Re: The Net (short movie review)

At 10:33 AM 7/29/95 -0400, Robert Hettinga wrote:
>At 3:04 AM 7/29/95, Joel McNamara wrote:
>>Don't bother.  Better to wait until it hits the video shelves then have a
>>party and see who can find the most (of many) technical flaws and gaffs.
>>Would be much more entertaining in that context.
>
>Agreed. In television interviews Ms. Bullock talks about how she's "on the
>net all the time" while in further conversation it's clear that all she
>does is hang out in AOL auditoria and chat-rooms, probably with some
>net.flack at her elbow....

So good for her.  I've spent most of the evening chatting on cypherpunks and
cyberia
rather than writing code....  Some recent survey found that 60% of time that
average folks spend on the net is communications rather than information
retrieval.

I rather enjoyed the movie, though I did share the experience of being
one of the two or three people in the theater laughing at various technical 
gaffes and/or in-jokes.  Obviously, you can't take anything from Hollywood too
seriously technically, but they did look at a few social issues related to
computerisation, such as the isolation, computer addiction, lack of face-to-face
relationships, difficulty in knowing what's real when everything's on the
computer,
vulnerability of society to computer problems, trustability of people who
tell you
that you can trust their computer security system for everything - even the 
government uses it!   So they didn't look into them too deeply - they're
Hollywood.
That's not their job :-)  Also, I like Sandra Bullock, and I think her acting
pulled the movie together more than the script did.
#---
#                                Thanks;  Bill
# Bill Stewart, Freelance Information Architect, stewarts@ix.netcom.com
# Phone +1-510-247-0664 Pager/Voicemail 1-408-787-1281
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                          SANDY SANDFORT
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C'punks,

On Mon, 31 Jul 1995, Bill Stewart wrote:

> I rather enjoyed the movie, though I did share the experience of being
> one of the two or three people in the theater laughing at various technical 
> gaffes and/or in-jokes.  Obviously, you can't take anything from Hollywood too
> seriously technically, but they did look at a few social issues related to
> computerisation, such as the isolation, computer addiction, lack of face-to-face
> relationships, difficulty in knowing what's real when everything's on the
> computer,
> vulnerability of society to computer problems, trustability of people who
> tell you
> that you can trust their computer security system for everything - even the 
> government uses it!   So they didn't look into them too deeply - they're
> Hollywood.

Got to agree with Bill here.  Book, TV, movie, etc. stories are
not about "what" they are about "what if."  For our purposes, it
was sufficient that THE NET plausibly created distrust in 
solutions provided by monolithic big brothers.  A lot of elements
echoed arguments about Clipper, this Alltel conspiracy stuff,
secret back doors, manufactured justifications for government
mandated or endorsed security programs, etc.  Of course the
nominal enemy was an evil corporation, but it, could certainly 
be read as something more.  The "Praetorians" are taken right 
of history, and can only be interpreted as a governmental group.

I hope the movie is very popular.  It helps us by inducing 
healthy cynicism with a dash of paranoia.


 S a n d y

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