This Fourth of July has probably got to be one of the most depressing in recent memory for me. It's depressing because what has been for almost two and a half centuries a celebration of freedom feels so unspeakably hollow to me. And it shouldn't.
Showing posts with label WTF. Show all posts
Showing posts with label WTF. Show all posts
Thursday, July 4, 2013
Saturday, December 22, 2012
Winter of Discontent
I cannot tell: the world is grown so bad,
That wrens make prey where eagles dare not perch …
--”Richard III”, Act I, Scene iii
By now, everybody on the planet who has access to a radio, a TV, or an Internet connection has heard of the Newtown shootings. It’s arguably one of the most heinous events this year, and likely will be in American history for many years to come. If Euripides, Aristophanes, and Sophocles sat down together and tried to create the ultimate tragedy storyline, they probably couldn’t have bettered Newtown if they had a hundred years to work on it. And once again, in the face of incomprehensible horror, we’re hearing the same chorus of voices.
“It’s the guns! Ban ALL the guns!”
“It’s the violent media! It’s Hollywood movies and video games! Burn them all!”
“It’s the press! It’s all their fault! Make them stop reporting tragedies!”
“It’s the lunatics! Lock them all up for our own good!”
There is the understandable desire to Do Something, or failing that to be Seen As Doing Something. There are going to be blue ribbon panels. There are going to be Congressional hearings. There will be more drama and agony in the next year or so then there was during the actual event that sparked the whole thing. And it will not end well for anybody.
That wrens make prey where eagles dare not perch …
--”Richard III”, Act I, Scene iii
By now, everybody on the planet who has access to a radio, a TV, or an Internet connection has heard of the Newtown shootings. It’s arguably one of the most heinous events this year, and likely will be in American history for many years to come. If Euripides, Aristophanes, and Sophocles sat down together and tried to create the ultimate tragedy storyline, they probably couldn’t have bettered Newtown if they had a hundred years to work on it. And once again, in the face of incomprehensible horror, we’re hearing the same chorus of voices.
“It’s the guns! Ban ALL the guns!”
“It’s the violent media! It’s Hollywood movies and video games! Burn them all!”
“It’s the press! It’s all their fault! Make them stop reporting tragedies!”
“It’s the lunatics! Lock them all up for our own good!”
There is the understandable desire to Do Something, or failing that to be Seen As Doing Something. There are going to be blue ribbon panels. There are going to be Congressional hearings. There will be more drama and agony in the next year or so then there was during the actual event that sparked the whole thing. And it will not end well for anybody.
Wednesday, April 27, 2011
PSN'ing Me Off - Sony's Failure to Secure The PlayStation Network
Let us establish first and foremost the basic position in which Sony now finds itself with the gaming public: they are fucked.
Some of you will doubtlessly protest my very strong language and crude imagery regarding the current situation with Sony's PlayStation Network. Some of you probably expect nothing less. Either way, I stand by my assertion. The scenario that has played out couldn't possibly be conceived, even with assistance from LSD, salvia, shrooms, and mescaline all mixed together. DDOSing the PSN, that sort of thing should be something that any network engineer, security oriented or not, ought to be factoring into their designs when they build something like this. But this has gone way beyond a mere botnet or script kiddie attack. Somebody, or a group of somebodies, didn't just shut down the PSN the way that Anonymous "accidentally" did a few weeks ago. They broke in and made off with user data. How much user data?
Try all of it.
There are, best estimate, some 70 million PSN accounts. Those accounts contain names, addresses, and most importantly, credit card info. And every last bit of that data was taken. This is light-years above owning a box on Sony's network. It's like the Great Train Robbery, only considerably worse. What could you do with essentially unfettered access to 70 million credit and debit cards? Depends on how smart you were about it. The best part, from the perspective of the hackers, is that Sony has actually helped them get away with this. How so? By not owning up to the fact that they got hacked, and not owning up to the fact that personal data was lost. Because Sony sat around with their thumbs up their asses, putting out milquetoast "updates" which informed without actually enlightening anybody, and ignored the rising degree of protests far longer than they should have, they essentially covered for the hackers. Their prevarications have given those guys at least a week's head start to play around with other people's money.
One thing that should be kept in mind at moments like this is that it really is smart to avoid ascribing malicious motives to certain actions which can be better explained by basic stupidity. Consider Patrick Seybold, the Senior Director of Corporate Communications and Social Media for Sony. It's tempting to paint him as an outright villain, a corporate mouthpiece stooge who propagated a farrago of lies by repeating over and over, "we don't know how bad it really is" for six whole days. But it's perhaps more accurate to look at him as being stupid. The less flattering view would be the typical suit, a guy who is in the habit of talking a lot but not really saying much of anything, which might go over well in the boardroom but tends to make your customers start hauling out their pitchforks and torches. The more forgiving perspective would be a man who was given the mushroom treatment by another segment of his company and used as a human shield for a week. Continuing up the food chain, we have the engineers whose balliwick the PSN falls under. Again, real tempting to paint them as evil bastards. Again, much better to look at them as exercising gross stupidity rather than genuine evil. In a corporate environment the size and breadth of Sony, the size of a problem is proportionate to the speed with which one's CYA reflex kicks in. A tiny little problem, nobody will give it a second thought, just fix it and forget it. A bigger problem, say an authentication issue for the East Coast for example, and you can be sure there's some CYA going on before the problem actually gets fixed. When you've got a problem like the current one, everybody will be on the verge of panic trying to figure out how their posteriors can be sufficiently shielded, even as the small vestiges of their brains still capable of coherent thought inform them that there isn't a snowflake's chance in Hell they can make anything relating to the disaster look good. Fiascoes like this one tend to lead upper management to demand people's heads, and heads will be served up one way or the other. If the engineers weren't feeding Seybold any genuinely useful information, then it's certainly understandable why Seybold's blog posts weren't assuaging the public's discontent.
I would like to take a moment to address another example of stupidity, and one that has far more potentially damaging consequences. It is the stupidity of complacency. The stupidity of "don't worry, it's not a big deal." To some extent, Sony gave us this brand of stupidity over the course of the last week, and it's turned out that we shouldn't just be worried, we should be all sorts of pissed off and justifiably scared. An article on Ars Technica had some choice words from Michael Pachter, an analyst at Wedbush Morgan who has seemingly made the current stage of his career focused on "analyzing" the video game industry. And by "analyzing," I mean "spouting mindless bullshit and getting paid six figures for it." In the past, I've done my best to avoid giving much thought to Pachter and his inanities, but his pronouncements in regard to Sony and the PSN breach just cannot go unchallenged. The first mistake is playing the "shit happens" card, stating that security breaches do happen and it sucks for customers. Sony wasn't even stupid enough to try and use that gambit, which doesn't start Pachter off on solid footing. Yes, security breaches happen, but in regards to the PSN, security breaches DIDN'T happen. Outages, yes. Authentication problems, more than Sony would probably like to admit. I know that no system is 100% secure and no system can avoid being breached forever. The PSN was probably the closest thing to an impenetrable system that Man has devised in the last decade. When it finally was breached, it was ripped wide open and the really valuable data, the personal user data, not the games, was sucked out like marrow from a cracked bone. The "hassle of tracking down whether somebody is fraudulently using credit info" which Pachter breezily dismisses isn't the sort of annoyance that can be dispensed with by clicking a mouse and re-entering some data. Assuming for a moment that the spread of credit cards stored on the PSN is evenly split up between the 4 major credit card companies (Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Discover), then each of those companies is looking at dealing with seventeen and a half million cards that need to be cancelled and re-issued. It's likely not such an even split, but the company who's only handling four or five million card cancellations probably won't be feeling suitably grateful for the distinction. That's going to tie up massive amounts of resources which would otherwise be pointed towards day-to-day operations. The ripple effect on the economy just from having to process all those cancellations beggars the imagination. Even if it's handled at a lower level through local banks and credit unions, it's still eventually going to impact the operations of the credit card companies.
