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.'"

Comments

Oh boy

[suso]

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.

Accurate or not

[Malakusen]

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?

Re:Accurate or not

[amliebsch]

Jason had some of the best lines

For someone who claims to love the movie, I'd think you'd know it was Joshua, not Jason! Nerd card SUSPENDED!

Re:Accurate or not

[ccandreva]

For 1983, I think WarGames got far more right than it got wrong. You really could get free phone calls by shorting out an old-style rotary pay phone.

You really can fake out any system that communicates via DTMF tones by recording and playing them back. Anyone remember hearing tones when you put money in early touch-tone payphones ? If that lock did communicate to a central system via DTMF, you could get out that way.

Poor passwords used to be far more common. From 2006 Joshua looks like an obvious bad backdoor, but that's only because it used to BE so common.

What did they get wrong ? WOPR was already an antique at the time, but they wanted something with blinking lights. There couldn't be a voice synth with the same voice everywhere. Often overlooked that complaint is the fact that they bothered to introduce it as a device at all.

I always thought they presented it correctly as a cinematic device, sort of like a scene starting in a foreign language with subtitles, to establish the characters are foreign, then switching to English so the audiance knows what is going on.

Re:Accurate or not

[Malakusen]

What did they get wrong ? WOPR was already an antique at the time, but they wanted something with blinking lights. There couldn't be a voice synth with the same voice everywhere. Often overlooked that complaint is the fact that they bothered to introduce it as a device at all.

One of the ways I've heard the voice synth explained is that it was pretty likely that both Matthew Broderick's character and the government bought the voice synth equipment from the same place. Much like how the Windows male voice synth voice is the same on all computers. Just something I heard tossed up somewhere.

Mr Potatohead! Mr Potatohead!

Re:Accurate or not

[AKAImBatman]

Often overlooked that complaint is the fact that they bothered to introduce [a voice synth] as a device at all.

And yet it was still surprisingly realistic. The Intellivoice module (a voice synthesizer with its own built-in speaker) was released for the Intellivision console in 1982, and the Macintosh "introduced" itself in 1984. It received a standing ovation from the crowd. And that's just what the public saw. The actual research into Voice Synthesis goes back to the 1930's!

So it was perfectly reasonable to include voice synthesis in WarGames, even if its purpose was to allow the viewer to read less text.

Re:Accurate or not

[DarthBart]

One of the ways I've heard the voice synth explained is that it was pretty likely that both Matthew Broderick's character and the government bought the voice synth equipment from the same place.

Most of the voice synth hardware in the 80s used the same voice synth chip, the venerable SPO256-AL2 from General Instruments...so yes, everything is going to sound similar, if not the same.

Re:Accurate or not

[AKAImBatman]

Breaking launch codes a single digit at a time was one thing they got glaringly wrong

Will people please stop complaining about this? If you've read Tanenbaum's book on Operating System Design, you'd know that this was a very real hack. In the system he describes (Tandem Computer, I think?), users could attach a listener to the page fault handler to know when a page fault happened. The system also checked passwords one character at a time.

A common method of breaking the super-user password was to align the password with the page boundary. If a page fault occurred, the hacker would know that the correct letter or digit had been found. The hacker would then move the password one character back in memory so that the next digit would be over the page boundary. This process was repeated until all the characters were found.

As a result, these computers were actually capable of being hacked "one character at a time" like you see in movies. Hollywood was just slow to update to the latest methods used.

Re:Accurate or not

[AKAImBatman]

Sure, but how and why was the voice synth connected to his modem/terminal program?

Well, at home he explicitly connected it to show off for his girlfriend. As for the government computers, have you seen their accessability requirements? :-P

Re:Accurate or not

[stunt_penguin]

The main thing that they got wrong in that scene was the fact that he actually impressed an attactive young female with his hacking skills, rather than eliciting a blank stare, a yawn or a breakup.

So unlike real life.

Re:Accurate or not

[misleb]

Well, at home he explicitly connected it to show off for his girlfriend.

