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Servers, Hackers, and Code In the Movies
Billosaur writes "As with anything, Hollywood has a weird way of viewing computer technology and the people who use it. To help quantify things, take a look at The Top 20 Movie Hackers, the Top Ten Movie Servers, and the things code doesn't do in real life." From the servers article: "3. UNIX environment - Jurassic Park (1993). The UNIX environment here is a classic geek joke. Everything we saw was real - created by Silicon Graphics and called IRIX. InGen was the corporation funding the island, and from an IT perspective they let the worst possible thing happen: they allowed one programmer to design the infrastructure with no supervision. What's worse, they obviously required no documentation of what was done. The result was a kid had to hack in and gain ROOT privileges. The likelihood of a young kid knowing a way to get ROOT (and not a more experienced programmer) is pretty hard to swallow. The hardware for this server was probably minimal, running door locks and starting Quicktime movies. 'We spared no expense!' You would think that with the millions of dollars they spent on the park, they could have hired a couple newbie programmers and added a server on the backend."
No, it's not funny. This sort of geek-complaining-because-it-isn't-100%-realistic crap is what gives us a bad name. No one cares about shit like this. Please stop posting meaningless "Top N" lists like this. That "Top 10 Geek Girls" article from last week was bad enough. How many decent, informative articles were rejected to make room for this dreck?
1. Buscemi's Seymour (Ghost World).
2. De Niro's Harry Tuttle (in keeping with the Brazil theme posts this week).
you had me at #!
As with anything, Hollywood has a weird way of viewing computer technology and the people that use it.
It may be weird to you or I, but Hollywood does it that way because that's how your "average joe" sees it.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
While I realize this list is written for folks who enjoy this kind of stuff, I don't think *anyone* would find that adding another half hour of film devoted to showing how Jurassic Park hired computer experts and documenting their security systems would benefit the movie.
Maybe it's just me, but I seem to find the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park a little less believable than a kid getting root.
If an officer ever threatens to taze you, say you have a pacemaker.
If Hollywood isn't accurate regarding computer technology, I shudder to think what else they've depicted might be wrong. Next you're going to tell me good guys don't have unlimited ammunition, you can't trick a killer to confesing to a murder on national television, and that ugly women can't be transformed into supermodels merely by taking off their glasses!
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
Take Swordfish for example where he hacks into some top secret site whilst having a gun pointed at him, a gorgeous blonde giving him a blow job and Halle Berry looking on. In my entire working career that's only ever happened to me twice (ok probably cos I live so far from Halle Berry). But still.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Because we all know it's only older professional programmers that do the fancy programming. Young people never came up with any innovative computer technology or became brilliant hackers.
They forgot the earth in the server list!
I always loved that turn in the HHGG. I still think it's a brilliant idea to think of the earth as a huge supercomputer to calculate the question to the answer "42" - and thus to actually formulate the question about life, the universe and everything - I think it's much more interesting than the Matrix version where the earth/reality just isn't the reality.
"Hannibal's plans never work right. They just work." Amy/A-Team
Ever watched E.R. with a doctor? This is hardly a computer geek specific trait.
There's nothing unusual about someone with knowledge in a specialized field finding the Hollywood portrayal of that field amusing. Because they are, 95% of the time, wrong and 50% of the time they're wrong enough for it to be funny to the person who knows better.
"I know this! This is UNIX!" is funny as shit. Okay, it's not funny at all to non-computer-geeks, but neither are the Hollywood gaffs that doctors, lawyers, auto mechanics, and ninja assassins find amusing to people not in those fields.
The enemies of Democracy are
Why was WOPR connected to a modem that a kid could dial-in to from home? I guess the NORAD folks needed to run thermonuclear war simulations from home sometimes...
o mputers of course.
A good list of fictional computers is available on here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Fictional_c
While I realize this list is written for folks who enjoy this kind of stuff, I don't think *anyone* would find that adding another half hour of film devoted to showing how Jurassic Park hired computer experts and documenting their security systems would benefit the movie.
Why not? Crappy prequels made a mint for George Lucas!
Is still the movie where the hacker hat to break into a box using a simple login window while getting a blowjob
He wasn't used to cracking 2048 Bit encryptions but jumped over his own shadow by cracking a 4096 bit one.
I'd kill to have a program that makes terminal output sound like it does in the movies!
||| I still can't believe Parkay's not butter.
If everything in movies were to happen as in real life, things would get boring quick. So fighting scenes, driving, hacking, kids, etc, all have creative/dramatic licenses applied to them. The question thus become, are you able to suspend your disbelief? I personally have trouble with several movies and series. "Dumb geniuses" is my pet peeve, what is yours?
Is still the movie where the hacker had to break into a box using a simple login window while getting a blowjob.
He was used to crack 2048 Bit encryptions but jumped over his own shadow by cracking a 4096 bit key.
they do that because it is quicker. Actual computer work is boring as hell to watch in a movie.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Alligator clips could communicate through insulation. Lasers had kinetic energy.(Meltdown) A guy who would buy that for a dollar.
20. Jack Stanfield, Firewall (2006)
firewalljack_stanfield_400
19. J-Bone, Johnny Mnemonic (1995)
jbone
18. Lazlo Hollyfeld, Real Genius (1985)
lazlo
17. Wyatt Donnelly, Weird Science (1985)
wyatt
16. Milo Hoffman, Antirust (2001)
milo_400
15. Dennis Nedry, Jurassic Park (1993)
nedry
14. Gus Gorman, Superman III (1983)
gus_400
13. Kevin Mitnick, Takedown (2000)
mitnick
12. Boris Grishenko, Goldeneye (1995)
borisgrishenko
11. John 'Captain Crunch' Draper, Pirates of Silicon Valley (1999)
crunch
10. Michael Bolton & Samir Nagheenanajar, Office Space (1999)
michaelsamir
9. Theodore Donald 'Rat' Finch, The Core (2003)
rat
8. The Puppet Master, Ghost In The Shell (1995)
puppet_master
7. Stanley Jobson, Swordfish (2001)
swordfish_400
6. Jobe Smith, Lawnmower Man (1992)
jobe
5. Kevin Flynn, Tron (1982)
flynn
4. David Lightman, WarGames (1983)
wargames
3. Dade 'Crash Override' Murphy, Hackers (1995)
crash
2. Martin Bishop, Sneakers (1992)
bishop
1. Thomas 'Neo' Anderson, The Matrix (1999)
neo
1. Suspension
2. Of
3. Disbelief
Even crappy technically ignorant movies like Wargames, ID4, and Hackers are fun to watch.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
They referenced the movie "Hackers" that pretty much nullifies any authority on this article. Not to mention they can't even spell antitrust.
/^([Ss]ame [Bb]at (time, |channel.)){2}$/
In Star Wars, hacks in, finds location of the shield generator. In Empire, hacks in, finds out the the Millenium Falcon's hyperdrive is disabled.
Was Barnard Hughes as the I/O port in TRON (systems programming as allegory, all "Through the Looking Glass") all covered with patches and patches and patches so that he was literally an imobile tower... Somebody who got it wrote that scene.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
I hate to ruin it for the guy on Drivl.com, but some machines do make a "blip" noise when you press a key. When I first popped up a DECterm from my simulated VMS machine, I found that every keystroke made a gentle beeping noise. I think Solaris might be able to do it to.
Klingon programs don't timeshare, they battle for supremacy.
My favorites are when the cops need to keep the bad guy on the phone for a certain number of seconds to trace his location, when the tech randomly pounds at a keyboard and the low-resolution black and white photo of a moving car suddenly becomes a high-def shot so they can read the license plate.
Ever see attempts to represent computers in movies from the '50s and '60s?
Lots of obsession with punch cards, belief that big mainframes were omniscient, operators who were comic-relief hysterics.
In addition to being flat-out wrong, the lessons and morals we were supposed to learn were totally inane.
The screenshot for Jurassic Park looks like a normal Irix screen. But what anybody who actually watched that part of the movie noticed was that the screen in the movie was some weird flying-through-a-virtual-reality-landscape thing, which the kid immediately recognized as UNIX. Almost everybody with actual UNIX experience just laughed at that, because it was classic a Hollywood computer representation. Except that it really was Irix, but running a window manager only available to people whose UNIX system had superfluous accelerated 3D graphics in 1995 (i.e., movie CG folks). What the audience couldn't see, but the kid would have been able to, was that the landscape had, written on the ground, things like "sbin" and "usr", clear signs of a UNIX system of some sort. As for breaking in, when dinosaurs are taking over your facility, chances are you aren't patching sendmail every day. And, in '95, that would have been a problem.
... that projects the back-to-front green text onto the face of the user.
Oh, and the image processing software that takes a poor quality security camera image, and 'enhances' it so you can see the villains face reflected in the sunglasses of the victim.
Quidquid Latine dictum sit, altum videtur (anything said in Latin sounds important)
Ever since I saved Tron from Master Controller, he does all my hacking Pro Bono.
