Hacker Cinema
Jason Bourne
2016 · Film · 123 min
Part of The Bourne Collection
Directed by Paul Greengrass
The most dangerous former operative of the CIA is drawn out of hiding to uncover hidden truths about his past.
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21 comments on Hacker News
If this were a Jason Bourne movie, it was the CIA that put the gold bars there.
Teenagers can be strong. Almost every adult would be dumb to pick a fight with a high school football player. And the reality of fighting is that generally once you’re up against two or three other people, you’re going to get beat up. It’s not a Jason Bourne movie. World-class MMA fighters have been jumped. One person generally cannot fight several people.
Remember there was that statement (I do not know if it is true) - that FBI approached telegram eng to gain backdoor access and eng refused, and this is the reason behind the arrest -- and likely, its stuff like this that they want access to, in addition to all the Epstein-esque data they can get...
What exposure does IDF have on Telegram backdoors wrt to the certainly interesting things being discussed on there...
https://i.imgur.com/ixak5vq.png
Related: The entire plot to the last of the Bourne movies, Jason Bourne, where there is a scene of the head of some intel agency (Tommy Lee Jones) propositioned a social media founder to give them backdoor access or he would be killed. Great movie.
https://youtu.be/VvfSkVDF8uE
I posted this else ITT, but whats your opinion on the following (I have NO opinion - as I cant verify any facts about anything - so I am just an Observer of the events and what people are saying:)
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https://i.imgur.com/ixak5vq.png
>This reminds me of the entire plot to the last of the Bourne movies, Jason Bourne, where there is a scene of the head of some intel agency (Tommy Lee Jones) propositioned a social media founder to give them backdoor access or he would be killed. Great movie.
https://youtu.be/VvfSkVDF8uE
Fun Thread:
https://old.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/1f0i2yi/guess_who_just_got_arrested_for_aiding_and/
A sideline question: In Jason Bourne movie there are a few shots showing the protagonist faking passports. Does such technique (looks like no advanced tools are used) exist or just a film fantasy?
This might not help you if you’re outside the country, but I believe the railway ticket office and the post office will also accept them.
An anecdote: few months ago, my partner actually exchanged a 100 CHF note in the big SNB building on Bürkliplatz, and it’s essentially a Jason Bourne scene (although that wasn’t really Zurich in the movie). You walk in, a guy speaking with a stereotypical Bünzli accent takes your name, then brings you individually into an office where you can hand your gross old bank note to a man wearing a suit. Next to arguing about chess in German over a beer on the train, this is the most Swiss experience available.
EDIT: Maybe more to the point, like everything else in Switzerland, you can resolve this by sending a registered letter. In this case, if you mail them the banknotes at the Cashier’s office in Bern, along with your account information, they will wire you the money.
This is actually a very interesting essay.
I always liked Die Hard way better than its sequels (Die Hard 2 is merely acceptable, and the rest are embarrassing), but I never thought about this use of space and architecture. "Military parkour", as the article calls it.
Also insightful are the comparisons between Jason Bourne and the latest Bond movies; Bond feels sterile, and I find myself in agreement that some of the reasons for this are:
> Jones writes that “there’s no travel in the new Bond”; there are simply “establishing shots of exotic destinations.” By the end of a Bond film, he adds, you simply “feel like you are in the international late-capitalist nonplace,” a geography with neither landmarks nor personal memory.
Whereas
> “Bourne wraps cities, autobahns, ferries and train terminuses around him as the ultimate body-armor.”
> And if I did live in a Jason Bourne movie, I'd expect the ninja to just beat me up when I get home and unlock my safe for him, assuming I had bought an unbreakable safe.
Here I was thinking you might blow him up with the toaster. Or crash him into a garbage truck after an extenuated car chase.
> Do you and people you know have a safe?
Yes. I'm not taking about a safe like you can see in the movies. Just a locked box.
> Where I'm from, we generally don't use safes.
That's on you.
> Do you consider your safe to be... safe? I'd imagine it to be relatively easy to get into, by picking the lock or sawing through the safe.
That's not the point. 2FA is about thwarting password leaks. If someone has physical access to my house and knows my passwords, I'm screwed, yes.
But since I don't live in a Jason Bourne movie, my threat model isn't a ninja who steals my passwords then comes into my house to hack my tiktok account. My threat model is breaking my phone and knowing that my backup passwords are in a minimally safe place where I expect them to be and weren't carelessly thrown away with old documents; and deter casual "attackers" like a niece who could be inclined to plunder my papers for coloring material.
And if I did live in a Jason Bourne movie, I'd expect the ninja to just beat me up when I get home and unlock my safe for him, assuming I had bought an unbreakable safe.
