Eagle Eye is a 2008 action thriller film starring Shia LaBeouf, Michelle Monaghan, Rosario Dawson, Michael Chiklis, Anthony Mackie, and Billy Bob Thornton. Two strangers who are forced to go on the run together after receiving a mysterious phone call from an unknown woman who uses information and communications technology to track their every move. Later in the film it’s revealed that the hero’s brother, Ethan, monitored the Department of Defense's top-secret intelligence-gathering supercomputer, the Autonomous Reconnaissance Intelligence Integration Analyst (ARIIA). Here’s a link to the movie trailer.
Mission Impossible Final Reckoning 2025 film is the eighth installment in the MI series.
“Two months after retrieving the key to the source code for the malevolent artificial intelligence known as the Entity, rogue IMF agent Ethan Hunt receives a message from U.S. President Erika Sloane. She informs Ethan that the Entity continues to seize control of global nuclear systems, aided by undercover doomsday cultists. Ethan is ordered to surrender the key, but he refuses and continues pursuing Gabriel, the Entity's former proxy, who was forsaken after failing to steal the key himself.”
Here’s a link to the movie trailer.
Below is an excerpt from this New York Times article dated July 21, 2025.
“Artificial intelligence isn’t just for drafting essays and searching the web. It’s also a weapon. And on the internet, both the good guys and the bad guys are already using it.
Offense: Bots and algorithms perpetrate much of the world’s cybercrime. Con artists use them to generate deepfakes and phishing scams. Want malware to steal someone’s data? A chatbot can write the code. Bots also cook up disinformation. As Israel and Iran fired missiles at each other last month, they also flooded the internet with A.I.-powered propaganda.
Defense: Cybersecurity companies use A.I. to intercept malicious traffic and patch software vulnerabilities. Last week, Google announced that one of its bots had found a flaw in code used by billions of computers that cybercriminals wanted to exploit — likely the first time A.I. has managed such a feat.”
Below is an excerpt from this New York Times article dated April 7, 2026.
“Anthropic, the artificial intelligence company that recently fought the Pentagon over the use of its technology, has built a new A.I. model that it claims is too powerful to be released to the public.
Instead, Anthropic said on Tuesday, it will make the new model — known as Claude Mythos Preview — available to a consortium of more than 40 technology companies, including Apple, Amazon and Microsoft, which will use the model to find and patch security vulnerabilities in critical software programs.
Anthropic said it had no plans to release its new technology more widely, but was announcing the new model’s capabilities in one area in particular — identifying security vulnerabilities in software — in an effort to sound the alarm over what the company believes will be a new, scarier era of A.I. threats.”
I grew up during the Cold War between the US and the Soviet Union. In so many ways it was a much simpler time, especially figuring out who were the good guys and who were the bad guys. It’s a lot harder to know these days.
Mad Magazine was a staple for kids and teenagers in the 1960s and 1970s.
“Mad publishes satire on all aspects of life and popular culture, politics, entertainment, and public figures. Its format includes TV and movie parodies, and satire articles about everyday occurrences that are changed to seem humorous. Mad's mascot, Alfred E. Neuman, is usually on the cover, with his face replacing that of a celebrity or character who is being lampooned.”
One standard feature of Mad Magazine was a Spy vs Spy cartoon. Always white against black though both were essentially the same. Both engaged in nefarious spy activities targeting the other.
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