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10 Terrible Portrayals of Technology in Film
Luke Hachmeister writes to mention a light piece at GideonTech on some of the truly terrible portrayals of technology in film. From Hackers to AntiTrust, Hollywoood just can't stick to reality. From the article: "Harrison Ford plays a security expert at a bank. He falls prey to a scheme to steal money for a gang that has taken hostage of his family. The film tried very hard to keep it a rollercoaster ride of thrills. From the beginning, you have Harrison Ford typing furiously to stop a hacker by writing new firewall rules. At least this time, these rules didn't float around in a rainbow of colors ala Hackers. What really puts Firewall at the top of the list, is the dumbest and non-believable use of an iPod to date. This is 2006, not 1995, you can't just make stuff up like this anymore. In the middle of the film, Harrison Ford happens to not only be a security expert, but an Apple hardware developer too."
Our jobs are BORING. Admit it. If the true essence of our profession was placed on film, people would walk out of the theatre.
... ;-)
Unless, that is, it was encapsulated in a vehicle like "Office Space"
Couldn't resist, just had to 'spoil' the ending by mentioning what made #1.
Independance Day.
Upload Virus.......
Enough said!
"This is UNIX. I know this."
The file viewer in Jurassic Park really does exist.
http://fsv.sourceforge.net/
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
Today, we're going to list the Top 10 worst violators. Here is the criteria:
1. Has to be a movie that you can rent on DVD.
2. Wide release, no limited release obscure films.
3. The movie can not be science fiction based.
Yet the number 2 movie:
2) Jurassic Park - 1993
You mean you can't disarm a nuke with a WinCE PDA ?
WTF ?
If you can't appreciate the pure joy that was hackers, you fail as a human being.
Hackers is great *because* it is nonsense. It is great *because* it is a total departure from reality. It expresses not how things are, but how we *want* them to be. It's called fiction.
Ladies and gentlemen, a big round of applause for The Slashdot Effect!
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My favourite (not stupid) take off of computer security is in Demolition Man where W/Snipes uses the guys plucked eyeball to get access out of the building. ;) very choice. (NP: This wouldn't work in real life (well shouldn't ;) ))
The website is down already. mysql is such shit.
This is more like "ten films I've seen containing computers, which I will describe in belittling terms". Okay, so some of these movies really did butcher the technology they included. But some of these complaints just show a lack of imagination on the part of the article writer.
/usr is? Or is the idea that girls don't use computers?
In particular, this guy basically loses for complaining about the "This is UNIX, I know this!" scene in Jurassic Park, complaining that a ten year old girl couldn't have "magically" known that the computer was running UNIX. Okay, except that at that exact moment the computer in front of her-- hell, he even has screenshots-- was in fact showing a real world file manager / demo program that came with SGI's IRIX operating system-- which is, as it happens, a System V UNIX. You don't think it's possible that a computer geek from a rich family might have at some point in her life used IRIX, or at least used it enough to recognize a very distinctive tech demo that came with IRIX at the time and could be used as a file manager? Is it really that improbable that a ten year old might know at least enough about UNIX to know what
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
There should be a movie based on the Slashdot effect...
The link is /. so I have no clue what is #1 but Hackers has to be #1. It was such a dumb movie but it had a very young Angelina in it!
HACK THE PLANET!
Since when are half of those films NOT science fiction?
Jurrasic Park? War Games? Independance day?
Could they please give me tickets to their dinosaur park? And, while they're at it, give the ID4 aliens my number, I'd like to have lunch sometime.
Clones are people two.
This is really a bad list. Basically they seemed to have made a point of picking movies that naturally involve a lot of technology. They totally ignore things like Independence Day where their little virus takes out an entire alien attack fleet because, persumably, they didn't even try.
:)
Wargames does not deserve to be on this list. He uses an acoustic coupled modem to dial in. He hacks using realistic approaches to it, trying to guess the password. He doesn't magically use a cracking program or have little 3D graphics fly all over his screen trying to crack it. Instead he studies the biography of Professor Falken and after much trial and error actually gets it.
Their biggest nitpick is that computer voice. The "voice" from the computer is clearly just a text to voice synthesizer which, may be a little high end but remember TI had voice synthesizers for their computers around 1980. They didn't want the audience to have to read what the computer was saying the whole damn movie. The computer AI for Joshua is seemingly quite primitive even though it's supposed to be a big defense department computer.
As for Firewall, I think they did a pretty good job of being realistic. The scanner IPod thing was a stretch, but when they do computer security in the movie it looks like an actual computer. We see actual firewall rules and such that look like what I'd see on my actual computer. Given that it was a hollywood movie built around a very technical subject, I was pretty impressed with the realism level.
If you really want to get picky, how about the fact that every time a computer shows up in a movie it has an Apple logo on it
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
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Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
For Firewall's iPod contraption, the way I understood it was that he converted the electrical signals of the fax scan-thingie into analog audio output, and recording that into the iPod.
Or maybe my mind was just trying to make up for the movie's shortcomings. That said, props for the movie's faint realism in handling the initial 1337 haxor attack onto the bank's systems. To stop this attack, Harrison Ford's character makes a rule in iptables to block the hacker's IP (you see him typing away on a terminal in the movie.) Meanwhile, the dedicated network security bloke acts as if that's a solution only a 1337 genious could come up with. I guess this kind of irony is lost upon the movie's audience.
Hollywood can be reliablely counted on to screw _everything_ up.
..".
..
Fire 20 bullets from a six shooter. 100 bullets from a semi auto and one magazine.
One bullet instantly kills any bad guy. (But good guys can get shot in the face and still go on to kick the bad guys ass.)
Have a round chambered, but work the action and one doesn't pop out, but hey, "working the action is cool and scary
Lasers being visible. Lasers being audible. Audible shit in space. And no one has ever heard of Newton's laws.
So given that we know Hollywood has such a rotten track record with the things we geeks know, I guess one thing we can rejoice about is this - all that sex the male leads are getting is just as fictional and unrealistic as the above
The sea changes color, but the sea does not change.
That's not true. V for Vendetta had Dell logos ... ;-)
Best movie ever for accurate portrayal of shooting and ammo: Heat. That gun scene as they come out of the bank is really spot on. They are reloading constantly as you would if you were tossing off 30 round clips in that kind of situation. For the most part they fire in short bursts as well instead of just holding down the trigger and emptying a clip. The only iffy bit is how the hell they'd carry that much ammo on them, but give or take that issue, pretty solid.
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How could they forget Armageddon? It's a movie premised on the idea that it's easier to teach oil drillers to be astronauts than teach astronauts how to drill a hole. It's got a shuttle docking on the outside ring of a rotating space station. It's got a single Russian cosmonaut refueling the shuttle through a single hose he wrestles around. It's got a nuclear bomb that must be planted exactly 800 feet below the surface of an asteroid, giving an excuse for dramatic dialog of the "Oh no! We're only at 790 feet!" sort. It's got inappropriate machine guns. It's the perfect example of a film about science and technology written and directed by Hollywood types who never took a word of advice from any pesky technical advisors.
Q: What does the "B." in Benoit B. Mandelbrot stand for? A: Benoit B. Mandelbrot
Yes you can. If the nuke is running windows, simply infect your PDA with the latest worm. Then when you plug it into the nuke, the nuke will cease to be dangerous instead endeavoring to send out ads for Viagra to any other nukes it can talk to.
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Is the humour of this article actually at gideontech's site?
Or is the punch-line found in the fact that slashdot users crashed their mysql server before even 20 responses were made?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Everything in films is exaggerated. Just look at gunshots; people fly in the air after catching a bullet, when in reality they wouldn't even fall over. Movies are never close to reality, so I would expect technology to be close either, especially because of how trendy it is and how obsolete it becomes.
They must have been using a HP. It was realistic after all!
www.shortman.com.au - top shorted stocks on the ASX
Pick any police/detective/thriller series I've seen (American, British, Swedish...) where the officers are "searching the database". Remember to always include the following:
1) A single huge textbox for entering search criteria. Preferably filling the whole screen.
2) Text slowly appearing on screen, preferably one letter at a time with a blipping noise.
3) As the search is being performed, all records must flash by the screen.
4) If no match, the words NO MATCH must fill the screen, preferably on a multicolored flashing background.
5) A records must fill exactly one screen. No scrolling or paging allowed.
That crap was barely tolerable in the 80s, but these days? 75% of the population use computers daily for crying out loud.
Being bitter is drinking poison and hoping someone else will die
Clearly written by a boy who wasn't tall enough to reach the ticket counter when Jurassic Park was in theaters, to say nothing of Wargames.
Yeah, most of those movies are truly terrible (and how did they miss "The Net"?), but the 10-year-old girl in Jurassic Park (who's been of legal drinking age for almost 3 years!) was shown using a real app called FSN that was indeed contemporary with the SGI gear of 1993 - a far cry from the Macromedia Director abominations of Mission: Impossible, for sure.
And listing WarGames - blasphemy! OK, it's ridiculous that Matthew Broderick would leave the speech synthesizer on (unless he was blind), but we (er, some people) really did use wardialers back then (well, just called them dialers before WarGames...), and man that IMSAI rig was sweet, if a little dated by 1983. Considering that typewriters still vastly outnumbered PC's at the time, the Internet had just switched over to TCP/IP, and the notion of booking an airline reservation with a home computer (fraudulently or not) was gee-whiz stuff, I'm willing to cut this movie much slack.
-Isaac
I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. For Entertainment Purposes Only.
This is 2006, not 1995, you can't just make stuff up like this anymore. In the middle of the film, Harrison Ford happens to not only be a security expert, but an Apple hardware developer too. Pfft, I went to a press screening preview for Hackers, and believe me, you couldn't get away with that stuff in 1995 either.
I laughed very hard, but not because of any comedy in the movie.
Server has been slashdotted, here's a link to the story on mirrordot
...was the laser in Real Genius popping popcorn. It (and some other questionable but less egregious errors) completely ruined the movie for me - a movie for and about ubergeeks should really get the science right. It's not like they didn't have plenty of historical MIT / CalTech hacks to draw from...
