This time it is a real financial success. Despite the leakage, Wolverine is a blockbuster. Last week, it was number 1 at the US box office. This week it is number 2 (being deposed by the new Star Trek). In 2 weeks, just for the US market, the cumulative gross is about 130M$. By comparison, Slumdog millionaire is at 141M$ after 26 weeks.
My predictions were not bad :Happy: .
As reported earlier, the expected blockbuster “Wolverine” leaked out about one month before theatrical release. The official release is next week.
The movie is still a success on P2P but not anymore in the top 10 charter. Why? Probably because many people heard about the real quality of the leak. Following are some representative snapshots.
– The picture has some special effect to add
– The picture has some details to remove
– The picture is quite empty due to missing special effects (quiet all the end of the movie)
– or my preferred one: annotated pictures
Conclusion: You have the plot of the story but not the pictures. All the fans will go to the theater to view the final movie even if they downloaded this version. We will not see a lot of impact.
This version is interesting because it gives a very good overview of how a modern movie is created. You have all the different stages of a movie. In fact, it is a super attractive trailer.
We will verify that if a GOOD movie leaks too early, it may not be too much of a disaster. For a bad movie, it may be another story.
Next week we will see the fist figures.
Friday, the Sweden court issued its verdict against the Pirate Bay. Peter Sunde (brokep), Fredrik Neij (TiAMO), Gottfrid Svartholm (Anakata) and Carl Lundström have been sentenced to one year of jail and 900K$ each. They already send to appeal.
The judge estimated that the first offenders were The Pirate Bay’s users but that the four defendants assisted the users to do the infringements. The verdict leaked out the court several hours before its actual official announcement. The police investigates this breach of confidentiality.
Nevertheless, The Pirate Bay is still online. There is even no visible sign or clue about the verdict. it is not the case of some other tracker sites such as Nordicbits, Powerbits, Piratebits, MP3nerds and Wolfbits which went off line. They feared prosecution.
Some Pirate Bay supporters have organized a DDOS attack against IFPI site as retaliation. We may expect other such actions in the coming days.
The story continues. Last week, it seemed that the law was in good shape. But the adventure continues.
Meanwhile, the “Commission Mixte Paritaire”, which has deputies and senators, rejected some amendments that annoyed the government. for instance, this commission decided that the customer should pay the full Internet subscription during the suspension.
Yesterday, the French National Assembly voted this new version of the law. About 40 députés were present (This lower house of the French parliament has 577 députés!) The result was 21 against the law and 15 for the law.
Is the law dead? No. The government can ask a second presentation of the law. It is already scheduled for the 28th April. No doubt, that the government will lobby its députés to avoid the same fiasco.
at least on P2P sites. It is now about one week that a leaked version appeared on the net. The version is an unfinished one; Not the final release. It has leaked out either from within Fox or from some sub contractors.
Of course, this version is already the top downloaded movie at tracker sites. According to TorrentFreak, more than 1 million downloads already. And the first DVDs appear on the street. This is three weeks before the official theatrical release.
This reminds the leakage of Hulk without right colorimetry. The movie was a disaster.
Interestingly, TorrentFreak made a poll: 40% of the downloaders expect to view the FINAL cut in theater or in DVD. The release was pre-effects and several months old. This means that it may be a good teaser. People know that the final one will be better.
Armageddon did not happen. For a few weeks, the virus specialist were ranting about the famous Conficker worm. This worm was so nicely written and protected (it should even use the latest encryption algorithms) that nobody was able to describe its payload.
Nevertheless, it was announced that the worm may trigger some lethal attacks on Fools April day. Every anti virus software vendors (at least some subscription based ones) were releasing dedicated tools to scan your network. Microsoft offered $250.000 for the arrest of the author(s). Armageddon was near.
On Saturday, we knew who the fools were. Not a smell of Y2K? If the purpose of Conficker’s author(s) was to scare people, then the success is great. Remember that often the purpose of terrorism actions is to create a feeling of insecurity, to scare people, to make their life less comfortable. Bingo!
The anti virus industry should be careful: too many false alarms like this one, and consumers will not care any more and will not use the latest updates. And then when the real threat will occur, bad bad bad 🙁 Of course, if they have really believed in the risk,then they should have reacted. But the only appropriate solution would be to come with a real detection tool integrated in their software suite, ie, transparent to the user. Why should Jo Six Pack care about the behavior of the virus, he only cares that it is removed.
Some people are already questioning who benefits from a climate of fear of worms and virus? Guess who…
Techcrunch is well known for its analysis of nice start-ups and the newest trends. His latest recommendations was for business people not to read business books but rather Sci Fi books for imagination.
Thus, Techcrunch provided its list of preferred books. I must confess that I have nothing to reject on this list. I don’t know “The wasp factory” and have not read the latest Stephenson. But all the other ones I highly recommended.
For security minded people, I would recommend also two other books of Neal Stephenson: The Cryptonomicon and Snow Crash (le samourai virtuel in French). In the last one, it was the first quotation of multiverse and metaverse.