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Impress Your Friends While Watching "Untraceable"
Frequent Slashdot contributor Bennett Haselton writes in today with a nerd-oriented review of "Untraceable," which opened in theaters last Friday. Read on for Bennett's take on what the movie gets right — a surprising amount as these movies usually go — but be warned, his review contains spoilers.
I went into the theater planning to come out with notes for an article like "Everything that 'Untraceable' gets wrong" (feeling pessimistic after "Swordfish" and "Firewall"), but it actually doesn't do that bad. Oh, it gets stuff wrong -- I don't think the FBI can "blackhole" an IP address by clicking a button -- but the errors are for dramatic license, not technical howlers, and the plot holes fall more in the category of things that could have been accomplished more easily some other way. In fact the dialog goes out of its way in several spots to make sure we know they know what they're talking about; screenwriters can't win with these movies, because they'll get grief for getting too much stuff wrong, but if they explain things correctly, it breaks the reality when we can feel the writers telegraphing their knowledge to the geeks in the audience. But it is mostly accurate, and the movie throws you just enough softballs for you to impress your movie-mates as well as the patrons two rows in front and back of you.
The movie takes its first stab at geek realism right at the top, when Diane Lane tells Colin Hanks that his Internet date is never going to see him again because she's more attractive in person than he is. (So far, the only thing wrong with this is that Colin Hanks has exactly the kind of adorable-nerd face that appeals to girls who like to think they don't care about looks.) Then Diane Lane explains how she's ensnaring the cyber-criminal on her screen, in a set piece that has nothing to do with the rest of the plot, like the pre-title action sequence in a Bond movie. First, in a horde of pop-ups covers her monitor, and a site tries to entice her into downloading and running a program that contains a trojan horse. She runs the trojan horse on a virtual machine, where she watches it steal a file full of passwords and financial records, but she inserts her own trojan into the data that's uploaded back to the criminal's computer. In a few moments they find the user's IP address and realize that it must be a neighbor stealing that person's wireless service.
Batter up! I think that an FBI cyber crime expert would have a pop-up blocker installed, but moving on. If a criminal wanted to gain access to your machine to steal your financial records, tricking you into downloading and installing a trojan horse as part of another program, is probably exactly how they'd do it. (However, a trojan wouldn't automatically and instantly find a file full of passwords, even if she did named it "passwords.txt" as bait.) The biggest slip is that if you upload a trojan horse back to someone who was downloading data from your machine, there's still no way to force the remote criminal's computer to run it, as happens in the movie. And a criminal that smart would probably be running the operation from the compromised PC of someone in another city, not stealing a neighbor's wireless access. (In any case, while having the criminal's IP address would allow you to go to someone's ISP and ask them to turn over the records of where that person lived, the characters should not have been able to narrow an IP address down to a person's house without that extra step.) Also, if I heard right, the FBI figures out who the guilty neighbor is even though he has no priors, based on the fact that he has two registered handguns. That will offend a certain portion of the audience, so viewers of "27 Dresses" in some cinemas may hear angry gunfire coming from the next theater.
However, most of these errors were probably necessary to show what the main character does in as short a time as possible and to end the set piece with the villain actually getting caught, so this is probably the best the movie could have done. Don't point that out to your date, of course, since she'll be more impressed by knowledgeable sneering, especially if everyone in the seats around you can hear what a smart guy she's with.
Then the main villain's site is introduced, and the movie has to handle the question of how a site with its own top-level domain like KillWithMe.com would be able to remain online despite showing real-time streaming video of a murder victim being killed. (The hook in the movie is that the more people visit the site, the faster some automated murder contraption kills the victim.) Diane Lane explains how, in a virtuoso sentence designed to silence the nerds who would otherwise say afterwards that there's no way that could ever happen. You'll know the line; it's the one right before her boss says, "I didn't understand anything you said; something about 'Russia'?" Apparently the domain is registered in Russia, and the DNS servers use a low TTL (yes, Diane Lane actually says "low TTL" -- sexy!) to switch the hostname between thousands of different IP addresses, each belonging to some compromised machine.
