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WarGames and the Great Hacking Scare of 1983
James W writes "Yesterday was the 25th anniversary of the release of WarGames and Christopher Knight has written a retrospective about the film and its impact on popular culture. In addition to discussing how the movie has held up over time, WarGames was responsible for what Knight calls the Great Hacking Scare of 1983. Some examples mentioned are 'one CBS Evening News report at the time that seriously questioned whether parents should allow their children to access the outside world via their personal computers at home. A magazine article suggested that computer modems be 'locked up' just like firearms, to keep them out of the reach of teenagers. I even heard one pundit proclaim that there was no need for regular people to be able to log in to a remote system: that if you need to access your bank account, a friendly teller was just a short drive away. And Bill Gates once declared that the average person would never have a need for more than 640 kilobytes of memory in a personal computer, too.'" 2008 is also 25 years after the real-life prevention of a WarGames-style nuclear incident.
if yesterday was the anniversary .. isnt this a bit late?
Caesar si viveret, ad remum dareris.
I saw WarGames when I was 5 years old. Later on that year, my father bought us our first computer: an Apple //c. I was incredibly depressed when the computer exhibited neither near-human emotions nor a synthesized English accent.
They that would sacrifice their
Uhm...not the Peter Brady one either.
Jeeze. Will the real Chris Knight please stand up?
Careful What You Wish For....
No. Bill Gates did not say that.
"If we let things terrify us, life will not be worth living."
- Seneca
And Bill Gates once declared that the average person would never have a need for more than 640 kilobytes of memory in a personal computer, too.'"
No. He actually never said that. Not once.
The first post is a Wargames post.
I was pretty close with some people who had actually hacked into some of those military systems back then. Like Strategic Air Command and others - some people were even showing off evidence they'd hacked the Shuttle's robotic Space Arm. We all watched _Wargames_ together, and were impressed with how basically accurate so much of it was.
Sure, the voice synth following the kids around was fake, and the exploding monitors when driving the AI into a paradox was typical Hollywood BS, as well as a couple other details of the action. Like the geek scoring Ally Sheedy. But overall, it wasn't that wrong about the vulnerability of those systems to any halfway-determined, fairly clever crackers. Of which there were more than just my friends: 1983 was the height of the Cold War, and the Russians still had budgets to spend.
In fact, the public portrayal of our private hobby convinced several of my friends to get out of the game for good, right after seeing the movie. And I've heard that a lot of the cracks portrayed stopped working shortly afterwards.
I just expect that today's even more complex, widespread and lethal systems are just as vulnerable. While not to the same elementary tricks, today's crackers have progressed along with those defending. We really have to be sure that there are a lot of human consciences in the loops, absolutely required to accept passing on an order that could kill or harm millions, maybe billions of people - maybe indeed destroy the world. If there's any lesson to learn, it's that the hairtrigger to extinction itself is the greatest risk, no matter how much those with their fingers on it would like to believe that the safety is engaged.
--
make install -not war
I suppose next you'll try to convince everyone that Al Gore did in fact NOT invent the Internet.
No sig for you!!
The only people who were deeply affected by that movie were either impressionable young people or those truly clueless about technology because the movie itself wasn't that good or believable, even for 1983. If you think most people know squat about computers today you should have seen how it was in 1983. Everybody knows the way you fry a computer's brain is to ask it to calculate pi to the last digit.
I still don't use a modem where I have to pick up the phone and place it on top, I've never actually seen one of those in real life, but it seamed cool when I was growing up. The flopies too, I'm not sure if there is a file that I used today on a regular basis that could even fit on one of those.
The day after my parents saw that movie my modem was taken away, never to return.
Apparently they were genuinely afraid that I might start a war inadvertently by logging into the wrong computer by mistake.
Ok, so I had, um, well, logged into a mainframe that sort of didn't belong to me, but I was a kid, and this was the eighties, it was still harmless fun back then, more likely to see you employed then arrested. Nowadays for the same thing I'd be sent to prison.
Now that's scary.
A learning experience is one of those things that say, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.' - D. Adams
In fact, I think I'll go home and play some.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
What's that? Something like the Great L.A. Marijuana Drought of '86?
The thing that really killed all of this was not government persecution. It was the carrot, not the stick - in 1994, a number of hackers began to get good jobs, by 1995 most hackers had good jobs and by 1996 pretty much every hacker had a good job. I went from being broke in 1996 to making $60 grand a year in 1997 without a college diploma.
