NEW YORK: Piracy is a long-running and even routine issue for Hollywood, whether it’s street vendors hawking bootleg DVDs on street corners or video uploaded to file-sharing sites like Pirate Bay. Now cybercriminals are also putting embarrassing chatter and other company secrets at risk.
The reputational risk from leaked e-mail is much more difficult to calculate than any financial risk from piracy. “In some ways, that risk can be higher because you have no way of knowing what’s in those e-mails,” said Erik Rasmussen of Kroll Cyber Security.
The cataclysmal event in the back of everyone’s mind is the Sony hack in 2014 . While unreleased movies were leaked, what’s remembered is the chaos unleashed amid a network shutdown and the disclosure of derisive comments about such well-known actors as Angelina Jolie and Leonardo DiCaprio and racially insensitive remarks about then-President Barack Obama.
Although the recent HBO leaks so far have fallen well short of the damage inflicted on Sony, there were concerns early on that hackers were setting the stage for an embarrassing sequel for Hollywood.
PIRACY STILL A PROBLEM
While the attention is on leaked e-mails, that’s not to say Hollywood isn’t worried about piracy.
On online forums where criminals “advertise their ill-gotten gains,” there is now entertainment content “popping up as basically sections of these websites,” Rasmussen said.
Some people believe that video leaks can help gin up media and viewer attention for a show or movie, but leaking shows and movies does hurt Hollywood’s take, especially if it happens before the official release, Carnegie Mellon professor Michael Smith said.
In a 2014 analysis, Smith and his co-authors concluded that a movie’s box-office revenue dropped 19 percent, on average, when it was leaked ahead of the theatrical release, compared with a leak after the movie hit theaters. The research was part of a Carnegie Mellon initiative funded by the Motion Picture Association of America, Hollywood’s lobbying group.
One way to overcome pirates is to make programs widely and cheaply available. Netflix has many shows and movies that are easily accessible around the world for a single monthly price. In April, hackers leaked most new episodes of Netflix’s “Orange is the New Black” before their official release in early June. That doesn’t seem to have driven customers away. Netflix added more than 5 million subscribers in the April-to-June period, the largest increase ever for that quarter.
Separate from HBO’s recent run-ins with hackers, upcoming “Game of Thrones” episodes have leaked several times, and it is TV’s most pirated show. The show is still a massive hit for HBO, with high viewership and critical acclaim. As for the recent hacks, episodes of “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” “Insecure,” “Ballers” and several other shows leaked.
It helped that entire seasons weren’t released, forcing viewers to subscribe to view the whole show.
THE FALLOUT AT HBO
HBO’s hackers demanded a multi-million dollar ransom payment, something HBO refused.
Because piracy is already prevalent, the leak of several scattered TV episodes might not have been enough to force such a payment, said Alex Heid, chief research officer at risk management firm SecurityScorecard. “Pirated content ends up on Pirate Bay within 24 hours of airing. Any show on HBO, any movie, the moment it’s released, on the first day, you see it on pirated Internet streams.”
But hackers released an e-mail from HBO in which the company expressed willingness to pay them $250,000 as part of a negotiation over data swiped from HBO’s servers. Whether or not HBO ever intended to follow through with the offer, the e-mail raised questions among security professionals about the importance of the data.
Besides upcoming episodes, the HBO data dumps included what appeared to be contact information of Hollywood actors , a month’s worth of e-mails of one employee, sensitive internal documents like job offer letters and scripts for future episodes.
A person familiar with the situation, speaking on condition of anonymity because the person wasn’t authorized to speak publicly, said HBO was proactive in communicating with actors ahead of their personal information being released to the public. That may be helping mitigate the impact of what leaks did occur.
Companies that do get hacked should be up front with customers, employees and other affected parties as soon as possible, said Richard Levick, the head of crisis-management firm Levick. “You can’t sweep it under the rug,” he said. “You can’t be opaque about it.”
