Movie: Mr. Pip

The brief synopsis of the movie does not really capture the social tensions, the brutality, and the beauty of this movie - it is one of those that you walk in expecting something, but leave after watching something quite different.

Set in early 1990, in Papua New Guinea's Bougainville island/region - the movie, based on a novel of the same name, explores the civilian village life in a fairly brutal civil war for autonomy/independence. The story follows Matilda, and Mr Watts, who takes up teaching the village kids; primarily through Dickens' Great Expectations - but also weaving in other villagers who bring their own expertise in exchange for staying to listen to the story. Matilda's imagination leads her to reimagine Pip in the context of her own people (but strangely still in Victorian clothing) - but this leads to a rather disastrous end as the army captain decides that Pip is really an important rebel being hidden by the village.

In the end, Matilda's life runs parallel to that of Dickens' Pip - in that she is a person of which there are great expectations, and one that eventually is (partially?) fulfilled. But it is not so much the parallel - but the sheer beauty and innocence of village life that makes this a compelling movie. In the context of current world events in Gaza, Ukraine, Syria and elsewhere - it really captures the dichotomy of experiences and wishes of the fighters and the people caught in between.

Movie: Dawn of the Planet of Apes

The reboot of the Planet of the Apes franchise has now got the possibility of tracing the full story of how the apes come to dominate a planet that was previously dominated by humans - a decade at a time. The movie is actually damn good - both from the perspective of story and effects; but it does degenerate to some clichés - the vengeful, backstabbing lieutenant, the good samaritan doctor, the great leader - but it is the packaging that makes it a good movie.

Missing ...

I think this was the first time that I saw a live performance by the legendary John Kani in his new play Missing ..., currently on at the Market Theatre. The story charts the story of a fictional (but quite believable) loyal, intellectual ANC activist who ends up in exile in Stockholm. There, he marries and raises a family - but when the new government arrives in 1994 he is apparently forgotten. But, with his daughter's upcoming wedding, and a longing for home - he decides to go back to South Africa and at least confront the ANC leadership on being forgotten.

It is funny, and poignant - and above all a critical dissection on some of the ails of the new political class. Quoting Orwell's classic "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others", the second act is a stunning criticism of politicians in general - but the play is also a reminder of what political service and self sacrifice actually means.

The performances, especially that of John Kani, are impressive. It is a different angle to cover politics and the anti-apartheid struggle; and a performance that needs to be watched - and fully deserved the standing ovation.

Movie: The Railway Man

Set in WW2, The Railway Man tells the story of a railway fanatic, who was a POW in Burma, building the railway line for the Japanese. In part, it is a story of the history - of effectively being a slave, and of torture - but it is also a story of redemption and forgiveness; when he goes back to Burma to confront his captor. It's a touching tale with great performances from Colin Firth in the lead.

SAA - 11th Best Airline in the World

I have always maintained that South Africans and SA media is overly critical of SAA. Yes, it is not as good Emirates or Singapore Airlines; and its financial management has hardly been stellar - but its service is good and usually on time. In the 2014 Skytrax awards, SAA was ranked 11^th in the world - better than Turkish (crap in my experience), Cathay Pacific and Etihad. And the airlines often mentioned as better than SAA - British Airways and Air France - do not even feature.

Defending the Caveman

Defending the Cave Man has been a hit show in South Africa for 18 years, with Alan Committie performing the show over 800 times. M & I had bought tickets about two years ago, but didn't go as I was out of town on a business trip. For a show that was written in 1991, it manages to stay quite relevant - and Alan's many performances means that the performance itself is very slick. It is surprisingly interactive, and that does lend some level of uniqueness for each performance.

The show is a funny, tongue in cheek set of observations on men, women and their relationships. Ultimately, it proposes that all actions that separate men and women are actually rooted in the past - in caveman behaviour to be specific. Many comedy routines build on the differences between men and women in their act - this is perhaps the finest exponent of that genre.

Movie: Maleficent

It has been a while since Angeline Jolie commanded such presence in a movie. M has been wanting to see Maleficent ever since we saw a trailer a few months back - and Jolie's amazing performance is reason enough to see it. The movie, tells the backstory for the classic children's fairy tale - Sleeping Beauty; motivating that the curse laid upon Sleeping Beauty is not as it seems. The visuals are spectacular, and Sharlto Copley plays, yet again, a deranged character - this time, the king - and the twist with the meaning of "true love's kiss" was a nice touch. However, the rest of the movie - especially some of the dialogue, acting and general story line is quite bad at places; but then again - it is based on a children's fairy tale.

