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

The Web != The Internet

[grub]

Subject says it all.

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.

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

[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

[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

[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: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!

not only the web

[kunzy]

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

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.

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.

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.

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

[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.