Wait for the french/german TV miniseries remake in a few years (not anything announced yet, but you just know one will be made), it will likely have a higher quality and accuracy.
Citizen Fours version of the Hong Kong meeting uses no cinematic devices to convey the palpable excitement.
Poitras's film contrasts the complete lack of 'action scene' with the consequences facing the protagonists.
Conveyed only by their attempts to suppress their mounting unease and the fight to calmly apply the opsec - the tension unbearably mounts second by second, the effect of distant sounds implies the real dangers.
Snowden's emotions are brutally felt, his lament at his loss left no dry eyes.
The stillness and unmoving camera style conveys more terror and excitement than jump cuts or explosive choreography can.
Where Snowden goes back in time and reveals American military and intelligence secrets to preempt its transformation into a global surveillance and military superpower?
But the real answer to that is "because time travel is a dramatic device." This is just as true for Primer as it is for all fictional scenarios involving time travel. Unless the story is about how time travel would "really" send you spinning off into space, the rules are whatever the plot requires.
It may be that the "science" behind Primer appears more coherent and reasoned out than H.G. Wells' Time Machine, but it's still fairy dust.
I find Primer interesting for the relatable human story. What are they doing with this knowledge and why?
Even Primer is fairy dust. The plot makes enough up to suspend your disbelief. For instance, I just made a rule up for my hypothetical new movie: travelling through time drops the traveler in the same location of the frame of reference they inhabit. This is always a fixed location relative to the Earth if the traveller is static relative to the Earth, and hence in the same frame of reference.
Interesting, I hadn't realized this was a cube already in existence. Neat!
I've broken a few rubix cubes in my day and so many of them have hallow squares so I'm not surprised you could hide stuff in one. Hell if you customize one you can probably get it to hold a huge amount of data.
These cubes actually come completely apart to replace the springs. You could probably put a good 4-5 micro-SD cards in the middle plastic ball, but it's not exactly a quick operation. But, yeah, quite a bit of empty space in them.
Yes, they provide the tension when you rotate the cube. The speed cubes come with different springs that can make it looser or tighter - in the center is this white ball that houses the springs where you screw in the center tiles. If it wasn't such a pain to open back up, I'd take some pics of that part of it. You can see the white ball on the official site here: https://rubiks.com/store/product/rubiks-speed-cube (disclaimer - the original article is mine)
This movie looks like is has a good chance of doing a better job than even The Imitation Game at ruining and fundamentally misrepresenting a topic I care about and a person I respect.
I'm just surprised that they didn't depict one of the most dramatic moments of his life (his death). I mean, suicide by poisoned apple? Maybe they didn't show it because it isn't 100% confirmed, but that event could basically have been ripped from a movie script into real life.
It isn't even confirmed that he killed himself, let alone by apple. He was using potassium cyanide to electroplate spoons and could have died by inhaling the fumes. The apple was not even tested for cyanide. I'm glad that they at least omitted that because we genuinely have no idea what happened.
It gets a fair amount of hate on HN for taking narrative liberties with Turing's actual life story. I won't deny that it does, and anyone who's genuinely interested in Alan Turing would do better to read about him and his work.
But the movie is a dramatization, not a documentary. Because of that, it got the general, non-CS-major public to care about Alan Turing. I'd say that's a pretty decent accomplishment.
I actually had a conversation with my mom about Alan Turing after she saw the movie. That's saying something. She still needs help browsing the web beyond AOL. She thought computers were "unhealthy" and borderline "dangerous" until very recently. I'm pretty sure she thinks her router contains the entire Internet on it. These are the kinds of people who need to be exposed to Turing, and "Imitation Game" breaks through to them. Great. I'll take that as a net-positive.
I don't know much abt Turing but watching the movie, i can see the dramatized in Cumberbatch's acting and the plot, and Knightley.. I agree w this comment that "if you like to see Cumberbatch and Knightly acting, you will enjoy it". Cumberbatch is too Cumberbatch and the plot is too Hollywood and stereotyped
It basically took the stock 80s movie plot of the ragtag bunch of misfits saving their community center from being shut down by greedy real-estate developers, and dressed it up as a 40s period piece.
Imagine if they told the story of the Normandy invasion as being a squad of GIs pulling one over on mean old man Eisenhower, saving the day by inventing the flat-bottom motorized landing craft.
That said, the small amount of stuff set in the future about Turing's persecution was well done.
