Ged Carroll

Blog

  • Spy craft disruption + more

    The Spy craft Revolution – Foreign Policy – really interesting to read from a privacy perspective, spy craft affected as much as general public. Intelligence agencies are apparently just like the rest of us and spy craft reflects this. More security related posts here.

    Algocurios – this is what happens when you plug Matt Muir into a machine learning algorithm. I’m just thankful SkyNet didn’t evolve. It doesn’t capture the desperation, profane language and ennui prevalent in Matt’s real posts

    Vodafone Found Hidden Backdoors in Huawei Equipment – Bloomberg – lots of reasons why this might be mostly dilute to poor software engineering practices but it doesn’t help Huawei reputation

    Opinion | Is China the World’s Loan Shark? – The New York Times – academics who have studied China’s practices in detail have found scant evidence of a pattern indicating that Chinese banks, acting at the government’s behest, are deliberately over-lending or funding loss-making projects to secure strategic advantages for China.

    A Conversation With Christopher Wray | Council on Foreign Relations – China poses multi-level threat to US (and the rest of the world if we’re honest about it)

    KaiOS takes on the Apple-Android mobile duopoly – Wizard of OS – given Google’s investment in KaiOS it could still be considered a duopoly of wireless OS’ – also shows what Nokia left on the table

    Brit spy chief: We need trust or we won’t have a ‘licence to operate in cyberspace’ • The Register – “must have the legal, ethical and regulatory regimes to foster public trust, without which we just don’t have a licence to operate in cyberspace”.

    Ralph Lauren Unveils The Super Woke Polo Shirt | Luxury Insider – a debut line of polo shirts made from recycled plastic bottles and dyed using a waterless production process. Besides being environmentally woke, the initiative has the noble aim of eradicating 170 million plastic bottles from landfills and oceans by 2025

    How the Kleiner Perkins Empire Fell | Fortune – just wow

    INTERVIEW: China seeking win with information warfare: professor – Taipei Times – interesting if depressing interview

    UK High Court confirms the way GSM gateways were banned was illegal • The Register – interesting reading

    Spotify Premium Adds 3 Million US Members | Consumer Intelligence Research Partners – keeping churn stable and improving conversion from free to paid (PDF)

    Malaysia’s sovereign wealth fund Khazanah closes London office: Report – probably a mix of 1MDB and Brexit

    A Specter Is Haunting Xi’s China: ‘Mr. Democracy’ | The New York Review of Books – interesting if very optimistic reading for the papers quoted

    Baidu is reportedly incubating a music app to defend itself against ByteDance – KrASIA – Tencent already has a number of music apps in China

  • Record Store Day 2019

    Record Store Day 2019

    Record Store Day 2019 redux. Record Store Day has moved away from its origins, to drive music fans into independent record stores and support independent record labels in a time of iTunes and Spotify. For various reasons I didn’t do any any vinyl shopping but used The Vinyl Store to compile a list of what I would have considered buying if I had been in a position to.

    My picks from Record Store Day UK 2019

    A few things:

    • Madonna’s True Blue single was one of her classic 12 inch singles. I am less convinced by the fake ‘obi’
    • Cloud One were a studio-based disco production team
    • Jazzanova’s Heatwave was given a 1980s makeover which sounds amazing
    • Lonnie Liston Smith – Space Princess is a great disco cut from the man that brought you Expansions

    Online consumer behaviour

    danah boyd on the current state of play of participatory media. I first met danah back in 2005 at the Yahoo! Campus in Sunnyvale with Bradley Horowitz. She was working on a project for Yahoo! Research back then and has kept close to youth and ‘social’ media since then.

    Design

    Even if you don’t know eBoy, you’ll recognise their work and its distinctive style. They’re doing a collaboration in customised Swatch watches. The video talks about how they work together, which is an interesting process in and of itself.

    Korea

    Asian Boss have done a collaboration with a documentary maker to bring Crossroads to YouTube. Crossroads is a documentary that shows how the Sewol Ferry disaster shaped modern Korean culture and politics. It was as big as the Poll Tax riots or the Brexit vote in the UK. It pressed the reset button on the Korean public’s relationship with the government captured by chaebol which was business as usual.

    Japan

    And Tomy’s range of mini retro consumer electronics are amazing. I presume that these are all aimed at adults. The level of detail is impressive. More related posts here.

  • Dragged Across Concrete

    In sharp contrast to the wall-to-wall kinetic-driven nature of action films in general; Dragged Across Concrete is a well-paced crime film.