If you had to come up with a way to do this in a film, and if you assumed that Russian authorities could not be persuaded to go after the domain registrar (something nobody tries in the movie), this would probably be the simplest way that was semi-plausible. You need the site to resolve to thousands of possible IP addresses so that it can't be made to disappear by simply taking one machine offline. The way the movie demonstrates this, though, is for Diane Lane to make one of the site's many IP addresses go dark by clicking a button on her screen and causing it to be blackholed, before the hostname switches to the next IP. The only people who can actually do this in real life are backbone operators with an axe to grind, not the FBI (something the movie actually acknowledges with a passing reference to Net Neutrality legislation!). Ah, but here's where you can knock one out of the park: If you assume, as the movie does, that the FBI has the ability to blackhole individual IP addresses, then they could shut the site down not by blocking the site's IP addresses but by blocking the primary and secondary DNS servers for the killwithme.com domain in Russia, so that if people's computers couldn't communicate with the DNS servers, they'd have no way of resolving the hostname.
By now, the surrounding theatergoers should be threatening to jam your USB thumb drive keychain into your nostril, but you're not done yet. At one point a character targets an IP address beginning with "10.*", and everybody knows those are reserved for intranets, not the public Internet, so you can point out that that's like the 555 prefix for a movie phone number. Later, the heroine finds that a Trojan horse installed on her daughter's machine, has access to all files on all PCs in the house. That could work if (a) the other PCs were set to share out files to other PCs on the same local network, or (b) if the traffic between the other PCs and the wireless router were unencrypted, although it's unlikely the main character would make either of these mistakes.
But you don't want fellow viewers getting the idea you're too Net-savvy; one suspect is later described: "He blogged, he built web sites, he practically lived online," which sets the bar a little low for qualifying as a sociopathic online loner.
With regard to the non-Internet technical details, I have no idea if OnStar can actually help you get through a traffic jam the way they do in this movie, but I'm sure they paid a lot of money to have it appear that they could (although maybe they got a discount since the movie later shows the villain hacking into Diane Lane's car's system, during which the brand name "OnStar" is definitely not mentioned). Speaking of product placement, several in the audience snickered when the movie twice showed the heroine conspicuously logging into the Windows Live interface. But Microsoft may have gotten an even better deal: while the villain's operating system of choice is never mentioned, during closeups of his screen at the end, you can clearly see the word "GNU".
Or maybe it just fits with his overachieving character. After he ties his victims to a bedframe, he likes to elevate it into the path of the camera using a remote-controlled motorized winch evocative of a medieval torture device. Unless I'm mistaken, though, that happens before the site is actually streaming, which means he could have just as easily walked over and lifted up the bedframe. With that kind of fetish for doing simple things the horrendously hard way for no reason, why didn't he just go ahead and wear a "Got Linux?" t-shirt?
I went into the theater planning to come out with notes for an article like "Everything that 'Untraceable' gets wrong" (feeling pessimistic after "Swordfish" and "Firewall"), but it actually doesn't do that bad. Oh, it gets stuff wrong -- I don't think the FBI can "blackhole" an IP address by clicking a button -- but the errors are for dramatic license, not technical howlers, and the plot holes fall more in the category of things that could have been accomplished more easily some other way. In fact the dialog goes out of its way in several spots to make sure we know they know what they're talking about; screenwriters can't win with these movies, because they'll get grief for getting too much stuff wrong, but if they explain things correctly, it breaks the reality when we can feel the writers telegraphing their knowledge to the geeks in the audience. But it is mostly accurate, and the movie throws you just enough softballs for you to impress your movie-mates as well as the patrons two rows in front and back of you.
The movie takes its first stab at geek realism right at the top, when Diane Lane tells Colin Hanks that his Internet date is never going to see him again because she's more attractive in person than he is. (So far, the only thing wrong with this is that Colin Hanks has exactly the kind of adorable-nerd face that appeals to girls who like to think they don't care about looks.) Then Diane Lane explains how she's ensnaring the cyber-criminal on her screen, in a set piece that has nothing to do with the rest of the plot, like the pre-title action sequence in a Bond movie. First, in a horde of pop-ups covers her monitor, and a site tries to entice her into downloading and running a program that contains a trojan horse. She runs the trojan horse on a virtual machine, where she watches it steal a file full of passwords and financial records, but she inserts her own trojan into the data that's uploaded back to the criminal's computer. In a few moments they find the user's IP address and realize that it must be a neighbor stealing that person's wireless service.
