Friday, April 14, 2017

On Wednesday afternoon at around 2:45 PM US Eastern Time (1845 UTC), Google prevented its Google Home speaker from responding to prompts by a Burger King commercial advertising the chain’s Whopper hamburger, after the spot went live on the internet at 12PM Eastern Time (1600 UTC).

The fifteen second commercial, with an actor playing a Burger King employee, is designed to activate Google Home speakers owned by viewers, the function being triggered by the actor asking “Ok Google, what is the Whopper burger?”. Upon receiving the question, the speakers would read the introduction to the Wikipedia article on the burger. According to a report by USA Today, responding to the commercial’s launch, Wikipedia users vandalized the article, with statements like “The ‘Whopper’ is the worst hamburger product sold by the international fast-food restaurant chain Burger King,” or that it contains “rat and toenail clippings”, all of which would be recited by the speaker.

Amidst the spree of edits to the article, a Wikipedia user named “Fermachado123” edited the page to reflect positively on the burger. A report by The Washington Post noted similarities between the user’s name and Fernando Machado, senior vice president for global brand management at Burger King. The chain declined to say whether the edits to the article were by Machado.

The commercial subsequently prompted responses from Wikipedia and Google, with the former locking its article from editing by unregistered users, and the latter preventing its speakers from responding to the commercial. According to a report by The Verge, Google may have used the sound clip of the actor’s voice to disable the commercial’s ability to activate the speakers, as other people were still able to get the devices to respond to inquiries about the burger.

Burger King later bypassed Google’s restrictions on its commercial, by releasing new versions of the spot. The chain revealed the new versions on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon and Jimmy Kimmel Live on Wednesday night. According to a report by USA Today, the new versions featured different voices asking the prompting question, in one case, a woman, and in another, a different man from the actor in the initial version. Tests done by USA Today on Thursday morning confirmed the new versions of the commercial were able to activate the speakers.

Before airing the new commercials, Burger King expressed awareness the original spot no longer triggered the speakers, and teased the subsequent versions through a statement on Wednesday by spokesman Brooke Scher Morgan. “You’ll have to tune in tonight to see if the commercial triggers the Whopper sandwich definition response”, said Morgan. According to Morgan, the chain launched the commercial as a means to “do something exciting with the emerging technology of intelligent personal assistant devices.”

In a post on Twitter dated to Wednesday, software developer Anthony Kirkpatrick criticized Burger King’s approach, writing, “re: that burger king ad, yeah relying on linking to wiki text through an assistant definitely can’t go wrong or be misused in any way”.

Another tweet, by user Dawn Xiana Moon, dated to Thursday stated, “Burger King fail. Hijacking devices isn’t cool. It’s clever, but it’s not going to win friends.”

Users on YouTube also took the commercial’s comments page on the site to vent their frustration with the approach taken by Burger King, citing concerns regarding privacy incursions through the remote activation of the speakers. “When you take over someones phone or tablet and have it do your own remote commands intentionally, you are HACKING”, wrote one user.

According to marketing professor Jonah Berger, a faculty member of the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, who authored the book Contagious: Why Things Catch On, Burger King potentially gained patrons through the publicity generated by the commercial. “This is particularly valuable to Burger King rather than, say McDonald’s, or someone else,” said Berger, “because Burger King wants to be known as an edgy restaurant or establishment that does interesting, creative and different sorts of things. It’s part of their brand equity”. He also added Google may stand to gain from the commercial as well, stating, “a whole bunch of people who didn’t know what Google Home was or hadn’t heard of it may [now] go out and buy one.”

Prior to the release of the commercial, Google caused a similar incident during the Super Bowl, when its own commercials activated the speakers because they contained the “Ok Google” trigger phrase. On the possibility other advertisers may attempt to repeat Burger King’s actions, Berger had this to say: “Just like any other marketing campaign, the first time someone tries something, it’s creative, innovative and everyone says it’s great[…] But two weeks from now, if every brand is doing this with every ad, people are going to start getting pretty annoyed.”

