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Iron Man's New Villain — an Open Source Terrorist
An anonymous reader writes "In a recent interview on Comic Book Resources about his new continuation of the Marvel comic-book series 'Invincible Iron Man,' Matt Faction provides information about the the new series (debut will be May 7). The villain is Ezekiel Stane, son of Obadiah Stane (the villain of the new Iron Man movie opening on May 2). Whereas Obadiah was a ruthless billionaire who fought as the Iron Monger, Zeke 'rejects the strategies of his father as being the crude tactics of Attila the Hun.' Instead, he will be 'a post-national business man and kind of an open source ideological terrorist.' As the author puts it, 'Windows wants to be on every computer desktop in the world, but Linux and Stane want to destroy the desktop.' The concept has gone over well on the CBR forums."
Since 9/11, every goddamned thing is considered terrorism. Shoot a gun downtown? Terrorism. Drink someone's milkshake? Terrorism. Ship cocaine from Colombia to the U.S. Yep, terrorism.
No! It's not! There are proper terms here, and by calling any crime terrorism you insinuate that the crimes are perpetrated by terrorists. That's giving a whole lot of credit to idiot criminals.
Installing Linux on the computers of unwitting Windows users may be a dumb plot, but it's hardly terrorism. If it were, every goddamned user on Slashdot would be a terrorist for trying to wrest Windows from Granny's warm, wet hands.
I'd like to see this OSS terrorist face the CEO of Nerv (from that other forgettable hacker movie a few years back). Geek Terrorist. Coming soon to a basement near you!
The FSF has announced Richard Stallman will be engaging in a speaking tour of comic conventions to demand they be called free ideological terrorists.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
Sharerman!
He will share global economy to it's knees!
His nefarious plan of... sharing stuff, has to be stopped!
As the author puts it, 'Windows wants to be on every computer desktop in the world, but Linux and Stane want to destroy the desktop.'
What part of that sentence did I understand?
"There is no time, sir, at which ties do not matter," Jeeves, (Jeeves and the Impending Doom)
Just because the movie is sponsored by SCO, Microsoft and NVidia does NOT mean that it is prejudice. Honest, gov.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
He's guilty of rant-terrorism. Don't let the terrorists win.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
... let this one go.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
I can see Comic books and open source uniting, working together to keep geeks around the world from getting laid.
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
We need to stop Doctor GPL! he wants to allow everyone to see everyone else's privates, and give them a way to directly modify them! His perversion of source code everywhere must be stopped, but who...
Great Intellect...
But we already have Linux Super Villian.
If i had one dollar for every brain you dont have, i would have $1.
If you ask me, the plot is ripe for a twist ; Stark discovers that Stane is actually the good guy, and that the massed legions of commercial software are colluding with the hardware manufacturers in a plan to take over the worlds computers by putting secret encryption keys on the motherboards and only permitting "approved" software to run.
I re-read the summary, the article, and some of the CBR forum stuff. I misunderstood that the movie isn't going to portray Open Source as being fuel for terrorism, but instead it is the new comic book.
God spoke to me.
I find it hard to look at the concept as menacing.
"We're going to provide Linux free of charge to anyone! MUHAHAHAHA!"
"Beware my open source laser! Powered by the distilled tears of Microsoft execs, it will cut you out of vendor lock-in!"
Or better, Stark teams up with Microsoft to combat the 'threat', then, during a battle as Iron Man powers up his blaster, the HUD flashes..
WinIRON.sys
The driver is attempting to access memory beyond the end of the
allocation.
Stop: 0x000000D6
(0x89781000, 0x00000000, 0xBF82683F, 0x00000000)
WinIRON.sys address BF82683F base at BF80000
Goddamn, I'd rather be Rick-rolled.
First they make him the mastermind of the whole Civil War saga, for sending Hulk into space(which admittedly was a cool series, but it made Iron Man the bad guy), and responsible for Captain America's death, and now this?
Iron Man was my fave character (A smooth but smart dude), but he's gone to shit in the past few years.