Pachter continues to show his absolute lack of anything resembling intelligent thought when he made the following pronouncement: "In my view, a serious hacker with evil intent would be better off hacking into a financial institution rather than a gaming network." He continues to diminish the scale of the disaster by concluding that the breach is "not a serious security threat." If I were a serious hacker with evil intent, directly hacking into a financial institution would be the last thing in the universe I'd want to do. It wouldn't matter to me if it was the Last National Bank of Zimbabwe. Shooting for a direct breach of bank data would be unbelievably stupid and ultimately profitless. Banks have been directly robbed so many times in physical form over the centuries that they tend to design their computer systems much like they would their branches. Lots of security fences, lots of redundancies, lots of alarms. Banks expect people to try and straight out rob them, so they harden themselves accordingly. True, they can still be breached, and user data can be obtained, but banks will go berserk the minute a breach happens and they will be locking down everything related to the breach very quickly. If you're lucky, you'll have about 24 hours worth of use out of that data, then it's pretty much wasted hard drive space. Rather than hit the banks directly, hacking a game network would allow somebody to come at them sideways. Remember how I asked what you would do if you had 70 million credit card accounts, all the personal data associated with those accounts, and a week's head start? If I were the smarter version of Pachter's hypothetical "serious hacker," I'd be making relatively small money transfers. A cash advance here, a direct withdrawl there. Keep the limit down to a C-note at a time. Even if I could only pull it off one time each for 10% of the accounts that I snagged, that's still 7 million accounts, and a Benjamin from each one of those accounts would add up to some serious money. Banks look for big money transfers into and out of individual accounts. Somebody shows up with a hundred million dollars and says, "I'd like to make a deposit," you can bet there's a manager on the phone to the Feds before the ink's even dry on the deposit slip. Small money transfers, on the other hand, it's background noise to a bank. A modicum of caution while pulling money out and putting in, nobody would have any reason to suspect anything, certainly nothing that would justify filling out a Suspicious Activity Report. And if I were being extra smart about it, there would be a mix of ATM withdrawals and electronic fund transfers. Shift a C-note to the bank of my choice, pull it out a few hours later, and the cash is mine. I could go on about how ATM cameras would be recording me, but if I'm smart enough to have planned and executed a plunder on this scale, dealing with ATM cameras would have been factored into my thinking and a suitable countermeasure developed. Bottom line: a gaming network is the perfect vehicle to rob a bank, because nobody will see it coming.
As my high school forensics coach told me oh so many years ago, it's considered good form to concede at least one of your opponent's points during a debate. And while I firmly believe that describing Michael Pachter as a halfwit is overly generous praise, his little chat with Ars Technica did produce one point which I can agree with. "Over the long run, we'll all forget about this, unless it happens again." Perhaps not entirely accurate, but close enough. The brouhaha will eventually die down, people will be fired, and life will return to something resembling normal. How quickly things return to almost-normal, and how close they come to the established benchmark of normal prior to the breach, depends very heavily upon what Sony does next. The smart thing to do would be complete disclosure. Let the world see how thoroughly they fucked up and how badly they got taken. Make sure that the conditions and the environment which allowed the breach to happen do not recur. Sony needs to be crawling on their hands and knees over broken glass coated in lemon juice and salt to win their customers' confidence back. Even then, it may never quite reach the level of confidence that they once enjoyed. The question is how to prevent a new breach from happening. If the hackers got in through a hacked PS3, what would Sony do? Update the firmware to further cut off functionality? Brick every PS3 currently out in the world and make their customers buy all new ones just to rebuild the integrity of the PSN? Both of those options would almost certainly exacerbate an already infuriated customer base, as well as give hacker groups like Anonymous more grist for their mills. Until Sony discloses how the hack was pulled off, it's exceedingly difficult to say how best to proceed. Continuing to do what they've been doing for the last week is guaranteed to make the situation worse. "Proactive" measures which somehow result in a further diminished user experience for the PSN when it finally does come back up will have the same effect. For the immediate future, Sony is fucked as far as their customers are concerned, because there is nothing they can do that won't piss people off even more. Even SCEA's board committing seppuku on YouTube wouldn't make people happy. Sony will just have to take their lumps and contemplate the scale of repairs needed not only to the PSN, but to their reputation and their customer base.
Some of you will doubtlessly protest my very strong language and crude imagery regarding the current situation with Sony's PlayStation Network. Some of you probably expect nothing less. Either way, I stand by my assertion. The scenario that has played out couldn't possibly be conceived, even with assistance from LSD, salvia, shrooms, and mescaline all mixed together. DDOSing the PSN, that sort of thing should be something that any network engineer, security oriented or not, ought to be factoring into their designs when they build something like this. But this has gone way beyond a mere botnet or script kiddie attack. Somebody, or a group of somebodies, didn't just shut down the PSN the way that Anonymous "accidentally" did a few weeks ago. They broke in and made off with user data. How much user data?
Try all of it.
There are, best estimate, some 70 million PSN accounts. Those accounts contain names, addresses, and most importantly, credit card info. And every last bit of that data was taken. This is light-years above owning a box on Sony's network. It's like the Great Train Robbery, only considerably worse. What could you do with essentially unfettered access to 70 million credit and debit cards? Depends on how smart you were about it. The best part, from the perspective of the hackers, is that Sony has actually helped them get away with this. How so? By not owning up to the fact that they got hacked, and not owning up to the fact that personal data was lost. Because Sony sat around with their thumbs up their asses, putting out milquetoast "updates" which informed without actually enlightening anybody, and ignored the rising degree of protests far longer than they should have, they essentially covered for the hackers. Their prevarications have given those guys at least a week's head start to play around with other people's money.
One thing that should be kept in mind at moments like this is that it really is smart to avoid ascribing malicious motives to certain actions which can be better explained by basic stupidity. Consider Patrick Seybold, the Senior Director of Corporate Communications and Social Media for Sony. It's tempting to paint him as an outright villain, a corporate mouthpiece stooge who propagated a farrago of lies by repeating over and over, "we don't know how bad it really is" for six whole days. But it's perhaps more accurate to look at him as being stupid. The less flattering view would be the typical suit, a guy who is in the habit of talking a lot but not really saying much of anything, which might go over well in the boardroom but tends to make your customers start hauling out their pitchforks and torches. The more forgiving perspective would be a man who was given the mushroom treatment by another segment of his company and used as a human shield for a week. Continuing up the food chain, we have the engineers whose balliwick the PSN falls under. Again, real tempting to paint them as evil bastards. Again, much better to look at them as exercising gross stupidity rather than genuine evil. In a corporate environment the size and breadth of Sony, the size of a problem is proportionate to the speed with which one's CYA reflex kicks in. A tiny little problem, nobody will give it a second thought, just fix it and forget it. A bigger problem, say an authentication issue for the East Coast for example, and you can be sure there's some CYA going on before the problem actually gets fixed. When you've got a problem like the current one, everybody will be on the verge of panic trying to figure out how their posteriors can be sufficiently shielded, even as the small vestiges of their brains still capable of coherent thought inform them that there isn't a snowflake's chance in Hell they can make anything relating to the disaster look good. Fiascoes like this one tend to lead upper management to demand people's heads, and heads will be served up one way or the other. If the engineers weren't feeding Seybold any genuinely useful information, then it's certainly understandable why Seybold's blog posts weren't assuaging the public's discontent.
I would like to take a moment to address another example of stupidity, and one that has far more potentially damaging consequences. It is the stupidity of complacency. The stupidity of "don't worry, it's not a big deal." To some extent, Sony gave us this brand of stupidity over the course of the last week, and it's turned out that we shouldn't just be worried, we should be all sorts of pissed off and justifiably scared. An article on Ars Technica had some choice words from Michael Pachter, an analyst at Wedbush Morgan who has seemingly made the current stage of his career focused on "analyzing" the video game industry. And by "analyzing," I mean "spouting mindless bullshit and getting paid six figures for it." In the past, I've done my best to avoid giving much thought to Pachter and his inanities, but his pronouncements in regard to Sony and the PSN breach just cannot go unchallenged. The first mistake is playing the "shit happens" card, stating that security breaches do happen and it sucks for customers. Sony wasn't even stupid enough to try and use that gambit, which doesn't start Pachter off on solid footing. Yes, security breaches happen, but in regards to the PSN, security breaches DIDN'T happen. Outages, yes. Authentication problems, more than Sony would probably like to admit. I know that no system is 100% secure and no system can avoid being breached forever. The PSN was probably the closest thing to an impenetrable system that Man has devised in the last decade. When it finally was breached, it was ripped wide open and the really valuable data, the personal user data, not the games, was sucked out like marrow from a cracked bone. The "hassle of tracking down whether somebody is fraudulently using credit info" which Pachter breezily dismisses isn't the sort of annoyance that can be dispensed with by clicking a mouse and re-entering some data. Assuming for a moment that the spread of credit cards stored on the PSN is evenly split up between the 4 major credit card companies (Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Discover), then each of those companies is looking at dealing with seventeen and a half million cards that need to be cancelled and re-issued. It's likely not such an even split, but the company who's only handling four or five million card cancellations probably won't be feeling suitably grateful for the distinction. That's going to tie up massive amounts of resources which would otherwise be pointed towards day-to-day operations. The ripple effect on the economy just from having to process all those cancellations beggars the imagination. Even if it's handled at a lower level through local banks and credit unions, it's still eventually going to impact the operations of the credit card companies.