"It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
#Shot 1 of glass office building
Narrator: She was a innocent data entry operator, he just wanted to finnish his perl program.
BUT! they were destined for a roller coaster ride from hell
#Shot 2 Close up of smoking server, flickering lights
Male Geek 1 with shocked voice: "Whats happening"
#girl screams
Male Geek 2: " I dont know I just posted a link to an article on one of the servers to slashot"
Male Geek 1 shouting: "Oh my god it's going to blow"
#Shot 3 Glass Office Building on fire lots of smoke and running people
Narrator: if you have never seen a movie about computers this movie shouldnt be missed
#Shot 4 Little Girl with Del Computer
Little Girl "Daddy I can turn on your laptop"
Father screaming "NOOOO"
#Shot 5 Little girl getting blown to bits.
Narrator: the slashdotting coming to a cinema near you, just pray you never get linked.
It's been alleged that the way that Trinity hacks into a computer system in The Matrix is quite realistic.
A bit unfair to my favorite movie, WarGames.
The voice of the WOPR is a necessary cinematic element so that the audience can relate to the "character" of the computer. But consider how realistic the movie is:
1. Wardialing is more-or-less plausibly portrayed (this is where the name comes from!)
2. While the particular technique shown won't work the idea of phreaking a pay phone to make free calls (redboxing) is not far-fetched.
3. The IMSAI computer was intentionally chosen as out-of-date junk that a young hacker might have found dumpster diving.
4. My favorite: a realistic security hole created by an employee (in this case of NORAD) who attached a modem to his desk computer so that he could login from home without realizing the security implications.
5. Hacking the school computer by reading the password taped to the desk.
6. Back door password.
There are some more unrealistic things such as the acoustic modem which is too fast and can dial and go on/off hook, that were added for cinematic reasons. The WOPR AI is of course totally unrealistic but necessary for the plot.
I have never seen another movie that even attempted to portray the hacker mindset as accurately as WarGames.
I'd have to vote for Matrix Reloaded with "sshnuke": http://www.securityfocus.com/print/news/4831 .
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I mean, that NEVER happens in real life. Does it?
Please stop stalking me, bro.
Well, it was a dystopia.
How about that movie where the guy's webserver is melted because he posted an article that every geek on the internet wanted to read?
Oh, wait...
-David
Unrealistic stuff in movies causes real difficulties in the real world.
There was a problem with a line item in a database that had no part number against it. It had originated from an order from a group of people who are allowed to order anything they want. The item description was "A sword that cuts through anything". There was no part number, so we had to try to track down this item. We figured it was probabaly something someone had seen in a catalogue where the capabilities were exagerated a bit. Eventually we tracked down the source - apparently it was something they had seen in a Lara Croft movie. [sigh]
Australian running a company that does C# / C++ / Java / SQL / Python / Mathematica
I think the worst movie about a computer guy would have to be swordfish. Creating a worm doesn't involve moving little 3-D blocks around on a computer screen.
Back in '93, it would be very unlikely a 10 year old girl would understand UNIX since it practically didn't exist at home computers and kids usually don't have access to UNIX servers.
Standards compliance is a wonderful thing.
Nerds wax on about misrepresentations of technology in the movies. Perhaps they're missing emotional representation of whatever movies try to present. Like in hackers joey looks into trash file. Film is made for non-geeks, to exemplify the excitiement in relation the specified topic like hacking. Which is why hackers is far better then takedown in terms of watchability. In fact per hackers, there were no computerized 3d effects were used as they would've brought coldness into the movie.(A the time 3d was expensive and immature)
So point is, movies are for fun. If you want details, go get a documentary. Its is simlar to coding projects, you can have it fun, technically correct and on budget. Pick two.
Die Hard... Say no more. I laughed the whole way through. The icing on the cake was when Mr Hard O'Dying pushes up a metal grate in the middle of the runway to get out onto the tarmac... That really cracked me up.
How's that for user-friendly!!!
Anyone care to take a guess at what movie that was from?
(I can't read the list as I am getting mySQL errors on the website, I don't know if this movie is on the list)
This space for rent
MirrorDot.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I always watch it when i get miserable and it does the job. http://www.revolution-os.com/ also i have seen a movie with Microsoft and Apple when they started [Bill Gates is really cool there] but i don't remember the name of it.
That's when your post lost the plot, nearly as much as Firewall itself. I know a lot of VeriSign MSS engineers who would disagree with you about the technical merits of that particular movie.
What's the surprise? Movies get technical stuff wrong all the time. Physics? Biology? Watch any action sequence. Don't even get me started on how they butcher the legal system.
Im surprised that nobody here mentioned TRON (http://imdb.com/title/tt0084827/) yet.
Now that was really stupid tech-wise.
Amusing, and pretty, but just unreal.
As for the sci-fi criteria - its pretty much as sci-fi as any other movie out there. Documentaries and bio's excluded.
Well, he did say:
I, for one, would want young Angelina Jolie to be topless.
At all times.
In my room.
Ignore this signature. By order.
DuggMirror's copy.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Please get a grip. Films have always been full of innacuracies. It's fiction for heaven's sake. Just because these fictions are in your area of expertise is no reason to get so wound up by it. If it bothers you so much, don't watch it.
...or dentures?
Superteeth! Repelling Plaque at every turn, by virtue of being completely incompatible with it!
http://nand.net/~demaria/hollywood.txt
Here's a sample: (From Jurassic Park) A custom system with millions of lines of code controlling a multimillion dollar theme park can be operated by a 13 year old who has seen a Unix system before. Seeing an operating system means you know how to run any application on that system, even custom apps.
Note: What OS was it really running?
(1) "These are super computers". A CrayOS?
(2) "Quicktime movie, Apple logo, trash can." MacOS?
(3) "Reboot. System ready. C:\" DOS?
(4) "Hey, this is Unix. I know this" Unix?
The computers in Jurassic Park were Cray supercomputers running the MacOS as a graphical shell of DOS all layered on top of a Unix base.
I always enjoy the sound of the old Mac II disk drive (don't know exactly what drive they used, IBM?)that is used for both deleting, copying and searching in many movies.
FA is slashdotted so sorry if this is redundant...
The thing which really made me cringe in Wargames was the fact that he realistically dials in, starts a countdown timer running which you see tick off time, and then logs off, but the countdown timer continues to count down.
At the time it really bothered me (I liked the movie, otherwise). But now I have a new inspiration about this! Maybe we can use that as prior art against patents for client-side web-apps?
I take it the author isn't all that familar with government security protocols at all. Because reading computer screens to read source code or secrets is actually something that the government does actually worry about in a number of their secure locations and even in hospitals and some doctors offices as well. I know some businesses also have issues about who can read their screens as well and use polarized filters on the windows and computer screens so that you can't read the screens from outside as well. So it isn't as far fetched as the author of the article seems to think.
I think the most unrealistic portrayal of technology is in that movie about those guys with a small web server who submitted an article to Slashdot and yet, minutes later, the server wasn't a flaming pile of melted plastic, or even smoking and shooting out arcs of electricity. Furthermore, not one person on the fictional version of the technology website has posted "f1rst p0st" or welcomed their unrealistic sci-fi overlords, and the layout of the site was both attractive AND functional.
Now THAT was unrealistic in the extreme...
What about those computers/electronics/bombs that beeps every 5 seconds or everytime you type something. If they really beep like that in real life, it will drive anyone insane just thinking how many beeps it would have made just from typing this message! and what's with the bombs beeping and have all the flashing leds and counters on them, make them easier to find?
Wargames: *I* was a cracker, hacker, and Phreak at that time. The acoustic coupler was part of the art at the time. Acoustic couplers at 110/300 baud were common. Hayes modems w/direct jacks were just on the scene for a year, maybe two at that point.
You also have to remember that about the early 80's was the time that RJ-12 jacks and the ability to wire your own home for phone service started. Yep youngin's, time was when you got charged by Ma Bell for EACH phone in your house, and those phones came from Ma Bell. Phones were hardwired to the jack. (nb: If you disconnected the ringer bell inside the phone, and left just one on there, then you only got charged for one phone... no matter how many you had).
The voice wasn't that far off from that which I had on my Apple ][ at the time - a "SuperTalker". Did a pretty damn good job too - quite understandable, even if it was a bit 'cyberish'.
And how he hacked in was also 'state of the art' at the time. Anyone remember a Demon Dialer program? Nothing too tremendous - I wrote tons of them in BASIC. Essentially:
Open modem port
Begin for loop with all local prefixes step 1
Begin for loop from 0000 to 9999 step 1
If police station - skip number
dial number
wait for response string
If modem - open printer port, print number out
next
next
You'd fire it off at night before going to bed, wake up in the morning and review the list of numbers. Then you'd call back and see what you could hack into... Sometimes the idiot thing didn't even ask for a un/pw. Sometimes it did, but in the MOTD there was enough info to get you started...
Sometimes you'd stumble on an entire network to explore (Telenet anyone?). VAXen, VMS, CP/M, and SCADA systems connected to phone lines....
The only problem with the sequential dialers was the phone co got lots of complaints from everyone who you woke up, and they'd go digging for records of sequential calls every min or so... Then you'd get a nastygram from Bell Security or a call from the cops...
The next gen Demon Dialers spiced things up a bit... Create a multi-dimensional array loaded with the prefixes and numbers. Have a bit to know if you dialed it or not, and a bit to know if it was a modem or not. Randomly pick a prefix and number to dial and check... Wait a random amount of time between 1 sec and 30 sec between dialing the next number...
But as for the rest of the movie technology usage *yawn* it's not even close... The thing that really gets me are the schmucks who pick a lock with just a pick... WHERE'S THE DAMN TENSION WRENCH?>!?!?!?!!?!?! (oh yeah, I'm also a locksmith and a tunnel rat)...
