Thursday 29 January 2015

Skyfall - oh dear...

Skyfall - oh dear...

This was dreadful.
I tolerated a sniper taking an unnecessary shot when she said she was going to loose the target - the target that was fighting another agent on top of a train. Now train tracks have a pretty fixed route.   I tolerated her shooting once and only once, using ammo that did not punch through her target and hit both of them, and failing to group her shots. If there are two targets, and she's been told that killing Bond doesn't matter she should be firing several shots to hit them both.
By the sniper scene on a rooftop, I gritted my teeth as the so-called groundbreaking fight cinematics  borrowed heavily from several Asian kung-fu films, Babylon 5's season four fight with Sheridan in the night club and a number of others, and Bond lost his lead because he was incompetent. Remember, bond has been told to kill his source. All previous bonds: Shoot sniper in leg, then twist gun in injury until you get the details. This one? Get into an unnecessary fist fight.
By the shower scene I was praying for Timothy Dalton's Bond to stick his arm round the corner of the shower, shoot Daniel Craig in the head and pull the woman out for interrogation. Screw sex, I want intel.
The scene on the island, with the guy handing him a gun? Bond is there to kill him, not to get out alive. It doesn't matter that there is one bullet. (Also Moore's Bond got the woman killed in similar situations twice, without blinking. Direct quote "You wouldn't kill me not after what we've just done." "I certainly wouldn't have killed you before".)
I quit watching when Q proved too incompetant to live.
You have a laptop of dubious provenance and unknown contents. Do you:
a) remove the harddrive and scan the contents in on an air-gapped virtual machine?
b) Turn it on on an isolated system
c) Plug in an alternate OS drive and boot it to read the data without running any programs on it.
d) Plug this into your network inside your firewall - what bad things could possibly happen?
I don't work with government data. I have worked with credit card data, and I can tell you what happens when someone brings an unauthorised laptop into the building, far less tries to plug it in. Not only would the company's IPSec department be on them immediately, if anything untoward triggered, the speed someone was in the server room pulling power to the switches would amaze you.
I'll allow the virus going through Mac filtering - if their IT guy is stupid enough to plug an unknown machine into a secure network, he's stupid enough not to be using it.
My friend quit watching shortly afterwards when a certain gentleman stole a panda car. Those cars, as most people are aware due to the press fuss over it, are tracked. They've had ways of tracking them since the last century. He did not disable any of them - he simply got in and started it. And from that moment, the police knew exactly where he was. 
For anyone who wants to wash out memories of Skyfall, here's the previously mentioned B5 fight scene - the bit it borrows starts at 2:40:

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