HOME OF THE BRAVE: Yesterday, I noted that a few theaters were announcing that in place of Seth Rogen’s “The Interview”, they planned to show South Park creators Trey Parker & Matt Stone’s classic film, “Team America: World Police”, the great puppet romance/action flick of our time, where the antagonist is a frustrated Kim Jong Il. Well, that didn’t last long: Paramount has demanded that theaters do nothing of the sort. vlt.tc/1r3o As Timothy Stanley puts it: vlt.tc/1r5d “Theres a sad irony in the fact that one of the great tests of Americas freedom of speech should involve a movie that, according to some reviewers, utterly sucks.” Hollywood is failing that test, and doing so with gusto, perhaps without understanding that the implications of surrender to hackers like this go far beyond Rogen’s movie. vlt.tc/1r4b I can’t help but look forward to what Parker & Stone cook up instead. But is the Sony hack even the work of North Korea, or does it have nothing at all to do with Rogen’s film? Marc Rogers argues that in fact, the hackers never made the connection until after the media speculated about it. vlt.tc/1r5e “It’s clear from the hard-coded paths and passwords in the malware that whoever wrote it had extensive knowledge of Sony’s internal architecture and access to key passwords. While it’s plausible that an attacker could have built up this knowledge over time and then used it to make the malware, Occam’s razor suggests the simpler explanation of an insider.” A more thorough breakdown of the Sony hack is here. vlt.tc/1r49 In talking with security experts about these issues, the general impression is that a North Korean hack is not impossible, but seems unlikely. The “99 percent certainty” regarding the source of the hack is all from unnamed administration officials, and other comments along these lines have been walked back. vlt.tc/1r5f But Sony is acting as if they are confident in the source, perhaps out of a sense to build up the hackers as a foe instead of admitting how much they had left their valuable information out in the open. You’d think the studio that paid millions for the rights to Edward Snowden’s story would know better. vlt.tc/1r5h Giving Sony the benefit of the doubt and the Norks more credit than they deserve turns this story into an example of Hollywood running into a nasty, aggressive dictatorship without recognizing them for what they are, and thus being unprepared for the ramifications of a regime that doesn’t see anything funny in making a movie about assassinating its noble leader. vlt.tc/1r5g “[Pyongyang has] assassinated enemies in numerous countries, it’s blown up foreign planes and politicians, it’s even kidnapped kids off foreign beaches in broad daylight… Pyongyang doesn’t get irony, which is the cornerstone of the millennial worldview that produces movies like The Interview. The North Korean regime has killed literally millions of people and would gleefully take out Sony executives and unfunny actors in horrible ways. Unfortunately the studio figured this out after, rather than before, beginning filming.” Still, even if the movie is bad, even if North Korea isn’t behind this cyberattack, the fact that they are gleeful about this development sticks in my craw. Can you imagine if studios had reacted this way to The Great Dictator? “Now Charlie, we understand what you’re doing here, and the globe scene is very funny, but we’re technically not at war with Hitler, and we don’t want to go setting the guy off.” Actually, this is close to what happened: the British Government originally claimed it would not show the film for that reason. vlt.tc/1r5i What changed? By the time the film came out, they were at war with Germany. This has an effect of clarifying things. via The Transom
Posted on: Fri, 19 Dec 2014 14:36:20 +0000
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