Another interesting thing is 2600 was founded in the year TAP died, 1984. TAP had come out of YIPL, a magazine of Abbie Hoffman's old Yippies. TAP meetings and 2600 meetings basically came out of the new left of the 1960s. I look at the whole hacker movement from the late 1970s to the mid 1990s as an interesting historical social movement. It is kind of like the US labor movement, which was also bought out by money (in the late 1940s).
WarGames was responsible for what Knight calls the Great Hacking Scare of 1983. Some examples mentioned are 'one CBS Evening News report at the time that seriously questioned whether parents should allow their children to access the outside world via their personal computers at home. A magazine article suggested that computer modems be 'locked up' just like firearms, to keep them out of the reach of teenagers.
Back in those days there was more separation between TV show and movie production. And the TV executives were concerned about anything that pulled people's eyeballs away from the boob-tube (and money from their advertising rates). So there were a lot of shows that slammed the new distractions: Personal computers, networking (especially bulletin-board systems), electronic games, etc.
Similarly a few years further back, when they did the same bit on cable TV - when the separation was still more pronounced and they were worried about losing audience to paid programming such as commercial-free movie channels. I recall one cop show where the murder was committed by a cable TV operator over the negotiations and competitive bidding on a franchise to wire a city or broadcast some team's sporting events.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I went to see it with my girlfriend. I had a brand new C64 at home and had just finished my first programing class and was getting ready to start college.
We enjoyed the movie but my girl friend got miffed when the Alley Sheenie's character didn't know what MIRVs where. She also said "Yea right they are going to nuke us in the next few hours and we are going to waste our last few hours trying to swim to the mainland!"
It was a good summer.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
I wanted to connect with Ally, not WOPR.
how well this movie still remains relevant today.
- The introverted genius, but under-achieving nerd.
- Does not RTFM, but asks for expert help first in understanding the program.
- Hours of relentless researching to find the flaws (hacks) in the target.
- 3rd party vendor mistakes allow entry point for unwanted intruders.
- Hacker not realizing they are not in the system they think they are.
Best quote ever by a end user:
General Beringer: Mr. McKittrick, after very careful consideration, sir, I've come to the conclusion that your new defense system sucks.
Enjoy,
It's just the normal noises in here.
>Like the geek scoring Ally Sheedy.
That's how you know it was a science fiction movie and not a documentary.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
Not for the movie itself, but afterwards, there were so many twerps out there war dialing everything that it wasn't unusual at times to receive two or three calls per night.
Of course, it might not have been like that everywhere. At the time, my office was across the fence from the Johnson Space Center. I suspect that any prefix in that area was considered to be a good target.
We also had several consecutive telephone numbers. When the war dialers hit the first, you could be pretty sure that they were going to hit the rest in turn.
With all the aggravation from the large numbers of calls in the middle of the night, I thought that everyone involved in that movie should be should have been strung up from the nearest tree.
CPE 1704 TKS! I refuse to double-check my results with google!
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
I remember being very impressed and proud at the time thinking that someone in my family could hack into a military site! :-)
It made me want to learn computers even more.
Because of War Games, my Mom refused to let me get a modem for my Commodore 64. Stupid Matthew Broderick...
Don't lock up the modems. Get them out and make minors use them. No broadband for you. Nothing faster than a Hayes 2400 until you turn 21. :-)
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
I have added the correction to it. 'Cuz we don't want to be accused of perpetuating urban legend :-)
Was the thought that hackers can remotely blow up your computer.
I enjoyed the movie. What I didn't enjoy was the waves of new callers to my BBS, many of whom were convinced that leaving an application for validation constituted 'hacking in'. Every second application was for Joshua or Dr. Falken. That got old very quickly. The other regrettable side-effect of the movie was that our family phone would ring two or three times a night as newbs dutifully dialed every number in our prefix because they were sure the BBS was a front for something more interesting. My parents were not pleased.
"Bill Gates once declared that the average person would never have a need for more than 640 kilobytes of memory in a personal computer" Which explains why his bloatware uses all but 640k of any pc onto which it is installed.
we almost had a *full slashdot article* where there was no mention of Microsoft, or its vast conspiracy to enslave all intelligent life into its hive mind.
Just you know, a piece of *news* for *nerds*.