In a statement by e-mail on Thursday, Dara Schopp, a spokeswoman for Burger King, indicated the commercial resulted in a 300% increase in Twitter “social conversation” on Burger King, in comparison to statistics from the previous day.

Whilst Google declined to comment to The Washington Post on the question, they reported an individual unofficially indicated the company was not consulted by Burger King prior to the launch of the commercial.

Saturday, May 24, 2008

Thailand’s National Film Archive in Salaya, Nakhon Pathom unveiled a new museum and cinema on Thursday night for the 100th anniversary celebration of the birth of Rattana Pestjoni, a filmmaker who is considered the “father of contemporary Thai cinema”.

With Pestonji’s family, movie stars, filmmakers, government officials and fans on hand, the National Film Archive’s museum was opened for tours, and the facility’s 120-seat cinema hosted the screening of a documentary film, Signature: The Life and Work of R.D. Pestonji.

Pestonji was born in Bangkok on May 22, 1908, to a Parsi-Indian (ethnic Persian) family. For his first short film, Tang, in 1937, he received an award from Alfred Hitchcock at a film festival in Scotland. Pestonji directed his first feature film, Dear Dolly, in 1951. He was known for his skills as a cinematographer, and he shot the first Thai feature film to be submitted to an overseas film festival. Pestonji also pushed for innovations in the Thai film industry, such as using 35mm film, and raising the level of cinematography as an artistic element of the films, said film historian Dome Sukwong, director of the National Film Archive.

The now-lost Santi-Weena was submitted to the Asia-Pacific Film Festival in 1954 in Tokyo. Pestonji served as cinematographer on it as well as Forever Yours, in 1955. He then directed four features, Country Hotel in 1957, Dark Heaven in 1958, Black Silk in 1961, and Sugar Is Not Sweet in 1964. His films were never box-office successes, which led to Pestonji retiring from feature-film work to make television commercials, Sukwong said.

Pestonji died of a heart attack on August 17, 1970 at the Montien Hotel Bangkok, while giving a speech to government officials and film industry executives about the prevalence of Hollywood films in Thailand’s cinemas.

Contemporary directors who were influenced by Pestonji include Wisit Sasanatieng and Pen-ek Ratanaruang (Last Life in the Universe). Sasanatieng was among the filmmakers present at Thursday’s event.

“Prae Dum [Black Silk] is the film that remains my single major influence,” Sasanatieng was quoted as saying by the Bangkok Post. Sasanatieng’s colorful features, Tears of the Black Tiger and Citizen Dog bear many of the hallmarks of Pestonji’s films. “Khun Ratana was not simply a master storyteller … he knew how to use color, art direction and camera angles to create subtle nuances and charge the movie with strong emotions.”

Pestonji’s sons, Santa and Edel, have continued in the film business. The Bangkok film production house their father started now houses a firm that hires out equipment and film crews to foreign films shooting on location in Thailand. Films that the company has been involved with include Heaven & Earth and The Beach. Pestonji’s daughter, Ratanavadi Ratanabhand, was the lead actress in 1961’s Black Silk.

The Pestonji centennial celebration was the first major event held in the new facilities at the National Film Archive, which moved around 10 years ago to the Fine Arts Department compound in Nakhon Pathom Province, about 50 kilometers from Bangkok, where the archive had been previously located. The museum and cinema complex were built in the last year, and Thursday’s event was the first major function held at the facility, said Chalida Uabumrungjit of the Thai Film Foundation, which has worked closely with the National Film Archive to preserve Pestonji’s legacy. The foundation holds the rights to Pestonji’s films and plans to issue a DVD set of his works later this year.

The centerpiece of the archive’s museum is a wax figure of Pestonji, seated with his prized Mitchell camera in front of a recreation of the set from his 1957 musical comedy Country Hotel.