We are all just people.
FTA:
"they let the worst possible thing happen: they allowed one programmer to design the infrastructure with no supervision. What's worse, they obviously required no documentation of what was done."
What actually happened was that the island was being left with a skeleton crew for the weekend. After the Nedry character sabotaged the system, the first thing the other characters do is try to phone "his people". With the phone system out however having the engineer say "I can't get Jurrassic Park back online without Dennis Nedry" doesn't seem all that far fetched.
Not requiring a password after a system reset however......
I hate the way computers/technology and geeks are portrayed in Hollywood. If you've ever seen an episode of '24' then you know what I mean. They just take a bunch of random computer buzzwords like "socket", "server", "IP address", "port", "upload", etc., and sprinkle them randomly through the dialog, all while the techno-nerds do impossible things with their computers 100x faster than should be possible (even if what they were doing made any sense). This kind of garbage really makes it hard for me to watch shows that portray anything having to do with technology.
A kid could r00t it.
Windows 2000 - from the guys who brought us edlin
movl (%esp),%eax # Load NPX control word.
andl $0xfffff2ff,%eax # Set rounding mode to nearest.
orl $0x00000200,%eax # Set precision to 64 bits. (53-bit mantissa)
pushl %eax
fldcw (%esp) # Recover modes.
popl %eax
is not binary. Writing something that is easily translated to machine code is not the same as writing machine code.
If we start buying CDs then the terrorists have already won.
You code in assembly which can be directly transcribed to binary machine code, not the same thing as coding in binary. Nobody codes in binary, it's just stupid. Why remember long strings of opcode gibberish when you can just remember MOV, ADD, MULT, etc.
Wow! A blowjob with a gun. Was her name, Trigger?
IANAL but I do provide IT support to a few firms.
You never, ever, see any paperwork, stacks of document boxes or any case files being used in any legal shows.
They make it seem(Especially in Boston Legal) that the defendant or plaintif just tells the attourneys their problem and then just go to court and argue it.
The systems in Jurassic Park (the book) were running on a 680x0 Mac. It was obvious from the dialog boxes and the font (Geneva, IIRC).
That Mac and the "Land Rovers" were placeholders indicating where the studio could negotiate sponsorship deals. (With SGI and Jeep, respectively).
Crichton's such a shill -- I hope the studio "forgot" to give him his cut.
I'm willing to bet that ER is (or at least was, Crichton lived it) more accurate on medicine than any of the movies listed is on computer tech. Now, any series about the court system... there you're entering pure fantasy land.
From ER you can actually LEARN stuff. Like the different forms of cardiac arrhythmia and how they present, causes, etc.
I'm a professional software engineer, have been for almost a decade, and I can still enjoy these movies
That being said, number 10 cracked me up, because thats true, expert in programming or not (I found these things silly when years before I had ever seen a line of code, because it really doesn't make sense):
I very nearly asked my parents buy me a TRS 80 instead of an Apple IIe back in the 80's when I was a kid because it looked more like the computer in War Games. I searched everywhere for the device with all the red and blue switches too. Don't get me started on the modem either, I didn't actually have one back then, but I definitely would have chosen the one that you could shove the phone ear piece into as opposed to the built in modem jack. That one was the best, right? War Games almost screwed me. I was 14. Thank heavens I didn't believe the hype, I believed the guys at Younkers in 1983 at the Mall.
Indepence Day has flaws--many, many, many flaws--but the whole virus-on-a-Mac is not one of them. What Jeff Goldblum's character did was standard cross-platform development. He wrote the virus on his Mac, compiled it to an EvilAlienOS binary and uploaded it via the EvilAlienNetwork port on the captured spaceship.
This is more or less exactly what you'd do if you were developing for, say, an embedded microcontroller. The host computer doesn't need to be compatible with the target.
If you want to quibble, you could ask where he got the EvilAlienOS programmer's reference manual or the EvilAlienCPU's architecture description or how he managed to find an exploitable vulnerability in EvilAlienOS so quickly. But enough about the frickin' Mac, okay?
This reminds me quite thoroughly of how movies depict video games as well. No matter what game, what system... most of the time, it's nothing but beeps and blips... usually not coinciding in the least with button-pushes on the controller.
Hell, half the time I recognize what game they're playing from a quick glimpse of it, and I'm thinking to myself "Oh come ON! I know that part, and there's nothing even CLOSE to those sounds there."
According to Hollywood... video games as well are stuck in the 80's.
HEY HOLLYWOOD! Move up another 20 someodd years, and you might stop parents from buying horrible crap games for kids, because then they might have a vague idea of what's good or current!
Planet Zebeth - Metroid with a twist
I'm surprised that The Net didn't make it onto the list. After all, this is the movie where the bad guys kill a guy by hacking into the computer controlling his car's anti-lock brakes.
Really.
In the realm of computing, code [...is...]: The symbolic arrangement of instructions that a computer can understand - like "Your PHP code is shit"
That made my day!!! Priceless!
This has got to be the best hacker movie. Hell, it stars Gene "Hackman" (synchronicity!). Not only that, but it was directed by Francis Ford Coppola. Harry Caul is a hardware hacker, a grey-hat into surveillance. "The Conversation" has the right amount of paranoia. It shows the powers and temptations of the technological elite... and it shows how smart people can be pwn3d. If you haven't seen this movie, put it at the top of your list.
If you look closely, you can see the names on those squares. Helps if you have a larger television/monitor.
Windows has detected an undetectable error.
Let's even ignore for a moment the fact that real hacking is boring to look at. What's interesting for Joe Average to watch a guy live on Chips and Jolt for hours and days while typing cryptic commands?
Imagine someone actually did a "true" hacker movie. Let's imagine a documentary. A "show hack" if you want, where someone who really knows what he's doing is giving us a 90 minute rundown of a hack. Using real tools, trying real exploits. How long do you think 'til certain three letter orgs step in and round up everyone who had even remotely anything to do with it?
Hacking isn't a funny game anymore. As more information and money is dealt through electronic channels, the stakes rose considerably. Hacking is a business, more than it ever was. And it has become a problem to the powers that be, more than it ever was.
Movies already tell BS in certain other areas, for example when it comes to chemicals used in bombs or how certain tools can be (ab)used to cause havoc, just to deter wannabe copycats. You think anyone would be allowed to do a "true" hacker movie in this climate?
Besides, nobody would want to watch it. Except maybe geeks, but you can hardly make a blockbuster that way. I mean, when was the last time your computer blew up due to a botched hack? See? No explosions, no gunfights, not interesting.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I can code for hours without touching the mouse. What purpose does a mouse serve when writing code? What does it provide that a keyboard doesn't? This isn't photo-editing or game-playing we're talking about, it's coding.
The only benefit I could see would be for cut-and-paste purposes, but even then a couple quick keystrokes in a good editor will do the trick faster.
If we start buying CDs then the terrorists have already won.
I have seen one episode of ER, but obviously it was the wrong one. They picked the one thing I knew anything about - premature births - and they were so far from the truth it wasn't even funny. I just turned it off when I saw a lady pick up and rock her one day old, 13 week early, 7 pound baby. My brother was only 11 weeks early but he weighed less than 3 pounds and Mom and Dad weren't allowed to pick him up out of the incubator for weeks. Little ones that early fit in your hand, not your arms.
It may be true that, in the present day, no one codes in binary, but I have. On a machine with bit variable instruction length! Also in octal, hexadecimal and even (a very tiny bit) decimal on an old IBM 1620. (You could actually load data and instructions into memory by typing digits on the IBM Executive-style typewriter console.)
Most of my binary etc. code was patched into previously compiled program images which couldn't be recreated from source for some reason, but a small amount was entered through the switch panel of what were then called mini-computers, including the DEC PDP-8 and PDP-11 and the HP2116 (both A and B).
At the time (70s and early 80s), this wasn't even especially unusual.
In the six years that I worked as lead game tester in the video game industry, I had never gotten drunk, stoned, titted or laid because of my job. "Grandma's Boy" is such an unrealistic movie that I laughed all the way through.
I read the list about things code doesn't do in real life. The one about text not making noise when it is typed on the keyboard struck me that the one making the list is just a kid. Anyone who has used a real VT100 terminal, or a clone of such (remember Wyse terminals???) had a keyboard with a very quiet touch...so quiet that people were uneasy about typing on it, so they added an artificial key click on the keyboard, with a volume control. Every key pressed made a very short beep, at the same time it appeared on the screen.
And the part about the Gibson in Hackers being a 3D city and having a problem with it just means this guy has no imagination. Anyone remember the movie Disclosure? There was a "cutting edge" operating system being rumored to be developed in real life that was a 3D world that people walked around in and interacted with files, etc in a virtual reality. That metaphor was used in several movies. How else can non-geeks understand anything about what we geeks do without clear visuals? It's called artistic license.