Pachter continues to show his absolute lack of anything resembling intelligent thought when he made the following pronouncement: "In my view, a serious hacker with evil intent would be better off hacking into a financial institution rather than a gaming network." He continues to diminish the scale of the disaster by concluding that the breach is "not a serious security threat." If I were a serious hacker with evil intent, directly hacking into a financial institution would be the last thing in the universe I'd want to do. It wouldn't matter to me if it was the Last National Bank of Zimbabwe. Shooting for a direct breach of bank data would be unbelievably stupid and ultimately profitless. Banks have been directly robbed so many times in physical form over the centuries that they tend to design their computer systems much like they would their branches. Lots of security fences, lots of redundancies, lots of alarms. Banks expect people to try and straight out rob them, so they harden themselves accordingly. True, they can still be breached, and user data can be obtained, but banks will go berserk the minute a breach happens and they will be locking down everything related to the breach very quickly. If you're lucky, you'll have about 24 hours worth of use out of that data, then it's pretty much wasted hard drive space. Rather than hit the banks directly, hacking a game network would allow somebody to come at them sideways. Remember how I asked what you would do if you had 70 million credit card accounts, all the personal data associated with those accounts, and a week's head start? If I were the smarter version of Pachter's hypothetical "serious hacker," I'd be making relatively small money transfers. A cash advance here, a direct withdrawl there. Keep the limit down to a C-note at a time. Even if I could only pull it off one time each for 10% of the accounts that I snagged, that's still 7 million accounts, and a Benjamin from each one of those accounts would add up to some serious money. Banks look for big money transfers into and out of individual accounts. Somebody shows up with a hundred million dollars and says, "I'd like to make a deposit," you can bet there's a manager on the phone to the Feds before the ink's even dry on the deposit slip. Small money transfers, on the other hand, it's background noise to a bank. A modicum of caution while pulling money out and putting in, nobody would have any reason to suspect anything, certainly nothing that would justify filling out a Suspicious Activity Report. And if I were being extra smart about it, there would be a mix of ATM withdrawals and electronic fund transfers. Shift a C-note to the bank of my choice, pull it out a few hours later, and the cash is mine. I could go on about how ATM cameras would be recording me, but if I'm smart enough to have planned and executed a plunder on this scale, dealing with ATM cameras would have been factored into my thinking and a suitable countermeasure developed. Bottom line: a gaming network is the perfect vehicle to rob a bank, because nobody will see it coming.
As my high school forensics coach told me oh so many years ago, it's considered good form to concede at least one of your opponent's points during a debate. And while I firmly believe that describing Michael Pachter as a halfwit is overly generous praise, his little chat with Ars Technica did produce one point which I can agree with. "Over the long run, we'll all forget about this, unless it happens again." Perhaps not entirely accurate, but close enough. The brouhaha will eventually die down, people will be fired, and life will return to something resembling normal. How quickly things return to almost-normal, and how close they come to the established benchmark of normal prior to the breach, depends very heavily upon what Sony does next. The smart thing to do would be complete disclosure. Let the world see how thoroughly they fucked up and how badly they got taken. Make sure that the conditions and the environment which allowed the breach to happen do not recur. Sony needs to be crawling on their hands and knees over broken glass coated in lemon juice and salt to win their customers' confidence back. Even then, it may never quite reach the level of confidence that they once enjoyed. The question is how to prevent a new breach from happening. If the hackers got in through a hacked PS3, what would Sony do? Update the firmware to further cut off functionality? Brick every PS3 currently out in the world and make their customers buy all new ones just to rebuild the integrity of the PSN? Both of those options would almost certainly exacerbate an already infuriated customer base, as well as give hacker groups like Anonymous more grist for their mills. Until Sony discloses how the hack was pulled off, it's exceedingly difficult to say how best to proceed. Continuing to do what they've been doing for the last week is guaranteed to make the situation worse. "Proactive" measures which somehow result in a further diminished user experience for the PSN when it finally does come back up will have the same effect. For the immediate future, Sony is fucked as far as their customers are concerned, because there is nothing they can do that won't piss people off even more. Even SCEA's board committing seppuku on YouTube wouldn't make people happy. Sony will just have to take their lumps and contemplate the scale of repairs needed not only to the PSN, but to their reputation and their customer base.
Wednesday, October 13, 2010
Honor At Stake
I've tried not to rant about this.
I've made a great deal of effort since this whole fracas with Medal of Honor started up to not say anything. To bite my tongue and hope that something resembling sanity and good sense prevailed at EA. Looking for the triumph of hope over experience when it came down to the tough call between sticking to one's guns and caving in to popular (if misguided) pressure.
And how I hate to have been disappointed.
The fracas started a couple months back. A British Member of Parliament went berserk when word got out that players would have the option of taking on the role of Taliban fighters in multiplayer matches. There was, as former SEAL Dick Marcinko might say, an F3 (Full Fucking Faulkner; lots of sound and fury) in the House of Commons as the MP decried the impending ability of gamers to commit atrocities on innocent women and children and kill honorable British soldiers in the name of electronic sport. From there, it just got worse. Canada's Minister of Defence also decried the news. Fox News, not exactly known for it's sense of gravity or restraint when it comes to U.S. armed forces, paraded about the mother of a soldier who died in Afghanistan to denounce what a horrible and callous company EA was for allowing this sort of thing to go through and belittling the sacrifice of soldiers who had died in Afghanistan and Iraq. The U.S. Army went on record as saying they were "disappointed" with the decision. Eventually, EA caved in and changed the name from "Taliban" to "Opposing Force."
Bearing in mind for a moment that I despise pretty much everything EA stands for, it perhaps sounds strange that I might be defending EA's original position, or more specifically DICE's original position, regarding the designation of one multiplayer faction as the Taliban in Medal of Honor. The aim of this particular iteration of Medal of Honor was to cover a different sort of conflict, a new theatre of warfare, one that might have lacked the headlines and press coverage of battles fought in previous eras, but one that undeniably has heroes worthy of the nation's highest award for courage and valor above and beyond the call of duty. I can understand why DICE and EA didn't use the swastika and other iconography of Nazi Germany in previous MoH games, but the part of me that demands historical accuracy has never agreed with that decision. Over sixty-five years after the end of WWII, there's still a taboo about those symbols outside of very carefully delimited fields, and they're still flat out illegal in Germany. But in a way, that earlier decision is very much a double-edged sword when applied to the current controversy. Some will argue that the fact DICE didn't put in swastikas in earlier iterations of the title means that it's perfectly fine for them not to use the name of the Taliban for the bad guys in the new game. Others will argue that they're letting themselves be used as a subtle means of propaganda against the Taliban, by refusing to "dignify" them with the proper designation. If one were to reduce the matter down to a pissing contest between who's worse as a bad guy, then I would unequivocally say that however morally and ethically reprehensible the Taliban have behaved over the past twenty years or so, they're lightweight amateurs when stacked up against the industrialized atrocities of the Third Reich. And however much the multiplayer screen might say "Axis" or "German" in earlier MoH games, if you weren't fighting in the jungle, you were fighting Nazis, you knew you were fighting Nazis, even the guys on the other side during a multiplayer match knew that they were playing the role of the Nazis for that round. None of the gamers who played the bad guys legitimized the Third Reich, nor did they diminish or belittle the pall it casts upon history. By the same token, labeling bad guys in turbans with AKs in Afghanistan as Taliban in the game is not giving any sort of blessing to the actual Taliban. It's not paying them a compliment. It's merely acknowledging an existing fact.
