Slashdot Mirror
More Than 20 Years of the Web on the Big Screen
Carl Bialik from WSJ writes "WSJ.com has compiled clips from a dozen movies over the past 23 years that depict the internet, with varying degrees of accuracy. Among the selections: WarGames, Sneakers, .com for Murder, and Mr. & Mrs. Smith. The Matrix Reloaded used real Linux code, while Mission: Impossible had the improbable email addresses Job@Book of Job and Max@Job 3:14. In a related article, WSJ.com reviews some of the more-absurd Hollywood conventions when it comes to the web. Harry Knowles, of Ain't It Cool News, says, 'The thing that always gets me is watching people send emails. You click "send" and the entire document begins to fold into an envelope and disappear into the screen. I tend to send around 300 to 400 emails a day, and that would drive me insane.'"
And with that goes more than 20 years of kids at school saying things like "I just hacked into the school's mainframe last night, with the password pencilsharpener, and changed your grades to all Fs".
Besides, its more like 24 years. They forgot Tron, in which the MCP uses the net or a direct connection to break into those other computers.
Regardless of how probable or improbable Wargames may have been, it was and will likely remain one of my favorite "nerd" movies. I don't think I could ever get tired of it. The chick's hot too. Jason had some of the best lines, even if they did sound like they were delivered by a Speak N Say. Perhaps because of it. Wouldn't you rather play a nice game of chess?
Never give in--never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to conviction
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Subject says it all.
Trolling is a art,
Come on, this isn't the BBC's Technology section or PeeCee Shopper magazine.
Stick Men
The internet is >20 years old oh yeah. But the web as we know it means web page's/websites as I know it and 20 years is a tadge of a pinocio situation there.
Coz it is hollywood/movie land and they do like re-writting history some.
The Web != The Internet
Also, just to further nitpick, I don't think Wargames even had the internet in it -- he found WOPR by dialing it up directly.
Not my kind of movie, seeing that the hapless heroine spent the whole bloody thing running away, without any kind of respite or comic relief or joy.
That being said, I seem to remember it used a perfectly authentic looking traceroute, even if they had to give each row different colours to make it more visually appealing.
Maybe my memory is failing, but the chat program used there didn't seem any more hokey than AOL chat or the average myspace profile. My theory is that most people quite like hokey.
D
I can't believe that list of inaccurate depictions left off Independence Day. No, you can't write a computer virus on your Mac and upload it to alien ships on the fly. And even if you could, it probably wouldn't show a pretty blue progress bar that said "uploading virus" while you did it.
Honestly, that's the worst depiction of computers in film that I've ever seen
Le français vous intéresse?
My favorite: the odometer/slot machine password cracking software, whirring the last few places as you hear the Bad Guy® coming down the hall...
"Provided by the management for your protection."
And don't forget the clicking keyboards... Talk about driving you insane... On a similar subject, don't you want to take the people behind CSI and just hang them by their thumbnails?
There's a company in the SF Bay Area which advertises on KCBS AM 740 traffic radio, bragging about more than two decades of writing web pages. Yeah right. I keep on thinking I ought to call them up and laugh, but anyone who believes them deserves whatever they get.
Infuriate left and right
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Densha_otoko
Not really web- or internet-specific, but regarding general computer usage: The thing that bothers me most about computer use on movies is how movies' computers generally make a noise for every character displayed on a screen. A close second is how they display the characters slowly enough that you can actually watch them appear serially on the screen. I guess even modern, high-tech computer systems still use 300 bps modems after all.
Now don't get me wrong, I loved Independence Day, for the premise, the special effects, and a pretty damned good cast. But was any idea more absurd than Jeff Goldblum hacking into an alien computer system and planting a virus in it to destroy it. Did I miss the part where a crack team of hackers cracked their system and reverse engineered root access and the aliens' virus detection software? Is it possible a race with such militaristic intentions would miss the idea of trying to infect a computer system? It was great product placement for Apple at the time, but please! I find it more plausible to think a guy dresses up like a bat and fights crime.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
As a narrative device it's lame, okay, but frankly I'll take that over the postmodern delayed deus ex machine of the geek's solution to a technical problem: Oooh, our brainwizard has been working away steadily at a problem all plot long, and now that we're ten minutes shy of the ending, she's finally broken through the security system/discovered the answer to the riddle/broken the code. The writers may as well have Geordi adjust the trust old modulation on the phase transponder, it's the same plot device.
Lately we're up to the level found in the funnies (other than FoxTrot): names get dropped. Ooh, she "googled" that term! That's about how far we've gotten with the Web in movies and TV... and the brain dead comic strip "B.C." for that matter.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
correct me if I am wrong, but I don't believe the internet was being used in wargames. I believe they were dedicated systems that could bedialed into, like BBSs.
six out of ten in my collection...
I know on TV, that the framerate of the film & the monitor usually don't match up.
Wouldn't you get the same flicker on Movie film? Or is there some trick that TV/Film people use to get around that?
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
A scene of blood transfusion is going on. Mother needs blood. The blood from her 3 sons is getting in a bottle 6 feet above ground defying all rules of gravity. The blood is mixed online and then comes down through 4th tube for their mother.
There are many, but this one was classic.
hilarious
Willow: "Have you tried Googling her?"
Xander: "Willow, she's only 17!"
How do you have time to post on Slashdot???
