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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."
If memory serves, Goldblum used a Mac :P
Everything I need to know I learned by killing smart people and eating their brains.
The funny thing is, sometime around the time Jurassic Park came out (before or after, I don't remember) I clearly remember visiting DisneyWorld with my family, and in one of the buildings at Epcot, SGI had this big display set up with some huge mainframe where they were giving demos rendering a complicated Egyptian tomb in realtime, and then there were a bunch of Indigo 2s sitting out on the floor with people to mess with. I spent most of the day just and playing with the tech demos they'd stocked up the Indy 2s with, running what in retrospect I recognize as X windows. I don't remember seeing the 3d file browser thing-- I seem to remember spending most of the time messing with a program called "New Jello", but I was just kind of clicking around at random, and maybe I saw it but didn't remember it. I would have been older than ten at the time, but not by much. I could certainly imagine someone about my age doing the same thing, randomly clicking into the 3d file system visualizer, and playing with it until they basically worked out what was going on.
So we could possibly explain that bit in Jurassic Park entirely if "this is UNIX!" girl had at some point in the year or so before the events of the film simply visited Disneyworld.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Already been done (sort of).
I found 23 to be a decent portrayal of hacking (though people who know the person portrayed in the movie say it's a bad portrayal of the actual events). No idea how they got their trojan in place but I guess they didn't want to bore the viewer with technical details, the book The Cuckoo's Egg does say the hacker used trojans in that manner.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
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.
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.