Tom Hardy Is Our New Johnny Depp

With Venom hitting VOD rental this week, it’s time to have a talk about Tom Hardy. The chameleonic British actor has moved up the ranks of the Hollywood star system primarily through a series of intimidatingly committed performances in grimy, often violent movies. But in the wake of Venom, he’s genuinely among our most interesting movie stars, just in the kinds of roles he takes and in the level of commitment he affords to them. It’s reminiscent of the work of one Johnny Depp, another actor who’s offbeat selection of projects and dedication to fully immersive, unsettling acting choices made him a genre unto himself.

Of course, Johnny Depp has lost a lost of luster in recent years, both for his offscreen scandals — including accusations of abuse against his wife, Amber Heard — and an onscreen product that has been increasingly stale. Which is why it’s high time we let Tom Hardy take over as our new overly-committed acting weirdo. If Venom is anything to go by, he’s having a lot more fun with it these days anyway.

After making a bunch of tough-guy Brit movies like Layer Cake and RockNRolla, Hardy gave his big breakthrough performance for director Nicolas Winding Refn in Bronson, where Hardy played a bald, tattooed, incarcerated criminal. Hardy’s charisma (and, honestly, his body) got him the attention of directors like Christopher Nolan, who cast him first in Inception and then in the role that would make him a “name” quantity (ironically by obscuring his face) in The Dark Knight Rises.

Since then, Hardy has leaned into the “indecipherable dialogue with a sick body” thing hard. He made Locke, where he delivered a virtual one-man show from the driver’s seat of a car, rocking what some surmised was a Welsh accent. There was Mad Max: Fury Road, where his character, Max Rockatansky, was muzzled for most of the film. There was crime drama Legend, where he played his own twin, one of whom mumbled through prosthetic teeth. There was The Revenant where he spoke in a heavy, indecipherable accent. There was Taboo on FX (more mumbles), and then there was Dunkirk, where he may well have been speaking the King’s English, but we wouldn’t know because he had his pilot’s mask on the whole time.

You’d think this would be irritating — and I suppose it is for some people — but the true gag of it is that Hardy has delivered some stellar performances from underneath those voice muffling apparatuses. He was Oscar nominated for The Revenant and award-worthy in Locke and probably Dunkirk too. Unlike these latter years of Johnny Depp’s career, Hardy keeps surprising us. Venom is, of nothing else, light years away from any other superhero movie you were going to see this year. It was strange, sinewy, even oddly sensual. And Hardy’s half of the Venom persona was nearly as interesting as the monster (well

‘Bird Box’: That Ending Explained

Photo: Netflix

Netflix’s Bird Box premiered on Friday, with Sandra Bullock leading a harrowing, blindfolded trip down a treacherous river so that she and her two kids can make it to sanctuary, all while unseen monsters and dangerous lunatics lurk around her.

So what happens at the end of Bird Box, and what did it all mean? Read on for some unraveling, some un-blindfolding, and some answers.

SPOILERS for the ending of Bird Box ahead…

What Are the Bird Box Monsters and What Do They Do?

The nature of the monsters and the madness they cause is better explained in the novel Bird Box by John Malerman. There, the world succumbs to disaster a bit more slowly. It’s explained that people see an unknown something, then swiftly go mad and start harming others before finally killing themselves. Before they do, they see something that terrifies them. In the movie, Lil Rel Howery’s character mentions mythology that talks about creatures that make you see your worst fear before you die. That seems to be what the creatures are doing in Bird Box.

What’s With All the Whispering?

When Malorie and her kids disembark their rowboat, they have to run through a wooded area, blindfolded. There, they hear whispers from the creatures, which take the form of familiar voices trying to convince them to remove their blindfolds. Whatever the creatures are, there’s a psychological element to them that know what people will most effect you. So the kids hear Malorie’s voice telling them to remove their blindfolds in order to trick them.

What’s the Sanctuary of the Bird Box Netflix ending?

It turns out the voice on the radio who contacted Malorie — Rick — was telling the truth about having found a sanctuary from the monsters. The fortress is an old school for the blind, and many of the children (and, one imagines, their teachers) who are there were blind to begin with, and thus not susceptible to the creatures.

This is a different — and less horrifying — spin on the ending of the book, where Malorie and the kids make it to the sanctuary and discover that most of the people there have blinded themselves in order to stay safe from the creatures.

London police to test out facial recognition technology

Tourists and Christmas shoppers in central London could come face-to-face with facial recognition scanners as police are set to trial the controversial technology.

This will be the seventh test by London’s Metropolitan Police Service since 2016.

