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Data as an instrument of war
- Thread starter Hair Warrior
- Start date
Beijing up to their old (new) tricks again...
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/03/chinas-tech-giants-test-way-around-apples-new-privacy-rules/
www.ft.com
Proposed solution: Ban all Tencent, Bytedance, Huawei, Baidu, Alibaba, and PRC state-backed IT products and websites on U.S. federal installations, including military bases, and even if you are using a personal electronic device on that base. Block access to those sites from base networks/NIPR.
(You can't bring guns on bases, either, but that doesn't infringe sailors' rights to own one at home. So if Seaman Timmy wants to install Tiktok on his personal iPhone, he can do so, but he can't bring it on base and/or has to uninstall it before coming onto base. Impractical? Yes, in the short run. In the long run it will change behavior and increase awareness of how China is constantly trying to F us.)
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/03/chinas-tech-giants-test-way-around-apples-new-privacy-rules/
China’s tech giants test way around Apple’s new privacy rules
ByteDance and Tencent see if they can keep tracking iPhone users with solution created by state-backed group
Proposed solution: Ban all Tencent, Bytedance, Huawei, Baidu, Alibaba, and PRC state-backed IT products and websites on U.S. federal installations, including military bases, and even if you are using a personal electronic device on that base. Block access to those sites from base networks/NIPR.
(You can't bring guns on bases, either, but that doesn't infringe sailors' rights to own one at home. So if Seaman Timmy wants to install Tiktok on his personal iPhone, he can do so, but he can't bring it on base and/or has to uninstall it before coming onto base. Impractical? Yes, in the short run. In the long run it will change behavior and increase awareness of how China is constantly trying to F us.)
Will The Curse Of 'Dune' Be Lifted In Venice?
With a $165-million budget and a cast to rival the star system of Arrakis, hopes are high for "Dune" as it prepares to land in Venice next Friday for its world premiere.
www.barrons.com
The problem with the old Dune movie was poor lighting. To set a mood the director used darkness and it failed him…most of that movie is visually impossible to follow. Star Wars has the right idea, dark backgrounds with well lit scenes. We’ll see how this one works but I go watch.Will The Curse Of 'Dune' Be Lifted In Venice?
With a $165-million budget and a cast to rival the star system of Arrakis, hopes are high for "Dune" as it prepares to land in Venice next Friday for its world premiere.
Poor lighting was the only problem? Not Sting? Not milking a cat? Not the weirding device? Not Patrick Stewart with a pug? Sure all this stuff is what makes it a cult movie but it's why it was never the great movie it should have been from the book. I'm not sure why someone decided that given the weird source material of the book and then said , "let's double down and make it even weirder and unapproachable" other than it's Lynch and that's kind of his thing.
I am humbled by your far deeper, penetrating analysis. And yes, you are more than right.
It's also coming out in an era where classic sci-fi/fantasy stories not called "Star Wars" or "Star Trek" are now accepted mainstream entertainment. Meaning the studio has an incentive to treat the story well. In the 80s, you probably had some studio exec born in the 1930s going "WTF is this bizarre nerd shit? Go ahead and make it an arthouse film; it'll never sell anyway."
Except they knew they had a best-selling book that had been well regarded for years at that point and intended to make a "star wars for adults."
Dino DeLaurentis also made Blue Velvet, Flash Gordon, and several Stephen King adaptations, so he was no stranger to Lynch or kitchy sci-fi/thriller genre.
True, but I still feel like it's only relatively recently that genre fiction has gotten the "we're going to treat this seriously" treatment from the entertainment industry machine. I think it's been Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings movies that got sci-fi/fantasy's foot in the door in the mainstream, and Game of Thrones that really sealed the deal. It's not that Hollywood didn't recognize the moneymaking potential, but that they'd still feel like meddling in the script, or doing weird things a la 80s Dune, because it was ultimately "just kids' stuff or nerds' stuff with rocketships and fairies and orcs," and not worth taking seriously from an artistic perspective.
As an example, Wheel of Time is (finally) coming out on Prime Video this fall, and the story arc has the potential to be the next Game of Thrones if they do it right. Robert Jordan was big enough in his day that he blurbed George R.R. Martin on the cover of the first Song of Ice and Fire book that Game of Thrones was based on. Anyhow, the first Wheel of Time book came out in 1990, and starts out in a setting that might as well have been blatantly cribbed from Tolkien. Young adults in a remote herding and farming community get taken out of town on an adventure by a mysterious magic user for mysterious reasons.
After that, the story goes in its own direction. With some editing, it'll make for incredible TV. Jordan had some annoying tics and tropes to edit out and there are some pointless subplots that can go away or be trimmed. Overall, he was an incredible worldbuilder who had a severe case of diarrhea of the keyboard. But the original story was much more grimdark and much more cynical and Martin-esque. The publisher throttled way back on that stuff and insisted on the Tolkein-esque start, because this was the late 80s and fantasy had to sell to kids, because that's who they thought the market was, not adults.
If you haven't already, look at some of "the making of" content for Alien (all on YT), particularly David Giler's commentary, to get a sense of how much tinkering and rewriting Dan O'Bannon's script went through. Ultimately they got it right and we got Alien instead of something closer to Dark Star.
Yeah, for anyone who's either finished Wheel of Time or doesn't care about spoilers, there's an interesting article about how it started out. Jordan was a helo door gunner and Vietnam combat vet turned Navy civilian nuke after the war. And the original plan he had was "George R.R. Martin on acid." Probably for the better that it got some tweaking, because WTF was that insanity?
It has an ending?
There are neither beginnings nor endings to the Wheel of Time . . . but it has an ending.