Thanks, Marvel.
Iron Man will be renaming himself "Palladium," fighting to keep your computer trustworthy against open terror!
;^)]]
I will be smelling stale milk for weeks after putting it out my nose laughing. I guess the "Heroes Happen Here" stuff isn't taking off?
--
Toro
(Note: I believe this article was about a new comic book, not the movie, which features "Iron Monger" (Jeff Bridges as Obadiah Stane) as the enemy.)
[[UAC warning: Someone is making a schizoid post! mod Funny or Informative? Yeah, you should probably just click "ignore"
I'm sure if the movie was sponsored by Red Hat, Sun and IBM, Iron Man would get his arse kicked by Big-Iron Man - who runs Linux of course.
I don't therefore I'm not.
- I voted for Nintendo and against Bush
Doesn't the ridiculous labelling of open source software as "terrorism" call into question all the other things that get labelled terrorism? Examples:
The ANC anti-Apartheid movement under the white South African government was labelled a terrorism. Nelson Mandela was public enemy number 1, the Osama Bin Laden of his time and place. White South Africa bought into their government's propaganda.
The White Rose organisation was labelled terrorist, and its leaders beheaded. for their non-violent anti-Nazi position in pre-WWII Nazi Germany. The German body politic bought into their government's propaganda.
Today, the word terrorism gets thrown around like some Muslim / Arab / Islamist (whatever that means) is hiding in the bushes outside your house with his AK-47 pointed at your door just waiting for you and your kids to step out so he can vent his hatred of your freedoms. The American people buy into their government's propaganda.
When you hear the label "terrorist" used, you should think about who is doing the labelling, and what exactly their agenda is rather than just taking their word for it that you are in danger and need their protection.
I hate printers.
The ones who have consistently followed terrorism patterns - extortion, blackmail, revolutionary tax, digital restrictions malware, mafia-controlled monopolies, forcing to upgrade, forcing to sell together with other products, etc. are those behind "Windows wants to be on every desktop". The only thing Linux advocacy does is helping people having a choice Microsoft would never give them.
But what else could you expect from stereotyped cartoons from the United Corporation of America?
I was about to say 13256278887989457651018865901401704640, but it appears this number is private property.
If you actually RTFA he is just using open source/closed source as metaphor.
Do you really this the world of entertainment really gives a fuck about the tensions between open and closed source?
Slashdot - News for nerds detached from reality.
Still, we have ATi (AMD) specifications at least. For many users, closed drivers are as good as no drivers.
For a few ideological zealots, closed source drivers are as good as, or worse than, no drivers. For "many users", closed source drivers make the product work and thus are fine.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
I can really only think of one company that would be "terrorized" by open source...
Ironic, really. One would think Steve Ballmer would be the ideal anti-hero.
Working in a DevOps shop is like playing in a band made up entirely of keytarists.
Well, this is a good reason to prohibit your children to read comic crap.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
These kinds of things frighten me because:
a) The people involved seem really adamant about something
b) You read the link, in it's entirety and you have no idea why
c) Worse, when you read it rationally, it makes no sense what they're talking about. It's like a random jumble of words
d) No, I'm not joking.
e) An open source terrorist? Sit down, deep breath. That's a random collection of words. Were there only closed source terrorists before?
f) People really are frightening after all.
Gut reaction: lynch mob time. /. comments: ...
Read TFForumPost: Wow... I thought I got nerdy with my fandoms...
Read more: Damn, they moved on quickly. lol @ suggestion of hero/villain alignment switch
Read the
I got nothin'.
The World's Worst Webcomic!