Batter up! I think that an FBI cyber crime expert would have a pop-up blocker installed, but moving on. If a criminal wanted to gain access to your machine to steal your financial records, tricking you into downloading and installing a trojan horse as part of another program, is probably exactly how they'd do it. (However, a trojan wouldn't automatically and instantly find a file full of passwords, even if she did named it "passwords.txt" as bait.) The biggest slip is that if you upload a trojan horse back to someone who was downloading data from your machine, there's still no way to force the remote criminal's computer to run it, as happens in the movie. And a criminal that smart would probably be running the operation from the compromised PC of someone in another city, not stealing a neighbor's wireless access. (In any case, while having the criminal's IP address would allow you to go to someone's ISP and ask them to turn over the records of where that person lived, the characters should not have been able to narrow an IP address down to a person's house without that extra step.) Also, if I heard right, the FBI figures out who the guilty neighbor is even though he has no priors, based on the fact that he has two registered handguns. That will offend a certain portion of the audience, so viewers of "27 Dresses" in some cinemas may hear angry gunfire coming from the next theater.
However, most of these errors were probably necessary to show what the main character does in as short a time as possible and to end the set piece with the villain actually getting caught, so this is probably the best the movie could have done. Don't point that out to your date, of course, since she'll be more impressed by knowledgeable sneering, especially if everyone in the seats around you can hear what a smart guy she's with.
Then the main villain's site is introduced, and the movie has to handle the question of how a site with its own top-level domain like KillWithMe.com would be able to remain online despite showing real-time streaming video of a murder victim being killed. (The hook in the movie is that the more people visit the site, the faster some automated murder contraption kills the victim.) Diane Lane explains how, in a virtuoso sentence designed to silence the nerds who would otherwise say afterwards that there's no way that could ever happen. You'll know the line; it's the one right before her boss says, "I didn't understand anything you said; something about 'Russia'?" Apparently the domain is registered in Russia, and the DNS servers use a low TTL (yes, Diane Lane actually says "low TTL" -- sexy!) to switch the hostname between thousands of different IP addresses, each belonging to some compromised machine.
If you had to come up with a way to do this in a film, and if you assumed that Russian authorities could not be persuaded to go after the domain registrar (something nobody tries in the movie), this would probably be the simplest way that was semi-plausible. You need the site to resolve to thousands of possible IP addresses so that it can't be made to disappear by simply taking one machine offline. The way the movie demonstrates this, though, is for Diane Lane to make one of the site's many IP addresses go dark by clicking a button on her screen and causing it to be blackholed, before the hostname switches to the next IP. The only people who can actually do this in real life are backbone operators with an axe to grind, not the FBI (something the movie actually acknowledges with a passing reference to Net Neutrality legislation!). Ah, but here's where you can knock one out of the park: If you assume, as the movie does, that the FBI has the ability to blackhole individual IP addresses, then they could shut the site down not by blocking the site's IP addresses but by blocking the primary and secondary DNS servers for the killwithme.com domain in Russia, so that if people's computers couldn't communicate with the DNS servers, they'd have no way of resolving the hostname.
By now, the surrounding theatergoers should be threatening to jam your USB thumb drive keychain into your nostril, but you're not done yet. At one point a character targets an IP address beginning with "10.*", and everybody knows those are reserved for intranets, not the public Internet, so you can point out that that's like the 555 prefix for a movie phone number. Later, the heroine finds that a Trojan horse installed on her daughter's machine, has access to all files on all PCs in the house. That could work if (a) the other PCs were set to share out files to other PCs on the same local network, or (b) if the traffic between the other PCs and the wireless router were unencrypted, although it's unlikely the main character would make either of these mistakes.
But you don't want fellow viewers getting the idea you're too Net-savvy; one suspect is later described: "He blogged, he built web sites, he practically lived online," which sets the bar a little low for qualifying as a sociopathic online loner.
