Disney sitcom says open source is insecure | Hacker News Reader

Disney sitcom says open source is insecure

theregister.co.uk

32 pointsibotty35 comments

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

How tech savvy do you expect the writers of a Disney kids show to be?

Incomprehensible technobabble permeates television and movies, but only when these people accidentally make a sentence that works, is it news.

This. Once an episode of Criminal Minds had a criminal whose IP started with 300-something. That would be immediately corrected if the writing was minimally revised by an specific consultant, which suggests it wasn't. So I'm going with s_henry_paulson and the Hanlon's Razor on this one.

On a side note, isn't the term "freetard" extremely pejorative?

That's probably not an error. It's like phone numbers starting with 555, so that it isn't accidentally someones' phone.

That seems a little overzealous for an IP, but indeed I hadn't considered this possibility.

It seems overzealous, until you're the one whose IP has been published in a mainstream media outlet, resulting in bored crackers probing around to see what's there.

In an age where television shows regularly incorporate "real world" tie-ins and easter eggs, it makes perfect sense to use an invalid IP address to save everyone some trouble. Not to mention, if someone were really attacked as a result of their IP address being randomly used on some television show, the lawsuit that follows would be unwelcome.

There are IP ranges reserved for that, much like example.com.

> On a side note, isn't the term "freetard" extremely pejorative?

This is The Register we're talking about. I see it as no coincidence that it has a red banner, it is a "Red Top" of tech journalism

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_tops#Red_top

Woundn't it actually make sense that a consultant would recommend using the 555 equivelant for an ip addresses since anyone could try to attack it after watching the movie.

Any qualified consultant would be aware of this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reserved_IP_addresses

Edit: To save a click-through, if the movie/show producers actually cared, a seemingly innocent IP like 203.0.113.42 would not only be fine as "random computer number" for the general audience but also it would be a valid IP and furthermore instead of causing nerdrages would cause nerdgasms as people "in the know" can revel in their shared secret. It's not "correct" in the sense that the IP goes somewhere in real life but it's not flat out wrong.

But if you're looking at the logs of connection over the 'net, as it's usually the case in those shows, a reserved IP would be wrong too. It's rather irrelevant which one you use.

An obviously fake IP address breaks the suspension of disbelief for those who know what an IP address should look like: four octets of 0-255 each. There's a much smaller population who both knows what an IP address looks like and what IP addresses are assigned and publicly routable. By your logic, IP addresses might as well contain only three dot-separated numbers, such as "350.897.260"... since if there are no degrees of wrongness, why even try to get it minimally authentic looking?

Wouldn't bother me.

I considered suggesting using 127.0.0.1, but I felt that at least a meaningful portion of the audience might know that that is the local host. 203.0.113.42 is good as are the other test nets. I wasn't aware of these before though.

Agreed, I hadn't considered this. I take that back.

"Freetard" is more or less a meme at El Reg.

Unsurprisingly I'm also in agreement, it's just stupidity and laziness that will only get picked up by a few nerds. Still, nerdrages can be very therapeutic!

it is not necessarily malice. but it tells how certain propaganda pays off. (remember microsofts anti-linux campaign?)

Was it before or after Linux's anti-Microsoft campaign?

Linux is just a kernel development project, it never had advocacy campaigns.

The open source thing aside. What the hell is up with Disney channel shows! They don't make them like they used to anymore. Another reason why I don't watch TV anymore. Life++

Are you 8 ?

(and yes that seems like terrible tv)

No, I'm just comparing them to how they were back when I was 8.

There are a crop of current Disney shows that are so awful their creators can not have souls. There are 6 or 10 of these and they are all the same, with the same characters and non-jokes covered by an aggressive laughtrack. They traffic in a kind of nastiness that you might have thought was consigned to the past, like making fun of foreigners. Somehow, however, the same outfit brings us the brilliant Phineas & Ferb.

I'm trying to figure out what's "Open Source code" actually means. Judging from what little is shown at the video, and without watching any of that programme, I think the idea here isn't "open source" as in "Free and Open Source software", but more of "code examples freely available on the net", in the same vein of someone copying information about a book from the Internet for school and gets an F with a "No, Lurch and Uncle Fester were not characters in David Copperfield."

That is not a jab at open source. I don't know how a virus could be inserted in a code snippet copy/pasted from the web, but I guess that's what the scene refers to.

I once instructed someone to download Open Office and he downloaded an unofficial version that I guess appeared first on the search engine. It was bundled with a not-so-nice toolbar, so these things do happen.

It's hardly a problem specific to FOSS, though.

"Disney-owned Pixar recently released some of its production code under an open source licence."

Then I guess now we know why...

Heck you don't even need to go that far. Just look up the headers to disney.com, they use Apache!!

they obfuscate technical information for legal reasons, they couldn't have mentioned the existence of "pirate" software otherwise the kids would be looking for "pirate" games and other type of software from the back of watching the show.

that is a good explanation. (still wrong to chose that plot though.)

Take a breath, it's gonna be ok. Not news.

Ironically some Disney animation studios have switched to Linux/Wine to avoid paying Windows licensing fees.

They also believe in Open Source:

http://www.disneyanimation.com/technology/opensource.html

Not to mention Panda 3D. On another note, time for a code audit, I guess!

She should have used Free (as in freedom) Software instead.

That really was a NOOBS mistake, Mr. Nerdy Boy.

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