Just the thought of sending out 2,000 e-mails per workweek would drive me a bit apeshit as well. Is he the new distributor for Matthew Lesko's wares?
First off, I love the show 24, but when I watch it, I have to shut my computer nerd brain off.
CHLOE: Jack, I'm going to open a socket to CTU so you can use your phone to upload the data from the thumb drive.
JACK: I can't upload it. Something's wrong!
CHLOE: It looks like the terrorists are trying to overload the router with IP addresses.
JACK: Can you find out where it's coming from?
CHLOE: I can't Jack, they're using a level 4 encryption algorhythm. It'll take me a few hours to decipher it.
JACK: Maybe you can use some of the bandwidth from the FBI servers to help break the encryption!
CHLOE: That might work, but I'll need level 5 network access from the FBI. I'll call you back!
It's a damn good thing that show has other good qualities...
-Arthur
Cave ne ante ullas catapultas ambules
I actually enjoyed that movie alot.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Oh, this is a *Unix* system. I know all about this. --Jurassic Parc
Comic book action stuff aside, one of the things that kicks the belief out, are the frequent computer superheroics. "Oh, I just machine coded up a thing-a-ma-bobbie to frammit the security on that secure line." (Ok, that's not a direct quote from the show - I said I watch it, not that I was an obsessive quote collecting fan.)
I am sure the same thing happens in just about any field that takes any expertise - entertainment media is bound to get things wrong, because their expertise is entertaining, not the subject matter of the plot vehicle. (Often on purpose - I mean who wants to watch a "real-time" show on a long drawn-out legal battle, for instance.)
In the end, the patient needs to be better at the end of the hour, the case solved, and the Internet deliver whatever lines it needed to to finish the story.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
I tend to send around 300 to 400 emails a day, and that would drive me insane.
Man, that's nothing. You should see Jim Carrey sending email in 'Bruce Almighty'
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Every time I hear it, I keep on thinking up excuses like that, but nope, it says something quite clear like "writing web sites for more than two decades". Maybe I will post the exact words and their URL later today if I hear it this morning.
Infuriate left and right
..And looking for backdoors. Pretty accurate for the time, you could get into a lot of telephone switching systems like that back then.
Very few norad supercomputers however....
One thing I always like to do is look at code while it is scrolling across the screen. As the summary mentions, The Matrix used Linux code. In the latest version of The Hulk the code scrolling across the screen was C syntax node defintions (node *head = null; etc.), probably for a linked list. I don't think that's the level a biochemist would be working at. In the newer version of The Italian Job the code looked like 3D coordinates for CAD or Maya, probably the special effects guy just grabbed the nearest thing that looked like "real code."
Long live the Speaker Bracelet
Rolo D. Monkey
What I love in movies is that if we are to believe Hollywood, incredibly high-res webcams are dotted around every location on earth, with which we can zoom in and pan around right onto the faces of our subjects, from anywhere, in crystal-clear hi-res display. You'd think these cameras everywhere would get irritating, but I plain don't notice them.
One thing that's always bothered me about movies is the fact that the visuals are terrible. Like stated in the summary, an e-mail will transform into an envelope, and when someone tries to hack into a system, the "ACCESS GRANTED" text fills up the entire screen.
I also love how, even when the movie is trendy and has its actors use iMacs, people seem to always TYPE everything because a mouse isn't computer-ish enough. Sometimes, the computers are even green text-mode terminals, even in modern TV shows.
anyone remember the bit in jurassic park where the little girl (the self proclaimed hacker) shouts "this is unix, i know this" (or words to that effect), and then hacks the computer by flying through a 3d landscape and clicking on shit. god that was bad. a friend of mine used to try and wind my up by quoting that line whenever he saw me using the command line. bastard.
24 is amusing on this point. They obviously have someone who knows something provide jargon. But then it gets translated into near-gibberish. Nearly every episode has Chloe "opening a web socket", or Tony will ask someone to "send it to my screen". It's nonsense, but you can see where it came from.
Who sends 300-400 emails a day? Really?
Assuming he takes 2 minutes per email and an average of 350 emails, that's like 700 minutes per day sending emails. That's almost 12 hours!!
And you say Hollywood is not realistic.
I didn't RTFA, but what about the obligatory "Hackers" and "Antitrust" and "Operation: Takedown" obligatory references?
One example in which Hollywood is somewhat realistic is in their depiction of progress bars to build suspense. I rather like this device.
In "Under Siege 2", Steven Seagal is desperately trying to send a fax from an Apple Newton (!)... which he has wired into the satellite transmission system on a moving train using, if I recall correctly (not), some nailclippers and his native SEAL instincts to identify the correct wires. The progress bar moves slowly, slowly, slowly as we hear bad guys coming closer, closer, closer to Seagal's hiding place.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Great article! It's not just the web that gets misrepresented in movies, though. Most computers in film are generally similar in that they're always generating some sort of sound. Anything happening on screen, in some cases just scrolling down a window, is accompanied by a click or a beep or some noise, assumedly, to make sure you didn't miss it. Besides being completely unrealistic, the thought of having to actually work at a computer that noisy, or even a room of computers that noise would drive anyone insane.
