Posted by: scott 16 years, 1 month ago

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WARNING:  THIS POST IS A MOVIE SPOILER!

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I watched Eagle Eye tonight at IMAX.  If you see it, make sure you see it in IMAX.  Just because IMAX is that good.

The premise of the movie is that the government has created a super computer that tracks suspected terrorists and gathers information about everyone through any medium – cell phones, cameras, etc.  After a botched mission where they get the wrong terrorist after the computer advises against it, it decides the government needs to go down.

Now that I’ve spoiled it for you, the main reason this sequence happens is because it assumes the government first has access to all these things.  Which is of course the discussion after the movie.  So I took it as a time to pitch open source.  I mentioned that for closed source systems, such as Windows, who knows if there is a government backdoor (many theories about this).  But since systems like Linux are open source, such a ‘back door’ would be very obvious since the source is readily available.

I don’t know if the movie was meaning to make a pitch for open source as much as against the government spying on people, one of the last lines is “Some of the things we put in place to keep liberty have themselves caused a threat to it.”

Maybe also a pitch to Net Neutrality?

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