How 'bout the way in the re-imaged Battlestar Galactica, Season 1, when Starbuck figures out how to launch, fly, and land a Cylon raider that's piloted by genetic material? There's no interface for any human-sized person to fly it, yet with a little tendon pulling, a leg jab here and there, and the raider is off and going? BTW, doesn't she need some viewscreen or two to see what's going on?
Or does it not count once there's enough science fiction involved to override any "common sense" of what a human can do with the science available?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
>>by virtue of being completely incompatible I think you mean OSX there
Great Intellect...
I know it doesn't qualify for this list because it is science fiction but that movie was just horrible. That wirey looking kid "the Rat" I think it was - was the most ridiculous portrayal of hacking (maybe not as bad as Hackers).
Didn't he whistle into his phone to hack something? I don't really remember every little ridiculous thing he did but I believe that was the worst.
I LOL'd. Wish I had mod points.
I know more than you drink.
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CINEMA Operating System
Dunno if he mentioned it as the site is Slashdotted straight to server hell, but Simone was fucking horrid. Okay, so the guy has software and a wicked computer that can render photorealistic CGI in realtime. Okay. Then it has a goddamned 5.25" floppy drive in it. The fuck it would! Then he puts in a 5.25" disk called "Plague" which wipes it. Okay, that's plausible. Then he pulls all the drives, discs, basically everything with a record of this software and destroys it. Then his daughter somehow brings it all back with a keystroke, even though the damned drives were GONE!! Not to mention they were completely scrambled before they were gone! Oh yeah, and the rest of the movie sucked ass too.
Not so far fetched...
No, I think it makes Linux equivalent to bad hygiene.
Speaking of actors flubbing lines, if you ever have the misfortune to watch Red Planet, watch for the scene where Tom Sizemore (while screaming about his being a genetics expert) shouts out the four letter code for DNA's bases: "A, G, T, P!!!"
;)
(It should be 'C' not 'P'
While working on the small UFO, they were able to determine which part of the alien code turned shields on and off. (flipping buttons, looking for what happened, and analyzing any data patterns). The mothership had been using human satellites so it was configured to interact with human computer systems. They were able to access a secured terminal due to lack of physical security inside the mothership. This way they bypassed alien firewalls, etc. The code they used probably didn't even access alien technology too much and used a transmit function for the shield off command. The program, script, etc. was executed when he did the "upload virus". Hell, he could have clicked on an icon if it makes you feel better. The alien would have been able to fix this problem right away by sending the shields on command, and that's why the immediate attack and nuke were necessary.
This was the equivalent of sneaking into an enemy radio installation, giving a quick and simple command over the airwaves then blowing up the communication equipment.
Anytime they use things like "upload virus" or "jam signal"(Mission Impossible), I assume they spent the time making the script or program off-camera. It's like setting up a batch of pen-tests, I'm not going to sit there and enter individual commands for each computer.
The movie could have ended nicely right there, because what SHOULD have happened was that since HF had his seatbelt on, and Bad Guy didn't... well, rev it up to 65 then slam on the breaks. See you on the pavement!
And to make matters worse, the movie reoffends an hour later. The wife and kids finally escape, get in the family car, and start to drive away-- but stop because there's someone standing in front of the car with a gun. How about duck and floor it. Even if the underpaid minion decided to hold the line for the half a second he had left to live, I seriously doubt he could hit a moving target safely tucked away behind an engine block.
Stupid movie.
UTF-8: There and Back Again
If you had HardOCP on your main page, you would have already read (or not) the article on Friday afternoon.
anyone have seen this movie where phone booth are owned by msn and they search phone number through it? :P
anyway firewall it's a good movie and putting funny things like the ipod scanner in the movie it's a good things because it increase the reality of the movie and make harrison ford a superhero without typing password at the speed of light like superman
i am a film buff. so i knew about the movie swordfish a few months before it came out (from fan sites like aintitcoolnews.com, etc.), and i knew sketchy plot points about the movie, namely that it would be about illicit transfers of illicit funds
i also used to work for a large multinational bank as a programmer. and a few months before swordfish came out, i was developing a system used by the bank for monitoring internal transfers. on a lark, i code named the system in development as "swordfish" for my own personal use as a joke
but in email conversations with my boss, i, um, kept calling it swordfish. oops. my boss wound up raving about the system, to his bosses, to other middle management, to everyone. he started telling everyone who would listen about it because the basic idea behind the project was a sound one and it was important for the bank. unfortunately, he kept calling it "swordfish," and the name stuck and went into general use
awareness of the swordfish project just happened to peak when the movie came out. to widespread media coverage and exposure and advertising. and the basic details about a hacker breaking into a financial computer system to transfer funds became common knowledge, even to people who didn't see the movie. and at the same time, here was my boss making an internal push to distribute this program to wider use for testing, and trying to drum up support for it amongst the higher ranking middle management... and it was called swordfish
he stopped raving about the program, and my boss got in the habit of shaking his head and smirking every time he saw me. but we never spoke about the "coincidence". he must have gotten laughed at pretty hard on my behalf
so the plot guys get the technical details wrong sometimes
i am living proof that sometimes the technical guys get the plot points wrong
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I know this is sacrilege, but the PC's running Mac OS in Office Space always bugged the hell out of me. Especially that scene where Mac OS shuts down to a C:\ prompt, makes me grit my teeth every time.
I was conned by an old man in a cloak. It turns out those *were* the droids I was looking for.
How about Richard Pryor Hacking in Superman 3? where he just types list! haha classic
Amen to that! It's all about the coffee-pot.
For those insterested in learning more about what movies are made of, may I suggest reading up on "Moving Pictures" by Terry Pratchett?
- Spinner
- Here's to everyone with no signature!
This is really a bad list. . . . They totally ignore things like Independence Day
Yeah, that could be something to do with the bit at the top of the article where they said they were deliberately excluding all science fiction movies.
If the had wanted to break *every* rule in the book, NASA would have *missed* the asteroid for a change.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
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Damn, these hackers are good!
So, being a computer geek isn't interesting enough on film; they have to dramatise it.
But this applies to pretty much every job. Do you think an average spy's day is like a James Bond film? Or do you think they spend most of their day sitting in a car drinking cold coffee whilst listening through hours and hours of dull domestic telephone calls?
What do most eco-warriors actually do? Fight running battles on oil rigs, or spend weeks in squalid apartments searching through scientific and legal journals?
The fact that Hollywood focusses on life's edge cases and dramatisations shouldn't come as any surprise.
And I'm quite happy with that - I want explosions on the big screen, not on my doorstep.
Andrew Oakley - www.aoakley.com
The real stuff is pretty boring; if we waited for PCs to boot, programs to start, connections to be made etc, then the movies would suck! so for me it is ok to show 'wild computer stuff' in a movie, as long as the audience pretty much recognizes that what it is displayed is fake at some degree.
If we want to be purists, then we shall reject almost all of science fiction, from Star Trek down to Space Odyssey 2001, because it is not realistic enough. Teleporters, phasers photon torpedoes, quantum missiles, wormholes, artificial intelligence, the HAL etc are all products of the human imagination with one purpose: to entertain us.
Hackers was a great movie. It wasn't a tech documentary. They tried to convey a lifestyle, the emotions of script kiddies, the feeling of being immersed into technology, and a cheesy love story. On top of that the movie is full of references to actual hacker lore. No reference goes deeper than a dropped name, but I found that entertaining. When they dive into a problem, the data surrounds them. That is a fitting visual representation of "the zone". It is not meant to be an accurate reproduction of hacking. Besides, killer soundtrack.
"Their biggest nitpick is that computer voice".
...
Yeah, but not for the reason you named or that it was available for a highschool-kid (David/Mathew broderick) at that time.
What amazed me was that the voice sounded the same everywhere, no matter if it came from the voice-synthesizer in the kids room, or in that pentagon defence-center, somehow having the exact same sound-hardware as the kid has. Just whats the chance that that would happen ?
Yeah, I know, I too would get confused if the voice would change depending on the different locations. I'm just nitpicking
Any weapon that could knock a person off their feet would have to be anchored, otherwise the person firing would also be knocked off their feet.
By reading this you acknowledge that you have read it.
Everyday we all use computers to do stuff and to get them to perform actions etc we click on stuff with a mouse but in a movie when anyone ever sits at a computer they get it to do stuff by typing at the keyboard. When was the last time you even say someone use a mouse on TV or in a movie. Even when it clearly shows a GUI on the screen they always issue command by typing stuff in.
...and they KEEP repeating it, time and again, is that one where a technician selects a small segment of a picture (usually in an FBI/CIA kind of setting and the picture involves some criminal or the like) and zooms it up to amazing detail, and in high resolution too! It's like the program automatically creates the detail all by itself! Or maybe that kind of software DOES exist? Sometimes I wonder, if that technician kept 'zooming' in to that segments, where would it end up? individual atoms that make up the criminals skin???
It would be more interesting to see the 10 times they got it right. I don't really think the detail is that important, like when a login screen is clearly drawn and not an actual login. What is much more annoying is when the plot is based on something that is counter to reality.
The lockpicking sucked, but the phreaking was amazing. If you watch carefully in the scene where he calls from a phone box, you'll notice that he does a little something with the coin return while sendinding tones from a little box. That's called red-boxing - his little box create the tones for "coin inserted" - and the thing he does with the coin return is a short circuit. The short is to indicate that coin is inserted, and the tones indicate the type of coin.
Let's face it, folks. Our jobs and hobbies are just boring to an outsider to watch. We type a few cryptic things, then screens of "nonsense" scroll by (aka "compiling a tool"), or we sit there and wait for a connection to finish, make a call or two, chat with other likeminded people... where's the action, where's the thrill, suspense or anything that doesn't scream "boooooring" to an onlooker.
Another problem is that this what makes it exciting isn't immediately understandable. You also can't explain it in 5 minutes, so someone sitting in the background and "explaining" it to someone (as a vehicle to explain it to the watchers of the movie) doesn't work either.