Assuming those binary blobs even work on your chosen operating system and processor, or the versions thereof.
how to invest, a novice's guide
I agree, however one must take into account the fact that the ANC viewed the entirety of white South Africa as the enemy. White South Africans on the whole (with few but very noble and notable exceptions) had racist views (partly the result of government propaganda and party the result of humans' latent xenophobia) and supported the government's racist policy. Furthermore, the average white South African treated blacks as slaves and expendable labourers, which made them appear as hostiles in the eyes of the blacks. Factory foremen brutalised their black workers, farmers often shot their farmhands just to make a point to the others and mining companies did not bother with even the most rudimentary of safety precautions for their mine workers, because in the eyes of management, the only good black was a dead black. Just because a person does not wear a uniform and salute, does not mean they cannot be a military type aggressor.
In fact, the US definition of "enemy combatant" is deliberately designed to allow civilians to be targeted by military action.
I hate printers.
Yeah, I run Damn Fickle Linux on my underclocked MC68000 with 256KB of RAM. I didn't engineer a PCIx slot into my setup just to have nVidia spit in my face like this!
which is totally what she said
"No ambiguity in the term"? When a roadside bomb attacking military vehicles is "terrorism", the word has lost all meaning.
Property is theft.
Imagine the FTF being founded with the idea to realize UNA (UNA is Not Al-Quada.)
...
Blueprints are available on how to setup your own organization. Crash courses in setting up your own cell, free formats to document the cell meeting minutes, open and verifiable systems to elect cell and organization leaders, recommended lingo to hide intentions (although open, the message encryption works but people are left guessing as to what you are conspiring about.)
However, a small but significant part is missing. There's no plan for the rocket. The base is there, the logistics, the whole organization, but no rocket. So reluctantly UNA uses rockets manufactured by evil corporations that do not allow you to modify them and only ause death and destruction with a very inferior sense of style.
Until one day a youngster from South-Jemen comes that desperately needs a rocket but is highly disappointed by the commodity but closed source rockets. So he boldly builds one himself and calls it Afred (he himself is called Alfred.) And he starts deploying it for his own purpose but uses the available UNA blueprints.
Before you know everyone is using Afred for the daily terrorism fix.
Then the FTF founder quite rightly points out that a missile launching compound consists of many more things than a missile. The missile is a vital part and without it no devastation takes place. However, one should not underestimate the infrastructure provided by UNA.
Compounds should not be referred to as Afred because that would not give sufficient credit to the FTF. Instead a more appropriate name is UNA/Afred. AT least so says the Saint of the Church of UNA, St. Ignitius (I bless thee missile.)
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
Iron Man hired villain's to kill other hero's. This new guy is only called a villain becuse he is lowering the bottom line. Money is was Iron Man cares about.
Remember the song "Iron Man"...
If it wasn't clear to you that governments love to use "terrorism" to demonize inconvenient political, social, or economic movements, you really haven't been paying attention. This has been going for as long as there have been governments.
For a stupid and corrupt movie script writer to do this really is only the tip of the iceberg.
I think this is far more simple than that (or it could be summarized by): You fear what you don't know. Most people don't know what open source means. So this is a potential source of fear. Most people don't know open source, but they have heard of it (especially the targeted audience:Young male). Hollywood movie plays with it.
Apartheid is always going to be a touchy subject, so I have to watch my words here, but... Nelson Mandela was a terrorist. That his cause was noble is beyond doubt, and his leadership of the post-Apartheid South Africa was magnificent, but the fact remains that he was the leader of Umkhonto we Sizwe, which carried out bombings of civilian targets and which was therefore a terrorist organisation.
They say that one man's freedom fighter is another man's terrorist, and I agree with the parent post that we have to be very sceptical whenever somebody uses the term "terrorist" because they usually have an agenda in doing so. But we also have to be careful not to condone acts that are genuinely terrorism just because we don't think the perpetrators are bad people. The world isn't made up of saints and sinners, and sometimes even good people cross a line.
-- Note to Mods: There is a good reason there's no "-1 Disagree" option. --
...farmers often shot their farmhands just to make a point to the others...Serious citation needed here. You can't make such a sweeping statement (*often*?!?) without giving at least some proof. I paid quite a lot of attention to the hearings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and I don't remember hearing any such thing.