An interview between Industry Gamers and three U.S. Special Forces members is particularly telling about this whole situation as far as the reaction from the guys who are actually in the suck. For the most part, they seem rather pragmatic fellows, which isn't entirely surprising. I will say (spoiler alert!) that the JTAC they interviewed seems to have a rather skewed sense of reality. He decries the game as "war profiteering," but he states that he's perfectly willing to give the game a try. He openly states that the Taliban will make use of Medal of Honor as a recruiting tool, though it seems difficult to picture Taliban fighters or those sympathetic to them to somehow start smuggling in Xbox 360s and PS3s into South Waziristan. Perhaps the statement that really irritated me was the one at the end where he states that adding the Taliban into the game made them "recognized as a legitimate fighting force." Clearly, years of military aid to the Taliban and others like them during the Soviet invasion and occupation of Afghanistan didn't rise to the level of recognizing the legitimacy of the Taliban as a fighting force, insofar as the JTAC is concerned. It bothers me when people spout off about how such-and-such a group or so-and-so's army isn't a "legitimate" fighting force. It sounds far too reminiscent of the Vietnam War, when the higher ups in the Pentagon derided the Viet Cong and the NVA even as they were chewing up American troops with gusto. If they're willing to tangle with you more than once, I'd say that pretty much gives them "legitimacy." As for the other two operators interviewed, both of them applauded EA's refusal (at the time of the interview) to cave in under pressure. Part of me would like to get their opinions now that EA has caved in. They both spoke to the inherent inability of any game, even one as detailed as Medal of Honor, to truly capture the essence of modern combat. They both saw no reason not to label the Taliban as Taliban in the game. If guys at the sharp end don't seem to mind, it says a lot about the brass in Washington who are "disappointed" about the situation, and none of what it says is particularly flattering.
I would like to take a moment to defend what has been stated by some as the intellectually lazy position that Medal of Honor is "just a game." Strip it off all the specifically identifying labels, remove all the fancy mechanics and graphics, and what do you have? You have "cowboys and Indians." You have "cops and robbers." You have good guys vs. bad guys, running around a predefined field, attempting to achieve an objective in order to claim victory over their opponents. Folks, that right there is a game. Does it trivialize the ongoing conflict in the region? I would say not. If anything, it's giving people a different perspective on the conflict, admittedly a very narrow one, but different all the same. Is it, as the JTAC stated, war profiteering? If so, then every news agency, wire service, broadcast network, website, and blog that even thinks to discuss the conflict is just as guilty, including this one. I will not deny that the perspective provided by Medal of Honor is narrow, even shallow to a degree. For a truly deep representation that goes into the larger issues and the smaller day-to-day perspectives of Afghanistan, I'd point to Armed Assault II and it's scenario building tools as having the best ability to model the conflict for the average person. As far as I know, nobody has attempted to make such a model, but that title would be the best suggestion I would make to somebody looking to create such a model.
The bitter irony of the whole situation is that EA released a game centered around men who refused to quit fighting even at the expense of their own lives, but gave up fighting when popular pressure over one small detail grew too loud for their liking. Had they continued to persevere, I might not have liked EA much more than I did, but I would have respected them a little more.
I've made a great deal of effort since this whole fracas with Medal of Honor started up to not say anything. To bite my tongue and hope that something resembling sanity and good sense prevailed at EA. Looking for the triumph of hope over experience when it came down to the tough call between sticking to one's guns and caving in to popular (if misguided) pressure.
And how I hate to have been disappointed.
The fracas started a couple months back. A British Member of Parliament went berserk when word got out that players would have the option of taking on the role of Taliban fighters in multiplayer matches. There was, as former SEAL Dick Marcinko might say, an F3 (Full Fucking Faulkner; lots of sound and fury) in the House of Commons as the MP decried the impending ability of gamers to commit atrocities on innocent women and children and kill honorable British soldiers in the name of electronic sport. From there, it just got worse. Canada's Minister of Defence also decried the news. Fox News, not exactly known for it's sense of gravity or restraint when it comes to U.S. armed forces, paraded about the mother of a soldier who died in Afghanistan to denounce what a horrible and callous company EA was for allowing this sort of thing to go through and belittling the sacrifice of soldiers who had died in Afghanistan and Iraq. The U.S. Army went on record as saying they were "disappointed" with the decision. Eventually, EA caved in and changed the name from "Taliban" to "Opposing Force."
Bearing in mind for a moment that I despise pretty much everything EA stands for, it perhaps sounds strange that I might be defending EA's original position, or more specifically DICE's original position, regarding the designation of one multiplayer faction as the Taliban in Medal of Honor. The aim of this particular iteration of Medal of Honor was to cover a different sort of conflict, a new theatre of warfare, one that might have lacked the headlines and press coverage of battles fought in previous eras, but one that undeniably has heroes worthy of the nation's highest award for courage and valor above and beyond the call of duty. I can understand why DICE and EA didn't use the swastika and other iconography of Nazi Germany in previous MoH games, but the part of me that demands historical accuracy has never agreed with that decision. Over sixty-five years after the end of WWII, there's still a taboo about those symbols outside of very carefully delimited fields, and they're still flat out illegal in Germany. But in a way, that earlier decision is very much a double-edged sword when applied to the current controversy. Some will argue that the fact DICE didn't put in swastikas in earlier iterations of the title means that it's perfectly fine for them not to use the name of the Taliban for the bad guys in the new game. Others will argue that they're letting themselves be used as a subtle means of propaganda against the Taliban, by refusing to "dignify" them with the proper designation. If one were to reduce the matter down to a pissing contest between who's worse as a bad guy, then I would unequivocally say that however morally and ethically reprehensible the Taliban have behaved over the past twenty years or so, they're lightweight amateurs when stacked up against the industrialized atrocities of the Third Reich. And however much the multiplayer screen might say "Axis" or "German" in earlier MoH games, if you weren't fighting in the jungle, you were fighting Nazis, you knew you were fighting Nazis, even the guys on the other side during a multiplayer match knew that they were playing the role of the Nazis for that round. None of the gamers who played the bad guys legitimized the Third Reich, nor did they diminish or belittle the pall it casts upon history. By the same token, labeling bad guys in turbans with AKs in Afghanistan as Taliban in the game is not giving any sort of blessing to the actual Taliban. It's not paying them a compliment. It's merely acknowledging an existing fact.
An interview between Industry Gamers and three U.S. Special Forces members is particularly telling about this whole situation as far as the reaction from the guys who are actually in the suck. For the most part, they seem rather pragmatic fellows, which isn't entirely surprising. I will say (spoiler alert!) that the JTAC they interviewed seems to have a rather skewed sense of reality. He decries the game as "war profiteering," but he states that he's perfectly willing to give the game a try. He openly states that the Taliban will make use of Medal of Honor as a recruiting tool, though it seems difficult to picture Taliban fighters or those sympathetic to them to somehow start smuggling in Xbox 360s and PS3s into South Waziristan. Perhaps the statement that really irritated me was the one at the end where he states that adding the Taliban into the game made them "recognized as a legitimate fighting force." Clearly, years of military aid to the Taliban and others like them during the Soviet invasion and occupation of Afghanistan didn't rise to the level of recognizing the legitimacy of the Taliban as a fighting force, insofar as the JTAC is concerned. It bothers me when people spout off about how such-and-such a group or so-and-so's army isn't a "legitimate" fighting force. It sounds far too reminiscent of the Vietnam War, when the higher ups in the Pentagon derided the Viet Cong and the NVA even as they were chewing up American troops with gusto. If they're willing to tangle with you more than once, I'd say that pretty much gives them "legitimacy." As for the other two operators interviewed, both of them applauded EA's refusal (at the time of the interview) to cave in under pressure. Part of me would like to get their opinions now that EA has caved in. They both spoke to the inherent inability of any game, even one as detailed as Medal of Honor, to truly capture the essence of modern combat. They both saw no reason not to label the Taliban as Taliban in the game. If guys at the sharp end don't seem to mind, it says a lot about the brass in Washington who are "disappointed" about the situation, and none of what it says is particularly flattering.
I would like to take a moment to defend what has been stated by some as the intellectually lazy position that Medal of Honor is "just a game." Strip it off all the specifically identifying labels, remove all the fancy mechanics and graphics, and what do you have? You have "cowboys and Indians." You have "cops and robbers." You have good guys vs. bad guys, running around a predefined field, attempting to achieve an objective in order to claim victory over their opponents. Folks, that right there is a game. Does it trivialize the ongoing conflict in the region? I would say not. If anything, it's giving people a different perspective on the conflict, admittedly a very narrow one, but different all the same. Is it, as the JTAC stated, war profiteering? If so, then every news agency, wire service, broadcast network, website, and blog that even thinks to discuss the conflict is just as guilty, including this one. I will not deny that the perspective provided by Medal of Honor is narrow, even shallow to a degree. For a truly deep representation that goes into the larger issues and the smaller day-to-day perspectives of Afghanistan, I'd point to Armed Assault II and it's scenario building tools as having the best ability to model the conflict for the average person. As far as I know, nobody has attempted to make such a model, but that title would be the best suggestion I would make to somebody looking to create such a model.
The bitter irony of the whole situation is that EA released a game centered around men who refused to quit fighting even at the expense of their own lives, but gave up fighting when popular pressure over one small detail grew too loud for their liking. Had they continued to persevere, I might not have liked EA much more than I did, but I would have respected them a little more.
