Anyone can play detective...

A friend of mine told me about this website www.spokeo.com. It basically markets itself as a kind of online phonebook so if you type in your name or email address it basically searches throught the internet to pull up any data it can find about you. Now it's an american site so typing in your name probably won't do any good, but your email address is worth a shot. When he typed his email address it pulled up some of his facebook photos (his privacy settings shouldn't allow anyone to see his photos though even on facebook). So I typed in my email address but it found nothing on me. Baptiste though typed in looking for info on a friend of his in america and it pulled up family members, phone number etc. the kind of stuff that shouldnt really be made public. Once the site pulls up information about you it then says that you can pay to find out more! Its crazy that search engines like this exist, where their sole purpose is finding out information about you. Obviously it started with great honest intentions but it can lead to your personal details ending up in the wrong hands. The main fear I have with sites like this is that this is just one we only discovered recently, how many more similar sites are online which give anybody the ability to easily determine someones personal information, without having to 'friend' them on social networking sites. Our lives are becomming more and more public and without our knowledge, scary stuff.

An update on current progress;

We are taking a new line with the narrative; one that has been finalised this time! We will highlight the extent and dangers of information-gathering and people-profiling in the inline domain by creating a real-world analogy of similar tasks being carried out by a surveillance team which the user is part of.

Ben and myself are drafting up scripts at the minute and hope to have one ready at the end of the week, at which time we will post ads for auditions and begin the rest of the preproduction. Keith is flat out programming working prototype programs for the interactive application and Baptiste continues to research the extent of what THEY KNOW ABOUT US...

Things are developing quickly...

Just a small update on the actionscript. We have begun the drag and dropping with movie clips. Its straight forward at the start, just have to tweek a few things on it. Were looking at coding transitions at the minute so the drag and drop function runs more fluently. Creating more of a 3d environment with all the movie clips.

We're also working on the script at the minute, in regards to the narrative. We hope to have this completed by the end of the week so we will keep you posted.

Laters

Another mood board version...

This one we used in the presentation:

Presentation Success!

First big Group Project day over... We had our presentation in the Dragon's Den today and I'd say it was a big success. We put alot of work into it (one of the reasons the blog has been quiet last while...), and it paid off. All the lecturers seemed to get the whole concept and were excited about the project, especially the core ideas of highlighting the issues of information leaks, media bias and the dangers of surveillance. There was some criticism regarding the narrative, but we cant win 'em all!! Overall we are delighted with the response.

We also learned later today that Glenn Doyle will be our supervisor for the year. Given his extensive knowledge in the area of media theory in particular, we look forward to working with him.

We'll keep you posted...

Updated Mood Board

I updated the mood board since we did the mock presentation last Thursday. The image here on the left is the updated version of the mood board, with the original version directly below it. As per the suggestions and recommendations of the team and of the lecturers, I tried to make it appear less "Hollywood" and give it a more gritty and real appearance. To achieve this I removed a lot of the futuristic cinema stills and also included more Irish references, such as the Garda crime scene tape. I also converted all of the images to black & white so now they all have a CCTV kind of effect. Hopefully this version is a better reflection of the style we hope to achieve with the project.

An other current affair in France..

To sum up the case, L'Oréal heir, Liliane Bettencourt, may have given money to Sarkozy's Party during his campaign.

And now, three newspaper's offices has been robed, and everything seems linked...

http://www.mediapart.fr/journal/france/271010/bettencourt-tapes-stolen-mystery-break-ins-target-mediapart-le-point-and-le-mo

Update : mediapart.fr is a french online newspaper that bet on the "pay to see" formula. You have quality information, but you have to pay 9€ per month. They already revealed some crucial information and this is why they have been robed as well.