...the average white South African treated blacks as slaves...That's a gross exaggeration. The average white South African was more or less indifferent. They played no part in actively oppressing blacks, but were happy to accept the advantages that the systemic oppression brought them, so long as it didn't cause too much trouble. It's hard to get people to stand up when other people's rights are being trampled, isn't it? Not a lot of Americans complained about the Trail of Tears either.
The trouble with politics is that it's the extremists who are most likely to be politically active. Decisions are made by those who show up, and those tend to be the people with strong views. Very few Russians in 1916 were enthusiastic communists; the rest were just prepared to go along with it. And very few South Africans in 1948 were hardcore racists; but they were OK with the fact that their government was made up of scumbags and that is their guilt.
-- Note to Mods: There is a good reason there's no "-1 Disagree" option. --
Please use the full, proper name of the villain... it's "Ezekiel GNU/Stane". Thank you, RMS.
Put your persecution complex away for a second, it was an analogy. Nowhere in this interview is open source software labeled terrorism, it is simply used as a metaphor.
Nice rant though.
-mcgrew
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Open source man, open source man,
Doin' the things that copyleft can,
What's he like? It's not important.
open source man.
Is he a geek, or is he a terrorist?
When he's on the internet does he distribute himself?
Or does the internet distribute him instead?
Nobody knows, open source man.
Iron man, Iron man.
Iron man hates open source man.
They have a fight, iron wins.
Iron man.
As I understand it, that's what the bomb itself does, very rapidly. ;)
:P
Oohhh you meant "instructions for making" rather than "ingredients. Never mind.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
Just remember... there was a time, when ATi didn't provide open drivers, nor specifications...
I always had the feeling, they open their specs, because they can't hold up with nvidia and closed source driver development...
and until today, I still prefer nVidia with closed source drivers over ATi with open drivers on my desktop...
even if nvidia has glitches with rects/shadows in opengl sometimes, and leaves nice grey stripes on my desktop with compiz (something which happened in windows too some time ago), the 3d, playback, 2d and so on work greatly and fast!
The closed ATi drivers don't offer everything, and the open ones cause Xv+kaffeine to crash my XServer from time to time, or have mouse cursor problems, and I have to tweak around all the time... so with ATi I can switch between performance+bugs and slowness+stability, in nvidia i have to install closed drivers from time to time but it is fast and stable... I prefer second option.
But that might change in future, of course.
But I wouldnt depict nVidia as evil, just because ATi (which was less supportive to linux) now opens its driverbase.
When a roadside bomb attacking military vehicles is "terrorism", the word has lost all meaning.
"Terrorism" was originally defined as violence against civilians to affect politics. How are actions against soldiers in any way considered "terrorism"? Yet the American government called the barracks bombing (pre-911, under Clinton IIRC) "terrorism" and the present terrorist-in-chief (if military actions against soldiers is terrorism then?) considers roadside bombs to be "terrorism", then as you say, the word has lost all meaning.
It is now just a propaganda ploy.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
If bombing civilians makes an organization terrorist, then any government which has engaged in mass aerial bombardment or artillery strikes is a terrorist.
Not that I disagree with that conclusion. It's all about who writes the history.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
"No ambiguity in the term"? When a roadside bomb attacking military vehicles is "terrorism", the word has lost all meaning.
The original post's line "No ambiguity in the term" reference was to Islamist, not terrorism. I'm not sure how that was confusing. But since you bring it up....
Do you think most people could go out on a limb and agree that suicide vest attacks at funerals, car bombings of schools, mass kidnappings (where the victims are likely to end up in mass graves ), and roadside bombs targeting children are still terrorism? What about attacking worshipers at a mosque with rockets? What about when they try to destroy an entire village? What about poison gas attacks on city government?
The fact that terrorists attack military and police units doesn't mean they aren't terrorists. The presence of a few police or soldiers at a site being attacked doesn't mean that the attack isn't terrorism.
The word terrorism hasn't lost its meaning, but some people seem to lack the ability to discuss it in a meaningful and reasonable way.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
In the article it's used as an ANALOGY.