Thursday, August 19, 2010
Totally Uncalled For
I have a pretty simple outlook as far as the Internet goes. I don't mess with you, you don't mess with me. It's a system that has served me pretty well up to this point.
However, somebody over in China thought it would be a tremendously fabulous idea to hack my Gmail account, and my Facebook account, and otherwise poke around where they should not be poking. I do not appreciate it. I do not like it. While I'm somewhat glad they didn't mess around with anything as far as I can tell, I'm a little annoyed that they didn't leave a note saying "This is how we got in. Please close your door more securely." As it turns out, Google was good enough to give me a warning. It would have been nicer if they'd warned me when it happened instead of two days later.
Since somebody, or more likely several somebodies, felt it was fine to hack my account for no good reason, I feel no particular compunctions about keeping silent on the matter. Below are the IP addresses of the individuals that hacked my accounts, along with the providers for those IPs. Yes, I know, somebody could be spoofing the IPs, but it's a place to start. Special thanks to All-Nettools for their free SmartWHOIS tool which helped make all this possible.
183.90.187.126
183.90.187.0 - 183.90.187.255
Asia Data (Hong kong) Inc. Limited
Block B 08/Floor
Hi-Tech Industrial CTR
No. 491-501 Castle Peak Road
ASIA DATA HONG KONG INC LIMITED - network admin
FLAT/RM 24 BLK B 08/F HI-TECH INDUSTRIAL CTR NO 491-501 CASTLE PEAK RD
TSUEN WAN HONG KONG
+852 39043643
+852 60618724
stanley@adi.hk
220.200.49.192
220.192.0.0 - 220.207.255.255
China United Network Communications Corporation Limited
No.21 Financial Street,Xicheng District, Beijing 100140 ,P.R.China
Xiaomin Zhou
No.21 Financial Street,Xicheng District, Beijing 100140 ,P.R.China
+86-10-66259626
+86-10-66259626
zhouxm@chinaunicom.cn
118.124.16.163
118.124.0.0 - 118.125.255.255
CHINANET Sichuan province network
China Telecom
A12,Xin-Jie-Kou-Wai Street
Beijing 100088
Chinanet Hostmaster
anti-spam@ns.chinanet.cn.net
No.31 ,jingrong street,beijing
100032
+86-10-58501724
+86-10-58501724
Remember, folks, I don't mess with you, you don't mess with me, and everybody's happy.
However, somebody over in China thought it would be a tremendously fabulous idea to hack my Gmail account, and my Facebook account, and otherwise poke around where they should not be poking. I do not appreciate it. I do not like it. While I'm somewhat glad they didn't mess around with anything as far as I can tell, I'm a little annoyed that they didn't leave a note saying "This is how we got in. Please close your door more securely." As it turns out, Google was good enough to give me a warning. It would have been nicer if they'd warned me when it happened instead of two days later.
Since somebody, or more likely several somebodies, felt it was fine to hack my account for no good reason, I feel no particular compunctions about keeping silent on the matter. Below are the IP addresses of the individuals that hacked my accounts, along with the providers for those IPs. Yes, I know, somebody could be spoofing the IPs, but it's a place to start. Special thanks to All-Nettools for their free SmartWHOIS tool which helped make all this possible.
183.90.187.126
183.90.187.0 - 183.90.187.255
Asia Data (Hong kong) Inc. Limited
Block B 08/Floor
Hi-Tech Industrial CTR
No. 491-501 Castle Peak Road
ASIA DATA HONG KONG INC LIMITED - network admin
FLAT/RM 24 BLK B 08/F HI-TECH INDUSTRIAL CTR NO 491-501 CASTLE PEAK RD
TSUEN WAN HONG KONG
+852 39043643
+852 60618724
stanley@adi.hk
220.200.49.192
220.192.0.0 - 220.207.255.255
China United Network Communications Corporation Limited
No.21 Financial Street,Xicheng District, Beijing 100140 ,P.R.China
Xiaomin Zhou
No.21 Financial Street,Xicheng District, Beijing 100140 ,P.R.China
+86-10-66259626
+86-10-66259626
zhouxm@chinaunicom.cn
118.124.16.163
118.124.0.0 - 118.125.255.255
CHINANET Sichuan province network
China Telecom
A12,Xin-Jie-Kou-Wai Street
Beijing 100088
Chinanet Hostmaster
anti-spam@ns.chinanet.cn.net
No.31 ,jingrong street,beijing
100032
+86-10-58501724
+86-10-58501724
Remember, folks, I don't mess with you, you don't mess with me, and everybody's happy.
Saturday, April 24, 2010
What the *bleep*?!
The latest episode of South Park has once again sparked controversy, but this time, it's not over what Matt Stone and Trey Parker have done. Rather, it's what Comedy Central did that's got people up in arms. The 201st episode (the 200th was the week previous and ended on a cliffhanger) concluded the bizarre story they had started by basically bringing back everybody that the show has ever mocked for one more round. Central to the premise of the storyline was the attempt by Hollywood celebrities to steal the power of "not being able to be mocked" from the Prophet Mohammed. At the end of the episode, as usual, Kyle launched into a soliloquy about what he'd learned from the whole affair. What was different this time was that it was essentially two straight minutes of nothing but a single very long "bleep," with a tiny break from Stan before continuing to cover the end of Kyle's soliloquy and a rejoinder from Santa Claus that was also bleeped out.
I'll be the first to admit, I did laugh when I heard it, but I was also kind of irritated because I kind of figured that it couldn't possibly be two minutes of nothing but Kyle cursing since the "bleep" was continuous as opposed to being broken up like it normally is when a character goes on a blue streak. After the show aired, Stone and Parker came out and expressed considerable disappointment that Comedy Central would make such a radical effort in censorship. It came out that a group calling themselves Revolution Muslim issued a death threat against the pair and against the network, being about as subtle as a chainsaw by putting a picture of murdered filmmaker Theo Van Gogh up with their statement. Comedy Central caved, not only obscuring Mohammed with a giant "Censored" sign (apparently another thing that I had assumed was originally part of the script) but bleeping out Mohammed's name as well as the monologue at the end which didn't even MENTION Mohammed or Islam. I do not always agree with Jon Stewart, but on this particular topic I find myself in considerable agreement with him.
Consider, for a moment, the fact that South Park already got away with showing Mohammed years ago when they came out with the episode "Super Best Friends." While the show might have been partially spoofing the 70's cartoon series "SuperFriends," they nonetheless did show Mohammed just as they showed Lao Tzu, Jesus, Buddha, Vishnu, and Joseph Smith. Horrors! They made the Prophet a superhero! I don't seem to recall there being a hue and a cry over that, much less death threats. Most likely because there was nothing mocking nor disrespectful about Islam or Mohammed in that episode. In the years since that episode, we've had the murder of Theo Van Gogh as well as the Danish cartoon controversy, incidents which have apparently cemented in the minds of a very small number of Muslims that it's perfectly acceptable to issue death threats for something that they find offensive, and in the case of Van Gogh to carry those threats out. I find it highly disturbing that it is only now, nine years after the fact, that there's such a fracas over this. The cat's been out of the bag for a long time now. It seems foolish and petty to be giving Stone and Parker any grief over something that they did once before without any previous complaint.
I can certainly understand the arguments that are usually employed when dealing with the visual depiction of Mohammed. Islam, just as with Judaism and Christianity, forbids idolatry. That prohibition stems from the concern that people will be more interested in worshipping the image than what the image is representing and, by extension, the larger ideas connected to that representation. Considering that the Christian Church split into Catholic and Orthodox branches over just such an issue, it's not that surprising that it should remain out there, and to some extent it's still alive and well even in some modern Protestant churches. The fact that I can understand those arguments doesn't mean I agree with them. For myself, religiously themed art has never been an object of worship. Admiration, to be sure. Aesthetically pleasing, quite often. But worship? Never.
