2001: A Space Odyssey is a 1968 epic science fiction film produced and directed by Stanley Kubrick. The screenplay was written by Kubrick and science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke, and was inspired by Clarke’s 1951 short story “The Sentinel” and other short stories by Clarke. Clarke also published a novelisation of the film, in part written concurrently with the screenplay, after the film’s release. The film stars Keir Dullea, Gary Lockwood, William Sylvester, and Douglas Rain and follows a voyage by astronauts, scientists, and the sentient supercomputer HAL to Jupiter to investigate an alien monolith.

The film is noted for its scientifically accurate depiction of space flight, pioneering special effects, and ambiguous imagery. Kubrick avoided conventional cinematic and narrative techniques; dialogue is used sparingly, and there are long sequences accompanied only by music. The soundtrack incorporates numerous works of classical music, including pieces by composers such as Richard Strauss, Johann Strauss II, Aram Khachaturian, and György Ligeti.

The film received diverse critical responses, ranging from those who saw it as darkly apocalyptic to those who saw it as an optimistic reappraisal of the hopes of humanity. Critics noted its exploration of themes such as human evolution, technology, artificial intelligence, and the possibility of extraterrestrial life. It was nominated for four Academy Awards, winning Kubrick the award for his direction of the visual effects. The film is now widely regarded as one of the greatest and most influential films ever made.

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      • comrade_pibb [comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
        12·
        3 months ago

        A multi year plan to insert malicious backdoor code into a boring compression library was discovered a few days ago

        This compression library is used at a very low level by a number of secure tools, and this vulnerability would’ve be massive in scale

        It was only discovered by a user who noticed a tiny increase in log in times using one of these secure tools.

            • buckykat [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
              11·
              3 months ago

              Unironically love trusting my security to a bunch of weird extremely dedicated volunteer nerds.

              Also love not updating I’m still on an earlier version of that tool didn’t have to do shit.

          • hello_hello [they/them, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
            9·
            3 months ago

            It’s good that someone found it before it got into LTS releases like Ubuntu 24.04 which would have increased the possible attack vectors by a ton since Ubuntu is used by a lot of servers that could be targeted.

            The malicious payload was inserted into the build tarball that the GitHub repository produced, not in the source code logic itself (where it could be more easily discovered by others who mirrored the repository).

            More evidence to always focus on reproducible builds from git rather than trusting trust in the form of binary tarballs.