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Silicon Valley Security Experts Give 'Blackhat' a Thumbs-Up; Do You?
HughPickens.com writes Cade Metz writes that last week Parisa Tabriz, head of Google's Chrome security team, helped arrange an early screening of Michael Mann's Blackhat in San Francisco for 200-odd security specialists from Google, Facebook, Apple, Tesla, Twitter, Square, Cisco, and other parts of Silicon Valley's close-knit security community, and their response to the film was shockingly positive. "Judging from the screening Q&A—and the pointed ways this audience reacted during the screening—you could certainly argue Blackhat is the best hacking movie ever made," writes Metz. "Many info-sec specialists will tell you how much they like Sneakers—the 1992 film with Robert Redford, Sidney Poitier, Dan Ackroyd, Ben Kingsley, and River Phoenix—but few films have so closely hewed to info-sec reality as Mann's new movie, fashioned in his characteristic pseudo-documentary style." "Unlike others, this is a film about a real person, not a stereotype—a real guy with real problems thrust into a real situation," says Mark Abene. "The technology—and the disasters—in the film were real, or at least plausible.
Director Michael Mann worked closely with Kevin Poulsen in researching, writing, and shooting the film. Like Hemsworth's character, Poulsen spent time in prison for his hacking exploits, and Mann says his input was invaluable. "It's the first crime-thriller to hinge so heavily on hacking without becoming silly." says Poulson. "We put a lot of work into finding plausible ways that malware and hosting arrangements and all these other things could be used to advance the plot and all of that I think turned out pretty nice." I'm a fan of Michael Mann, and the previews I've seen of Blackhat make it look at least like a passable thriller. For anyone who's seen the film already, what did you think?
Director Michael Mann worked closely with Kevin Poulsen in researching, writing, and shooting the film. Like Hemsworth's character, Poulsen spent time in prison for his hacking exploits, and Mann says his input was invaluable. "It's the first crime-thriller to hinge so heavily on hacking without becoming silly." says Poulson. "We put a lot of work into finding plausible ways that malware and hosting arrangements and all these other things could be used to advance the plot and all of that I think turned out pretty nice." I'm a fan of Michael Mann, and the previews I've seen of Blackhat make it look at least like a passable thriller. For anyone who's seen the film already, what did you think?
No matter how good, I won't pay Hollywood or the mpaa. Period.
Silence is a state of mime.
Where have I head this before? Oh right - Blackhat is the Interstellar of info-sec terrorism films - sigh
Interesting analogy, because the "accuracy" in Interstellar actually was somewhat distracting to me because it made the areas that weren't accurate stand out more.
OK, so there are magic space aliens driving the plot at some point. That I didn't have a problem with. Magic space aliens doing magic, whatever, it drives the movie, willful suspension of disbelief and all that.
Infinite fuel space-planes and the magical spaceship that somehow carried enough supplies for a multi-year mission while looking way too small to do that, on the other hand - those annoyed me. If they hadn't gone for the "realistic" initial spaceship launch I probably could have binned those into the "magic space aliens" "suspension of disbelief" category and just ignored them, but when you go for "realism" you need to go for "realism" everywhere.
Sounds like it's the same with this movie. OK, so the hacking is super realistic, great. Too bad the rest of the movie isn't, making the contrast just that much more jarring.
(That being said, I enjoyed Interstellar. It's a good movie. The science stuff is still a bit bogus, but the core movie is good. Sounds like the same can't be said for Blackhat based on the reviews I've seen.)
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
Terrible. It insulted my intelligence at every opportunity. To pick just three:
This movie insulted my intelligence at every turn. I have a long (and spoilerific) list of all the what-the no-they-didn't good-Christ moments I saw in the movie; if there's interest I'll post them here.
I'm aware of the studies. I've read and applied Beyond Brawn by Stuart McRobert, just about half the books by Ellington Darden, the Nautilus Bulletins by Arthur Jones, Heavy Duty 2 by Mike Mentzer, every article at Cyberpump (back when all of the site content was free), Power Factor Training by John Little and Pete Sisco, articles by Doug McGuff and Drew Baye, and even the Power of 10 by Adam Zickerman and Super Slow: The Ultimate Exercise Protocol by Ken Hutchins. I've also read the fitness research paper published in the June 2004 edition of the Journal of Exercise Physiology online. I've worked out as often as every other day to as infrequently as once every three weeks. I've done routines with full body single set circuits at each workout. I've also done routines with different muscle group splits. I've trained to concentric failure, to static failure, and even occasionally to eccentric failure. All that from 1996 to 2014 and in all cases the gains stopped after the first few weeks and plateaued for months until I quit and started over.
The only thing great about HIT is that it's easier on the joints. When I do higher volume work I tend to develop joint pain, and of course in the long run it's better to have barely-better-than-untrained muscles and healthy joints than strong muscles and damaged joints.
Strength training studies are problematic. A trainee can hold back at the initial strength test, thus giving false gains at the end of the study. The trainees can do additional workouts outside of the supervision of the study supervisors. Study participants can be using steroids. Perhaps worst of all, regaining muscle mass you formerly possessed tends to be much faster than gaining new muscle mass. ( There are several studies that document this. One such link: http://www.thinkmuscle.com/art... ) Most workout studies don't control for the influence of this factor on outcomes or try to control for it but only rely upon word-of-mouth of the study participants, which is unreliable. So if you conduct a strength study and your random assignment of subjects puts five people that each used to have twenty more pounds of muscle mass in one group, they're going to make much greater gains in a shorter time than other subjects in the same group, and skew your results. If you're familiar with Arthur Jones' "Colorado Experiment", the two research subjects had both gained and then lost over thirty pounds of muscle in the years before the experiment. So the fact that they made massive gains on HIT doesn't mean anything for trainees that had never previously had thirty additional pounds of muscle.