Does art imitate life, or life imitate art? I don't know, and really, it has nothing to do the fun we at NetQoS are having with the new movie Untraceable and it's uncanny resemblance to our Network Performance Daily post on Wafaa Bilal. Here's a little slice of life into our day:

Pam: Hey, Brian, have you heard about this new movie, "Untraceable?"

Brian: No, Pam, I haven't, actually. What's it about?

Pam: It's about a serial killer who kidnaps this guy, ties him up and puts a webcam on him, and then hooks him up to poison, and the more people who view the site, the more poison he gets. Or that's the impression I got from the trailer.

Brian: Uh…

Pam: I think you should write about this in the blog.

Brian: Uh… Pam, I'm not sure that's a good idea. I mean, I'm working on this post about Time Warner, and…

Pam: Well, what's the problem? Can you imagine the spike in network traffic something like that would generate? It would be amazing.

Brian: Well, it's just that the entire premise is a little shaky. First, even if you can't trace him, I mean, everyone who visits the site is an accessory to murder. Unlike the eponymous serial killer, the site visitors aren't untraceable. So why not charge them with accessory to murder?

Pam: Yeah, but it's a movie, Brian. This isn't supposed to be something that could really happen. It's funny!

Brian: And I mean, the guy has to register a domain name, there's live traffic going through, he's got to have an IP address somewhere, and that's probably enough to narrow it down to get the cops to find him. I mean, the entire thing's really implausible from a technical standpoint.

Pam: Yeah, but it's a movie, Brian. I think you actually inspired them with your Wafaa Bilal post.

Brian: Then there's the whole fact that if this guy is expecting a lot of incoming hits, even through a proxy he's going to have to lease at least a OC3 line to handle simultaneous streaming video to that many people, and it's not exactly hard to cross reference who bought or leased OC3 lines in the past whatever months…

Pam: Brian. You're overthinking this...

Brian: Of course, if he does get a lot of hits, he's going to want to have a whole bunch of load balancing servers and you'd probably be able to pick him out if nothing else by being the only creepy cabin out in the woods that draws - oh, I don't know, three gigawatt-hours more every month more power than the other creepy cabins - with a constant load of 5kWh constantly, even during off-peak hours.…

Pam: Brian, it's a movie!

Brian: Okay, yeah, but there's also the idea that - well, I'm uncomfortable with it. I mean, it looks like it's just one of those stupid serial killer movies, probably based off of that episode of Millennium. I mean, it seems like it's going to be something like "Saw" or "Hostel," something like that where people get killed without any real plot - torture porn, really.

Pam: Anyway, you could tie in this "Untraceable" movie in with your Wafaa Bilal coverage on virtual dehumanization and take an angle about recreational network traffic.

Brian: Pam, unless you're Matthew Broderick playing Global Thermonuclear War with Joshua, no one out there is worried that their recreational network traffic will kill a guy. And despite my most cynical judgments, I think that even people who would shoot a non-lethal paintball at a guy over the Web wouldn't participate in actual murder.

Pam: You really think that you can't get a good blog post out of this?

Can't blog. Sumo will eat me.

Brian: The truth is that I'd really not like to talk about the movie. I mean, I've seen the trailer, and the idea is that the more the cops talk about it, the more visits the guy has. Me, I think it's a stupid movie, and I really don't want to give it more publicity. I think I'm more likely to get a good blog post out of "Teeth."

Pam: Uh…. I don't think so.

Brian: … Give me a couple of hours to think of something. "Teeth: Why you should always test before deployment" maybe?

Pam gave me a little sumo wrestler toy if I promised not to mention "Teeth" again. Would you like to name him? If you would, feel free to post in our comments section.