Tag Archive for: Absurd

10 Classic And Absurd Examples Of Computer Hacking In Movies

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As long as you can leave the realm of reality firmly behind you, “Swordfish” is both wildly entertaining and utterly absurd. With such Hollywood glitz in the form of John Travolta, Hugh Jackman, Don Cheadle, and the captivating presence that is Halle Berry, you wouldn’t think twice about tuning in if you found it when browsing through Netflix. That is, of course, unless you have already endured even five minutes of it. 

As a hacking movie, “Swordfish” gets almost everything wrong. It’s riddled with the amateur errors we now expect in Hollywood blockbusters, from misspelled technical terms (algorythm!) to code lines obviously repeating over and over during hacking scenes that the audience is supposed to be taking seriously. 

The absurdity peaks when Jackman’s character effortlessly deciphers unbreakable 512-bit encryption keys in a snap, an impossible feat in reality. Scriptwriting intelligence doesn’t end there, either. At one point, Travolta’s government operative character forces Jackman into hacking the Pentagon while receiving the unwanted attention of a female and a gun pointed at his head, which he does, of course, just in the nick of time.

John Travolta received a Razzie Award nomination for his eccentric performance. In fact, he managed to get himself nominated for two separate movies that year. However, if you’re one for over-the-top acting and action sequences, you may well enjoy this ridiculous movie. That is provided you can put aside its disregard for complex hacking techniques.

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Eight Sarasota Conspiracy Theories That Range From the Very Absurd to the Very Real

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The anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks leads many to reexamine one of the most significant events in modern American history, and many Americans believe that, 21 years later, our government is still not telling the full truth about what happened that day. Conspiratorial thinking has exploded, and become a mainstream phenomenon.

But to be called a “conspiracy theorist” is no compliment. If you are accused of being one, you are a tinfoil hat-wearing, schizophrenic paranoiac who believes in lizard people and a flat Earth.

This might be a little unfair. History shows us that governments and shadowy networks have conspired to illicit and nefarious ends. From the Iran-Contra scandal to oil companies hiding data about climate change and CIA-funded mind control programs, real conspiracies abound. And what is a conspiracy anyway? The legal definition is “an agreement between two or more people to commit an illegal act, along with an intent to achieve the agreement’s goal.” That’s pretty broad. What doesn’t fall under that rubric?

By that very loose definition, Sarasota is filled with conspiracies that go back more than a century and, these days, in the time of loony politics and social media, we’ve landed on the national radar. A New York magazine article dubbed our beach town the “Conspiracy Coast,” while Vice wrote a story calling Sarasota “the Conspiracy Capital of the United States.” The Sarasota Herald-Tribune’s Chris Anderson goes even further, claiming Sarasota County “has somehow become the Conspiracy Capital of the World.”

Are we really a hub for conspiracies? Is there something in the water? Or is it the white quartz crystal sand? 

Here are eight common conspiracy theories that involve Sarasota—ranging from the very absurd to the very real.

9/11

Conspiracies are born out of coincidences, so we’ll start with the big one—9/11. Sarasota has a bizarre number of connections to this defining moment in world history, and we still don’t know the whole truth about what really went on here leading up to that fateful day.

Sarasota was destined to be in the 9/11 spotlight because President George W. Bush was reading to a classroom of…

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Mexico Reverses Ban On Selling Roku Hardware After Absurd Piracy Ruling

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So just about a year ago the Mexican court system decided to ban all Roku streaming hardware from being sold in Mexico. The ban was the result of legal action taken by Mexican cable company Cablevision, which accused Roku of facilitating piracy. How? While Roku devices are more locked down than many of the more open home media PC solutions (also the target of endless pearl clutching and hyperventilation by the entertainment industry), users can install certain unofficial, third-party “private” channels that provide access to pirated live streams of cable content.

While Roku went out of its way to try and lock down their hardware, some users paid hackers a few bucks to crack open and modify the devices anyway, letting them access the dubious third-party channels in question. While this obviously wasn’t Roku’s fault, Cablevision believed Roku should be punished for the behavior of the company’s customers, and declared it was doing Mexican consumers a public service:

“Cablevision cannot allow the content that it licenses from domestic and foreign companies to be illegally used,” Cablevision spokeswoman Maria Eugenia Zurita told Reuters via email. “We would also like Roku Inc to better supervise the use of its software so that it’s not used inappropriately.”

Roku quickly appealed, and while a federal judge initially overturned the ban, a subsequent ruling restored it, so the ban has been in place for the better part of the year, costing Roku a notable sum. Roku subsequently jumped through all manner of hoops in a bid to please the courts, including building a new internal team specifically dedicated to cracking down on piracy, posting notable warnings to users who decide to install unofficial channels, and renaming the channels from “private” to “non-certified” in a bid to make it even more obvious Roku wasn’t sanctioning the behavior of its users.

Fast forward to this week, and the 11th Collegiate Court in Mexico City has ruled to again overturn the ban, opening the door to Mexican consumers being able to, you know, buy whatever hardware they like and use the devices as they see fit.

“The Court reportedly acknowledged Roku’s efforts to keep pirated content away from its platform, an opinion also shared by Cablevision. However, should pirate channels appear on Roku in the future, Cablevision warned that it would take further legal action to have those sources blocked via the Mexican Institute of Industrial Property and other local authorities.”

Again, consumers are just using a computer to access content online, and what that content is really shouldn’t really be seen as Roku’s responsibility. The irony here is that Roku has spent a lot of time kissing up to entrenched cable operators here in the States, helping them scuttle efforts to make traditional cable boxes more open. Of course much like the cable industry, the more locked down Roku makes its products, the more likely consumers are to flock to products that actually let them do what they want, which obviously doesn’t necessarily include piracy.

The same hysteria surrounding Roku has been doubly-applied to programs like Kodi, which (in much the same way that Roku is just a computer) is just software that (with the help of plugins) can be used to access copyrighted content… and a laundry list of other things. This nannyish approach to what hardware and software can be used and how is an unproductive and expensive game of Whac-a-Mole, which is why we’ve pretty consistently argued that embracing openness and innovation tends to be a notably more productive and profitable solution.

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