What bothered be about movies is when they substitute one thing for another. For example, in Tron, when Flynn gets "lasered" back into the real world, the printer starts printing. The printer was a daisy-wheel printer, and it made sounds like a dot matrix printer.
Oh well. Lighten up!
I dont remember the name of the character (or the actor for that matter) but you gotta give props to the guy who can design a virus that can disable a completely alien computer system and then hack into that alien space ship's computer system to implant a virus from an iBook! I mean we're talking alien communication protocols, alien hardware, alien software, alien everything!! ... unless ofcourse aliens use macs.
Not to mention. HE SAVED THE EARTH! No top 20 greatest movie hackers to have ever existed list is complete without him!
- Tempestdata
Web Designers also are getting screen time on Hollywood movies.
Need a color? Try 100 random colors
Uh? Assembly is *not* binary. Binary would be programming in machine code. I know people who have done that, though, it's not *that* difficult, it just doesn't make any practical sense.
Obviously they can't use real premature babies.
When we were just switching from terminals which printed letters on paper (not just teletypes, but IBM 2741, TI Silent 700s (thermal image printing) and various "daisy wheel" terminals), the first "glass teletypes" often had a artificial keyswitch "click" to reassure us that our typing was actually working. It was a big advance (for those who appreciate the silence) to get a programmable option to turn that sound off.
Listing Crash but not Burn!
OMG code in the movies is not like real code in the real world? Next thing you will be telling me is that cops in the movies are not like real cops.
Is Hollywood warfare completely different from real world warefare as well? At least I know that all the cars, boats and planes in movies are
behave and look exactly like the cars, boats and planes in real life. I am just glad women we see in movies are just what we get in reality.
What real people are not completely good or completely evil? The world is not black and white? Damn you Hollywood for misleading me!
Get over it. Almost everything in movies is NOT what it appears.
The window manager showed in Jurrasic Park is actually real, it's fsn. There's a linux port, fsv at sourceforge. As you'll notice, the view does make it possible to tell that you're in a *nix enviornment.
www.isoHunt.com
According to the "Things Code Doesn't Do" he mentions that binary is dead because he doesn't know anyone who programs like that. So does this mean that 8088/8086 code isn't used anymore?!?
The only security problem IRIX suffered from was that it was too easy to use. And that led to a lot of users successfully using such systems, but not having the background to keep them up to date and patched. It's much what we see with Windows today, although Windows has an arguably horrible security model to begin with. At least IRIX was based upon the far more reliable UNIX model.
Most of the security issues with IRIX systems were due to ancient versions of various HTTP, FTP and mail server software being used in production environments. As would be expected, such software did have security holes, those holes were well-known, and thus they could be easily exploited. IRIX often got the blame for problems with software that wasn't even developed at SGI.
And obviously nobody wants to watch a real hacker sit and type code that doesn't look like it's doing anything. The point was simply that anything is going to look more realistic in Hollywood when you're not familiar with the field, but once you get into something you recognize, you can see that they decided using something easy to film and interesting was more important than realism.
"Democracy." It's just a slogan.
This guys never met anyone who codes in binary? I've done it plenty of times. It's called Assembly.
No, we coded in alpha letter opcodes in Assembly. Binary programming was done earlier by toggling a switch up or down for each bit and hitting Enter. I didn't have one of those, I started with the TRS-80.
rd
Hacking a DOD system in 60 seconds all while getting a hummer from a hot blond and a revolver pointed to your head....now that gent's is a hacker..
Got Code?
The class I learned assembly in was on 8086s. We programmed on a keypad with 14 keys i think? 0-9 and a few others...start, go, end, something else. Our "display" was 20 leds. Our text editor of choice was college ruled loose leaf, and a mechanical pencil. Totally awesome.
Try being a firearms afficionado and watching some action movies.
Better yet, get a room full of WWII buffs, and show them a bunch of WWII films. Record what transpires, because you'll need to review it twice.
... still waiting for this free-as-in-beer free beer I keep hearing about.
. . . When you were gwowing up, didn't you notice that anything was possibwe in cawtoons? Do you weawwy think Howwywood movie diwectors ow pwoducers awe any diffewent? It isn't weawity, you know?
Oh, BTW, that weminds me . . . I went out hunting this weekend and the stwangest thing happened. Weww, I saw this wabbit, you see. So, I chased him down and he wan and jumped into this howe in the gwound. I said, "I'm gonna get you, you wascawy wabbit!!". You wouldn't bewieve what he did!! He jumped out of the howe, gwabbed my big, fat cheeks and kissed me wight on the mowth!! Then he jumped up again, spinning in a compwete bwur at about a thousand times a second, to which, at his apex he jack-knifed and did a Gweg Wouganis-style dive, wight back into the howe. So I stuck my double-bawwel shotgun in the howe and said, "Now, I've got you, wabbit!!". Suddenwy, I fewt a tun on my gun, and befowe I know it I was in a tug-of-waw with him. He yanked and I yanked back. Yank . . . yank. . . yank, . . . back and fowrth. When I finawwy puwwed my gun out, it was tied in a knot!! As a wast wesowt, I puwwed the twigger and bwew my own face owff. That was the wast time I went wabbit hunting.
Now, I just wook fowawd to duck season. If that doesn't wowk out, I'ww just take up painting.
Sorry to break it to you - ER sucks. Yes, even with their countless medical "experts" to guide them. But House sucks even more.
So do CSI and other forensics-related shows (their biochemistry is atrocious).
BTW, having read some Chricton, I have to say his knowledge of biochemistry is so bad that I'm surprised he ever passed enough of his exams to become a doctor. Seriously, the guy is a dumbass.
Maybe it's just me, but I seem to find the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park a little less believable than a kid getting root.
What, cold blooded animals with scales, teeth and claws are unbelievable? It's the hot little furry ones that seem out of place to me, kind of like a run away finger snack. The world is full of big bad beasts.
Given recent findings of soft tissue in fossils and the fiendish pace of cloning research, you might live to see dinosaurs of an earlier vintage than these. Just think of it as the biological equivalent of running Windows 3.1 in dosbox.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
Was the baby alive and expected to make it? Parents sometimes get some time with their dead or dying premie.
While Michael Crichton did graduate from Harvard medical school he is not and never has been licensed to practice medicine. His writing career had started to to take off while he was still a student and he only finished school at the urging of the Dean.
BL is a comedy. Most comedies (other than "Office Space" of course) don't even try to be like real life. Except Shirley Schmidt. She's real. I've met her. You don't want to get in her way.
But your point is well taken for shows like Justice, Law & Order, The Practice, etc.
Thank you for the great Friday night article. I needed this laugh after a long week. It's funny everyone; just laugh and move on
K Man
I cannot believe no one has mentioned Colossus the super computer of the 1970s. This is a cult classic.
I didn't know we were getting to this. Is this the punchline to your "joke"? The comedians around here just kill me.
Weren't all those vehicles famous for being Ford Explorers?
"If you want to quibble, you could ask where he got the EvilAlienOS programmer's reference manual or the EvilAlienCPU's architecture description or how he managed to find an exploitable vulnerability in EvilAlienOS so quickly. But enough about the frickin' Mac, okay?"
I don't have to quibble. It was in the movie. Remember that Area 51 had an alien spacecraft for several years. Plenty of time to figure some things out. And it stands to reason that the alien technology used in the mother ship isn't much different than what is in the spacecraft even after several years.
All hardware is compatible.
I remember watching "The Lone Gunman" one day (thank God that show didn't make it!) and they needed more processing power to crack a password to take over a hijacked plane. "We could do this if had one of those new Octium 4's!" Well, they get one, right before the plane hits the building, they pull out their existing processor and drop in the Octium 4 (without so much as powering the machine off) and BAM! They had their password and saved the plane. (Oh, and no processors had any type of thermal anything!)
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
The only perfectly healthy premie I've ever seen.
Very dated now, but they did at least get some things right. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064177/
Any geek worth his salt will find Hackers entertaining as hell, cheeseball plot and dialog notwithstanding. It's the epitome of geek-kitsch.
"RISC architecture is gonna change everything."
"Yeah, RISC is good."
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
Not as big as my news about your girlfriend.
I work in Level 2 tech support. I occasionally have other techs ask me to help them figure out why they can't mount a CD on a customer's server they're dialed into. I always start by asking them to check with the customer to see if the CD is in the drive SHINY SIDE DOWN. You'd be surprised how often the disk is upside down in the drive. I don't blame the non-techies, when every single TV show or movie that shows someone using a computer's {C|DV}D drive shows it shiny side up.
[100% ISO 646 Compliant]
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
Binary is not assembly. it is not a programming language. it is an integral base (like decimal and hex). we use it in programming for bitmasks primarily. these are used for things like flags -> using bitwise AND operations to determine if a particular flag is valid. we usually use predefined constants for these in higher level languages, but in asm we have to make these ourselves. so yeah, we do use binary in assembly, we just don't write everything using it.
in truth, we don't have to use it at all - bitmasks can be made simply with hex - sometimes it's just easier to do it in binary (such as each bit representing a switch or led, and rather than convert it to hex, just use the binary representation of the switches)
Uphill both ways in the snow?
