2.0 Collections

I had written earlier that I wouldn’t be surprised if 2.0 tanked at the box office. Now that it has been declared a blockbuster, I owe an apology. My opinion then was based on how horrible Rajnikanth’s last few releases were and the unfortunate missteps he took, right after he announced his political entry. Fortunately, they had no impact on the success of 2.0. I had ignored the wow factor that accompanies a Sankar film and the brilliance of Akshay Kumar in dismissing 2.0’s chances. True, it is a “Rajnikanth” film, but Sankar has his own legion of fans and Akshay Kumar’s pulling power cannot be underestimated as well. This could explain why the Hindi version of the film is doing so well! If you negate the Hindi collections, 2.0 would firmly be in the damp squib territory.

The real truth about the collections will be known only when the dust settles. Rough estimates are saying that it has crossed 500 crores overall. It might be interesting to see a territorial breakup of collections after sometime to gauge the movie’s real success. Overseas market will bring a considerable chunk and with the monstrous Hindi collections, I am just eager to see how the movie did in TN, where it matters the most! Now, coming to the festivities associated with a Rajnikanth movie release, I think this time, it was really measured. There’s a fine, compact movie screen pretty close to where I live and the celebrations were really muted when 2.0 got released. Contrast that to Sarkar’s release a few weeks back when there were plenty of banners and posters. Talking about Sarkar, what a load of bull crap!  Lame ass film from a lame ass director. Although, Murugadoss is marginally better than that lazy douchebag Atlee. Sarkar deserves a separate blog post and it is coming in a couple of days.

So, in conclusion, I am glad that 2.0 is doing well. I certainly did not expect its smashing success in Hindi and am pleasantly surprised. Sankar has been able to repair the Rajnikanth brand name a bit after Ranjith spoiled it and it is my sincere hope that Karthik Subbaraj has followed in Sankar’s footsteps with Petta.

Max Ray Vision – WTF?

The “Iceman” Max Ray Vision

Looks like the Iceman has struck again. What he did this time, allegedly, is so ingenious that he deserves the title of the most insane under your nose hack job ever! Feds are charging him for using a smuggled cell phone (T-Mobile myTouch) to steal loads of debit card accounts and funneling the loot into an outrageous slammer smuggling jest that used a …wait for it….., remotely-piloted drone to drop contraband into the prison yard. That is so ridiculously illegal, yet so freaking brilliant! Not to mention that he was about to finish serving his record-breaking sentence for an earlier cyber crime offense related to card & identity theft. He was supposed to have been incarcerated for 30 plus years but the prosecution and the judge found how guilt-ridden he was for the crimes and decided on a 13 year sentence.

How many times have we heard about a brilliant hacker turning over to the dark side? The trigger most of the times either happen to be a totally unexpected innocent breach of security or inserting a piece of code to plug the inefficiencies in the system. If someone can easily break into your system intentionally or unintentionally, it is time to rethink the whole security apparatus. And if one actually did you a service by making your system better with the breach, like in the second case, he or she should be actually thanked and rewarded and not treated as a murderous criminal. Unfortunately, that is exactly what happened with Max Ray Vision in 1998. He was a white hat then and wrote code that infiltrated thousands of US military systems. It actually fixed a dangerous software vulnerability in DoD computers before anyone with malicious intent could exploit. The military saw it otherwise and put him behind bars for 18 months. We all know what would happen next. He couldn’t find any legitimate security work after his release and became Iceman, a black hat and started stealing credit/debit card information. Of course his association with criminals during his earlier prison term helped setting up this operation and went full steam ahead culminating in an underground market place called, Carders Market. The site attained mainstream notoriety when Vision forcefully merged competing cyber crime forums into Carders Market by hacking into them. Naturally, nailing him became top priority and he was finally arrested by the Feds and Secret Service and after a long trial, sentenced to 13 years in prison. He was charged with stealing 1.8 million credit and debit cards amounting totally to $86 million! That is something, isn’t it? How many times have a military agency had its security compromised ever since? From a guy harmlessly looking for UFO related files to a guy who became über-famous for disclosing classified information about US global surveillance, the security of military systems is nothing to be proud of!

As I had mentioned earlier, looks like the Iceman has dug himself a deeper hole this time and looks certainly set to add another long term to his  already long prison life. Just looking at what he did, I must say again, “pretty impressive”. Somehow, I wonder what would have happened if the US Military saw his first hack as a damning assessment of their security and actually solicited his help in making it better rather than throw him in jail. The outcome would have been very different and would have voided this post. Sad, really sad!

The Schwarzwald Singularity

The Foundation Series by Isaac Asimov

So I was resurrecting one of my oldest boxes a few hours ago and found my entire Isaac Asimov collection which I believed I had lost sometime back. Naturally, started re-reading his Foundation series again and it has motivated me greatly to rethink my plans for my own novel, The Schwarzwald Singularity. You see, I started writing this novel nearly 10 years ago and it has gone nowhere. I was only planning to circulate it among a small circle of friends who are into SciFi like I am. I gave a very rough, incomplete draft to a friend a couple of years back who commented that the idea was insanely good, but the writing was horrible. She also added that there were some brilliant set-pieces in the novel that had the ability to become individual story arcs of their own but the overall coherence was seriously lacking. That was it. It remained untouched until now.