With regard to the non-Internet technical details, I have no idea if OnStar can actually help you get through a traffic jam the way they do in this movie, but I'm sure they paid a lot of money to have it appear that they could (although maybe they got a discount since the movie later shows the villain hacking into Diane Lane's car's system, during which the brand name "OnStar" is definitely not mentioned). Speaking of product placement, several in the audience snickered when the movie twice showed the heroine conspicuously logging into the Windows Live interface. But Microsoft may have gotten an even better deal: while the villain's operating system of choice is never mentioned, during closeups of his screen at the end, you can clearly see the word "GNU".
Or maybe it just fits with his overachieving character. After he ties his victims to a bedframe, he likes to elevate it into the path of the camera using a remote-controlled motorized winch evocative of a medieval torture device. Unless I'm mistaken, though, that happens before the site is actually streaming, which means he could have just as easily walked over and lifted up the bedframe. With that kind of fetish for doing simple things the horrendously hard way for no reason, why didn't he just go ahead and wear a "Got Linux?" t-shirt?
Save your money and DON'T WATCH Untraceable. For bonus points joke that they "should've called it Unwatchable."
Oh no, they're in my wireless network, I've got to go.
"If you take sexual advantage of her, you're going to burn in a very special level of Hell. A level they reserve for child molesters and people who talk at the theater."
'nuff said.
You zap the moderators with a wand of humor! The moderators resist!
"Oh no! He hacked my car!"..... What!?
Hey! Look a Distraction!
Did anybody else see this movie the first time it was released when it was an episode of The Millennium several years back? The plot line is exactly the same. Another forum even posted that some of the lines in the movie match up with the episode.
:wq
It is really sad when Matrix Reloaded got hacking more accurate than a movie about hacking!
these writers should log into IRC sometime and chat with people that know how this stuff works. I could have rewritten portions of this movie to be more plausible as well as more compelling.
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
"The biggest slip is that if you upload a trojan horse back to someone who was downloading data from your machine, there's still no way to force the remote criminal's computer to run it, as happens in the movie."
This is actually how many worms have spread in the past, actually. If you can get files onto a windows box, you can probably execute them remotely (easy mode: you have acquired logon credentials or the box accepts null sessions).
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897553.aspx
...around "impress"
I'll keep that in mind.
I would be laughing my ass off if the bad guy ran something on the hurd kernel.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
Right, but frankly the movie would be boring as shit. Movie makers aren't avoiding accuracy in this area because they're ignorant or wanting to spread mistruths -- they're doing it because they know the real thing is pretty boring and drawn-out.
Actually the concept of using a botnet and fast flux-DNS is not that bad. I think the review is pretty good and the movie isn't that bad. Most of the mystery is actually solved with old school detective work on the 'high tech' data anyway.
Besides, Diane Lane is a fine POA and the thought that any chick that fine would actually work in computer security give all nerds something to dream about.
GAL
"Speaking of product placement, several in the audience snickered when the movie twice showed the heroine conspicuously logging into the Windows Live interface" Sorry, they did what now?
I think the only thing worse as far as "hacking" or tech movies would be the one released recently whose plot revolved around getting killed by a text message or something equally ridiculous. The sad thing is that it will probably rake in millions because the general public doesn't care about plot, just how pretty the explosions are and that everything is dumbed down [mutilated] so that they can understand.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
why can't we go back to the days when film-makers would have an enormous penchant for factual accuracy? The amount of science and computing howlers in modern films (and TV shows) irritates me beyond belief.
Doesn't sound quite as bad as Independence Day, though. I mean, a PowerBook from 1997 connecting to the Internet on the move? Deep Impact - a progress meter saying "TRANSFERRING TO FLOPPY DISK"? Retrieving E-mail with the command "open mail server" in the terminal, only to be confronted with such a terse error message as "server down"?
It may not be particularly noticeable to the average viewer, but to me it's intensely off-putting.
Those using pirated Tinysoft signatures(TM) are a real threat to society and should all be thrown in jail.
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2007/07/16
Yeah, I agreed that there weren't too many technical groaners in the movie, there were more implausible non-technical things that happened in the movie. Like why didn't she secure her car before getting back into it, especially when she suspected someone was in there? Oh well, what do you expect from a January movie.
