Not a Moments Peace

Conditions: Warm, actually.

Fun And Games

Oh you thought having a smart phone was all about being able to check you email and send facebook updates? Well hidden away inside are features that are slowly stripping away all your anonymity

Thanks to the explosion of GPS technology and smartphone apps, these devices are also taking note of what we buy, where and when we buy it, how much money we have in the bank, whom we text and e-mail, what Web sites we visit, how and where we travel, what time we go to sleep and wake up — and more. Much of that data is shared with companies that use it to offer us services they think we want.

We have all heard about the wonders of frictionless sharing, whereby social networks automatically let our friends know what we are reading or listening to, but what we hear less about is frictionless surveillance. Though we invite some tracking — think of our mapping requests as we try to find a restaurant in a strange part of town — much of it is done without our awareness.

“Every year, private companies spend millions of dollars developing new services that track, store and share the words, movements and even the thoughts of their customers,” writes Paul Ohm, a law professor at the University of Colorado. “These invasive services have proved irresistible to consumers, and millions now own sophisticated tracking devices (smartphones) studded with sensors and always connected to the Internet.”

- nytimes.com

And it's important to note that this stuff cannot really be turned off, not without removing the battery - and then what's the point of having the phone in the first place if you have to take the battery out in order to stay private? Is this really what we wanted, to be herded together into classifications for the use of various corporations?



Film Review: Safe

After the first couple of minutes I was ready to walk out of this film. Right from the start it's trying to setup two different characters at the same time, and hopping back and forth in time, before finally returning us to the point we started at. And all the while the director is frantically whizzing the camera around and gritty-ing up the shots for all he's worth. You're really not sure if it's going to be worth all the effort. But gradually, some sense returns and the story finally settles. Safe tells the fast-paced tale of Lucas, a cage fighter who screwed up what was supposed to be a fixed match and in return has his family killed and his life ruined. On the verge of suicide, he comes across little Mei, a mathematical genius with a great memory who was abducted by Chinese gangsters a year earlier to act as their walking secure computer. She's just managed to escape them with this Very Important Number, and is now being chased by the Chinese gang and the Russian mafia, who've caught wind of what's going on. And since the New York cops are totally corrupt, they're mixed up in it as well.

At this point Statham starts doing what he does best, kicking ass left, right and center. Turns out he used to be a cop, so he knows all the players, and has a grudge to drive him on. Several setups, fight sequences and brutal beatings later and we get to the meat of the story, which involves some new guy we never met before who works for the mayor and Lucas squaring off. Apparently they shared a history of ...I think killing terrorists rather than taking them through the courts. It's kind of vague. By now most of the other players are either dead, or tied up in the trunk of Lucas's car anyway.

It's a robust effort, a film full of violence and attitude, tailor made for "the Stath" to strut his stuff. It's not really anything grand, and despite the effort it's about as deep as a puddle, and I'm not sure the director had full control of the thing. It's also essentially a take off of the Bruce Willis film Mercury Rising, which I think did it better. I am surprised however at the end that Lucas let the wife-killer go free. I guess it was meant to prove a point of some kind but after all the blood soaked killings we'd just sat through, why not just throw this guy off the nearest roof? Anyway, two punches out of five.


- Peace out