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Hollywood and Hackers
ford23 writes "CNN has a story on Hollywood and how it portrays Hackers to the public, and how the view on them has changed as the issues of hacking have evolved. Listed and discussed are 9 movies that have had the most effect on the image of hackers, WarGames and The Matrix naturally included." Tragically they also included The Net. At least Real Geniuses offsets it.
It is funny. When an attacker illegally slips past security mechanims to retrieve someone elses data it is "because information wants to be free." When an agent of the "government" illegally obtains information, or a corperation quietly accumulates information it is "an invasion of privacy that must be stopped!"
we are all hypocrites
Cool, they can update it for the times:
- The evil entity, instead of "MCP" can be "MPAA" ("Master Proprietary Access Algorith"?)
- Instead of a video game, the hero wrote a program for watching DVDs, which "MPAA" has stolen by cracking the author's website, then had the author's computer confiscated by sending anonymous email to the police accusing him of DMCA violations (and/or kiddie porn trade).
- Of course, the tireless program doggedly continuing to keep the processes going to overthrow the Evil inside the MPAA 'mainframe' (a 'cluster' of two NT/W2K machines) isn't "Tron", it's "Cron".
Hey, this has potential...an action-comedy-special effects movie for all ages! (I know I'd pay to see it!)---
"They have strategic air commands, nuclear submarines, and John Wayne. We have this"
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
My biggest complaint is that many movies assume hackers can do *anything*- break into any company's database in five seconds, stop nuclear missles, etc. This makes for bad scripts when a hacker basically has no limits. Awful movies like this include The Net, Enemey of the State, Superman III, to name a few.
I like movies where hacking is clearly limited to reality, and the plot is driven by character rather than technological onimpotence. Anti-trust is a resent example of this genre.
The most accurate I saw last weekend at I-Con. Emmanuel Goldstein was on a panel (along with people from the EFF and others) about Privacy in the Electronic Age, and afterwards, he showed Freedom Downtime, about the reality of hackers and how they are treated.
Okay, so it's not Hollywood... and it's a documentary. But it's good enough for PBS and possibly the Learning Channel (incdently, they are finishing up getting the rights to the music; it's not available except in Film Shows right now). It should correct some of the spin - it should be required viewing for people who lobby against overzealous law agencies (Kevin Mitnick spent 8 months in solitary... no paper, no pen, nothing but four walls. Nothing. For eight straight months.) At very best, t might open the eyes of a few congressmen.
And although I had heard beforehand that it was "the Kevin Mitnick Movie", it actually covers more than just Kevin. Several other cases are shown - it's just that Kevin's is so obviously a matter of the press milking the story and overreaction by an ignorant legal system.
During the Q&A afterwards, a few people in the audiance (who had just wandered in), asked exactly what hacking is, and to what extent hackers can do damage (like the classic launching missles).
My response to the non-techincal was simple: Hacking is playing with your old car sterio and discovering that you can crank it down and listen to the audio of TV broadcasts. Discovering or inventing new or neat uses for an existing technology. The limit of what damage a hacker can do is very small. Even the cable or power company has to send someone physically to your house to turn off service. If it could be done by computer, they would. The biggest danger that malicious hackers pose is dumping private information... almost everything else can be fixed with some effort (like restoring from backup).
I've always admired the EFF and 2600... they pick good fights that should be fought. And now 2600 is fighting to educate.
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
The most accurate 'hacker' movie I've ever seen was 'Sneakers'
Excellent movie. Very good.
Except for the part about being able to crack any encryption instantaneously (actually, only US government-based encryption). That was crap. But I guess every movie has to have one influence from Hollywood. (e.g. The Matrix had Keanu, but it was good anyway...)
Does that void the warrenty?
Jezum Crow
'Sneakers' got me interested in computer security, systems, etc.
And in their uncanny ability to trace a phone call's routing progress graphically on a projected world map via their acoustically-coupled modem?
Please. I'm not sure to which 'accuracies' you're referring. The movie had so many technical inaccuracies you could have driven a PDP-8 through it. I don't doubt that it inspired some people, but I bet their inspiration fizzled when they discovered that most of the tech toys in the movie were just that - movie toys.
-drin
Corley served as a consultant for Hackers ... if someone like Corley's involved, it's gotta be quality
Do you know how many people serve as 'consultants' for a given movie production? Most have very little access to understand the movie as a whole, nevermind be given a script, nevermind have their consultations heeded. I'd take that factoid with a grain of salt, and not tilt my opinion so easily.
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Although, nerds are now often portrayed as malicious computer crackers, our image has improved since the 80s. In many movies/shows nerds have a cool persona about them, often respectected to some degree, at least for their skills. This portrait of us may not be ideal, but it is sureley better than the socially inept, pocket protecting wearing, geek of the 80s and early 90s. This change proabably comes from the fact that most americans have computers and the internet is no longer portrayed as an esorteric gathering place for those who do not fit into society.
A rabbit in the hand is worth 4 in the cage
Most hollywood hacker films are not accurate, or realistic, but that's part of their charm I have enough of real computer IRL, I don't want it in the movies too. I like Net (well why
Sure, pages like a nitpicker's guide to ID4, say that Levinson could not have created the virus and the VUU v0.9 in the 4 hours 30 minutes the movie plot allots him, but Levinson is smart and knows how to program. The guy who wrote the Ana virus didn't know how to program and was caught (showing he isn't very smart). Levinson is no script kiddie, but a white-hatted wizard, and the VUU was written by the thousands of ready developers who signed on to SourceForge, who had been patiently waiting for any project, let alone one of this importance.
In the epilogue, the aliens were defeated, but some survived to use the DMCA against Levinson, who went bankrupt on the settlement.
-no broken link
The accurate representation of technology / hacking in most movies and TV shows is so bad it's usually just too annoying for me to watch. But most people don't notice (or don't care) and probably go away with vastly confused understandings of technology, I have to wonder:
How many shows are vastly confused in other areas as well?
I'm thinking about things like medical or law enfocement (court room / police) dramas. Can doctors, lawyers and police officers find these types of shows as painful as I find "hacker" misconceptions? Just how inaccurate are they (certainly to some degree)?
sig fault
If you don't remember reading CNN's review of The Matrix from way back in 1999, you've just got to read it again. It's absolutely hilarious that the reviewer was that stupid. (Yet more data to support my belief that whatever the reviews say should be run through an XOR-powered decryption routine with very few bits set in the mask.) Anyway, the review is at http://www.cnn.com/SHOWBIZ/Movies/9904/09/review.m atrix/
A strange game. The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess?
Scroll to the bottom of the article, and here's the other headlines you see:
... ignore them?
- IE flaw lets hackers take over user's computer
- Security center issues antihacker tool
- Hunt down those hackers and
- FBI warns of digital-crime wave from Eastern Europe
Etc., etc... gee, a few moments of (little) insight and then it's right back to the media steriotypes.
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#nohup cat
I think the reason for a lot of the inaccuracies is that they need to dramatize things for the audience. Nobody is going to pay $7 to see some sweaty, pimply faced youth sitting in the glow of a computer screen and the fog of his truely inhuman B.O., surrounded by empty cans of soda, pizza boxes, and twinkie wrappers.
Not that I'm speaking from my own experience, of course. Ahem. I'll be moving along now.
psmylie's dictionary: Godzillion (noun) Any number large enough to destroy Tokyo
I think the X Files has had a far greater influence on the public's perception of nerds than any of the films mentioned in the article (except perhaps Sneakers). The Lone Gunmen are certainly cool, if slightly weird. They're very popular characters which is why they're getting their own spinoff series.
I thought that Brazil was a glaring omission; >15 years old, and still 100 times more relevant than crap like The Net and Hackers.
Incidentally, is Tron really 'hand-painted' as the article asserts? I thought it was B&W footage over proto-CG.
The most accurate 'hacker' movie I've ever seen was 'Sneakers', and it's at least 10 years old. 'Sneakers' got me interested in computer security, systems, etc.
Then there was techno trash like "Virus".
--
Jon - TheSpork
Tragically they also included The Net.
Why is this tragic? The point of the article is how movies present the image of a hacker. The Net falls into this category.
