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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."
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 #!
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
...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...
While your point is well-made (I love the CSI episode where they "rotate" the security camera still to see the front of the guy's face, when the camera caught him from the back), you'd be surprised what can be done with heavy math and a LOT of processing power to improve the quality of digital images.
Depending on the type of images (stills versus video), and whether compression has been used, it's potentially possible to extract more information from the datastream than was intended. There's a neat trick that can be used on video, where the algorithm enhances one frame by analyzing the preceding and succeeding frames, recognizing the actual objects in the picture. It combines several seconds' worth of video information to provide a much clearer image of what's in a single frame. Of course, this doesn't always work, it depends on what you have to work with.
A guy I sometimes work with got hold of a cellphone camera video, shot freehand during a demonstration in New York City, of some cops pulling people down and roughing them up. Because of the crappy camera work, and the fact that the cellphone was such a horrible source, and the video had been compressed to hell, it wasn't possible initially to make out the faces of the cops or protesters. After tweaking the algorithm parameters and running the original stream through a LOT of processing, he had the video clear enough to identify most of the people present, AND read an officer's badge number.
This was originally prompted by the cops charging the protesters with resisting arrest and assult, all of which were thrown out of court for other reasons. But a couple of people won civil suits against the city on account of the video enhancement, and I think at least one cop lost his job.
I love telling people this story when they complain that higher math is useless except in theoretical physics. Power to the people, man!
I disagree. You see UNIX I know about. If they do something stupid that contradicts my knowledge then it damages my suspension of disbelief. Recombining DNA with modern day creatures? I don't know much about that. I know I don't see dinosaurs outside my window so I can deduce that there are major stumbling blocks that the movie glossed over, but it doesn't contradict my experience and knowledge in the same way as a kid getting root on the island's entire system.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
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.
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.
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.
Yep. I was amazed by how fast the cops and the city backed off from the bullshit charges, when they realized how extensively people had documented the actual goings-on. When I started getting calls from friends to help get bail money together, I was pretty worried about some of the folks that I knew had been popped, but it mostly turned out fine in the end. The cops weren't even that rough--only a few serious injuries, most of the physical incidents just left bruises. I didn't know anybody in Times Square, though--I heard that was worse than around MSG and in the village.
I've always said, the cops are effective not because of guns and uniforms, but because of their radios--you're never just messing with one cop, there are always dozens just a call for backup away. Now, we have the civilian answer to that: a population armed with cellphone camera and other hand-held video, waaay to many to just smash and ignore.
And honestly, I think that anything that makes the cops think twice about busting heads is better for them, too, in the long run. People are more likely to support the police and cooperate with them if they perceive cops as good guys, a point that seems lost on many in the American law-enforcement community.
I find this outlook somewhat humerous. I studied computer vision as a grad student, and yet whenever a face recognition story is posted on slashdot, sure enough, all of the +5 comments reflect Hollywood misconceptions. Digging through the articles, I generally find that people with real experience in the computer vision field have their comments relegated to a 1 status.
I cannot believe no one has mentioned Colossus the super computer of the 1970s. This is a cult classic.
I think the implication in the movie, is that technologies from the recovered craft were recreated, and marketed as products.
Perhaps that is exactly what would be intended, the aliens send a craft specifically to be captured, allow the civilization to become dependant on that set of technologies, then swoop in and take over (using human made communication satelites, etc.) Since the target would be using systems effecivly designed by the attacker, they don't stand a chance.
A number of years ago, I remember seeing a movie on TV where the cockpit of a large passenger jet was totally destroyed in a mid-air collision (or was it an explosion?). The pilot and co-pilot were dead and all of the controls, instruments and radios were destroyed so there was no way for the passengers to fly the jet. Fortunately, there was a bundle of wires hanging down into the passenger compartment and there was a geek with a laptop sitting nearby. He calmly explained that all he had to do was hook the wires to his laptop computer and he would be able to fly the jet from a program on his computer. When someone questioned whether he could really do that, he explained that of course he could do that because "he was from Silicon Valley." They safely landed the jet of course. What was that stupid movie called?
As I recall, he did not mention ever having worked with aircraft avionics equipment before, he was just an ordinary computer expert from Silicon Valley. They did not have radio contact with any experts on the ground and did not have access to any wiring diagrams or manuals. How likely is it that he would have been able grab some bundle of wires and within several hours get them hooked up and working with some program on his computer? Would those be some common type of wires using some common protocols that are well know outside the aviation industry? Perhaps he might have had to quickly use some boolean algebra to reverse engineer what the circuits were doing and then within several hours quickly write, debug and compile some C++ code and interface that with a flight simulator or game program on his computer. He is good!
