The Sony ‘censorship’ controversy
This just in from Mark Anderson, the guy who told me about the sub-prime mortgage racket nine months before the collapse (and indeed before I knew what a sub-prime mortgage was):
When Dalian Wanda, China’s largest commercial real estate and entertainment firm, bought the US’ second-largest theater chain, AMC, a few years ago, I wondered what the result would be.
Already, we had started to see the effects of China’s desire to move its censorship efforts offshore and into the US film industry, with the increase in various levels of pandering to Chinese censors by US studios in an effort to get Chinese domestic distribution. Double endings, Chinese heros, Chinese settings, and even Chinese script approval, all became part of the new economics of making more money on blockbuster films.
This week, as Sony wrestled with how to manage the damage from North Korea’s hack of its networks, it waited for theater chains to ring in. According to the LA times, Regal decided not to cancel, but to delay showing The Interview, a comedy based on “taking out” Kim Jung Un.
And then AMC announced it would pull all of its US theaters out of distribution for the film. It was AFTER AMC’s announcement that Sony decided to pull not just the single Christmas day showing, but the entire distribution of the film.
Could Sony have launched the film in defiance of AMC’s pullout? I seriously doubt it.
Result: For all intents and purposes, it appears that China censored the American film offerings this season, and not Sony.
For some reason, all of the press seems to have missed this story to date.
Quote of the Day
“When I get asked in interviews to predict the future, I always have to struggle to come up with something plausible-sounding on the fly, like a student who hasn’t prepared for an exam. 1 But it’s not out of laziness that I haven’t prepared. It seems to me that beliefs about the future are so rarely correct that they usually aren’t worth the extra rigidity they impose, and that the best strategy is simply to be aggressively open-minded. Instead of trying to point yourself in the right direction, admit you have no idea what the right direction is, and try instead to be super sensitive to the winds of change.”
And
“Another trick I’ve found to protect myself against obsolete beliefs is to focus initially on people rather than ideas. Though the nature of future discoveries is hard to predict, I’ve found I can predict quite well what sort of people will make them. Good new ideas come from earnest, energetic, independent-minded people.
Betting on people over ideas saved me countless times as an investor. We thought Airbnb was a bad idea, for example. But we could tell the founders were earnest, energetic, and independent-minded. (Indeed, almost pathologically so.) So we suspended disbelief and funded them.”
Who’s got Putin-envy now?
Interesting OpEd piece by Tom Friedman.
IN March, the House Intelligence Committee chairman, Mike Rogers, was asked on “Fox News Sunday” how he thought President Obama was handling relations with Russia versus how President Vladimir Putin had been handling relations with the United States. Rogers responded: “Well, I think Putin is playing chess, and I think we’re playing marbles. And I don’t think it’s even close.”
Hmmm. Marbles. That’s an interesting metaphor. Actually, it turns out that Obama was the one playing chess and Putin was the one playing marbles, and it wouldn’t be wrong to say today that Putin’s lost most of his — in both senses of the word.
Rogers was hardly alone in his Putin envy. As Jon Stewart pointed out, Fox News has had a veritable Putin love fest going since March: Sarah Palin opined to the network that: “People are looking at Putin as one who wrestles bears and drills for oil. They look at our president as one who wears mom jeans and equivocates and bloviates.” Fox contributor Rudy Giuliani observed on the same day that in contrast with Obama, Putin was “what you call a leader.”
Personally, I can’t understand why the West is obsessing about ISIS when Putin’s loose on the borders of Europe. That’s not to say that ISIS isn’t dreadful; but it doesn’t have nukes. And the more desperate Putin becomes as Russia’s economic woes increase, the more dangerous he becomes. Or so it seems to me.
How not to introduce an IT system
This morning’s Observer column
When you walk into my GP’s surgery, the first thing you see is a screen on the receptionist’s counter. Displayed on it are the words (all in capitals) “TOUCH THE SCREEN TO ARRIVE FOR YOUR APPOINTMENT”. Being pedantic, the first time I saw it I pointed out to the receptionist that I had arrived for my appointment. She grimaced. I then asked if the medical implications of asking every patient to use the same touchscreen during, say, a flu epidemic had been considered. Another grimace. It was, she explained, “a new system”.
This system was provided by Epic Systems, a US corporation based in Wisconsin, which may explain why its software designers seem unfamiliar with the verb “to arrive”. It’s one of eight major vendors of healthcare information systems, all of which are based in the US, and it got its foot in the NHS door quite a long time ago. My doctor’s surgery has been using it for a while. At the beginning, the system’s user-interface was abysmal and dysfunctional. Now, several years on, it’s merely ugly. But at least it works…
LATER
One of my colleagues wrote, confirming my friend’s experience:
The only thing that marred our recent experience of Addenbrookes A&E (also with suspected broken foot/feet, there must be something in the water in Cambridge!), was the introduction of the new system:
there was a 20 minute wait to register once we had initially registered, because the details hadn’t come through, then the x-ray results had to be manually retrieved …and really very stressful for the staff who had to keep apologising and physically running between departments to get results.
The new movie business
Nice piece of PhotoShopping. Via @Steve Hewlett.
Kim Jong Un is not a joke
I’m not entirely overwhelmed by Obama & Co going all righteous over Sony’s ill-fated comedy, The Interview. So this piece in The Atlantic came as a welcome antidote to the fabricated indignation emerging from the White House.
This film is not an act of courage. It is not a stand against totalitarianism, concentration camps, mass starvation, or state-sponsored terror. It is, based on what we know of the movie so far, simply a comedy, made by a group of talented actors, writers, and directors, and intended, like most comedies, to make money and earn laughs. The movie would perhaps have been better off with a fictitious dictator and regime; instead, it appears to serve up the latest in a long line of cheap and sometimes racism-tinged jokes, stretching from Team America: World Police to ongoing sketches on Saturday Night Live.
