Mixed Signals
Any sufficiently advanced information is indistinguishable from noise
Friday 27 September 2002, 6:00 PM
Rupert Goodwins' Diary
Monday 23/09/2002It's fun, this information technology, but sometimes lacking in colour. Not today though, as a delighted Matthew Broersma, top news hound, gets to write up a tale of murder, hit men, financial naughtiness and Web sites. The case continues, but it is alleged that the wife of the bloke who started Scoot hired a hitman to get rid of him and keep the family fortune. There are lots of other bits too, but that's steaming hot stuff for the industry.
The last time I can remember anything similar was in the early 80s, when a well dodgy businessman by the name of Keith Rose ran a company called Modem House. A small company called AMD had just produced a chip that crammed everything you needed for a 300/300bps and 1200/75bps modem into one package -- remarkable for the time. As a result, anyone could build and sell a modem for not very much money. You had to have money to get your modem through the BABT approval process in order for the thing to be legally usable, but it wasn't illegal to sell them unapproved. Which, of course, Mr Rose did: hey, it got plenty of people online. He was less happy to pay some pals of mine for work they did for him, which didn't make any of us love him much.
And then the modem business went away, and the next thing we heard was that Keith R was behind bars on the Isle of Wight, after a kidnapping had gone wrong to the tune of one body. He recently tried to escape by nipping over the fence and flying a light plane to freedom -- unfortunately, someone had taken the battery out and he was well and truly grounded.
He's still behind bars, and as far as I know still hasn't paid my pals for their programming work. Beware the wrath of teenage nerds!
Previous