So I'd stop trying so hard. Those that know will understand. Those that don't won't care. Instead, team the hacker with the usual standard action film buff and have them go to work together. That can work for anything, from classic fast paced action movie to cheesy action comedy.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Mass of a .45 ACP bullet: 17g (this is higher than everything but specialty loads, but let's run with it) .45 ACP bullet with a +p load: 290 m/s
.017*290=4.93 Kg*m/s
.154 meters/second when shot with this bullet. That child is not going to be "knocked off [its] feet"--it probably will fall down, but that's entirely from physiological shock.
Muzzle velocity of a
Momentum:
Let's take a small child, massing in at 32 kilograms. That child is going to experience an acceleration of
Summary: you don't have the slightest clue what you're talking about.
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davecb5620@gmail.com
Am I that old?
It's a reel of tape. My grandad had a similar recorder that I used to play with in my youth.
Dang youngsters. Get off my lawn.
Seriously, that's one of the few Hollywood movies to have respected the speed of sound in gunfights (esp. the ambush scene). Then again, Micheal Mann also tries to atone for his earlier sins in Miami Vice by making the reports from the pistols less foleyed.
...and I'm sure it's impossible to break a 128-bit encryption code while recieving a blow job just by typing quickly, although it would be fun to try
How about a film where a terrorist organisation is brought to it's knees by having its website put on Slashdot? Now that would be realistic!
You're missing the point. The characters in that movie were so petrified that there's no way they would attempt to flee that scene. Besides, the car was parked beside a house and she would have to put it in reverse, back up, turn, then go. Which is the kind of maneuverability skills a mother of two scared to death just doesn't have in a movie. A single woman chased by a dozen criminals, however, would.
load this page
http://time.gov/timezone.cgi?Eastern/d/-5/java
now disconnect your network connection...
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
It's a general rule that the Bad Guys use PCs, the Good Guys Macs. The change in 24's CTU from Mac to PCs is an ominous sign.
In Superman III, Gus Gorman (Richard Pryor) notices his "talent" with computers when he types "LIST" in the computer keyboard and a BASIC program listing is shown on the screen (the program was stupid AFAIR, a few lines of code numbered 10, 20... as usual).
Thats SCIENCE fiction.
What's the name of the one where they assemble a crack team of hackers and then drive a tank down the middle of the street and blow the doors of the bank.
davecb5620@gmail.com
You'd fire it off at night before going to bed, wake up in the morning and review the list of numbers.[...] The only problem with the sequential dialers was the phone co got lots of complaints from everyone who you woke up, and they'd go digging for records of sequential calls every min or so... Then you'd get a nastygram from Bell Security or a call from the cops...[...](oh yeah, I'm also a locksmith and a tunnel rat)
But most of all you are a prize asshole.
Linux would be dentures. They don't come with the system, you have to install them.
(I know, the analogy fairy is going to kill me now. I'm sorry.)
Heh - I had a hayes direct connect - darn, remember what those things COST!! A 1200baud Hayes cost more than a computer costs now. I had a 300 baud at home, and a 1200 at the lab. Remember having to order data grade lines?
/. are alive (anyway by the last poll I saw)
I remember when modens came DOWN to the 200 dollar or so price mark - what a breakthrough - and remember - if you were GOOD, you could actually speedread a 300 baud text data stream - without X-on X-off
Yeah folks - there are some OLD geeks here - I actually worked with punch cards (still have a couple of boxes of them - use them as note paper when feeling geeky) Gettting a terminal was COOL - even a 75 baud teletype. If you had a DEC Flexwriter, you were BIG time..
Sigh
I'll bet that I've offically been a programmer (aka getting paid for it) longer than MOST people on
Gahhh - can't believe I said that - man I'm feeling like an old fart today. Ran into a YL yesterday who recognized me - and she said "hi" and offerered me her cheek - took me a few seconds to realize it was a friend's daughter who I have not seen in 2 years. I remember holding her while she was in diapers.
-- 73 de KG2V For the Children - RKBA! "You are what you do when it counts" - the Masso
Well the site is down, but browsing through the summary and comments I see that Jurrasic Park is on there and Firewall...so my bones to be picking.
Jurrasic Park...well when I saw this I thought "damnit that is stupid" but I hadn't touched linux yet...some years roll by...I install linux...stumble across a 3d file system viewer thing and I thought to myself "This is Jurrasic Park! I know this!" Not to mention any claims of a kid that young not being able to use a computer has obviously not spent any time around kids that young with computers. I was writing simple programs in BASIC on my C64 at age 11, and I have seen kids these days that make that seem pretty behind the curve.
Firewall...iffy movie...was sorta entertaining...was actually hoping for a little more tech focus but was still pleasantly surprised that they addressed the whole security thing as not just being wizbang nonsense. You can bet when your organization catches some alerts all your firewall guys are going to be sitting watching traffic and putting in new blocks...or you should probably be letting them go. As far as the iPod thing..well..it was a bit of a stretch, but hardly unbelievable given the number of odd ipod hacks out and about. I mean its totally unrealistic to expect people to do strange things with an ipod right? Go look at how they got linux on an ipod...using the piezo to dump the software via audio and recording it and then reassembling it from an audio dump?! That is freaking impressive geek stuff, and terribly innovative. So you are going to tell me there is no possible way to make an ipod a portable scanning thing when its already been hacked so much? Quit yer bitchin, just because noone has ACTUALLY done it doesn't mean it can't be done...of coarse...unless you refuse to believe that aircraft work, radar works, or computers exist, etc etc etc.
That having been said...I think some of the other movies are probably spot on. Hackers was so much innane drivel that the parts bearing any truth were so lost in the cruft that its just easier to assume its all stupid...fun movie to watch none the less...but technologically stupid...and a villian on a skateboard...ugh how Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle do you have to be?
The only change I can believe in is what I find in my couch cushions.
When whizkid sits down by the fence control computers.
Starts flying around in some 3D interface. In 1996.
"This is a UNIX system! I know this!!!".
Yeah. Real UNIX like...
Sneakers, while a good movie, was ridiculous when it came to decryption. Besides the ludicrous speed of the device, the way it decrypted on the screen is non-sensical. But, that's was just eye-candy in an otherwise good movie.
Have you read my journal today?
I love Armageddon. Watched it a crapload of times. But then again I also own all 6 seasons of Xena, Hercules, Highlander and the original Star Trek.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
since they are fictional, i don't expect them to be accurate.
i believe the audience will be very bored watching movies if everything were to be done as is. there's no thrill and excitement.
when i do watch movies and i see it to be wrong, i just ignore it so i can still have fun watching it. otherwise, if i go complaining all the inaccuracies, then bah!
Live your life each day as if it was your last.
If you enjoy this kind of thing, I also recommend the Insultingly Bad Movie Physics page. Includes information about the bad physics that crop up all the time, and reviews of particular movies. Most recent article piece on the site? "Bioinformatics and Hollywood".
I can't believe no one has mentioned Firefox yet. The Clint Eastwood flick where he is tapped to steal the latest Soviet jet that is controlled by thought, and he is the man because he knows Russian?
they should've used a *real* database engine.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Speedread 300baud? Are you kidding? That was way too slow. I remember how happy I was when 1200 came out, because the bulletin boards I read were 'one key' compatible. That is, you could log in, and then just hit the space bar and go through ALL the new messages posted, and since i could read at modem speed, it was like direct download into your head.
There is an Episode of Macgyver Where He gets a 5 Inch Floppy into his Shirt Pocket by Folding it First. - Oy !
Let's push this discussion into the TV arena.
24 is still a fairly decent show, but season by season they've been relying more and more on this type of B.S. technology to the point where I can barely watch the show.
The new show Vanished is that 10 times over. I refuse to watch it anymore, but my wife insists on continuing.
The popular police drama comes to mind with this, I just got to get the software they use. However, the worst, best ?, I ever say was in "Enemy of the State" when the techie is able to change the point of view of a recorded video image to see behind a person in order to see what he is slipping into the hero's bag. At that point I just got up and left the room.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
"The only teeth strong enough to eat other teeth."
Just can't get enough Futurama.
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
You had modems?
:-)
Young'un. Spoiled brats with their newfangled tech. IN MY DAY, WE SPEEDREAD ACOUSTIC PHONE SIGNALS DIRECTLY INTO THE DAMN RECEIVER. KZZZCHHHHZKKKKZHHHTTTTKKKCHZZZZZZZZBLEEEEEEP. Hoarse for days, I tell you. And all that clicking on connect? That's an obscure Bantu dialect of Swahili. I tell you. When you said you learned a new language, it was a real language, not that that object-oriented fiddlesticks you have today. Internet? We'd just SHOUT PACKET CONTENTS at each other REAL LOUD.
That is, when we weren't busy touching live wires together to program in binary. There's a reason why a lot of 1970s hackers had huge frizzy hair. I tell you. Computing got a lot more interesting after electricity was invented.
Man, I'm an old fart too, but I so hate old-school technology downmanship
Cole's Law: Thinly sliced cabbage
I think people really miss the point with the "This is UNIX, I know this" scene from Jurassic Park.
The thing people should be complaining about is that the little girl was able to repair everything that was broken on the park just by running /usr/foobar.sh, which presumably contain all the initialization scripts for every single security problem that was happening on the park.
Yet Newman (yeah, I had to google the actor's name, it's Wayne Knight) was shown on screen burning the midnight oil trying to hack the security system. Unless Newman was trying to figure out
"#!/bin/sh
services park_security off #HOLY CRAP T-REX RUNNING AROUND",
it couldn't have been that simple to make everything Just Work (TM) again.
PS: Yeah, I'm sure someone's going to correct me and say "Hey there was no services command in 1992, we had to tell the OS which services to run by changing bits on the initialization script on the HD with a magnet", or something of the sort. Well, I never ran System V, you know those damn kids that only know Linux and FreeBSD... But you got the point.
Ah, Antitrust. The movie that was blatantly anti-Microsoft. And so blatantly ridiculous when it came to tech. I'm a Windows using gal, but I know enough about the *nixes to be insulted when a movie attempts to claim that "mount" does the same thing as "ls."