    The role of smartphone shot video dragged it kicking and screaming into the modern day via Rodney King.

    The film reminded me of a number of others:

    • The Usual Suspects and Magnolia for its multi-threaded plot. It was interesting to see how the director managed to drop some threads sooner than others
    • Quentin Tarantino for his emphasis on dialogue, even to the point of awkwardness. And the resurrection of Don Johnson as a film star – which worked really well in this film
    • Michael Mann’s Heat for the meticulous planning of the crime and the way Gibson’s character continuously weighed up his options in terms of probability. It was kind of like being inside the head of the DeNiro character in Heat

    Dragged Across Concrete owes a lot to Spaghetti Westerns with its stand offs pacing and anti-heroes. All action comes with consequences which is very unlike the fireworks of Hollywood. It owes more to the realism of Sergio Corbucci‘s action films.

    There are odd moments like the gimp masked thug who finances the robbery van by robbing a pawn shop and convenience store. More film reviews here.

  • Hellboy reboot and flawed superhero films

    I got to see the Hellboy reboot. Make no mistake it’s flawed. It doesn’t have the synchronicity with the source material of Guillermo del Toro’s adaptations. It was great to see Daniel Dae Kim on film, but his English accent wasn’t great. It was right up there with Dick Van Dyk. There was an ensemble of supporting actors and the amazing Ian McShane. David Harbour does a good job filling Ron Perlman’s shoes as the title character.

    The cinematography was really nicely done. There was something about the CGI that was both ambitious and felt cheap at the same time. I was reminded of Russian films like Guardians.

    The script showed a great love for the comic source and at the same time the pacing, the dialogue was a bit punchier than del Toro, but the pacing didn’t feel right. But that doesn’t mean that it deserves the kicking that it has received in the media. Part of this is down to the fact Hellboy is going head-to-head in the box office with Shazam. Shazam is DC’s answer to Guardians of The Galaxy. A confection with the right degree of surrealism, humour and action.

    Hellboy is darker and misses del Toro’s deft stylistic touch.

    I quite like a number of flawed superhero films. I really enjoyed Ang Lee’s reboot of Hulk with Eric Bana and Nick Nolte. Yes it was artistic, but I could see why your average superhero film wouldn’t appreciate its symbolism.

    Lexi Alexander’s Punisher: War Zone‘s problem wasn’t that it was a poor film but that reviewers couldn’t handle an accurate rendition of the Garth Ennis story in film. My favourite has to be the supposedly unfilmable Spawn. Amazing effects, the underrated Michael Jai White and Charlie Sheen hamming it up like his life depended on it. I am sure Hellboy will grace their number too. More related content here.

  • RESIST + more things

    RESIST – counter disinformation tool – published by UK government. There needs to be more done beyond this document however. Secondly, much of the disinformation in the UK is from within the country supporting anti-vaccination, Islamic fundementalism, Islamophobia, the far left and the far right. RESIST feels like a start rather than a solution. This brings up a whole range of issues from security to wider societal ethics. (PDF)

    15 Months of Fresh Hell Inside Facebook | WIRED – interesting read on the cultural issues and business decisions inside Facebook as it faced criticism externally. The world has changed, Facebook’s culture hasn’t. The comparison between Facebook and Microsoft under Gates and Ballmer is a valid one. This time the stakes are much higher (paywall). More on Facebook here.

    I was gobsmacked when Leica dropped The Hunt. Chinese netizens are notoriously nationalistic, taking offence at any perceived slight. Chinese consumers are a big market for Leica and this was way beyond what even Dolce & Gabbana did in China. Like the NBA, Leica will still have diehard fans amongst the camera community in China. It also screws their partner Huawei who make a big deal of their top-of-the-range smartphones using ‘Leica’ cameras. But that maybe the idea given how toxic the Huawei brand is becoming.

    More on The Hunt reaction in China from the South China Morning Post.

    YouTube flags Notre-Dame Cathedral fire as 9/11 conspiracy | AdAge – machine learning isn’t the be all and end all yet (paywall)

    Gen Z doesn’t want to buy your brand, they want to join it | AdAge – This group isn’t waiting for brands to lead on issues. Instead, they’re leading. Since movements rarely come with a business case or cost-benefit analysis, marketers must consider how they can partner with Gen Z to become more involved and deliver on the promise of purpose (paywall)

    Mediatel: Newsline: Audi/BBH limbo; P&G puts down a(nother) marker – interesting points on P&G media platform pronouncements

    Apple App Store downloads went into decline, Morgan Stanley says – Business Insider – which indicates a ceiling to services