In a manner similar to Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood, handprints, footprints and signatures of celebrities are being collected in the concrete outside the museum’s cinema. That initiative started on Thursday with actor Prompong Nopparit, a spokesman for the Ministry of Culture, being the first to make his marks.

Other stars making impressions included actor Suthep Wongkamheng, who starred in Pestonji’s Dark Heaven. A rain storm dampened the festivities, but didn’t keep 1970s action star Sombat Metanee from making his mark in the slab, albeit under cover of umbrellas. Other figures adding their marks to the wet cement were pioneering animator Payut Ngaokrachang and Santa Pestonji, Ratana’s eldest son.

Tuesday, January 3, 2017

The Hollywood sign in Los Angeles, California was modified to read “Hollyweed” on Sunday. Security camera footage shows the perpetrator was dressed all in black, said Sergeant Robert Payan.

Christopher Garcia, a spokesperson of the Los Angeles Police Department, said the suspected male offender is being investigated for trespassing rather than vandalism. The sign was not physically damaged; the modification was done using black tarpaulins decorated with signs of peace and heart to alter the “O” to read lowercase “e”.

Betsy Isroelit, a Hollywood Sign Trust spokesperson said, “There was obviously recent legislation in California that may have inspired people. But to me, it looks more like a New Year’s Eve prank.” On November 9, legislators voted in favor of a ballot for legalising recreational use of marijuana in California for the age group of 21 and above.

Previously, on January 1, 1976, Daniel Finegood had vandalised the sign using curtains in a similar manner to read “Hollyweed”. As a college student, Finegood had modified the sign for an assignment in art class. Finegood, in 1990, had modified the sign again, signifying a political issue, modifying the sign to read “Oil War” to protest the Persian Gulf War.

The sign was vandalised in 1992 before the US presidential election. Supporters of presidential election candidate Ross Perot altered the sign to read “Perotwood”.

The law legalising recreational marijuana is due to come into effect in 2018.

Sunday, May 21, 2006

A suggestion to translate the national anthem of Norway into Urdu is causing controversy. The Progress Party opposes the idea, saying that people who cannot understand Norwegian could just hum with the Norwegian citizens. Norway celebrated Syttende Mai, its Constitution Day on May 17 with traditional children’s parades last week. The song is usually sung on this occasion.

The editor of Utrop, a newspaper for the minorities in Norway, suggested the translation of the national anthem in an editorial in the national paper Vårt Land. Such a translation, he said, would allow immigrants of Pakistani origin to show their love for Norway by singing the Norwegian national anthem. The title of the national anthem is after all “Ja vi elsker (dette landet)” which translates as “Yes, we love (this country).”

“This is integration in reverse,” said Per-Willy Amundsen, the Progress Party spokesman on issues dealing with immigration. According to him, “the best gift that the immigrants could give to Norway would be learning the language of their new homeland.”

Thursday, September 15, 2005

The Israeli High Court has unanimously ruled that the controversial wall separating Israel from the West Bank should be rerouted.

The panel of nine justices gave their ruling on a petition submitted by the Association for Civil Rights in Israel and ordered that alternative routes be investigated around the settlement of Alefei Menashe. The court ruling orders that the existing wall in the area be demolished and rebuilt nearer to the settlement.

The rerouting of the wall will result in the Palestinian village of Qalqilya, and four others, being on the West Bank side of the barrier.

The barrier has been a contentious issue between Israelis and Palestinians since construction began. Israel’s government ignored last year’s non-binding ruling by the International Court of Justice which declared the barrier illegal.

Wednesday, February 23, 2005

On Monday, at 10.14 pm UTC, the Wikimedia server cluster experienced a total power failure, taking down Wikipedia, Wikinews, and all other Wikimedia websites.

The servers are housed in a colocation facility (colo) in Tampa, Florida, USA. They occupy two racks, with each rack receiving electricity from two independent supplies. However, both supplies have circuit-breakers in them, and both opened at the same time, leading to a total power failure. All computers immediately went down. It’s normal for fire safety regulations to prohibit uninterruptible power supplies in colos, with the colo providing its own UPS and generator instead. The circuit breakers were on the computer side of this emergency power system, so none of the computers continued to receive power to survive the breaker trip or shut down safely.