NSA's Operational Security Failures

In the May issue of the Communications of the ACM, Bob Toxen does a thorough examination of the operational security failures of the NSA in the Snowden leak. Snowden, as an administrator did have privileged access to many systems, but the scale of the leak, and the access control failures that allowed for the leak points to wide scale operational security failures. 

I do not agree with Bob Toxen on the ease of detecting smuggled USB sticks (in or out of the organisation) - modern USB drives are far easier to smuggle in, and it is even easier to smuggle in SD cards and the like. I do agree with his assessments on the scale of logical access control failures: administrators in any large organisation should certainly not have access to all systems; and users with higher classification accounts should require multi-factor authentication to access highly sensitive information. These are not new dangles processes or controls, and in fact the NSA helped write some of the key theory and practical guides in this area.

The learnings of the NSA's failures extends to most organisations. Unfortunately, unlike the NSA, most organisations do not have effectively unlimited funds at their disposal.

Movie: X-Men: Days of Future Past

Like super hero movie franchises like Superman, Spiderman and Batman - which have all effectively retold the same story in slightly different ways; the X-Men franchise was seemingly going in the same direction - especially when X-Men 3 killed off so many characters, and X-Men First Class and the Wolverine movies started telling back stories. Days of Future Past is effectively the best way to extend the story without retelling the same stories. 

At its heart, this is a time travel story - the current X-Men universe is over-run by killer robots that want to exterminate mutants; and so the solution is to send the ever-green wolverine back to the past to stop the extermination starting in the first place; and hopefully the mutants and humans will live happily ever after. The story now leaves lot of scope for new stories to be told - since the universe is effectively reset.

As an action, super-hero movie it is great entertainment. The opening battle scene is frenetic and the prison break scene is a touch of genius.That said, I hope future X-Men movies do with fewer characters - and really explore the myriad of great characters - instead of just throwing so many of them at the same time on the screen. In a battle for survival, it made sense (even though the mutant cast is substantially reduced) - otherwise they would just like become X-Men 3 - garbage.

Jon Stewart's Extended Interview of Timothy Geithner

The Daily Show, and especially the extended interviews are not easily accessible outside the US; and that's a pity - as Jon Stewart is an amazing interviewer. The interviews are far more in depth and in detail than many news channels - especially those that are seemingly "constrained" in their ability to get news; despite the fact that news is their business. The extended interview of former US Secretary of Treasury, Timothy Geithner - on the bailout and financial crisis is amazing. It was one of the clearest discussions on the motivations, constraints and ideas that shaped the US bailout. There is no real conclusion on whether it was the best way, but the discussion is definitely worth watching to at least understand all the various pressures.

Unfortunately, I think the full interview is only available on torrent outside the US.

JPO's 2nd 2014 Season, 4th Concert

The 4^th and last concert of the 2^nd season, was sponsored by Hollard, who also gave away tasty purple macaroons in the lobby - a great branding exercise I think! The concert was conducted once again by Adrian Parabava, who conducted all the pieces of the night from memory - which I don't think I have seen before at the JPO!

The first piece was the overture to Carl Maria von Weber's opera Oberon - which was also the last composition by Weber. The piece starts of slowly, as if drifting through the clouds - but does pick up in pace and excitement as it continues. Definitely a good way to start a concert!

Max Bruch's Violin Concerto No 1 is one of the most popular violin concertos, and it's a piece that is played often on radio. I have attended at least one previous performance, and last night's performance by Russian violinist Ilya Gringolts was quite mesmerising - and certainly more memorable than last year's, closing off with an impressive virtuoso encore.

Sibelius' Symphony No 1 finished off the evening. The piece had an interesting byplay between various woodwind, percussion and string instruments which made it quite an interesting piece to listen to. Compared to the Bruch, I don't think I have heard either of the other pieces from the evening, and they were certainly very interesting pieces and performances!

ITWeb Security Summit 2014

ITWeb Security Summit in 2009 was my first "industry" security conference, and after a long diet of academic security conferences, ITWeb was a huge let-down. There were some interesting talks - especially the key notes, but a lot of the others were a big waste of time. So much so, I did not bother going again until last year - and even then, it was for half a day.

This year was slightly different - I was presenting in the afternoon, and so took the opportunity to also attend the keynotes in the morning and some of the other topics in my own track. The organisation was a bit sloppy: for a conference in its ninth year, starting late due to traffic is inexcusable - rather start late given that traffic in Sandton at 8am is bad! Likewise, the opening remarks were a long ramble with no particular purpose - especially given that the conference was already behind schedule!