COMPARISONS WITH SONY
In the Sony case, hackers crippled Sony’s network, wiped the company’s data and dumped thousands of internal e-mails and documents, including sensitive information such as employees’ salary information and Social Security numbers. Racially insensitive comments made by the former co-chair of Sony Pictures Entertainment, Amy Pascal, paved the way for her exit a few months later.
Michael Lynton, who left as Sony Pictures’ head in January, said that press coverage of the e-mails hurt the studio’s standing in Hollywood and that the public airing of employees’ private information and conversations “took a long time to deal with,” the trade publication Variety reported .
The movie studio said in April 2015 that “investigation and remediation expenses” related to the hack cost it $41 million, or about 8 percent of the film and TV division’s profit that fiscal year. It later reached an $8 million settlement with current and former employees.
Studios are learning to be cautious.
“I know people in the industry that now don’t do deals over e-mail,” Smith said. “They do deals over the phone because it’s not archived.”
Lynton told Recode in 2016 that instead of e-mail, “my fax machine is in great use at this point.”
Sony declined comment on Lynton’s remarks.
Rasmussen said companies are also sharing information with law enforcement in an effort to protect the whole industry — and stave off another sequel.
Hollywood’s hacking pains are bigger than movie leaks
Hollywood’s hacking pains are bigger than movie leaks
Palestinian prisoner in Israel wins top fiction prize
- The mask in the novel’s title refers to the blue identity card that Nur, an archaeologist living in a refugee camp in Ramallah, finds in the pocket of an old coat belonging to an Israeli
ABU DHABI: Palestinian writer Basim Khandaqji, jailed 20 years ago in Israel, won a prestigious prize for Arabic fiction on Sunday for his novel “A Mask, the Color of the Sky.”
The award of the 2024 International Prize for Arabic Fiction was announced at a ceremony in Abu Dhabi.
The prize was accepted on Khandaqji’s behalf by Rana Idriss, owner of Dar Al-Adab, the book’s Lebanon-based publisher.
Khandaqji was born in the Israeli-occupied West Bank city of Nablus in 1983, and wrote short stories until his arrest in 2004 at the age of 21.
He was convicted and jailed on charges relating to a deadly bombing in Tel Aviv, and completed his university education from inside jail via the Internet.
The mask in the novel’s title refers to the blue identity card that Nur, an archaeologist living in a refugee camp in Ramallah, finds in the pocket of an old coat belonging to an Israeli.
Khandaqji’s book was chosen from 133 works submitted to the competition.
Nabil Suleiman, who chaired the jury, said the novel “dissects a complex, bitter reality of family fragmentation, displacement, genocide, and racism.”
Since being jailed Khandaqji has written poetry collections including “Rituals of the First Time” and “The Breath of a Nocturnal Poem.”
He has also written three earlier novels.
Mexican doctor claims victory in $28 Cartier earrings battle
MEXICO CITY: A Mexican man has claimed a victory over French luxury brand Cartier, saying an error allowed him to buy two pairs of earrings for $28 that were supposed to cost nearly $28,000.
After a four-month struggle, doctor Rogelio Villarreal said he had finally received the jewelry, which he accused the company of refusing to deliver after his online purchase in December.
According to Villarreal, he came across the low-priced earrings while browsing Instagram.
“I swear I broke out in a cold sweat,” he wrote on the social media platform X.
Cartier declined to recognize the purchase and offered Villarreal a refund, as well as a bottle of champagne and a passport holder as compensation, according to a company letter shared by the doctor.
But Villarreal refused and decided to take the case to Mexico’s consumer protection agency, which ruled in favor of the doctor.
Cartier accepted the decision, Villarreal announced.
“War is over. Cartier is complying,” he wrote.
French barber still trimming at 90
- “I love this job, it’s in my bones,” he said
- Even with arthritis, he is on his feet from Tuesday to Saturday, tending to his customers’ hair and beards in his shop in the small southern town of Saint-Girons
SAINT-GIRONS, France: French barber Roger Amilhastre, 90, could have hung up his clippers decades ago but he said his passion for hair gives him a reason to get up in the morning.
