportunity to have your own custom radio newscasts!!!!

http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/980929/skytel_1.html

Yah boo sucks to Fraunhofer!!!!

A lot of people were a little cheesed off earlier this year when some dude called Fraunhofer put a patent on an algorithm to encode MP3 files!!!! Well, some Swedish dude has found out the patent doesn't really apply in his own country, and has gone right ahead and done an encoder using the "Fraunhofer" algorithm!!!!!!!! And he's even done it for all you Linux dudes!!!

http://bladeenc.home.ml.org/

Here's that naughty Fraunhofer dude...

http://www.mp3.com/news/095.html

Say hello to our new viewer- Echelon!!!!! Or is it!??!?!

The EU is a little cross because they've heard about this thingy that the NSA (See issue 6...) have called Echelon, which apparently monitors all the comms coming in an out of Europe for "key" phrases!!!! Of course, the US denies it exists, but they always do that on the X-Files, don't they!!!!!!!!! Oh well, let's check if it exists or not: Monica Lewinsky!!!! President Clinton!!! Bomb threat!!!! Osama Bin Laden!!! etc...

http://www.wired.com/news/news/politics/story/15295.html

Anyway, here's a whole load of info on this "non-existant" Echelon thingy!!!

http://www.disinfo.com/ci/dirty/ci_dirty_projectechelon.html

Oohh err missus- your cache is showing!!!!!!!!! (!!!)

Yes, someone's worked out how to interface between the CGI thingy on a webserver and the Javascript on your browsey-wowsey in order to work out what's in your cache, and where you've been on tha W3!!!!! Only one prob- that sort of data is not supposed to go beyond your browsey-wowsey, so it's a bit of security prob!!!!!

http://www.wired.com/news/news/technology/story/15285.html

Yahoo- the new Sunday Sport?!??!?!

Remember the good old days when the *Sunday Sport* newspaper gave us such classic headlines as "Duuble-decker bus found in South Pole!!!!!" and "WW2 bomber found on Moon- vanishes!!!!!" Well, we were extremely pleased to see this headline:

• "Adult Star to Dance Nude on World Wide Web Throughout Pregnancy"

What's odd is that it didn't come from the Sunday Sport, but Yahoo Business News!!!!! Obviously those stocks 'n' shares spots aren't getting enough of an audience!!!!!! Anyway, apparently the "adult star" (Well, I would be extremely worried if it was a little kid!!!!!!!) is Tabitha Stevens, who has presumably changed quite a lot from when she appeared as a kid on that lovely family show Bewitched!!!!!!!!!

http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/980930/tabitha_st_1.html

You got zapped last month!!!!

Are you recovering from last month's gamma ray exposure!?!?!?! (ooh-er!!!) Well, you should be affected, as a star from a quite a few light years away threw out a gigantic gamma ray pulse, which affected 7 satellites in orbit around the Earth, shutting down 2 of them for a short time!!! It even "it knocked electrons out of the atoms in Earth's upper atmosphere" !!!!!! Apparently the culprit is this star is called Aquila, which is something called a "magnetar", which ... er, doesn't this sound familiar!??!?! Oh yeah, we've mentioned magnetars before!!! (See issue 5...) And in the story referenced, Aquila got a mention!!!!!

http://www.mercurycenter.com/breaking/docs/012819.htm

'What would Jesus Do?'

How about give you lead poisoning!?!?!?! There's been quite a few necklaces sold in the US with the words "What would Jesus do" on them!!!! Unfortunately they're made of lead, and not properly sealed up and can cause to lead poisoning!!!!! So for loads of people their fervent belief in the Son of God has cost them quite a few cells in the brain department!!!!!!!

http://www.mercurycenter.com/breaking/docs/074678.htm

Wait till they find out about the street-light problem!!!!

Wow this is new!!!!! The Americans have just found out about this brilliant little wheeze to use power lines for net access!!!! Why, we've only been going about this in the UK for a year or so now!!!!!! We wonder how long it'll take them to find out about the brilliant side-effect of this idea- it turns the streetlights into radio transmitters!!!!

http://cnn.com/TECH/computing/9809/29/powernet.idg/index.html

Calling them 'shades' is a bit stupid tho!!!!

Whenever in the future, in that spiffy digital telly era or whatever, you see some "famous" person wearing "shades" whilst walking past the "papparazzi", who then trips up and falls into a plant pot, what are you likely to say!??! Well, you'll probably say: "Oh, he's checking up on his share options"!!!!!! The reason you'll be saying this is because "shades" in the future will not really be shades!!!! Sony had just developed LCD Screens which can be put in "shades"!! So you'll be able to check up on the latest news, whilst you're tripping over everyone!!!!

http://www.newsbytes.com/pubNews/118890.html

Network re-vamped!!!!

This is jolly good!!! We like Network, the online demo scene mag, as they're one of the few cross-platform demo scene mags around!! The only problem is that the server used to be really slow!!!! Now they've fixed it in their new revamp- it's a lot faster now!!!

http://www.scene-central/

Dead Hackers mail gets killed!!!!

We went on IRC last Sunday (27/09/1998), and immediately got quizzed by Evl of Dead Hackers Society about a mysterious crew called "The Poets of Bombay" Well, we just heard about this mysterious crew through a release we saw at the Reservoir Gods Cwmvention the previous week!!! It turns out that someone calling themselves "Muhatma Ghandhi" had mailed 20 copies of a 560K demo to Evl, and as a result of his full mailbox the whole system had come to a standstill!!!!! As a result, the demo is getting a plug on the DHS site, but he forwarded one of the mails to us. After working out how the hell to run the demo (It turns out that the demo is for an Atari Faclon using a VGA display!!!), we watched it, and were a little surprised to find a completely different demo to the one we saw at the Cwmvention- these dudes must be a little busy!!!

http://www.dhs.org/