This whole affair is contemptible and there are only two parties that deserve my scorn. The first is quite obviously Comedy Central. You guys have known since you first put South Park on the air that it was satirical, which means that it's going to offend somebody somewhere at some point in time, and it has been proven over the years to be an equal opportunity satire. Nothing is sacred, everything is fair game, and while the writers may have devoted more attention to some targets than others, they have never pulled punches over the larger issues that they put into their crosshairs. Sure, they cuss a lot. Yes, they delve into some seriously gross humor in order to make a point. THAT'S WHAT YOU'VE BEEN PAYING THEM FOR ALL THIS TIME! When you censored the final scene of "Cartoon Wars," they took it with a lot more grace than you probably deserved. This time, you stabbed them in the back. Worse, you made it look like it was part of the show, trying to create a meta-joke that didn't exist and quite frankly never should have existed in the first place. If you can't or won't shoulder the responsibility of artistic integrity for a show that you know is going to be pissing people off at some time, cut them loose and let somebody with more sack pick them up. Pious platitudes about "safety concerns" be damned. You knew the risks then, you know them now, and to continue to air the show is a tacit acceptance of those risks. Anything less than unflinching support for the show and its crew is a gutless renunciation of principle. Not to mention that it makes you look chickenshit. Somebody makes a death threat? Call the cops and let the show go on. Laugh while making the call.
The other target of my scorn, and quite a lot of fury in the bargain, is not just Revolution Muslim, but every outfit like them, no matter how big. There are, by most counts, some 1.6 billion Muslims in the world. Groups like Revolution Muslim make up less than one very tiny fraction of one percent, yet their actions will have a tremendously disproportionate effect on the Muslim community, not only here in America but around the world. And believe me, the effect is not going to be anything even remotely positive. To put it bluntly, they're fucking it all up for every other Muslim out there. First, they are continuing the disturbing and morally abhorrent trend of countering even the slightest thing they don't personally agree with by threatening death and violence instead of any kind of effort at reasoned debate. Second, they are helping to perpetuate the stereotypes that motivate and justify atrocious behavior by non-Muslims towards Muslims. Third, they are not merely undermining efforts at fostering understanding and tolerance of Muslims, they're actively sabotaging those efforts with their thuggish shenanigans. If these self-proclaimed defenders of the Faith bothered to actually read their Korans, and take a trip through the Hadith while they were at it, they might find something terribly surprising.
There is no explicit prohibition on depictions of Mohammed. Not in the Koran. Not in the Hadith. Nowhere.
To be sure, the Hadith does make several references to Mohammed's pronouncement that "painters of pictures" would be sent to Hell, but does not specifically instruct or suggest Muslims take action against such people. The judgment of "painters" is solely in the hands of God. The Koran does not make prohibitions against the creation of pictures, but does prohibit worshipping the pictures, as that would clearly be idolatry. The prohibition against depicting Mohammed is most likely a prophylactic measure to avoid the potential or the appearance of idolatry. Yet there are numerous examples dating back to the medieval period that do depict Mohammed (primarily Persian in origin), which seems to support some contemporary fatwas indicating that, as long as the depiction is respectful, it is permissible to create figurative representations of the Prophet, particularly in film and television. It should also be pointed out that the Hadith relating to Muslims and images only forbids looking at them. It does not demand their removal or destruction, and as was mentioned before, it certainly doesn't advocate the destruction of their creators. More importantly, it applies only to Muslims, not to non-Muslims. As a final thought, while it is a generally bad idea to take any religious text too literally, one could certain take the position that the admonishment in the Hadith, "Breathe soul into what you have created," has actually been satisfied in the case of South Park, as it is not a static image of the Prophet but rather an animated figure.
Stone and Parker have stated that the show will go on, that a new episode will be delivered to Comedy Central, and that we'll all just have to wait and see what happens. For myself, I more than willing to support the show, but I'm beginning to reconsider if I should be supporting the network, since it seems clear they haven't got the backbone needed to support their creatives when they truly do need it.
I'll be the first to admit, I did laugh when I heard it, but I was also kind of irritated because I kind of figured that it couldn't possibly be two minutes of nothing but Kyle cursing since the "bleep" was continuous as opposed to being broken up like it normally is when a character goes on a blue streak. After the show aired, Stone and Parker came out and expressed considerable disappointment that Comedy Central would make such a radical effort in censorship. It came out that a group calling themselves Revolution Muslim issued a death threat against the pair and against the network, being about as subtle as a chainsaw by putting a picture of murdered filmmaker Theo Van Gogh up with their statement. Comedy Central caved, not only obscuring Mohammed with a giant "Censored" sign (apparently another thing that I had assumed was originally part of the script) but bleeping out Mohammed's name as well as the monologue at the end which didn't even MENTION Mohammed or Islam. I do not always agree with Jon Stewart, but on this particular topic I find myself in considerable agreement with him.
Consider, for a moment, the fact that South Park already got away with showing Mohammed years ago when they came out with the episode "Super Best Friends." While the show might have been partially spoofing the 70's cartoon series "SuperFriends," they nonetheless did show Mohammed just as they showed Lao Tzu, Jesus, Buddha, Vishnu, and Joseph Smith. Horrors! They made the Prophet a superhero! I don't seem to recall there being a hue and a cry over that, much less death threats. Most likely because there was nothing mocking nor disrespectful about Islam or Mohammed in that episode. In the years since that episode, we've had the murder of Theo Van Gogh as well as the Danish cartoon controversy, incidents which have apparently cemented in the minds of a very small number of Muslims that it's perfectly acceptable to issue death threats for something that they find offensive, and in the case of Van Gogh to carry those threats out. I find it highly disturbing that it is only now, nine years after the fact, that there's such a fracas over this. The cat's been out of the bag for a long time now. It seems foolish and petty to be giving Stone and Parker any grief over something that they did once before without any previous complaint.
I can certainly understand the arguments that are usually employed when dealing with the visual depiction of Mohammed. Islam, just as with Judaism and Christianity, forbids idolatry. That prohibition stems from the concern that people will be more interested in worshipping the image than what the image is representing and, by extension, the larger ideas connected to that representation. Considering that the Christian Church split into Catholic and Orthodox branches over just such an issue, it's not that surprising that it should remain out there, and to some extent it's still alive and well even in some modern Protestant churches. The fact that I can understand those arguments doesn't mean I agree with them. For myself, religiously themed art has never been an object of worship. Admiration, to be sure. Aesthetically pleasing, quite often. But worship? Never.
This whole affair is contemptible and there are only two parties that deserve my scorn. The first is quite obviously Comedy Central. You guys have known since you first put South Park on the air that it was satirical, which means that it's going to offend somebody somewhere at some point in time, and it has been proven over the years to be an equal opportunity satire. Nothing is sacred, everything is fair game, and while the writers may have devoted more attention to some targets than others, they have never pulled punches over the larger issues that they put into their crosshairs. Sure, they cuss a lot. Yes, they delve into some seriously gross humor in order to make a point. THAT'S WHAT YOU'VE BEEN PAYING THEM FOR ALL THIS TIME! When you censored the final scene of "Cartoon Wars," they took it with a lot more grace than you probably deserved. This time, you stabbed them in the back. Worse, you made it look like it was part of the show, trying to create a meta-joke that didn't exist and quite frankly never should have existed in the first place. If you can't or won't shoulder the responsibility of artistic integrity for a show that you know is going to be pissing people off at some time, cut them loose and let somebody with more sack pick them up. Pious platitudes about "safety concerns" be damned. You knew the risks then, you know them now, and to continue to air the show is a tacit acceptance of those risks. Anything less than unflinching support for the show and its crew is a gutless renunciation of principle. Not to mention that it makes you look chickenshit. Somebody makes a death threat? Call the cops and let the show go on. Laugh while making the call.
The other target of my scorn, and quite a lot of fury in the bargain, is not just Revolution Muslim, but every outfit like them, no matter how big. There are, by most counts, some 1.6 billion Muslims in the world. Groups like Revolution Muslim make up less than one very tiny fraction of one percent, yet their actions will have a tremendously disproportionate effect on the Muslim community, not only here in America but around the world. And believe me, the effect is not going to be anything even remotely positive. To put it bluntly, they're fucking it all up for every other Muslim out there. First, they are continuing the disturbing and morally abhorrent trend of countering even the slightest thing they don't personally agree with by threatening death and violence instead of any kind of effort at reasoned debate. Second, they are helping to perpetuate the stereotypes that motivate and justify atrocious behavior by non-Muslims towards Muslims. Third, they are not merely undermining efforts at fostering understanding and tolerance of Muslims, they're actively sabotaging those efforts with their thuggish shenanigans. If these self-proclaimed defenders of the Faith bothered to actually read their Korans, and take a trip through the Hadith while they were at it, they might find something terribly surprising.
There is no explicit prohibition on depictions of Mohammed. Not in the Koran. Not in the Hadith. Nowhere.
