Fallout creator and The Outer Worlds director Tim Cain has talked about Bethesda’s direction with the iconic RPG games, praising what they brought to the Fallout series while continuing the legacy. In fact, Cain’s even mentioned how he’d love to see Bethesda listen to modders ahead of the Fallout 5 release date.
People need to realize that the unions for white collar people like WGA or SIEU or NEA (public sector unions are why cops who kill the people they were supposed to serve & protect remain employed get pensions) is not the AFL-CIO or any other historical union fighting for the lives of the people who built the country’s industry and made it run, any more than the NRA are the Minutemen of 1775 New England.
First, go fuck yourself, you fucking scab. No, seriously - you don’t come to my blog and spout off about what workers deserve unions and decent pay and what ones don’t, like it’s your fucking decision. The intellectual labor that writers perform is just as real as any other work done on a film set - “all who labor by hand or brain” is the inherent logic of industrial unionism for a reason.
Second, writers aren’t asking to get paid more than once: residuals are deferred pay, you absolute moron. In Hollywood, whether it’s writers or actors or voice talent or whatever, you get a small fraction up front - it’s usually an ok check, depending on the union’s day rates and so forth, but you can’t make a living off stitching these together - and then most of your pay comes from monthly royalty checks that provide you with the income you need to live off when you’re between jobs.
The problem is that, historically in Hollywood, residuals have been structured with a very long “tail” - the payments start out relatively low and then get more generous over time as the show has more seasons and (presumably) goes into syndication. This doesn’t work with streaming’s new business model, where increasingly shows are getting 2-3 seasons max and streaming services have become increasingly quick to not just cancel shows but yank them off their servers in order to avoid paying residuals.
So what WGA writers are fighting for is a system that ensures writers (but also actors and other creative workers, because the unions pattern bargain) get a fair share of the show’s revenue, even if the show is only given 2-3 seasons.
Third, the U.S labor movement would not exist today if it wasn’t for white collar workers and public sector workers. About half of the U.S labor movement - 7 million workers - is public sector, and those workers are overwhelmingly women of color, mostly working as either teachers or postal workers. Likewise, about half the U.S labor movement is made up of white collar workers, and we’re graduate students and adjuncts and lab researchers, teachers and social workers, administrators and IT departments.
I’m both public sector and white collar, and I’m a member of an NEA union. I’m an adjunct professor who earns $6,000 a course and it’s my job to get working adults with jobs and families who’ve never gone to college or who’ve been out of higher ed for a decade to graduate with a bachelor’s or a master’s. If you don’t think that’s real work, you’re free to research and write all the lectures and powerpoints, deliver those in an entertaining and educational fashion, answer a flood of questions from students who need help navigating academia, and then grade all the midterms and finals and research papers.
The two primary features of James Gunn's multiple "Guardians of the Galaxy" projects are their quirkiness and their unabashed sentimentality. To assure the former, Gunn made his title team a group of weirdo outsiders who are all possessed of a playfully semi-ignorant, devil-may-care attitude that communicated a flip irreverence toward the Marvel Cinematic Universe, a series usually bogged down by overtly earnest mythmaking. On the other side of things, the outsider characters were, over the course of their multiple appearances, careful to tell each other about their respective trauma and issues with abusive fathers. The Guardians, then, didn't merely come together as a team, but emerged as a found family, holding each other for mutual warmth.
The Guardians movies, sadly, don't always strike a great balance between their flippant tone and their emotional leanings. The Guardians, as part of their job, kill enemy soldiers by the score and then are expected to sit and discuss how they rarely receive empathy.
This imbalance is especially sharp in "Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3," a sprawling 150-minute denouement to the Guardian's story that ups the emotional stakes, but also expands the violence. The emotional beats occasionally hit, but they are largely undone by the sheer scale of destruction on camera. One might recall Zack Snyder's 2013 film "Man of Steel" in this regard. That film's final fight was between Superman (Henry Cavill) and General Zod (Michael Shannon) in a destructive conflagration that almost lays waste to downtown Metropolis. The film never stops to assess the destruction, and it appears that Superman feels no compunction about the mass death he is personally responsible for.
"Vol. 3" climaxes with the destruction of an entire planet. It doesn't pause to mourn.
The villain of "Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 3" is a mad scientist called the High Evolutionary (Chukwudi Iwuji), a man obsessed with eugenics. For an unspecified amount of time, he has been building an exact replica of Earth out in the cosmos that he calls Counter-Earth. His plan is to use surgery and a high-tech evolution chamber to create a race of anthropomorphic animal people that will live on Counter-Earth in complete peace and prosperity. By the time the Guardians catch up with the High Evolutionary, Counter-Earth is already living through the 21st-century phase of its development.
At first, the animal people seem placid and friendly, and the Guardians are housed by a gentle bat woman who serves them drinks and lends them her family car. Immediately after, however, the Guardians drive into town and find that crime and drugs are rampant among the animal people and that society appears to be afflicted with as much violence and strife as many modern cities on Earth. When the High Evolutionary learns from the Guardians that his model society is failing, he resolves to incinerate the planet and start again.
The High Evolutionary flees in his creepy, medical spacecraft, just as Counter-Earth begins exploding from within. There is no talk of evacuating the planet, so it seems that the animal people who live on it -- presumably billions of them -- are all going to die.
One might think that, at the very least, Rocket Raccoon (Bradley Cooper), himself a result of the High Evolutionary's genetic tinkering, would pause to reflect on the mass death in front of him. Instead, the Guardians focus on apprehending the villain instead. Did I mention that billions of intelligent beings just died?
One might have to do a little mental stretching to justify the Guardians' neglect. Perhaps the High Evolutionary's animal society was only a few weeks old and had been artificially accelerated in some way so that it would resemble modern Earth. That would mean the animal people hadn't organically formed their own Earth-like society but were mentally programmed to playact inside of one. And if they were merely remote-controlled meat bots without any free will, perhaps the Guardians can be forgiven for not being wholly attached to them -- although that doesn't make their murders any more ethical. It will be the small number of cute humanoid children they encounter later in the film that really matters.
Or perhaps director James Gunn wanted the villain to do something hideously villainous that would further warrant his comeuppance. Whatever the creative decision, worry not. The Guardians will get him.
But these are all conceptual calisthenics. The truth of the matter is the destruction of Counter-Earth forms a curious compassion black hole in the middle of "Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3." In a film that is ostensibly about empathizing with all beings -- no matter how weird, wounded, or dejected -- it doesn't bother shed a single tear for a massive act of on-camera genocide. "Vol. 3" is a film that wants us to see a test animal as a victim worthy of saving, and then turns around and guns down multiple other said animals merely because they are "enemy combatants." Are the Guardians gentle and empathetic, or are they wisecracking, gun-toting badasses?
Gunn is eager to have his cake and eat it too. He wants sentimental gentleness, but also the dismissive attitude of a violent clown. Both elements work in turn, but they rarely work together.
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The post Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 Has a Man of Steel Problem appeared first on /Film.
Nintendo is once again on the warpath. After taking down the multiplayer mod created for the emulated PC version of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, the Japanese game company has now reportedly issued takedowns for Lockpick, the homebrew project that allows users to 'dump' their own digital keys from their Switch consoles and load them on emulators like Ryujinx and Yuzu for PC.
The news came from programmer Simon Aarons, who had created a fork of Lockpick. He also received a DMCA from Nintendo and shared it via Twitter. In the legal document, Nintendo argues that Lockpick allows users to circumvent the protective measures of the Switch console and facilitates copyright infringement by enabling pirated versions of Switch games to be played on modified consoles or other systems.
Ironically, as noted by many users, Lockpick is currently the only legal way to emulate Switch games, as it simply allows you to transfer your digital rights from the console to another platform, such as a PC. By taking down Lockpick, Nintendo may be forcing emulator users to actually look for pirated keys in the future.
this is ridiculous. this is quite literally the only legal way to emulate switch games, dumping your OWN keys
im now forced to obtain keys in illegal ways to emulate my own games thanks nintendo https://t.co/RWBcYJH8zE
— Mors (@MorsGames) May 5, 2023
While the Lockpick repository on GitHub is presently still available, it may be just a matter of time before GitHub complies with the takedown request.
Meanwhile, Nintendo's actions have already scared the developers of Skyline, an Android Switch emulator, into shutting down development to avoid any potential legal issues. The Skyline team posted the following message on their Discord server:
It is with great sadness that we bring you this news. Recently, Nintendo has issued a DMCA takedown notice against Lockpick RCM, which will likely come into effect on Monday. Lockpick is a core part of legally dumping keys from the Switch. They claim that it circumvents their copy protection (TPMs) and therefore violates their copyright. We find ourselves in a position where we are potentially violating their copyright by continuing to develop our project, Skyline, by dumping keys from our own Switches.
However, they won't remove the GitHub repository or builds, and the source code will be publicly shared. The team's next project will be a way to emulate Windows PC games on Android.
Lockpick had been around for years, inevitably prompting speculation on why exactly Nintendo took action at this precise time. The answer appears crystal clear, however: The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom leaked and became playable on PC emulators for several days now, way before the Switch release set for next week.
Does this mean the end for PC emulators, too? The Ryujinx team already responded with a resounding no on their Discord, while the Yuzu developers haven't issued an official statement yet. Needless to say, we'll keep a close eye on any future developments regarding this matter.
This article contains spoilers for "Star Trek: Picard."The bulk of the third season of "Star Trek: Picard" was devoted to the mystery of Jack Crusher (Ed Speleers), the son of Dr. Beverly Crusher (Gates McFadden) and Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart). At the beginning of the story, Jack was being hunted by a mysterious bounty hunter named Vadic (Amanda Plummer) who was willing to kill everyone on board the U.S.S. Titan-A in order to get him. While Jack was indeed a criminal, his crimes weren't entirely serious. Mostly, he and his mother merely smuggled medical supplies to planets overlooked by Federation doctrine. Why was Vadic so hellbent on apprehending him?
By the end of the season, it was revealed that Jack had inherited from Picard a curious brain condition that manifested as superhuman powers. He could read thoughts, and he could project his consciousness into the bodies of others. This was, it seems, the result of a gene placed in Picard's brain by the Borg decades before. Using Jack's brain, a re-emerged Borg Queen (voice of Alice Krige) was able to infiltrate a fleet of Starfleet vessels and attack Earth. Worry not. A 105-year-old Picard, in command of a reconstructed Enterprise-D, charged to the rescue. The day was saved.