“I love this job, it’s in my bones,” he said, leaning on one of his cast-iron barber’s chairs from the 1940s.
“And despite my age, my hands still don’t shake.”
Even with arthritis, he is on his feet from Tuesday to Saturday, tending to his customers’ hair and beards in his shop in the small southern town of Saint-Girons in the foothills of the Pyrenees.
“I would have liked to retire at 60, but my wife was sick and I needed to pay for the care home,” he said, which cost more than 2,000 euros ($2,150) a month.
Even after his wife died in January, he kept going to work to stave off the sad thoughts.
“I’m not grumpy getting up” to go to work, he said.
France’s national hairdressers’ union believes Amilhastre may be France’s oldest active barber.
“We have a few who continue late in life, but 90 years old is exceptional,” union president Christophe Dore told AFP.
“I’m not sure if he is France’s oldest barber, but if not, he can’t be far off,” he added.
According to the national statistics institute INSEE, a little more than half a million people over 65 still work in France.
In the southern region of Occitanie, where Amilhastre lives, only 1.65 percent of people older than 70 years old still work, including 190 79-year-olds. But statistics do not go beyond that age.
Many of Amilhastre’s customers call him Achille, after his father who founded the barber’s shop in 1932, giving it his name and then teaching his son the profession.
The shop witnessed the German occupation of France during World War II.
“During the war, German police came to find my father to groom a captain who had broken his leg,” Amilhastre said.
German troops had taken over a large stately home in town called Beauregard.
“We were scared because they used to say that anyone who went up to Beauregard never came back,” he said.
“Luckily he did.”
The 90-year-old said he remembered a “tough period” for businesses when he first picked up the scissors in 1947 a few years after the war ended.
But then the town rebounded, he said, with its men following a flurry of new hair trends from greased back quiffs in the 1950s to 1970s bowl cuts.
The barber’s shop survived an economic downturn as local paper mills closed in the 1980s sparking mass layoffs, and supermarkets pushed small shops out of business.
“People started looking for work further afield, so we had to adapt and stay open later in the evening,” Amilhastre said.
That same decade, the AIDS epidemic sent customers into a worried frenzy.
“People were scared. They no longer asked to be shaved and when we did, we were petrified there’d be a cut, that someone would bleed and the virus would be passed on to the next customer,” he said.
Jean-Louis Surre, 67, runs the nearby cafe where Amilhastre once taught him to play billiards as a young boy.
Behind his bar, Surre said he still remembered his mother taking him across the road to see Amilhastre for a haircut every month as a child.
“He’d pump up the chair to reach the mirror, use his clippers and then at the end perfume you with some cologne — you know, squeezing those little pumps,” he said.
He is one of several old-timers to regularly drop by Achille’s — even just to read the newspaper or have a chat.
Inside the barber’s, Jean Laffitte, a balding 84-year-old, said he no longer really needed a haircut.
“With what little is left up there, these days I come out of friendship,” he said.
China’s Shenzhou-18 mission docks with space station
- The astronauts took off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in China’s northwest at 8:59 p.m. local time Thursday
- The astronauts will stay at the Tiangong space station for six months, carrying out experiments
JIUQUAN, China: A spaceship carrying three astronauts from China’s Shenzhou-18 mission safely docked at Tiangong space station Friday, state-run media reported, the latest step in Beijing’s space program that aims to send astronauts to the Moon by 2030.
The crew took off in a capsule atop a Long March-2F rocket from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in China’s northwest at 8:59 p.m. local time 1259 GMT) Thursday.
By early Friday the spacecraft had “successfully docked” with the space station, state-run news agency Xinhua reported, citing the China Manned Space Agency.
The mission is led by Ye Guangfu, a fighter pilot and astronaut who was previously part of the Shenzhou-13 crew in 2021.
He is joined by astronauts Li Cong and Li Guangsu, who are heading into space for the first time.
