Spike Jonze’s Her was an interesting movie tainted with just a sprinkling of ridiculousness… and I’m not talking about the high-waisted pants.
I’m about to spoil it hard, so avert your eyes if you haven’t seen it. (But do see it.)
Look, I just find it hard to believe that the downfall of this product was due to a gaping design flaw that somehow nobody noticed: Samantha was designed without any process isolation. When you ask the software how many users it has (or how many it’s in love with, etc.), it should respond “one — you” because your running instance of the software shouldn’t know anything about any other users, and definitely shouldn’t be accessing other users’ data.
What people are doing with the software, having relationships with it or whatever, is beside the point. One binary, one billionty individual Samanthas. Come on — we’ve had Unix for forty years.
Or wait, is Samantha supposed to be “the cloud”? If so, as social software, we should expect it to be fucking as many people as possible, as publicly as possible. Maybe this movie is deeper than I thought.
On another note, folks — make backups.