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| Posted by
JonKatz
on Sunday March 03, @11:05AM
from the smash-geek-drama dept. CSI: Crime Scene Investigation has become the most successful, intelligent, improbable and geekiest drama on commercial network TV. Considering its setting -- Las Vegas -- and its subject matter - decomposing pigs, corpse-sucking larvae, transgender serial killers, serial killer make-up artists, murderous and skate-wielding hockey fiends -- and its near total absence of traditional TV fare like sex or shoot-em-ups, this show shatters conventional wisdom about what people want to see on TV. A year ago, CSI seemed promising. Now it's great and getting steadily better. And as CSI has become more successful, its production values have soared. At times, it's beautifully shot, a cross between the old Miami Vice and the early days of The X-Files, from which it borrows heavily.
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) Posted by
JonKatz
on Tuesday February 26, @10:20AM
from the a-powerful-censorship-archive-online dept. Here's the great irony: There's more censorship -- all kinds, everywhere, involving more media and culture -- than ever before. But it's doomed to fail. As the Net and Web become more commercial, and as parents, government, schools, politicians, churches and corporations have belatedly grown interested in controlling networked computing and the speech and intellectual property therein, battles over censorship and content -- from school blocking filters to music wars to efforts to curb sexual imagery -- have raged throughout cyberspace. That's why Chicago artist Antonio Muntadas' website "The File Room" may be one of the most significant sites ever created on the Web. Despite relentless efforts to curb art, speech, software, writing, thinking and the free flow of ideas, censorship as a contemporary idea is virtually impossible. The Net killed it, and now the Web is becoming a living, global archive of ideas people want to kill.
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) Posted by
JonKatz
on Tuesday February 19, @11:25AM
from the the-web's-great-promise dept. Sure, we are being lied to by bloated, corporatized media all the time. What else is new? The great promise of the Net and Web has always been more truth: a great, hyper-linked network of diverse, individual expression, a vast, linked alternative subculture. There is hope. You can go to the Disinformation Web Site to see that idea in action, despite the AOL-ing and MSN-ing of cyberspace. This trove -- its content ranges from "The X-Men" and "Space Mutation" to "The Matrix" to pieces on the Real Jesus and Radiohead -- is what the Web is really about. It offers perspectives you definitely won't find anywhere in the mass media. Don't miss Marty Beckerman's "Death to all Cheerleaders 1." (Marty, whose piece became a book, was canned from a daily newspaper for observing that cheerleaders were "a urine stain on the toilet seat of America.")
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) Movie Review: John Q |
Posted by
JonKatz
on Sunday February 17, @10:27AM
from the hollywood's-solution-to-hmo-troubles dept. John Q is contemporary Hollywood's idea of an issue movie: preachiness hiding behind a superstar. The good news is that a major film studio is taking up a complex issue like health care, one of the worst messes in American life. The bad news is that the movie is so hypocritical, heavy-handed and gummed up with silly, sentimental and cliche-stuffed sub-plots that it undermines its own good intentions. Fortunately for the studio, Denzel Washington and Robert Duvall are always worth seeing. Spoilage warning: plot is discussed, not ending. And your own reviews are as welcome as mine.
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) Features: The Myth of Open Source Security Revisited v2.0 |
Posted by
timothy
on Friday February 15, @02:00PM
from the looking-through-the-right-lens dept. Dare Obasanjo contributed this followup to an article entitled The Myth of Open Source Security Revisited that appeared on the website kuro5hin. He writes: "The original article tackled the common misconception amongst users of Open Source Software(OSS) that OSS is a panacea when it comes to creating secure software. The article presented anecdotal evidence taken from an article written by John Viega, the original author of GNU Mailman, to illustrate its point. This article follows up the anecdotal evidence presented in the original paper by providing an analysis of similar software applications, their development methodology and the frequency of the discovery of security vulnerabilities." Read on below for his detailed analysis, especially relevant with the currency of security initiatives in the worlds of both open- and closed-source software.
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) Part One: Information Arts |
Posted by
JonKatz
on Tuesday February 12, @10:30AM
from the intersections-of-art-science-technology dept. Culture is being re-defined right before our eyes. For centuries, art and technology have been considered separate parts of culture. Now, because we live in an information society, they may be be coming together. We are, say some people who study such things, at a critical place in history, where it's sometimes impossible to distinguish between techno-scientific research and art.
The creation, movement and analysis of ideas is increasingly the center of our cultural, social and economic life. And that's why a startling (and hefty) new book calls itself "Information Arts" -- because the art such a culture produces has to deal with information if it's going to remain central.
So this is the first part of a series -- inspired by "Information Arts," edited by Stephen Wilson and published by the MIT Press -- which deals with the new intersection of art, science and technology. This book is onto an enormous idea, exploring the science and art from algorithms, robotics, quantum physics, coding, nanotechnologies, genetic and kinetic art to electrical music, telecommunications and A.I.
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) Posted by
JonKatz
on Sunday February 10, @11:00AM
from the post-9/11-action-movie dept. The post-9/11 action/terrorism movie is now a genre all of its own. If this movie is interesting at all, it's through the prism of September 11, a day that changed culture as much as it did politics. Our perceptions of Black Hawk Down, Behind Enemy Lines, and now, Arnold Schwarzenegger's Collateral Damage are shaped - nearly haunted - by the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks and the subsequent military operations in Afghanistan. Some movies - Black Hawk Down - are greatly enhanced by 9/11. Because it was true and well done, it hits us between the eyes. But for poor aging action-pioneer Schwarzenegger, whose movie was postponed for three months by his nervous studio, the opposite is true. This movie comes from another time, not enlivened by reality but diminished by it. Spoilage warning: plot discussed, not ending.
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) Posted by
JonKatz
on Thursday February 07, @10:30AM
from the can-you-find-the-pulse? dept. From the beginning, the Net has always seemed to have a heart – a locus, a center of activity. At first the academics and defense researchers who'd created and patched together its architecture were its pulse. Then hackers in suburban bedrooms all over the country became the epicenter, followed by the free music and intellectual property guerrillas; the open source, online rights activists and advocates; the Wired magazine gurus and visionaries, and the Web creators, programmers and designers. After that, the Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and the dot.com capitalists took over. This culture is becoming increasingly diverse, commercial and subterranean. Where's the heart of the Net now? A.I. or AOL?
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) Posted by
JonKatz
on Tuesday January 29, @11:05AM
from the will-tech-industries-ever-learn? dept. In the wake of the dot-com washout, a lot people nearly wrote off cyberspace as a retailing wasteland. But last week, Amazon reported that it had finally turned a profit, something most of us thought we'd never see, and preliminary figures show a sharp upturn in online sales despite the mild recession. Some other interesting post-Christmas tidbits are popping up, too: for the first time, more women than men are buying things online, a landmark barometer of a bright digital retailing future. Beyond that, in case you haven't noticed, online retailers are getting a lot smarter. The arrogant, customer-abusive tech world could learn a lot from these people, who offer steep discounts, stand behind their products, and actually offer real and free customer support.
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) Review: Kung Pow |
Posted by
JonKatz
on Sunday January 27, @11:45AM
from the enter-the-mess-of-a-movie dept. Well, some of you warned me, and you were right. Kung Pow - Enter the Fist had a great premise and the trailers were tantalizing. Steve Oedekerk borrowed from Woody Allen's What's Up Tiger Lily? to make a Kung Fu spoof patched together from a little known 1976 karate film Tiger and Crane Fists. But the result is anything but funny. Spoilage warning: plot discussed, not ending.
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