I believe it was Bruce Schneier who coined the term "movie-plot threat" for a kind of security threat that gets more attention, not because it's plausible and around the corner, but because it excites our imagination the most.
It seems that there's something similar here. For most of the world, it's just natural that your government provides you with identity proof. USA and maybe other anglo countries could be the exception, although other times the question was discussed, I was told that, even if there is no official id card, other means like SS numbers provide an equivalent mechanism.
The movie plot, in which you are framed for some heinous crime and you need to go full Jason Bourne, is what justifies having a handful of fake passports, of course guns and a sizeable reserve of cash in a hole in the woods. Now it would be your bitcoin wallet and some sovereign identity keys in USB drives.
We need a balance of the various ideologies, and not the extremism of any one ideology.
Actually I think that those extreme views are a reaction to one ideology adopted by all mainstream parties. You see that no matter what you vote, you're going to be screwed, so you turn to fringe options.
the mythologized bond of the older films worked much better in the cold war. Jason Bourne films are a natural product of the changing public perception of spies in the post 9/11 era. I think the grittier Craig reimagining was inevitable as 'good v evil' bond narratives had only become more outlandish and irrelevant as the 2000s rolled on.
> A "burner phone" gets thrown away--"burned"--to prevent the someone from tracking you.
I would see this as a tertiary characteristic of burner phones that is certainly optional. Almost every usage of "burner phone" you see in media, film, and print, is used to indicate a phone that is unmonitored.
Queue scene of FBI in room with monitors showing camera views of Jason Bourne talking on a phone. "He's got a burner" is more likely to be said when Bourne is talking on the phone, not when he's throwing it away.
I wish they would go a little bit further in their restraints, also not ok:
* Giganormous battles between robots, demons, superheroes, mutants or aliens in CG (puppets/masks/costume/makeup is ok).
* Two mortal enemies that need to coöperate (no you're not going to bring a new angle to this, and no it won't be funny).
* Anything including a magical database or magical computer programs that will do whatever you need right now.
* Time-travel in non-scifi movies/series (e.g. super-assassin in Jason Bourne traveling from Rome to Athens and arrives five minutes after Jason Bourne was spotted).
Maybe then we could get some movies that depend on good writing...or maybe I'm just dreaming...
Im about to fully read Mark Fischer's "Capitalist Realism" [0]. It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. After 1989, capitalism has successfully presented itself as the only realistic political-economic system - a situation that the bank crisis of 2008, far from ending, actually compounded. The book analyses the development and principal features of this capitalist realism as a lived ideological framework. Using examples from politics, film (Children Of Men, Jason Bourne, Supernanny), fiction (Le Guin and Kafka), work and education, it argues that capitalist realism colours all areas of contemporary experience, is anything but realistic and asks how capitalism and its inconsistencies can be challenged It is a sharp analysis of the post-ideological malaise that suggests that the economics and politics of free market neo-liberalism are givens rather than constructions.
[0] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=zerobooks+capitalist+realism&t=ffab&ia=web
Adapt? Really? It doesn't seem so. They are in their own world, and don't care.
But no wonder when you read about the crazy head of Sony Pictures, the woman that got kicked because of the scandals that got made public (emails leaked). For example we can "thank" her for that the Steve Jobs movie lost the The Social Network director and is now such a boring piece of movie.
We don't need hundreds of super hero movies, such a mass is stupid. Where are the funny movies, the action movies, the adventure movies? We want less CGI and more real action, or CGI looking like real action.
We want movies not boring hour long series, we have no time to waste hours for a stretched story arc.
The Accountant, (second half of) Bourne 2016, Jack Reacher 2, Mission Impossible Rogue Nation ... were good movies. But it gets harder and harder to find a few movies per year that are watchable. The last two X-Men movies were so bad, so many CGI effects, so dark, so little content that made the previous X-Men movies great. Were are the Die Hard 1-2, Air Force One, first three Tom Clancy movies of this decade - right, directors and script writers forgot how to pace a movie, as constant action is just wrong, you need intense action then calm situations and then action again and a bit humour does't hurt (something almost completely forgotten). I just saw a 1968 action movie and it was so much better (Steven Spielberg mentioned it's his favourite movie he sees up to), this decades Hollywood is in a sad state.
There's definitely a move from the theater to on-demand streaming platforms for all movies except giant movies like Star Wars, so I think the author is right that the theatrical experience will see audience attendance continue to drop. Also making movies that can play for audiences around the world does mean that the dialogue has to be very simple and/or reduced. I think Jason Bourne had 50 lines of dialogue total in the latest Bourne movie for this reason. Without dialogue it does get harder for great actors to shine (Chaplin & Keaton excepted). As movies have gotten less culturally specific, they've also gotten less culturally relevant and this minimizes the importance of directors, writers, actors, and movies as art.