You know, the first language I learned way back when was COBOL. I didn't love it much, but that's only because nobody ever told me that you could create a Terminator with it!
Of course, even as a junior programmer I probably would have been sharp enough to send information directly to the brain on the cyborg rather than just doing a printout to the eye. But you know how it goes - machine generated code is always crap.
as a senior unix admin, I gotta say I personally enjoy the mystique surrounding our profession, especially that of the hardcore sysadmin. if they wanna think that it takes some uber-genius to be a sysadmin, and therefore keep our pay up in the ranks, let em! I may even buy a skateboard and hold onto limos while I intercept garbage files on a floppy from the teenager who just rooted my Sun e25k. heh.
A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.
Get off my lawn!
It was more a class on the actual design of microprocessors, memory bus, etc. The poking around on the kits was more for demoing what we learned.
This class took place two years ago...the college I went to just hadn't updated their electronics curriculum in 10 years lol
No matter what your area of expertise, you'll find flaws whenever a Hollywood screenplay tries to mimic whatever it is that real people do for a living, or even hobbies for that matter. As a guitar player, I find 90% of the instances when Joe-famous is playing guitar to be utterly hilarious. I'm surprised that even the audience can't tell that the actor obviously isn't playing what's being portrayed on the screen, but that's probably because I'm the only one paying attention. I'm sure Doctors, Lawyers, etc. all find movies portraying their profession to be as ridiculous as us software folks do.
Wow, they actually referenced an anime on their list, although I haven't been able to figure out what kind of criteria they're judging on.
Anyway, it's a TV show so I understand why she wasn't included, but it's hard to see Iwakura Lain ignored on a list like this. Very few hackers can reach her level...
Alita69
"Information softly strokes my lips. The soft spot below the ear."
-- Serial Experiments: Lain
The most powerful server was also the most dangerous. The 50 mile by 50 mile computer complex on "Forbidden Planet". The server could create anything a mind could think of. Even monsters from a Disney movie.
In GOD we trust, all others we monitor.
Um, no, assembly uses mnemonics like, "mov %eax,(var+$10)".
When I code in machine code, I generally use hex.
TCP: Why the Internet is full of SYN.
...and ninja assassins find amusing to people not in those fields.
While I am not a Ninja Assasin, I am a Unix admin, and I did laugh at "I know this!". But in the same vien, I have studied martial arts for years, and whenever I see a swordfight, in a movie, it drives me insane.
The next time you watch a swordfight in a movie, watch where the swords are being swung. Most of the time, if the opponent just dropped their sword to the floor, the attacking swing would miss completely. In hollywood, they swing the swords at the other swords - blade to blade - instead of trying to actually hit the other guy.
That drives me nuts.
(Still working on the Ninja Assasin bit though...)
Try to hack my 31337 firewall!
I can understand that the movie writers can't be familliar with the inner workings of every industy, and I'll pardon them when they make mistakes on the in depth stuff... what really bugs me in a lot of movies is when they get things wrong about things they should be intimately familliar with... pet peave for one of my friends is 2-way radios... 3/4 of the people on the set are using the silly things, you'd think they'd know how they work! (things like when they interupt someone talking on a radio, or don't release the push to talk button to listen)
some of the mistakes are excusable, a lot of them are not.
like infinite resolution (can you enhance that?), or clients that pull every available record on the database from the server and flash them on the screen while searching for dna/fingerprints/faces (no wonder they constantly complain about the network and servers being slow on 24).
--
Stay tuned for some shock and awe coming right up after this messages!
Blake's 7 got that one right, in that you almost never got the "World War I Dogfight" space combat. Mind you, how much of that was due to skill and how much was due to a budget you could barely feed a canary with is up for debate. The same goes for the few flickers of space combat in The Tomorrow People and most of what you get in Doctor Who in that regard. Most of the other British telefantasy series I can think of that involved space (such as the Quatermas series) avoided the issue entirely.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
...which was the most realistic cop show ever on TV and all of them said Barney Miller.
Here's a quick test for you. Can you think of one good reason they might do that?
You like top 10 lists because they give you an easy path to flamebait, I like top 10 lists because they remind me of some of my favorite movies. I've seen Hackers so many times. I seriously got worried when I didn't see Dade Murphy until the bottom of the list, but #3 is ok with me.
That guy obviously doesn't use emacs.
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People in filmmaking often use Macs. When they are asked to prepare computers for a movie set in an office environment with DOS prompts viruses and all, they'll use what they have and try to make it look like whatever the director wants. So I'd say, what you saw was Mac OS that was supposed to like like Windows 3.11.
The next time you watch a swordfight in a movie, watch where the swords are being swung. Most of the time, if the opponent just dropped their sword to the floor, the attacking swing would miss completely. In hollywood, they swing the swords at the other swords - blade to blade - instead of trying to actually hit the other guy.
A very noteable exception -- or maybe not since it isn't Hollywood but what you're saying is common of action movies from everywhere -- being The Seven Samurai. Everyone who uses a sword in that movie uses it to kill, and as a result most sword fights are one or two strokes long. While lacking the acrobatic beauty of a good ten-minute lightsaber duel, it did have a gritty reality that just felt right.
The enemies of Democracy are
Try being a firearms afficionado and watching some action movies.
.223 caliber brass is hitting the ground?
.357 magnum revolver?
Like when Neo is going akimbo with 22. caliber pistols and
Or when someone is firing shots from a semiauto pistol while the slide is locked open.
Or when someone tries to fire an empty semiauto pistol and the slide didn't lock open after the last bullet or it has locked open and yet there is still the sound of a hammer falling.
Or when someone fires 10 shots from a
Or when someone assembles a rifle out of a case and hits a bullseye from 400 yards away.
Or when someone rapid fires a bolt-action rifle.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
You don't have to be a specialist to see this kind of crap, either. I know this society seems to steer towards an ant-like specialisation, and people are supposed to be absolutely ignorant about everything outside their field, but hollywood writers routinely show abject igorance of things like basic physics to the point where it seems miraculous these people can get through a day without winning a darwin award. And they're lucky if their gaffes turn out to be funny - they're very often just stupid, and destroy the suspension of disbelief necessary to the enjoyment of fiction in anyone not similarly brain dead.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
While I am not a Ninja Assasin,
Or so you'd have us believe, Kinjo.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
What drove me absolutely bonkers was in the early 1990s when someone would dial a cell phone, there'd be a dial tone!!!!
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
The dude was hacking before I knew what a computer was: he was dumpster diving and doing late nite hack sessions on a work computer, LEO (Large Enumeration Officiator).
http://imdb.com/title/tt0067219/
Also of note:
Spock and James T. Kirk, they programmed and logic bombed many a computer in thier time - Star Trek
http://imdb.com/title/tt0060028/
and where is Bryce Lynch??!!??! he was able to pirate some guy's brain into a mainframe! - Max Headroom
http://imdb.com/title/tt0089568/
Totally missed was Michael Fox & Judy Collins - in Prime Risk
http://imdb.com/title/tt0087942/
Bobby Witherspoon (aka Xardon) - in Interface
http://imdb.com/title/tt0087476/
Dr. Charles Luther - in Runaway
http://imdb.com/title/tt0088024/
Marcus Pendleton alias Caesar Smith - in Hot Millions
http://imdb.com/title/tt0063094/
Freeman Lowell - in Silent Running
http://imdb.com/title/tt0067756/
Then there are 'Computer' Hackers which are computers using the system,
Edgar, the Pinecone OS - in Electric Dreams
http://imdb.com/title/tt0087197/
such as Colossus - in Colossus: the Forbin Project
http://imdb.com/title/tt0064177/
Proteus - in Deamon Seed
http://imdb.com/title/tt0075931/
And the well meaning but not too bright MCP (kind of like Microsoft) - in Tron
http://imdb.com/title/tt0084827/
and the Robotrix Maria - in Metropolis
http://imdb.com/title/tt0017136/
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
That always was my problem with the series. Even as an 8 year old I thought: "Damn, they sure move pretty fast to get to all those places every week." I had less problems with Star Treks physics, although I couldn't have explained those either
Doting uncle of three preemies speaking here:
My niece (who just turned 21) was one of the incubator babies who wasn't allowed to be picked up, and we all felt good about how solicitous the hospital was of her health. But by the time my twin nephews were born (just 5 years ago), everything was different about the way the same hospital treated them.
7 pounds at 13 weeks early is laughable indeed, and you're absolutely right about the size. But in recent years, they've learned that the previous practice of protecting premature infants by keeping them isolated in an incubator was usually a big mistake. I gather it turned out that depriving preemies of parental touch -- direct, unmediated touch, not touch-through-a-rubber-glove -- greatly increases the odds of failure-to-thrive and of SIDS in later life, and may contribute to the emotional problems and autoimmune disorders common (although not universal) in preemie kids. (My niece has asthma and tons of allergies; not so for the twins.)
