My Code made it to a Hollywood Movie(hackoftheday.securitytube.net) |
My Code made it to a Hollywood Movie(hackoftheday.securitytube.net) |
It's always disappointing to see my work appear somewhere else without credit, but usually it is not worth moaning about. At the end of the day, he put that material up to be helpful to someone - and even if it wasn't used in the way it was intended, or with appropriate credit, at least it was still helpful.
It's a good attitude to have, I feel.
Especially as it means he gets to feel "cool, my work is in a hollywood movie" rather than "they stole my work". A much more positive feeling :)
I am yet to contribute to either project, but I did successfully get in a patch to PHP which removed logo GUIDs for good, which means once PHP 5.5 is out, I can claim that a lot of internet websites use my code :D
My "claim to fame" (which puts a smile on my face when I think about it) is to have written one of the advertising SDKs that pretty much every mobile game uses, and having it shipped to something like half a billion devices. Yay :).
Good work regardless, though!
[1] As opposed to "The Terminator" who came from the future running a bootleg copy of the Apple II boot roms :-)
1) http://www.westerndesigncenter.com/wdc/
2) side theory I read somewhere: Pixar's Cars is a sequel to Terminator about 1,000 years later.
For source code, I don't know how far copyright stretches. Does it apply to the textual form at all? For example, if this this code is GPL-ed, and you buy a copy on DVD, would ey be required to give you the source on demand?
I'm not sure whence the code was lifted, but it would not surprise me if they just grabbed some code from Wikipedia and assumed it was freely usable.
http://cs.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Raw_socket&dif...
Do you see they mention a reference: http://security-freak.net/raw-sockets/raw-sockets.html which was later removed as the site is now down. Both the code + the reference was added by the same author on wikipedia on the same day in 2011.
A whois on Security-Freak.net gives me that Vivek is still the owner of the domain: http://whois.domaintools.com/security-freak.net
This matches the whois person for securitytube.net (OP's site) http://whois.domaintools.com/securitytube.net
Proof 2: Wayback machine:
http://web.archive.org/web/20071217111629/http://www.securit...
Code: http://web.archive.org/web/20071219013022/http://www.securit...
The above C file is the exact same code posted in the Wiki article - in 2011 which was there on security-freak.net in 2007.
How it got onto Wikipedie is another question (might have been on en, ru, or other wiki and translated).
Look at the average credits for the average film. They go on forever, and there are tons of people in them. It's not like crediting somebody is a big deal, in terms of the cost of giving it out. There are plenty of people whose contribution to the film was small, just like the author of this code, but they get credited anyway, and that's just as it should be - the credit is for the contribution, not for the extent to which it makes the film a success.
"Not that it's needed, but I hereby grant any permissions needed for the inclusion of my code in the movie in any format it's released in. If anyone involved would like to show gratitude for this, I'd like to receive a copy of the movie on DVD or Blu-ray after it's released that way, with either the cover or an insert signed by the director or one of the named actors in the movie - or just a spare poster or bit of promotional material if planning something for after DVD release is going to be a headache.
Thanks for using my code!"
Now he needs an Erdos number :)
BTW, a Bacon number of 10 is extremely high. IIRC, the highest finite Bacon number of anyone in the IMDB is 8.
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr-esq/Maya-hayuk-lawsuit-...
I'm not saying I think he should pursue it in this case, just that the scenario you laid out isn't unprecedented.
I don't really mind abstracting anything high-level and taking shortcuts -- it's hard enough watching someone navigate a web browser in real life ("Ctrl-L, goshdarnit!"), I certainly wouldn't want to watch them go through the search results in a TV series. Just like every OP scene boils down to one dramatic event, not hours of meticulous work.
I just get riled up when the basic computer operation is totally unrelated to the real world, because by now people kinda know how a computer works, it's not the early '80s anymore. Two people typing on one keyboard, 3D views etc.
One thing I've accepted by now is the useless display of data when searching. Non-matching ugshots flashing on screen and the like. A progress bar just isn't very exciting. (Actually, if it wouldn't slow down the actual operation, more real-life interfaces might benefit from something like this.)
Some of it still makes me cringe, but when you put it into the perspective of their general audience it does seem, to me, that it's more complex than 95% of said audience can understand. Additionally, I haven't noticed many blatantly stupid/irrelevant errors in the shows technospeak. It's all generally, vaguely, sorta legit.
I mean, I am not seeing any gooey interfaces in visual basic yet (ignoring the typical beep-boop flashy computer interfaces).
I think a progress indicator with figures calculated to the billionth pretty well secures joke status.
Hollywood movies are a fantasy, right?
It's not useful, but it's technically true, the overhead and development is negligible, and it amuses me. "See? It's super sophisticated just like that progress bar in the movies!" Incidentally, it also makes it easier for operators to accept the computer is busy and just wait a minute.
The difference is, of course, that writing code is joy so no wonder people will gladly do it and give the results away, whereas creating art is unpleasant, tiresome work, so it's an insult to suggest anyone would do it for reasons other than money.
When I was small, and even into high school, my dad helped me with my math homework. So I claim that I co-wrote many math related things with my dad, and so I have an Erdos number of three with a big fat asterisk.
E.g., I'm Norwegian, with no direct connections to the movie industry at all.
But if you include documentaries, Gro Harlem Brundtland, a former Norwegian prime minister and WHO director, has a Bacon-number of 3 (she was in some documentary that included Morgan Freeman)
As a child, I pretty much ran into her while on vacation. In high school, I interviewed a member of parliament that had regular dealings with her at various points in his career, and later I was politically involved and did debates against a later minister in a Labour party government, etc. I can find a number of other things connecting me to her.
Depending on how strict you want to be, I can "trace" back to Kevin Bacon either directly (tenuous) or about half a dozen people that both she and I had dealings with, in the latter case with 4 people separating me and Kevin Bacon.
Alternatively, I can find a link to Kevin Bacon via Mao Zedong: I used to know a guy that met Mao on a trade union trip to China in the 50's. Mao obviously met Nixon, and Nixon and the Clintons know each other, and Hillary Clinton was on Entertainment Tonight with Kevin Bacon at one point. Alternatively Nixon mas in a TV special with Robert Wagner, who was in Wild Things...
I could probably find dozens more paths to someone in the IMDB data.
Most people can probably "connect the dots" via people they can name in their social circuit to someone in the IMDB dataset in at most 2-3 steps, and actually find a specific path to Bacon...
Quite likely you can find several weird paths. Find anyone who has ever served as a member of congress or parliament in your respective country, for example, and you have at least an indirect path to a head of state, which gives you a path to any of a large number of high profile heads of state that have IMDB credits...
Love watching the movie while drinking somewhat heavily with friends.