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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.
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
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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.
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.
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.
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?
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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.
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.
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.
What a terrible portrayal of a working web server.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
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
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