obl, borat, riaa hacked & hollywood's war profits

osama film super sized at sundance
from canoe: As it turns out, finding Osama bin Laden is harder than getting fat eating Big Macs. Who knew? Not Super Size Me director Morgan Spurlock apparently, whose highly anticipated documentary Where in the World is Osama bin Laden? bowed Monday in front of a sell-out crowd. The project, in which the 37-year-old filmmaker treks across the Middle East in search of the 9/11 mastermind, has set the Internet abuzz with speculation he had succeeded at what the U.S. government has so miserably failed at - namely, hunting down the world's most wanted fugitive.

court sides with 'borat' over etiquette teacher's humiliation
from click2houston: Alabama's Supreme Court has sided with British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen in a lawsuit filed by an etiquette teacher who unknowingly appeared in his hit movie "Borat." The justices overruled a lower court, saying Kathie Martin signed an agreement stating that only courts in New York could hear disputes that arose from her appearance. That means she can't sue Cohen and the companies that produced the movie in Alabama.

riaa website wiped clean by 'hackers'
from torrentfreak: It started out on the social news website Reddit, where a link to a really slow SQL query was posted. While the Reddit users were trying to kill the RIAA server, someone allegedly decided to up the ante and wipe the site’s entire database. The comments on Reddit are only speculation so far. Based on the username, which was apparently “webReadOnly”, it might not have been setup correctly, or someone could have found another way to delete the content form the site.

hollywood cashes in & makes wars easier to support
from david swanson: Hollywood may oppose war but it has cashed in handsomely from the 3,000 war-related films it has churned out since 1939, 21 of them Oscar winners for "best picture," a noted economist says. Where "bomb and bullet makers must seize their profits while the fighting is hot," writes David Whitten of Auburn University, Alabama, "movie makers can cash in on a war forever after, and they do. Hollywood, for all its outspokenness against war, created war's popular image."