DawgTalkers.net Forums DawgTalk Everything Else... A sad day for creative expression

http://time.com/3639275/the-interview-sony-hack-north-korea/

The horse is out of the barn now.

Wow, commit a few acts of computer espionage and terrorism, and get your way.

Just crazy.

Good or bad it seems like a necessary business/liability decision.

I can't blame NK for their outrage.

For some reason I'm thinking we're only seeing the start of computer hacking issues.

I hate to see what's coming next.

Especially since its been outed that the gov't has required backdoors in all of these products. It only encourages others to find and use them. So much for making as safe lol...

Sometimes you've got to threaten mass murder when Seth Rogen cracks wise on you.

Can't blame 'em.

I get it, but has the hack been directly linked to their government?

Is their government capable of that kind of technology?

How would the US respond if NK or Iran put out a movie about assassinating Obama or GWB?

Heck, we get pissed when someone burns the flag.

Hacking can be done by a guy with a laptop and a bucket of chicken.

Hacking is only limited to how creative your mind is.

This is covered in the article.



I'm capable of that kind of technology.



Just a guess, but 'not threaten civilian mass murder'?

This is sad. Bowing to some type of terrorist threat. It sets a precedent that I'm very uncomfortable and disappointed with.

James Franco == Charlie Chaplain

A UK film company, Borough Films, put out a movie based on the assassination of GWB in 2006. I believe we nuked Britain over that.

Totally legit, too.



This is double-sad.

Paramount Blocks 2004 Movie 'Team America' From Being Shown In Theaters

Several movie theaters that were planning to show the 2004 comedy "Team America: World Police" because Sony Pictures had bailed on the release of another North Korea-themed movie, "The Interview," said on Thursday that Paramount Pictures had cancelled their screenings of the puppet movie.

Sony Pictures cancelled the Dec. 25 release of "The Interview" on Wednesday after major theaters chains backed out, following threats from alleged North Korean hackers.

As a replacement, theaters such as the Texas Alamo Drafthouse decided to screen "Team America" instead, as it contained similar mockery of the North Korean regime.

But on Thursday afternoon, several theaters, including the Drafthouse, announced that Paramount Pictures had pulled their "Team America" screenings.

Imagine if you will, a threat has been made, however hollow it may be from this piss ant little nation. Then some moron sees his chance to get his name in lights and does something nasty at one of these theaters showing this flick. What happens next, the cash grab.

It's happened before, it will happen again.


Cinemark is sued over Colorado theater shooting
September 21, 2012|By Richard Verrier

Cinemark USA Inc. is being sued in federal court in Denver on behalf of three victims of the deadly July 20 theater shooting in Aurora, Colo.

Two separate lawsuits allege that Plano, Texas-based Cinemark, the nation's third-largest theater circuit, negligently failed to provide adequate security to prevent the shooting by suspect James Holmes at the Century Aurora 16, in which 12 people were killed and 58 injured.

Show the flick and risk the lawsuit. Not with my profits say the businesses.

Don't mistake my response for approval of Kim. I was just thinking the whole movie was kind of ignorant in the first place.

And the article clearly states there are "indications" of NK involvement.

I guess I actually believed NK was pretty inept.

I also think there are many countries willing to threaten apocalyptic consequences. I believe many similar statements have been made in congress, but again don't mistake that I approve.

I just think from beginning to end back to front inside to outside this whole event has been a massive cluster _______

Sony is rightfully faced with class-action lawsuits and I guess Seth Rogan fans must be bummed.

That explains the bad teeth I guess.

During the 70s and 80s, the IRA mostly stopped planting bombs in the Underground of London, and started calling in fake bomb threats. The British government was still forced to close sections of the Underground until the threat was proven false. I personally hate the idea of falling to terroristic threats like this. Could you imaging what would happen if daily threats were called into the DC Metro, the NY subway, or other high traffic areas? I still think these types of threats are as close as you can get to a declaration of war. The FBI needs to track down where this hack originated.