And don't even get me started about how they drove the wrong way down Broadway in Portland.
It's not sexy, and it won't work against well-implemented security plans, but thanks to human nature bashing is still a simple and common method. Tried and true.
While I thought The Recruit was a pretty exciting movie,
the scene where Colin Farrell writes a program in 30 seconds designed to crack a CIA officer's password in under 10 was pretty far fetched.
(I wish I could code and crack like that)
Um no... more like....
"He needs to build it..."
"Okay...how much will Apple pay to make it an iPOD???"...
Dunno, call them up and ask..
Product placement is huge in entertainment media.
It's never by accident or ignorance.
The thing which really made me cringe in Wargames was the fact that he realistically dials in, starts a countdown timer running which you see tick off time, and then logs off, but the countdown timer continues to count down.
Is it so hard to believe that the WOPR was using screen as its default shell? man screen
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
It's basically a list of movies which feature a prominent computer part. It's not the ones who got it wrong.
My specific annoyance is that the author thinks a high quality security feed could never be used to lift text off a screen. Not because it's so hard to film a CRT (which would have been a decent, although arguable, objection), but because the author doesn't know what OCR algorithms are...
In Independence Day Jeff Goldblum just happens to figure out how to establish an uplink with an alien mothership, able to work with it's protocols, and able to infect it's system with a virus.......
Umm yeah
That's because he started a simulation without ending it. If I use VNC to remotely start a game of, say, Starcraft on my computer, then disconnect, would you expect that Starcraft would just stop?
Presumably that was by design, because if you wanted to do a long simulation you wouldn't want to have to be logged on every second for 5 days.
Comment of the year
I didn't think it was that bad - How implausible is it to take video capture and feed it into an OCR system to 'steal' code from someone elses screen?
Yes, all that is very improbable. But the real BS about it is that if she was a real computer geek, she would have gone off on a scoffing tirade about how she couldn't believe that they didn't use [insert favorite *nix flavor].
OK, we all know the stupid things done with technology in movies. They do stupid things with everything else too, from medicine to police to martial arts. (Steven Seagal's amazing medical recovery in Hard to Kill was an awesomely bad rendition of all three) But what are the ones that did a decent job portraying technology? Sneakers? Weird Science? Real Genius?
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Good point. In Smallville, when Lex Luthor offers to help Chloe rebuild the school paper's offices, all the colourful little iMacs get replaced by huge yellow Alienware boxen. Shortly thereafter, Lex makes Chloe betray Clark...
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
I'd have to say my biggest pet peeve is the 'laser' guns in star trek and star wars. Seriously. Why don't they just call them some kind of 'energy' gun instead?? This at least would borrow on 'science' that's truly fictional instead of something we already have, everyone has seen, and everyone knows is faux. For most of the disregard for accurate science in movies, I just take it for what it is.. a way to keep the movie interesting. I'd say the only ones that really need a thumbs down are the ones that are so bad even joe average and his dog know they're faux.
There is no -1 Disagree mod. Slashdot.org/faq defines mod options. USE IT.
They Are Missing Superman 3. The WORST Movie Ever! [FROM http://www.agonybooth.com/superman_3/default.asp?P age=2%5D
Several students at the "Archibald Data Processing School" have witnessed the mayhem from a window. Inside, we see a small chalkboard and students hard at work on several computer terminals, and Gus Gorman is among them. A female student whose face isn't shown asks the instructor a question, and her line is clumsily looped in. "Excuse me, but what if, uh, you want to program two bilateral coordinates at the same time?" The teacher calls this "impossible" but Gus nervously raises his hand. "Sir?" He shows the commands on his screen and types a few keys. Of course, this computer is one of the first personal models ever made and it's hard to be impressed by flashing green text. [Editor's Note: And as a programmer, I have to step in here and point out that Gus is programming in BASIC, and his entire program is nothing but PRINT statements. Actually, they're mostly empty PRINT statements, meaning Gus has just written a very complex program that will display... absolutely nothing. --Albert]
Nevertheless, it does the trick for the teacher, who exclaims, "Good Lord, how did you do that?" A bewildered Gus says, "I don't know! I just did it!"
That's How You Learn You Are A computer Genius! When You "Just do It!"
1200? Hah! I used to read at 9600, while watching TV!
The latest Slashdot meme.
The Master Control Program name came from the OS for a series of Burroughs mainframes starting with the B5000. The MCP itself was quite a revolutionary piece of software, being the first OS to be fully written in an HLL, the first OS to have virtual memory, and so forth.
:)
Alan Kay consulted for Tron, and he was quite a fan of the Burroughs; the tagged-data architecture the Burroughs used (a precursor to a similar idea used in Lisp Machines), and the code+data storage method on another Burroughs machine, the 220, both influenced the way Smalltalk and object-oriented programming developed.
By the way, the MCP lives on today, in the Unisys ClearPath architecture. Remember that next time you go to the bank or make an ATM withdrawal (due to their legendary stability, MCP systems were widely used by financial institutions).
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
NUMB3RS Stars David Krumholtz, who had a big part in Serenity. Krumholtz plays a mathemetician that uses math and computers to help catch the bad guys. They actually have a mathemetician on staff to help write the script (I have a friend who's an editor on the show).
The only way that they could get that whole movie to work hinged on the security access for a fired and arrested employee not being deactivated. I don't know about where you work, but when we have someone hauled off in handcuffs, the FIRST thing we do is set about disabling all their accounts and access.
2 cents,
QueenB
HDGary secures my bank
As for Firewall, I think they did a pretty good job of being realistic. The scanner IPod thing was a stretch, but when they do computer security in the movie it looks like an actual computer. We see actual firewall rules and such that look like what I'd see on my actual computer. Given that it was a hollywood movie built around a very technical subject, I was pretty impressed with the realism level.As for Firewall, I think they did a pretty good job of being realistic. The scanner IPod thing was a stretch, but when they do computer security in the movie it looks like an actual computer. We see actual firewall rules and such that look like what I'd see on my actual computer. Given that it was a hollywood movie built around a very technical subject, I was pretty impressed with the realism level.
I agree, I thought Firewall was very well done. Agreed, the scanner/iPod thing was a stretch, but hey, at least they got the basic components right (a FAX machine really does contain optical scanning stuff, and an iPod really can be used as a hard drive to store pictures).
What impressed me most about Firewall was that they actually tried to deemphasize the tech stuff, visually - there was a lot of tech stuff, but the tech stuff wasn't the main focus of the scene, it's just what the characters were using, because we live in a world filled with tech stuff. The main focus was on the characters.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
I'll admit I haven't seen all the movies in this list, but given what I have seen, and given how he's described them, the only one I can really agree with is #1, Firewall.
WarGames is disqualified automatically by the author's own rules: it's science fiction! Joshua was supposed to be the pinnacle of AI, having learned far more than even its current maintainers have realized.
As for Jurassic Park (which, incidentally, is also science fiction, but we'll let that slide), his complaint about the 10-year-old Unix geek is really reaching. Since when have movies not been full of child prodigies? And what does that have to do with how the technology itself is being portrayed?
A good bit of the rest of the list seems to nitpick the characters' talents, which, while often implausible, are not outright impossible. There are a whole crop of much better examples out there. Here are just a few off the top of my head:
The Net: Great movie in my humble-and-not-widely-shared opinion, but the idea of Castle Wolfenstein 3D being the "latest gaming craze" in 1995 was laughable. And remember that IP address?
Enemy of the State: This movie is good enough to forgive the latitude/longitute coordinates that are not as accurate as the movie would have people believe, but the ability to make 3-D models based on a single security camera's grainy video feed had me rolling in the aisle.
Disclosure: Wow, voice recognition, virtual reality, and AI helpers have really come a long way! Wait, no they haven't, at least not when the year is still 1994. You can arguably file those away under "science fiction," but all the buzz words that were indiscriminantly thrown about didn't help matters any.
But forget the medium. In drama, you use shorthand. If you've got a scene where the police visit a widow, you don't film the cops ringing a doorbell, the widow asking, "Who is it," they say, "The police," and the door opens. You don't start with the door opening. You start with the widow weeping over her husband's photos, looking up to the officers, and saying "It was Dracula."
It used to be portrayed in long-hand. It's taken decades for directors, editors, and the audience to build and accept the quick takes. Now we are in such a short-hand mode, we are impatient for them to cut to the point and move on.
They may have Apple logos on them but did you ever notice the Apple logo is sometimes upside down so it is readable when the laptop lid is open.
BTW - Did anyone notice a new Nissan commercial where the guy uses an Apple monitor. I wonder if Nissan had to pay Apple to use its logo on the ad or did Apple have to pay Nissan to get its monitor in the ad.
Page was generated in 1159198028.983965 seconds
which, in round numbers, is 36 years, 267 days, 15 hours, and change.
Good thing I started downloading the page just before the Apollo 11 moon landing, otherwise I'd still be waiting.
It seems everbody has forgotten which film truely deserves to be #1:
Tron
Due to the server being down here are a couple other movies that should be on the list.
Lawnmover Man
Innerspace
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
I actually worked on the CM5 "thinking machine" supercomputer. The line in Mission Impossible when he says he want's a thinking machine laptop had me laughing out loud in the theater. People were turning and looking at me.
g es/CM5_lg.jpg
In case you don't know, the thinking machine was a HUGE system, I have had smaller apartments.
http://archive.ncsa.uiuc.edu/Cyberia/MetaComp/Ima
You may also remember this system being referenced in Jurassic Park.
I still have a mental image of Ving Rhames being crushed by his thinking machine laptop.
Sure, the aliens do a bunch of magic, but hey, they are supposed to be more advanced than us. Look around where you are right now, and I bet you could find five things that would be 'magic' and 'impossible' to people even a century ago in 1906. (Start with the computer you're reading this on.)