Hollywood has always played around with "stereotypes" that are totally wrong in real life. For example:
o All the fire sprinklers going off in a building when only one has been activated.
o Car tires that "squeal" on dirt roads.
o Cowboys shooting indians with pistols, from horseback at a gallop (with 100% accuracy)
o (Not 100% sure of this one) The placement of periscopes in the main control rooms of submarines
The list goes on and on. After all it *is* Hollywood.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
My family and I always love it when someone will zoom in ion some distant face in a scratchy webcam sht, get basically a twelve-pixel image, and magically "enhance" it to get a crystal-clear picture of some important bad guy or something, often when he was even facing the wrong way.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
Was that really 10 years ago?
I love the lengths they'll go to in movies to build suspense around computers. Sometimes they succeed, a la Wargames and Sneakers. Most of the time they fail.
What I love is how in these movies, you'll inevitably have one scene where the protagonist is using someone else's computer. They're sneaking around, pulling information off the machine, when all of a sudden, the music begins to change. Then we flash to the computer's rightful owner, who's walking back to their computer from the bathroom or wherever they were at. Then we flash back to the protagonist, who's still trying to pull stuff from the computer. Maybe there's something that holds them up, like an error or something. (ok, that much is realistic) Then we flash back to the computer's owner, who's still on his way. We flash back and forth like this several times, and the question in our mind the whole time is, "Will he get caught?" We think he's going to get caught, we think he's going to get caught, we think he's going to get caught.... but then he doesn't!
The awful movie Antitrust did this, like 6 times. It was their main way of building suspense. It never works.
I suppose I am a retroactive dirty old man, but I thought she was hot back then too...
Computers in Movies
SkyNet a la The Terminator would most definately fit the bill.
If you look closely at the code that scrolls through Ahnold's head you'll see it's Atari 8-bit DOS.
Pretty cool, considering when the movie was released.
They probably all read slashdot now. Hi Guys!
Australian running a company that does C# / C++ / Java / SQL / Python / Mathematica
In addition, the byline reads: ... about a minute to guess it."
"... Good news: the system is password protected. Bad news: it only takes David Lightman
I hope they mean excluding all the -days- he apparently (he was missed from school for days) spent reviewing library material on the author of the system, reviewing videos, etc. etc. He didn't guess it in 1 minute - it came to him in a thought that lasted mere seconds after Jennifer mentioned the designer's son's name, reciting it from an article.
At that point in time it was hard enough to get a printer and a Windows 95 box to work together. Let alone Macs with intergallactic hardware.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
Robocop is a DOS based machine
In Robocop 2, the bad guy made into a robot was a Mac based machine.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
The reason that movie makers do stupid things like show a big envelope flying off into the ether is that your average movie-goer could not recognize email being sent even if the screen read "Your email has been sent". All they would see is someone pecking at a keyboard. Then they would wonder "What just happened?" Without the envelope, you would need the character to turn around and announce, "Okay, the email's been sent!"
Average movie-goers still don't get computers, and probably won't for a while.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
Computers in films are plot devices. Whether their imaginary use is technicaly possible or accurate is totally irrelevent.
You have to communicate to the audience what the computer is doing, and why the character wants the computer to do it.
You have only a few seconds of screen time to do it in.
That's why you have to make it really obvious ("the entire document begins to fold into an envelope and disappear into the screen"), otherwise you will leave the audience wondering what the hell is going on.
I can't believe they forgot this; I've seen it in dozens of movies and TV series, including "realistic" ones like CSI.
Surveilance camera catches a blurred, grainy, black and white image with a 2x2 pixel head on it, software enhances the face into a highly detailed 3D model and even autodetects the name of the person.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
As an office tech, I was once pulled aside to demonstrate screenlocking to a new employee. I told her to put in a password while I wasn't looking, then locked the screen and had her unlock it. Then, to kill five seconds, I said "And now look what happens when I try to guess it," and with half a neuron thinking of "WarGames", quickly typed "Joshua" into the password box and hit Enter.
How was I to know it was also her kid's name?
The show / movie escapes me but I'll remember this pants wetting funny awful sequence to the day I draw my terminal breath:
> DELETE ALL SECRET FILES
SECRET FILES ARE PROTECTED. CANNOT DELETE.
> OVERRIDE
DELETING ALL SECRET FILES...DONE!
naah sig schmig
You could argue that the 'Internet' includes machines connected only by modem as well as those attached to network gateways.
> I tend to send around 300 to 400 emails a day
All related to penis enlargement no doubt
...in fact, he may not be a genius. However, he worked on the tech side of a TV broadcasting station, using the same satellites the aliens were, and recognized that the distortions in TV picture weren't random, but rather repetitive - if decreasing slowly. Most people would probably guess that something's going to happen when it ceased to decrease... after all, "beep ... beep beep beepbeepbeebeebebebebebbbbbbbb" tends to be the forecast for some manner of action hero saying "RUN!" or "DUCK!"
Now as to how he'd make the logic jump from that to the countdown being "destruction of all human life", that's another thing to question - but given that most people who believe in aliens fall into two camps: A. they come in peace and B. they're out to destroy us... *shrug*
It's weird questions, really... it's like that bad science website complaining about shuttles not being able to do this-and-that like they did in Armageddon; completely failing to understand that they weren't ordinary shuttles. Of course they could argue that "but those don't exist!" - well yes, and neither do talking animals.. I guess if they find that reason to dismiss a movie, their kids will have a very peculiar childhood.
In short: it's a movie - who gives a flying f*ck?
If they didn't spice it up with flashy graphics and virtual worlds who the hell would want to see it?
