Need To Know

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This article refers to the newsletter called "Need To Know". For a discussion of "need-to-know" security classification, see the classified information article.

Need To Know, also known as NTK, is an email newsletter, published late on Fridays, written by former Wired journalist and Irish Times columnist Danny O'Brien and former Wired and Future journalist Dave Green. NTK was published weekly from 1997 until 2004, when it moved to fortnightly publication. In 2005 it changed to a monthly schedule.

The newsletter bills itself as "the week^H^H^H^H now-monthly tech update for the UK" and presents the highlights of the week happenings in the IT, blogosphere and general Internet community. NTK frequently concentrates on British issues, such as UK legislation like the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act and the UK Campaign for Digital Rights. It has also looked at less-weighty matters such as confectionery and nudity in films. It takes an irreverent tone that is similar to the later The Register and the earlier Private Eye and Viz, and remarkably dissimilar to the tone of this description. The original manifesto for NTK, showing its Special Projects origins, suggests the intent of the publication while attracting the target demographic.

[edit] Format

The newsletter is also available on the World Wide Web and has used a fixed-width ASCII text based layout since its inception. It is sent to subscribers in plain-text email. Since 2004 the website has offered readers the ability to use their own style sheet, providing some variety.

The newsletter comprises the following sections:

  • An ASCII art representation of the letters "NTKnow", along with the strapline and date.
  • An ironic or amusing quote of the week, not seen since April 2005, when NTK was weekly.
  • HARD NEWS: Important, but not necessarily mainstream, news stories from the IT world during that week. Each story is accompanied byURLs for further reading.
  • ANTI-NEWS, later ANTI-MEMES: A collection of "D'Oh!"s; errors in mainstream news articles such as using the wrong image for a story, typos, inappropriate web adverts, meta-information for editors or page filler that was accidentally published without being edited or even outright nonsense like "Columbia: shuttle travelling nearly 18 times the speed of light". This section has been recently spun off into another web-log, D'Oh! the humanity!. From 2002 onwards, the section also intermittently included "puerile google goofs", which presented Google results for searches using misspellings such as "first aid tit" or "penny farting".
  • EVENT QUEUE: Events to attend that may be of interest to technologically-minded people. This includes visits to the UK by open source leaders, sci-fi conventions and blogging conferences, as well as talks and seminars by the NTK writers and their friends. The selections are frequently London-centric, attracting criticism from readership living north of Watford, although with O'Brien's move to California, the geographical range of events covered has widened; Burning Man also usually merits an annual mention.
  • TRACKING: Focusses on interesting, useful, or just plain esoteric software. The selection is not limited to any particular platform; software for Linux, Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X all features regularly, and occasionally software for the C64 and ZX Spectrum, such as a mini TCP/IP stack, is included if it is particularly interesting or can be mocked in an amusing fashion. The section also sometimes includes reviews of web-services like BugMeNot rather than conventional software.
  • MEMEPOOL: like Memepool, a collection of the week's best Internet memes.
  • GEEK MEDIA: short synopses of television programmes or films that are of interest to a geek audience. Films also include quotes from CAPalert and the BBFC ratings for added irony.
  • After the geek media section, there is a schedule of rotating extra items, including "Confectionery Theory" (reviewing new sweets upon their arrival in the UK, now outsourced to snackspot.org.uk), "feebdack" (as a form of letters page; the title is a reference to a coinage in Rudy Rucker's Hacker and The Ants), "boners" (correction of errors in NTK itself), and an occasional music review section.
  • SMALL PRINT: Other than containing the basic meta-information that NTK is a newsletter, published every week, etc., this section always includes the motto "THEY STOLE OUR REVOLUTION. NOW WE'RE STEALING IT BACK" and the phrase "Registered at the Post Office as", which is usually completed by an oblique reference to another website or publication that has itself referenced NTK, Danny or Dave. For example, it linked to their Wikipedia article on October 1, 2004.

[edit] Significant events

[edit] External link

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