To be sure, the Hadith does make several references to Mohammed's pronouncement that "painters of pictures" would be sent to Hell, but does not specifically instruct or suggest Muslims take action against such people. The judgment of "painters" is solely in the hands of God. The Koran does not make prohibitions against the creation of pictures, but does prohibit worshipping the pictures, as that would clearly be idolatry. The prohibition against depicting Mohammed is most likely a prophylactic measure to avoid the potential or the appearance of idolatry. Yet there are numerous examples dating back to the medieval period that do depict Mohammed (primarily Persian in origin), which seems to support some contemporary fatwas indicating that, as long as the depiction is respectful, it is permissible to create figurative representations of the Prophet, particularly in film and television. It should also be pointed out that the Hadith relating to Muslims and images only forbids looking at them. It does not demand their removal or destruction, and as was mentioned before, it certainly doesn't advocate the destruction of their creators. More importantly, it applies only to Muslims, not to non-Muslims. As a final thought, while it is a generally bad idea to take any religious text too literally, one could certain take the position that the admonishment in the Hadith, "Breathe soul into what you have created," has actually been satisfied in the case of South Park, as it is not a static image of the Prophet but rather an animated figure.
Stone and Parker have stated that the show will go on, that a new episode will be delivered to Comedy Central, and that we'll all just have to wait and see what happens. For myself, I more than willing to support the show, but I'm beginning to reconsider if I should be supporting the network, since it seems clear they haven't got the backbone needed to support their creatives when they truly do need it.
Tuesday, April 6, 2010
I Sense A Disturbance In The Farce
Whilst checking out news bits on Yahoo's movie section, I stumbled across an item in the gossip section that George Lucas was teaming up with Seth Green and Matt Senreich (creators of Robot Chicken) to do a Star Wars comedy series. The suspicion was that it would likely end up on Cartoon Network, very likely during their "Adult Swim" block of programming.
Like any geek who was young and impressionable, I ate up Star Wars as a kid. Like any geek who is currently older, wiser, and stuffed full of pop culture, I dig on Robot Chicken. Even when a sketch doesn't make a pop culture reference, it's still a damn sight funnier than that moronic clot of wasted tape known as Tim & Eric Awesome Show! Great Job! or the even more painful predecessor Tom Goes To The Mayor. Robot Chicken has elevated Star Wars spoofs almost to an art form. Probably the only guy who's in the same league is Seth McFarlane with the various Family Guy spoofs, and he's a semi-regular voice actor on Robot Chicken. So why does the idea of an entire series of Star Wars comedy make me feel like a plate of Mutandan porf* just went bad right in front of me?
I can't really argue with Green's point that the Star Wars universe is so expansive that there has to be plenty of opportunity for comedy. "What do these characters do when they're not overthrowing empires?" he asked. To answer semi-rhetorically, they're not doing anything that's meaty enough to make a whole series out of, Seth. There have always been moments of comedy to be found even in Star Wars but the nature of spoofs is to take the familiar and stretch it wildly out of proportion. The spoofs work because they're something that deliberately warps the established knowledge of existing characters. A more conventional situational comedy based off the Star Wars universe is a tough concept, but possibly doable if it doesn't involve existing characters. A show based off the idea of the most incompetent stormtrooper legion in the galaxy might be good for a laugh, though it also might make for a short show, given the established nature of Emperor Palpatine to pretty much send Darth Vader to clean up problem spots. Somehow, I can't quite see a Friends-style show where characters hang around a cantina all day listening to synth-jazz, complain about how badly their job with the Empire or the Rebel Alliance sucks, and have screwed up personal lives where the Rodian pilot breaks up with the Twi'lek dancer which causes her to go over to the Dark Side.
For all the fondness I have for both Star Wars and Robot Chicken, I gotta say, I've got a very bad feeling about this.
(*bonus geek points for anybody that knows the really obscure reference)
Like any geek who was young and impressionable, I ate up Star Wars as a kid. Like any geek who is currently older, wiser, and stuffed full of pop culture, I dig on Robot Chicken. Even when a sketch doesn't make a pop culture reference, it's still a damn sight funnier than that moronic clot of wasted tape known as Tim & Eric Awesome Show! Great Job! or the even more painful predecessor Tom Goes To The Mayor. Robot Chicken has elevated Star Wars spoofs almost to an art form. Probably the only guy who's in the same league is Seth McFarlane with the various Family Guy spoofs, and he's a semi-regular voice actor on Robot Chicken. So why does the idea of an entire series of Star Wars comedy make me feel like a plate of Mutandan porf* just went bad right in front of me?
I can't really argue with Green's point that the Star Wars universe is so expansive that there has to be plenty of opportunity for comedy. "What do these characters do when they're not overthrowing empires?" he asked. To answer semi-rhetorically, they're not doing anything that's meaty enough to make a whole series out of, Seth. There have always been moments of comedy to be found even in Star Wars but the nature of spoofs is to take the familiar and stretch it wildly out of proportion. The spoofs work because they're something that deliberately warps the established knowledge of existing characters. A more conventional situational comedy based off the Star Wars universe is a tough concept, but possibly doable if it doesn't involve existing characters. A show based off the idea of the most incompetent stormtrooper legion in the galaxy might be good for a laugh, though it also might make for a short show, given the established nature of Emperor Palpatine to pretty much send Darth Vader to clean up problem spots. Somehow, I can't quite see a Friends-style show where characters hang around a cantina all day listening to synth-jazz, complain about how badly their job with the Empire or the Rebel Alliance sucks, and have screwed up personal lives where the Rodian pilot breaks up with the Twi'lek dancer which causes her to go over to the Dark Side.
For all the fondness I have for both Star Wars and Robot Chicken, I gotta say, I've got a very bad feeling about this.
(*bonus geek points for anybody that knows the really obscure reference)
Monday, March 22, 2010
First Caracas, Then Zurich
Up until a few weeks ago, if you'd asked me offhand what Venezuela and Switzerland had in common, I'd have been hard pressed to come up with an answer beyond the fact that they both existed on Planet Earth. It now seems that, barring the restoration of sanity to the legislative process, Switzerland will be the second country inside of a month to issue a total ban on "violent" video games.
Switzerland's National Council (the equivalent of the U.S. House of Representatives, I believe) approved a bill that would ultimately lead to the total ban of any computer or console game that it deems unacceptably violent. The original draft of the legislation called for banning the production, sale, or distribution of any game which "requires cruel acts of violence against humans and humanlike creatures for in-game success" within Swiss borders. There is some question as to whether the upper chamber of the Swiss parliament will go along with this or if they'll exhibit some common sense and stop this bill dead. Even if the bill passes the upper house, it's apparently a lot easier for Swiss citizens to get a stupid law repealed than it is here in the States. One would hope that Swiss gamers would rally to get this idiocy overturned.
However little I might like the idea of a Swiss game ban, or any country enacting a game ban for that matter, I must extend a grudging degree of respect to the Swiss parliament for entertaining reasoned debate on the matter, however flawed the reasoning might be. In sharp contrast is the measure passed in Venezuela last summer which finally went into effect just under two weeks ago. For the crime of making, selling, renting, importing, or distributing "video games or programs that can be used on personal computers, arcade systems, consoles, portable devices or mobile telephones, or any other electronic or telephonic device, that contain information or images that promote or incite violence and the use of weapons," you're looking at a sentence of three to five years in a Venezuelan prison. If you're guilty of merely buying or promoting such a game, you just get hit with a fine. Somehow, I don't think you'd get a lot of sympathy by claiming you're a political prisoner because you sold a copy of Final Fantasy XIII on the streets of Caracas. President Hugo Chavez went on record earlier this year and denounced PlayStation games specifically (and presumably games on other platforms in general) as "poison" and a capitalist plot "to sow violence so they can later sell weapons."
Reasoned or insanely unreasoned, complete bans on video games will accomplish precisely nothing. They will not make street crime magically disappear. They will not cause teenage disaffection and alienation to become a thing of the past. They will not guarantee moral or ideological purity of the masses. They will not make people happier, more productive, or more content. The only thing they will do is turn an otherwise productive segment of a nation's population into criminals, whether it is on the supply side or the demand side of the market, while completely overtaxing law enforcement resources which could be better utilized for more serious crimes. And still, in every country that has even the rudiments of a parliamentary system, there's some nutjob who thinks that banning violent video games will cure all the ills that face their nation.
So far, at the state level in America, violent video game bans have been passed and overturned as unconstitutional. I suspect that a similar fate awaits the Swiss ban, though it's also possible a gamer sponsored referendum will remind Swiss parliamentarians that they work for the people. As for Venezuela, well, that one might have to wait until Hugo Chavez and his glorious socialist paradise die together. And what of other nations that have or are considering bans on violent video games? My advice: don't. Scrap the ones you've got. Forget about trying to pass them if they don't exist. Too many people have chased the chimera of "better living through banning video games" and have nothing to show for their efforts but disgruntled citizens and irritated cops. It is a fool's errand pursued to create a fool's paradise.