The first keynote  by Jacob Appelbaum's was definitely worth attending; covering a number of interesting topics related to surveillance. A bulk of it related to a primer of the NSA surveillance techniques, and especially on how these techniques are leveraged and integrated to provide a holistic end-to-end capability to intercept, inject and siphon data. His observations were scathing - not only of the US government but also of the general attitudes - and called the European/US/Canadian stance effectively "deep seated racism" - that they see themselves as superior, and thus it is ok to be doing mass surveillance on other people. I particularly enjoyed his argument, that it is not so much the NSA that is wrong - but the fact that this capability is provided for, and accepted. His view that even court authorised targeted surveillance without informing the target should outlawed is extreme - but was logically sound in the context provided. Sadly, he did not have much in the way of solution - and his approach of effectively open source (not necessarily commercially free) software and hardware will take a long time to really mature to be usable by the masses.

 Christopher Soghoian's keynote continued in a similar vein, focusing more on the, almost willing, corporate participation in the NSA programmes. Some of it, such as major service providers like Google and Yahoo not forcing SSL connections for email logins by default inadvertently helped programmes like those run by the NSA. Although he did comment on the business models employed - effectively targeted advertising - I think part of the issue, that these services are free to the user could lead to undue expectations - after all, you do get what you paid for.

Unfortunately, I can't make day 2 - but at least the keynotes were well worth attending. The track I was on was ok overall - a wide diversity in the level of content presented; and was generally well attended.

Online Trust and Jihadi Forums

Back at RSA 2012, Mikko Hypponen gave a very interesting talk on the IT platforms used by various terrorist groups - not only Islamists, but also white supremacists etc. I have seen sporadic articles since, but most are quite superficial without much detail.

A fairly lengthy academic research paper on trust in online forums, specifically Islamist Jihadi forums is therefore quite impressive - not only in the breadth of the article's coverage; but also in the author's conclusions.That trust will be difficult to achieve, especially in an online forum about terrorism, is not hard to fathom; but the fact that overall trust has declined and been supplanted by social media is harder to understand (although the period of research was before the NSA revelations).

The paper also doesn't discuss whether the issues of trust appear on other forums - both private and public on the Internet. The discussion points on why trust is difficult to achieve on the Internet would apply to all forms of Internet forums - not only Jihadists; and would these findings apply to forums for open source developers, car enthusiasts, media pirates and Hollywood gossip mongers?

That said, the paper is very interesting reading and covers a subject matter that is rarely discussed in any real level of detail. Even if it is ring fenced to a small Internet community - the methodology should be easy to transfer to other groups, and see if this is a general trend or not. If it is a general trend, there are interesting implications for telecommuting and perhaps even open source communities and other mostly digital communities.

Last Night of the Proms

Richard Cock's annual colourful spectacle in support of Lifeline, had the theme of "Movie Blockbusters" this year. There were some great musical pieces, with Ennio Morricone's Gabriel's Oboe from The Mission was my personal favorite. The song selection was somewhat dated - but still generally well known. 

The sold out shows are a testament that classical music does have an audience in Johannesburg. The shows also help two of my assertions on what the JPO should be doing - more well known pieces; and having shows on the weekend.

On the over reliance on "experts"

This month, The Economist's Intelligence Life magazine has an interesting article on convergence of opinion with regards to art works. The article argues that due to hype, marketing and just general overwhelming praise (or otherwise) - our own appreciation of art work will be tainted by these wider opinion. The result however is, when one does come across a lesser heralded work, one struggles to understand why it is not considered in the top 10 lists etc. 

This has interesting implications as art (and other things) are commented upon in great numbers via social media; and off course some things have just been condensed down to "Like" or some star ratings. Thus, with increasing number of ratings, is it really possible to distill whether the rating is genuine appreciation or just the convergence by the herd - i.e. since it is a 4.2 star, and I didn't like it, I will give it a 4 - instead of giving it a 2 ...

JPO's 2nd 2014 Season, 3rd Concert

Indonesian born conductor, Adrian Prabava, shuffled the seating for the orchestra; on a night of some welcome good news for the orchestra. The JPO has been invited to perform as the core orchestra at the Gabala Music Festival in Azerbaijan during August bringing some much needed exposure for the musicians and the orchestra. CEO, Duncan Gibbon, commented that this provides a stronger motivation on why the orchestra needs support from government bodies; but my opinion in the latter matter is more simple. The JPO  needs to attract more audience members more than anything else, and a half full hall witnessing an amazing soloist performance highlighted this very problem.