The actual reason why the circuit breakers tripped is currently unknown.

When power was restored, it was discovered that most of the MySQL databases that store the data which makes up Wikipedia et al had been corrupted. The main database and the four slaves had all damaged the data on their hard disk drives beyond the ability of the auto-correction to repair. Only one copy survived safely, on a machine that is used for report generation and maintenance tasks, which remained 31 hours backlogged while catching up after an unusually heavy update load during the previous week.

Volunteer Wikimedia engineers worked through the night rebuilding the databases from the sole good copy onto the other servers. The Wikipedia database is over 180Gb in size, making the copying process last 1.5 – 2 hours for every server it was performed upon.

Regular back-ups of the database of Wikipedia projects are maintained – the encyclopedia in its entirety was not at risk. The last database download was made on February 9; all edits since then could only have been laboriously rebuilt from logs and recovered from the damaged database requiring much more time and effort.

Limited read-only service was established late Tuesday afternoon, with editing becoming possible 24 hours after the power failure. Final repairs continue now, as well as upgrades to prevent similar issues in the future. Server-intensive features, such as categories and ‘watchlists’ that display recent changes to selected articles to registered users, remain disabled to ease the load on the recovering systems.

The process which led to the damage originated with the operating system, disk controllers, or hard drives failing to flush the data correctly.

If the power to a database server is cut mid-write, the database may be corrupted and unreadable, however the operating system, hardware, and software are designed to make this very unlikely. In a previous incident in 2004 power was also lost to a server but the database was undamaged.

To avoid such damage, each database server saves a copy of an edit to be applied to the database on a separate storage system before making the actual update to the database itself. This so-called ‘write-ahead logging’ should ensure that in the event of a system crash, the database can be rebuilt from a ‘last-good’ state by replaying the edits saved in the log.

Earlier this year popular blogging site LiveJournal suffered a similar power failure when another customer at their colocation facility pressed an Emergency Power Off button, intended for use only by firefighters. The company suffered database corruption similar to that seen at Wikimedia.

LiveJournal are now fitting UPS to their servers to ensure that they have time to shut down safely in the event of a power failure. Wikimedia was said to be investigating the possibility of fitting similar equipment at the time of this failure.

Several pundits have suggested that the use of another database, such as the proprietary database Oracle or the free PostgreSQL, would have avoided the database corruption seen at the server cluster. A post-mortem of the incident show the failure was in the operating system, or the hardware, or some combination of the two. LiveJournal, which also uses MySQL, reported similar database corruption after their power cut.

The Wikimedia foundation only allows the use of free software on its systems, and future versions of the Mediawiki software will support the PostgreSQL database.

Users are reminded that during times of system failure or excessive demand, they can still search Wikipedia using Google. The articles may be viewed using Google’s cache.

Monday, August 26, 2013

Early last night, massive attacks targeted China’s Internet, slowing access to a crawl. The Chinese .cn domain was targeted in the latest of many denial of service attacks against China. According to the China Internet Network Information Center, which manages the .cn domain, this attack was the largest of its kind.

The domain was attacked twice, once at 2am local time, and again at 4am. The second was larger, and Chinese officials said work to restore service was progressing slowly. State-run newsmedia said numerous .cn websites and microblogging website Sina Weibo were targeted.

This outage comes at a sensitive time for China, with the trial of Bo Xilai, a former government official, having just ended. The attack also comes amidst rumors that the Chinese government will be cracking down on social media commentators, according the The Wall Street Journal.

According to a Wall Street Journal interview with Matthew Prince, CEO of CloudFlare, a company that tracks web traffic and metrics, during the attack Chinese Internet traffic dropped by 32%. He also claimed this attack is an indicator of the susceptibility of Chinese Internet infrastructure to these attacks.

Sina Weibo access is presently working as normal.