THE NATIONAL CIRCUS
December 18, 2014
12:44 p.m.
Frank Rich on the National Circus: Sony’s Apocalypse Is Now
By Frank Rich Follow @frankrichny


Every week, New York Magazine writer-at-large Frank Rich talks with contributor Eric Benson about the biggest stories in politics and culture. This week: the devastating Sony hack and our new age of cyber warfare.

Yesterday, Sony Pictures canceled the release of the Seth Rogen–James Franco comedy The Interview after hackers linked to North Korea threatened terrorism against theaters that showed the film. What do you make of Sony's decision? Was it prudent, or does it set a dangerous precedent for future controversial works of art?
I think everyone knows the precedent is ominous. As Fred Kaplan asked rhetorically at Slate, “Will hackers now threaten to raid and expose the computer files of other studios, publishers, art museums, and record companies if their executives don’t cancel some other movie, book, exhibition, or album?” The short answer is yes. We are witnessing, in Alan Dershowitz’s phrase, the “Pearl Harbor of the First Amendment.”

But this story is far bigger than the threat to the First Amendment. And the vituperation being aimed at Sony for canceling the film’s release — coming from both the left and the right — is a sideshow that misses a bigger point. Before Sony capitulated, every major movie theater chain in the country had pulled out of showing The Interview. The Wall Street Journal reported that the nation’s largest cable company, Comcast, would have refused to show the film — and no doubt would have been joined in this veto by all the other cable and satellite providers if Sony had considered such a distribution alternative. So if Sony canceled a film that couldn’t be shown anyway, was that a cancellation or just a certification of reality? If Sony is a coward, they all are.

Let’s say for the sake of argument that Sony had not canceled The Interview and, hypothetically, that one big theater chain — say, AMC — had agreed to exhibit it. Does anyone doubt that Sony’s rival studios (like the Comcast-owned Universal) would have exerted pressure to get The Interview yanked anyway? They wouldn’t want their own big Christmas releases to risk losing a single terrorized customer fearful of entering a multiplex where The Interview was on a neighboring screen. In that context, look at the Mitt Romney tweet that caused such a stir overnight:

Related Stories
Defending American Culture From Kim Jong Un Is a Job for Washington, Not Sony
The Sony Hack Might Have Killed a Certain Kind of Satire
Wonderful sentiment, but would Comcast or any other American internet provider be brave enough to host a free online streaming of The Interview? Would the Comcast-owned NBC broadcast it, or would Rupert Murdoch’s Fox network? Let’s see if Mitt has the leadership abilities to broker that deal. The Motion Picture Association of America couldn’t even come together to draft a statement supporting Sony until two weeks after news of the hack broke.

But as I said, this story is bigger than the First Amendment. In the aftermath of breaches spanning from the NSA to JPMorgan Chase to Home Depot, it confirms that hackers may be able to bring any corporation — or government agency — to its knees for any reason whatsoever. And what are we to do about it exactly? Obama Administration intelligence officials now say that North Korea was “centrally involved” in the hacking. We have yet to see the proof, and, as Wired has observed in a skeptical analysis of North Korea’s alleged role, a cybercrime of this magnitude and ingenuity may be “difficult if not impossible” to attribute to any single source. But even if the administration can make an air-tight case, does America respond with a counter-attack at North Korea and risk further retribution? Is an American government that has seen computer breaches at the White House and State Department even capable of a failsafe retaliation? This is why I think people will one day look back at today’s newspapers and laugh that the long-overdue American détente with our Cold War nemesis Cuba received banner headlines while the cyberwar of our current century was relegated to below the fold.