> And Bill Gates once declared that the
>average person would never have a need for
>more than 640 kilobytes of memory in a
>personal computer, too.'"
Awww, and then you ruined it.
DOS has absolutely zero to do with that limit. The limit came from the computers themselves, and how they addressed memory. They had a 20-bit address bus which gives you 1MiB of addressable memory. Now being 16-bit devices, that meant that they accessed it in 64k pages. However, as Gates noted, it was divided so you only had 100 pages that could be used for regular programs. The rest was reserved for hardware. Hence the 640k limit.
You can actually see a similar (though not the same thing) situation today when you approach 4GB of RAM in a 32-bit system. With a 32-bit address bus you can, of course, address 4GB. The problem is that hardware still needs memory areas to work, and actually far more than it used to. So you'll find that you get less than 4GB of RAM accessible, how much depends on what hardware you have installed. To actually get full use of the 4GB of RAM, you'll need to run on a 64-bit chip, which has a larger address bus and thus memory ranges for the hardware.
So DOS was never the reason here. It was the way the hardware was designed.
I think the year was 1990 or 1991 -- I was about 6 or 7. On a tour of the school library, the librarian made a point of telling us about the modem they had connected to the computer in the library.
I had an old Leading Edge computer at home, running DOS 2.0. I asked if it were possible for someone to dial into the library's computer and erase their overdue fines.
Thus was ended the tour of the library, and the modem was never mentioned again.
Humans are always in the loop when it comes to weapons systems. Even things like modern planes. Humans don't actually trigger bomb releases anymore. It's far too complicated and there's a lot involved in guided weapons. It's all programmed in prior to the mission. Ok so what does the pilot do then? They consent to release. When they activate the trigger it doesn't drop the bomb, it just enables the plane to drop it when it is time.
That is, of course, unnecessary in a technical sense. The plane could simply drop at the programmed location. However it is part of the doctrine that a human always has the final call. Should the pilot decide something is wrong, they don't press the trigger and the bomb won't drop.
So at this point at least in the US, it is very much a system where humans are always in the loop. Machines may do the actual work, but there is always a human with their finger on the trigger who has to make the decision to fire.
"And Bill Gates once declared that the average person would never have a need for more than 640 kilobytes of memory in a personal computer, too."
So why is it I have to continually add RAM to my computers to bring their speed back up after a Windoze update?
Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Albert Einstein
> A magazine article suggested that computer modems be 'locked
> up' just like firearms, to keep them out of the reach of teenagers.
> I even heard one pundit proclaim that there was no need for
> regular people to be able to log in to a remote system: that if
> you need to access your bank account, a friendly teller was just a
> short drive away. And Bill Gates once declared that the average
> person would never have a need for more than 640 kilobytes of
> memory in a personal computer, too.'
It is amazing how much things have not changed since then. The why-do-we-really-need-this-technology crowd got all of this completely wrong in 1983, yet today the same sort of people are saying that 5 GB per month is more than enough for anybody, and that there is no need for average people to use p2p, and that no-one really needs speeds of 50 Mbs, and so on. Some people never learn.
shame on you !! you hear me ? shame on you and your family !!
Read radical news here
...and I can tell you the tellers were not that friendly.
ATMs and on-line banking are blissfully free of surly humans wearing disco outfits.
Computers? Hell I won't even let my kids use the phone.
Ultimately, the film was not about showing off flashing technology. If it were, it would be dated and obsolete. Thankfully, the film was actually a well done commentary on human condition and how we relate paranoia and war. On that front, it succeeded and shall continue to. That kind of thinking doesn't age, it's all relevant. Perhaps even more so nowadays.
"He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." --Paul Atreides, Dune
In the very beginning of the movie they show the human operators of the missile silos being replaced by fully automated systems because they have problems getting them to actually launch when they have launch drills. In reality, there are so many missile sites that even if a third fail to launch for one reason or another there are still more than enough to assure the total destruction of any attacker.
"I'd piss on a sparkplug if I'd thought it would do any good." ...which also happens to be President Bush's approach to foreign policy.
Remember the Prophylactic recycling center. It made up for the stupid talking box.
Eviscerate the Proletariat!
I saw War Games on AMC Tuesday night and hadnt seen it for years. The ancient computers brought back nightmares of the limitations of that time. However, many of the tricks then-very-skinny Matthew Broedrick used to hack computers are still relevant. He systematically scanned ports, looked up personal info on people for password clues, used social engineering to fleece information. The strangest thing was him physically going to the library to do research. People use online search now.
