Latin America Movie Ideas

I took at Latin American film studies class in the fall 2013 semester at the University of South Carolina. It was a very interesting course, which covered the film industry in Latin America. One of the points made during the class was that there were not really a lot of Latin American representation in Hollywood. This included: actors, actress, movies, etc.

I'm taking an introduction into Latin American history this semester, spring 2014, and I'm a little surprised that Hollywood hasn't dipped into this treasure trove of film ideas. Today, in particular, we were covering the independence of Cuba and, my gosh, there's a movie trilogy there, maybe even more. It took three wars for Cuba to gain it's independence: The Ten Years War (1868-1878); Guerra Chiquita (1879-1880); and the Final War (1895-1898).

Jesus Perez a vigilante who returned runaway slaves attempting to join the independence army to plantation owners, who himself later joined the independence army, is one protagonist for a movie idea in the Ten Years War.

Another protagonist would be Antoni Maceo who was a free Afro-Cuban who joined the army as a soldier and quickly rose to the rank of General. He fought all the way through the first Treaty of Zanjon (1878).

The Guerra Chiquita or Small War is set on a plantation in East Cuba named La Esperanza, which translates, ironically, to "hope." This War involved a slave revolt, where the slaves demanded the dismissal of an overseer. The army was called in and was unable to subdue the slaves initially, as they remained defiant to the army Colonel Aguillera.

Then there's the Final War, which saw the return of Antonia Maceo. This time around the independence army had much greater support from the Cuban population.

I would love to go into much greater detail about the synopsis for these films, and maybe I will in the future. Today wasn't the first time I've thought about a piece of Latin American history as a movie idea. The history of Latin America is plentiful with movie ideas and I'm a little surprised that more movies haven't come out on the topic.

Don't Be A Pingback Jerk

According to Brian Krebs over on krebsonsecurity.com, online attackers are using the Pingback function on WordPress sites to denial-of-service attack (DDoS) other websites:

At issue is the “pingback” function, a feature built into WordPress and plenty of other CMS tools that is designed to notify (or ping) a site that you linked to their content. Unfortunately, like most things useful on the Web, the parasites and lowlifes of the world are turning pingbacks into a feature to be disabled, lest it be used to attack others.

Fortunately, there's a relatively easy fix:

Bloggers can disable pingback on posts by clicking “Settings” then “Discussion”, and then unchecking the following options if they are checked:

-Attempt to notify any blogs linked to from the article
-Allow link notifications from other blogs (pingbacks and trackbacks)

Unfortunately, Cid said, this only appears to prevent pingbacks on new blog posts and does nothing to disable pingbacks on posts that are already published for which pingback was previously enabled. There is, however, a highly-rated WordPress plugin that disables the pingback functionality.

As Sucuri notes, for the gearheads who don’t trust plugins, one easy way to block your WordPress blog from participating in these attacks is to create your own plugin that incorporates the following code:

add_filter( ‘xmlrpc_methods’, function( $methods ) {
unset( $methods['pingback.ping'] );
return $methods;
} );

If you run a WordPress site I would highly recommend disabling this function so as not to cause your fellow website administrators angst.

Awful "Cyber" Images

"Cyber" images are some of the funniest images around. Take for example this tweet:

I really don't know where to start with this. There's just all sorts of wrong here. Take the ski mask for instance.

Who wears a ski mask when they're at a computer?

Unless you're using a laptop while you're flying down the slopes of some mountain, I imagine it's quite uncomfortable to wear while using a computer.

Then there's the extremely pixelated (Minecraft?) laser blowing up the hackers computer screen into green pixelated pieces.

Oh and the money. Hackers always have a pile of cash sitting right next to their computers.