With that kind of fetish for doing simple things the horrendously hard way for no reason, why didn't he just go ahead and wear a "Got Linux?" t-shirt?
How do we mod an article?
... I say the next techno movie plot shows how forwarding insipidly cute emails about kittens doing something pukingly cute causes your head to explode.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
There is a Japanese animated series, Reideen 2007, where one of the villain (well, he is on the good side, but uses a quite naughty methodology...) uses clearly Debian Ubuntu GNU/Linux and one of the heroes uses The Borg OS.
The only good thing for us, free hackers, is that this hero admits clearly that this villain has always been quite smarter with computers he has never been. Well, one could see propaganda to tell people: GNU/Linux is for advanced users and The Borg OS the average user, fact which has been wrong for several years...
They know he's in Portland. Once they know that, he has to be on either cable or DSL, or mooching off someone else's nearby connection.
The FBI could ask the cable company to reboot, in sequence, the router for each cable segment. When the right cable segment went momentarily offline, the streaming video would stop for a moment. Similarly, each DSLAM could be restarted. That would narrow it down to a hundred houses or so.
I don't know what kind of dates this guy has, but I don't think any date I have had would want me to talk through a movie and nitpick on every little detail.
"Don't point that out to your date, of course, since she'll be more impressed by knowledgeable sneering, especially if everyone in the seats around you can hear what a smart guy she's with."
</sarcasm>
i know you are being sarcastic, but a sentence like this pretty much explains the social life with a straight face of a good amount of slashdotters here, so your sarcasm might be wasted here, and actually encourage this sort of behavior
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Boring and drawn-out? You should read my screenplay based on Slashdot: Full of insightful commentary, everybody RTFA and lots of hot chicks running Linux on their desktop.
Well, thanks to the Internet, I'm now bored with sex.
Seriously. Just go watch Rambo instead.
...and "friends".
Well, thanks to the Internet, I'm now bored with sex.
Yes, the process of making an atomic bomb is public knowledge by this point, but I still don't really want to see it drawn out for easy imitation and distributed to the general public.
NetInfo connection failed for server 127.0.0.1/local
Here are a few screen shots from the high (non-HD) movie trailer. I wonder if those IP addresses are valid. It looks like they use Vista.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
My first reaction was to make the password file a Word document, and write the trojan as VBA macro, but at this time and age I don't know if that's still feasible. The most plausible way would be to craft a malformed Word document that causes buffer overrun when Word reads the file, executing arbitrary code to launch the payload counter-trojan. You could also embed other OLE objects so the document leverages another application's flaw to exploit Word, which gives you more options.
I once had a signature.
I can't remember the name, but from reading that short review, "Untraceable" sounds quite a bit like the episode of Walker Texas Ranger where Walker is going after some psycho with a website, a streaming video feed, hostages, and a shotgun hooked up to a timer.
Making an atomic bomb is easy!
Step one: find an atom
Step two: split it!
By what name do you wish to be mourned?
or around "friends" ... at least they stayed away from "Impress your date".
I have spoken'eth.
Actually, I used to work for a company that sold products that did just that... sort of. I haven't seen the movie and don't plan to, but for traffic on their own enterprise network our goal was to give users a "big red button" they can hit to blackhole traffic that matches a given signature. This could be an IP, or it could be traffic from a given IP, to another IP on a specific port, or even matches packet content. We had another product for big ISPs that allows them to do the same (but I think it only went as specific as /24's for source address). Both of these products are widely deployed and see regular use. The ISP version even let them create accounts for given customers that allowed them to block traffic heading to their network while not showing any traffic that was heading to other customers' networks. Our products were commercially available. I bet the NSA had something along the same lines. I guess what I'm saying is, maybe that isn't as far-fetched as you think.
So... fiction then?
my UID occurs in pi starting at the 384,199 digit after the decimal point.
Plot Schmot! Was there any boobies!? Gratuitous nudity of pretty girls?!
I prefer Flambe as apposed flamebait.
Too bad she didn't have Sandra Bullock on her team to type "UPLOAD VIRUS." ;^)
--
Toro
Step?? Profit!
Don't worry, the summary is for the wrong audience (not slashdot). Note: "Don't point that out to your date, of course, since she'll..."