So while they definitely got some pretty significant things wrong, the mother holding the premature baby wasn't one of them. (Now, if she was doing so with unsterilized attire and outside of the pediatric ICU, then there's even more fodder for ridicule.)
How can a post be modded "overrated" or "underrated" when it hasn't been rated yet?
I'm always vaguely confused by the Jurassic Park complaints. The Jurassic Park movie had almost nothing wrong with its presentation of computers or technology in general. (I'm not including the sci-fi cloning in that. I'm sure there were problems with that.)
First of all, yes, that's a real Unix system. A very stupid one, but a real one.
Secondly, the system was crap. And the point is?
It's a very badly designed system. It was designed by one person, and it's not finished. No one was trained in it yet, and the only person who understands it dies early, and it was sabotaged. Of course you have crazy stuff like not automatically switching the power over or the fences going down.
I mean, yeah, some stuff was slightly improbable, but it's the kinda shit that actually does happen in emergency situations, at least the first time...you discover that, hey, the damn generator didn't come on line or that the carefully constructed key-card security system is not, apparently, on the battery backups This is why you don't test with live data, or, in this case, live dinosaurs.
Again, unfinished, crappy system. Sorta like the actual park itself, when you think about it. Remember it was being worked on by someone who, at least for a short period of time, knew he was going to fleeing his job with a boatload of money for selling them out, and ask yourself if you think he really was working on fixing bugs during that time?
About the only thing I actually have issues with is the 'We can't get a phone line out' plot. But I guess, logically, those couldn't be 'real' phone lines, it's not like the phone company ran lines to the island. No, they have a sat or underwater cable connection with somewhere, and a PBX, and Nedry screwed up the PBX, and they don't know what the hell they'll talking about, all they know is they can't get a dial tone.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
I have coded in Hex but never in binary. Yes Writing direct Hex representations of Machine instructions. Early on it was the fastest way to Hack by changing the values on disk with out having to disassemble and reassemble. But Hex wouldn't be as obviously computer related as binary is.
Personally I think the guy who wrote the article about what code doesn't do, is either a "Web Developer" or just wanted to try and irritate some old school hackers.
1) Code does move, especially when interactively debugging. Having watched machine instructions be executed command by command I will testify to this one. It just might not move as fast as it does in the movies
2) Alot of Code "WAS" green text on a black background and I even have some of my current IDE's configured that way (preference plus easier on the eyes), when I'm not using white on blue that is.
3) Code has Structure. The only thing I can do about this one is Laugh. Most code might have structure but not one most people, developers included, could ever understand.
5) Code "can" make blip noises and can actually make coding easier because it is easier to know if you hit multiple keys at once by accident, or skipped a key press.
6) Code "can" be broken by an eight year old in seconds, would you like to meet some.
8) I think we already covered binary representations of code
9) Good developers avoid the mouse at all costs. It's slow and mostly useless.
10) Good code can be compiled to many different machine codes, you just have to assume the wrote a good C compiler for the alien technology in Independents Day I mean they had the ship long enough.
Troll, my ass. You all know it is true.
(OFF TOPIC)
This is why American film students study Kurosawa. He was a genius, and a stickler for details.
what still gets me is when someone hangs up on you, you do NOT get a dialtone!! (or do you in some other part of the world? certainly not here!)
the other trend I've noticed in a lot of movies recently is characters, especially drug lords, using satellite phones... in doors, underground, etc... I've used these things, it's hard enough to get a reliable signal when you can see the sky!
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I am working with embedded code and hardware simulators (fancy emulators), and in many occations I've had the need to enter opcodes in binary (actually hex, but close enough). When developing simulators you kind of fall down to hand assemled code when doing the initial testing.
Just recently I was more or less forced to patch individual instructions in an already compiled program for an embedded target (don't we just love compiler bugs). I opened the elf-file in an hexeditor and then manually changing an offending instructions to nop-instructions in this case.
The bad thing is that I recognise several instructions for this target by just looking on the hex-representation.
"Civis Europaeus sum!"
... because while the downside about knowing a subject well is the wincing, snickering and occasional audible snarls, the upside is the thrill when it becomes clear that the writer understands the science, understands the culture, and has pulled it all together with a story that works.
The kid didn't have or need special skills. They were around for the hardware being rebooted, and the tools being used provided automatic basic access for dedicated terminals in the data center. That's fairly normal for a dedicated network operations center, or control center for a physical plant, especially early on before enough non-privileged employees are in place to justify setting up security that will interfere with critical work. If you've got keys or access to the room, you're assumed to be trustworthy.
Also, remember that the core designer was a greedy, overwhelmed contractor, and about to steal stuff. He would *deliberately* leave the security a mess to ease his theft, and blame the poor security on being underpaid and not having it on his tasklist. That kind of security hash is unfortunately quite common: How many of your core servers are redundant, with unique passwords, no backdoors, a BIOS password to prevent booting from a USB stick, etc., etc., etc.
I've seen the exact same thing where the IT people fight having hardware management and inventory, because it turns out they're ripping off equipment for home use as a "perk" of the job.
Consider the source.
Yes, "heating engineer." Actually I screwed up with those suggestions, especially with Seymour, because of course they weren't computer hackers, but just geeks (for some reason I thought that page was about 20 Movie Geeks; D'oh!).
But there were "computer hackers" in Brazil; the real hacker was Sam Lowry, who used quite a number of techniques including social engineering: "ERE I AM JH." The funnier candidate would be Harvey Lime, who had the memorable lines, "Computers... are my forte" and "I'm a bit of a whiz on that thing," but was, in the end, revealed to be computer-incompetent.
you had me at #!
...because they get so close, and then they just have stupid things. Things like ignoring conservation of energy (human batteries with the sun gone). Things like the Matrix being run on dialup (they talk about a "Carrier signal"), networked between DOS clones (Enter the Matrix had a "hacking" mode with a DOS prompt, only worse -- no USB keyboard support on the Playstation 2, you HAD to use the soft keyboard with a joystick. Ugh.).... Things like being unable to unplug people, or to figure out how Neo did what he did -- not to mention that it is, once again, hacking through "focus your chi" or some shit rather than "Oh, he found an exploit -- wasn't hard, since the Matrix runs on Windows 95."
Anyway, sorry for the rant, it's nice that they got that piece right, but seriously, the idea of such an advanced videogame in which someone obviously made some stupid ass mistake -- I mean, Neo can fly. That shouldn't happen unless sv_cheats = 1...
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
For a good 10-minute lightsaber battle, you need the Darth Maul scene in The Phantom Menace. That quarterstaff wielding lunatic was absolutely fabulous, insanely quick, and clearly a master of his weapon. And he ws having *fun*, not only fighting but actively embarassing his opponents with his wildly superior skill.
The Seven Samurai was also wonderful, and much more faithful to real sword fighting: the swordfights were as faithfully done as you could with the available movie techniques.
CCSU?
I'm hearing a lot of people pointing out where they've seen this list in action, where they (surprisingly) haven't, and what TFA missed -- but I don't see anyone disagreeing. I do.
Depends what it is. If said 8 year old is looking at binary, hex, or moving random text, then no. But if said 8 year old is looking at a Windows 98 login screen, he might try the unthinkable and hit "cancel". Or even the esc key. I did this, and I was maybe 12 or 14 or something.
While it's true that our environments could be a little more realistic -- maybe a web browser with some documentation -- I actually don't use the mouse much while coding.
I mean, I'm on a Mac at work, and it is kind of unusual to see a real OS in a movie, but I mostly am ssh'd in to a Linux box writing the actual code, and the Mac has a wonderful keyboard shortcut of command+left/right to switch between open terminal windows. It's not the same thing as tabs -- I can fit four 80x24 terminals (all green text on translucent black background, because I like it that way) on my screen at once. On my Linux, I have to twitch my mouse, which is annoying, even with sloppy focus.
But yeah, as I learn more about vim, I'm learning that the keyboard is pretty much all I use when editing and testing most of my code. And it actually does look kind of like the movies -- between my vim setup, and my typing commands in, and my seeming to type insanely fast (due to tab completion), and my kernel compiles and whatever scrolling past (which I do understand some of, enough to ctrl+z it sometimes if I'm curious)...
Which brings us to:
Yes and no. Code does not move, but output does. I watch logfiles with tail -f, I watch compiles (kernel and otherwise) and actually get an idea of the gist of what they're doing, I watch IRC discussions, and I watch the debugging output of my programs to get an idea of their progress.
It's not the same as Hollywood, where code is 3D and flying all over the screen, and I'm using VR gloves to put stuff together. Snow crash had the right idea -- even when the primary computer interface is 3D, we still go to Flatland for some things, including source code.
But, many of his points are weak, and most we've seen before. The #1 mistake I see is them dumbing down the computer stuff -- can you name a single hack that's actually been explained to you that made any real sense, without you inventing huge amounts of crap to fill the gaps?