As for non-computer movies, I recall seeing one where Arnold Schwartzeneger was being chased by dozens of solders with rifles. They shoot at him for about 10 seconds with their rifles as he is running and miss. Then he suddenly turns around and kills them all in 2 seconds with his machine gun. I have never been in the military and don't know much about guns, but supposedly dozens of trained solders with rifles were almost useless against one man with a machine gun.
As for Science fiction, I don't even know where to begin. In the old television series "Space 1999" a nuclear waste dump on the moon exploded with enough force to seen Earth's moon flying through space past a different solar system each week. The nearest star is over 4 light-years away, so the moon must have been traveling faster than the speed of light. Fortunately, the crew of the moon base survived the rapid acceleration.
On one of the various CSI type programs on TV, a crime was recorded by a security camera. They noticed a small reflection in on of the victims pupils so they zoomed in and enhanced the picture. There was the reflection of the killers face visible in the reflection. I have zoomed in on a few digital images on my computer and the image very quickly becomes a useless collection of large individual pixels. Who has security cameras that record at that kind of resolution?
I was amazed by how fast the cops and the city backed off from the bullshit charges, when they realized how extensively people had documented the actual goings-on.
I tend to think that they would have backed off anyway, maybe framing it as a show of mercy or something along those lines. The reason being that the cops' bosses got what they wanted - freedom of expression was successfully restricted. The event was over, so no point it dwelling on it. The sooner the whole thing was swept under the rug the less likely someone with a high enough profile might start asking questions.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Actually, they showed a few different things:
:-)
- assembler source code
- core dump
- cobol source code
but i remember the cobol the most
This was mostly bullshit, but not total bullshit. I worked at a company a few years ago that was looking at image sequences, determining their rate of movement, and working out where the sub-pixel data went. In other words, if you captured a video of a slowly panning camera, the software could track the movement and watch how the sub-pixels changed. With that data, they could fill in the missing pixels and make a higher resolution image.
This doesn't really make your example plausible, but I just wanted to point out that with video, you actually can pull out information even if the pixel resolution is limited.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
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?
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 #!
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!
> Off-topic but does anybody know whether the Apple used by Dennis is running Mac OS or Apples Unix A/UX
:)
Not sure, but I've heard it claimed before (usually by people who think Lex is staring at a Mac when she says "It's a UNIX system!").
Nedry's using a Quadra 700, which was capable of running A/UX. However, you can see his HD is named "NEDRYLAND", and one way you can always tell an A/UX system is that the primary hard drive is always named "/", you can't change it.
So in short, "It's a System 7 system! I know this!"
"While your point is well-made (I love the CSI episode where they "rotate" the security camera still to see the front of the guy's face, when the camera caught him from the back),"
I've seen this done under certain conditions.
They illuminate the scene with a digital projector, using it like a flying spot scanner.
Then, they capture a frame with a camera each time the spot advances.
With the enormous amounts of data captured, they can look at how the light bounced around the room and convolve it to recreate the occluded faces of objects.
Not very practical for CSI, but it can be done!
Not necessarily. Look at Heat - no one in that film ever shot from the hip and hit guys half a mile away, or had infinite ammo, or ran around with pistols held akimbo (as cool as that is) and yet it still has one of the coolest and best gunfights in a movie ever. Fighting scenes are similar, they don't have to be spectacular to hold your interest. There's a drama in the UK called Spooks. Every now and again it has some kind of violent, hand to hand style scene. They're usually very short (one was simply an MI5 agent twatting someone in the back of the knee with a baseball bat and then slamming him in the face when he went down) but they're beautifully choreographed and, in my opinion, some of the best fight scenes I've seen in some time. And I'm not exactly experienced in these things, but they looked pretty realistic to me.
You don't have to have infinite ammo, flying kung fu fights, or, yes, Matrix code to make a scene enjoyable.
I've also read of accounts of ER staff who've had shot-up gangbangers come in saying they had no idea that gunshots really hurt -- "On TV, a guy gets shot four times and still catches the shooter and beats the crap out of him."
Not sure why they think anyone uses a gun if it has no effect.
There was one part of this move that I really enjoyed: The portrayal of someone really into writing their code. When I complete a significant portion of a project, I celebrate. From time to time, I also spin around in my chair and clap my hands like an ape.
So, I guess my point boils down to this: Jackman portrayed being a computer dork rather accurately ;)
And I believe this even though the visualization of code was entirely unrealistic. Aside: That gives me an idea... Someone should write a program that has the little blocks fall into place as a project compiles. It would be useless, but so is xeyes.