Besides all points presented in other replies, two other problems with the movie come to mind:
* They presented Turing's characacter as the generic caricature of the pedantic genius, kind of like The Big Bang Theory's Sheldon. Other reports I read on Turing's personality didn't match that at all.
* Holywood seems adamant to have a romantic man-and-woman relationship going along with the story, even if it had to be a platonic one since the lead character is famously gay.
I think the thing that pissed people off was the was naming the computer Christopher instead of Victory by inventing this idea that Turing had a childhood crush he never got over.
I don't know though. I've never seen it. There's a whole section on Wikipedia if you care.
So basically like every modern movie loosely based on actual real life events. Then again, movies are almost always designed to entertain and munch popcorn, not so much to inform.
Also to make it much easier to grease the cube - if you do it as you stack the rows, you can get much more even distribution (and the cube will fly afterwards).
All Rubik's cubes have removable center tiles covers; they're usually difficult to remove without the help of an Xacto knife or similar. Under each tile is a screw; unscrewing these will allow you to take the center cubes off. After removing all the other non-center cubes, once you take the center 'cubes' off (they aren't really cubes, actually more like plates) it's easier to grease your cube up.
I'm sure the nerds here will find ample opportunities to tear this movie apart, but keep in mind that the "average American" (a) doesn't know much about Snowden, other than "he stole secrets and hid in commie Russia, so he must've been working for them", and (b) just believes what the government says. To counter the powerful voice of the government, you need an equally powerful voice like Hollywood. Maybe this movie will make the average American think more about the issue, and it might even cause some to change their views about Snowden. If it does, this movie has served its purpose, and kudos to Stone.
I agree. I like ripping on these as much as the next guy, but as long as it gets people talking that's enough. Also, one of the best ways to learn something is to find out that the teacher was wrong. People love that.
This movie is made by Oliver Stone right? Judging by prior work like The Doors (Jim Morrison) and Alexander (Alexander the Great) I don't have high hopes.
Oliver Stone likes to destroy characters on the big screen paying attention to the flaws rather than the charisma of his charactes. Jesus, I didn't remember a single battle scene from the movie "Alexander" and this guy went from Greece to India on horse battling his way out. He is considered one of the biggest strategic minds in history. He was the only leader I recall who changed the faith of battles consistently by making swift, unexpected moves with his cavalry hitting the enemy where he least expected it. Being gay[2] is not the reason why Alexander was named "Great".
[1] In the case of Alexander he admitted that it was a huge failure, but I'm not sure if by failure he and I mean the same thing, probably not.
[2] Sexual relationships amongst men were a very natural thing in ancient Greece, especially between soldiers. Indeed Alexander was married twice AFAIK.
No director is perfect. Oliver Stone had a few duds, but he also made some excellent movies: JFK, Any Given Sunday, Platoon, Talk Radio, Wall Street...
If you have to criticize him, you could say that his recent movies have not been up to the bar he set in the '90s -- but it definitely was a very high bar.
I'm much more worried about Gordon-Levitt playing Snowden, from the trailer he looks pretty bland.
I've been impressed with Joseph's other recent work like "hit record". For me personally I can't think of anyone better for the role.
Also maybe relevant is his opinion not an opinion after meeting Snowden for research on the role:
> "Now, as he would say, it’s not for him to say whether it was right or wrong. That’s really for people to decide on their own, and I would encourage anybody to decide that on their own. I don’t want to be the actor guy who’s like, ‘You should listen to me! What he did was right!’ I don’t think that’s my place. Even though that is what I believe – that what he did was right.” [1]
tbh I don't like the choice but I consider Gordon-Levitt a good actor. I don't have high hopes but I have to say that is unfair to judge an actor by a trailer.
Agreed. Who's choice was Gordon-Levitt if not Stone's?
As another commentator pointed out, it's one of those rare situations where the real-life character is more beautiful, fascinating and tall(!) than the actor. Don't you find this a little funny/awkward?
Oliver Stone also like to make every movie about Vietnam, and how the government lies and manipulates. Even his movies that apparently aren't about Vietnam reflect his Vietnam experience.
Snowden was a favorite to be screened at the Cannes Film Festival at an early Out of Competition slot. Stone himself requested an early slot. In the end he didn't get it, so this is a hint that the movie lacks something.
On the other side Laura Poitras new Assange documentary "Risk" screens in the Quinzaine (Directors fortnight) competition.
This raises an interesting question: how did Snowden get the documents out of the NSA? I don't recall reading much about how this was accomplished. Has that been discussed/reported anywhere?