Police said the trials, which are taking place on December 17 and 18, are not meant to be covert and that scanners are set up with information and a “clear uniformed presence.” They added that anyone who refuses to be scanned won’t be considered suspicious.

The current trials are only being held near Soho, Leicester Square and Piccadilly Circus. Three more tests are planned but have not yet been scheduled.

Big Brother Watch has already decried the technology as “authoritarian, dangerous and lawless.”

“Monitoring innocent people in public is a breach of fundamental rights to privacy and freedom of speech and assembly,” the group said in a statement.

Earlier this year, the group conducted an investigation which found the tech had flagged a “staggering” number of innocent people as suspects.

In the US, various civil rights groups have been pushing for strict laws and regulations over the technology’s use, as scanners have started to pop up at airports.

China, which has more than 200 million surveillance cameras installed, is already using facial recognition to catch both criminals and jaywalkers.

Russian trolls tried to discourage black voters to get Trump elected

WASHINGTON — Russia’s sweeping political disinformation campaign on US social media was more far-reaching than originally thought, with troll farms working to discourage black voters and “blur the lines between reality and fiction” to help elect Donald Trump in 2016, according to reports released Monday by the Senate intelligence committee.

And the campaign didn’t end with Trump’s ascent to the White House. Troll farms are still working to stoke racial and political passions in America at a time of high political discord.

The two studies are the most comprehensive picture yet of the Russian interference campaigns on American social media. They add to the portrait investigators have been building since 2017 on Russia’s influence — though Trump has equivocated on whether the interference actually happened.

Facebook, Google and Twitter declined to comment on the specifics of the reports.

The reports were compiled by the cybersecurity firm New Knowledge and by the Computational Propaganda Research Project, a study by researchers at the University of Oxford and Graphika, a social media analysis firm.

The Oxford report details how Russians broke down their messages to different groups, including discouraging black voters from going to the polls and stoking anger on the right.

“These campaigns pushed a message that the best way to advance the cause of the African-American community was to boycott the election and focus on other issues instead,” the researchers wrote.

At the same time, “Messaging to conservative and right-wing voters sought to do three things: repeat patriotic and anti-immigrant slogans; elicit outrage with posts about liberal appeasement of ‘others’ at the expense of US citizens and encourage them to vote for Trump.”

The report from New Knowledge says there are still some live accounts tied to the original Internet Research Agency, which was named in an indictment from special counsel Robert Mueller in February for an expansive social media campaign intended to influence the 2016 presidential election. Some of the accounts have a presence on smaller platforms as the major companies have tried to clean up after the Russian activity was discovered.

“With at least some of the Russian government’s goals achieved in the face of little diplomatic or other pushback, it appears likely that the United States will continue to face Russian interference for the foreseeable future,” the researchers wrote.

The New Knowledge report says that none of the social media companies turned over complete data sets to Congress and some of them “may have misrepresented or evaded” in testimony about the interference by either intentionally or unintentionally downplaying the scope of the problem.

The Senate panel has been investigating Russian interference on social media and beyond for almost two years. Intelligence committee Chairman Richard Burr said in a statement that the data shows how aggressively Russia tried to divide Americans by race, religion and ideology and erode trust in institutions.

“Most troublingly, it shows that these activities have not stopped,” said Burr, a North Carolina Republican.

One major takeaway from both studies is the breadth of Russian interference that appeared on Instagram, which is owned by Facebook and was not frequently mentioned when its parent company testified on Capitol Hill. The study says that as attention was focused on Facebook and Twitter in 2017, the Russians shifted much of their activity to Instagram.

The New Knowledge study says that there were 187 million engagements with users on Instagram, while there were 77 million on Facebook.

“Instagram was a significant front in the IRA’s influence operation, something that Facebook executives appear to have avoided mentioning in congressional testimony,” the researchers wrote. They added that “our assessment is that Instagram is likely to be a key battleground on an ongoing basis.”

The Russian activity went far beyond the three tech companies that provided information, reaching many smaller sites as well. The New Knowledge report details sophisticated attempts to infiltrate internet games, browser extensions and music apps. The Russians even used social media to encourage users of the game “Pokemon Go” — which was at peak popularity in the months before the 2016 presidential election — to use politically divisive usernames, for example.

The report discusses even more unconventional ways that the Russian accounts attempted to connect with Americans and recruit assets, such as merchandise with certain messages, specific follower requests, job offers and even help lines that could encourage people to unknowingly disclose sensitive information to Russia that could later be used against them.

The Russians’ attempts to influence Americans on social media first became widely public in the fall of 2017. Several months later, Mueller’s indictment laid out a vast, organized Russian effort to sway political opinion. While the social media companies had already detailed some of the efforts, the indictment tied actual people to the operation and named 13 Russians responsible.

