71. The John de Koning trap
I.
Music platform 3voor12 drew me into a tunnel from which I couldn’t escape last week. In the podcast De Machine featured the song Zo Zomer by a certain John de Koning. The presenters suspected it had been created by artificial intelligence. But Zo Zomer is now in fifth place in the charts on radio station Sterren NL.
The song itself is catchy. “It’s so, so, so, almost summer,” sings a voice. At the same time, the production sounds tinny, the lyrics are strange at times (“Where are we going, it’s really important”) and after exactly 3 minutes and 16 seconds, the track cuts off.
I tried to find out whether any detection tools exist that could determine whether Zo Zomer was indeed created by AI and came across a French institute. Read the full story on NU.nl, because who is John de Koning anyway?
---II.
On radio station JOE, I said that on Friday smoke was almost coming out of my keyboard because I was typing so hard. Blisters on my fingers. It was the day of the ultra-super-mega glitch in Windows systems, which meant half the world woke up to blue screens of death. If you weren’t affected yourself, you’d certainly have heard about it second-hand.
I won’t go over everything again, but just a few final thoughts:
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CrowdStrike is a highly regarded cybersecurity firm. The company provides software designed to protect users against viruses and attackers in the background. To do this, the software requires deep access to computer systems. And if a glitch creeps in there, you can see what consequences that can have. The fact that the error occurred at CrowdStrike of all places is particularly unfortunate.
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Exactly how this could have gone wrong is unclear. Normally, updates are thoroughly reviewed and double-checked. It’s still human work, so something like this can happen, but the chance is extremely small. It’s not for nothing that we hardly ever see computer failures of this magnitude. This error will put everyone on high alert, so that it doesn’t happen again any time soon.
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A round of applause for all the system administrators who worked overtime on Friday to come up with solutions to the problems that had arisen. It was hard work and required staying on their toes, because setting up the wrong solutions or backups can lead to new errors. And that, in turn, can lead to vulnerabilities. We may well find out to what extent that has happened.
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The outage highlights just how vulnerable and dependent we are on digital infrastructure. Of course, companies and organisations worldwide opt for the best security (and, once again, CrowdStrike is definitely one of them), but if a slip-up occurs, half the world suffers immediate consequences and damage. And according to Microsoft, less than 1 per cent of all Windows computers worldwide have been affected – just imagine.
III.
Brrr, Longlegs. The opening scene of the film alone, in which a girl is lured into the snow to the back of a house by a mysterious creep. It sends shivers down your spine.
Longlegs is about a serial killer and an FBI agent with clairvoyant tendencies who is trying to catch him. It features a brilliant performance by Nicolas Cage, who steals the show in every scene he appears in, and whose image is deliberately kept out of the film’s marketing. It’s best, therefore, to watch the film without knowing too much.
Let me just say this: I particularly enjoyed the first hour, in which director Osgood Perkins crafts a brilliant horror thriller. The plot unfolds slowly, though you’ll get a few proper scares. The tone of the film feels a bit odd, in a way that reminds me of Alan Wake II. Because just like in that game, subtlety and madness are never far apart in Longlegs. It works perfectly for this mystery.
---PS.
The medieval knight’s tale Karel ende Elegast is being adapted for the screen by Dutch animators. A teaser has been released for The King & The Thief which looks promising. Lovely style.
---Conan O’Brien recently had actress Rashida Jones as a guest on his podcast. The conversation touched on Twin Peaks for a few minutes, as Jones is the daughter of Peggy Lipton (Norma Jennings in the series). O’Brien raves about the series and calls it something nobody had ever seen before. “It changed everything and showed what was possible with the medium of television.”
Jones thinks she was a bit too young when she first watched Twin Peaks. “I was so scared of Bob, I used to look under my bed every morning,” she says. “And my mum’s in the series, I know it’s fake!”
What Beats Rock is rock-paper-scissors taken to the next level. What beats rock? Paper, yes, but a bomb too. And what beats a bomb? A robot, for example. Superman can then beat that robot. In this online game, you keep coming up with something that can beat your previous answer. Every correct answer adds to your high score. It’s reminiscent of the game Infinite Craft.
Keanu Reeves has built his fictional world around an 80,000-year-old warrior who cannot die. The ancient warrior plays the lead role in the comic series BRZRKR, and a film and animated series are in the pipeline. Now there is also a novel set in the BRZRKR universe. Reeves wrote The Book of Elsewhere together with the British science fiction writer China Miéville. “Keanu Reeves wrote a book”, headlines The New York Times. “A really weird one.”
---The Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision has posted a lovely video about the province of Utrecht on YouTube. Lovely footage from forty years ago.
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