Earlier today I went to see Avatar 3D over at the Vue Cinema in Eastleigh. James Cameron has a pretty good track record, but I won’t deny being a little worried that the film might concentrate too much on special effects at the expense of the story, but I was very pleasantly surprised.

It would be very easy for the 3-D effect to become the centrepiece of a 3-D movie, but it seemed as if it was carefully thought out. Nice touches included the fact that some of the humans' display devices were themselves displaying images with depth and the various things floating in the atmosphere (including the Atokirina’ and the dust after the destruction of the Na’vi Hometree).

The only thing really wrong with this type of 3-D right now is that you can’t focus anywhere other than where the camera is focused. Of course, fixing that is incredibly difficult, since you’d need to be able to adjust the focal length for specific areas of the image in the projector, not to mention adding the requirement of being able to film everything in every shot in perfect sharp focus in the first place.

Pandora itself is amazingly beautiful, particularly at night with all of the bioluminescence, and it really is difficult not to marvel at the amount of work that went into designing the lush and importantly believable landscape of the Pandoran forest and its native wildlife.

Anyway, it’s a wonderful film; let’s hope James Cameron gets to make a sequel. Let’s also hope that unlike the Alien series (which has been fatally marred by the awful Alien Resurrection, not to mention a certain amount of stupidity in the AvP films), the studio knows when to call it quits.

Posted by alastair at 6:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So far over the past week, we've had two people tell us that they think some sort of scam is going on via our website after their bank decided to ask them for something stupid as part of its 3-D Secure (Verified by Visa/MasterCard SecureCode) implementation.

The first one was a U.S. bank that decided it'd be a great idea to ask its customers to enter their Social Security Number into a web form on the Internet. U.S. citizens are understandably very wary about giving out their Social Security Numbers on-line, particularly on websites they don't recognise, and it also seems that the bank in question apparently hadn't mentioned to the cardholder that it might go and ask them for this information during a card payment transaction, resulting in a worried e-mail to us asking if it was some sort of scam.

The second incident involved a credit union that had told its members that it would never ask them to enter their credit union member number online. And then it did, in its 3-D Secure authentication form. Again, we get an e-mail asking us if it's some sort of scam.

Most of these problems seem to be due to inept security policies at U.S.-based card issuers. At the very least if you are going to enroll your customers' cards for 3-D Secure, you need to make sure they know what to expect when they see the Verified by Visa or MasterCard SecureCode boxes appear. Otherwise it's actually a major security risk, because someone could set-up a site that pretends to use VbyV or MCSC and asks for information like Social Security Numbers that can then be used for credit fraud.

Posted by alastair at 11:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

OK, so this will probably go wrong (usually does, thanks to the amount of customisation of the templates and the fact that my site is based on rather old template files now).

Posted by alastair at 1:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)