Sadly, I have a hard time coming up with much more. Maybe The Manhattan Project isn't too far off. Several things in it are (ahem) highly implausible, and the specific design chosen wouldn't work, but nothing that's actually physically impossible happens.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
Don't forget archaelogy. I'm no archaelogist, but I can't imagine the day to day work being like The Da Vinci Code, National Treasure, or Indiana Jones.
But, anyway, we geeks should be honored that Hollywood takes enough interest in our not-that-interesting-to-us fields to make fluff entertainment out of them. Overlooking the usual medical/law/cop/spy/military shows/movies, how much entertainment centered around other specialized professions has been made?
You don't see many movies/films (or even supporting characters) based on civil engineering, sociology, or English literature, do you? Shoot, computer tech movies are beating out those archaelogy films* and archaelogy's been around forever! So take that, archaelogy!
*Comparison is limited to the quantity of entertainment in each genre, not the quality.
Ya know, noone's mentioning it, but I cringed a bit when he dialed in, because it wasn't technically realistic with his equipment. It was an acoustic coupler for a handset. On the ones that I had used, you dialed the phone number manually, waited for the carrier, then put the phone in the cradle and started the session. The acoustic couplers were incapable of going on and off hook without human intervention. Once they did develop the hardware to plug your phone cable into the modem, they no longer needed the acoustics.
I rationalized that away by saying to myself "well, he must have made a circuit that we don't see to do the bullshit technical stuff that we really don't need to bother with because it's just a movie..."
Just look at what kind of girl the übergeek ends up with.
Where are hackergirls like that? Err. Where are girls like that?
Defining Statistics and Social Research
Hah, I build a converter that converted signals from my pocket calculator into modem numbers, and hand typed in the binary code necessary to send. I had a headset on me so that I could hear the response.
I could send signals at 14.4k but receive signals at 33.6k. The problem was getting all that data to the hard drive. That's for another post.
But when I say this to the younger generation today, they don't believe me...
not likely have access to UNIX since it was almost entirely only available at universities, government offices and large businesses.
UNIX was twice as old as the kid back in 1993. UNIX and Unix-like OS's had beed around for PCs for six or seven years at that point -- including PC's like the Tandy Color Computer (OS/9 - also available for the Atari ST series). Other 'nix flavors included Minix, QNX, Xenix, Coherent, and, by '93, BSD and Linux. Plus, in the mid-80's everyone and his brother were making comparatively cheap 'nix workstations (based on M68K, Z8000, NC32032, or what have you) running a real port of System V. You could get Apple Unix (A/UX) for the Lisa.
Anyone familiar with any of those would recognize a unix system, and they all ran on affordable hardware. (For various values of affordable).
And there was very limited net access back then so learning remotely would be difficult too.
The "net" in those days was mostly dial-up modems and UUCP. Ever hear of Usenet? That goes back many years too. And there were plenty of books around -- I taught myself Unix back around 1983 from a paperback book by Que publishing (forget the title). Well, that and man pages and access to a PDP 11/34 (128K of memory, 10MB of disk!) running Version 7.
I find your lack of faith...disturbing.
-- Alastair
And then, in fifteen minutes, when the Bad Guy doesn't call in, the guys with his family assume that HF has managed to take the bad guy out, and kills the family.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
Their biggest nitpick is that computer voice. The "voice" from the computer is clearly just a text to voice synthesizer which, may be a little high end but remember TI had voice synthesizers for their computers around 1980.
I don't even see this as a valid nitpick. Computer synthesized voices have been around for ages, and sound pretty-much just like the one in the movie. At one point the girl even makes a remark when first hearing the "talking" computer... something like, "Woah, it can talk!?" Matthew Broderick's character replies (I'm paraphrasing) "Not really, it's just a computer program that converts the text to sound."
It's quite disturbing, that kids a few years ago knew DOS and BASIC etc
Back in the day, you had to know how your car worked, just to keep it going. Now practically nobody knows how modern cars really work. Beyond changing the oil, most people simply take the car in to the dealer or mechanic. Is it better that people spend less of their own time fixing cars, or worse? Does it really matter?
Computer technology has advanced to the point where you don't need to know BASIC in order to make your computer do what you need it to do. Plus, when most of the people in society don't know how to do anything beyond move around the GUI, that keeps Slashdotters employed. ;-)
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
... you just have a limited set of things you care about.
If a character who gets killed shows up again, then they're a ghost, or they're a twin, or a con artist, or the death was faked. You don't go "it's only fiction", most of the time... you expect most movies to have more continuity and realism than Looney Tunes.
Movie studios spend millions on things like the texture of the wet street in night-time shots, because they know people know what a wet street looks like at night. Even movies with Bugs-bunny levels of realism go to huge lengths to get a character's clothes blowing the right way in the wind, and take a shot over when a legionary is caught wearing a wrist-watch. Because enough stupid mistakes will destroy any movie-goer's ability to immerse themselves in the story.
Just because you don't happen to care about this particular kind of mistake is no reason to dismiss the opinions of folks who do.
So it's not really an analogy then, more of a statement of fact.
The Core, just terrible.
Indecent Proposal. I want that email notifier for my computer.
Gotta love "This one's for you Jack - Anniversary year, and his daughters birthday . . . I'm In!" ."
Jack Ryan "Remind me to change my ATM pin . .
Pug
An Invisible Entity of Vast Power whose existence must be taken on faith alone: Liberal Media
I thought that this was common knowledge: "Swordfish" the password comes from a Marx Brothers. movie. "Horse Feathers" (1932). A funny movie; recommended.
Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061
Sorry, The worst ever movie to protray technology was "The Net" with Sandra Bollock. Completely aweful. The whole, click Pie sign while holding down control or something stupid like that. Just aweful.
When a man lies he murders a part of the world.
I think they were referring more to gender than to age.
But note when this film was made: 13 years ago in 1993. If there was a 10 year old girl then who knew UNIX, my questions would be "Where is she now?" and "Is she available?"!
(T>t && O(n)--) == sqrt(666)
Titanium implants ?
> You could get Apple Unix (A/UX) for the Lisa.
Nitpick: The Mac II was the first machine capable of running A/UX.
http://www.faqs.org/faqs/aux-faq/part2/
Further nitpick: Lex wasn't 10 years old in the movie, she's more like 13. She's getting her boobies even!
As a Programmer, Computer Tech, and Electronics major I feel GideonX is being a bit unfair.
1) Firewall: The fax machine contains all of the parts needed to scan. The IPod uses USB not that complicated of an interface. The IPod is meant to store files. People have made IDE interfaces for the serial port of a COMMODORE 64. This is plausible.
2) Jurassic Park: Full character development was not done. Had the 10 year old had access to the proper resources and people she might have. I was writing my first BASIC programs when I was 10! Plausible.
3) Mission Impossible: Formatting? Does everyone here type an email with perfect spacing, indention, and carriage returns every time? - Graphical News Groups - Ever heard of ocr or indexing?
4) Goldeneye: There are good hackers out there. Given a list of known exploits you would be surprised what a hacker can do.
5) Swordfish: People can write what every type of graphical interfaces they choose and it can look any way they want!
6) Transporter 2: Have you heaver heard of satellites, IP addresses, or Bluetooth phones?
7) Hackers: OK, pretties for the non tech. They didn't have the whole movie to convey to people how data is stored on a computer.
8) Antitrust: Ever head of OCR?
9) The Italian Job: Ever heard of GPS, 3D engines, and VR?
10) Wargames: Hello, computers, modems, and voice synthesizer all existed back then. Maybe the kid was running a program to verbalize all incoming messages!
I'm posting awfully late, but I really don't think this thread would be complete without a mention of '10.9', a movie clearly designed to scare the bejeesus out of Californians. My wife wanted to watch it for the fun effects, so I joined her. I ended up apologizing for half the movie because I couldn't control my laughter.
Highlights:
The only way to stop the monster quake is to set off nuclear bombs buried at locations (and depths) precisely calculated in a matter of minutes by our heroine. Much like Armageddon, if we're off by a few feet, it won't work. Hmmm...I thought the cases where close counted were horseshoes, hand grenades and nuclear weapons.
When they do manage to set off the bombs, a tech is staring at a screen giving updates on the magnitude of the earthquake as it subsides...10.9...10.5...9.7...8.5..."we did it"...7.6...5.2...etc. For anyone who doesn't know about earthquakes, my understanding is that the Richter scale (sp?) is a measurement of the total energy released by the quake...not something that can really subside.
These of course are just what come to mind. Of course the best moment was a clip of some earthquake specialists, whom they supposedly planned on interviewing live after the movie was over. They cut to a shot of them watching the movie, and the entire room bursts out in hysterics. I don't think they even bothered with the interview.
Wargames had its problems, but I agree that it captured more of the spirit and methodical approach to hacking that most any other film out there. It certainly inspired a huge legion of real hackers and has added terms like "war dialer" into the lexicon. The voice synthesizer was Votrax, which was available as a hardware device with an RS-232 port (http://www.redcedar.com/sc01.htm). It would say whatever it saw on the serial port -- e.g., from a terminal programs log or print feature. I wanted one so bad, but couldn't afford the $300 back then.
He must have linked in KDE. Couldn't have had that much time otherwise.
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
Basic TTS software was available on the C64 in the early-mid 80's. It didn't require a high end PC, nor was it expensive. Other options were also available:
[quote]Software Automatic Mouth, or SAM, was a speech synthesis program for the early personal computers, developed and sold by Don't Ask Software (now SoftVoice), and a distant ancestor of PlainTalk, found in today's Mac OS. The program was available for Apple computers (including the Apple II, and the Lisa), various Atari models and the Commodore 64. Prices ranged from about USD$50 to $200.
SAM is claimed[citation needed] to have been the first commercial software voice synthesis program; however, it was not. In March 1983, Classical Computing, Inc. had released David Dubowski's Speak Up! for the TRS-80 Color Computer, and it had reached the Apple II+ and IIe in 1984. Unlike SAM, Speak Up! cost only USD$29.95, took up 7kB of RAM and allowed BASIC programs to produce speech. SAM's greatest competition, however, was Voice Box by Alien Software.[/quote]
... I don't know if it was Hackers or Sneakers, but there was one with a blind guy who was a computer hacker and he had his hands over the keyboard and the keys would jump up at him so he knew what he was reading. That was total crap. At least, it certainly felt like it; I've no experience with reciprocating keyboards.
