Movie Mondays: Did Adam Sandler Hack Uber?

Welcome to The Modern Day Renaissance Man newsletter. I, Trey Layton, write about the things that interest me, often covering topics such as startups, sports, and entertainment. If you'd like to receive these newsletters directly in your email a few times a week, go ahead and subscribe to never miss an email!

Happy Monday, folks.

The Slap Heard 'Round the World.

I think we all remember where we were when we either saw or heard about Will Smith slapping Chris Rock at the Oscars. Regardless of your own opinion on whether or not Smith took his Mike Lowrey method acting too seriously, one group that gave it a mere 4/10 was the Academy which banned him from attending the event (even via Zoom) for 10 years. That stings.

However, the one which might be left with the biggest red handprint on its face is Apple, the dinosaur computer company turned award-winning film studio, who dished out 120 million big ones to acquire the rights to an upcoming Civil War drama starring the actor called Emancipation. 

Apparently, it's good. Like, Oscars winner good.

That has left the company in quite the pickle as it decides what to do with the movie. Does Apple release it and risk tarnishing its own reputation by associating itself with the aftermath of the WWOscars, or does it go full HBO Max and scrap the completed project altogether? Apple has already pulled the ol' "Let's revisit this next week" and delayed the release until 2023, but can it really play that card nine more times so that Smith can jump up on stage and thank the 572,975,024 people that helped him get there?

Time will tell, but it's not a decision I'd personally want to be making. 

Now, warm up your thumbs 'cause we're talking gaming.

Over the weekend, I saw two noteworthy hacks on large, open-world multiplayer games. The first was a takeover of Wizard 101, the technically-free-though-paywalled-and-protected-like-Fort Knox MMO magic game that made Club Penguin look mild, which went down for "maintenance," minutes after players were bombarded with in-game messages like "kings isle is the worst company i have ever worked for", "the wizard police are after me", and, my personal favorite, "The next world is my boss's asshole".

We will likely never know whether these messages truly did come from a disgruntled employee as indicated or whether it was merely a CS major with a future in standup, but the Wiz subreddit loved every second of it. The company is infamous for the rampant microtransactions and terrible community management which has plagued the player experience. Many hope that this serves as a wakeup bucket of water for whichever Kings Isle employee serves as company Dumbledore.

However, a much more impactful hack took place when GTA VI, the long-anticipated sequel to (get this) GTA V, experienced a breach in which some hooded crusader managed to get access to screenshots, videos, and even the source code for the upcoming title before posting said content on an online GTA Forum. There, the hacker hosted a show & tell in which members of the community inquired about certain potential game features, and the hacker would check for its inclusion by searching the stolen code. The videos and account posting them were taken down by the Forum, an effort meant to prevent being"obliterated" by Take-Two Interactive, the company behind the game. Before he was silenced, "teapotuberhacker" posted that any representative of the game or company should email him to negotiate.

What makes this even more wild, however, is that this individual claims to also be the person responsible for breaching Uber's fancy schmancy internal communications system (Slack. It's Slack.)

The Uber IT team quickly responded to the hack, though a few team members DID still manage to get in some dank memes:

While it is unclear how the hacker managed to breach Take-Two's system, it's likely that the Uber hack was a human error in which an individual accidentally gave up account passwords to an outside party, thus granting them access to internal systems. In each case, investors weren't even mad... just disappointed. Take-Two's stock ($TTWO) fell 3% while Uber's ($UBER) fell 5%.

Attacks such as these are becoming more prevalent in society, but hacking in the gaming industry actually happens to be far more common than elsewhere. Reportedly, 55% of gamers have had an account compromised. This might be because there is a lot of overlap between the computer-savvy individuals who hack and those who enjoy the high-tech world of gaming.

Some might do it to gain a competitive edge as is obviously the case with at least 90% of the people who have killed me in Fortnite. Others do it for financial reasons such as holding important data or credentials hostage until companies or individuals pay large bounties like what we saw with Take-Two. There are even a few out there that just do it for fun and to see if they can.

With so many outdated cybersecurity structures and so many technical developments that can be used for malicious causes, stories such as these are bound to be common ones for the foreseeable future. Hopefully, we can convince enough of these brainiacs to join the good guys and fight their former brothers in crime to provide protection for the vast majority of us hapless internet users, but honestly, with the hundreds of millions of dollars that these people "earn" doing this every year, would you ever give it up?

This past week's box office numbers:

It's nice to see so many new and original titles at the top of the list for this past weekend. The Woman King balled out (critics say deservedly so), and Barbarian and Pearl are two of the fall (summer?) titles I've been most excited for.

Average week of releases ahead:

• Jeepers Creepers Reborn (9/19 via select theaters; the OG is hit or miss but I'll watch)

• Andor (9/21 via theaters; thought Obi was mediocre and didn't even finish but might give this one a shot)

• Don't Worry Darling (9/23 via theaters; talk about a media tour... but all publicity is good publicity, right? Right?!?)

I'm way behind on my watchlist. I just got around to watching Elvis. Nonetheless, shoot me a couple of gems to add to it that I might get to by this time next year🤷

Cheers to another day,

Trey