Right there it is totally unbelievable. How does a guy like that get a girl like that when he spends so much of his time trying to figure out how to connect voice synth to an accoustically coupled modem link...

-matthew

Re:Accurate or not

[Chr0nik]

Chicks like guys with skills...

Numbchuck skills, computer hacking skills....

Re:Accurate or not

[HTH NE1]

Also, the wardialer shown in the movie really is a useful tool.

Indeed, I wrote one myself, but quickly realized that sequential dialing was a bad idea, so I rearranged the last four digits to "avoid detection". I also found out that in my home town there were really only 3000 assignable phone numbers in the prefix, that a number beginning with 3 or 9 could also be called beginning with a 9 or 3 respectively, and that the system would allow you to dial 8 indefinitely. The town was also small enough that I could eliminate all published numbers.

The town was also small enough to not have anything of interest to connect.

Re:Accurate or not

[nuzak]

Note to self: change combination on nuclear launch code suitcase. -- GWB

The Web != The Internet

[grub]

Subject says it all.

Re:The Web != The Internet

[PsychicX]

On a related note, from TFA:

Filmmakers must sidestep delicate trademark issues when setting a scene. Prominently showing an AOL email screen or Google search page, for example, requires approval from the companies, so some production designers create a variation that avoids the red tape.

Yet showing a coke can prominently is ok? Well duh, coke paid them for it. So why can't Google pay to show up on a computer screen in 24 or something?

Re:The Web != The Internet

[fossa]

This depresses me somewhat... The real world is full of trademarks and copyrighted works. It seems impossible to film anything, save naked humans or other animals in pristine nature, without violating something. It isn't trademakr violation for me to say "I am holding a can of Coke" or "Google offers a search engine". Should it be so legally dubious to do the same via film? Is trademark the relevant law here?

Re:The Web != The Internet

[Fred_A]

It seems impossible to film anything, save naked humans or other animals in pristine nature, without violating something.

That whould explain the popularity of porn. It's the only honest cinematography left.

Web != Internet

[turgid]

Come on, this isn't the BBC's Technology section or PeeCee Shopper magazine.

Re:Web != Internet

[aclarke]

According to Wikipedia, the first web browser wasn't released until February 26, 1991. That seems as good a place as any to mark the beginning of the "Web", which would make it a little over 15 years old.

You're right - you'd still hope that even now, Slashdot submitters and editors would understand the distinction between the www and the internet.

Re:Web != Internet

[turgid]

Quite. My mother-in-law thinks that Tim Berners-Lee invented the Internet.

Re:Web != Internet

[kalidasa]

Why both with the Wikipedia article, when you can post links to the inventor's own history of the first web browser (source code; written for NeXTStep for 680x0 I believe).

Woah there, headline

[iamdrscience]

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.

Re:Woah there, headline

[sootman]

One awesome thing about War Games: they rigged the computer he was using so that each time he pressed a key--ANY key--it would pop up a letter on the screen. One of my big pet peeves in movies is when the sound of the keyboard doesn't sync up with the screen display.

So, Matthew Broderick didn't have 7337 typing skillz, but the filmmakers did loan him Galaga to play, so when he's playing that game in the movie, that's really him playing.

I remember "The Net"

[daviddennis]

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

Re:I remember "The Net"

[camg188]

I rented "The Net 2.0" a couple of weeks ago. In the first scene the heroine is checking her bank account over the internet. While she is distracted, it shows her balance count down to zero, like an odometer in reverse. I guess the hacker was making 0.01 withdrawls in rapid succession that got posted immediately and somehow refreshed her browser every tenth of a second. After that, I turned off the movie and switched to Cartoon Network because I wanted to watch something a little more realistic. I guess it's the same feeling a mechanic gets watching the General Lee jump a creek, destroy it's frame and then be complete fine in the next scene.

Wow

[koreaman]

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

Re:Wow

[Rob T Firefly]

No, you can't write a computer virus on your Mac and upload it to alien ships on the fly.

Maybe you can't...