If you liked that article try reading some Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics. They don't update much anymore, but there are some gems in this site.
"When the atomic bomb goes off there's devastation...but when the atomic bong goes off there's celebraaaaation!"
All it takes is a micro relay. No circuit needed. Use XON/XOFF for flow control, and use the hardware handshake output line to pick up/hang up the phone.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Thanks for the reminder of those good old days. I had an Apple IIe and had a LOT of fun back in those times. That is, until the Secret Service served a search warrant on my (parents) house for phone phreaking....
:)
I suspect I am not alone in being a little dumber back then than I am now.
Man, red-boxes, 2600 signals.....those were the days. I have fond memories of my ultra-elite 2400bps Hayes modem, when everyone else was trotting along at 300/1200. I had it soooo good and I learned a lot. Of course, that was back when the learning curve was actually reasonable for a technically minded person. I am not so sure that is the case now.
not that I blame them, but let me give some examples:
FTA:"Here's a shot of Hugh Jackman decypting data and trying to access a worm/virus he stored on a server."
No, he was trying to create a "virus/Worm" that would steal banking data/money
FTA:"So since his P2P file sharing program got stolen, Seth now makes a wire frame program that follows a Mini around perfectly through walls?"
No it was a computer simulation of the distance the mini would have to travel, as long as they had the blueprints of the house, it is not to far of a stretch to make a little car drive through a wireframe model of the layout and calculating distance from that simulation as well as making sure the mini could navigate the passage ways (space wise).
Of course they could have just done this by measure a Mini and checking the blueprints.. but this is the big screen man!
There was a rule that sci-fi movies were not allowed. Read the first page of the article.
-- The Internet is a too slow way of doing things, you'd never do without it.
yep... they are called Titanium rods implanted into jawbone with ceramic teeth attached to them...
http://frag-legion.uk.net/wiibar/mario-5732799551
Actually this is just regarding your comment on the movie firewall about using ipod. I am a computer geek so i know what actually harrison ford did. He used ipods hard drive to store data. And knowing that he is a computer geek in the movie i think it is very much possible to do something like that.. thats all
After reading all the comments, I guess we can be sure that there a lot of movies breaking all kinds of science laws. The question arises, then, which movies have it right? And again, with the same rules: major movie, and no science fiction.
-- The Internet is a too slow way of doing things, you'd never do without it.
I had an AT&T acoutsic coupling modem that you didn't have to dial manually.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Info here: http://ipodlinux.org/ For programming on the iPod: http://ipodlinux.org/IPod_Programming I've run this on my nano, I hear it runs on the mini too. I imagine you could write an app to crawl the terminal and save data to the ipod hd.
Well, Linux. Both my kids were using Linux at an early age, including the command line. They still prefer Linux for most stuff when there's a choice. Games still Win, tho...
IN MY DAY, WE SPEEDREAD ACOUSTIC PHONE SIGNALS DIRECTLY INTO THE DAMN RECEIVER. KZZZCHHHHZKKKKZHHHTTTTKKKCHZZZZZZZZBLEEEEEEP.
Who modded this funny? This guy sounds like the real deal to me. this documentary shows a bling phreaker who is able to dial a phone simple by whistling into the reciever. Pretty freakin' amazing if you ask me (puns rule).
barack to the future?
Er, shows a blind phreaker...I mean, what good is a bunch of fancy jewlery- the poor fella is blind...
barack to the future?
"Quit picking on Hackers 'cuz it shows a young Angelina Jolie's boobies!"
This is Slashdot. It's okay to admit that you watched that scene in frame advance. That's why I bought the DVD in the first place.
Re: your later point, there are actually 3 soundtrack albums, and they're all pretty damn shiny.
Boundless Expansion, Self-Transformation, Dynamic Optimism, Intelligent Technology, Spontaneous Order- BEST DO IT SO!
Here in New Zealand, and probably schools around the world, 5 year olds are learning to capture and edit movies, then burn them on to dvd's. I think thats something, they use iMacs with iMovie so it is easy, but for 5 year olds to be able to shoot "film", and edit it quite well, with menus etc, and then make a disc of it. Little tiny laser beams inside a slick white box a 2 inches thick, burning tiny dots and dashes onto a polycarbonate disc, all piloted by a 5 year old? How would that have sounded a few years back?
---
"Never trust a computer you can't throw out a window"
I always assumed he meant this in terms of dropping out of a GUI to a text prompt.
Sometimes my arms bend back.
Everything in films is exaggerated. Just look at gunshots; people fly in the air after catching a bullet, when in reality they wouldn't even fall over. ;-)
You've never seen anyone get shot by Chuck Norris.
Boundless Expansion, Self-Transformation, Dynamic Optimism, Intelligent Technology, Spontaneous Order- BEST DO IT SO!
Everyone knows that ninjas kill people ALL THE TIME! Their lives are actually MORE exciting than they're portrayed in movies, but I don't think that we could really handle their true awesomeness. :-)
Boundless Expansion, Self-Transformation, Dynamic Optimism, Intelligent Technology, Spontaneous Order- BEST DO IT SO!
All Apple laptops since the black G3s have the Apple logo on the lid positioned so it's right side up when the lid is opened. It makes a lot more sense, doesn't it?
Web consulting +
I agree. This list was pretty harsh, and somewhat misguided.
General thoughts:
- Firewall
iPods are pretty versatile. I haven't seen this movie, but, it is conceivable that a small device/adapter could be used to turn the iPod into a general storage device. Certainly the adapter would need to be designed before hand.
- Jurassic Park
Doesn't deserve to be in there. Since when has age been a barrier to knowing/understanding anything? UNIX isn't THAT difficult to learn. Besides, the girl was using SGI's graphical file navigator, not hacking from the command line.
- Mission Impossible
The e-mail/usenet program was a bit odd. But, not a huge blunder, IMHO. The whole scence is plausible, and there is no reason that Cruise couldn't have had local e-mail aliases ("Max@Job"), and a graphical auto-detachment-decoding Usenet client.
- Swordfish
The graphical effects were bad, but the worst part for me, was the "hacker's" magical ability to decrypt 256-bit AES in 2 minutes flat.
- Hackers
The fancy graphical effects were absurd, but the movie did lots of realistic bits.
Jurassic Park (#2) holding on line two.
I think you are spot on there, but this is another example of something that I don't have the right word for, but it is definitely something to think about.
Throughout history, there have been human artifacts that have been created that have utterly changed the course of human history. In many if not most of these cases, these artifacts are so world changing and challenging to everyone who comes in contact with them that they become inextricably enmeshed with popular culture. Popular culture reacts with music and other art which incorporates these artifacts, in some cases showcasing them as main characters. A prime example would be the personal automobile.
This is where, with computers, things get weird. Despite the fact that the computer has forever altered the course of human history, despite the fact that it has entrenched itself in every facet of human existence, the showcasing of this artifact within popular culture has never seemed to take hold. I can probably count on one hand the number of popular songs in the past 20 years which have mentioned computers or the people that use them, and in most of those cases I couldn't really ascribe popular status to them as I doubt the masses have heard them. While the number of movies in popular culture incorporating computers seem greater, these movies invariably cast the computer (and/or its users/developers/etc) in a very negative light. The computer in these cases are seen as evil incarnate intent on wiping out the human race, or at least making it very uncomfortable.
Maybe the computer as an artifact is currently seen by popular culture as something more than human, or possibly the first real itteration of something constructed by humans to replace humans? While those that operate or know such machines are seen as collaborators in the destruction/downfall of mankind (classic mad-scientist run amok scenario)? The ignorant character, meanwhile is seen as virtuous, the "savior" of humanity, by not having subcumbed to the necessary levels of reason and logic needed to fully understand a computer.
Of course, I think I may reading way too much into all of this, but these ideas are definitely things that make you go "hmmmm"...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
This list was horribly written and conceived. Almost nothing in the entire list was unattainable at the time the movies were made.
#10 - Wargames
Simply put, the idea of a computer talking to you after you 'hack' into it is laughable in this day and age.
The computer "talking" to him was it asking things in natural language (as it was programmed to do) mixed with the guy having a text-to-speech program (which did exist at the time).
#9 - The Italian Job
Below is an image of a wire frame display on his laptop that shows a Mini Cooper making rounds. Seth now makes a wire frame program that follows a Mini around perfectly through walls?
It's been over a year since I saw this, but IIRC the whole "wire frame Mini" part was Seth watching a computer simulation of what the Minis were supposed to be doing - the same simulation you saw him plotting out the heist with just a few minutes earlier in the movie.
#8 - Antitrust
One scene that jumps right out is the ability for the security team to lift code off a computer screen via a security camera.
At high enough resolution, or with good interpolation software, why not? Besides, if you can reconstruct everything someone types by listening to the keystrokes, I'm perfectly willing to accept a high-res camera being used to read text when pointed at a screen.
#7 - Hackers
this film is borderline comedy
Uhhh... actually it was a comedy. (Action/comedy, but comedy nonetheless.)
One obvious failure of technology here is the ridiculous flying through sequences of the supercomputer. Not only is all the data stored in what looks like skyscrapers, it's also technicolored like a crazy rainbow.
So eye-candy and stylistic design makes everything else in the movie fradulent? The whole "skyscrapers computers" visual motif worked just fine when you think about what it was meant for.
Hackers is actually one of the most accurate portrayals of computer technology and hacking/cracking/phreaking in a movie if you ignore the visuals and ignore the crap added to appeal to the masses. Listen to the dialogue. Think about what they're doing. It all actually makes sense.
#6 - Transporter 2
French officer in the police station, he looks up a criminal on the computer. Within a few seconds, that information is magically beamed to Frank's car. How in the world did they sync up? How did the computer at the police station know where Frank was?