And…
Yes, North Korea has long been ruled by an eccentric dynasty of portly dictators with bad haircuts. Yes, the propaganda the regime regularly trumpets to shore up its cult of personality is largely ridiculous. And yes, we on the outside know better, and can take comfort in pointing fingers and chuckling at the regime’s foibles.
But it takes no valor and costs precious little to joke about these things safely oceans away from North Korea’s reach. When a North Korean inmate in a political prison camp or a closely monitored Pyongyang apparatchik pokes fun at Kim Jong Un and the system he represents — that is an act of audacity. It very literally can cost the person’s life, and those of his or her family members. To pretend that punchlines from afar, even in the face of hollow North Korean threats, are righteous acts is nonsense.
Right on.
Cowardice, Hollywood style
George Clooney nails it in an interview with Deadline.
DEADLINE: How could this have happened, that terrorists achieved their aim of cancelling a major studio film? We watched it unfold, but how many people realized that Sony legitimately was under attack?
GEORGE CLOONEY: A good portion of the press abdicated its real duty. They played the fiddle while Rome burned. There was a real story going on. With just a little bit of work, you could have found out that it wasn’t just probably North Korea; it was North Korea. The Guardians of Peace is a phrase that Nixon used when he visited China. When asked why he was helping South Korea, he said it was because we are the Guardians of Peace. Here, we’re talking about an actual country deciding what content we’re going to have. This affects not just movies, this affects every part of business that we have. That’s the truth. What happens if a newsroom decides to go with a story, and a country or an individual or corporation decides they don’t like it? Forget the hacking part of it. You have someone threaten to blow up buildings, and all of a sudden everybody has to bow down. Sony didn’t pull the movie because they were scared; they pulled the movie because all the theaters said they were not going to run it. And they said they were not going to run it because they talked to their lawyers and those lawyers said if somebody dies in one of these, then you’re going to be responsible.
This is interesting because it suggests a promising new line for real and would-be ‘terrorists’: simply issue vague threats about nameless horrors to be visited upon public venues in the US and corporate lawyers will do the rest.
So does the hacking of Sony signify a new era in cyberwarfare?
Some people think that it does
Most cyberattacks to date—by China, Russia, Iran, Syria, North Korea, Israel, the United States, and a dozen or so other nations, as well as scads of gangsters and simple mischief-makers—have been mounted in order to steal money, patents, credit card numbers, or national-security secrets. Whoever hacked Sony (probably a North Korean agency or contractor) did so to put pressure on free speech—in effect, to alter American popular culture and suppress constitutional rights.
Matt Devost, president and CEO of FusionX LLC, one of the leading computer-security firms dotting the Washington suburbs, told me in an email this morning, “This is the dawn of a new age. No longer do you have to worry just about the theft of money or intellectual property, but also about attacks that are designed to be as destructive as possible—and to influence your behavior.”
Bob Gourley, co-founder and partner of Cognito, another such firm, agrees. “I have tracked cyber threats since December 1998 and have never seen anything like this. It might have roots in the early Web-defacements for propaganda”—usually by anti-war or animal-rights groups—“but they were child’s play, done really for bragging rights. A new line has been crossed here.”
And the attack has had effects. Sony has canceled the film’s scheduled release due to terrorist threats against theaters (even though no evidence links the source of the threats to the source of the hacking). While a Seth Rogen comedy is an unlikely cause for a protest of principle, a case can be made that Sony’s submission to political pressure—especially pressure from a foreign source, especially if that source is Kim Jong-un—should be protested.
Well, it might be seen as an attack on American popular culture, I suppose.
Apparently some (off-the-record-natch) US sources think that Kim Jong Un and his chaps are responsible. In which case it’s an instance of cyberwarfare, not just an anti-corporate stunt.
And, as @dangillmor asks, “Are these the same US govt people who determined that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction?”
Kim Zetter has a good, sceptical piece in Wired.
What it all adds up to is that the big difference between “cyberwar” and the kinetic version is that it’s very hard to be sure who has just attacked you.
And, as usual, Dave Winer has an original take on it:
Back in 2000 when Napster was raging, I kept writing blog posts asking this basic question. Isn’t there some way the music industry can make billions of dollars off the new excitement in music?#
Turns out there was. Ask all the streaming music services that have been born since the huge war that the music industry had with the Internet. Was it necessary? Would they have done better if they had embraced the inevitable change instead of trying to hold it back? The answer is always, yes, it seems.#
Well, now it seems Sony is doing it again, on behalf of the movie industry. Going to war with the Internet. Only now in 2014, the Internet is no longer a novel plaything, it’s the underpinning of our civilization, and that includes the entertainment industry. But all they see is the evil side of the net. They don’t get the idea that all their customers are now on the net. Yeah there might be a few holdouts here and there, but not many. #
What if instead of going to war, they tried to work with the good that’s on the Internet? It has shown over and over it responds. People basically want a way to feel good about themselves. To do good. To make the world better. To not feel powerless. It’s perverted perhaps to think that Hollywood which is so averse to change, could try to use this goodwill to make money, but I think they could, if they appealed to our imaginations instead of fear.#
Hacking, by Royal Command?
The Intercept has just published an intriguing PowerPoint deck from the Snowden trove. It gives some details of the hacking of the Belgian mobile phone operator, Belgacom, (probably using Regin).
Slide 5 shows two distinguished visitors being given a briefing, presumably on this operation (otherwise why is the picture in this deck?)
Slide 9 makes it clear what this is all about:
So my question is this: Did Prince Charles know about the hacking of Belgacom?