Fantasy on a par with "The Wizard of Oz".
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
Now why point this to the Michigan Militia? That is insulting.
Owning a gun isn't just legal, it was encouraged by those who wrote the Constitution, and protected by it. Owning a handgun should provide zero suspicion of any other action. In fact, owning a registered handgun is a sign of a law-abiding citizen, since a criminal would likely not have his handguns registered.
Either this section is completely bull, or it's a sad but true description of a government that sees legal handgun ownership as a sign of criminal leanings. Unfortunately the latter is more likely.
But in movies like that, I like to imagine that ALL advanced technology isn't necessarily accessible to the general public. So what if the FBI can blow up a computer with a ping command. What REALLY annoys me is when they computers beep and boop incessantly.
And blade runner-like image zooming with today's technology. Graaargh.
There is a UK Simpsons comic where the 3 nerds make a space movie, and in the final cut they remove all the sound and have the space ship travelling at a realistic time :p
This looks like another Hollywood marketeer ploy. Sounds like "Hackers" was better, and AJ always delivered woodies (those lips, that smile, whiplash body, breathless seductions keeping the heart pumping even in a mediocre movie or dead-body. So, if "Untraceable" is lacking in 5|!115, then ... I'll just watch Hackers again at home.
... where are the babes/bitches, booze/beer, caffeine/meth ... more pink, splattering red, and seditious seductive black. (Technology Experience Knowledge) TEK-correct ain't Hollywood without some vintage thrill (real/virtual) rides. Let hard-old-core (USMC) grandma (SWeaver) teach and care for her 31137 cracker twin daughters who return the favor to their Tits-flapping, cunt-clapping, dick-head-bitting, Ass-pounding ... seriously tight and Violent grandma. Then as all the good-(FBI, CIA, delta-farce ...)-guys are about to totally whack the king-prick ... dear sweet lovable "AND" fuckable grandma drops the bad-sob with a 60cal long-shot (quite end, neat and complete). Grandma and the twins our heroes saving US, and "The USA Constitutional," to bare lethal weapons and/or beautiful bodies, all about US, free of dogma-cults, plutocrats, and megalomaniacs.
If "Untraceable"is 2007 nerd-oriented
TEK is important, but Hollywood without TAV (real/virtual) is just torture. GFBA and Hollywood and keep them on the road to happiness.
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
for someone who didn't watch many episodes, you sure were quick to point out the exact episode.
Be sure to put the hot grits scene in the trailer!
While the part about the DNS sounds plausible (especially if she's describing a DynDNS solution where the bots re-register the IP as needed, since this would imply the low TTL), that still doesn't make the site untraceable. Given what is at stake and the computer aptitude she supposedly had, it shouldn't be all that difficult to lookup the temporary DNS entry, hack into that machine (which should be easy, considering it was likely hacked to be part of the botnet by the villain), and then monitor the connections it made to find the source of the streaming video. Regardless of how large a botnet you put up to obfuscate the source of the streaming video, that part needs a somewhat static IP address.
The movie sounds like the technical equivalent of having the main characters in "The DaVinci Code" get to the second clue and say, "Well, the first clue said it would be here, but all there is here is another clue...I guess we have to give up." In both cases, you keep following each step of the route from a user's browser to the source of the streaming video. If the streaming video can find its way from the victim to the viewer, it can be traced back to its source. Sure, you can introduce hurdles that need to be cleared (with each one likely introducing latency that makes streaming video less and less practical), but nothing is "untraceable". And no technical hand-waving can change the fact that this movie is predicated on a fundamental misunderstanding of how the internet works.
Dump the insightful commentary, RTFA'ing, Linux and all mention of Slashdot and you've got a deal.
For the perfect anti-Unix, write an OS that thinks it knows what you're doing better than you do and let it be wrong.
'Nuff said!
I prefer Flambe as apposed flamebait.
Speaking of movies that just plain get it wrong, what movies are there that get it right, or right enough? The only two tech movies, that I can think of at the moment, that haven't made me grown have been Sneakers and Anti-Trust. I'll also admit that Hackers holds a special place in my heart. It's amazing that you can possibly get a movie that wrong. It was the most spectacular pile of crap that mankind has ever created. But I digress. Any other recommendations for actually good tech movies?