The current JPO season's fascination with Schumann continued with the overture to his only opera Genoveva; a lively piece performed at a frantic pace. It was not otherwise memorable but enjoyable none the less.

Scheduled Russian soloist Peter Laul did not make it to South Africa; but the last minute replacement - American born but local resident Bryan Wallick - did not disappoint. I have not heard Brahms' 1st Piano Concerto before, and it was quite a strange concerto. Brahms wrote it as a tribute to Robert Schumann; and the first movement is apparently meant to represent grief (of learning of his mental illness and subsequent death); and the movement certainly sounds like a horror/thriller soundtrack in places. The weirdness of the piece for me comes from the mostly segregated performance of the piano and the orchestra - one is almost whispering if not completely silent while the other plays. Regardless, the performance of both were amazing - especially the pianist, which was quite virtuosic despite the claim that audiences were disappointed at the lack of virtuosity  on the piece's debut.

The final piece of the evening, Beethoven's 3rd Symphony was too long for the program. With its long movements, the performance extended well past 10pm. It was a good performance, and I love Beethoven symphonies - but I was ready to leave after the second movement!

JPO's 2nd 2014 Season, 2nd Concert

Pianist Antonio Pompa-Baldi is quite amusing to watch on stage - he is often playing with his eyes closed (lost in the music perhaps), his facial gestures are amusing - especially his eyebrows moving up and down; often with no relation to the actual music, and when he has a break and the orchestra takes over completely, he hangs his hands to his side as if he is completely exhausted. Over and above the amusing show; his performance of Schumann's Piano Concerto was amazing. I have heard it before at the JPO, but this performance was somehow far more engaging and interesting.

On either side of the Schumann concerto, were orchestral pieces by Mendelssohn - Overture to A Midsummer's Night Dream and Symphony No 3. The overture was fun, and interesting; and the symphony had its moments - but it was the concerto that was the highlight of the evening.

JPO's 2nd 2014 Season, 1st Concert

The 1^st concert of the new season, literally started with a bang - the opening percussion for Rossini's Overture to The Thieving Magpies. Bright, and upbeat (despite the nature of the tale); it was a great piece to start the new season. The JPO, led by celebrated South African conductor Conrad van Alphen, put on a great show to a nearly full house; a welcome change from the half full houses in the past concerts this year.

A crowd favourite, Rachmaninov's Piano Concerto No 2 followed the overture, this time being performed by another celebrated South African musician - Nina Schumann. It's a piece I love, and was performed expertly by the soloist and the orchestra. The orchestrated version of Musorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition finished off the evening - and was certainly a great selection of classical music.

CliffCentral and "new" radio

In a country where Internet access is still quite expensive and exclusive, Gareth Cliff's venture into Internet radio is a bold venture - but one that has made some innovative partnerships. There is a partnership with Tencent's WeChat (rival to What's App etc), a co-broadcast on Comedy Central Africa and now a partnership with MTN to bring this particular Internet Radio station at a more affordable price. The idea of having live auditions to set up new shows on the radio station (beyond the current morning show) also brings about a very different approach to radio; at least in South Africa.

I was not a big fan of the Gareth Cliff show on 5FM, and I have only listened live for a short while (though I have listened longer to some of the podcasts). In a crowded arena with other talk radio stations - such as 702 and Power FM, the competition is fierce; but many of these shows are not focused on the youth market - so perhaps CliffCentral will find its own niche.

In the past few weeks, I have been impressed with Power FM's coverage of politics, and its ability to get the leaders of various political parties to debate and discuss political issues. But I doubt, that even Power FM has managed to get a full hour interview with any politician - and Gareth Cliff's interview with Julius Malema is one of the best open discussions on politics in South African media. 

If the station can continue in that vein - it would be an excellent addition to the South African media space.

Movie: Philomena

Based on a true story, Philomena charts the story of an old woman trying to find her son - who was "adopted" against her wishes about 50 years back, together with the help of a journalist/ex-spin doctor - who initially has no interest in "human interest" stories. 

The adoption of Anthony is itself a story of effectively human trafficking. Philomena, a poor and unsophisticated Irish girl falls pregnant, and the catholic nuns effectively force her to do uncompensated hard labour for "taking care" of her and her son; who is then effectively sold to an American couple for adoption. 

Philomena's search has a bitter sweet ending; but beyond the ethical questions regarding adoption; Judy Dench's amazing portrayal of Philomena also challenges some very fundamental stereotypes of "simple folk" - that they were fooled into doing things; or that they are anti-gay etc. It is a profound story that features excellent acting, and a very sad story on the dark side of adoption.