I mean, even classic stuff, like that grabbing-the-fractions-of-a-penny stuff? Come on, what's stopping you from just doing a debit from one account and a credit to another -- shit, what's stopping you from simply making up a bunch of deposits from cash, and claim you got it from an unnamed Swiss bank account? Or how about the "Send Spike" of Goldeneye: "It jams their modem so they can't hang up" -- well gee, if it can do that, you've already 0wned them, why not just have their box traceroute one or two hops and give you that IP, then let them hang up and trace some random server that no one cares about?
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
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if you watch the sceen a frame at a time you will see the blades go through the fighters a couple of times with no injuries
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It is Irix here. Hell it's usually 1 step away from making the shell suid root.
Care about electronic freedom? Consider donating to the EFF!
From TFA:
The firewall would've blocked all non-solicited traffic to the inside network, leaving only the telnet connections in, which could be turned off in a state of emergency.
Aww, how sweet, this kid's got a computer at home...and he allready knows how to turn on the firewall! Good thing telnet is a really secure way of doing things...
The Bigger The Headache The Bigger the Pill
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The whole point of going to the movies is suspension of belief... please check physics, chemistry, math, and higher logic back at the ticket booth before entering the theatre. In fact you can drop biology, behavioral science, and yes, fair depictions of numerous social minorities, all in that same pile, because the whole point of movies is to escape reality, and celebrate our fantasies.
When the "Six Million Dollar Man" reaches up and pulls an overturned car down to right it, without launching himself into low earth orbit (can you say Newtonian Physics at work?) or When Kevin Bacon becomes invisible in "Hollow Man", and he can still see, even though his invisible eyes are no longer stopping photons, a brighter child might stop and say "Hmmmm, Obviously not my space time continuum".) Of course in all fairness, the same could be said about Washington D.C., but then who am I to judge?
An really interesting list might be, science fiction movies (TV or Movie) that actually got the science part right...
These things always nag at me and whenever I mention them, people just look at me funny (unless they also have some idea of what code does). Reading these put a smile on my face and made a great start to my day so I'm pretty happy about it to be honest :)
My blog - This link wouldn't be interesting even if we set fire to
While I realize you were making a joke, could you actually provide details of any remotely exploitable vulnerabilities in Windows '95? The only thing I could find was an ICMP exploit, but all that could do was crash the PC (a DoS), not execute arbitrary code.
...good to see Neo at the top!
http://nathanlindsell.blogspot.com/
The likelihood of a young kid knowing a way to get ROOT (and not a more experienced programmer) is pretty hard to swallow.
What - they never heard of script kiddies?
It is easy to point fingers at non-techies and explain at a haughty tone that certain things cannot happen that way!
.exe that promised to show something nice like fireworks for the newyear and in addition to that planted a virus on the computer that would forward those mails and destroy something)
I remember well how in the ninetees people who claimed that one could get a virus by just reading a mail or opening a wordprocessor document were laughed away.
You know, there was a difference between programs and data! The poor souls could not know that, but a virus was a PROGRAM and it had to hide in a PROGRAM or at most a bootsector.
A virus hiding in a textfile was simply impossible. You could safely open any mail and as long as you would not save the attachments therein and launch them, there was zero chance that you would get a virus from this.
(and indeed, in those days it was happening that mails had an attached
But as time went by, it turned out that it COULD happen after all! We forgot about some possibilities that seemed remote, but turned out to be commonplace. We thought it would have been "impossible" to craft an exploit for a stack overflow bug that would actually execute some "useful" code instead of just crashing the system, but it happened. And more complex things happen today.
I'm don't know anything about swordfighting but wouldn't it make sense to go after the other guy's sword so you could get in a position to actually hit him with lesser or no risk of getting slashed?
enouch said :)
----
Agreed, The trouble with reality in computing is that it would make pretty poor viewing to the paying masses.
:wq into an email.
If I saw a truly realistic computer portrayal of a computer being used in an action film I'd not be impressed. I want to see the stuff like Johny Mnemonic used, or the fancy interface in Minority report. Not people cussing because they've yet again put
Ironically, that's not so. Anyone who has ever inherited a Unix system with an unknown root password very likely knows that the "secure" flag is set backwards on a high percentage of them. I.e. "secure = yes" means that the physical console is in a secure environment and that it is therefore OK to run programs in single user mode without logging in. Setpass is not restricted in single user mode. Result. On a great many Unix/Linux/whatever systems if you have physical access to the computer, have a console attached, and can force a reboot, hacking into the system is trivial. Of course, you'll have to set a new root password, but you'll be in.
I don't know if this hole has been plugged, I used this technique to hack into a Red Hat based router in the late 1990s. It took me about fifteen minutes to find it on the Internet. No reason that a kid mighten't know it, and certainly no reason they couldn't use it if they knew it from, for example, hacking into a scrapped system that dad brought home from work or that somebody fished out of a dumpster.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
Or see it portrayed in a realistic manner?
Then watch a documentary. Or read a book.
I hate sitting in movie theater and hearing someone say "that could never happen".
I know that Zaphod Bebbeblebrox isn't the galactic president, but it is fun to see it on screen or read about it in a book. It is called entertainment. In this case a work of fiction. Actors and places may resemble those you know, or think you know, in real life, but any similarity is purely coincidental.
Yeah, you're AC and a troll, but if you feel brave, tell me what's bogus. I only really mentioned two basic facts:
1) Protestors in NYC getting into trouble with the cops. For the record, the sibling poster is correct, this was at RNC 2004, in the Flatiron neighborhood somewhere in the vicinity of 5th Avenue and 16th Street. The events of the convention were pretty heavily documented, both in the maintream media and the more... unconventional press. The vast majority of charges against civilians for street incidents were dropped, before trial, a lot of it due to the documentary video evidence that the cops didn't realize, or didn't care, was being shot. A few people sued, or threatened to sue, and settled out of court with the city--some lawsuits might have gone to trial, too, but I don't remember for sure. Now, I don't need to prove any of that, because it's all a matter of public record, and you can do your own damn homework.
I was protesting, I know a lot of people who were protesting, and many of them were hassled by the cops, to varying degrees. I have a lot of fringe-political friends, and there are even more of us with sympathies in that direction who aren't so active about it, having day jobs. I can't prove any of that to anybody, at least not here on Slashdot, without giving up a lot of privacy that I'd rather not. So, tough shit and fuck off.
2) Advanced digital video enhancement techniques. Google for it. Lots of proprietary stuff, some has been commercial for years and other stuff is using newer techniques. There is a lot of unlicensed or OSS-licensed, non-comercialized code available, too: MIT's media lab has a whole working group on the subject, and some even more interesting things are coming out of Russia and Eastern European grad schools.
You have to at least know enough about information theory to recognize that the concept is on solid theoretical ground, right? Lossy compression (like MPEG used to compress cell phone video) is using DCT to remove visually redundant image bits, and again to remove visually redundant frame info, because it's fast and easy to implement on most processors, NOT because it efficiently packs data to a near-minimum message size. It's not trying to approach the Shannon limit or the Nyquist limit (both of which deal with lossless compression, anyway, which is a whole 'nother ball of wax), it's trying to make some quick cuts in data stream size that aren't necessarily pulling information out in the most efficient way. In other words, it's leaving more bits in the message that absolutely need to be there, meaning there's more information to be extracted if you have the time and technique.
There are other "intelligent" video compression methods that require much more processing power, but which provide significant size gains for the same quality--those would probably be resistant to the kind of analysis that I described in the GP post. But I don't know for sure--I've only used the stuff, I didn't design it or code it. Again, do your homework, and fuck off.
I don't think I made any other claims, and I'm pretty sure I'm on solid ground with those two, so what gives? Your boyfriend's been cheating on you, or something?
Even if the statement were "Code is not always green text on a black background", the films where it's presented in this way only show that the character using the computer prefers those settings.
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The first rule of usenet is: Don't talk about usenet.
The second rule of usenet is: Don't talk about usenet.
I'm supprised no one commented about the Thinking Machines Super Computers in the background of the control room of Jurasic Park...
:)
lots of flashy red leds, and they all mean something
No, it wouldn't.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Over the past 50 years, Sci-Fi - the literature rather than the film - has gotten computers wrong. Remember all those sentient computers? AI is a dead subject. Yet, rarely sci-fi predict the actual blazing speed, smallness, or distributed nature of computers today. There are few true visionaries = the exception being possibly Arthur C Clark. Yet even Clark bought into the idea that a monolithic sentient computer was to be the future. Now we can see that this is so wrong. So if much of the source material for sci-fi films gets it wrong, why blame Hollywood?
The only writer to be consistently right about the future was Phillip K Dick. Dick wrote consistently about vision rather than technology. Even so, look at the balls-up that (*spit) spielberg (/*spit) made of Minority report: the conclusion a moral cop-out in a film supposedly about morals.