In an epilogue, Jack was in a Starfleet uniform, having been fast-tracked through Starfleet Academy, and is already awaiting his first starship assignment. His first job will be on-board the Enterprise-G, which was merely the Titan-A rechristened. There was every reason to assume that the new Enterprise would be the subject of a new potential "Star Trek" spinoff series called "Star Trek: Legacy."
Speleers himself admitted in a recent interview with Collider that nothing would make him happier than to see "Legacy" come to fruition. He's happy to make Jack Crusher his career.
When CBS All Access (later Paramount+) launched in 2017, it dove headlong into "Star Trek" in a big way. A huge spate of Trek shows is currently operating on the network, each one taking place in a different place on the vast "Star Trek" timeline. "Star Trek: Discovery" took place a few years prior to the original series, "Star Trek: Lower Decks" took place shortly after the events of "Star Trek: Voyager," and the new season of "Picard" is set about 20 years thereafter. This time-spanning approach has allowed the various Trek showrunners to dig into every last chapter of Trek history for nostalgia, callbacks, and guest appearances. Shows like "Picard" have included any number of Trek actors returning to roles they abandoned years before.
Speleers seems to know that "Star Trek" is a long-game career choice, and that he could very well be playing Jack Crusher for decades. This is a fate he is perfectly fine with. He said:
"[Jack] just resonated with me. I joked to someone the other day: I was like, 'I just want to play Jack Crusher for the next 15 years and then retire.' I feel like there's so much storytelling to do with him."
Even if "Star Trek: Legacy" is not made, there's every reason Jack — or a descendant played by Speleers — could show up on any number of other Trek shows.
Speleers also feels that Jack is too complicated a character to merely leave "mature." Like all of us aging coots, he didn't merely grow to a certain point and then stop. The character, one might find, is still young enough that further growth is required. Speleers wanted to continue his exploration.
The actor said:
"I just feel he's so complicated, and who knows what the future holds, but I think within that storytelling, I don't want it to be such a clean break as, 'Okay, he's dealt with everything now.' You still want that emotion because that's what we enjoy seeing. You want to see people that can ... You live everything they live, I suppose that's what you want."
It's worth noting that "Picard" featured a Marvel Cinematic Universe-like teaser for a show to come. While on board the U.S.S. Enterprise-G, the playful deity Q (John De Lancie), previously assumed to be dead, appears to Jack and lets him know that he will become the subject of Q's constant testing of humanity. Jack, less mature and diplomatic than Picard, will likely respond to Q's threats, tests, and gambols quite differently than his elderly father. If "Legacy" picks up where that stinger left off, then there is already plenty of adult exploration waiting for the character.
Also, what better way to assure career security than hooking into a long-running media franchise like "Star Trek?" Jack may be an interesting character worth exploring, but, more than that, he's a central figure in a vast, interconnected mythology with decades of history. Being a central part of the "Star Trek" universe isn't a bad place to be in.
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The post Star Trek: Picard's Ed Speleers Would Gladly Play Jack Crusher Until He Retires appeared first on /Film.
More than 40 years ago, Steven Spielberg gifted us with "E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial," a film about growing pains, life-altering friendships, and the inevitability of loss. A sense of childhood nostalgia is inevitably associated with "E.T.," to the point that the film's theatrical version feels near-perfect, despite its flaws (which can be very easily overlooked). On the occasion of the film's 20th-anniversary release, however, Spielberg ended up making several tweaks to the movie's original cut.
These changes were initially meant to improve on the theatrical edition, as this iteration featured modern visual effects and added new scenes to provide a definitive viewing experience for fans of "E.T." Major changes included slight sprinklings of CGI to make E.T.'s movements more seamless and fluid, along with upgrades to the technological design of the spaceship and a more vibrant color scheme. However, over time, Spielberg regretted making some of these changes, especially when it came to a particular chase sequence that originally involved firearms, which Spielberg had switched out for walkie-talkies in the special edition.
Speaking at Time's 100 Summit, Spielberg shared his views about censorship, saying that art, once put out into the world, should not be changed or revised to adapt to changing political climates or the creator's own evolving views. This led to him reflecting on the walkie-walkie tweak in the 20th-anniversary version of "E.T.," which he called " a mistake," musing that he "never should have done that." Spielberg had previously expressed similar regrets back in 2011 when he admitted that he was "overly sensitive" to parental concerns when the film was first released in 1982, which led him to make a host of changes — including digital enhancements and tweaks — 20 years later. In hindsight, Spielberg felt that it was the wrong call.
Once Steven Spielberg realized that he has made a mistake with the tweaks, he worked with Universal Pictures to release a two-film DVD set of "E.T." that would contain both cuts of the film. However, with time, the 2002 special edition cut became more difficult to find, with the theatrical cut becoming more widely available, especially around the time of its Blu-ray release. This might be the reason most folks remember the gun chase scene vividly, where the kids on BMXes are followed by menacing federal agents with loaded firearms, making the scene genuinely scarier than the tweaked version in the 2002 special edition.
Moreover, Spielberg elaborated his stance on the changes at Time's 100 Summit, stating that he should have "never messed with the archives of his own works," despite his evolving views over the years:
"'E.T.' is a product of its era. No film should be revised based on the lenses we now are, either voluntarily, or being forced to peer through. [...] 'E.T.' was a film that I was sensitive to the fact that the federal agents were approaching kids with firearms exposed and I thought I would change the guns into walkie-talkies. [...] I should have never messed with the archives of my own work, and I don't recommend anyone do that."
Spielberg went on to explain that all movies are markers of a creator's mindset at the time that they are made, where many aspects of a film's visual/narrative language are predominantly shaped by the trends of the times. Stories are molded through multiple lenses, including personal, cultural, and societal, and the result is an amalgamation of these factors, which always remain ever-changing. Per Spielberg, a work of art is sacrosanct, and should not be retroactively changed for any reason whatsoever.
Steven Spielberg's comments about the gun edit in "E.T." opened a wider conversation about retroactive censorship as a whole, and he was asked about the latest edition rewrites in Roald Dahl's works, which removed language that was considered offensive. The director said:
"Nobody should ever take the chocolate out of Willy Wonka, and they shouldn't take the chocolate or the vanilla or any other flavor out of anything that's been written."
This issue does call for a more informed, nuanced conversation about censorship, and whether retroactive edits have any bearing on altering an author's intent or worldview at the time it was written. Many artists have complicated and problematic legacies, and while contemporary edits help create a more safer and inclusive space, it also risks the erasure of those very legacies.
For instance, if an artist's work contains offensive and problematic ideas, they should be remembered for exactly who they are, which opens the space for rightful criticisms levied at them and their body of work. When such works are airbrushed or tweaked later, these original intents and ideas, no matter how damaging or otherwise, are lost with time, altering our collective perception of the artist in question.
To round off his discussion about censorship, Spielberg concluded by saying that all kinds of art contribute to our history and cultural heritage and he does not believe in censorship within the context of retroactive revisionism. While the 2002 special cut might have had a longer version of the Halloween scene (with brighter colors!), the 1982 theatrical cut will always be the definitive version of "E.T."
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The post Steven Spielberg Wishes He Never Edited the Guns Out of E.T. appeared first on /Film.
Pundits frequently cite "The Sopranos" as one of the greatest television series of all time, and that reputation is warranted. From the very first episode to the eternally controversial series finale in 2007, David Chase's crime drama cemented HBO as a prime destination for "prestige" television, ushering in a new era of television storytelling along the way. Italian-American Mafia boss Tony Soprano's struggle to hold his family and livelihood together remains as compelling and impactful as it did nearly two decades ago, thanks to top-notch writing and an Emmy Award-winning cast.
It's tough to pick favorites from such a legendary roster of characters, but Paulie "Walnuts" Gualtieri ranks among the best. The late Tony Sirico (who passed away in July 2022), transformed Paulie into one of the show's biggest personalities. His wisecracking and neurotic nature brings much comedic relief, but beneath that larger-than-life exterior is an emotionally complex man whose paranoia and competitive streak often puts him at odds with the rest of the Soprano crime family. From landscaping feuds to encounters with the supernatural, here are our picks for the 12 best Paulie Walnuts episodes.
Their bond as mother and son wasn't perfect -- a recurring theme in "The Sopranos" -- but we still adored Nucci and Paulie's relationship. Season 4's "Mergers and Acquisitions" showed the lengths to which Paulie would go to ensure his mother's happiness, taking the strong-arm tactics of the mafia to Green Grove's retirement community.
Nucci's problems with fitting in at Green Grove would be explored further later in the season, but Paulie is quick to defend his mother when he learns that the other residents -- including Cookie Cirillo and Minn Matrone -- don't like her. For the most part, Paulie is charming with Nucci in earshot, although we can't help but laugh when he tells Cookie and Minn that, "When I was a kid, you two were old ladies. Now I'm old, and you two are still old!"
In a show like "The Sopranos," using the threat of violence to get what you want feels as common as Tony eating cold cuts straight out of the fridge. But few men would do it quite like Paulie Walnuts, who tracks down Cookie's son and gives him an ultimatum: tell your ma to be nice ... or else. Chuckie Cirillo's inaction lands him a beating from Little Paulie and Benny, proving that you're never too old to be a momma's boy.
Paulie loves and respects Tony Soprano as much as the next wise guy, but no matter how deep that love runs, his Achilles heel is always money. With Tony left in a coma after Junior shot him in the explosive Season 6 opener, the Soprano family must consider what comes next if things go south. Naturally, Paulie's mind goes straight to his wallet, and "Mayham" brought out the ugliness of his greed at the worst possible time.
This episode opens, quite purposefully, with Paulie and Vito discussing Carmela's devotion to Tony in his time of need. "The Sopranos" fills the screen with hypocrites, and that's why it's no surprise when the pair quickly begin scheming behind her back. If a mafia boss dies, his crew's supposed to financially support the surviving family. But when Paulie gets shorted on a heist, he resents those obligations and considers holding back the payments to Carmela for his financial benefit.
It would do the episode no justice to leave out a classic moment of Paulie comedy when his bedside griping to Tony about his own health sends the comatose boss into cardiac arrest. It's a genius bit of bleak humor that also echoes Paulie's temptation to betray Carmela and the Soprano kids. With Tony's emergence from his coma at the end of the episode, Paulie reluctantly hands over the cash, but -- much like Carmella -- the audience won't quickly forget it.