Wake up and smell the ashes.
Switzerland's National Council (the equivalent of the U.S. House of Representatives, I believe) approved a bill that would ultimately lead to the total ban of any computer or console game that it deems unacceptably violent. The original draft of the legislation called for banning the production, sale, or distribution of any game which "requires cruel acts of violence against humans and humanlike creatures for in-game success" within Swiss borders. There is some question as to whether the upper chamber of the Swiss parliament will go along with this or if they'll exhibit some common sense and stop this bill dead. Even if the bill passes the upper house, it's apparently a lot easier for Swiss citizens to get a stupid law repealed than it is here in the States. One would hope that Swiss gamers would rally to get this idiocy overturned.
However little I might like the idea of a Swiss game ban, or any country enacting a game ban for that matter, I must extend a grudging degree of respect to the Swiss parliament for entertaining reasoned debate on the matter, however flawed the reasoning might be. In sharp contrast is the measure passed in Venezuela last summer which finally went into effect just under two weeks ago. For the crime of making, selling, renting, importing, or distributing "video games or programs that can be used on personal computers, arcade systems, consoles, portable devices or mobile telephones, or any other electronic or telephonic device, that contain information or images that promote or incite violence and the use of weapons," you're looking at a sentence of three to five years in a Venezuelan prison. If you're guilty of merely buying or promoting such a game, you just get hit with a fine. Somehow, I don't think you'd get a lot of sympathy by claiming you're a political prisoner because you sold a copy of Final Fantasy XIII on the streets of Caracas. President Hugo Chavez went on record earlier this year and denounced PlayStation games specifically (and presumably games on other platforms in general) as "poison" and a capitalist plot "to sow violence so they can later sell weapons."
Reasoned or insanely unreasoned, complete bans on video games will accomplish precisely nothing. They will not make street crime magically disappear. They will not cause teenage disaffection and alienation to become a thing of the past. They will not guarantee moral or ideological purity of the masses. They will not make people happier, more productive, or more content. The only thing they will do is turn an otherwise productive segment of a nation's population into criminals, whether it is on the supply side or the demand side of the market, while completely overtaxing law enforcement resources which could be better utilized for more serious crimes. And still, in every country that has even the rudiments of a parliamentary system, there's some nutjob who thinks that banning violent video games will cure all the ills that face their nation.
So far, at the state level in America, violent video game bans have been passed and overturned as unconstitutional. I suspect that a similar fate awaits the Swiss ban, though it's also possible a gamer sponsored referendum will remind Swiss parliamentarians that they work for the people. As for Venezuela, well, that one might have to wait until Hugo Chavez and his glorious socialist paradise die together. And what of other nations that have or are considering bans on violent video games? My advice: don't. Scrap the ones you've got. Forget about trying to pass them if they don't exist. Too many people have chased the chimera of "better living through banning video games" and have nothing to show for their efforts but disgruntled citizens and irritated cops. It is a fool's errand pursued to create a fool's paradise.
Wake up and smell the ashes.
Thursday, March 18, 2010
Now we just need the Trilateral Commission . . .
Amid all the brouhaha over the health care bill, there's another bill currently in committee in the Senate which probably will make it out of committee without much in the way of serious debate. As reported by Declan McCullagh on this CNET news piece, Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) has reintroduced a bill that went nowhere fast last year. While a large chunk of the text of the bill appears to be proposed rules for certification of cybersecurity professionals, there are some elements of the bill that are particularly disturbing despite language which states that civil liberties will be protected.
Towards the start of the so-called Cybersecurity Act of 2010 (S.773), one of the stated goals of the bill is to grant the President the power to designate a specific system as a "United States critical infrastructure information system" which meets sufficient criteria (to be determined later) such that if said system was compromised, it would constitute a threat to "strategic national interests." While there is a phrase buried halfway into the text that states the act is not to be construed as an expansion of existing Presidential authorities, it seems exceedingly difficult not to quantify what is essentially nationalization of currently held private sector Internet assets by Presidential fiat under the guise of a "cybersecurity emergency" as anything less than such an expansion. Language further down in the text may delimit how long such an emergency may be used as justification, but the language doesn't feel like it is sufficiently robust to guarantee a showdown between Congress and the President will end well for Congress, or by extension American users of the Internet.
I'll be the first to admit that when it comes to cybersecurity, America could probably learn to do a lot better keeping the doors locked. And while there's a part of me that wouldn't mind seeing cybersecurity get some genuine attention from the government, I think this is the wrong way to go about it. I think federally mandated and designed certification schemes do not carry any inherently greater likelihood of effectiveness than MCSE, A+, Net+, CCNA, or any one of the other dozens of alphabet soup certifications that overpromise and underdeliver. If I've learned anything in my hunt for employment, it's that hiring managers are desperate to see those certifications on resumes while recruiters are perfectly aware that the certs aren't worth a damn. They look pretty but they're proof only that somebody paid to take a test and didn't flunk it. While the bill calls for people who have plans for a career in cybersecurity to be the primary beneficiary of the training programs, I can't help but suspect that it will soon become the latest "trendy" certification. The shiny new degree that everybody will be scrambling to get and nobody will actually be able to practice.
Cybersecurity should not be quantified by committees and academics. It should not be raised to the level of a specialized discipline divorced from the larger fields of computer science and information technology. It should be a brutal Darwinian process that recognizes only the quick and the dead, or the l33t and the pwned if you prefer. It should be an endless battle of wits between the most vicious, most brilliant, most fearless and inventive minds who ever got root access on a box. Let the private sector take care of the private sector and the feds take care of the feds. If a company or government agency wants to go hunting for talent, let them pony up for contests where "capture the flag" becomes "own the box" and pick out the people who've proven they're the best at what they do instead of smiling at the shiny little acronym on their resume.
However great it sounds on the surface, this bill is not going to help America figure out how to protect itself on the Internet. It's an unworthy effort for unsavory ends by means of ineffective policies.
Towards the start of the so-called Cybersecurity Act of 2010 (S.773), one of the stated goals of the bill is to grant the President the power to designate a specific system as a "United States critical infrastructure information system" which meets sufficient criteria (to be determined later) such that if said system was compromised, it would constitute a threat to "strategic national interests." While there is a phrase buried halfway into the text that states the act is not to be construed as an expansion of existing Presidential authorities, it seems exceedingly difficult not to quantify what is essentially nationalization of currently held private sector Internet assets by Presidential fiat under the guise of a "cybersecurity emergency" as anything less than such an expansion. Language further down in the text may delimit how long such an emergency may be used as justification, but the language doesn't feel like it is sufficiently robust to guarantee a showdown between Congress and the President will end well for Congress, or by extension American users of the Internet.
I'll be the first to admit that when it comes to cybersecurity, America could probably learn to do a lot better keeping the doors locked. And while there's a part of me that wouldn't mind seeing cybersecurity get some genuine attention from the government, I think this is the wrong way to go about it. I think federally mandated and designed certification schemes do not carry any inherently greater likelihood of effectiveness than MCSE, A+, Net+, CCNA, or any one of the other dozens of alphabet soup certifications that overpromise and underdeliver. If I've learned anything in my hunt for employment, it's that hiring managers are desperate to see those certifications on resumes while recruiters are perfectly aware that the certs aren't worth a damn. They look pretty but they're proof only that somebody paid to take a test and didn't flunk it. While the bill calls for people who have plans for a career in cybersecurity to be the primary beneficiary of the training programs, I can't help but suspect that it will soon become the latest "trendy" certification. The shiny new degree that everybody will be scrambling to get and nobody will actually be able to practice.
Cybersecurity should not be quantified by committees and academics. It should not be raised to the level of a specialized discipline divorced from the larger fields of computer science and information technology. It should be a brutal Darwinian process that recognizes only the quick and the dead, or the l33t and the pwned if you prefer. It should be an endless battle of wits between the most vicious, most brilliant, most fearless and inventive minds who ever got root access on a box. Let the private sector take care of the private sector and the feds take care of the feds. If a company or government agency wants to go hunting for talent, let them pony up for contests where "capture the flag" becomes "own the box" and pick out the people who've proven they're the best at what they do instead of smiling at the shiny little acronym on their resume.
However great it sounds on the surface, this bill is not going to help America figure out how to protect itself on the Internet. It's an unworthy effort for unsavory ends by means of ineffective policies.
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