Reading Foundation has reignited the passion and I have decided to pursue The Schwarzwald Singularity very seriously. I read the draft once more and now understand my friend’s issues with it and also see why she said there were a few seeds in it that can spawn some shorts. I will start working on the novel again and those seeds and thought of releasing some snippets right here in the near future.

Enthiran 2.0 – Anticipating a damp squib

It’s been more than a month since my last post, I know. Work related commitments and some hectic travel. Now that I am back home, I want to continue where I left off.

I would like to talk about the upcoming movie Enthiran 2.0, featuring Rajnikanth and directed by Sankar. I saw the original Enthiran in Amsterdam and I remember thinking that it wasn’t all bad. The evil incarnation of Rajnikanth is what saved the movie in my opinion. It so expanded the comfort zone of the actor that he certainly looked like he really enjoyed doing that character. There were shades of his younger self in that character. The other two roles were mere footnotes. The rest of the cast had nothing to offer, except Danny  Denzongpa. Although his role was brief, that of an enabler of chaos, he was brilliant. Given Sankar’s reputation for being an effects heavy director, I thought he did a good job overall.

Rajnikanth in Enthiran 2.0

Enthiran 2.0 is slated for release this 29th and by the look of it, I have my doubts about this movie. First, it has to be the delay. I read that Sankar is actually blaming the effects studio in Hollywood for failing to deliver on time. Come 29th, the jury will be out on whether the delay was worth it. But this is not the only reason why the usual hype around a Rajni release is missing this time. The lead up to the premiere is so quiet and highly unusual. I think it is because the audience has more choices than ever before and the excitement for a Rajni film is simply not the same anymore. His films, even if they flop will end up making more money than four, five movies combined. But the exorbitant rates people have to pay to claim a piece of the pie would eventually diminish the return on investment.

Ranjith and Rajnikanth

Adding to this situation is the failure of his two previous releases. Looks like the guy Ranjith has succeeded in helping accelerate Rajnikanth jump the shark. If you thought Kabali was horrible, Kala was simply unwatchable! Ranjith had enforced all his ridiculous ideologies and boneheadedness on both his films and Rajnikanth simply looked like a stupid pawn. I believe a lot of people saw through Ranjith’s bullshit and poor Rajnikanth had to suffer the consequences. Go and see Ranjith’s twitter feed, then you will know. For a guy who constantly talks about how he is speaking for the voiceless and against hatred, his feed is full of hatred for a few people. Why Rajni thought it was a good idea to do not one but two films with him just beats me! His political ambitions and constant flip flopping on issues have also made him a laughing stock recently and that might also dampen the chances of Enthiran 2.0’s success.

I love some of his earlier movies. I always felt that Rajnikanth was a far better actor than most of his other brilliant contemporaries, but he was cast in a bubble the moment he was Superstar and we lost a truly great actor. KB was one of the few people who brought out this aspect in him. Mahendran was another. So, may be this is it. Good things have to come to an end eventually.

I feel for Sankar though. The guy spent so much money. Of course, more than 75% of the money has been recovered already with language rights, TV and satellite rights. The rest 25% will be easily recovered, but the blockbuster that he might have imagined earlier, would definitely not happen in my opinion. His earlier I was a piece of crap film and I am not sure how much he lost with that. Vikram has also jumped the shark and the only way he could pique audience’s interest these days is when he physically tortures himself trying to play multiple roles. Vikram as Vikram is worthless these days. Anyway, if Enthiran 2.0 tanks badly as expected, it is proof that the phenomenon called Rajnikanth is over and that Ranjith is partly to blame.

Technology Site

My day to day work involves a lot of mathematical research. I have to oversee the development of a strategy based on mathematical principles right from its inception to implementation. Therefore, computation is an integral part of the development process. This means, there’s a lot of coding involved. Due to the management aspect of most projects involved, I was forced to focus less on coding myself. Selling our strategy and findings to the clients take up most of my time. You cannot escape doing this if you have substantial management consulting experience.

In my present job, it’s different. My boss has given me complete freedom to do something akin to fundamental research. Naturally, I program more right now. Unfortunately, due to the proprietary nature of my work I cannot release my code. Still, I have been writing a few useful code snippets independent of work that might come in handy for a lot of people. I have decided to release them in a few days after some cleanup. I have a github account for quite sometime now that hosts my older dotfiles. Yesterday, I created a github.io account to basically keep all my code related, professional things in one place. You can visit the page for more details. Please note, it’s a work in progress and it might take a few days to get as professional as it could be.

This place would focus more on day to day things, life in Chennai, some physics related stuff, religion and some of my other interests. I decided to do this because my older blog evolved from generally talking about paranormal phenomena to technology related things and this time I want to keep them differentiated to maintain focus.

Anyway, click on the link to get to my github page site.

Mad Dog Daisuke Aramaki 

Daisuke Aramaki and Skinwalker are two avatars that I used to go by years back.