The Sony hack, of course, has caused more casualties than The Interview. There have been leaked social security numbers, leaked screeners, and, most salaciously, leaked emails from producers, directors, and executives behaving badly. You've seen showbiz from many angles in you career. Did any of what you read surprise you?
I am shocked to learn that there has been dissent within Sony about the quality of Adam Sandler movies. And to discover that even in liberal Hollywood, women do not get equal pay for equal work. As for the Amy Pascal–Scott Rudin thread about what movies President Obama might like, I was less startled by its content than by Pascal’s decision to apologize to Al Sharpton for it. Who elected this guy the Zelig of racial conflict in America?

But the real damage in the hack is not the gossip and the bitchiness. And it’s not merely the theft of intellectual property like screenplays and full cuts of movies, and the looting of personal information that could lead to identity theft and other crimes against the legions of non-boldface names who have been victimized. There are other subplots involving all sorts of people and corporations that have little or nothing to do with Sony or show business. And we don’t remotely know the whole of it yet. The hackers claim that the stolen Sony cache amounts to 100 terabytes — ten times the estimated storage space needed to digitalize the entire Library of Congress. And those who want to sift through it, whether journalists or bloggers or amateur sleuths, can and will continue doing so no matter what critics have to say about it. On Monday, for instance, the Times published an opinion piece by Aaron Sorkin lashing out at the press for trading in the Sony material, and the lawyer David Boies, in a news story in the business section, warned that Sony would go after any news organization that did so. But on the front page of the paper that very same day, the Times bucked both Sorkin and Boies to run a story on The Interview drawn in part from “hacked emails published by other media.” Yesterday, another Times article, about Google lobbying, also drew on Sony emails — these provided by “an industry executive.” Given that so many other players beyond Hollywood have figured in the emails thus far — from Google to NYU to the Times itself — it’s safe to assume that the digging will continue, with more unexpected revelations yet to drip out bit by bit. It’s a Chinese — or perhaps North Korean — water torture of untold American companies and institutions.

Last year, after the Edward Snowden leaks, you wrote that "though Americans were being told in no uncertain terms that their government was spying on them, it quickly became evident that, for all the tumult in the media-political Establishment, many just didn’t give a damn." Certainly the Sony hack has led to a lot of embarrassed executives and irate staffers. Did you underestimate Americans’ desire for privacy — at least when their private matters are made public?
My point, which I think still holds, is that Americans talk a good game about wanting their privacy protected but in reality we are almost sheeplike (and I include myself in that we) in the docility with which we turn over personal information to Amazon, Google, Uber, Facebook — you name it — in pursuit of convenience, shopping, entertainment, and facile social engagement. All the information we give up can be hacked and too frequently is. One might imagine that the Sony apocalypse is making many Americans think twice about their voluntary exhibitionism. But I think we are unlikely to change our habits so much as hope, as Sony did, that surely there must be some nerd in IT somewhere who is protecting us from harm.

link

Good article!

I look back at 9/11. I remember most everything being canceled for "one week". Even that upset me. But I couldn't wait to go to the Browns game that immediately followed. Of course I enjoyed the Browns game, but to me it was an even bigger message to send. That message?

That no terrorist act or threat of a terrorist act could dictate my actions. That no matter what was done or said my life would go on. I remember those sentiments abounded. I'm not a huge Seth Rogan fan, but I would have gone to this movie strictly as a matter of principal.

Yes it is an attack on The First Amendment and it's working. Sadly......

If you're going to spend your whole life living in fear, you may as well not exist at all.

I understand the liability aspect. This became a thing because distributors didn't want to touch it, but didn't want to take their mouth off the teat, so Sony inevitably pulled the plug.

But this was a pretty big stage, with some pretty big stakes.

This isn't going to stop. And the entire industry just more or less agreed to censor itself.

You won't see another movie about any religion from a major studio in a long time. You won't see anything that could be considered offensive to militant countries or sects. They just watered themselves down even further than they already were.

Get ready for Toy Story 7.

I know that sounds like hyperbole, but it isn't. The green light was just given to anyone with the stones to make a threat if they don't like the idea of a movie.

5 cruise missiles into their secret IT installation and a drone landed at Kim's palace with a copy of the movie.