You'll scare her away! She's a hot chick who posts on Slashdot. Most of us wouldn't care if she thought that rabbits flying out of her ass let her communicate with Zippy the Pinhead.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
I also have two copies of the novelization. One of them, from the Science-Fiction Book Club, was edited to remove references to drugs.
Also they've released a sequel direct to DVD. It comes out July 29 along with a 25th anniversary edition of the original. Still no Blu-Ray editions though.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
If I was a teenager alone in my room with Ally Sheedy, the computer would get very little attention.
My mother was all set to buy a modem for the Atari 800XL I was getting for christmas that year. After she walked out of the theater, the modem was cancelled until I was 18. My mother and teachers felt it was for the best as I was one of a handful of kids they figured would attempt to copy the movie.
I did, secretly, get a 2400baud modem that I used with my Atari ST during my sophmore year in high school. I hit a few BBS's but that's about all you COULD really do back then.
Fifty watts per channel, baby cakes.
There were DRUG references? Whoa.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
Wargames: The Dead Code
IMDb and the trailer can be seen on YouTube.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Especially the scene near the beginning where David is playing the arcade game, and he's like a town hero for being good at it, with a crowd of onlooking fans. Reminds me of my own childhood playing the arcades... um... except for the part about the hot chicks wanting to come home and play with my hardware.
... and then they built the supercollider.
From Wikiquote (Where you can find to pointers to the source)
That means he had some influence on IBM to help them choose a layout. Of all different combination of layout, he went for the one that is hard to extend and is going to be a big problem down the line (rather than putting the ROM first, so ALL the address space after the BIOS is free for memory access, or a mechanism which would allow the BIOS to be mapped to any address space - which would have extended the address space of 16bits softwares up to 1MiB + 64KiB),
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Maybe he was talking about putting that much memory in an IMSAI. :-D
Nah... I don't think that would have even been physically possible -- what was the largest capacity RAM chip available back then? -- much less affordable and anyone who tried would have to have come up with some kind of bank switching to even make it work.
Thankfully, my first PC came from a vendor who must not have heard of Bill's proclamation and who included enough sockets on the m'board to hold a megabyte. (Oh, I had those babies full of chips in no time.)
BTW, for some IMSAI nostalgia, you can still buy the darned things. (Less than a grand for a basic model.) Let the hand assembly and the toggling in begin!
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
No, he never said that.
Parroting an urban legend doesn't make it true -- and only makes the parrot look foolish.
We're all born with nothing.
If you die in debt, you're ahead.
Anyway, whenever I face the ridiculous bloat and waste of resources typical of today's software, I wish there was a 640K limit in every developer's computer.
WANT TO PLAY A GAME?
"Yes, I have a Disaster Recovery Plan. It's called my Resume"
I loved the scene where Lightman scrounged around for a poptop to use on the rotary dial payphone.
Guitar Hero: Aerosmith comes out July 29. On Wii. Screw Wargames.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
Paranoia about computer cracking may have also been increased by highly publicized real events. The Cuckoos Egg was published in 1990 about events that occurred in 1986. The Morrison worm happened in 1988, I think.
Knight didn't mention if he still has that dream with the screaming women and pickles.
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
Sorry - I just have to reply to the bad analogy here since it a decade out of date.
The way to address the memory is to get a 32 bit processor such as the Intel Pentium Pro or newer and to use one of the many operating systems that fully supports it. There is more than XP Home out there guys. Don't blame the hardware for a limitation in XP that got carried into Vista.
If you are stuck with the original Pentium or older then that is what happens. The Intel Pentium Pro, Pentium II, and whatever AMD and VIA came out with around the same time can address more memory than that. The problem you are describing is no solely due to software. There is much argument over who is responsible for drivers in the home and workstation versions of Microsoft operating systems being written in such a way as to make the full 4GB and above unusable - however MS Server 2003 and a variety of non-Microsoft operating systems do not have this problem at all due to having proper support of the Pentium Pro and later. That is where a misconception about "server grade" hardware creeps in when it's really about server grade software. I really do not understand why this behaviour was carried into 32 bit Vista since there was no requirement to run old drivers.
Oh fuck you all for making me re-live the hell that was DOS memory managment.
Now I'm going to have those nightmares again.
lol I just saw Wargames yesterday on cable. Still most hackers just want new video game and will brake the law to get them....