Wasn't he working from home from Hawaii as a contractor with a remote login and could easily transfer data from NSA systems at his leisure? Isn't this whole framing of a Jason Bourne-esque exfiltration of the data just a myth?
Aside from Snowden you don't have to elaborately hide an SD card in a Rubik's cube. Just strick it in a condom and shove it.
From what I've read security against this sort of exfiltration is focused on disabling USB ports and the like. Not trying to detect something the size of an SD card leaving the building. They're not doing a full cavity search or giving you an MRI each time you enter/exit.
> Aside from Snowden you don't have to elaborately hide an SD card in a Rubik's cube. Just strick it in a condom and shove it.
Or just use a spy coin. The UK pound coin version is pretty good, but will stop working when we change our coins. Coins are handy because you carry them in your pockets, so they avoid xray checks at airports.
Snowden wasn't 'on-site', AFAIK he had remote access as a private contractor.
One of Snowden's main revelations was how little oversight there was.
He was motivated to come forward by the abuses he saw the NSA database put to, rather than its mere existence.
Snowden has reported his colleagues reguarly exfiltrated 'dirty pictures' from the NSA database. Snowden says 'nudies' were a 'commodity' traded around his colleagues.
If one can trivially sneak out dirty pics without oversight then...
Of course if Snowden could do it for the best of reasons, it is hard to believe moles and foriegn agents don't have similar access.
Years before Snowden it was revealed that recorded sex was traded around the NSA. In 2008 it was revealed that NSA employees made mix tapes of phone sex they recorded:
>Gordon routinely shared salacious or tantalizing phone calls that had been intercepted, alerting office mates to certain time codes of "cuts" that were available on each operator’s computer. "Hey, check this out," Faulk says he would be told, "there’s good phone sex or there’s some pillow talk, pull up this call, it’s really funny, go check it out. It would be some colonel making pillow talk and we would say, ‘Wow, this was crazy’," Faulk told ABC News.
- Wired: NSA Snooped on Innocent Americans’ Private Calls from Iraq, Former Operators Charge https://www.wired.com/2008/10/we-snooped-on-i/
Do the people with that kind of access simply not understand the power they have? If Snowden had access, surely there are at least dozens of other 20-somethings running around able to read the correspondence of almost anyone in the country. Are we to believe that they really are so self-disciplined the only thing they'll look at are nude photos? Why haven't we seen industrial and political fallout from these guys?
Yeah, but surely there would be a way to get the ball rolling without outing yourself. NSA analysts are going to be acquainted with at least the basic ways to stay anonymous online. If they found something interesting in the correspondence destined for a prominent politician or corporate officer, they could get the rumor mill started, or even make strategic leaks. Perhaps they already are doing it and we just aren't aware because they're covering their tracks well, but it seems like we'd see more aggressive targeting of interests that offend the likely demographic of NSA analysts, which to my knowledge hasn't happened.
However many people have access to this, I don't know if it's dozens, hundreds, or thousands, have a frightening amount of power. They have to realize it.
I guess they probably can't just type in "My Least Favorite Politician's Emails" into NSA internal search. Maybe this is the practical limitation that provides some nominal check on the power of these people?
Ah, he's quoted in the article saying that he has to have a personal email address. That probably means that there's a filter and/or blacklist that's at least watching for, if not actively blocking, access to whitehouse.gov and/or other official/important domains. This probably extends into the commercial world. I wonder if looking up anything other than the conventional email domains is a cause for suspicion. Thus, looking up "trump@trump.biz", for example, is inadvisable.
Boeing lost a $4.5 billion contract for jets, soured by the Petrobras "Blackpearl" & "Blarney" slides that detailed NSA & GCHQ spying on businesses worldwide[1].
NSA's James Clapper issued a denial "What we do not do, as we have said many times, is use our foreign intelligence capabilities to steal the trade secrets of foreign companies on behalf of – or give intelligence we collect to – US companies to enhance their international competitiveness or increase their bottom line."
By 2014 overseas contract losses to US businesses attributed to dissatisfaction with NSA spying were estimated at $180 billion [2]
I worked for a well known computer software company, and one of the close by teams worked on a photo-sharing web-app, which also allowed for private albums.
While analyzing the metadata someone discovered that a certain rare and expensive camera model was used almost exclusively to shoot models, including nude ones. Searching the storage for pictures made with that camera model became a popular activity in that team :)
So it's pretty easy to trivialize privacy breaches and rationalize it as "no harm was done"
It's hard to believe that it would be worth violating your users' trust for some nudes. The internet has enough free racy pictures to last anyone a lifetime.