As "Pine Barrens" proved, Paulie isn't the easiest guy to be stuck in an enclosed space with. In "Remember When," the FBI unearths the remains of Tony's first-ever hit, forcing him and Paulie to hide in Florida. It's the rare episode where we see Paulie through another character's eyes, and what Tony sees in his old friend truly vexes him. This episode served as an edge-of-your-seat culmination of ongoing friction between Paulie and Tony, reflecting how serious the stakes have become by the final season.
Tony could never prove it, but ever since the Ginny Sack joke leaked out, he's held (correct) suspicions about Paulie's culpability. The trip to Florida isn't just to lay low, but also an opportunity to extract the truth from Paulie once and for all. Tony has forgiven a lot over the years they've known each other, but with the families at war, Paulie's big mouth is more than annoying, it's a liability. When Paulie keeps bragging about the family's past exploits to strangers, you can hardly blame Tony for reaching the end of his tether.
The murder of Pussy at sea back in Season 2 was one of the show's most heartbreaking moments, and the choice to call back to that moment as Tony weighs up whacking Paulie on a boat opens up those wounds all over again. We were as relieved as Paulie that he ultimately passed the test.
Christopher Moltisanti's initiation as a made man in Season 3 marks a major turning point for the character. It provides a chance to prove his capability to the family, but it also puts him directly in Paulie's crosshairs as a target for hazing and exploitation. Of all the grief Paulie puts Christopher through, the pettiest has got to be the antics in "Second Opinion."
While Tony finds a credible doctor to treat Junior's cancer, and Carmela weighs up the morality of her marriage, Paulie and Christopher lock horns like a pair of Italian stags. Paulie maintains the upper hand thanks to his seniority in the family, and he puts Chrissie through the wringer with earnings. It's not merely about making the latest made man prove himself; Paulie enjoys having a subordinate, especially if he can squeeze some passive income out of the situation.
Their tension reaches a fever pitch after Paulie subjects Christopher to a humiliating strip search at the Bing, followed by an impromptu apartment inspection in the middle of the night, during which Paulie sniffs Adriana's underwear. With Tony refusing to mediate, things look dicey, until Paulie pulls out an expected symbol of cease-fire: a Big Mouth Billy Bass. Sure, it didn't defuse the pair's feud long-term, but the laughs they share are a moment of goofy levity that everyone -- audience included -- desperately needed.
Some of the best Paulie episodes of "The Sopranos" are the ones in which he's got a bone to pick with Christopher (or vice versa), and we rate this one highly. Paulie's long-running disrespect for Chris reaches an all-time high in "Walk Like a Man," leading to a minor war of attrition with dire consequences for the young man.
With Chris's father-in-law as the middle-man, he and Paulie set up a lucrative side hustle selling stolen power tools. A great arrangement for all parties involved; but when Little Paulie starts skimming the product, Chris demands a resolution from Paulie and Tony. Their refusal to play ball is the inciting incident in a brutal back-and-forth between Paulie and Chris, which lands Little Paulie in the hospital and even sees Paulie tearing up Christopher's front lawn with his car.
To directly blame Paulie for Christopher's falling off the wagon in this episode wouldn't be quite fair. Tony already played a major role in that earlier in the season, and it was arguably an inevitability in their line of work. But we think it's also reasonable to point out that Paulie's recurring position as the antagonist in their relationship certainly helped lay the groundwork. Paulie's roasting of a drunken Christopher is more than a tipping point for the young Capo; it represents a tragic indictment of a man who could've helped steer Chris away from the darkness.
The made men of "The Sopranos" take great pride in their Italian heritage, especially Paulie. When Tony arranges a trip to Naples with Christopher and Paulie, it's more than business. It's as if they're going home for the very first time. But their romanticized beliefs about the ancestral homeland face scrutiny, as Tony clashes with the head of the local crime family boss, Christopher spends most of his time getting high, and Paulie receives the cold shoulder from the locals.
It's a sobering experience for the trio, and Paulie's fish-out-of-water antics are among his most memorable. Tony handles the business during their time in Italy, negotiating a car-smuggling operation with a local crime family distantly related to his own. While Christopher explores the world of high-quality heroin from his hotel bed, Paulie hits the streets and tries desperately to blend in using the few Italian phrases he knows. Despite his earnest exclamations of "commendatori," the Neapolitan people can spot the foreigner from a mile away, and he's either ignored or rebuffed.
As the opening scene of the Soprano crew trying (and failing) to watch a bootleg copy of "The Godfather Part II" so poetically suggests, there's a gaping chasm between the Paulie Walnuts of the world and his European counterparts. His expression of relief on the drive home through New Jersey says it all.
By Season 4, Paulie's relationship with Tony becomes strained. After a stint in prison, Paulie returns home to find himself outmatched by Ralphie's earnings and feeling increasingly irrelevant. He finds an ally in Johnny Sack, but after the Ginny Sack joke leaks out, Tony becomes suspicious of their bond. "Eloise" finds Paulie at one of his lowest points in the series, as he comes to a crossroads in his loyalties and stands up for his mother to deadly results.
At the club, Silvio raises the issue of Paulie's performance, hinting that it may impact his standing with the family. Despite pleading to the contrary, Paulie is genuinely concerned, and his allegiance with Johnny seems more crucial than ever. That house of cards comes tumbling down when Paulie bumps into Carmine Sr. at a wedding, only to learn that the New Jersey crew's knowledge of him starts and ends with Johnny.
This all leads to one of Paulie's most woeful on-screen acts: the robbery and murder of an elderly woman. After Nucci gets into a minor fender-bender with friends Cookie and Minn, Paulie pitches in as a temporary chauffeur and begins to notice how poorly they treat her. Paulie's efforts to stand up for his mother are as lovely as they are hilarious, but we'd say that good will gets canceled out by smothering Minn to death when she catches him robbing her house.
Season 5's "Where's Johnny?" is jam-packed with iconic moments amidst its heavier plot developments. There's Junior mistaking an episode of "Curb Your Enthusiasm" for footage of himself and Bobby Bacala, and the oft-quoted line: "He never had the makings of a varsity athlete." But we've also got to give credit to the ridiculous landscaping feud between Paulie and Feech La Manna.
Anyone who's seen Robert Loggia as Mr. Eddy in David Lynch's "Lost Highway" knows how terrifying the late actor was in an onscreen fit of rage, and he brought that same intensity to the role of Feech. Newly released from prison and ready to make up for lost time, Feech kicked off an absurd territory war with Paulie after finding gardener Sal Vitro working in a neighborhood he wanted for his nephews. Both sides end up with casualties as the aging mobsters clash.
You're probably thinking the entire premise is ridiculous, and you'd be correct. To men like Paulie and Feech, the Sal Vitros of the world are disposable pawns in a broader game. As long as they get their cut, it doesn't matter who gets hurt. It's hard to choose which scene is funnier: Paulie nodding along to Sun Tzu's "The Art of War" before attacking the La Manna brothers, or his insistence to Tony that it was an act of self-defense: "He jumped out of the tree and come at me with a chainsaw!"
"The Ride" offers some of the season's biggest developments: Christopher learns that he and Kelli have a baby on the way and he proposes to her, only to end up breaking his sobriety in a big way after Tony pressures him into a toast. For Paulie, it's a point where his personality quirks have become a thorn in the side of his friends and family, and it's beginning to turn everyone against him.
Every year, the family chips in to fund the Feast of Saint Elzear, a Catholic festival celebrated with a local fair. Among other responsibilities, Paulie is in charge of the safety and working conditions of fairground rides; a duty he skimps on to reduce his bottom line. Predictably, there's a major accident when one of the rides malfunctions, leaving several riders (including a child) with serious injuries. Bobby and Janice's daughter Domenica is among the attendees who were nearly injured, and it's satisfying to see typically timid Bobby confront Paulie about how irresponsible and dangerous his frugality has become: "Everybody wants to get rich, but you don't scrimp on safety."
He's not wrong; nor is Nucci, who Paulie angrily rebuffs when she pleads with him to reconsider his attitude. As frustrating as Paulie is in this episode, we think it's all worth it for two unforgettable scenes: Paulie's vision of the Virgin Mary at the Bing and the beautiful conclusion with mother and son watching television as an evening breeze blows through the window.
As much as we love Paulie's comedic side, the times he couldn't wisecrack or shoot out of a situation are equally as memorable. The mobster's persistent worries about death and family came to fruition with the passing of his aunt Dottie, leading to revelations about his heritage and fueling one of Tony Sirico's best performances.
In "The Fleshy Part of the Thigh," Paulie visits Dottie after learning that she's in her final days. Her deathbed confession hits Paulie harder than any bullet could: she's his birth mother. A war-time fling with a soldier led to Dottie falling pregnant; facing shame from their family, Nucci adopted Paulie as her own. Understandably, Paulie is shaken to the core, and Sirico carries the weight of that inner turmoil to heartbreaking effect. As he puts it: "The worst thing is, I'm not who I am."
After watching how important his bond with Nucci has been over the years, it's impossible for us not to feel for Paulie as he's torn back and forth across the emotional spectrum. Although Tony convinces him to forgive Nucci, in light of all the love she's given over the years, it's not an easy decision. He's even brought to tears by Jason Barone's mother pleading for her son's life; a sight you'd never expect from a stone-cold killer. And that's why this episode's final scene, in which Paulie savagely beats Jason to extort retirement home funding for Nucci, delivers the perfect punchline.
Paulie Walnuts is a superstitious man, the inevitable result of an old-school Catholic upbringing and a life of sin. It's no surprise that he takes matters of the afterlife seriously, and "From Where to Eternity" explores Paulie's superstitious anxieties in a subplot as hilarious as it is revealing. With Christopher in critical condition after Matt and Sean's attempt on his life, Paulie and the rest of the family gather to pay their respects and comfort Adriana. Despite a close call during which he's clinically dead for over a minute, Christopher recovers and shares a cryptic vision of the great beyond that leaves Paulie haunted: "Tell Tony and Paulie, three o'clock."
Tony might be able to shrug off Christopher's near-death experience as a dream, but it's not so simple for a guy like Paulie. He's not getting any younger, plenty of skeletons sit in his closet, and the uncertainty of whether Christopher really saw purgatory (or Hell) is just too much to bear. After experiencing severe nightmares, Paulie violates his religious instincts by visiting a medium, only to throw a chair and storm out when the psychic appears to channel the spirits of Paulie's past victims. "That's what this is, you know," he says. "Satanic black magic. Sick s***!"