"On the other side of the screen, it all looks so easy. "
"You're everywhere. You're omnivorous."
The Bourne Supremacy - Bourne uses an Internet cafe computer to look up news reports of the Neski killings. Realistic enough.
more recently:
The Sentinel - Michael Douglas's character uses (again) an Internet cafe computer, to print up some bogus mailing labels. He also uses one to log on to a secret service website and look up an address on it. (I sort of doubt they put services like that on the Web, but who knows...)
All fun and joy but have you noticed how many sites are dumping QuickTime/WMP/RealMedia for video and starting to use Flash? Including those clips we see here.
YouTube is exclusively Flash based, so is Google Videos, and the videos on CNET too.
Kinda makes you think Microsoft has a point when claiming Flash is a competitor to WMP, even if the EU refuses that as an argument.
There's other things it really got wrong, really.. the voice synth (see also poster above) could just have been bought by both David /and/ NORAD - that's not entirely infeasible.
However, the codes being projected onto their faces is something that is indeed plain wrong - it's done in many other movies as well.
The 'exploding' consoles are odd as well - if WOPR's drawing power, there wouldn't be a power surge that would blow out components (like they do on Star Trek.. all the time.)
Other than that, the movie's actually fairly nice from a techie viewpoint, and definitely good over all. Who has seen the movie and doesn't remember the chairs being taken out of the missile silo control bunkers? They could have left the seats there, save them a couple bucks for dismounting them and removing them, but it made the image very clear that the 'human being' was being taken out of the loop.
You have to first say "Uh oh, these are encrypted files, guys. This could take a few minutes." Three minutes later, while your buddies are shooting bad guys off your back, you've somehow managed to break the encryption.
mirrorshades radio -- darkwave, industrial, futurepop, ebm.
"absurd Hollywood conventions"\
it's true that hollywood makes a lot of silly depictions, in my opinion. but about "@ job 3:15" and all this, you might actually argue something else: that the text conventions for workable web/email addresses are THEMSELVES absurd.
no spaces? WHERE DO THEY COME UP WITH THIS STUFF? (i'm just making a point with the emphasis)
i'm somebody can point out the current, present mess of dilemma that makes certain formats unusable. cause 'space' isn't encoded as a standard character, or something. and so forth. i don't know.
imagine if we were in a reality where all movie depictions of computers were crappy tube-monitor CLI's? and all computers in real life were actually like that? and then somebody made a movie depicting a cool, intuitive, aesthetically pleasing GU interface (resembling, say, OS X in the present reality), and then there was a slashdot thread talking about how absurd that depiction was?
from a "realistic" standpoint, yes. but you may tend to see things differently, or at least in a slightly more complex way, if you're interested in Human user interface.
(naturally i haven't rtfa, so maybe it actually talks about cases that are much more absurd than the spaces-in-the-email-addy-OH-NOES! example)
2006 - 1991 = 20 ?
Looks like the editors went to public school.
Another example I've seen a couple of times is when someone is attempting to transfer funds (usually under intense time pressure, of course) and the computer screen shows a progress bar moving across the screen with a quickly changing counter showing how many dollars have been transferred! As if an electronic wire transfer sends one dollars at a time and your status could be at $748,282 of $1,000,000. Atomic transactions, anyone?
And you could argue that the Internet includes a piece of paper I have sitting on my desk. You'd be wrong either way.
Don't blame me; I'm never given mod points.
Swordfish!
Hugh Jackman cracks NSA network with a gun to his head and a woman's face in his lap. Then, Wolverine dances in front of computer with nine screens, constructing a "hydra worm" out of pretty cubes...using code stored on an ancient tape drive on a computer in some basement.
Nobody mentioning anti-trust ? One of the best movies where computers look like they are and where a great struggle of today is shown.
Pupeno
Now matter how hard you work to break into a computer, the hacking is not completed until you say the magic words, "We're in!" I challenge you to find a script that does not have that statement, or something like it.
http://www2.english.uiuc.edu/cybercinema/sounds/fo rbin_sounds/coloss04.wav
In GOD we trust, all others we monitor.
That is all.
It's not just computers. There are certain Hollywood conventions that make no sense, yet persist.
One example is binoculars. Whenever a character looks through them, you see two intersecting circles on the screen, like a Venn diagram. Ever looked through a pair of real binoculars?
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
What I really like it most of those movies have sound when text is scrolling in the screen... Even one of the that have no sound have the blind device that make sound!
Please! I know there's something wrong when I start to laugh instead of cringe!!!!
Actually, I was going to mention Blade Runner, the movie, as the exception, where infinite resolution is acceptable. Why? Because it's in the future, of course. And, yes, in the scene where he is examining the photograph, he does somewhat look around an object. Whatever imaging technology that might exist in the future (holographic? spatial? voxels?) could conceivably allow this. I thought the idea was fascinating.
"The files are IN the computer?"
"The stupider people think you are, the more surprised they will be when you kill them..."
No, you wouldn't. If you use a dial up connection to access the Internet, you are indeed on the Internet. Broadband snob.
I may be a broadband snob, but I remember connecting to BBSs with a 300 baud modem, and I can assure you I wasn't on the Internet while doing so.
Don't blame me; I'm never given mod points.
OK, then how is it wrong to say that two machines connected only by a modem are part of the Internet? You could argue that they are not necessarily part of the Internet, but it's hardly wrong to say so.