The author's inexperience in the industry shows though in this article. Crews are extremely efficient. Movies are made one shot at a time and when you have big crews made up of different departments (art, camera, sound, lighting, vfx) they have to work essentially in very quick shifts. For example, the camera move is set, then the actors step out and the lighting crew lights the scene, then lighting steps out, art dept. steps in and works, then the actors come back in, etc. To an outsider it looks like 90% of the crew is just standing around doing nothing, but it's much more efficient to work that way and safer too. So I think the author is putting too much blame on union crews for inefficiency.
Also, the author completely omits the marketing costs of films which increased hugely once TV advertising was used to market movies. Marketing costs are one of the main reasons that movies have to basically be blockbusters to make money. A TV ad spot for Star Wars costs the same as a TV ad spot for an indie film.
The idea that CG actors are going to replace real actors en masse is not realistic. I work in visual effects and, trust me, it's a lot more work than this author realizes and is not cost effective unless an actor has died in the middle of your shoot.
I also don't see editors getting replaced by A.I. for films or TV/streaming. Maybe for wedding and vacation videos or perhaps as a tool for reality TV editors to help select shots from the massive amount of footage. But film/TV editing is now an extremely efficient process thanks to digital editing tools like Avid or Premiere. A single editor can cut a film almost as fast as they can think at this point (okay a bit slower). Having to screen 50 versions of an edit produced by AI (and then do rounds of editing notes that way) would take longer than having a good editor just cut the movie.
Don't get me wrong, the theatrical movie experience is going to keep going down hard. I think the biggest threat to movies is that for the most part they don't matter much to the culture any more. But this author's lack of experience in the industry makes some of his predictions suspect.
Makes no sense to me. Vast numbers of Hollywood stars who build their careers as violent people on screen (Jason Bourne e.g.) are anti-gun people in real life. I don't think Gun companies are putting any pennies into movies.
People in general including myself love violence on television and love guns in real life. I think Hollywood is merely appealing to people's taste to make profits for themselves.
Whisleblower protections typically don't have clauses that protect dumping a bunch of juicy, exciting tidbits so that people pay attention. You're informing the public of what they need to know, not making a Jason Bourne movie.
True. They say producing movies is extremely expensive, but only because they force blockbusters upon us and because they use stars from an extremely reduced pool of actors. Example: There are thousands of muscular guys worldwide who beg to act in better movies, why always require the same few US actors? Example: The French movie industry makes money, although they focus on a romantic/comedy market with much lower production costs and much reduced (French) market. Movies don't necessarily have to be worldwide-reaching to be pleasant. I'm confident it's possible to build action movies or thrillers without 3D, with much fewer battle scenes, with a much better scenario (Jason Bourne I'm looking at you), with younger actors and in other countries than USA without harming the audience's pleasure too much. But that requires not having the existing marketing-pumped blockbusters as competitors.
"Some aspects of Snowden's story do NOT look like a thoughtful plan to defend freedom and fair play around the world, but rather a haphazard rash move by Snowden to see what he can get away with."
I think you're enormously overestimating the capacity for planning that any single individual could be capable of. Jason Bourne exists in the movies, not in real life.
The age of 25 is like that. "Most geniuses did their best work in their twenties"-pressure. "My God, 30 is just 5 years away"-pressure.
I suggest tackling this from a psychosomatic perspective. The body is an indirect but very powerful agent of change to the mind, Give yourself the permission to be calm and collected and deserve an average, wonderful, American middle-class day without guilt or anxiety. Enjoy that yummy sandwich and coffee and count your blessings. Avoid breathing like a bull in a fight. Avoid walking fast as if you're in a Jason Bourne movie. Avoid thinking rapidly, as if you're a hacker in a bad Hollywood movie. Real-life badasses are often deliberately slow. Real-life geniuses are very slow at the beginning when you ask them a puzzle. Secret : Expand the gap between perception and deliberate-thought as much as possible. That's where the magic happens.
Thus, using your body, allow your mind to reach a place of inner calm. Turns out that Clarity is the perfect path to doing anything good or great. Because it naturally leads to slow-thought, which leads to natural Know Thyself questions, which lead to self-confidence and a moment-by-moment ability to discriminate between what I want to do right now to be genuinely happy vs. what you should do right now as an employee, as a boyfriend, or other role-player (external conditioning). This leads to exercise, cutting down work hours to focus on a startup business plan, being a good serial killer, or whatever it is that you realize as part of the everyday slow Know Thyself process.
All the best! I'm sure you'll do quite well based on what you wrote!
tl;dr version : Deliberately Slow => Mental Clarity. Rest = automatic, by natural design.