It's undeniably some of Paulie's funniest material. But the episode also reminds us that underneath all the horrific violence, dirty jokes, and tough-guy posturing, everybody in "The Sopranos" has skeletons in their closet.
If we could pick a single episode to recommend to anybody on the fence about starting "The Sopranos," it would have to be "Pine Barrens." Directed by actor Steve Buscemi — who would later join the show's cast as Tony's cousin — it's a comedy of errors sparked by Paulie's impulsivity and accelerated by Christopher's hot head.
At Tony's request, Paulie and Christopher make a collection visit to Russian associate Valery. Arriving on the scene in a foul mood, Paulie antagonizes Valery so much that a clumsy brawl breaks out, and it takes both Paulie and Christopher to put the Russian down. They're too busy bickering to check if he's really dead, so when they drive his body out to the freezing Pine Barrens of New Jersey, Valery bursts out of the car and flees into the wilderness. The ensuing wild goose chase has Paulie and Christopher braving the elements and at each other's throats before you can say "gabagool."
It's "The Sopranos" with the dial turned all the way to black comedy. Paulie and Christopher are capable soldiers in their own right, but from the bungled murder to mishearing Tony's directions ("The guy was an interior decorator!") to fighting over Tic-Tacs, they prove themselves to be no better than Abbott and Costello.
Read this next: The 18 Best Crime Dramas In TV History
The post 12 Best Paulie Walnuts Episodes of The Sopranos, Ranked appeared first on /Film.
For those who aren't ready to take the plunge and buy a completely electric vehicle, there are great plug-in hybrid vehicles available that promise to be excellent alternatives.
Any Buster Keaton movie is a feast of visual invention and breakneck energy -- to the point of wondering if some of the performers ever broke their necks -- which is part of why they continue to hold up, even in the 21st century. To see the man in his prime is to see a true death-defier, one who braved the wilderness that was the world of early cinema and conquered it with grace and fearlessness.
In his 1926 film "The General," Keaton gave audiences what they wanted in the form of a chaotic romp and unpredictable stunts. He also delivered spectacle, with an episode of Civil War history that he could shape into a classic Buster Keaton experience. Keaton's movie was like the 19th-century equivalent of the post-apocalyptic car chase of "Mad Max: Fury Road," as director George Miller readily admits. Rather than futuristic, modded vehicles, it's a movie of trains, one that was also dangerous.
And very expensive. As with any Keaton movie, you watch it in awe of the gags and stunts. But "The General," both in its subject matter and scale, operates on a different level. Here, Keaton's characteristic grace and physicality are wedded to (and clashing against) the unstoppable, unceasing travel of the locomotive. In using those trains, Keaton gave himself a difficult and complex workload.
But beyond that, he burdened the movie with a high budget and a particular shot that ranks among the most expensive of any shot in the silent era. In fact, some sources call it the most expensive. It's definitely the most iconic, a shot that even now has viewers wondering how they did it: an extreme wide shot of a train, moving through the woods, falling through a collapsing bridge into the river below as soldiers ford it.
It's 1861 in Georgia, and word is spreading around town that war is coming. Every man in town signs up to enlist, but the hapless train engineer Johnnie Gray (Buster Keaton) is deemed ineligible, a better fit for the Confederate army as an engineer. Instead of joining the cause, he gets back to working on his train, the titular "General," one of the two loves of his life. The other love is Annabelle Lee (Marion Mack), who rejects him when he can't make it into the army.
According to James Curtis' "Buster Keaton: A Filmmaker's Life," Keaton was given the story by his regular co-writer and collaborator, a storied comedic writer and filmmaker named Clyde Bruckman. He had found a book by Union Civil War veteran William Pittenger called "The Great Locomotive Chase," a nonfiction account of a wild moment in the war's history, in which a small Union dispatch stole a train from the Deep South. As the Confederates chased the rogue train up north, the Union soldiers left fires and downed trees in their wake, making for an enormously difficult pursuit.
The operation was complex, and doing justice to the book would lead to, as Keaton recalled Bruckman saying, "A lot of film with no laughs in it." So they reshaped it. For one, the story wouldn't be told from the perspective of Union spies, but from the Confederates whose trains are stolen. Being on the losing side of the war was a more natural fit for Keaton's famous sad loner shtick.
As repellent as it is for modern audiences, the establishing context of the Civil War is limited mostly to the first reel. The true story was gutted for a movie full of some of Keaton's most daring work ever, as his character fights for his train.
Finding a proper location for the production of "The General" proved to be a difficult task. Buster Keaton's not insubstantial perfectionism meant that the look had to be just right, which first led the production team to scout the real South. Per James Curtis, Keaton went from "Atlanta, Georgia to Chattanooga" and still was unable to find a suitable location to stage his feature-length train chase. In fact, he was most perturbed by the railroad tracks, which were too wide and too modern to look accurate.
On location manager Bert Jackson's recommendation, Keaton's company traveled to the opposite corner of the country in Cottage Grove, Oregon. The town was effectively a settlement in the wilderness, one that looked more Southern than the actual South. The only problem was that its distance from civilization meant it would be extremely expensive, with production costs coming to a reported $400 an hour even if film wasn't getting exposed.
As the production unit established itself in town, Keaton charmed locals with his classic tricks and a genuine fascination with trains. The railroads in Cottage Grove were narrow-gauge, in keeping with Keaton's concept of 19th-century technology.
He soon purchased two engines, one of which would be the train in the famed burning bridge shot. Sets were built and tourists from Seattle and elsewhere descended upon the formerly quiet town to observe the production. As the director, Keaton liked to pat himself on the back for getting the historical sweep of the chase with perfect accuracy, but as a performer, he brought in some of his classic improvisation and electric gag work, making sure that the scope never overwhelmed the Buster Keaton of it all.
According to James Curtis' "Buster Keaton: A Filmmaker's Life," Keaton and company had been talking up what would become the movie's most iconic shot throughout production. In "The Great Locomotive Chase," the book that inspired the movie, there was an episode in which the Union train thieves attempted to set a river bridge behind them on fire. As Keaton and co-writer Clyde Bruckman saw it, such a moment could be exactly the climactic centerpiece the movie needed.
When a modern viewer sees that shot, they have to wonder how it was done. The answer? They just did it.
Keaton was sure of one thing: the shot would not be accomplished through fakery or movie magic or miniatures. It would be the real thing, all of it. A real train, real fire, real bridge. If Keaton was always in competition with fellow silent movie maestro Charlie Chaplin, it would effectively come to an end here, as the director was set to create an unrivaled cinematic moment.
Keaton knew what he needed visually for the shot, and he reportedly examined every potential location in the region to find the perfect setting. It was not a shot that could be replicated -- when you're running a train through a burning bridge, you only get one chance to do it right, even if you have a blank check while making your movie.
The company ended up having to build its own bridge that would be set on fire. The bridge needed to be built to exact specifications, running 250 feet long at a 50-foot height above Oregon's Row River. It had to be capable of holding the engine and breaking down on cue.
"The General" largely concerns Confederate engineer Johnnie Gray's pursuit of his beloved train, the General, using another train called the Texas. He has to abandon it when he ends up behind enemy lines and needs cover. By the next day, he spots his beloved engine, steals it back, and sets a fire on the Rock River Bridge.
Union soldiers give chase in the Texas, and as the Texas hits the bridge, the fire becomes too significant for it to handle, causing the train to fall into the river. Meanwhile, hundreds of soldiers ford the river, all in the same shot. As director, Buster Keaton had come a long way from the mentorship he'd received from Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle years prior.
It's a magnificent image, one that required nearly a thousand extras. It was an extremely expensive shot, one that could only be filmed once. According to numerous sources, including James Curtis's "Buster Keaton: A Filmmaker's Life," the shot cost $40,000, making it the most expensive single shot of any film at the time. And it was an event -- that day on July 23rd, 1926 saw some of the most excitement to ever greet Cottage Grove. In fact, many town merchants took the day off.
Onlookers from town camped out to see the shot, seeing a day's worth of rehearsals as Keaton worked to get the timing of the shot perfectly down. Small complications arose and the mood was tense. On that day, they decided to douse the bridge with gasoline and load it with dynamite to better time the explosion. And then, as the cameras began to roll and Keaton saw the flames, he called it off, not liking how they were looking.
According to James Curtis, there were a couple of thousand spectators on hand to watch the shot, eagerly awaiting its completion despite numerous setbacks. Even besides the flames that Buster Keaton rejected, another take had to be prematurely stopped when two boys were spotted swimming in the river.
The cost of the shot, the spectacle of it, and the danger of it seemed to make everybody a little anxious. Even the soldiers ruined one shot by charging into the water a little too soon. Before long, the production would lose its light, meaning the shot would have to wait another day.
But Keaton got the shot. As he called for the upriver dam to open, with water flowing again through the river, he called for the bridge to be set on fire, and, finally, called action on the shot. Dummies were flung from the train as it fell successfully and beautifully through the bridge, which collapsed with perfect timing. Some spectators may have reportedly fainted, and the extra water from the dam opening may have almost led to some of the soldiers drowning, but they got the shot.
The movie ended up being a flop, but it made for a cinematic achievement now rarely matched, and a modern reputation as one of the all-time greats. If it really was the most expensive shot any movie had produced to that point, it was worth it, creating a genuinely spectacular moment that almost certainly would be illegal to make today.
Read this next: The 20 Most Influential Comedy Stars In Movie History
The post The Story Behind The Most Expensive Shot in Silent Film History appeared first on /Film.
A recent breach in MSI's servers exposed Intel's BootGuard keys and has now put the security of various devices at risk.
Last month, a hacker group by the name of Money Message revealed that they had breached MSI's servers and stolen 1.5 TBs of data from the company's servers including source code amongst a list of various files that are important to the integrity of the company. The group asked MSI to pay $4.0 million in ransom to avert them from releasing the files to the public but MSI refused the payment.
This action promoted the group to release the files on public servers this Thursday and based on an investigation done by BINARLY, the files include Intel BootGuard keys from MSI which not only affects MSI itself but also other major vendors including Intel, Lenovo, Supermicron & many others.
Digging deeper into the aftermath of the @msiUSA data breach and its impact on the industry.
Leaked Intel BootGuard keys from MSI are affecting many different device vendors, including @Intel , @Lenovo, @Supermicro_SMCI, and many others industry-wide.