We'd planned a canoeing trip in NE Tennessee with some very good friends. It was scheduled to begin 3 days after the 9/11 attacks. Those friends- Paul and Crystal... were ex-USMC. Paul was still an active reservist at the time, but wasn't called up to duty in the aftermath of the attacks.

I called Paul, and asked him if he wanted to cancel the trip.

His response: "If we do that, we'll give those bottom-feeders exactly what they want. Let's paddle that river."

We did it... and I'm glad that we did.

That weekend, we shared that river float with countless other American citizens. Among them was a Boy Scout troop from Pennsylvania. Kids too young to even comprehend what had just happened, teens who worked their azzes off to maintain a 'brave front'... and Troop Leaders who were visibly taxed, as they tried to maintain some air of normality and emotional order among their young charges.

I've never seen so many people, from so many different walks of life work so hard to keep America's $#!t together at such a pivotal, emotional time. It was inspirational beyond words. I watched my neighbors work their collective azz off to enjoy what they'd planned for months... with this incredible weight hanging over their heads like the Sword Of Damocles.


If ordinary people can make themselves go about their daily lives in defiance of abject terror, a business entity should surely be able to do the same.



Corporations ARE NOT People, my friends... and here is your living proof. That proof was provided on 9/14/2001... on a river in America's heartland.


Real People have guts. They do what they said they'd do.


If you capitulate, the villains win.


Gutless, the lot of them.
This moment in time will be their shame. Forever. I will never let them off the hook for this.

Never.

Some of you talk like Hacking is sooo easy but I can tell you it ain't!

Chainsaw went down and I been Hacking at this stinkin oak tree for two days now!

Oh, wait, you guys are talking bout those internets. Nevermind.

I think this all goes back to Colorado... I don't blame the theater chains for not wanting to show the movie.

They specifically said a "9/11" style attack. I think that goes from playful to obviously quite serious.

I wish there was some kind of resolution where they could show this movie...

Maybe buy a 3 hour block and put it on network tv?

Nobody may have died, but this is definitely an attack on America soil. I'm sure they could have worked out something with ABC or one of the other networks. I bet comedy central would have gotten on board.

I think NK did themselves no favors by doing what they did. 2 other big time movies come out on Christmas (Unbroken and Into the Woods) This movie would have come out Christmas Day, and been forgotten in a matter of weeks. Instead, it's the most talked about film in this country, as well as others, I'm sure.

Idiots.

Not for nothin, but all four of the internet providers in North Korea are "DOWN" They are without Internet today...

http://www.cnbc.com/id/102289459

Sounds entirely accidental to me .....

They probably just used their purchased bandwidth and are being throttled by AT&T.

Sounds like someone dropped their traffic into a black hole.

I've never seen anything in real life that so closely resembled a 'South Park' plot.

This thing is going to make a boatload of money on Thursday.

I bet it was the Korean Netflix that crashed it.

I see where Russia and China have issued statements sympathizing with North Korea over the movie killing of its leader by the United States.

Those of you who are against Defense spending better rethink it because much of the world doesn't get the joke. They see this as another cocky American slap in the face.

What is next from Hollywood? Perhaps a comedy about Nuking Moscow? Maybe a comedy/drama about enslaving the Chinese people?

Free speech is a wonderful thing however some things should remain unsaid IMO.

It's been done already.... And it wasn't a comedy movie.

By Dawns Early Light

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0099197/?ref_=nv_sr_1

Fail Safe

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0058083/?ref_=nv_sr_1

Then there was the movie (title escapes me) but it's the one where the cowboy was riding a nuke like a bronco as it crashed into russia.. What the heck was that movies title? At least that one was a comedy.

Is this serious or satirical?

I honestly can't tell.

That quote is not what I said.

I quite literally copied and pasted from your post. How is it not what you said?

I was just asking if it was a satirical joke or not.

Oh, you mean like this?