Patriotism is a virtue of the vicious
Like the fact that Dell(TM) and Purdue Pharma paid $HUGEASSLOADSOFCASH for product placement.
...Rob
The American Dream isn't an SUV and a house in the suburbs; it's Don't Tread On Me.
> Please stop posting meaningless "Top N" lists like this. That "Top 10 Geek Girls" article from
> last week was bad enough.
Aww hell! How'd I miss that! Time to haxor teh gibson...
To quote my old sensai: 'I prefer my opponents dead, not unarmed'
And nowadays he's about as scientific as "Dr" Deepak Chopra.
the layman's guide to computer science
No.
The swords are blunt, the stunt men are trained swordsmen.
Why would they need to pretend?
When was the last time you saw a hand-to-hand fight scene where the opponents were swinging past each other?
the layman's guide to computer science
The only thing we were not allowed to do (for insurance purposes) is swing at someone's head. While most people can block these, there is a chance that one sword will break, and the other person will end up with the end flying at their head. If you fail to block a hit, then it hurts (often a lot), but if you are performing close to an audience, you typically choreograph the entire fight in advance and then you can do whatever you want, because the other person knows what to expect.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I think it's funny. I'm sorry that you don't have a sense of humor.
However, when glaring inaccuracies exist in films, it hurts them. Too much suspension of disbelief required makes the film less meaningful. Ever watch movies with someone who knows physics?
Nobody expects Hollywood to take them seriously, but sometimes you need to vent in a humorous way.
And everything else.
Ask a real cop about the likelyhood a "Lethal Weapon" type character. Mel's character would shoot about 40 people on a slow day, then be right back to work the next day.
Ask a real airline pilot about these airline movies (with the exception of "Airplane").
These medical and legal shows are also a joke to the real pros.
that sounds more probable. I still recall the other buttons to start/stop, next line, etc, so it was probably 20 i suppose
Are they talking about content in the movie or actual servers used for a Jurassic Park website? I have never seen such an ambiguous piece of writing.
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#2) Speaking of Quicktime (which rivals Realmedia as a windows virus) movies and hacking:
http://blog.spywareguide.com/2006/08/using_quickt
http://blog.spywareguide.com/2006/12/myspace_phis
Apple clearly has it in for windows users and actively creates exploitable technology to sabotage windows boxes.
I may have posted this before, but it bears repeating. An acquaintance of mine teachers in colleges around the country, and one of the classes he teaches is "science for non-science majors". He's talked about the food chain of students he gets, and works his way down to:
- next to the bottom are the business majors, who don't get it, but don't
let that worry them, and
- on the bottom are the communications majors - the folks who go to
Hollywood, and "journalism", and "broadcasting", and ad agencies,
who not only don't get it, they don't *know* that they don't get it.
And you expect people like these to have a clue in the stories the film?
mark "don't forget, producers IQs are also the same as their shoe size"
1. Sure it does
at first i thought this guy was saying code doesn't move around on its own, as seen in the Matrix, where it's all sliding and zooming. but, really, it sounds like he's simply saying things don't scroll down. now, coders aren't (generally) speed-readers, that's true. but having it scroll down the screen to read what's going on is a reasonable way to get through it.
2. Sure it does, or at least frequently can
i know tons of coders who hate syntax highlighting, and technicolor shells are perhaps the most irritating user-level "innovation" of the GNU world. i mean, it's just text! this is about as sensible as bolding all your prepositions and putting all your pronouns in italics when writing english. also, keep in mind that in many (most?) of the hollywood scenes, folks are hacking remote systems; they've viewing code through a terminal emulator, not generally a fancy dev environment.
3. True, but not true enough
i wish this was as ridiculous as the author makes it sound.
4. That's not code
generally, the 3d representation isn't of code, but resources. for example, in the "I know this" scene, the girl wasn't doing anything with code, just trying to find an on switch.
5. Thank god this one's right.
6. Not all code is meant to be cracked
don't assume that what you're seeing in films is always cracking. there's plenty of instances of kids just learning how to use an unfamiliar system. while 8 year olds are a bit outside my experience, i've seen young teenagers pick up new technical systems very quickly. this isn't about being a super-hacker, generally, just picking up new stuff.
7. Not all code is being cracked
honestly, i'm not even sure what it means to crack code. one cracks systems. unless the code's been intentionally obfuscated, this just doesn't really apply - and i've never seen a movie go into enough detail to tell whether code's been obfuscated or not.
8. There's other ways to look unintelligible
this is true and valid. if movie producers want to look totally unintelligable to normal people (even geeks!) and still not have to worry about what the code actually means, they should all just write in APL. looks like it's written by aliens, and even for good APL hacks, it's very nearly a write-only language anyway.
9. Cue religious war
personally, i use an editor called acme. we're constantly fighting battles over why on earth coders would ever want to touch the mouse. i agree it's, overall, a significant time-saving device, and i think there's good evidence to back it up empirically, but that's highly contrary to people's own perception of what's going on. certainly most people i know who would describe themselves as "hackers" (rather than, say, "programmers" or "engineers") are very anti-mouse.
10. But it should be
i wish reality were more like the movies here.
i speak for myself and those who like what i say.
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
Was also what they said about the Titanic. They spent huge sums on first-class cabins, lunges, restaurant etc. And then to cut costs they only carried the minimum required lifeboats, not the number they actually needed for their passenger load. Let this be a lesson to us all...
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Double ended (as distinct from double edged) weapons might look kewl, but in reality you'd probably chop your own legs off using one.
It's true I tell you, feller at work's next door neighbour read it in the paper.
I don't see any mention of Benny Hill from "The Italian Job" (the good one, I mean). Even if he's not the best hacker, the fact that the target's a mainframe with all those reels of tape going round must make him a contender for frist hax0r.
It's true I tell you, feller at work's next door neighbour read it in the paper.
you can assemble a rifle out of a case an hit a target at 400 yards. You have to take a minute, and get your bearings, and check the scope, to really estimate how far away they are. But it can be done.
In fact, many snipers carry their rifles in cases during transit.. The case protects the parts from the elements.
And a decent sniper rifle is accurate to 1000+ yards.
(Just saying. If you are going to nitpick, only nitpic on those things which are actually wrong. I dont know handguns so well, so I cant comment on the rest)
Hey, way to miss the point, genius.
1) Code does move, especially when interactively debugging. Having watched machine instructions be executed command by command I will testify to this one. It just might not move as fast as it does in the movies
The fact that it is possible, in certain limited circumstances, for computer screens to display scrolling text, does not excuse the Hollywood convention that all text scrolls at incredible speed.
2) Alot of Code "WAS" green text on a black background and I even have some of my current IDE's configured that way (preference plus easier on the eyes), when I'm not using white on blue that is.
You are in a tiny minority. The fact that it is possible to configure a modern system to mimic ancient technology does not excuse the Hollywood convention that supposedly-ultra-modern-high-tech computer systems should be configured that way, when generally speaking they are not.
3) Code has Structure. The only thing I can do about this one is Laugh. Most code might have structure but not one most people, developers included, could ever understand.
And this excuses the Hollywood presentation of computer code as not even having line breaks, or in many cases not even consisting of words and numbers... uh... precisely how?
5) Code "can" make blip noises and can actually make coding easier because it is easier to know if you hit multiple keys at once by accident, or skipped a key press.
The fact that it is theoretically possible does not alter the fact that in practice it is practically unknown for computer systems to go "blip" every time a character appears on the screen.
6) Code "can" be broken by an eight year old in seconds, would you like to meet some.
The fact that there exist certain rare combinations of very poor security systems and very bright 8-year-olds does not alter the fact that the vast majority of security systems could not be broken in seconds even by a supergenius 8-year-old with a PhD in computer science.
8) I think we already covered binary representations of code
I don't. While looking at hexadecimal representations of code is very common, looking at binary is extremely rare.
9) Good developers avoid the mouse at all costs. It's slow and mostly useless.
Most good developers use a combination of mouse and keyboard input, switching between them as appropriate. It is true that good programmers will on average make greater use of the keyboard for things that other users might use the mouse for, but it is nonsense to say that any but a handful actively refuse to use the mouse for anything.
10) Good code can be compiled to many different machine codes, you just have to assume the wrote a good C compiler for the alien technology in Independents Day I mean they had the ship long enough.
Aside from trivial programs, even the best and most portable code is invariably tied to a single platform, whether that be POSIX, the JVM, Win32, or whatever. (I can't be bothered to read up on ID4 and find out exactly what the fictional scenario was, so I shan't bother arguing this point in detail.)
Then you stand up, and I'll swing a five pound bar of steel at you.
I was conned by an old man in a cloak. It turns out those *were* the droids I was looking for.
The Article it self was inaccurate and not thought through. I mean if you are going to pick on something pick on War Games were Every Computer not only can speak, but they do speak and uses the exact same voice. This is far more unrealistic than 8 year old hackers, reading code on a scrolling screen, accessing a computer through a mono-crome terminal, or writing cross compilable code.
Most of your arguments say that these things happen but it is rare. Movies often represent rare circumstance, often trying to portray hackers as the ultra elite developers (which is sometimes true and sometimes not). These are the people that refuse to use a mouse, spend most of their time in a terminal coding through vi or some other text only editor possibly in perl (I have seen perl programs written without spaces or line breaks).
Remember the article was titled "What code DOESN'T do in real life", not "what code DOESN'T always do in real life." Most people that coded over 20 years ago are not surprised by these representations since they probably had there hands on assembly on mono-cromatic monitors on systems without scroll back ability and which made beeps when typing (which back then I never understood but sometimes miss it today), which is not so different from a lot of the things represented in the movies.
Beyond a small number of those things mentioned, these things do happen in real life, obviously more often than most people think.
In fact, many snipers carry their rifles in cases during transit.. The case protects the parts from the elements.
Sure, they might case a rifle before taking a 5 thousand mile flight, but the rifle must be assembled and calibrated before it's accurate. Headspacing, scope alignment and the tightness of the stock will all be affected by disassembling a rifle (like they do in the movies) and then putting it all back together. Every one of those things will affect accuracy.
And a decent sniper rifle is accurate to 1000+ yards.
A good sniper can hit a target from a mile away, but that's not the point I was making.
You can not get sub MOA performance by field assembling a rifle.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
I just figured that aliens didn't have a system with a 'Jump On Conundrum' opcode.
Have gnu, will travel.
I assume you've never practiced with a staff (which admittedly is blunt on both ends), or with some of the more interesting Oriental and medieval weapons. A lightsaber built that way is insane, admittedly, since too much of it is blade that can cut the wielder to ribbons. But staves are surprisingly effective against swords, in practice and in real life, as long as they're tough enough to withstand sword edges.
I've done some staff training: I never got really good, but was very impressed with their effectiveness against even skilled opponents with other, more popular melee weapons. They're especially fun against 2-sword fighters.
Or when you just say that line: "This is my boomstick. It's a twelve gauge, double barreled Remington pump. Next one of you primitives touch me..." (Ash, Army of Darkness) and you just shoot 3 shots in a row... pffft I hate that! /sarcasm
Of Code And Men
The Lone Wolf & Cub series is the same way. Even boss fights are over in a matter of seconds -- but again, not Hollywood... yet.
I believe that the name of the movie was Panic in the Skies. On the Amazon.com webpage on of the customer reviews mentions "a laptop controlling a 747," so that must be the film
Looking at the Amazon.com review, I see that I was slightly wrong about how they got into that situation. It says "a 747 filled with passengers is struck by lightning in mid-flight. The explosion kills the pilot and co-pilot and sends the airliner into a deadly nose dive." Of course, that adds another unrealistic detail to the story. Aircraft that have been hit by lightning usually survive without experiencing serious problems.
Taking the blurred, barely legible low resolution images generated by the miniscule CCD in a cameraphone and enhancing them so that faces which previously couldn't be recognised suddenly become clear, and badge numbers become legible is just crap.
Sorry pal, that's as ridiculous as anything on 'CSI'.
"In hollywood, they swing the swords at the other swords - blade to blade - instead of trying to actually hit the other guy."
Well, suppose you try to actually hit the other guy. What should the other guy do? Options:
1) do nothing and get hit
2) throw his sword at the floor and laugh at you missing the swing just before you try once more and cut his head off
3) run away like a coward
4) parry the swing with his sword and try again
Options 3 and 4 are reasonable enough but since this is a Hollywood flick, it wouldn't bode well to either have a cowardly hero or bad guy. Hence, long swordfights with lots of parrying...
I don't feel like it...
A very noteable exception -- or maybe not since it isn't Hollywood but what you're saying is common of action movies from everywhere -- being The Seven Samurai. Everyone who uses a sword in that movie uses it to kill, and as a result most sword fights are one or two strokes long. While lacking the acrobatic beauty of a good ten-minute lightsaber duel, it did have a gritty reality that just felt right.
Ah sweet... The Seven Samurai just arrived in my mailbox today.
Now to find time in my busy admin schedule to view it. Maybe I'll recompile the Xen kernels a few times...
Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
Jurassic Park is a good example of a book that didn't translate that well into a movie. Several plot points were only briefly alluded to in the movie and should probably been cut completely. For example, remember the sick dinosaur and the big pile of poop that (in the movie) served only to separate the male and female scientists? In the book, the dinosaur was pregnant, and that whole episode was key to their finding out that the dinosaurs were reproducing. The references to chaos math were also done much better in the book, and didn't really add that much to the movie (in its abbreivated form).
Anyway, back to the programmer. He was a relative of the owner (son in law, IIRC). He was a brilliant programmer but had financial problems and was desperate for money. The owner knew this. So he hired him at a sub-standard rate, basically taking advantage of the programmer's problems. This explains the programmer's actions and motives much more clearly, as well as why there was no team of coders or reams of documentation. In this case, the owner was *not* "sparing no expense." And he got what he paid for.
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"The hardware for this (Jurassic Park) server was probably minimal . . ."
In the movie it's identified as a Connection Machine (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connection_Machine/) and looks like a CM-5, "useless" blinkylights and all. No Mac, but a step above a Vic-20, to be sure.
Distorted doesn't necessarily mean funny. What's more the distortion is spread over the spectrum to all facets of technology and society. Also, it seems the more graphic portrayals of things, the more distorted and erroneous it is. Starting with those idiotic special effects showing people getting blown across the room by being shot with a shotgun, back in the late 60s or early 70s, the more 'realistic' the portrayal, the less real it all started to become.
Now, over half the actors out there seem to get all of their reality from movies. They're total nitwitts.
Ideas have consequences and massive system failures tend to start from a few minor problems and/or design flaws which interact and grow into major catastrophes. Much of the growth is fueled by faulty information being transferred. This applies to civilizations as well as embedded systems.
Going after the other guys sword risks damaging your sword, and won't disarm a trained swordsman.
Worse, the trained swordsman will likely hit you and kill you as he will know your swing is going to miss him.
If you are going for a disarm, in swordfighting the term is literal. Take their hands off. Or their whole arm... It is probably where the term originates, but I dont know for certain.
This is also why as swords became more modern, they had more and more effective hand covers, so your hands would not get cut.
Where you try to hit with a sword depends on the length of the sword, and the style in which it is used. The only time I have been shown to "go after" the weapon being held was when using butterfly swords against dragon poles. The reason is that the butterfly swords are very short, but the dragon pole is about 10 feet long. This is done because the pole is wood, and you can trap it with the swords, before closing the distance and cutting the hands of the holder.
Try to hack my 31337 firewall!
It looks like I misunderstood the OP. I thought he meant forcing the other guy to block not going solely for the weapon without endangering the other person. I agree that it doesn't make any sense to go for the weapon only because one would just move it out of the way and counterstrike.
Thank you for the clarification.
As a user, if I had to put up with that every time I logged in I'd be screaming Get to the fucking prompt! every morning from 9:05 to 9:06, and by the sixth or seventh day I'd be storming the IT department with a cricket bat so I could re-educate some Bastard Systems Programmer on the finer points of having one's brains splattered across a distant wall.
Now that I'm older and wiser the entire movie makes me feel that way. Bad movie. If the old self-loathing is acting up I'd encourage you to watch Burglar right after. No computer problems in it, really, it just sucks quite a bit.
This is not my sandwich.
Any list of famous movie computers that omits "Alpha 60" from "ALphaville", or the PDP-10 from "THX-1138" is...incomplete. There's one scene in "THS-1138" where you can see the console lights light up to spell out "TILT".
There is no God, and Dirac is his prophet.
Pretty much every fight scene is done this way. It's rare (more common now with the influence from Hong Kong stunt men, who were way more hardcore, but still rare) for there to be actual contact in fight scenes, except in carefully blocked closeups. Perspective and camera angles, along with foley, are used to give the impression of a hit. It's most obvious in older films, like old westerns of course, but you can see it even in the most recent blockbusters. One of ways you rate the quality of action choreography and cinematography is how well you can hide the fact that the stuntmen are swinging to miss each other. Of course, if you're actually familiar with martial arts it's easy to tell even if the camera angles are perfect and the sound effects are impeccably timed - many of the fancy acrobatic leaping aerial moves so common these days simply can't be done if you hit something.
Speaking of UNIX, one day I was talking to a semi-geek and I brought up UNIX and he wanted to know why in hell I wanted to talk about guys with no penises. HAHAHA! Eunichs never even came to mind for me.
IMHO, IANAL, TINLA, etc...
It's true I tell you, feller at work's next door neighbour read it in the paper.
Even back then, NOBODY programmed by typing "0 1 0 1 1 1 0". Typically it would be assembler, or at least hex, where a single keystroke is equivalent to 4 bits.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com