Have you noticed that WOPR, the computer broken into to play the war games, has a "speaking" part in the latest ATT/SBC commerical?
Not internet - but tech related. Any blurry photograph is amazingly clear with the "Enhance" command - and I thought that the "Smart Unsharp" in CS2 was great.
www.wildpad.com
It featured a geek with a girlfriend.
By the way, I recommend the DVD. It has one of the better commentaries.
For many years, all the phone numbers used in films have been bogus, I.E. 555-123-9876. If a real number is shown, thousands of people would dial it up to see if it was real. Not cool! :\
:)
Same thing seems to be starting for web addresses. If you use something bogus, like , the audience cannot flood some unsuspecting web site with "are you there" messages.
In other words, If you show too much reality on films, you get slashdot effects.
I always thought that 60's SF writers were postulating the future loss of the technology of "the fuse". That's why stuff was always blowing up.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Dammit, man! Apple's going to sue you if you leak details about the next OS X like that!
"Time is an abstract concept devised by carbon-based lifeforms to monitor their ongoing decay." - Thundercleese
"I tend to send around 300 to 400 emails a day, and that would drive me insane."
If you work an 8 hour day and send 320 emails per day, then you are sending one every 90 seconds. Unless he is just forwarnding most if it, he must not do any real work since he spends his entire day composing/replying to email.
Ninjas don't carry tic tacs
You click "send" and the entire document begins to fold into an envelope and disappear into the screen. I tend to send around 300 to 400 emails a day, and that would drive me insane.
The client for insane nuts. A teacher of mine at the university used this one. And yes, he was completely out of his mind.
Here's a direct link to the Wall Street Journal article. It may be fixed now, but when I originally clicked on the link, it just sent me to the WSJ homepage. Come on, guys!
I tend to send around 300 to 400 emails a day.
wow, that's a lot of e-mail. i would go gaga over sending that much. maybe chatting over e-mail? (sorry but i couldn't seem to think living a normal life sending that much e-mail - unless of course your are in the support or something similar that reads feedbacks, etc.)
Live your life each day as if it was your last.
Pretty sure they had a QuickTime player impersonating a video-phone window at one point, complete with progress bar at the bottom as the movie played. Are we thinking of the same scene, with the guy on the phone in the storm? The window widgetry looked very System 7.
Mind the Gap
"This is Unix. I know this!"
On opening night, long haired men in birkenstocks cringed in unison.
From the comments next to the clips, they've tried to make the clips look much more ridiculous than they actually are. They say it took about a minute to break into the WOPR in WarGames. Wrong -- David went to the library and read many books and magazines and watched videos of Professor Falken before he finally figured out that the password was the name of his deceased son. They say that in Sneakers they break into a government site with little more than a soldering iron. Wrong -- it's a probe, and guess what it's connect to? Say, is that the fancy decryption box they stole from the govenment? Guess that might have something to do with breaking the encryption on the site!
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Having worked in a top-secret environment, I'm a little amused at how the people on "24" let uncleared vistors view all the computer screens. Also, when the characters are caught disobeying orders, and using the computers in completely unauthorized way, they seem to just get a verbal admonishment, or - at worst - temporarily "fired."
The security on the "Star Trek" is even sillier. They have no problems with giving anybody complete specifications on the ship, and the complete run of the ship.
I was impressed by Firewall actually (despite being a medicore movie) that it actually used cisco ACLs to add a route for some supposed 'hacker'. Needless to say, that won't stop anyone for long these days, but it's nice to see that they're at least trying to accept that the right tools will be on the front-line.
Contrast that with Swordfish, where he's building some virus by moving blocks around on the screen. It reminded me of flying through the mainframe on hackers in order to pull up the garbage file. Swordfish was just sad technically, as it really made it look like something very strange. Either the blocks fit together or they don't... strange.
-M
when you see the word 'Linux', drink!
from Clear and Present Danger - "We're wayyy beyond birthdays now. I'm gonna have to write... a special program, here."
Downmodding is the refuge of the weak. Don't downmod, make a better argument!
hell, remember the ridiculous grainless blow-uops in the _movie_ blow up?
otoh, i remember seeing microscopic enlargements of kodachrome (II, not 25;-) slides in pop.photog/whatever a looooong time ago...
The thing that always gets me is watching people send emails. You click "send" and the entire document begins to fold into an envelope and disappear into the screen. I tend to send around 300 to 400 emails a day, and that would drive me insane.
I'm not saying the movies are anywhere near accurate, but I do understand why they need to make some actions more clear than they would be on a real computer. When you're not the one 'driving', it's easy to miss the tiny mouse pointer flicking up to the 'send' button. All you see is a window disappearing.
I think you could compare it to watching someone play an FPS. To a player, a game feels responsive when the view twitches at every tiny mouse movement. To a person watching, the constant, jerky movement is hard to follow and looks like very bad camera work.
Also, it's annoying for media to confuse separate networks with the "Internet". BBSes pre-date the Internet and were never part of the Internet until much later, thus the scene in Wargames where he dials into the computer is not an Internet thing. Likewise, AOL is not the Internet. If something happens on AOL's private network, like a pedophile luring some kid from a chat room on AOL, that has absolutely nothing to do with the "Internet" yet the media is fond of making such claims.
For many years, all the phone numbers used in films have been bogus, I.E. 555-123-9876. If a real number is shown, thousands of people would dial it up to see if it was real. Not cool!