Re:Wow

[JimmehAH]

Independence Day is on the list. That very scene too. But in the film Area 51 had 50 years to reverse engineer the computer systems on the crashed alien ship, so it's not entirely unrealistic.
Disclaimer: I've not seen the film in years and my memory of it is a little patchy.

Re:Wow

[mgblst]

To be fair, the film screws up so badly in all areas, it would be weird if they got the computer stuff right.

How did Jeff Goldblum's character figure out the alien signal?
How did they know how to fly the alien ship?
All of the characters in this film are stereotypical.
The President of the United States of America flies a fighter plane against alien ships.
The town drunk is a hero for no reason.
I could come up with more, but like a child who had been molestered by her uncle, I don't like thinking about it too much.

Possibly the most idiotic film of the past 30 years.

Re:Wow

[mwvdlee]

It's a movie about a friggin' alien invasion, yet you complain about the computer stuff being unrealistic?

Re:Wow

[linvir]

How can you complain about the president flying a fighter plane? It was one of the greatest moments in the history of accidental satire!

Re:Wow

[gstoddart]

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.

Actually, in fairness to the film, if you watch the special edition/director's cut that whole part makes a LOT more sense than the theatrical release which outraged us all so very much.

In the director's cut, they add back enough footage to show that the communications of the aliens is sound/radio wave, and that he (Goldblum's character) had figured out the way their communications worked.

He didn't write a computer binary virus on his Mac and upload it to the aliens. He used his Mac which had been outfitted with signal processing gear, and transmitted a series of signals which acted on their system in the way a virus would operate on a computer. So the bar could be the same as an upload status -- "this much more signal to transmit".

As much as I thought it was a travesty when I saw the theatrical release, I thought the expanded version's explaination was plausible.

Likewise, if you want to see a film that made no sense in theatrical release but becomes clear in extended release -- The Abyss is a good example. SO much of what was cut ouf ot he theatrical release caused it to become muddled and confusing. The extended release made sense.

In both cases, the films were somewhat crippled by the way theye were initially released to the public, but SO MUCH BETTER in a director's cut.

Anyway, just some musings from a film geek. :-P

Re:Wow

[dorkygeek]

A. He got probed up the ass by the aliens, he's got to get some comeback. It's a classic tale of revenge and redemption. Positively Shakespearian.

Some of us here would be very happy to get it at least up the butt. Although a kind of "revenge" afterwards woul be nice too.

Re:Wow

[Zak3056]

Clearly you haven't seen Hackers. TYPE COOKIE!!

Oddly enough, you picked one of the few things in that movie that was more or less accurate. The Cookie Monster "virus" (not really a virus in the modern sense of the word, just an annoying piece of code) was around in the 1970s, and would randomly pop up "Cookie! Gimme cookie!" on ttys. Typing "cookie" would make the prompt go away. Typing "chocolate chip" would remove the virus.

Re:Wow

[geoffspear]

Q. The President of the United States of America flies a fighter plane against alien ships.

A. So what's your point? Admittedly with your current draft-dodging coward of a president, I can understand your skepticism (if you're not American, I apologise for that).

Our current draft-dodging coward of a President was actually trained as a fighter pilot (in a unit that had no realistic chance of seeing combat, but that's hardly relevant to whether he could fly a fighter plane if he needed to.)

At the time the film was made, the previous President had been an actual combat fighter pilot. So no, not unrealistic at all. Although if someone told me that either of the Bushes would be an effective pilot in combat during their presidencies, years after having flown anything at all, I'd be a bit skeptical.

Re:Wow

[CastrTroy]

Are you kidding me? Every night on CSI they zoom in 100x on digital photo and are able to make the photo clear as an original, with no pixelation. People have no idea what's possible with computers. They just assume that everything they see on television could really happen.

Re:Wow

[sootman]

Remember, that film took place in the System 7 days--the Mac OS *was* the virus. What you were seeing was the installation progress bar. :-)

Re:Wow

[TopShelf]

They should really revisit that film, and digitally include a "Mission Accomplished" banner after his triumphant landing...

