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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"
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
Maybe you could render it useless by installing WinCE on the nuke itself.
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!
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 ;) ))
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
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
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
Actually, I'm pretty sure that device driver conflicts would activate the countdown.
77 HITS
Really Long Off Topic Combo
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.
Server has been slashdotted, here's a link to the story on mirrordot
#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.
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.
Well, it was a dystopia.
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.
Standards compliance is a wonderful thing.
MirrorDot.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
That all depends on what they're hit with. Take a shot from a
Good, inexpensive web hosting
...or dentures?
Superteeth! Repelling Plaque at every turn, by virtue of being completely incompatible with it!
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?
The fun part of this is that you guys actually spent time trying to "track down this item". (Oh, I forgot - you are smart, most people are not. Right.)
Well the little guys inside my PC thought it was pretty spot on.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Would it make you feel better if I said that it wasn't likely for boys to know UNIX back in 1993 also? Jeeze, I hate how people are always trying to be PC. It's absolutely true that it was (and still is) unlikely for a typical 10-year old kid to be familiar with UNIX.
Also, people shouldn't be modded down for simply being wrong. Other posts that are insightful should be modded up instead. You state:
The underlying assumptions regarding ten year old girls and computers are pathetic.
My assumptions are that 10-year old girls back in 1993 would not likely have access to UNIX since it was almost entirely only available at universities, government offices and large businesses. Most (actually all) 10 year old kids I ever knew did not have sufficient access to such locations as to be able to become familiar with UNIX. And there was very limited net access back then so learning remotely would be difficult too.
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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.
No, I think it makes Linux equivalent to bad hygiene.
I actually watched tron fairly recently and technology wise (for a film) it was pretty good, TRON himself seemed to be a hybrid of selinux and a firewall - which was why the MPC (here you can read "trusted computing" or WGA) hated him so much. TRON was going to monitor what all programs were doing and what systems they were accessing so that they didn't do anything inaporpriate.
So when you think about it, although it might have seen strange at the time, the ideas were spot on; even years ahead in the public mind
*''I can't believe it's not a hyperlink.''
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
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.
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
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.
Minix was around for about $50 (with a book) and ran on an 8086. I recall that my father's (small) company had an old UNIX box of some description (with a 20MB hard disk!) even though they were a primarily Windows and embedded systems shop.
386BSD was released in March 1992. GNU had been around for almost a decade and there were early versions of Linux floating around that could probably have been used by it.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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.
Yes, I thought that was uncalled for, too. Antitrust deserves kudos for being one of the more convincing Hollywood tech movies (admittedly, an easy target). Sure, grabbing text off a screen using a hidden camera (designed and placed specifically for this purpose) and OCR software sounds tricky, but step back and look at the message: hey, it isn't true that you can automatically hack into any system in 30 seconds (especially one set up by a networking ubergeek) - sometimes you're better off with physical surveilance, honey traps etc.
Plus, it was one of the few films where the "genius" protagonist actually wins the day by being clever and outsmarting the baddie, instead of stripping down to a vest, morphing into an action hero and chasing him up the scaffolding!
Add to that the fact that the director actually cut out the gratuitous sex scene that detracted from the plot (Milo bonking Lisa is amongst the DVD "delete secenes") and you have a film which really doesn't deserve to be mocked.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
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.
The OS in Office space was carefully crafted to mix elements from both MacOS and Windows. If you looked closer, you would see that although the window title bar is from Mac OS, the hourglass icon is from Windows. I haven't seen the movie in a long time, but I remember being amused at the way they mashed interface elements from the two OSs to make a Grand Unified OS. In addition, some of the boxes in the movie are Macs.
Fancy handmade instruments at The Camel's Back
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
Heh. I once created a fictitious item to test a stock control system (a Sanderson running PICK) at the last place I worked. The order code I created was CIG-B&H/20 and the description was "Cigarettes, Benson and Hedges, pack of 20". When the system was replaced with a new (but reckoned inferior by everyone who had to use it) Sage Tetra system, we had to get in temps to re-enter everything from the old system into the new one (open source would have made it too easy to create our own import filter). As far as I know, CIG-B&H/20 is still on the stock control system there although there were never any kept in stores.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
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
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".
they should've used a *real* database engine.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Incidentally, SGI provided the hardware for the Jurassic Park control room, not to mention it was also the hardware platform for the rendering farm. So it's not entirely too far-fetched to presume that the SGI techs assigned to the JP project might have shown someone the "really cool" file manager.
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
Starts flying around in some 3D interface. In 1996.
Everyone knows that computers were only 2-dimensional in the 1990's. That's why Y2K was such a big deal. When the third millennium began, and brought with it a third dimension, the old 2D computers couldn't handle it.
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!
Algorithms to create hires pictures from multiple low resolution images do exists, its called super resolution. It is also possible to extract 3d data from 2D photos or videos and there are algorithms around that can put an unsharp out-of-focus image back into being a sharp image with proper focus. So having unsharp source data and usable end results is not unthinkable, however pretty much all movies and tv shows just go way beyond what is technically doable and turn into something completly ridiculous. Which is really shame, since with a little bit of extra effort they should be able to come up with something that is actually believable.
Jurassic Park (#2) holding on line two.
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