* themselves not particularly good, but they made enough money to induce the cloning process
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
Yes I know which one you're talking about, seems to be based on this Japanese movie "Chakushin Ari." The most bizarre and nonsensical thing I've ever seen.
I don't plan to see this movie so can I just get credit for pointing out that
Web consulting +
I guess the part where they discovered that the DNS is co-located with kremlin.ru did not make to the movie, probably it will be in the DVD bonus features. That would be wonderfully accompanied by the main villian depicted in a red should-strap overcoat with Kalashnikov next to his monitor.
Seriously, you have to send a copy of your passport to register a domain name in Russia.
But it's so convenient to have a tried and reliable image of an enemy...
If you need a badly written article on Slashdot telling you how to "impress your friends" with your technical knowledge about a bad techno-thriller, then maybe you should stop reading Slashdot, stop trying to impress people, and read a book or something to learn a damn thing or two?
-Bill
SlashSig Karma: Excellent (mostly affected by moderatio
Yeah, we told Natalie Portman we were thinking of making this movie and she was utterly petrified.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Hm, one step is extremely easy and one step extremely hard. Taking the average, it should only be a moderately difficult task.
"When the atomic bomb goes off there's devastation...but when the atomic bong goes off there's celebraaaaation!"
Maybe it was too highbrow for them.
But it is mostly accurate, and the movie throws you just enough softballs for you to impress your movie-mates as well as the patrons two rows in front and back of you.
Sweet. You've just outed yourself as one of those jackholes that feels the incessant need to comment on the authenticitty of scenes in movies, in a theater, in a mannor that other patrons can here.
Because everybody *loves* your witty banter during the movie. And when you text your friends about something that just happend? Major lulz and whatnot; nice. And the mouth-breathing? Classy.
Sad that I need to do this: . If I wanted MST3K, I'd frakkin' watch MST3K. Shut up the theater. Don't text your friends. Don't try and impress patrons two rows back with your geekosity. Go blow your nose.
Something else to fuel the frequent imbecilic questions I get to deal with during the course of communicating with clients, most of which I answer with: "that is not an area of computing that I am interested in" only to notice that some folks equate one's level of computing knowledge with one's level of cracking/security knowledge. No entertaining/hollywoodish answer, not impressed. bah.
SARAVA!
An exiting thriller about a bunch of ubergeeks playing a "Cat and Mouse" game with each other? Sounds great! One of the ubergeeks is a grisly killer (a la "Saw") who dips people in acid while sheets of pink skin peel away? That is disgusting. "Swordfish" was bad geekwise, but at least it didn't make me want to wretch.
http://www.htcherocentral.com
they are stealing the internets again ?! dammit !
... I say the next techno movie plot shows how forwarding insipidly cute emails about kittens doing something pukingly cute causes your head to explode. You fool! There are sick, sick people out there who would try it, just to see what happens!The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
"No! They simply copy it relentlessly..."
[Dam Busters]
"How many guns do you see skipper?"
"I say about 10 guns, some on the surface, some on the tower!"
[Star Wars]
"How many guns do you see Gold Five?"
"I'd say about 20 guns, some on the surface, some on the tower!"
[Dam Busters]
"It's a hit!"
"Negative, it's still holding, just impacted on the surface"
[Star Wars]
"It's a hit!"
"Negative, it didn't go in, just impacted on the surface"
[Dam Busters]
"Get set for your attack run!"
[Star Wars]
"Get set for your attack run!"
[Dam Busters]
"Look at the size of that thing!"
[Star Wars]
"Look at the size of that thing!"
[Dam Busters]
"There's too much gun fire, i can't shake it..."
"...almost there..."
[Star Wars]
"There's heavy fire, i can't take it..."
"...almost there..."
[Damn Busters]
"We're too high skipper! We won't make it!"
[Star Wars]
"We're going to fast, Luke! We won't pull up in time!"
[Damn Busters]
"Get set for your attack run!"
(Leader crashes)
[Star Wars]
"Get set for your attack run!"