Re:Wow

[finkployd]

I'll play

Their ship is pretty big, One- fourth the size of the moon, although an object that size in near-Earth orbitmight be expected to cause tidal waves, there are none!


That is a really good point and I had not thought about that. However we do not know the nature of their drive system, I'm assuming not propulsion (which would have leveled the cities simply by hovering over them), so let's pretend some kind of anti-gravity thing which could in turn be used to negate any gravitational pull their mothership would have exerted on earth (or the moon for that matter, probably knocking it out of orbit).


Why are the aliens using hours and minutes, in their doomsdays signal?


They are not, the are simply using a increasingly short interval between their signal transmissions. Jeff Goldblum (exercising his acting skills by being the only character he has ever attempted) figured out that it was a decreasing pattern and extrapolated when it would end. Then he displayed that information using hours and minutes. Note that nowhere did he "translate" the signal or its meaning.


If these creatures can field a spaceship a fourth the size of the moon, why do they bother engaging in aerial dogfights with the U.S. Air Force?


Presumably they wanted Earth and everything on it, minus the pesky ape decedents who tended try to protect stuff and cause problems for the new alien overlords. They could have wiped the planet clean or just nuked it at once, but then they would have lost the resources they were supposedly after (not sure it they just wanted raw materials or technology or what).

And why don't they blow up everything at once?

Well my understanding is that they did blow up every major city they were hovering over at once as soon as their countdown hit zero. However rather than show a bunch of split screens in real time the director choose to show each explosion in sequence.


Or knock out the Internet with a neutron bomb, instead of simply causing snow and static on TV screens?

The purpose of the static was not to knock out communications, it was to synchronize their attack. Perhaps they were after our swiss clock technology since they obviously could not coordinate time on their ships. Maybe they caught a bit of Parker Lewis Can't Lose that we beamed into space and were intrigued when the characters said "synchronize swatches". I can see the discussion now: "Hey, those earthlings know how to keep accurate time, think of what this technology could do for our invading forces? No longer would we be limited to invading planets which have the communications satellites in place we need to coordinate!". No wonder their computer system was so vulnerable.

That said, your complaints about the moving sucking were right on, it was pretty unmatchable. Even Judd Hirsch couldn't save this one.

For my money, Sneakers was probably the best computer geek movie. At least until someone makes Cryptonomicon into a movie (on second thought, as much as I liked that book I think the movie would probably suck)

Finkployd

Re:Wow

[monkeydo]

Actually, members of Bush's unit did see combat. Bush tried to volunteer for the program that would have taken him into combat, but by the time he had enough flight hours, the jet that he was trained to fly was being phased out.

Re:Wow

[Kombat]

Q. How did Jeff Goldblum's character figure out the alien signal?
A. Duh! He's a genius.

Wasn't his character falling-down-drunk mere minutes before hacking the alien code and writing a cross-platform virus?

It's not just computers that Hollywood takes liberties with. People in movies sober up instantaneously, and are almost never hungover. See "40 Year Old Virgin" for another example. He's utterly wasted at the end, goes back to some random's apartment, then sobers up and rides his bike to tell Katherine Keener he loves her (smashing through a mobile billboard in the process).

Or how about the laughable driving stunts in "Transporter 2?" Or the way minute amounts of explosives can demolish entire buildings in movies? Or how airplanes run out of fuel, then crash into the ground, creating a massive fireball? What exactly is burning, in that case, hmm?

Hollywood has conditioned us to turn our brains off when we go to the movies. We just notice the glaring computer flaws because, well, we're computer geeks. I'm sure automotive engineers laugh at all the new tricks James Bond's car can do. Or pilots laugh at the things airplanes get away with in movies.

Re:Wow

[Zaphod2016]

The day I see the President of any political party fight aliens in a jet plane, I will pay double my taxes and adopt a family on welfare.

Re:Wow

[myth24601]

Here in Hazard County, we normally keep ramps setup all over the place in case you need to jump your car over somethin.

Visual Incremental Password Decryption

[4of12]

My favorite: the odometer/slot machine password cracking software, whirring the last few places as you hear the Bad Guy® coming down the hall...

computer noises & slow displays

[check6]

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.

Doogie Howser and SATC epitomize pop 'puters

[ianscot]

The diary entries on "Doogie Howser, MD" and Carrie's "Sex and the City" word processor were about par for the course when it comes to computers in the pop media. Both shows posited worlds where computers were for t-y-p-i-n-g v-e-e-e-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y, in fonts that took up maybe 1/10 of the screen per line, so that the viewer could watch the appear over the character's shoulder. (Both shows also featured characters whose grand observations about life were invariably a single short sentence's worth of trite aphorism, or a simple question.)

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.

Re:Click click click

[amliebsch]

And don't forget the clicking keyboards... Talk about driving you insane...

All true geeks use a Model M.

This is nothing...

[William Robinson]

..compared to what I saw in a Hindi movie, called "Amar Akbar Anthony".

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.

Re:This is nothing...

[amliebsch]

"Amar Akbar Anthony...Mother needs blood."

Was it a trap?

Reminds me of a Buffy scene

[Anonymous Coward]

Willow: "Have you tried Googling her?"

Xander: "Willow, she's only 17!"

New Spam King in Town?

[gregarican]

The WSJ writer claims, "I tend to send around 300 to 400 emails a day, and that would drive me insane."

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?

Chloe O'Brien - Master H4Xx0r!

[a_nonamiss]

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...

Re:Chloe O'Brien - Master H4Xx0r!

[elrous0]

You expect realism from a show where all the good guys use Apples and all the bad guys use PC's?

-Eric

Re:Chloe O'Brien - Master H4Xx0r!

[soft_guy]

That seems like the most realistic part.

Anyone else rember Electric Dreams?

[LWATCDR]

I actually enjoyed that movie alot.

not only the web

[kunzy]

Oh, this is a *Unix* system. I know all about this. --Jurassic Parc

Don't forget the "small screen" too

[NotQuiteReal]

I started watching "24" for the first time this year, because the buzz was that it was good - and while I do enjoy the fast pacing of the plot and the twists, the novelty quickly wears off if you ever let your "suspension of disbelief" slip for too long.

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.

Mass Mailing

[digitaldc]

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'

true - He was wardialing numbers with modemss

[Lanboy]

..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....

Re:true - He was wardialing numbers with modemss

[Malakusen]

They mentioned that in the movie, IIRC he got in through some contracting company or something in the same area code as the game company, that still had a connection open to WOPR because of an oversight. And as someone in the military, I do know that accidental glaring oversights happen all the time. Love the "...whoops" moments.

Re:jurassic park

[Rob T Firefly]

Allthough that's a common complaint about that scene, the GUI she recognizes as UNIX was actually a real Silicon Graphics 3D File System Navigator for UNIX.

Progress bars to build suspense

[dpbsmith]

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.

BEEP!

[Dubpal]

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.

Re:BEEP!

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.nullsoft.com/free/nbeep/

Nullsoft Beep is an application that makes your computer sound like computers sound in the movies.

EnHANCE that image!

[Rob T Firefly]

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.

Re:jurassic park

[OzPeter]

Forget the stupid programming stuff. Who was the dumbshit project manager that signed off on the backup generator being located *outside* of the safe command compound?? The whole project design was an engineering nightmare that should have been squashed from the start!

Movies For Nerds Stuff That Entertains

[Heir Of The Mess]

I remember when I was in school I went to see The Terminator with some friends. When the assembly code was scrolling up the screen many of us recognised it and sang out "Hey he's a Commodore 64".

They probably all read slashdot now. Hi Guys!

Re:3-400 emails per DAY???

[slashbob22]

He not only finds time to Post Once on slashdot. But at least 2 articles in 24 hours!

More Than 20 Years of the Web on the Big Screen
Videogame Remake of 1986's World Series Game 6

Surveilance camera's

[mwvdlee]

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.