Tony Stark is a closed source old school military industrial complex type. The new enemy is a diffuse open source agile terrorist type. Tony Stark finds that he and his closed source ways are having trouble keeping up with the open source stylings of his enemy.
P.S. It has NOTHING to do with the movie. Take off the tinfoil, this is an article about the new story arc in the comic book and is not part of a MIAA plot to take away your Linux.
I have a lot of opinions about Cyborgs and Architects
How is the parent a troll? Sigh. The moderators must be smoking up again.
Linux would never have become what it is today if it hadn't been for widespread documentation of hardware-software interfaces. "The next Linux" will need the same. It boggles the mind how many Linux users refuse to understand that.
http://outcampaign.org/
Incorrect. The installer merely compiles a wrapper around the blob in order to interface it with your kernel. The installer is not the "blob"; you can extract the (clearly unencrypted) tarball from it, as is done in many distributions to automate the build.
Once you've had the experience of a system software upgrade rendering hardware unusable, and the manufacturer flat doesn't want to provide new drivers for old equipment, you will immediately see the value of open source drivers.
A working closed driver is nice when it supports your system. An open driver means that if more than four or five hardcore geeks out there run a similar system as you, you WILL have a driver.
So no, for day to day use on current consumer desktops that are free to update and reinstall whenever, closed drivers aren't a big deal. That isn't the only type of system out there.
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
Once you do this, then explain how the US would not be a state sponsor of terror, based on our confirmed historical support of right-wing paramilitaries in Nicaragua, and our more recent involvement funding warlords in Somalia, and violent separatist groups in Iran.
For extra-credit, justify the US's refusal to prosecute perpetrators the My Lai massacre, or our WW2 era concepts of total war, or even better, the African National Congress's tendency to or Irgun.
After you finish with the mental acrobatics necessary to do such a thing, then apply these new and broad standards to Hezbollah, Hamas, or the Mahdi army.
The point? Things are not black and white, and we do not possess any moral high-ground upon which to condemn others. Terrorism is just a tactic, one used for good and bad. And at the same time, a tactic that kills far less people then organized war.
In the comics recently, Iron Man has contradicted some of your statements somewhat.
... because Tony has very much become Microsoft. In fact, I can't read comics where Iron Man appears anymore, because every time the character opens his mouth I can't understand why they are still calling him a hero, when he seems to really have become little more than a smarter, more modernized version of Doctor Doom.
Marvel recently had a big crossover plot line called "Civil War," in which it was decided that superheroes were too dangerous to have running around without government oversight. They were all required to register with the Federal government. If they failed to do so, they were subject to imprisonment in one of SHIELD's top-security prisons designed for supervillains.
Who was the main man responsible for hunting down his fellow heroes and former comrades? Tony Stark, the invincible Iron Man.
In fact, Tony went on to become the head of SHIELD, the government's most ultra-secret spy organization (think more oversight than the FBI, more freedom than the CIA). In most respects, they've taken the "Tony is a billionaire industrialist" angle and spun it into "Tony is an arch-conservative storm trooper of the old guard of manufacturing wealth, using the power of the government to enforce a neo-facist agenda that goes contrary to 50 years of Marvel Comics philosophy."
It's interesting that they are portraying the latest villain as an "open source" one
Breakfast served all day!
Some of the groups labeled as 'terrorist' are vile, evil, and deserve to be wiped off the Earth.
I'm assuming you mean the groups need to be wiped off the face of the earth, since after all it is presumed that the people in the groups still have their human rights and deserve fair trials, right?
So if you mean an entire ideology should die out, then doesn't that require a form of thought police?
Actions should be punished, not beliefs.
If a civilian in the US were to attack our government troops it would be an illegal act.
Kind of like when civilians fired on British troops during the US Revolution? The winning side's "freedom fighters" are the losing side's "terrorists".
If you target civilians for political purposes it's terrorism. Calling anything else "terrorism" is propaganda, and a lie to boot.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest