This is a pretty advanced hack. If I had it hazard to guess someone got into sonys Vpn on a high level adminstrative account.
I remember early on it was suggested this is an inside job. Which would make sense, a disgruntled former employee used his access to take a bunch of shit, and then uses the Interview as a smoke screen to just unload on the people they think wronged them.
Again this feels more punitive than some NK group. This is someone wanting to hurt sony.
Even as an IT guy I have to go through like 2 managers to go anywhere near data containing people's SSNS and health records.
Either Sony's security is absolutely laughable or someone got access to a server administrator level account.
At that level if Sony wasn't using two point authentication for VPN access they're completely inexcusably retarded.
Yeah, it was a good 7-8 years ago that our company scoured SSNs from the majority of accessible drives. If you're as big as Sony, you've got a legal department that (should have) already made sure that shit is on lockdown.
If working in corporate america has taught me anything its that just because something should be impossible to get access to, doesn't mean it is. I bet the security update was something that was budgeted for 2015.
I would like some money because these are artisanal nuggets of wisdom philistine.
And if the last decade has taught me anything, it's that when something couldn't have happened a certain way without several people being impossibly stupid, that's probably exactly what happened, and probably in an even stupider way than you imagined.
It would not surprise me if Sony's security system was literally built out of clown shoes.
I submitted an entry to Lego Ideas, and if 10,000 people support me, it'll be turned into an actual Lego set!If you'd like to see and support my submission, follow this link.
something that basically already happened in Team America: World Police.
Ohhh yeah. I forgot they killed Kim Jong Il at the end of Team America.
yeah, people tend to forget that Trey Parker and Matt Stone have already done everything a crazy group could be offended at. Like how people went nuts when they planned to show Mohamed in a cartoon but completely forgot that they had already had him on the show several times.
It'll be interesting to see the South Park take on this. I wouldn't be surprised if there is an entire episode dedicated to killing NK's dictator, a la Kenny. "Oh my god, they killed Kim Jong-un. You bastards!"
But yeah, now I'm going to see "The Interview" just on general principle.
Can this country please stop pissing it's fucking pants about everything
I remember back in the day when Men were Men and Women were Women; when pants came with a spare leg and cars came with full sized spares. When we could supersize our meals without a second glance; when velcro was invented and was subsequently called 'the lazy man's lace' by TIME magazine; when TIME magazine was just a magazine with clock faces; a time before Family Guy, when it was called ALL IN THE FAMILY; when coffee was strong and the baristas were stronger; when we had to staple sticky notes to surfaces because glue hadn't been perfected yet; when every store accepted every coupon and when bottle caps were used as pacifiers; before all this nambly-pambly, wishy-washy weak society, we were a society of the greats, like Aristotle, and Shaq, and abacuses and beer cans made of tin, when we'd mix our milk with gin and be goddamn happy about it.
Youths
"A new take on the epic fantasy genre... Darkly comic, relatable characters... twisted storyline."
"Readers who prefer tension and romance, Maledictions: The Offering, delivers... As serious YA fiction, I’ll give it five stars out of five. As a novel? Four and a half." - Liz Ellor My new novel: Maledictions: The Offering. Now in Paperback!
AstaerethIn the belly of the beastRegistered Userregular
Apropos of nothing, dammit, nothing, this is a great Grantland piece about how today's studio leadership is a bunch of risk-averse, corporatized assholes slowly crushing all hope of joy and beauty in films in favor of sequels and franchises extending from now on into the future.
Some choice quotes:
What the movie industry is about, in 2014, is creating a sense of anticipation in its target audience that is so heightened, so nurtured, and so constant that moviegoers are effectively distracted from how infrequently their expectations are actually satisfied. Movies are no longer about the thing; they’re about the next thing, the tease, the Easter egg, the post-credit sequence, the promise of a future at which the moment we’re in can only hint.
So it’s appropriate that the two most important movie events of 2014 weren’t movies at all, but rather what amounted to a pair of live-action trailers. The first came at a Time Warner investors’ summit, when chairman/CEO Kevin Tsujihara announced a slate of 10 Warner Bros. movies based on DC Comics characters to be released between 2016 and 2020. The second came two weeks later, when Marvel Studios chief Kevin Feige took the stage of Hollywood’s El Capitan Theatre, at a fan-service event that had every bit of the importance and money-consciousness of a shareholders’ meeting, to announce Marvel’s “Phase 3”: the nine movies, to be released over the same stretch as DC’s lineup, that will follow the 12 movies in “Phase 1” and “Phase 2.”
[...]
A successful franchise is no longer used to finance the rest of a studio’s lineup; a studio’s lineup is brands and franchises, and that’s it. Disney,3 of all the big companies, is the closest to approaching the absolute zero of this ideal — its movies are virtually all branded, whether Lucasfilm, Pixar, Marvel, or Walt Disney Studios — and anyone who doesn’t imagine that other studio CFOs are gazing at that model in envy and wonder is delusional. Disney is a kingdom of subkingdoms. Nothing minor or modest need apply.
[...]
I believe that what studios see when they look at the bumper-to-bumper barricade of a 2015–20 lineup they’ve built is a sense of security — a feeling that they have gotten their ducks in a row. But these lists, with their tremulous certainty that there is safety in numbers, especially when numbers come at the end of a title, represent something else as well: rigidity and fear. If you asked a bunch of executives without a creative bone in their bodies to craft a movie lineup for which the primary goal is to prevent failure, this is exactly what the defensive result would look like. It’s a bulwark that has been constructed using only those tools with which they feel comfortable — spreadsheets, P&L statements, demographic studies, risk-avoidance principles, and a calendar. There is no evident love of movies in this lineup, or even just joy in creative risk. Only a dread of losing.
At this point, optimists usually say lighten up, because, after all, good movies always find a way to get through. But here’s the thing: They don’t. The evidence that good movies survive is the fact that every year brings good movies, which is a bit like saying that climate change is a hoax because it’s nice out today. Yes, good movies sprout up, inevitably, in the cracks and seams between the tectonic plates on which all of these franchises stay balanced, and we are reassured of their hardiness. But we don’t see what we don’t see; we don’t see the effort, or the cost of the effort, or the movies of which we’re deprived because of the cost of the effort. Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice may have come from a studio, but it still required a substantial chunk of outside financing, and at $35 million, it’s not even that expensive. No studio could find the $8.5 million it cost Dan Gilroy to make Nightcrawler. Birdman cost a mere $18 million and still had to scrape that together at the last minute. Imagine American movie culture for the last few years without Her or Foxcatcher or American Hustle or The Master or Zero Dark Thirty and it suddenly looks markedly more frail — and those movies exist only because of the fairy godmothership of independent producer Megan Ellison. The grace of billionaires is not a great business model on which to hang the hopes of an art form.
[...]
Think of how old you’ll be in 2020. Where will you be in your life? What will be different? Do you imagine that your taste will be exactly what it is today? Hollywood profoundly hopes the answer is yes. Your sameness is what it prays for.
Apropos of nothing, dammit, nothing, this is a great Grantland piece about how today's studio leadership is a bunch of risk-averse, corporatized assholes slowly crushing all hope of joy and beauty in films in favor of sequels and franchises extending from now on into the future.
Some choice quotes:
What the movie industry is about, in 2014, is creating a sense of anticipation in its target audience that is so heightened, so nurtured, and so constant that moviegoers are effectively distracted from how infrequently their expectations are actually satisfied. Movies are no longer about the thing; they’re about the next thing, the tease, the Easter egg, the post-credit sequence, the promise of a future at which the moment we’re in can only hint.
So it’s appropriate that the two most important movie events of 2014 weren’t movies at all, but rather what amounted to a pair of live-action trailers. The first came at a Time Warner investors’ summit, when chairman/CEO Kevin Tsujihara announced a slate of 10 Warner Bros. movies based on DC Comics characters to be released between 2016 and 2020. The second came two weeks later, when Marvel Studios chief Kevin Feige took the stage of Hollywood’s El Capitan Theatre, at a fan-service event that had every bit of the importance and money-consciousness of a shareholders’ meeting, to announce Marvel’s “Phase 3”: the nine movies, to be released over the same stretch as DC’s lineup, that will follow the 12 movies in “Phase 1” and “Phase 2.”
[...]
A successful franchise is no longer used to finance the rest of a studio’s lineup; a studio’s lineup is brands and franchises, and that’s it. Disney,3 of all the big companies, is the closest to approaching the absolute zero of this ideal — its movies are virtually all branded, whether Lucasfilm, Pixar, Marvel, or Walt Disney Studios — and anyone who doesn’t imagine that other studio CFOs are gazing at that model in envy and wonder is delusional. Disney is a kingdom of subkingdoms. Nothing minor or modest need apply.
[...]
I believe that what studios see when they look at the bumper-to-bumper barricade of a 2015–20 lineup they’ve built is a sense of security — a feeling that they have gotten their ducks in a row. But these lists, with their tremulous certainty that there is safety in numbers, especially when numbers come at the end of a title, represent something else as well: rigidity and fear. If you asked a bunch of executives without a creative bone in their bodies to craft a movie lineup for which the primary goal is to prevent failure, this is exactly what the defensive result would look like. It’s a bulwark that has been constructed using only those tools with which they feel comfortable — spreadsheets, P&L statements, demographic studies, risk-avoidance principles, and a calendar. There is no evident love of movies in this lineup, or even just joy in creative risk. Only a dread of losing.
At this point, optimists usually say lighten up, because, after all, good movies always find a way to get through. But here’s the thing: They don’t. The evidence that good movies survive is the fact that every year brings good movies, which is a bit like saying that climate change is a hoax because it’s nice out today. Yes, good movies sprout up, inevitably, in the cracks and seams between the tectonic plates on which all of these franchises stay balanced, and we are reassured of their hardiness. But we don’t see what we don’t see; we don’t see the effort, or the cost of the effort, or the movies of which we’re deprived because of the cost of the effort. Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice may have come from a studio, but it still required a substantial chunk of outside financing, and at $35 million, it’s not even that expensive. No studio could find the $8.5 million it cost Dan Gilroy to make Nightcrawler. Birdman cost a mere $18 million and still had to scrape that together at the last minute. Imagine American movie culture for the last few years without Her or Foxcatcher or American Hustle or The Master or Zero Dark Thirty and it suddenly looks markedly more frail — and those movies exist only because of the fairy godmothership of independent producer Megan Ellison. The grace of billionaires is not a great business model on which to hang the hopes of an art form.
[...]
Think of how old you’ll be in 2020. Where will you be in your life? What will be different? Do you imagine that your taste will be exactly what it is today? Hollywood profoundly hopes the answer is yes. Your sameness is what it prays for.
Yes. Movies having branding, being risk averse, encouraging sequels for franchises and execs crushing creativity never existed in the past.
"Think of how old you’ll be in 2020. Where will you be in your life? What will be different? Do you imagine that your taste will be exactly what it is today? Hollywood profoundly hopes the answer is yes. Your sameness is what it prays for."
While Hollywood might wish for things to stay the same things are certainly changing and changing all the time.
Apropos of nothing, dammit, nothing, this is a great Grantland piece about how today's studio leadership is a bunch of risk-averse, corporatized assholes slowly crushing all hope of joy and beauty in films in favor of sequels and franchises extending from now on into the future.
Some choice quotes:
What the movie industry is about, in 2014, is creating a sense of anticipation in its target audience that is so heightened, so nurtured, and so constant that moviegoers are effectively distracted from how infrequently their expectations are actually satisfied. Movies are no longer about the thing; they’re about the next thing, the tease, the Easter egg, the post-credit sequence, the promise of a future at which the moment we’re in can only hint.
So it’s appropriate that the two most important movie events of 2014 weren’t movies at all, but rather what amounted to a pair of live-action trailers. The first came at a Time Warner investors’ summit, when chairman/CEO Kevin Tsujihara announced a slate of 10 Warner Bros. movies based on DC Comics characters to be released between 2016 and 2020. The second came two weeks later, when Marvel Studios chief Kevin Feige took the stage of Hollywood’s El Capitan Theatre, at a fan-service event that had every bit of the importance and money-consciousness of a shareholders’ meeting, to announce Marvel’s “Phase 3”: the nine movies, to be released over the same stretch as DC’s lineup, that will follow the 12 movies in “Phase 1” and “Phase 2.”
[...]
A successful franchise is no longer used to finance the rest of a studio’s lineup; a studio’s lineup is brands and franchises, and that’s it. Disney,3 of all the big companies, is the closest to approaching the absolute zero of this ideal — its movies are virtually all branded, whether Lucasfilm, Pixar, Marvel, or Walt Disney Studios — and anyone who doesn’t imagine that other studio CFOs are gazing at that model in envy and wonder is delusional. Disney is a kingdom of subkingdoms. Nothing minor or modest need apply.
[...]
I believe that what studios see when they look at the bumper-to-bumper barricade of a 2015–20 lineup they’ve built is a sense of security — a feeling that they have gotten their ducks in a row. But these lists, with their tremulous certainty that there is safety in numbers, especially when numbers come at the end of a title, represent something else as well: rigidity and fear. If you asked a bunch of executives without a creative bone in their bodies to craft a movie lineup for which the primary goal is to prevent failure, this is exactly what the defensive result would look like. It’s a bulwark that has been constructed using only those tools with which they feel comfortable — spreadsheets, P&L statements, demographic studies, risk-avoidance principles, and a calendar. There is no evident love of movies in this lineup, or even just joy in creative risk. Only a dread of losing.
At this point, optimists usually say lighten up, because, after all, good movies always find a way to get through. But here’s the thing: They don’t. The evidence that good movies survive is the fact that every year brings good movies, which is a bit like saying that climate change is a hoax because it’s nice out today. Yes, good movies sprout up, inevitably, in the cracks and seams between the tectonic plates on which all of these franchises stay balanced, and we are reassured of their hardiness. But we don’t see what we don’t see; we don’t see the effort, or the cost of the effort, or the movies of which we’re deprived because of the cost of the effort. Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice may have come from a studio, but it still required a substantial chunk of outside financing, and at $35 million, it’s not even that expensive. No studio could find the $8.5 million it cost Dan Gilroy to make Nightcrawler. Birdman cost a mere $18 million and still had to scrape that together at the last minute. Imagine American movie culture for the last few years without Her or Foxcatcher or American Hustle or The Master or Zero Dark Thirty and it suddenly looks markedly more frail — and those movies exist only because of the fairy godmothership of independent producer Megan Ellison. The grace of billionaires is not a great business model on which to hang the hopes of an art form.
[...]
Think of how old you’ll be in 2020. Where will you be in your life? What will be different? Do you imagine that your taste will be exactly what it is today? Hollywood profoundly hopes the answer is yes. Your sameness is what it prays for.
Yes. Movies having branding, being risk averse, encouraging sequels for franchises and execs crushing creativity never existed in the past.
If you read the article, about half of the text is refuting that statement. Here, have some:
Over the 25 years that followed Star Wars, franchises went from being a part of the business to a big part of the business. Big, but not defining: Even as late as 1999, for instance, only four of the year’s 35 top grossers were sequels.
That’s not where we are anymore. In 2014, franchises are not a big part of the movie business. They are not the biggest part of the movie business. They are the movie business. Period. Twelve of the year’s 14 highest grossers are, or will spawn, sequels. (The sole exceptions — assuming they remain exceptions, which is iffy — are Big Hero 6 and Maleficent.)
Tsujihara has an MBA from Stanford. He started out managing Time Warner’s interest in Six Flags theme parks, then moved to home entertainment, and early last year took over the whole business. He has never produced a movie; in fact, he is the first studio head to rise in the ranks purely through brand extension and ancillary divisions, and brand extension is what he’s all about. Besides the DC announcement, his big accomplishments have been to nail down those three additional Rowling movies to add to the studio’s portfolio of eight, and to turn one Lego movie into four — a ninja Lego movie, a Batman Lego movie, and (for purists, I suppose) The Lego Movie 2. This is what successful purveyors of goods do; they make more of what sells, they cull what doesn’t from the lineup, and they seek to create products in which quality-of-execution variability is never going to be too much of a wild card.
Tsujihara’s counterpart at Universal is Jeff Shell, who became the chairman of Universal Filmed Entertainment Group a year ago. He has never made or overseen a movie either; he emerged from the corporate division of Comcast, the Philadelphia-based cable company that now owns Universal, and soon after he got the job, one executive sighed to Variety that “he doesn’t understand the big dreams or the big risks.” That may be true, but it is equally true that those are clearly not among the job qualifications.
Guys like Tsujihara and Shell are the future disguised as the present. Right now, they exist atop studios side by side with rivals who came up the old-fashioned way, like Alan Horn, who worked in television production, cofounded Castle Rock, went on to run Warner Bros., and now chairs Walt Disney Studios, or Amy Pascal, who brought decades of production and development experience to her 12-years-and-counting chairmanship of Sony’s Motion Picture Group. It’s easy to look at Tsujihara and Shell in one column and Horn and Pascal in another and simply conclude that there are a lot of different types of people who can run a studio and make it work. But that’s not what’s going on. What we are witnessing is not stability but transition — the evolutionary moment of overlap in Hollywood when the old way and the new way transiently coexist. Ten years from now, the old way will be gone. The new way will simply be the way.
The author also talks about how it used to be laughable to secure a release date for a movie two years in advance; how they would never announce 4- or 5- or 10-year plans; how the movie business used to be interested in following trends and participating in contemporary conversations but now designs its products to be "movies that retreat almost completely from any kind of temporal or cultural specificity that might feel short-lived or exclusionary."
But consider how much of Hollywood’s collective effort and money and insistence and attention that roster is going to consume, and I think that if you love movies, you have to sigh a little. And if you care, you have to resist consoling yourself by claiming it was ever thus, because it wasn’t.
Back to Bond movies. I forgot even though they were kind of silly, Brosnan's Bond was a rather vicious person. Like I'd say he's even more mean spirited than Craig, if only because he seems to enjoy the killing. Always finishing someone off with a smile.
I mean this is a guy who killed his villains by
Dropping them from height
Flat out Execution
Squeezed to death by a helicopter (good bye xenia)
Ground up by a drill missile
Blown up while your foot is trapped thus seeing your fate coming
Impaled by a nuclear rod (ok world is not enough is still the worst jesus)
And finally tossed into a god damn plane engine
Ice Fucking cold.
I would like some money because these are artisanal nuggets of wisdom philistine.
Back to Bond movies. I forgot even though they were kind of silly, Brosnan's Bond was a rather vicious person. Like I'd say he's even more mean spirited than Craig, if only because he seems to enjoy the killing. Always finishing someone off with a smile.
I mean this is a guy who killed his villains by
Dropping them from height
Flat out Execution
Squeezed to death by a helicopter (good bye xenia)
Ground up by a drill missile
Blown up while your foot is trapped thus seeing your fate coming
Impaled by a nuclear rod (ok world is not enough is still the worst jesus)
I wonder now if this will drive a bunch of interest or none at all. I could see people wanting to see the movie now just to "stick it to terrorists" but I still think its a bit tin foil to suggest Sony buried their own movie with a hack attack.
I would like some money because these are artisanal nuggets of wisdom philistine.
Posts
Spoiler for the movie.
Yes they apparently do, or someone does, they had to tone down his exploding head for the r rating.
pleasepaypreacher.net
Diablo 3 - ArtfulDodger#1572
Minecraft - ArtfulDodger42
Even as an IT guy I have to go through like 2 managers to go anywhere near data containing people's SSNS and health records.
Either Sony's security is absolutely laughable or someone got access to a server administrator level account.