Onlookers cheered as the rocket blasted off into the night sky, an AFP journalist at the scene said.
Xinhua said the launch had been declared a “complete success.”
The astronauts will stay at the Tiangong space station for six months.
There they plan to carry out experiments “in the fields of basic physics in microgravity, space material science, space life science, space medicine and space technology,” the China Manned Space Agency has said.
They will also try and create an aquarium onboard and seek to raise fish in zero gravity, according to Xinhua.
“Not only will the taikonauts find joy in the space ‘aquarium,’ but it may also pave the way for their future counterparts to enjoy nutritious fish from their own in-orbit harvests,” it added.
They will also conduct experiments on “fruit flies and mice,” a researcher quoted by the agency said.
The new crew will replace the Shenzhou-17 team, who were sent to the station in October.
Plans for China’s “space dream” have been put into overdrive under President Xi Jinping.
The world’s second-largest economy has pumped billions of dollars into its military-run space program in an effort to catch up with the United States and Russia.
Beijing also aims to send a crewed mission to the Moon by 2030, and plans to build a base on the lunar surface.
China has been effectively excluded from the International Space Station since 2011, when the United States banned NASA from engaging with the country — pushing Beijing to develop its own orbital outpost.
That station is the Tiangong, which means “heavenly palace” — the crown jewel of a space program that has landed robotic rovers on Mars and the Moon, and made China the third country to independently put humans in orbit.
It is constantly crewed by rotating teams of three astronauts, with construction completed in 2022.
The Tiangong is expected to remain in low Earth orbit at between 400 and 450 kilometers (250 and 280 miles) above the planet for at least 10 years.
Algeria’s first KFC restaurant reopens without logo following Gaza protests
- Protesters gathered outside outlet last week in solidarity with Palestinians
- KFC parent company Yum! Brands has faced backlash for its ties with Israel
LONDON: Algeria’s first Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet has resumed operations after a temporary closure prompted by a series of pro-Palestinian demonstrations last week.
However, the restaurant, situated in the Algiers suburb of Dely Ibrahim, reopened its doors without the familiar Col. Sanders logo on its exterior.
It remains unclear if the outlet has had a change of ownership or remains under the umbrella of Yum! Brands, the parent company of KFC.
Demonstrators gathered outside the eatery on April 16, calling for a boycott and expressing solidarity with Palestinians amid the Gaza conflict.
Protesters draped in Palestinian flags voiced support for “Palestinian martyrs” while obstructing access to the storefront.
The restaurant has faced a backlash due to its perceived ties to Israel, with Yum! Brands having made investments in Israeli startups, including TicTuk, a company that allows customers to order food on social networks and message apps, and Dragontail, a system software company specializing in food processing.
In response, the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement designated KFC’s sister company, Pizza Hut, as an “organic boycott target,” due to the “brands’ complicity in Israel’s genocide and apartheid against Palestinians.”
بعد أيام من افتتاح فرعها الأول، KFC الجزائر تزيل شعار علامتها وتُغلق أبوابها!
— أحمد داود (@AhmadDaoud14) April 17, 2024
منذ افتتاحها تعالت أصوات مقاطعتها، ووقفات احتجاجية أمامها، واستنكارٌ لمنح الترخيص لوكيلها! #الجزائر
pic.twitter.com/rIaOG80xTi
While the temporary closure of the KFC outlet was hailed as a success by demonstrators, its reopening sparked disappointment among some Algerians.
The incident underscores challenges and employment ramifications stemming from boycotts related to the Gaza conflict.
Since the start of the war, regional franchises of McDonald’s, one of the key boycotted brands, have distanced themselves from the parent company, arguing that they are 100 percent local.
The opening of a KFC branch in Algeria was noteworthy given the nation’s historical aversion to Western food chains, as well as its stringent foreign investment regulations, which typically prohibit the establishment of foreign food or beverage franchises.
Previous efforts to establish outlets without official approval, such as the brief appearance of a counterfeit “Starbucks,” have been met with swift action and closure.