Actually, the numbers are real. There's nothing preventing telecoms from assigning "555-xxxx" exchanges to their customers, and many do.
Like woodworking? Build your own picture frames.
Me You and Everyone We Know is a strange little independent film, and not exactly the sort that would be likely to be known by the /. crowd.
But I bring it up because it features a lot of instant messaging, with the characters quite obviously using Gaim, which amused me greatly when I saw it.
Funny scene *mocking* faux-tech in bad movies: in the opening montage of the TV pilot for Heat Vision and Jack, Jack Black types on an clunky terminal that displays the requisite status message: "ACCESSING MAINFRAME". He's "hacking in" we can only assume...
a ck.txt
http://www.weeklyscript.com/Heat%20Vision%20&%20J
You must be thinking of this kind of person. This is what my bedroom looks like.. doesn't yours?
"Job@Book of Job" was clearly an email ALIAS. It was a SPY movie after all, they had to have had Aliases everywhere.
Oh You POS
Anti trust is one of my favorite movies, but something really cool about the way they did the code in the movie, was that they actually tied real code output to the actor's key presses. So while the actors knew nothing of *nix code or programming, you could look at the output and be impressed that it wasn't the lame commands of "Open door", or "Kill slow white guy". Movies are getting smarter, because the public is getting smarter.
je suis parce que j'aime
MI One, the address was for a newsgroup alias, not an email address. War Games was dialing directly into the Mainframe not the Internet. Ugh!
Of course, Wargames conclusion was spot on. Global Thermonuclear War ... The only way to win is not to play.
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
"Computer, install a recursive subroutine." (Harry Kim on Star Trek Voyager).
Really funny to watch as a computer scientist. Voyager's computer fights against Klingons, translates any language, does a lot of crazy stuff on the hollow deck and even makes tea for you but cannot use recursive algorithms on its own.
My favorite thing in computers in movies is when they show hard drives without their covers on in working computers. I guess it is more visually appealing to see the heads moving and the discs spinning.
I've got a good friend who does DNA analysis for the state of Florida; I hear the stories all the time. Ten years ago, the challenge was convincing a jury that the evidence was ironclad, because most of them didn't know anything about the science. Now, thanks to CSI, the challenge is to explain that it's not magic. There's no magic computer that instantly identifies a perp based on a hair follicle. In the real world, it's all about statistical analysis and minimalizing margin of error. All math. But thanks to ridiculously unrealistic programs like CSI, we have one huge jury pool that now expects 100% certainty - a mathematical impossibility - in all cases of forensic analysis.
It still boils down to education. In the old days, it was about educating juries that the science was valid. Now, it's about educating them that the science is actually science.
You know, the LCD flat-panel that's apparently so bright that not only does it illuminate the face of the person using it but you can distinctly make out the characters they're typing (most of them are even so user-friendly they reverse-image what they're projecting so we don't have to watch the movie in a mirror to figure out what they're typing!!!)
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oh how did they miss The Core, internationally popular as the worst sci-fi movie ever? not content with violating several laws of physics, geology and thermodynamics and pure commonsense, this movie had to take a stab at the internet/computers as well. US govt hires master hacker 'Rat' (who nonchalantly unlocks the hero's cellphone for lifetime free minutes by blowing thru a chewing gum foil) to 'control the internet' by 'hacking the planet' and regulating the flow of information! and how can we forget the ending where he connects to the internet and sends (spams) ALL users of internet with an email glorifying the deeds of Virgil's unsung heroes?!
My sig has been answered.
You must be new around here...
Overall, this film was not a bad offender. The clip shown was of Janek's black box, which was the film's McGuffin. The technology behind it is not really described in detail, except that it has encryption cracking technology hard wired in.
Throughout the film, technology behaves properly (pretty well). TV cameras do what TV cameras are supposed to, security systems are bypassed by breaking into wiring closets and such. The worst scene for accuracy, by far, was the telephone trace.
If I can go off topic for a moment, there is a bit of Internet trivia I see journalists use all the time and it bugs me. Example: "According to google there are 20,000 pages for X, but only 18,000 for Y." or "An Internet search for X results in in 200,000 hits." Really? There's 200,000 pages completely relevant to your search??? And you can go to the 20,000th page of the google search to find more links that aren't spam, porn and porn-blog-spam??? Everyone knows that that number of hits found counter is mostly bull and that very little of relevance exist beyond the first two or three pages. Everytime I see a reporter cite the hit count as evidence of something I cringe.
My big Jurassic Park geek peeve was when Wayne Knight's geek character announced that he had written all 3 million lines of code for the park's computer system -- by himself.
I know the filmmakers (and probably Crichton) wanted to show off how l33t the geek was, but all I could think about was that it's already hard enough coordinating a software team to write 300,000 lines of code, and then scaling the issue...
--R.J.
Electric-Escape.net
Rob Lowe's finest puter movie....I'm sure most of you missed it, but it's trully entertaining. The one scene where people should take umbrage is where Lowe's character the govt goon who was out to wack him, and later turns into his pal are hiding in Govt Goon's cave and he turns to Lowe's character and tells him he has "dual ISDN links" in his cave - mind you, which is out in the middle of nowhere - while they await the final siege from the rogue govt goons.
Two films that were pretty accurate:
Takedown (referenced as "Hackers 2" sometimes, althought nothing like it) - shows hacking as mostly social engineering and research
Antitrust - actual Unix commands on a command line!