Also notable is the study’s finding that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was favorably treated in posts aimed at both left-leaning and right-leaning users. The New Knowledge report says there were a number of posts expressing support for Assange and Wikileaks, including several in October 2016 just before WikiLeaks released hacked emails from Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

The Oxford study notes that peaks in Internet Research Agency advertising and organic activity — or posts, shares and comments by users — often corresponded with important dates on the US calendar, crises and international events.

The researchers from Oxford said that organic postings were much more far-reaching than advertisements, despite Facebook’s sole focus on ads when the company first announced it had been compromised in 2017.

Other findings in the studies:

• During the week of the presidential election, posts directed to right-leaning users aimed to generate anger and suspicion and hinted at voter fraud, while posts targeted to African-Americans largely ignored mentions of the election until the last minute.
• Establishment figures of both parties, especially Clinton, were universally panned. Even a tag targeted to feminists criticized Clinton and promoted her primary opponent, independent Bernie Sanders.
• Several posts promoted the Russian agenda in Syria and Syrian President Bashar Assad.
• IRA’s posts focused on the United States started on Twitter as far back as 2013 and eventually evolved into the multiplatform strategy.
• Russian activity on Twitter was less organized around themes like race or partisanship but more driven by local and current events and made use of occasional pop culture references.
• Facebook posts linked to the IRA “reveal a nuanced and deep knowledge of American culture, media and influencers in each community the IRA targeted.” Certain memes appeared on pages targeted to younger people but not older people. “The IRA was fluent in American trolling culture,” the researchers say.

How to stop Apple and Google from tracking you

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Apple and Google can track your every move. But there are ways to mitigate this or shut it down.

The tracking and snooping that Apple and Google do isn’t necessarily a nefarious plot to spy on you. It can make apps more useful. For example, data used by Google Maps can be helpful in getting directions.

That said, it’s not always clear how app providers harvest and use this data. There’s no telling, for example, how a shopping or dating app may use your data.

The New York Times reported this week that a variety of companies use location data when users enable location services.

Set against this backdrop, users need to think about privacy. “Companies use IP addresses, advertising IDs, and cookies to track users and store details about their online behaviors, browsing history, searches, purchases, viewing habits, and more,” Paul Bischoff, privacy advocate at Comparitech.com, told Fox News.

“The resulting ‘profiles’ sold to third parties might not have names attached, but they can be so specific as to only belong to a single person or small group of people,” he added.

Generally, disable your phone’s location services when not in use, Bischoff said.

iPhone / iOS: Turn off tracking

In iOS, go to “Settings,” then select “Privacy” and turn off the “Location Services.” You can also turn off tracking for individual apps on the list that appears below Location Services. Apple, however, warns on its support page that these actions will “limit the performance of various Apple and third-party apps.”

Even if you don’t turn off Location features, Apple will give you reminders about apps using location data in the background. For example, a screen may pop up and say, “’Weather’ has been using your location in the background. Do you want to continue allowing this?”

And if you want to do something less drastic, such as curb ad tracking, on the Privacy page under “Advertising” you can turn on “Limit Ad Tracking.”

Google/Android: Turn off tracking

With Google, it can be a little more involved because Google is not only in charge of Android but its reach extends to the popular Chrome browser and to Google Search.

On Android, go to the Settings icon on your phone and then tap “Security & location.” Under “Privacy,” tap “Location,” then tap “Use Location” and turn that off. Or below Use Location on “App-level permissions,” you can turn off the location permissions for individual apps.

But you may want to go a step further. Go to your Google My Account page and turn off “Location History.” Then, if you have more serious privacy concerns, you can opt to turn off “Web & App Activity.”

“Remember that Google is a bit sneaky in this regard, as some apps collect location data even if your location history is disabled. You’ll have to turn off all tracking of web and app activity, which may impact how other Google apps function,” Compareitech’s Bischoff said.

Here are some more tips about app tracking from Marco DeMello, CEO of app security specialist PSafe.

“When the product is free, you are the product,” DeMello said, citing a widely used axiom of the internet. “Consider going for a premium or, at a minimum, an ads-free version of an app/game you’re using or interested in. When you pay for services, there’s no incentive to sell your data.”

“Keep your phone like you keep your house — clean. Don’t keep around apps and/or games you no longer need or use. [It will] reduce the chance of these apps and/or games capturing and profiting from your data,” DeMello added.

Apple did not respond to a request for comment on this story. Google provided pages (linked to above) that explain how to manage your location data on Android devices and in apps.