(Red leader crashes)
Nah. =)
I own a bound copy of a screenplay for a movie called "iRobot". The screenplay has absolutely no relation to the movie of the same name. I believe it was an early draft to show producers. However, I'd much rather see the movie if it had followed this screenplay.
Request a Linux Shockwave player here: http://www.macromedia.com/support/email/wishform/
A stereotype of the downright annoying geek explaining what is wrong in the film DURING the film. Mind you the same stereotype exists for the physic / chem. / bio / math geek explaining why what you are watching is impossible (bullet ricochet with sparks anyone ?). Although I had a friend like that, she never did it in the cinema itself , always afterward or while watching tv.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
I'm just impressed that your attempt at stereotyping and belittling the entire station actually included their ability to count properly.
And you call yourself an elitist!
> Don't point that out to your date, of course, since she'll be more impressed by knowledgeable sneering, especially if everyone in the seats around you can hear what a smart guy she's with
Ahh no, I don't think that'll work at all. She'll probably just think you're a boring, sneering geek with a bad attitude, and start looking for the exit.
On the other hand, if you do point this technical stuff out with the additional comment re. constraints imposed on the script writer by the need to tell an engaging story in the most efficient way, she might just think you're a well rounded guy with an appreciation of the arts and respect for the context in which other people work.
Try it sometime, you might even get lucky.
...I'm busy watching my 2-disc Blu-ray anniversary edition directors' cut of "The Net", in glorious 8.3 surround. Oh, Sandra, you're so knowledgeable.
Here's a thought. Maybe your friends aren't as concerned with the technical side of the movie. Some people just go to a movie to be entertained. Perhaps you can impress your friends by STFU while they're enjoying a movie. I think the other movie patrons would feel the same way. If you must dissect a movie, why don't you discuss how Superman would really fly due to the yellow sun. Then, I will wonder why your real problem isn't believing that someone could fly at all.
What irritates me is how movies, especially tech movies, tend to shove in a bunch of confusing techno babble that makes no sense to the audience anyway but sounds smart. Problem is that the techo babble is meaningless and wrong. What's so hard putting in some real jargon that means something? Then at least the geeks in the audience will get what they've just said and the general public will be just as impressed.
Anyone else remember the episode The Mikado from season two of Millennium? Based on the trailer, looks like the writers of this movie did too.
There is a problem with the term "stealing" in this context. Using it unapologetically, instead of "sharing" or "surreptitously using", makes me bristle. The review author sweeps this under the rug WAY too glibly.
...or quietly chew her cud?
Gravity Sucks
The Michigan Militia is an extreme example of gun ownership, and to lump all gun owners with them is insulting. It would have been better to point it to the NRA (even though they're a little severe for me), or maybe to the Second Amendment, or nowhere.
Let me let you in on a dirty little secret about computer geeks: they're mostly idiots. Granted, many are far more literate and intelligent than most people, but those tend to have a really bizarre streak of arrogant self importance that monkey-wrenches their ability to recognize their own fallibility.
There, I fixed that for ya.
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
First, if the machines that were relaying the video stream were "taken over" they would be able to trace back the IP of where it was geting the stream. This is pretty trivial for an ISP. Second, they could easily have put up a fake DNS to point people to a different site. Third, the hacker would have little if any idea of how many people were watching the stream if it is comming from some huge farm of compromised machines, unless they were pusing back to an origin point that would be traceable. I also have been able to hook up a MAC to an alien ship. That was really easy because they were designed by aliens.
The wonderful word of Oz is is fiction?
Why must you ruin my childhood memories?
Re:STOP! Your AC post says it all ....
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
The good thing about this movie is all the norms will see it and hear about how Russia is a bastion for spammers and bot farmers.
The BAD thing about this movie is all the norms will assume it's all fiction.
Russia, Korea, Malaysia, and a few dozen other lax countries are my worst nightmare as a sysadmin. I'm so fed up with it, I just download country-wide blacklists and feed them into iptables, because I can't possibly care about the handful of english-speaking southwest-asians who might give a damn about my vengeful blogs and counter-culture wikis. And isn't pr0n considered satanic over there ? Ya, I'm doing these wedgeless tards a favor by banning them all.
-Billco, Fnarg.com