Both great flicks, but (disclaimer) I also loved Hackers, although certainly not for the realism. Mostly Angelina and the soundtrack.
Ignore anything I said above, I actually agree with everything you believe - mod accordingly.
It did bug me in the movie how the incredibly crude SWTPC video terminal was suddenly able to do fancy color graphics (just like Boz's VT100 on Riptide). Also as someone said, acoustic couplers can't dial. And I like how he gets the tic-tac-toe program to play against itself by typing Z-E-R-O (not 0) at the prompt for # of players.
It's clearly inspired by the MS Windows security model
If I seem short sighted, it is because I stand on the shoulders of midgets
In "The Recruit" when Al Pacino is chasing Colin Farrell towards the end of the film, Al shoots Colin's laptop. When he shoots the screen the actually had the screen show bullet hole graphics instead of actually putting holes in a laptop. It was only a fraction of a second of screen time, but it made me yell at the screen. Bad special effects, bad computers, just bad.
"It's because they're stupid, that's why. That's why everybody does everything." -Homer Simpson
OK, then how is it wrong to say that two machines connected only by a modem are part of the Internet?
Because the whole point about the internet is the protocol for connecting machines which are part of different networks. You're on Network A using one standard, your partner is on Network B using another local standard, but through the magic of TCP/IP you can interact with each other.
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
An old version of Mac OS (8 or so?) acted pretty much this way. Empty Trash would say something like "The Trash could not be emptied, because it contains locked items. To delete all items, hold the Option key and choose Empty Trash." (In Mac OS, "locked" means roughly the same as "read-only" in Windows.)
Hackers:
Independence Day:
Matrix Reloaded:
Overall, I'd say this article makes the huge, yet common, mistake of looking back on movies which were supposed to represent some dystopian future and judging them by current reality. These movies often contain some specific warning to us, usually something along the lines of "don't become too dependent on machines, or this will happen to you." This is a perfectly valid literary device, and the movies do not suddenly become invalid because some aspect of the technology represented therein is bypassed, or shown to be impossible, by reality.
They leave out the most glaring inaccuracy of hollywood's portrayal of computing all together. If you were to believe films you'd think that Apple had a monopoly on the PC market. Ever seen anyone running Windows in a film? Even boxes that are obviously not Mac somehow manage to run MacOS. Even little things like people using two button mice to control MacOS (yeah I know it's possible but it certainly isn't the norm).
I looked at the link, and that's the same keyboard I use at home. Damn I need a new keyboard.
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
if he were being trained for combat, he would have been trained on the appropriate plane. he was a man who was not slated for combat. his air guard unit was a dumping ground for those who could wangle a way out of real combat. that was the whole point of being in the texas air guard.
...
c ation_Zone. When an "unknown" aircraft get's near the ADIZ interceptors may be scrambled and they may be Regular Air Force or Air National Guard. The Texas Air National Guard has a rather large area of responsibility and interception was considered an important role due to the possiblity of Soviet bombers coming to the US via Cuba. You might recall that the US and the Soviets had narrowly missed having a nuclear war over Cuba.
Apologies if reality is intruding on your political RDF but
At the time there was this thing called the Cold War, it was actually a bigger deal than Vietnam to the Pentagon. The Cold War was due to a period of time in history where there was more than one super power and they were regularly probing each other's airspace. The combat mission that Bush Jr. was trained for was to intercept Soviet bombers approaching the coast of the US. Go find an aerial chart that covers the US coast. You'll find a line label ADIZ, that is Air Defense Identification Zone http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Defense_Identifi
we're gonna change Rock n' Roll FOREVER!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
This is how much Hollywood has an effect on the pointy haired class...
I once worked for a company that had such a high level of holy wars over what a good email system was that an Email Steering Committee was formed of about 27 throughout the company. The non IT members of this committee submitted features that they would like to see in a potential email system for the company.
One request was: "I'd like us to purchase the email system featured in the movie 'Disclosure'."
"...the shortest distance between two points may be straight line, but it is by no means the most interesting."
trust me- if you air naked humans, you'll find out very quickly that you violated something.
do it again, they'll send you to federal prison, where you'll find a whole 'nother meaning of 'violated'
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Carl, you said "I tend to send around 300 to 400 emails a day".
:D
No shit?
Is that your day job? I mean, responding to people on e-mail lists, or are you just personally involved with so many people on so many subjects?
Just curious
--exa--
Yes, 1992 is the year before JP came out. Movies are often made one, even two years before they come out.
-- Boycott Shell
Yeah, that stupid claim that she used nmap seemed pretty dumb to me. They know what nmap is, but, they don't know that if they just simply look ONE LINE below the nmap line they can see everything else, such as the command "sshnuke." What I find particularly funny though is that the security is so pitiful. It said they were using SSH protocol version _1_... Everyone knows you should require version 2 on anything that is worth more than 5 cents. I think it even said it had a mere 256-bit encryption. God, I think my computer today could crack that in a pitifully short period of time even if there wasn't an exploit to take advantage of. If this is the future, I'm holding on to my old 1999 hardware which can handle SSH protocol version 2 and a 2048-bit key. There are already systems which can crack that in less than a year (I don't know what we're down to on such a large key, but, it's still a long time even for a good cluster) but right now it's easier for a hacker to find an exploit in another of my services than to try to guess my authentication key and break into ssh, not to mention that even a moron knows you disable remote root logon... (Seriously, minimum IQ to realize this if you work in any kind of *nix whatsoever is about 80. It's tantamount to a bank giving even the janitors the main key to their vault and then posting one unarmed guard at the door figuring that will be good enough to stop anyone from trying anything.