#FwHunt is on! https://t.co/NuPIUJQUgr pic.twitter.com/ZB8XKj33Hv
— BINARLY
The leaked files contain signing keys for a total of over 200 MSI products which can be used to access the firmware of these devices. These include a total of 57 devices whose Firmware Image Signing Keys have leaked out and 116 devices whose Intel BootGuard Keys have leaked.
Why these keys are so important is because they are used to flag certain software that isn't verified as untrusted and "potentially malicious", says PCMAG. These keys can be used to tag malicious software with malware as trusted and handed over to the system which ends up compromising its security.
“The signing keys for fw [firmware] image allow an attacker to craft malicious firmware updates and it can be delivered through normal BIOS update processes with MSI update tools,” Binarly CEO Alex Matrosov tells PCMag.
MSI replied to its customers to avoid downloading UEFI/BIOS Firmware from any place except its own official websites where the proper version will be available without any fear of being compromised. Furthermore, since these files have been made public over the last couple of days, it is very likely a number of UEFI/BIOS firmware are already floating around various sections of the web with malicious code.
It seems this leak affects not only Intel Boot Guard technology, but all OEM signing-based mechanisms in CSME, such as OEM unlock (Orange Unlock), ISH firmware, SMIP and others... https://t.co/Eptmbo6cci
— Mark Ermolov (@_markel___) May 5, 2023
According to Alex Matrosov, the CEO of BINARLY, the leak is confirmed to include Intel's private keys for OEM devices. Furthermore, the BootGuard may not be as effective on devices based on 11th-Gen Tiger Lake, 12th-Gen Alder Lake, and 13th-Gen Raptor Lake platforms. The leak also affects all OEM signing-based mechanisms within CSME (Converged Security and Management Engine) as stated by Alex. Intel and its partners who are affected by this leak have to to comment on how they plan on tackling this major security flaw that's occured through this breach.
Tom Shadyac's 1997 comedy film "Liar Liar" had a light supernatural concept: Fletcher Reed, a typical Hollywood Workholic Dad (known in screenwriting circles as "reliable, clichéd character type #4") constantly lies to his family and clients in order to succeed in life. As a lawyer, lying is handy. As a father, however, lying gets him in trouble with his five-year-old son, Max (Justin Cooper). As such, the child makes a birthday wish, longing that his dad cannot lie for just one day. The wish comes true.
What follows is a comedic showcase for star Jim Carrey to put his talents for physical comedy on display. The actor hilariously mugs and thrashes about in agony as Fletcher's newfound truthfulness gets him in various amounts of trouble. In one case, he cannot lie to exonerate a dishonest client. In another, he says openly lascivious things to a woman on the elevator. He gets slapped in the face and even arrested for his comments.
"Liar Liar" is slick Hollywood pabulum, invented merely as a showcase vehicle for its superstar lead actor; Jim Carrey was one of the biggest stars in the world at the time. The film cost $45 million to make, with $20 million of that providing Carrey's salary (though another film would mark his biggest payday). The payday was worth it. "Liar Liar" made over $302 million worldwide.
"Liar Liar" was also a chance for director Shadyac to include a few jokes and Easter eggs, cracking wise at Carrey's career. Did you know, for instance, that Fire Marshal Bill, a character Carrey created for the hit sketch comedy series "In Living Color," has a cameo?
One cannot overstate the popularity of "In Living Color." Keenan Ivory Wayans' sketch comedy program, which ran from 1990 to 1994, was meant as a diverse counterpoint to stodgy, older sketch comedy shows like "Saturday Night Live," and featured stranger, edgier humor. It also featured regular dance routines from the show's in-house troupe, the Fly Girls, and regular hip-hop music acts. Several notable characters emerged from "In Living Color," including Homey the Clown (Damon Wayans), Wanda (Jamie Foxx), and Fire Marshal Bill.
Fire Marshal Bill was a scarred and mentally damaged fire marshal who, when teaching others about fire safety, often did a great deal of bodily damage to himself. Undeterred by injury, his lessons would persist. His lessons also typically ended in fires and explosions. Fire Marshal Bill's upper lip had seemingly been burnt off, and Carrey played the part with his sizable front teeth jutting out. He was the only character to appear in all five seasons of the show.
At the end of "Liar Liar," Fletcher makes a mad dash to the airport to stop his son from being moved to Boston with his ex-wife Audrey (Maura Tierney). In so doing, he steals a wheeled boarding staircase vehicle and flees out onto an actual runway. This leads to his own injury. The following scene is the immediate aftermath of Fletcher's crimes, with the plane stopped and fire personnel surging in to help. Tierney, Cooper, and Cary Elwes stand next to each other in the fracas to talk to a police officer.
Look at the photo above. Behind the lead actors, one can see Jim Carrey -- in character as Fire Marshall Bill -- standing in the crowd. See it in action below too.
It seems that Carrey is having a wonderful time playing Fire Marshal Bill, his first time playing the role in three years. A look at the extras around him reveals that they are snickering and laughing at whatever he may be saying. While the Fire Marshall Bill character isn't wearing his signature hat, the jutted-out teeth, and demonstrative nodding are a dead giveaway. That's definitely Jim Carrey, and he's definitely playing Fire Marshal Bill.
Whether this was Shadyac's idea or Carrey's one cannot say, but it does seem that Shadyac wanted to prank Carrey at a different point in the film.
During one of the many trial scenes in "Liar Liar," Fletcher faces off against a lawyer named Dana (Emmy- and Tony-winning actress Swoosie Kurtz). In one moment, both lawyers lose their cool. When Dana raises an objection, Fletcher yells "You would!" Dana yells "Wimp!" Fletcher shoots back with "Hag!" It's a cute moment of comedic childishness.
In a post-film outtakes reel, after Fletcher yells "You would!," Kurtz yells back "Overactor!" Carrey tries to return with a "Jezebel!," but laughs too hard at the prank. Yes, Jim Carrey overacts. The crew laughs, all seemingly in on the joke. Kurtz laughingly points out that Tom Shadyac put her up to the insult. Carrey hugs her in good humor. "Oh no," he jokingly comments, "they're onto me."
"Liar Liar" is a puffball of a movie, but its screenplay functions better than it ought to. Plus, at only 88 minutes, it'll be over before you know it. It's no wonder it was a hit.
Read this next: The 20 Most Influential Comedy Stars In Movie History
The post Liar Liar Gave Jim Carrey a Second Sneaky Role That You Probably Missed appeared first on /Film.
Besides being the favorite show of dads and grandads all over the country, "Yellowstone" is also making bank for its creator, Taylor Sheridan, and it's doing so in ways you may not expect.
It's a given that a hit show is going to do well for the showrunner. We're now in its fifth and final season and that's not counting any of its many spin-offs, including two prequel shows ("1883" starring Sam Elliott, Tim McGraw, and Faith Hill, and "1923" starring Harrison Ford and Helen Mirren) that are released now and at least three others that are in the works: "Bass Reeves" starring David Oyelowo as the title character, the first Black US Marshal, "1944" and "6666."
That's a whole lot of shows to have your name on as creator, but Sheridan is also making some money on the side by renting out his own ranch property, horses, and livestock to Paramount Studios. The Wall Street Journal did some digging and found that Sheridan was making cash hand over fist (and good for him) by renting his ranch space for $50,000 a week and even renting the productions his cattle at $25 a head.
That's right, he's renting out cows.
It's mainly the spin-offs that Sheridan is renting out his property to, using his ranches as "cowboy camps" where the actors of his spin-off shows learn how to ride horses and get a firsthand feel for what life on a ranch is actually like. These camps reportedly cost the studio well over $200,000, including $2,000 a head for the use of his horses.
The Wall Street Journal says these expenses might be causing a little bit of friction between the network and Sheridan, but honestly, good for Sheridan. This is an expense they'd have no matter what and if the creator of one of the most popular original shows on television can be the one to provide them, even if it's at a premium price, then so be it.
If there is some grumbling going on between the moneymen, that hasn't bled into the actual productions. Rumored conflicts between Sheridan and "Yellowstone" star Kevin Costner might be the real reason the main show is ending this season, not because the creator is earning some extra scratch on the side. Still, Paramount hasn't slowed down greenlighting these spin-off shows. It feels like there's a new one announced every 6 weeks and the studio wouldn't do that if the shows weren't successful.
The second half of "Yellowstone" season 5 will air later this year, a sequel series is in the works, possibly starring Matthew McConaughey, and season 2 of "1923" with Ford and Mirren is expected to air sometime in 2024.
Read this next: The 15 Best Anthology TV Series Ranked
The post Taylor Sheridan Charges Paramount to Shoot Yellowstone at His Ranch And Rent His Cows appeared first on /Film.
SpaceX has received a crucial Federal Communications Commission (FCC) authorization for its Starlink satellite internet constellation. The firm, which has rapidly built the Starlink network and launched more than four thousand satellites to date, nevertheless suffered from high usage in certain areas and low in others even as it rushed to populate orbital shells with the satellites. This led to a degradation of internet speeds for users in North America, but now, it appears as if the internet speeds might improve. The FCC has approved SpaceX's request to increase the transmit duty cycles of its second-generation user dishes after SpaceX submitted data to the Commission outlining that doing so would not violate any radiofrequency emissions regulations.
SpaceX has been investigating ways to make its Starlink user dishes more potent for quite some time now. The firm first filed an application with the FCC in June last year seeking approval to launch new Starlink satellite dishes. These would feature several upgrades over their predecessors, including a higher transmit duty cycle. In networking, the transmit duty cycle is the time a terminal spends connected and communicating with a transmitting body.
SpaceX's application revealed that the new dishes would have a duty cycle of 14% - implying that they would communicate with the satellites for longer. However, this percentage was later reduced to 10.5% due to changes in the Commission's radiofrequency calculation. Following the application for the second generation user dishes, SpaceX submitted another request to the FCC to test 200 user dishes at higher duty cycles to evaluate their performance.
Keeping up the pace of upgrading its dishes, SpaceX followed these steps with another application in December when it asked the FCC to allow it to increase its duty cycle to 17.5% permanently.
SpaceX submitted this application after testing the Starlink user dishes at the maximum transmit duty cycle of 100% - or in other words, a scenario where they would communicate with the satellites all the time. These tests utilized the flat shape of the second-generation Starlink dishes, and they demonstrated that as opposed to the new rules, which had laid down a maximum duty cycle of 10.5%, the dishes could in fact transmit up to 17.5% of the time, without exceeding any radiation hazard limits.