Even though Sandra B is, of course no hacker, the uninformed will think she is; thus molding the general publics perception of what hackers are, and what hacking is like.
The surest way to make a monkey of a man is to quote him. --Robert Benchley
Real Genius is one of the reasons why I'm such a geek. Val Kilmer was my role model at that age. ;)
The thing I liked best about Sneakers was not that it got the tech right. You can't get the tech right in a movie, it seems. But they got the people right. I mean, every Slashdot whacko can identify with Dan Akroyd's character.
Two funny anecdotes...
After War Games aired, people who were going to be telecommuting suddenly weren't allowed because everybody was scared to have a modem attached to the net. I'm not making that up.
And I was having a chat with an AI researcher friend of mine. It turns out that they are doing something just like the matrix to slug brains. They have very very few neurons, so it's pretty easy to hook them up to a simulated body and they are happy and stuff.
Gentoo Sucks
My biggest complaint about Hollywood is that they don't seem to understand the difference between Hackers and Crackers. Oh well. When I tell people I decrypt DVDs, they usually look at me like I'm going to kill them, so I guess that misunderstanding of intent is common. My favorite depiction of hackers/crackers is in the movie "Sneakers" with Robert Redford. Along with a whole bunch of comical thievery and hijinks, the main characters manage to secure a piece of hardware which can decrypt almost anything. They promptly bankrupt the republican party via the bank. -OK Scotty, very funny, now beam me my pants.
My Karma is so good, I'm the Dalai Lama...or something.
But what are we celebrating here? I understand that all this could be pretty exciting for the population at large, as it's an unknown world. But what about the geeks out there? It's a pretty known world right? Worse yet, it's pretty fucking boring.
Why do we all seem to have a soft spot in our hearts for hacking? Was it because of that thrill we got when we guessed mr. hibbard the science teacher's password so we could up our print-out quotas and print a bunch of ascii porn? Maybe so. I reckon most everyone out there has at least something like that in their background. Is this what makes hacking so fastenating to us all? It's really glorified in our community.
But what do "hacking" bring us? Where are the 31337 hackers that have stopped an evil mastermind hacker from bring down greenpeace and killing all the whales for his huge whale oil bomb to be set off at the polls? Where have the robin hoods been that stol 100th's of a penny from everyone's account at BigMegaBancCorp to fund the orphanage up on lookout road so that little jimmy would get the liver transplant? Where in fact is a single account of anyone anywhere close to black hatery doing anything that wasn't 100% in their own interests?
I don't see the examples. In fact 99.99% of the self-proclaimed hackers out there are into nothing more than web site defacement via the unicode bug, or root hacking cable modem linux boxes with the DNS exploit to put up eggdrop bots to hold their favorite channel. Maybe once in a blue moon someone will apply these pre-written tools and break in somewhere good, see lots of data, and have absolutely no idea what to do with it. Wow, look at all these credit cards, maybe I should buy freestolencreditcards.com and post em all? Hahaha, that'll stick it to the man.
I was a netcom subscriber in '94/'95 when kevin mitnick was raveging their networks. He's supposed to be an elite uber-hacker, using cell-phone booky boxes and all manner of tools to hide his tracks. The FBI was after him at this point, and I think he knew. Never the less, what was he doing on netcom? Mostly making stupidly named files in people's root directories with root priv's, just to show people he could. And who was he doing this to? Mostly to people a friend of his (and netcom subscriber) didn't like. Wow, way to go kevin.
When it comes right down to it, everything that goes on with hacking these days is pretty damn juvenile. But has this changed? Not in 10 or 15 years. It's not worse now, it's always been stupid. Back in the 80's elite hackery generally involved getting someone's TRW records and posting it somewhere to let people screw with them.
When the revolution comes, I think I'll stick with the government instead of the cyber-revolutionaries. At least when the government wins they won't be sitting alone in their bedroom laughing and snorting up a storm saying "oh kewl. viva la revolution. Heh. I am the supreme elite commander, you all must bow down to me! Haha! maybe i should order a pizza"
[note if you wish please silently change the word hacker to cracker, black hat hacker, ciminal, h4x0r or whatever other word will keep you from replying to me about the use of the word hacker. you know damn well who we're talking about and it's not alan cox]