Microsoft's MSN arm is currently running a competition for budding filmmakers, Sneak hears, soliciting short films on the topic of intellectual property theft. Thought Thieves asks entrants to convey a world "without protection for intellectual property". It doesn't require a dog's ears to detect the sounds of axes being ground on the part of the world's richest software firm. Still, Sneak does wonder what the world would look like if protection of intellectual property was at the other extreme: and no-one was able to pinch anyone else's ideas. It's rather doubtful that Microsoft would be in a position to sponsor the competition. Would Windows exist if Xerox and Apple had enjoyed perfect protection of their ideas?
The competition opened in May and the deadline for entries is next Friday. Sneak has just received a reminder from Microsoft's PR machine urging entrants "not to miss the deadline", a publicity tactic that suggests entries may be a little thin on the ground.

June 23, 2005 Film | Permalink | Comments (0)

Last night Sneak happened to catch the opening of the movie Alien3 on channel Five, and noticed the name of the planet on which the action is set: it's called Fiorina 161. On the whole it's a grim and uninviting place stocked with abnormal misfits, but everyone seems to be getting along OK. Then a ball-breaking woman arrives, takes charge, and unfortunately disaster swiftly follows. So... Nothing like what happens in the vicinity of that other Fiorina, then.

October 25, 2004 Film | Permalink | Comments (0)

Hollywood movies have long specialised in portraying a certain kind of computer security situation: the one in which a grungy ace hacker has 13 seconds to crack the password needed to shut down a brace of fully-armed nuclear missiles, and after two failed attempts finally manages to guess the right combination, averting Armageddon with half a second to spare. Sneak has always laughed in the face of such lunacy, but it turns out that the situation is not quite so ludicrous after all. Apparently for most of the 1970s, the super-secret code number used to authorise control over US Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missiles was, rather worryingly, zero-zero-zero-zero-zero-zero-zero-zero. "The Strategic Air Command ... remained far less concerned about unauthorised launches than about the potential of [coded] safeguards to interfere with wartime launch orders," recalls former launch control officer Bruce Blair. Of course nothing so stupid would happen today. No, it would probably be stupider.

June 3, 2004 Film | Permalink | Comments (0)

Microsoft is preparing a second edition of Windows Server 2003, to lumber in and fill the increasingly yawing void between now and when Longhorn might finally coast into view. The updated software's codename, R2, seemed innocuous enough until Sneak learned that the upcoming desktop gap-filler is no longer called Windows XP Reloaded but is now labelled D2. The combined desktop-server offering, R2-D2, will please the web's legions of Star Wars fans (who even after Send in the Clones must still outnumber those feigning an ongoing interest in the wobbly Matrix trilogy). But Sneak does worry that Microsoft might be tempting fate. After all the problems it has had with Longhorn's schedule, why would the firm name two vital interim products after a wayward and incomprehensible mobile swing-bin? Unless, of course, it's an unconscious admission that they're rubbish.

May 28, 2004 Film | Permalink | Comments (0)