If you X-rayed the cube with the card on top or bottom, I wonder if the card would be distinguishable? I imagine that, if the cube was on one of the sides, it'd be practically impossible to see.
I just had some teeth X-rays at a pretty regular dental clinic here in Taiwan. They were showing me the results and explaning what they have found. I was totally amazed how thing that look super-light tiny shadows for me at one place they say "we must check", while elsewhere they were "nothing". What you see totally depends on the expertise you have and I think it wouldn't be hard at all to spot things that for us outsiders are just "maybe a little bit lighter".
On its surface, the movie appears to be praising Snowden. I am convinced it is intentionally shitty and is deliberately overly praiseful of Snowden so that viewers will find it annoying. The net result is that people leave with a negative opinion of Snowden the person. It just looks so over-the-top terrible from the trailer alone.
It's largely the same, the speed cube just replaces the stickers with plastic tiles. The internals are also tweaked to make it easier to spin and to make it resist "popping" where the cube would jettison some pieces if you were moving it too fast / hard.
89 comments
[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 188 ms ] threadAlso expect at least two forced action/drama scenes that never happened.
They are staging the Hong Kong hotel meeting, of which real footage exists, as if it were an action scene.
Poitras's film contrasts the complete lack of 'action scene' with the consequences facing the protagonists.
Conveyed only by their attempts to suppress their mounting unease and the fight to calmly apply the opsec - the tension unbearably mounts second by second, the effect of distant sounds implies the real dangers.
Snowden's emotions are brutally felt, his lament at his loss left no dry eyes.
The stillness and unmoving camera style conveys more terror and excitement than jump cuts or explosive choreography can.
https://citizenfourfilm.com/
It may be that the "science" behind Primer appears more coherent and reasoned out than H.G. Wells' Time Machine, but it's still fairy dust.
Even Primer is fairy dust. The plot makes enough up to suspend your disbelief. For instance, I just made a rule up for my hypothetical new movie: travelling through time drops the traveler in the same location of the frame of reference they inhabit. This is always a fixed location relative to the Earth if the traveller is static relative to the Earth, and hence in the same frame of reference.
I've broken a few rubix cubes in my day and so many of them have hallow squares so I'm not surprised you could hide stuff in one. Hell if you customize one you can probably get it to hold a huge amount of data.
Even without customising it, 200GB on a single microSD card is no small amount of data.
But the movie is a dramatization, not a documentary. Because of that, it got the general, non-CS-major public to care about Alan Turing. I'd say that's a pretty decent accomplishment.
I actually had a conversation with my mom about Alan Turing after she saw the movie. That's saying something. She still needs help browsing the web beyond AOL. She thought computers were "unhealthy" and borderline "dangerous" until very recently. I'm pretty sure she thinks her router contains the entire Internet on it. These are the kinds of people who need to be exposed to Turing, and "Imitation Game" breaks through to them. Great. I'll take that as a net-positive.
Imagine if they told the story of the Normandy invasion as being a squad of GIs pulling one over on mean old man Eisenhower, saving the day by inventing the flat-bottom motorized landing craft.
That said, the small amount of stuff set in the future about Turing's persecution was well done.
* They presented Turing's characacter as the generic caricature of the pedantic genius, kind of like The Big Bang Theory's Sheldon. Other reports I read on Turing's personality didn't match that at all.
* Holywood seems adamant to have a romantic man-and-woman relationship going along with the story, even if it had to be a platonic one since the lead character is famously gay.
I don't know though. I've never seen it. There's a whole section on Wikipedia if you care.
Or you could pop out a piece and you'd have room for dozens of MicroSD cards inside the pieces.
To be meta-fair, most means those who have a brand name (those you could distinguish when you buy).
https://rubiks.com/blog/how-to-customise-the-rubiks-speed-cu...
Oliver Stone likes to destroy characters on the big screen paying attention to the flaws rather than the charisma of his charactes. Jesus, I didn't remember a single battle scene from the movie "Alexander" and this guy went from Greece to India on horse battling his way out. He is considered one of the biggest strategic minds in history. He was the only leader I recall who changed the faith of battles consistently by making swift, unexpected moves with his cavalry hitting the enemy where he least expected it. Being gay[2] is not the reason why Alexander was named "Great".
[1] In the case of Alexander he admitted that it was a huge failure, but I'm not sure if by failure he and I mean the same thing, probably not.
[2] Sexual relationships amongst men were a very natural thing in ancient Greece, especially between soldiers. Indeed Alexander was married twice AFAIK.