The FCC has approved the application for the higher duty cycle, which will improve Starlink's performance. The longer duration of the dishes communications period will directly impact the upload speeds for Starlink users. This is because the terminals will spend a more extended period communicating with the satellites; however, the overall speed can also improve significantly since the terminals will be able to make up frequently for information losses between them and the orbiting spacecraft.
Additionally, the longer the dishes communicate, the faster they establish links to newer Starlink satellites. This will reduce switchover times and lead to fewer connection drops. SpaceX has launched more than four thousand Starlink satellites to date. It plans to launch tens of thousands more to gain a foothold in the market that will open soon as Amazon's Kuiper subsidiary secures a rocket and launches its own satellites.
One of the ways I do this is by creating simple plugins for Events Ripper, a proof-of-concept tool for "mining" Windows Event Log data for pivot points that can be applied to analysis, and in particular timeline analysis. Events Ripper uses the events file, the intermediate step between normalizing Windows Event Log events into a timeline, extracting pivot points and allowing me to build the picture of what happened, and when, a great deal faster than doing so manually.
The recently created or updated plugins include:
sec4797.pl
Check for "Microsoft-Windows-Security-Auditing/4797" events, indicating that a user account was checked for a blank password. I'd never seen these events before, but they popped up during a recent investigation, and helped to identify the threat actor's activity, as well as validate the compromised account they were using.
filter.pl
"Microsoft-Windows-Security-Auditing/5156", and /5158 events; this plugin output is similar to what we see with ShimCache parsers, in that it lists the applications for which the Windows Filtering Platform allows connections, or allows to bind to a local port, respectively. Similar to "Service Control Manager" events illustrating a new service being installed, this plugin may show quite a few legitimate applications, but it's much easier to go through that list and see a few suspicious or malicious applications than it is to manually scroll through the timeline. Searching the timeline for those applications can really help focus the investigation on specific timeframes of activity.
defender.pl
Windows Defender event IDs 1116, 1117, 2051, and 5007, all in a single plugin, allowing us to look for detections and modifications to Windows Defender. Some modifications to Windows Defender may be legitimate, but in recent investigations, exclusions added to Windows Defender have provided insight into the compromised user account, as well as the folders the threat actor used for staging their tools.
msi.pl
Source "MsiInstaller", with event IDs 11707 (successful product installation), 11724, and 1034 (both successful product removal).
scm.pl
Combined several event IDs (7000, 7009, 7024, 7040, and 7045) events, all with "Service Control Manager" as the source, into a single plugin. This plugin is not so much the result of recent investigations, as it is the desire to optimize validation; a service being created or installed doesn't mean that it successfully runs each time the system is restarted.
appissue.pl
Combined "Application Hang/1002", "Application Error/1000", and "Windows Error Reporting/1001" events into a single plugin, very often allowing us to see the threat actor's malware failing to function.
Each of the new or updated plugins is the result of something observed or learned during recent investigations, and allow me to find unusual or malicious events to use as pivot points in my analysis.
We can do the same things with RegRipper plugins, Yara or Sigma rules, etc. It simply depends upon your framework and medium.
This article contains major spoilers for "Guardians of the Galaxy: Vol. 3."
The Guardians of the Galaxy ... no more? Well, in a manner of speaking, at least. Rumors of the demise of writer/director James Gunn's "bunch of a-holes" may have been exaggerated. Despite all the talk about delivering a definitive end to this iteration of the Guardians, leading many fans to assume that Chris Pratt's Peter Quill, Bradley Cooper's Rocket, or anyone else on the team would end up having their ticket punched in heartbreaking fashion, not a single one of the core group actually died. The lovable losers saved Rocket's life from the kill switch that the High Evolutionary (Chukwudi Iwuji) once implanted inside him, Will Poulter's Adam Warlock experienced a change of heart and saved Quill from an icy demise in the vacuum of space, and everyone received the send-off they deserved.
But that doesn't mean the Guardians as we've known them will continue.
Sure, the threequel ends with the promise that "The legendary Star-Lord will return," hinting at Marvel's larger plans for Quill even as Gunn makes his exit from Marvel to focus on "Superman: Legacy" and the rest of his DC responsibilities as co-head of the rival studio. But the mid-credits scene makes it abundantly clear that a new version of the Guardians might very well be set up for future appearances down the line. As with the Avengers themselves, it appears that the Guardians could be in for a revolving door of members. Let's break down the intriguing hints of what the Guardians 2.0 might look like in the future.
In an exciting twist for this trilogy, "Vol. 3" shifted the team dynamic right from the opening moments. Rather than focusing predominantly on Quill, Gunn made the long-awaited move to place Rocket and his origin story in the foreground of the film. With audiences now given a clearer understanding of what drives the bioengineered raccoon and the character himself having come to terms with his survivor's guilt, it simply makes sense that the story would end with Quill passing on the mantle of team leader to Rocket. In a rare moment of being moved beyond words, the film ends with the heavy implication that a future "Guardians" movie could position Rocket as its main lead ... until the mid-credits scene puts this tease into practice.
After the credits begin rolling, we dive right back into Rocket's perspective on an unknown planet and surrounded by his new teammates. Sharp-eyed viewers will notice not-so-baby Groot (Vin Diesel) sleeping one off behind the team before his big reveal, but he's joined by a whole cast of exciting characters, both new and old. Sean Gunn's Kraglin is there, having finally mastered the art of Yondu's (Michael Rooker) tricky arrow telekinesis. Adam Warlock and his loyal pet Blurp also make their presence known, adding a serious amount of muscle (and cuteness!) to the new group. And then there's young Phyla-Vell, played by actor Kai Zen. Rescued from the High Evolutionary's sinister experiments and brought on board with the Guardians, she adds a fun new dynamic that could end up paying dividends in the future of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
It's unclear if this mid-credits scene is meant as a prelude to a potential "Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 4," likely without Gunn's involvement, but who knows!
Who says death is the only way to give a character a conclusive end?
"Vol. 3" concludes by giving each and every one of its members a satisfying ride into the sunset. Drax (Dave Bautista) and Nebula stay in Knowhere, taking on the responsibility of rebuilding the community as best they can. The empath Mantis (Pom Klementieff) embarks on a quest of self-discovery, freed from the pressure and expectations of her new family so she could focus on herself, for a refreshing change. Gamora (Zoe Saldaña), or at least the alternate universe version of Gamora who ended up invading the main timeline back in "Avengers: Endgame" thanks to some time-travel shenanigans, leaves on good terms with the team and especially Quill -- who may not have recovered that spark of romance between them, but at least feels closer to her than before. She returns to the Ravagers as their more hard-edged leader. And as for Quill? He finally comes back to Earth to reconnect with his grandfather, who suffered the loss of his daughter and the disappearance of his grandson on the same fateful night all those years ago.
While we know at least Quill will return to the fold, as mentioned earlier, it doesn't seem terribly likely that we'll ever see this same group of Guardians reappear in future installments of the MCU. We can safely rule Saldaña out, who has previously expressed her desire to retire from the character and make way for a future recasting, and likely Bautista as well, who has made similar remarks about wanting to move on. But all good things come to an end and at least Gunn got to go out on his own terms.
"Guardians of the Galaxy: Vol. 3" is currently playing in theaters.
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The post Let's Talk About That Guardians of the Galaxy Mid-Credits Scene and What It Means for the MCU appeared first on /Film.
(Welcome to Under the Radar, a column where we spotlight specific movies, shows, trends, performances, or scenes that caught our eye and deserved more attention ... but otherwise flew under the radar. In this edition: Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi's latest "No Bears" is another personal triumph, "Joyland" tackles painfully relatable South Asian shortcomings, and "Sisu" puts the hurt on some deeply unlucky Nazis.)
Goodbye April, hello May, and welcome to the unofficial start of the summer movie season. If it seems like the yearly schedule for big-screen releases is weirdly compressed, well, that's because it is. We essentially go from the doldrums of the early winter months of the year to a blockbuster-heavy "summer" slate that extends from May all the way to September or even October, before pivoting right back to awards season mayhem. Traditionally, Memorial Day weekend is the point at which it feels a little more socially acceptable to kickstart our more spectacle-heavy entertainment (remember, "Top Gun: Maverick" released just in time for the long holiday weekend last May), but more and more it feels like the calendar has become all but meaningless, with so many big-budget crowd-pleasers jockeying for position.
In the March edition of this column, we pointed out how springtime tends to feel like the forgotten months of the moviegoing calendar. That tone somewhat continued through April, though that's not to say we lacked for worthy options to watch either in theaters or streaming at home. Kelly Fremon Craig debuted "Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret," "How to Blow Up a Pipeline" stirred up quite a bit of noise, and Peacock released the mind-bending series "Mrs. Davis." But for our purposes, we're focusing on a trio of underseen gems: Jafar Panahi's "No Bears," the queer drama "Joyland," and the blood-soaked action of "Sisu."
Where does the line between fiction and reality blend into something altogether more complicated? Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi's latest film, "No Bears," explores this and even more nuanced concerns in unconventional fashion. You see, Panahi has suffered through government censorship and even arrest in Iran because of his movies, which dare to portray Iranian politics and social customs in an honest light. Originally detained in 2010 and sentenced to house arrest and a 20-year ban on filmmaking in his native country as punishment for his outspoken views, Panahi nonetheless filmed several movies in secret that starred himself as a fictionalized Jafar Panahi, whose cinematic backstory largely reflected his own.
The same is true of "No Bears," in which Panahi plays a filmmaker named Panahi who has been forced to flee Teheran and relocate to a remote border town in Turkey, where he conducts a remote shoot of a documentary that he can't physically visit. Faced with a spotty internet connection that interrupts his efforts, the reclusive Panahi finally steps out into the town and instead trains his curious camera on the villagers. But upon snapping a few innocent photos, Panahi becomes embroiled in a local dispute involving two young forbidden lovers that he happened to capture on film. Between the regressive rites and traditions involving arranged marriage on one side of the camera and his ongoing documentary falling to pieces as his two Iranian subjects struggle to acquire passports in order to escape government overreach, the links between these seemingly disparate storylines -- and Panahi's own exile -- soon becomes clear.
With a playful sense of meta-textual humor and a keen eye on capturing profound truths, "No Bears" is an experience unlike any other.
"No Bears" is currently streaming on The Criterion Channel.
