Skip to main content

How It Works: The Emoji Movie


The posters were just too obnoxious, I couldn't subject you good people and myself to that. This is nice though. From IMDB.

I am going to refrain from pointing out things like “Why are some emojis available immediately but others aren’t? Do emoji die?” where I can.

That’s not tech, that’s “Who did this, and why aren’t they in jail?”

(And that’s sarcasm).

In case you were wondering, yes, it does have the same issue of characters from one app going into others without any ill effects that Ralph Breaks the Internet had, but it’s a movie. You do what you have to.





“I am the system supervisor here, because I was the original emoji!”
*cuts to a shot of :) on the ground*

Was the Smiley Face the Original Emoji?
Seems plausible. An interview with Shigetaka Kurita, the inventor of the emoji, suggests that the : ) was one of, if not the first emoji made, created based upon expressions he saw people use in everyday life.

Considering most of these are based pretty strongly after iOS emoji…how did they get away with that?

According to this site, and yes it depends on what OS your Sony Xperia is running, chances are your emoji are Android’s little bright golden gumdrops, not the round, pale yellow of iOS faces.

Bonus reading;
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/78kzn9/what-the-emoji-youre-sending-actually-look-like-to-your-friends


There’s talk of wiping the phone entirely because Gene (The main character) can’t properly convey the ‘meh’ emoji.

When I search ‘meh’ emoji, you do not get one truly called ‘meh’
but neutral, confused, expressionless, and my personal favorite, unamused.

Instead of restoring the phone to factory settings, a scan could be run, or Alex (The human kid who owns the phone) can go up to that XperiaBlog link and download the keyboard again.

Though I don’t think it’s expressly said what kind of Sony phone he has.

Which makes the impending doom plot pretty dumb; Erase the phone and the entire concept of emojis are still there. They’re in the keyboard. It may be a stock keyboard but they still exist upon it.

Emojis can be used in (most) of the apps that they’re visiting (Facebook, I guess WeChat) because they all have text input, so being concerned that your keyboard isn’t working makes more sense.

Alex has a ‘piracy’ app, but it looks like a dictionary icon. That’s pretty smart, until they go inside and somehow find internet trolls within an app that really should just be illegal file sharing.  I don’t know if these applications have chat interfaces, but it doesn’t sound right to me.

There are ‘bots’ that are hunting Gene, and they go into the piracy app and completely ignore the little characters indicated as Viruses, so they’re clearly not Anti-Virus.

“Women are always coming up with stuff that men are taking credit for” is the only smart thing this movie has said.

“The firewall uses face recognition”…the faces. Of emoji.

What does a firewall do? It monitors in/outcoming network traffic based upon rules. I suppose “Do not let emoji pass” are a rule, right at this point they open up an email from the trash with an emoji inside of it.

So:

- This is POP3, if it was downloaded and saved to local storage before being deleted.
- Or they could simply be using the internet connection to connect to a mail server and their trash container.

How the face recognition of emoji factor into that, I have no idea.

The trash bin of a phone isn’t easily accessible. You may have to connect it to a PC and use developer software to truly empty it.

But since we visit it, let’s see who’s here;
- Spam. Fair enough.
- An emoji. I suppose you could…after jailbreaking your phone and trimming down your keyboard to pick the emoji you use most of all.
- An internet troll. Stop, do not pass GO, do not collect 500$.

The rest builds upon the (lack of) fleshed out ideas from mthe rest of the movie.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Connecting IoT Devices to a Registration Server (Packet Tracer, Cisco)

 If you're seeing this post, I'm helping you, and you probably have LI presence: React and share this post to help me in return.   In Packet Tracer, a demo software made by Cisco Systems. It certainly has changed a lot since 2016. It's almost an Olympic feat to even get started with it now, but it does look snazzy. This is for the new CCNA, that integrates, among other things, IoT and Automation, which I've worked on here before. Instructions here . I don't know if this is an aspect of "Let's make sure people are paying attention and not simply following blindly", or an oversight - The instructions indicate a Meraki Server, when a regular one is the working option here. I have to enable the IoT service on this server. Also, we assign the server an IPv4 address from a DHCP pool instead of giving it a static one. For something that handles our IoT business, perhaps that's safer; Getting a new IPv4 address every week or so is a minimal step against an...

Create a Simple Network (Packet Tracer) + A Walkthrough

Again; I've done this, but now there's so many new things, I'm doing it again. The truly new portions were...everything on the right side of this diagram; The cloud needed a coax connector and a copper Ethernet connector. It's all easy to install, turn off the cloud (Weird), install the modules. Getting the Cable section of Connections was an unusual struggle - The other drop down menu had nothing within. It required going into the Ethernet options and setting the Provider Network to 'cable', which is the next step AFTER the drop-downs. The rest was typical DHCP and DNS setups, mainly on the Cisco server down there. The post is rather short - How about adding a video to it? Find out what A Record means - This site says 'Maps a name to an IP address', which is DNS. So it's another name for DNS? You can change them (presumably in a local context) to associate an IP address to another name.

Securing Terraform and You Part 1 -- rego, Tfsec, and Terrascan

9/20: The open source version of Terraform is now  OpenTofu     Sometimes, I write articles even when things don't work. It's about showing a learning process.  Using IaC means consistency, and one thing you don't want to do is have 5 open S3 buckets on AWS that anyone on the internet can reach.  That's where tools such as Terrascan and Tfsec come in, where we can make our own policies and rules to be checked against our code before we init.  As this was contract work, I can't show you the exact code used, but I can tell you that this blog post by Cesar Rodriguez of Cloud Security Musings was quite helpful, as well as this one by Chris Ayers . The issue is using Rego; I found a cool VS Code Extension; Terrascan Rego Editor , as well as several courses on Styra Academy; Policy Authoring and Policy Essentials . The big issue was figuring out how to tell Terrascan to follow a certain policy; I made it, put it in a directory, and ran the program while in that ...