I've never seen the movie, but I can hazard a guess: Satellite internet service (or similar wide-range wireless options) + FTP or other transfer protocol + static IP or dyndns.org.
#5 - Swordfish
I never knew worms and viruses looked like little gems.
Once again, complaining about visual elements rather than actual use of technology.
#4 - Goldeneye
With the ability to 'spike' remote computer systems, Boris is the most powerful hacker in the world.
I haven't seen this in over 10 years, and have forgotten what this is even referring to. I have no intention to see it again to find out what this is talking about, but the rest of the movie was so bad there's a decent chance they're actually right on this one... but then again, this list is so bad they probably aren't.
#3 - Mission: Impossible
The emails he tries are not even formatted correctly. Also, his un-canny ability to find information through graphical newsgroups is something else.
Once again, I haven't seen it in 10 years and will never see it again. They do sound right on the money in their complaint (backed up with screenshots this time), so I'm going to give them the thumbs up on this one.
#2 - Jurassic Park
he grand-daughter of the park's owner, sits down at a computer terminal. Like magic, she exclaims "This is UNIX, I know this!". Where on this planet is there a 10 year old girl who knows and can under
Yes, WarGames took some dramatic license. But except for the silly talking computer, it wasn't all that bad, particularly considering when it was made. I always wondered where the money came from to buy all the fancy computer gear, considering that it was (in 1983) worth about the same as a nice used car.
I'm reminded of the display at Parkes about The Dish, where they talk about the things that really happened, and the things that made a good story.
There is a line between dramatic license and badness. Personally, I don't think WarGames crossed that line.
...laura
I notice one flaw in Swordfish everybody has let slide.... the fact that Halle Barry would hit on the geek. Maybe if people would write some flashier looking worms, it would be much easier to impress the ladies with hacking skills.... just a thought....
Steal my band's record! Seriously,
I'll tell you the exact moment of unreality that made me lose instant interest in Firewall. Putting aside everything mentioned, for me it was right near the beginning, when the Bad Guy slips into HF's car and says "Drive, I have your family". The movie could have ended nicely right there, because what SHOULD have happened was that since HF had his seatbelt on, and Bad Guy didn't... well, rev it up to 65 then slam on the breaks. See you on the pavement!
...and they kill his family. Genius!
I heard guys complain about kung fu movies. Well, Jet Li flipping through the air is more entertaining to watch than two juijitsu fighters roll on the ground for 40 minutes. Film is about images.
Martial arts movies are a great counter argument to your own argument.
I only need to bring up one name:
Bruce Lee
It's possible to be both realistic and entertaining at the same time, it's one of the things that will have people watching his movies fifty years from now, when many others are forgotten.
Movies shouldn't just tell a story, they should tell a story well. That means, good research, actors who remeber their lines and a director who wants to do more than just "get this thing over with."
The arguments you're making could be applied to anyone who does a crappy job at their profession. Sure it's easier to do a lousy job and there are always people who won't notice, but that doesn't change the reality that you are disgracing your craft.
Life is too short to proofread.
I can't believe it! They put GoldenEye on there and didn't even mention the "500MHz drives"!!!!!
The Farewell Tour II
Much of what Gideon Tech complains about in the 10 terrible portrayals of technology is people copping interface ideas from Gibson's "cyberspace" and Stephenson's "metaverse." There's a double standard here where people rave about how cool Stephenson's and Gibson's visions are on the printed page, but complain about how stupid the same ideas are when portrayed in film.
Of course, Neuromancer and Snow Crash were much, much better as literature than Hackers or Swordfish was as a film, but the problem with the latter was not their use of Gibson's and Stephenson's cyberspace iconography. It was the fact that the former had imaginative unpredictable plots and engaging sometimes subtle characters while the latter had stupid, derivative stories and stupid, one-dimensional characters.
Firewall gets its own section, because it was so close to right, yet so wrong.
While it'd be an incredible feat of MacGyverism, it's not quite as implausible as it would seem. The hard drive in an iPod doesn't use some secret interface, it's just a smaller IDE. He can't take it out entirely, but he could rewire it (so he didn't have to deal with the actual board and software), so it'd just be a hard drive with a battery. Ten thousand songs means it can easily fit ten thousand accounts -- which sounds ridiculous when you think of them as ASCII numbers, but no way will this thing be able to do OCR on the fly. It'll just read data directly from the scanner and dump it to the hard drive, and if it does it at a slow enough rate, it could work.
Of course, it still can't work if the scanner works the way I think it does -- reading one line at a time, normally moving across the paper. Yes, the numbers scroll past, but they do so a line at a time, not a pixel at a time. Also, he'd barely have time to hack together a way to not obliterate his daughter's songs (or did he?), and to somehow feed that data, as a valid image, into OCR software which he just happens to have on his laptop. Meaning he'd have to implement a scanner driver -- arguably easier than an iPod interface, though.
The other inconsistency mentioned is adding a firewall rule on the fly. As far as I can tell, that was actually an iptables command, or something similar. It was also not far off from what a real admin would do. What's annoying is that blacklisting his class C block is seen as a brilliant insight -- the security "expert" sitting there is saying "Wow, I never would've thought of that!", when it's a common enough practice among IRC ops. It's also not necessarily a good choice -- does Harrison Ford know, off the top of his head, whether they have any customers at all in that block?
The frustrating thing is, Firewall is not only a good movie, but they actually seem to come much closer to day to day reality than other movies involving technology -- and then they have to go and ruin it by showing Harrison Ford taking several minutes to delete a simple log. That's neither short enough to be a simple unlink, nor long enough to actually be shredding any storage system I know of capable of storing terabytes of video logs (that is, actually overwriting the files).
This is compared to, say, Hackers, which never even pretends to b
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
This article SUCKS, and you're just about the only person to notice. The author is making himself look like a fool by posturing himself as being smarter than the filmmakers, while at the same time making all the obvious oversights you listed, and more.
CSI Miami can usually beat any of the films listed here. Not only does it not understand technology - it *hates* technology. The people who dig through other people's garbage looking for clues for a living have the cheek to call the staff computer experts "geeks" - even though they probably get paid more and they don't have to trawl through landfills.
And, of course, video games are the number one cause of homicides in the United States.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Actually, you'll never see the bad guys using Macs.
At least not for what are list as their most "hideos" examples.
In War Games the Norad computer WHOPPER doesn't talk. It places text on a screen. Matthew B.'s character purposefully flips a switch to impress the girl. The switch enables a speach synthesizer. In this case, I beliece the voice is that of then current DECtalk by Digital Equipment Corporation. Same voice for Stephen Hawkin uses or used.
I didn't see Antitrust so I don't know the actual protrayal of the technology. But I do know that the image provided is that of a CRT. CRT's are patently insecure. There are devices that can rebuild the image on a CRT screen from the flicker created on the wall. Since at any instant only one pixel is illuminated at a time, the pixel's color can be picked up off the wall. Since the CRT is refreshed in a certain order the device can pick of all the pixels in order and recreate the screen. All that's left is deciding where the screen begins.
Was the screen image is know, simple OCR algorithms can do the rest.
9600?? I found anything higher than 2400 to be a major pain because the data compression made the text come out in packets instead of a continuous stream, which made it much harder to read.
Nitpick: The Mac II was the first machine capable of running A/UX.
Right, my bad. The Lisa had a port of AT&T Version 7 Unix that Apple paid UniSoft to do. I just remembered seeing a Unix on a Lisa at a Usenix (or UniForum?) conference a couple of years before the Mac II.
-- Alastair
Petrified with fear? The same group who had the piece of mind to safely and quietly manuver escape in the first place? If they had just bonked one guy on the head with a potted plant then bolted, fine. But they had a well formulated and calculated plan. They weren't petrified.
And seriously, they should have helped the gene pool and left the kid for dead anyways. "Hey, I'm deathly allergic to peanuts, and I know it. Here's a bad guy whose broken into my house, beat up my mother, and threatened to kill me. But hey, if he SAYS the cookies have no peanuts in them, who is he to lie?"
UTF-8: There and Back Again
Granted-- but HF had already known that no matter what he did, his family was going to die. The hostages were the bad guy's only bargining chips. Killing them is less than ideal, since that means the whole plan's gone to pot. If they don't hear from their leader, they'll get nervous, but sit tight. Long enough, at least, for HF to get home, kill the power, and drop a septic tank on them or something.
That's why it bugged me so much. He had the ball in his court AND home-turf advantage AND the element of surprise AND the odds were better for his family to fight than to comply.
UTF-8: There and Back Again
But he wasn't a superhero or an action movie star or an Indiana Jones; he was a computer geek who's family had guns to their heads.
Plus, of course, the challenge of defeating the security system probably intrigued him...
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
My main problem with it was that scene where he (Ford) is going on about how you cant get into any of the gear racked all around them. Yah, like not a single device there had a local access port for a service terminal or anything.
Well I've wrestled with reality for thirty five years doctor, and I'm happy to say I finally won out over it.
A couple of years back, I went to a presentation at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA. It was by a guy who had done a lot of research on 2001. He even had a few of the original props which escaped the destruction of the set demanded by Arthur Clarke. (He said that if anyone was going to do a bad sequel, they could make their own bad set to go with it.)
Anyway, a lot of the presentation was on how close Clarke actually got to the technolpgy of 2001.
A couple of examples -- HAL watches Dave and reads not only his lips, but also his expressions. Even today we can't read emotions accurately, despite attempts to break the face down into usable units lke mouth, eyes, eyebrows, etc. However, we have well surpassed the scene where Dave is using a pencil and paper to take his notes.
>> The movie could have ended nicely right there, because what SHOULD have happened was
...and they kill his family. Genius!
>> that since HF had his seatbelt on, and Bad Guy didn't... well, rev it up to 65 then slam on the breaks.
>> See you on the pavement!
>
Only if he let Greedo shoot first, but that would NEVER happen, would it?