Amusingly -

[Geminii]

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?

My favourite moment

[ascii]

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!

Re:My favourite moment

[linvir]

1.2, improved efficiency

#!/bin/bash

protected_files()
{
echo SECRET FILES ARE PROTECTED. CANNOT DELETE.
echo -n '> '
read line
if [ $line == 'OVERRIDE' ]; then
echo DELETING ALL SECRET FILES... DONE!
else
echo INTRUDER DETECTED, SCRAMBLING ENCRYPTION.
fi
}

if [ "$1 $2 $3" == 'ALL SECRET FILES' ]; then
protected_files
exit
fi
if [ "$1 $2" == 'ALL FILES' ]; then
echo DELETING ALL FILES...
sleep 2
protected_files
exit
else
echo Usage: DELETE [how many] [type] [what]
fi

Hey, I'm finally learning shell scripting!

Re:My favourite moment

[Master of Transhuman]

Now do it in Perl.

The result will look like this:

$..=$_ for( qw(^,?y,(.),:^ y?y ?@xz?:^ .?y .mvm.:^ :?y :grr::^ .? udvn
+'',(ebmv% //,^ .)[1,0,2]:^ :?~e :^,\1:^ `^ &^'::^y?~f?@xz?xz@?:^:?~e:^,\1^,\2:^2
+^1^2::));
$_=$.;y*^y: @wx fez %db uvm?*$q; auc ysh top jil=*;eval;print for($q,$
+;,$ .,$/)

(From Perl Monks Obfuscated Code Web page.)

Re:Could you even shoot a computer screen?

[dsci]

Which, I believe, was first done (at least for TV) for the show "UFO," one of my childhood favorites and made by the same folks who brought us Space: 1999.

Transferring Funds

[blaster151]

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?

Re:Internet ARPAnet

[geoffspear]

And you could argue that the Internet includes a piece of paper I have sitting on my desk. You'd be wrong either way.

Anti-trust

[pupeno]

Nobody mentioning anti-trust ? One of the best movies where computers look like they are and where a great struggle of today is shown.

And don't forget the Obligatory Announcement

[ishmalius]

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.

Re:Internet ARPAnet

[EatHam]

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.

Deliberate obfuscation

[McLae]

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. :)

"Document begins to fold into an envelope..."

[ebonkyre]

Dammit, man! Apple's going to sue you if you leak details about the next OS X like that!

Re:jurassic park

[Jethro]

...which someone wrote as a result of the movie, not before the movie.

It was actually fairly useful.

Incredimail

[RinzeWind]

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.

The one that always gets me is...

[smithmc]

from Clear and Present Danger - "We're wayyy beyond birthdays now. I'm gonna have to write... a special program, here."

Movie with real code, AntiTrust

[SavedLinuXgeeK]

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.

"The CSI Effect"

[Greslin]

Very, very true. It makes forensic testimony on criminal court cases a blast, though.

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.

Sneakers

[BigFootApe]

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.

Re: Votrax

[KC1P]

I assumed at the time that the speech synth was a Votrax Type-n-Talk. It was popular back then (at least among people who had $400 to blow on a gimmick, so count me out -- I built my own with a cheapy GI SP0256 chip from RadShack, but it didn't do text-to-speech itself, so I wrote some PDP-11 FORTH code to make it swear and then lost interest). There were ads in Byte, and you could get the SC01 speech chip separately to build into your own stuff. The Type-n-Talk was a stand-alone text-to-speech unit with a serial input so it would have been trivial to hook it up as shown in the movie (but it wouldn't have worked that well, I don't think the text-to-speech algorithm was very smart).

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.

Re:jurassic park

[imaginaryelf]

Um, I actually USED that graphic file system viewer on an SGI workstation in 1992, BEFORE Jurassic Park came out in 1993.

Ewwww!

[Rob T Firefly]

Obviously, that lingerie store had some high-tech, holographic VR camera setup, which makes me really wonder about the store owner.