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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.'"
Subject says it all.
Trolling is a art,
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."
For someone who claims to love the movie, I'd think you'd know it was Joshua, not Jason! Nerd card SUSPENDED!
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
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.
All true geeks use a Model M.
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
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
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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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!
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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?
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
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.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
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.
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?
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.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
...which someone wrote as a result of the movie, not before the movie.
It was actually fairly useful.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is kinky.
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.
When the posters fear their moderators, there is tyranny; when the moderators fears the posters, there is liberty.
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
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
Um, I actually USED that graphic file system viewer on an SGI workstation in 1992, BEFORE Jurassic Park came out in 1993.
Obviously, that lingerie store had some high-tech, holographic VR camera setup, which makes me really wonder about the store owner.
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