This movie review is scheduled for publication in Media Wave magazine. For information on that publication, contact the editor, John Shinnick. Permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim electronic copies of this article for non-commercial purposes provided this permission notice is preserved on all copies. All other rights reserved.
William Gibson wrote this movie, and they held a neat Internet hunt to promote it (check http://www.mnemonic/sony.com/nethunt for the aftermath), but the story is badly flawed.
It's the year 2021. 300 gigabytes of data (cure to a disease) are on a CD ROM. Rebels are willing to pay a fortune to upload this data onto a chip implanted in someone's brain, so he can carry it to the other side of the world for downloading. What's the big deal about 300 gigabytes 25 years from now? It should be terabytes or orders of magnitude above that to be credible and interesting. The data is already on an easyto carry and easy to hide little CD ROM; so why bother to transfer it to a chip in someone's brain? Also, the world in 2021 is supposed to be an Internet-centric society. Why use sneaker net when you could transmit that data anywhere, anytime, instantaneously?
And the guys doing the sending use FAX (not Internet) to transmit the code needed to download the data at the endpoint. This is a bizarre use of FAX and bizarre non-use of the Internet. Above all, what the hell's the need for security if you want to broadcast the data to everyone?
Published by B&R Samizdat Express, 33 Gould St., West Roxbury, MA 02132. (617) 469-2269. seltzer@samizdat.com
<
| Internet Business Showcase: | ||
|
|
|