Comments on: Anti-open source propaganda in Disney kids' TV show

By: kevins_76

kevins_76 — Thu, 23 Aug 2012 04:10:00 +0000

Then they sold the ad space to MS :)

By: Oroka

Oroka — Tue, 21 Aug 2012 17:08:00 +0000

lol, also on Fox 5 news at 5…

kids show techno babble offends open source community, possible hate crime being alleged

orrrrr

Open source community watches Disney tween garbage, credibility of man hood questioned

By: Rob T Firefly

Rob T Firefly — Tue, 21 Aug 2012 13:31:00 +0000

Disney.com is running on Apache webservers. They appear to have used open source code to save time.

By: Petzl

Petzl — Tue, 21 Aug 2012 06:12:00 +0000

Strongly concur. In the rough draft from the script, I’m sure it was something like:

Nerd: Did you use [TECH PHRASE] to save time, and the virus was hidden in it?

Stupid: Maybe?

Nerd: Rookie mistake.

By: koanhead

koanhead — Tue, 21 Aug 2012 03:37:00 +0000

Nerd: Did you use closed-source code to save time, and the virus was hidden in it?

Stupid: Well, I don’t have any way to know, do I?

By: koanhead

koanhead — Tue, 21 Aug 2012 03:27:00 +0000

Open Source isn’t about “free speech”. It’s about keeping the code open. Licensure is a tool used to enforce the openness of the code. If you don’t enforce your license terms then they are meaningless.
Free Software is about freedom, but still depends on licensure to ensure that freedom- and the freedom in question isn’t necessarily freedom of speech.
Besides, from Disney’s point of view surely a violation of the license is infringing on the rights-holder’s freedom of speech, yes?

By: Brainspore

Brainspore — Mon, 20 Aug 2012 23:00:00 +0000

Disney has also been sending pretty mixed messages about piracy lately. (Oh, sure, it’s OK when Johnny Depp does it… but rip one DVD and they bring down the wrath of God!)

By: Getefix

Getefix — Mon, 20 Aug 2012 22:40:00 +0000

Damn Ace Ventura meme seems to have saturated the space for the shower scene I most remember being discussed…

By: dolo54

dolo54 — Mon, 20 Aug 2012 20:48:00 +0000

I’ve worked on a couple of their movie websites. Disney doesn’t allow any open source code in their sites. They check all the code and if they find any publicly available libraries in use they will make you take them out and reinvent the wheel even if that means days of extra dev time. In my case I was using Grant Skinner’s tween lib in a Flash site. This was one of the most commonly used libs at the time, pretty much everybody used it. That had to be removed and all tweens refactored. Fortunately it didn’t turn into too much extra work, but I was pretty dumbfounded that something so ubiquitous in development would be called out. Entertainment companies generally have a very long, obtuse list of requirements you have to fulfill when developing sites for them, but Disney was by far the worst in that regard and the only one that doesn’t allow open source at all (as far as I know). If I hear any dev telling me they are up for a job with them I always tell them to take their worst case estimate and double it.

By: Andy Carloff

Andy Carloff — Mon, 20 Aug 2012 20:30:00 +0000

Propaganda is most effective when it’s not recognized as propaganda. It’s called mass media.

By: Brainspore

Brainspore — Mon, 20 Aug 2012 19:59:00 +0000

In fairness, the crew of the USS Enterprise didn’t have the benefit of telephone tech support.

By: Brainspore

Brainspore — Mon, 20 Aug 2012 19:55:00 +0000

Frankly I’m not convinced the writers really know what “open-source” means either.

By: C W

C W — Mon, 20 Aug 2012 19:42:00 +0000

The link you posted indicates that they do not have a trademark for “open source”.

By: Michael Langford

Michael Langford — Mon, 20 Aug 2012 19:34:00 +0000

That clip amusingly also has Amy Okuda (who plays “TinkerBalla” on The Guild, and has also been on Californiacation)

By: C W

C W — Mon, 20 Aug 2012 19:12:00 +0000

I don’t think the film Hackers was some sort of subversive product, either.