Those who've grown up in South Asian culture have an intimate knowledge of how much entrenched social customs and traditional mindsets can negatively effect those caught in their wake. For decades, women have been burdened with the societal pressures of marrying a total stranger, bearing children, and leaving all other responsibilities to their husband. Men face a strict and suffocating definition of what "masculinity" is supposed to be, relegating anything that dares to exceed those boundaries as a threat to be snuffed out. You'll notice that such a binary mindset leaves out practically the entire spectrum of human identity that doesn't quite conform to one label or the other.
"Joyland," the directorial debut of Pakistani filmmaker Saim Sadiq, addresses all of this and more with an incisive and utterly empathetic approach -- one that resulted in the film's banning in its native country. Though this has since been reversed (albeit with certain scenes subjected to censoring), Pakistan's response all but confirms the fact that the film's subject matter hit its mark.
The story follows unemployed husband Haider (Ali Junejo) and his fiercely independent wife Mumtaz (Rasti Farooq). The almost pathetically ineffectual Haider constantly disappoints his hard-edged father Amanullah (Salmaan Peerzada), but lucks into a new job ... which involves being a backup dancer at an erotic dance theater to a transgender headliner, Biba (Alina Khan). Compelled to give up her own job to stay at home and help with domestic duties, Mumtaz begins to spiral as Haider is drawn more and more to the freedom afforded by Biba. Impressively, the film never once judges any of the main trio of exceptionally well-drawn characters, choosing instead to highlight how their culture has failed them. Don't miss this one.
"Joyland" is currently playing in select theaters.
What happens when you cross a legendary, John Wick-like figure straight from myth with a style evoking Quentin Tarantino's exploitation streak? You wind up with something close to the balancing act that "Sisu" (mostly) pulls off. From Finnish writer/director Jalmari Helander, the movie explains from the outset that "Sisu" is a Finnish word for, essentially, finding strength and resilience when all hope is lost.
The avatar for this entire concept is embodied in Aatami Korpi (portrayed with impressive physicality by Jorma Tommila), a rugged gold prospector and former soldier who earned a reputation as an "immortal" killer and a one-man scourge to the invading Russians. Having left his wartime ways behind him, he now quietly ekes out a living in the Lapland wilderness in the latter days of World War II, panning for gold and searching for wildly profitable deposits. When he finds one and seeks to make off with unimaginable wealth through his war-torn country, he runs afoul of a marauding group of Nazis with nothing better to do than accost solitary travelers. This, needless to say, turns out to be a grave mistake.
What follows is a straightforward exercise in the ever-silent Aatami brutally killing Nazis in all sorts of creative ways, turning a fight for survival into a vengeance-seeking crusade against the fascists who simply couldn't leave him be. As the film goes on, divided into six chapters that further lends to the episodic feel of the movie, it quickly becomes clear that "Sisu" works best when it embraces a much more heightened and fantastical tone. Aatami simply refuses to die, no matter how dire his predicament, and viewers can't help but get swept along with him.
"Sisu" is currently playing in theaters.
Read this next: The 15 Best Korean Directors Of All Time
The post Under The Radar: The Nazi-Killing Thrills of Sisu, Finding Truth in Fiction With No Bears, And More appeared first on /Film.
Eating a pancake breakfast sandwich is a flavor experience every salty-sweet-loving human deserves. Bacon, egg, and cheese combined with fluffy pancake batter is such a triumphant blend of smoke, salt, fat, and sweet, this winning combo should be inextricably bound. Please join me in observing the sacred union of BEC…
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
If you remember that a new Saints Row game came out in the summer of last year, then you might be pleased to hear that the open-world adventure's first DLC expansion will finally arrive next week, nine months on from the game's initial release on PlayStation, PC, and Xbox platforms.
The Heist and The Hazardous — which hits all platforms on May 9 — will see our uber-trendy gangsters on a mission of vengeance, tracking down the double-crossing Hollywood star Chris Hardy following a botched assignment. The expansion will feature new in-game events, story missions, and a wardrobe full of new clothing, weapons, and other related chicanery. The Heist and The Hazardous is the first of three paid DLC expansions planned for the title in 2023.
https://twitter.com/SaintsRow/status/1653399037180010500?s=20
Saints Row, which launched last August after being delayed from its initial spring release date, saw the tongue-in-cheek crime franchise rebooted with an oddly elite fashion aesthetic and a cast of younger, entrepreneurial stars. While the game itself was serviceable, with high-octane action and an appetite for destruction, many critics and fans were non-plussed at the reboot's general vibe, complaining about a dated mission design, obnoxious and offputting dialogue, as well as a slew of technical issues.
Developer Volition has been releasing updates to correct the latter problems, which has led to this long delay between launch and DLC drops. Soon after release, it was announced that Volition was being transferred from Deep Silver to another Embracer Group publisher, Gearbox Entertainment.
Saints Row is available now on PlayStation, PC, and Xbox. But not Stadia. Not anymore.
The post Saints Row DLC, The Heist and The Hazardous, finally arrives next week appeared first on Destructoid.
In Michael Mann's 2001 biopic "Ali," Jamie Foxx played Drew Bundini Brown, Muhammad Ali's assistant trainer. Brown was, as the film depicted him, a little crass, openly lascivious (he confesses his particular fetishes in public), and not always up to living the way Ali would have liked him to. In one notable scene, Ali (Will Smith) bursts into Brown's dingy apartment and finds him hungover. Ali screams at the man to respect himself.
Mann is a filmmaker fond of shaky, handheld camera moves, was an early proponent of digital photography, and seeks a certain kind of steely, assertive realism in his work. This was an exhilarating approach for a high-profile Hollywood biography like "Ali," a film that was nominated for Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor at the Academy Awards.
It's worth noting that Mann and his three credited "Ali" co-screenwriters, Eric Roth ("Forrest Gump") and writing duo Stephen J. Rivele and Christopher Wilkinson ("Nixon"), are all white men. They may have been able to capture the historical details correctly, and they may have accurately depicted Muhammad Ali's unique character, largely thanks to the legendary boxer's many outspoken press conferences and interviews, but what they lacked was the perspective of the Black community. It was here that Jamie Foxx stepped in.
In a 2018 interview with Yahoo! Life, Foxx recalled an afternoon he spent with Mann during the production of "Ali," and how a chance encounter with one of Foxx's fans gave the actor a chance to tell his director what needed to happen in a key "Ali" scene.
The scene in question was when Brown was to meet Muhammad Ali for the first time. Because Ali was already a celebrity when Brown met him, Mann felt Brown needed to be quiet and nervous in the champ's presence. Jamie Foxx immediately pointed out to Mann that this would not be an accurate response between two Black men. He said:
"I had never worked with Michael Mann, so I wasn't aware of the presence, and I had to learn some things. But he learned some things as well. Like, when it came to me walking in as Bundini talking to Ali the first time, he said you should be scared of him. I asked why. He said, 'Because he's the champ.' And I said, 'So?' He said, 'Why are you saying, "So?"' I said it was because Black people don't do it like that."
Foxx patiently explained to Mann that Brown would not have been intimidated by Ali. Indeed, he would have approached with friendliness and confidence, showing his gregariousness and willingness to pal around with a celebrity. Foxx initially followed Mann's initial direction, but felt his instincts as an actor were still the correct way to play the scene. Foxx said:
"[I said to Mann] 'If I see someone who's a star, and I say hello to them, I feel like I'm a part of them.' So we shot it the nervous way, and I didn't think it was the right thing, but I had to respect the director."
Foxx was able to prove his point to Mann a few days later when a random fan approached the actor while he was filming an outdoor scene in Miami. The fan possessed the same confidence Foxx said Brown ought to have.
Foxx couldn't have communicated his intentions better than if he staged the following incident himself. Foxx doesn't say the name of the fans who approached him, but one person provided a real-world example of exactly what Foxx had tried to communicate to Mann:
"[A] few days later, I was standing on the street, and we're shooting something in Miami, and this little white couple comes up and quietly says, 'Mr. Foxx, is it okay if I get a picture?' and I said, 'Sure,' and we took the picture. As soon we get through with the picture, I hear a brother across the street — 'FOXX! What about it, baby? What's up?' He comes across the street, got a little bag of something he's eating, 'What's good, baby? Holler at me Foxx, what we doing tonight?'"
This person was not a friend of Foxx's. He was merely a confident human being. Foxx pointed out that this fan was more emblematic of the way Black men communicate. Indeed, Foxx pointed out that the confidence of a fan is a subtle test of the celebrity's character. Foxx said:
"Mann says, 'Do you know him?' I say, 'Never met him in my life. That's just the way we are. If I'd have shined on him, and told him I couldn't holler at him, he would have told everybody Jamie Foxx is an a**hole.'"
After this encounter, Mann and Foxx went back to the scene in question and reshot it in the manner Foxx preferred. Not only did the actor like the finished product better, but he felt it informed Bundini's optimistic character for the rest of the movie.
Michael Mann, Foxx admitted, is a brilliant director. But even the most seasoned pros can learn from their cast.
Read this next: The 14 Best Film Acting Debuts Of All Time
The post Jamie Foxx Brought a Key Cultural Perspective to a Scene in Ali appeared first on /Film.
“Put some potato chips in there” is a sandwich hack so timeworn, I’m hesitant to characterize it as anything more than generally accepted wisdom. What sandwich wouldn’t benefit from extra salt and texture? Who actually prefers a peanut butter and jelly sandwich without a hidden layer of fried potato (preferably the…
As we continue to drive toward making the world safer and more productive for all, it is vital we empower our customers to secure every aspect of their organization. Each day we are seeing more advanced security threats as bad actors develop new tactics that aim to take advantage of businesses as they digitally transform and adopt a multicloud infrastructure. At Microsoft, we understand cloud security is a problem you manage, not a problem you solve, so we are constantly working to use data, intelligence, AI, and automation to provide a comprehensive solution that helps us all respond faster and even stay one step ahead of bad actors and events.
Core to this approach is our ability to help customers do more with the security of Microsoft Azure that’s built-in, embedded, and out of the box, and extending that protection to multicloud infrastructures. We are honored to be recognized as a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Infrastructure-as-a-Service Platform Native Security (IPNS), Q2 2023 report. The IPNS category compares public clouds and highlights the native security provided to customers on public cloud platforms. This includes capabilities for storage and data security, identity and access management (IAM), network security, and hardware and hypervisor security. In the report, it is great to see Forrester recognize the continued progress we have made, noting “Microsoft provides strong CSPM and CIEM [cloud security posture management and cloud infrastructure entitlement management] capabilities. It has made significant investments in CSPM and CWP [cloud workload protection]. The vendor sports a strong vision for IPNS offerings, and its execution roadmap and market approach are ahead of the competition.”
Additionally, Microsoft received a top score from Forrester in the current IPNS offering category and had the highest possible score in the data centers, security certifications, roadmap, market approach, innovation, and seven other criteria. The report states, “Microsoft offers strong admin IAM management, above-par CSPM and CIEM capabilities, and broad coverage guest OS [operating system] security. Network security capabilities and multicloud support are ahead of others evaluated as well.”
Microsoft is committed to continual innovation and investment in cloud security. In Azure, our security approach focuses on defense in depth, with layers of protection built throughout all phases of design, development, and deployment of our platforms and technologies.
In a constantly changing world, we work hard to release features that help our customers strengthen their security posture, accelerate protection against modern threats, and reduce risk throughout the cloud application lifecycle. Microsoft Defender for Cloud is a critical component of that strategy. Natively available in Azure, it helps protect multicloud and hybrid environments end-to-end, from development to runtime as a comprehensive cloud-native application protection platform (CNAPP). Our multicloud approach means customers get the protection they expect from Microsoft—not only in Azure—but also by centralizing and unifying their security needs on other public clouds as well.
Customers like VECOZO choose integrated security from Microsoft across Defender for Cloud, network security, and identity to combine their various security layers and functionalities into an easy-to-deploy, easy-to-manage, highly secure environment. Igor van Haren, Lead Architect, VECOZO, said “There’s always security work to be done, but with Azure, we’ve gained improved visibility, removed some of the most tedious work from our administrators’ agendas, and adopted a number of solutions that aid our Zero Trust security approach.” Read more about VECOZO’s experience in their customer story.
Over the last several months we have also announced new feature releases across Defender for Cloud, network security, and other services that continue to build on our vision for a comprehensive, intelligent cloud platform. These include:
Microsoft Defender Cloud Security Posture Management is now generally available to help organizations get an end-to-end view of risks and prioritize remediation across their multicloud environments with contextual cloud security. And now, new integrated data-aware security posture capabilities allow teams to automatically discover their data estate, assess threats to their most critical assets and sensitive data, and proactively prevent breaches along potential attack paths.
Microsoft Defender for Storage now offers sensitive data discovery and malware scanning to address threats to critical storage resources in the cloud. New scanning capabilities prevent infiltration attempts with near real-time detection of metamorphic and polymorphic malware across cloud data.
Microsoft Defender for APIs is in preview. A new offering as part of Defender for Cloud, Defender for APIs helps organizations gain visibility into business-critical Azure APIs, understand their security posture, prioritize vulnerability fixes, and detect and respond to active runtime threats within minutes. For more information on future Defender for Cloud releases, our roadmap showcases a comprehensive list of information about new features.
Microsoft Azure Firewall Basic, a new SKU of Azure Firewall, delivers an enterprise-grade network firewall to small and medium businesses (SMBs) at an affordable price point. You get essential network firewall capabilities, like filtering of east-west and north-south traffic with built-in threat intelligence to block malicious traffic. As a cloud-native service, Azure Firewall is easy to set up, configure, and manage, and requires zero maintenance.
Microsoft Azure DDoS IP Protection, a new SKU of Azure DDoS Protection, is designed with SMBs in mind and delivers enterprise-grade, cost-effective DDoS protection. You can defend against the most sophisticated DDoS attacks with always-on monitoring and adaptive threat intelligence that is tuned to your normal traffic volume. Customers have the flexibility to apply protection on individual public IP resources.
These innovations highlight how Microsoft is committed to solving some of the toughest security challenges we all face today. By continually improving the platform, tools, and intelligence our customers need, we can help drive meaningful change in how we protect the world around us.
We invite you to read the full Forrester report here.
To learn more about Microsoft Security solutions, visit our website. Bookmark the Security blog to keep up with our expert coverage on security matters. Also, follow us on LinkedIn (Microsoft Security) and Twitter (@MSFTSecurity) for the latest news and updates on cybersecurity.
The post Forrester names Microsoft a Leader in 2023 Infrastructure-as-a-Service Platform Native Security report appeared first on Microsoft Security Blog.
Having a broad complement of full-time software developers and product managers is critical to leading an organization that operates as a product team. At the same time, we recognize that federal tech resources are in scarce supply in the market, and the technical landscape changes more quickly than the traditional government employee pipeline can accommodate. While we seek to increase the number of full-time technical staff in OIT, our efforts cannot match our demand for tech talent. Our scope spans over two thousand locations, a thousand systems, and over a half million users. As a result, we will continue to depend heavily on contractors to deliver on our mission, and we embrace them as members of one team. To do this effectively, we conduct project reviews and planning jointly. We are clear on who is responsible for what, and we work together to continuously improve our technical rigor as a single Product Group at VA.
The government often gets into a mindset of shielding contractors from meetings, decision-making, and performance review; this is a mistake. When you think about the structure of most product and development teams within the commercial space, they act as a single team. We also must do this in the federal environment, even though a lot of our work is outsourced.
Operating as a single team still means we must hold our contractor partners accountable for their portion of the end result and how they do the work. By doing so, we get better incrementally and bring forward the issues they face. We expect them to develop ideas on making process improvements, thereby getting into a rhythm of continuously improving. As a measure, if we don’t know the names of the contractors, then we aren’t getting a balanced view because we don’t hear those voices. If we aren’t hearing from their leadership on what is going well and what isn’t, then there’s an important voice missing from the conversation. So, again, we must act as one virtual team, with all members performing their job.
Of course, this doesn’t mean that we mistake purposeful inclusion for blanket participation. It’s not always appropriate or ethical for contractors to participate in decisions and planning that would give them an unfair advantage during competition for a contract requirement that flows from privileged conversations around planning and decision making. Careful coordination with the Contracting Officer and Office of General Counsel during both the contract planning and post-award stages is critical to mitigating these risks.
At the same time, we must recognize that they are contractors. Just like our full-time employees, the government must take action if the contractor is not performing well. It’s a delicate balance of acting as a team and holding contractors responsible for their work. We in the development teams and in Strategic Sourcing do this by having candid conversations with their leadership and by documenting contractor performance, reflecting on how well the contractor performed on past work and whether we would want to work with them again in the future. Every time VA conducts a Federal Information Technology Acquisition Reform Act (FITARA) review, it serves as a gate as we consider how well the contractor has performed before continuing our partnership.
My past experience working on the team that recovered from the early failed effort of Healthcare.gov illustrates the importance of operating collectively as one product group and ensuring performance-based accountability at both the government and contractor levels. Originally, everything was farmed out to multiple contractors who were each responsible for delivering individual pieces of the larger system. Each one believed that their individual pieces would “magically work,” despite the immense complexity and scope of the system. This led to a lack of accountability and a reluctance to work together to solve the problem when those individual pieces resulted in a dysfunctional product. During the recovery, we forced the teams to act as one composite team, problem solving together as one.
This project also illustrates why a great full-time system architect is so critical. If you’re contracting several pieces out, you need an architect with deep systems development experience who can ensure that you have a solid system design to begin with, assess the technical roadmaps chosen by the teams, identify the problems before they explode, and ensure the teams are working together in harmony towards the same goal.
In most cases, I believe it’s a mistake to contract out top-level strategy work. It can be supported by contractors with specific knowledge and insight, but in the end, the internal teams are the ones that know the environment best and will be on the hook to deliver results for stakeholders, policymakers, and taxpayers in the future. They are going to be the ones who lead the organization through implementing the strategy, and they need to have been intimately involved in its creation and the development of the implementation roadmap. They must be passionate about that role, understand it well, connect it to the strategy, evangelize it, and communicate to stakeholders. That just can’t be outsourced.
The value of contractors is, instead, to leverage them to dig in and do independent assessments in areas that we don’t have the full-time capacity or the independent perspective to do. But if we use them in this way, we need to be sure that the questions we’re asking them to answer are ones that we truly can’t live without the answers to – e.g., don’t ask them to do a complete industry assessment when we know that we really only have two feasible options. In fact, don’t use them at all until you believe you have the problem well framed and the critical questions identified.
The government relies heavily on contractors to accomplish the mission. This necessitates rigorous evaluation not only in ensuring that we’re using the most appropriate contract vehicles to satisfy the business need, but that we’re making contract selections in the right way—both areas that are ripe for innovation.
This demand for contract labor has created a vast, lucrative marketplace for vendors. Amid all this choice, it can be difficult for the government to align the right contractor solution to the government’s requirement. Cutting through the marketing pitches of contract proposals in order to evaluate the feasibility of their approach can be difficult, and that’s why you sometimes see proposals that make sense on paper but reflect a different reality when it comes to execution. At VA we utilize a “show me, don’t tell me” evaluation approach. Instead of long written “book reports” or other static proposals that do not directly reflect how a vendor delivers, we review real work products and processes demonstrated by vendors in response to a fictional problem. Alternatively, we’ll competitively award a small project to a promising contractor to see how well they deliver. Both approaches provide us confidence that the vendor is capable of delivering high quality solutions in support of our Veterans in a way that aligns with OIT’s working principles of engineering excellence and with a focus on the customer and user experience.
We review the past expertise and experience of the vendor. This includes the review of case studies, project artifacts, and live products, delivered by the vendor during previous projects, allowing us to separate the “fakers” from vendors who truly specialize in digital transformation and agile delivery.
We also ensure that we contract for systems “in increments.” If a contractor is not delivering, there is always an “Optional Task” or “Option Period” milestone coming up where we can reconsider whether to continue the relationship. This is particularly important in major modernization projects. We’re increasingly defining contracts with a series of incremental deliverables that avoid “big bang modernization,” where the entire system is bought as a single, fully deployed system. Instead, we’re focusing more and more on delivering the MVP (Minimum Viable Product) first, validating it meets the goals, and scaling with success.
Veterans can only receive the benefits and services that they deserve when VA has a strong partnership between government and contractors delivering modern software products. This doesn’t happen by accident. In response to tough labor markets, tight government resources, and the ever-changing nature of the IT problems that we’re trying to solve, we lean heavily on a growing contractor workforce to modernize our software products. As we continue to innovate around these acquisitions to ensure the government is maximizing value from taxpayer dollars, we must also not slip into the old way of thinking—that you can purchase a little help from here and from there and then put it all together for a working product. The complexity of our systems and software requires a mindset where the government and the contractor workforce operate as one team, and both are held accountable for the product’s success.