Not to be pedantic (okay, to be pedantic), while the Matrix itself was in the future, the reality it represented was approximately 1999. So it's possible that SSH 2 wasn't implemented yet on that system.
Besides, we all know how behind any regulated entity is in computer tech. This was the power company, for Christ's sakes! PG&E! An accurate representation of PG&E by the AIs!
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
So There!
[sorry, this thread was getting so silly, it just needed to be pushed over the edge]
- "History shows again and again how nature points out the folly of men" -- Blue Oyster Cult, 'Godzilla'
Generally, the IMSAI did not have a 'font'. It primarily used a terminal over serial for IO (assuming you weren't stuck flipping switches on the front). The terminal generally had a screen and a tape reader/puncher.
There were s100 cards for the IMSAI/Altair that held character buffers, and could spit out NTSC to a suitable monitor or TV. I have one of these, and the picture quality is remarkably good. However, most 'tapeware' assumed a serial terminal, and had to be convinced to use the character buffer through much cursing and gnashing of teeth.
Still planning on making a HTTP server on my old box... but have been a bit busy lately. And have to work on the power supply before that happens.
Obviously, that lingerie store had some high-tech, holographic VR camera setup, which makes me really wonder about the store owner.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
Not strictly or explicitly speaking a movie about "the internet" but it presupposes global computer networks. It's also interesting because it's clearly written by people who know enough to be very silly. (Think of the character "Bit" who only says "Yes" or "No" ... or the name of the movie itself -- the name of a standard MS BASIC debugging command.)
And then there's Terminator -- who if you recall was running 6502 assembler (it's visible in the scene where he's deciding what to say to the guy banging on his hotel room door).
I actually used to be friendly with one of leading guys in the "fake-movie-computer-interface-design" industry (they call it 'videographics' apparently). He designed many of the interfaces that have been mentioned in this debate including Mission Impossible, the last half a dozen Bond movies and quite a number of other blockbusters. He might be willing to do a Slashdot Q&A if there was any interest.
That argument would work better if SSH-2 weren't even older than that: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ssh#History I did mention that I was using hardware from 1999 too, right?
And isn't the time in the Matrix supposed to take place closer to the modern day? Is it really 1999, or wouldn't it be more like 2003-2006 depending on which movie? (Most movies of this sort take place in the modern day just because it's easier that way.)
Simply put, as was demonstrated in the movie, even a power company should have enough brains not to use such an easily hacked system. Can you even imagine how much it would cost if a power company in real life could be so easily hacked into? With the tools she used, a script kiddie could get in, and they are to a hacker what a desk fan is to a jet engine. Power companies would stay up about three seconds grand total within a day every day in real life.
The prohibition against forward slashes dates back to the days of DOS, when forward slashes were used (instead of hyphens) for passing options to programs on the command line. Since no spaces were required before or between options, a forward slash in the middle of a filename would cause the latter part of the name to be interpreted as a switch. I gather that this is so you can do things like:
/W /P
DIR/W/P
instead of:
DIR
A bit silly, but it's consistent with | and >.
Visit the
I had a friend that I called a lot in the early 70s, during the Watergate hearings in the summer (74?) as I recall when there was nothing better for a teen to do. He and I found out that if you whistled the correct tone, the call would hang up. I can't recall if you got a dial tone, but it definately hung up the call. As I was tone deaf and could not reproduce the exact tone, I could do it by whistling a rising tone and when it matched, the call was disconnected. Since I knew he was going to call back, I also found out that if I continually pushed up and down on the, uh, what do you call those two little buttons on the cradle? -- the "hanger-up-buttons"? If I pushed pushed and released them over and over I could answer the call before it rang. As soon as he dialled the last number, there I was and said "hello." It freaked him out the first time.
In this otherwise excellent series, Number 6 destroys the room-sized computer known as "The General" by asking it the question 'WHY?' when typed on the card and fed into the machine. Sparks, smoke, etc.
"Let's say, hypothetically, someone's writing emails to someone else, and you want it to look like AOL. That's a proprietary look, a proprietary software," said Ms. Zea, who has worked on several films including "Silence of the Lambs" (1991) and "The Manchurian Candidate" (2004). "You're certainly not going to go online and just dial up AOL, for example. You're going to create your own."
So who would the movie-makers ask permission from in order to use Linux and Thunderbird? Precisely who would threaten to sue them if they did'nd ask permission and went ahead anyway?
I had a friend that worked as the night operator for a university mainframe and he told me how the day operator wrote scripts on the machine to bypass all sorts of questions like, "are you sure you want to do this?" So if anyone wanted to, you could type 'shutdown' and immediately the mainframe would turn off.
hey,
don't forget the famous 3d animations of semi-transparent builidngs with blinking
persons as red dots (bad guy) and green dots (good guy).
What you think about a google tool: "google housing 3D"?
D.
..if you spend a little time playing Uplink.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
I have nothing useful to add to the thread than: I second that. She's a hottie. The Net is also one of the few movies where she's in a bathing suit and the camera spends a meaningful time on her.
OTOH, she's starting to get kind of old lately. Bummer.