By: gadgetphile

gadgetphile — Mon, 20 Aug 2012 17:23:00 +0000

From the quote, it sounds like the rookie mistake was forgetting to verify the checksum.

By: Thad Boyd

Thad Boyd — Mon, 20 Aug 2012 17:08:00 +0000

Weird, given that Tron Legacy seemed pretty positive on the whole open-source thing.

Not that anyone saw it.

By: Jesse K.

Jesse K. — Mon, 20 Aug 2012 16:54:00 +0000

yeah, take them to court, brilliant way to promote the free speech that open source advocates.

By: Jorpho

Jorpho — Mon, 20 Aug 2012 16:45:00 +0000

That said, viruses CAN hide in plain sight in open source code, and if you’re talking about someone who is basically cheating/not reading code… and the commit is new enough… and the project isn’t monitored by a gatekeeper and is just your typical one of thousands of projects on github.. well, that can happen.

I guess it doesn’t count since it’s not exactly a virus, but so very timeless nonetheless:
https://github.com/MrMEEE/bumblebee-Old-and-abbandoned/commit/a047be85247755cdbe0acce6f1dafc8beb84f2ac

By: Jesse K.

Jesse K. — Mon, 20 Aug 2012 15:44:00 +0000

This isn’t propaganda so much as it’s lazy writers for a crappy show that’s targeted at 10 year olds doing buzzword bingo with a googled (or more likely binged) list of “high tech” sounding terms.

I don’t think that CSI:NY’s laughable “set up a GUI in Visual Basic to track an IP address” was pro-MS propaganda either. It’s just a combination of non-tech savvy writers + talking down to the audience + needing a convenient high tech sounding mcguffin to advance the plot.

By: nesjumpman

nesjumpman — Mon, 20 Aug 2012 15:38:00 +0000

Do the kids still download ‘shareware’ ?

That would have been a much better term and still sounds ‘techy’.

By: Moonpie Nobot

Moonpie Nobot — Mon, 20 Aug 2012 15:27:00 +0000

Tinkerballa!

By: jacobian

jacobian — Mon, 20 Aug 2012 15:07:00 +0000

Unless ‘children’ means ‘some children’ this simply is not true. And since it’s ‘some children’ what about the ones that do? I have two kids that do know what ‘open source’ is, and they also care. They’re not alone either, many of their peers do too.

By: Rezeya Montecore

Rezeya Montecore — Mon, 20 Aug 2012 14:55:00 +0000

The NCIS link is neat, but tell us more about these tile errors… >:)

By: Nathan Hornby

Nathan Hornby — Mon, 20 Aug 2012 14:52:00 +0000

Good call; ‘misinformation’ would have probably been better. It’s not like OpenSource software can’t contain malware.

Of course my point was more that just because some children won’t understand what OpenSource is, doesn’t mean it wouldn’t benefit them to be educated, rather than mislead.

By: Rezeya Montecore

Rezeya Montecore — Mon, 20 Aug 2012 14:48:00 +0000

It also doesn’t mean that every error is a lie.

By: Trey Roady

Trey Roady — Mon, 20 Aug 2012 14:37:00 +0000

A bit of an obvious ploy. Writer says that they need a geek. What do geeks look like? They go with their only mental picture of one.

By: retepslluerb

retepslluerb — Mon, 20 Aug 2012 14:34:00 +0000

Yes, they obviously hired someone to provide plausible looking whiteboards. But the execution didn’t work.

Well, perhaps they were running a Hacked Mac OS X.

By: LinkMan

LinkMan — Mon, 20 Aug 2012 14:30:00 +0000

Big Bang Theory is actually somewhat obsessive about getting the science right (or at least plausible).

By: retepslluerb

retepslluerb — Mon, 20 Aug 2012 14:27:00 +0000

Spoiler: Watch the end of the clip. :-)

Same thing in Star Trek: TNG. Took the geniuses of the future 45 minutes screen time to the idea to reboot the infected mainframe from protected memory.