At that level if Sony wasn't using two point authentication for VPN access they're completely inexcusably retarded.
pleasepaypreacher.net
It would not surprise me if Sony's security system was literally built out of clown shoes.
Obama likes white people, Michelle Obama does not. Boom your fox news headline for this story.
pleasepaypreacher.net
She's right. The book is dramatically better.
And just like that we let the terrorists win.
pleasepaypreacher.net
Holy shit, I didn't expect this.
*insert joke about now I know how to stop the next Taken movie*
pleasepaypreacher.net
Ohhh yeah. I forgot they killed Kim Jong Il at the end of Team America.
Parker and Stone must be jealous they didn't get this much attention for that.
To be honest I'm surprised, if it is them, it took this long to act on Hollywood making fun of them.
pleasepaypreacher.net
yeah, people tend to forget that Trey Parker and Matt Stone have already done everything a crazy group could be offended at. Like how people went nuts when they planned to show Mohamed in a cartoon but completely forgot that they had already had him on the show several times.
Best Korea dares win.
Shitty Tumblr:lighthouse1138.tumblr.com
PSN/Steam/NNID: SyphonBlue | BNet: SyphonBlue#1126
But yeah, now I'm going to see "The Interview" just on general principle.
Diablo 3 - ArtfulDodger#1572
Minecraft - ArtfulDodger42
Hollywood retroactively removes Die Another Day, wait that might actually be something good...
pleasepaypreacher.net
I remember back in the day when Men were Men and Women were Women; when pants came with a spare leg and cars came with full sized spares. When we could supersize our meals without a second glance; when velcro was invented and was subsequently called 'the lazy man's lace' by TIME magazine; when TIME magazine was just a magazine with clock faces; a time before Family Guy, when it was called ALL IN THE FAMILY; when coffee was strong and the baristas were stronger; when we had to staple sticky notes to surfaces because glue hadn't been perfected yet; when every store accepted every coupon and when bottle caps were used as pacifiers; before all this nambly-pambly, wishy-washy weak society, we were a society of the greats, like Aristotle, and Shaq, and abacuses and beer cans made of tin, when we'd mix our milk with gin and be goddamn happy about it.
Youths
"Readers who prefer tension and romance, Maledictions: The Offering, delivers... As serious YA fiction, I’ll give it five stars out of five. As a novel? Four and a half." - Liz Ellor
My new novel: Maledictions: The Offering. Now in Paperback!
pleasepaypreacher.net
Some choice quotes:
Yes. Movies having branding, being risk averse, encouraging sequels for franchises and execs crushing creativity never existed in the past.
pleasepaypreacher.net
While Hollywood might wish for things to stay the same things are certainly changing and changing all the time.
Franco can stay, Rogen's voted off the island.
If you read the article, about half of the text is refuting that statement. Here, have some:
The author also talks about how it used to be laughable to secure a release date for a movie two years in advance; how they would never announce 4- or 5- or 10-year plans; how the movie business used to be interested in following trends and participating in contemporary conversations but now designs its products to be "movies that retreat almost completely from any kind of temporal or cultural specificity that might feel short-lived or exclusionary."
I mean this is a guy who killed his villains by
Dropping them from height
Flat out Execution
Squeezed to death by a helicopter (good bye xenia)
Ground up by a drill missile
Blown up while your foot is trapped thus seeing your fate coming
Impaled by a nuclear rod (ok world is not enough is still the worst jesus)
And finally tossed into a god damn plane engine
Ice Fucking cold.
pleasepaypreacher.net
I don't even care if it was going to be terrible, now I want to see it to spite everyone.
Pfff. Dalton Bond 4 Life.
pleasepaypreacher.net
Just send it straight to On-Demand followed by a quick delivery to Netflix.
Wat. If they ever remove Die Another Day for Bond punching North Koreans, they'd have to take away the excellent Goldfinger, too.
pleasepaypreacher.net
Bask in it.
Also, the cellist.
FFXIV - Milliardo Beoulve/Sargatanas