If you have to criticize him, you could say that his recent movies have not been up to the bar he set in the '90s -- but it definitely was a very high bar.
I'm much more worried about Gordon-Levitt playing Snowden, from the trailer he looks pretty bland.
Also maybe relevant is his opinion not an opinion after meeting Snowden for research on the role:
> "Now, as he would say, it’s not for him to say whether it was right or wrong. That’s really for people to decide on their own, and I would encourage anybody to decide that on their own. I don’t want to be the actor guy who’s like, ‘You should listen to me! What he did was right!’ I don’t think that’s my place. Even though that is what I believe – that what he did was right.” [1]
[1] http://www.ew.com/article/2015/09/18/joseph-gordon-levitt-sn...
As another commentator pointed out, it's one of those rare situations where the real-life character is more beautiful, fascinating and tall(!) than the actor. Don't you find this a little funny/awkward?
On the other side Laura Poitras new Assange documentary "Risk" screens in the Quinzaine (Directors fortnight) competition.
They're separate?
Average Americans know nothing about Snowden.
Aside from Snowden you don't have to elaborately hide an SD card in a Rubik's cube. Just strick it in a condom and shove it.
From what I've read security against this sort of exfiltration is focused on disabling USB ports and the like. Not trying to detect something the size of an SD card leaving the building. They're not doing a full cavity search or giving you an MRI each time you enter/exit.
Or just use a spy coin. The UK pound coin version is pretty good, but will stop working when we change our coins. Coins are handy because you carry them in your pockets, so they avoid xray checks at airports.
One of Snowden's main revelations was how little oversight there was.
He was motivated to come forward by the abuses he saw the NSA database put to, rather than its mere existence.
Snowden has reported his colleagues reguarly exfiltrated 'dirty pictures' from the NSA database. Snowden says 'nudies' were a 'commodity' traded around his colleagues.
If one can trivially sneak out dirty pics without oversight then...
Of course if Snowden could do it for the best of reasons, it is hard to believe moles and foriegn agents don't have similar access.
>Gordon routinely shared salacious or tantalizing phone calls that had been intercepted, alerting office mates to certain time codes of "cuts" that were available on each operator’s computer. "Hey, check this out," Faulk says he would be told, "there’s good phone sex or there’s some pillow talk, pull up this call, it’s really funny, go check it out. It would be some colonel making pillow talk and we would say, ‘Wow, this was crazy’," Faulk told ABC News. - Wired: NSA Snooped on Innocent Americans’ Private Calls from Iraq, Former Operators Charge https://www.wired.com/2008/10/we-snooped-on-i/
However many people have access to this, I don't know if it's dozens, hundreds, or thousands, have a frightening amount of power. They have to realize it.
I guess they probably can't just type in "My Least Favorite Politician's Emails" into NSA internal search. Maybe this is the practical limitation that provides some nominal check on the power of these people?
[1] http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/31/nsa-top-secret-...
PRISM can notify when new emails appear and can provide a live view of the targets online activity. [2]
[2] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/politics/prism-...
NSA's James Clapper issued a denial "What we do not do, as we have said many times, is use our foreign intelligence capabilities to steal the trade secrets of foreign companies on behalf of – or give intelligence we collect to – US companies to enhance their international competitiveness or increase their bottom line."
By 2014 overseas contract losses to US businesses attributed to dissatisfaction with NSA spying were estimated at $180 billion [2]
[1] http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/09/nsa-spying-braz... [2] https://shadowproof.com/2014/08/01/nsa-spying-costs-u-s-comp...
While analyzing the metadata someone discovered that a certain rare and expensive camera model was used almost exclusively to shoot models, including nude ones. Searching the storage for pictures made with that camera model became a popular activity in that team :)
So it's pretty easy to trivialize privacy breaches and rationalize it as "no harm was done"
Perhaps the illicit nature of the trust violation adds something beyond the legally available porn.
Evidenced by the criminal risks voyeurs still take to get creepshots, upskirts,
http://rusolut.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/msd1xray.jpg
And an xray of a rubiks cube:
https://c1.staticflickr.com/5/4138/4859926370_10d2a0d071.jpg
Overall, doubt you could see it without looking very carefully.
What kind of guard will let a cube not pass through the system like that? If I were that guard I would find that cube throw highly suspicious.
And while we are at it, wouldn't it be easier to hide the microSD card under the tongue for example?
And lastly, where exactly are you supposed to stick that card into in the facility? Even low-level security companies glue all USB/card reader inputs.