I was expecting Bobby Brady when I clicked on the link, scary
Success is not the result of spontaneous combustion, you must set yourself on fire.
So when Bush says he "took the initiative in removing Saddam Hussein from power" (don't think he's ever put it like that, just using a theoretical example), do you think he's not taking credit for it? Despite the fact that he didn't come up with the battle plan, didn't fight, and wasn't present when Saddam was captured?
Bush gave the orders.
Gore took credit for all the work done by hundreds, if not thousands, of engineers with that self-serving statement.
While Gore didn't go far enough, he supported D/ARPA's creation of arpanet/milnet, he didn't take all credit.
that's one of the reasons he's not President today.
The Reason Gore didn't win in 200 was because then Florida Secretary of State, who was in charge of elections there, Katherine Harris was also Bush's FL campaign manager and did what she could to make sure Bush won.
FalconShould there be a Law?
wish they would release an anamorphic DVD of it
They are, er at least widescreen, on 29 July 2008. In a sense I'd expect them to release it on Blu-ray.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Phreaking (dunno if the portrayal was accurate, but phone booths around these parts fell victim to something not too far removed from what was shown in the movie).
How it was done was even easier than the movie portrayed it, for long distance calls a signal of 2600 Hz would allow free calls. At the tyme Cap'n Crunch included a whistle in the box that produced that signal. So all you needed to do was blow the whistle to make a free call. Blue boxes which made the sound were also made.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Of course, the Russians weren't allowed have modems either.
You don't want them or teenagers running about in your strategic defence systems.
Nice of them to comply with that.
Genesis 1:32 And God typed
Oi! Quit posting my password!
why continue that myth?
Technology -- No Place For Wimps! Grateful Dead and Jerry Garcia Chatroom -- http://www.wemissjerry.org
This reminds me of a story I saw in the mid to late 90's. It was just local news but it made me laugh and got strange looks from my parents who thought it was a good story. Basically, there was some woman that was saying how when you dispose of an old computer, you should destroy it so data can't be recovered from it. For demonstration, she drilled holes through the motherboard and then picked it up to the camera to show the damage and with this smug look said "No one will get my personal data, now." I LOL'd. The hard drive was untouched. Anyway.. Point is, most general news sources don't have a clue what they're talking about and their information should be taken with a grain of salt. Unfortunate that anyone ever blindly believed that crap from the 80's/90's.
...is that Barry Corbin ( http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0179224/ ) ad-libbed that line (source: DVD commentary)
If our movement was bought out by money, then why am I still eating ramen noodles and bumming rides to 2600 meetings?
First an OT "Howdy!": I think we've crossed paths before on LJ. (lj user=mr_z) Howdy. :-) BTW, where'd you go to school at? It appears we're from the same neck of the woods. Oh, and I turn 33 in a couple months myself.
Swinging back on to the subtopic: Probably one of the larger motivators for Segment + Offset addressing was so that pointers (or, at least the live portion manipulated during loops) could fit in a single 16-bit register. The 8086 was a 16 bit machine, and there was significant advantage to building small applications in a "near" model, and slightly larger applications that rarely dealt with objects larger than 64K.
The 8086 was architected to allow porting 8080 code to 8086 with a minimal translation. This is likely why the 16 bit registers are also addressable as 8-bit H/L pairs. The 8080 H/L registers themselves correspond to the 8086's BX, which explains addressing flexibility heaped on to BX. (As you may recall, the 8080 ganged these two 8 bit registers up to make a 16 bit indirect pointer register.) You might get a larf reading through that XLT86.ASM I linked above--it appears to have been translated by itself! (How's THAT for a test case?)
The segment-offset model also allowed for fixed offsets to be compiled in for "large aggregates" when coding for one of the "large data" models. Large aggregates are things like large arrays and large structs in C. This mode of course requires 32-bit pointers (which are really just seg:ofs pointers, so they only give you a 20-bit address space). This may've been what your professor was thinking of.
I know I've abused the various segmentation models before. I've even used the CS register as an extra data segment in loops that needed to address three separate tables that weren't in the same segment before. :-)
As for SPARC, it just uses a nice, linear, flat 32-bit address space for each task. 32-bit registers make it easy. Even UNIX works that way on 32-bit x86 machines generally. Pointers do, in a sense, get "hard coded," or at least fixed to specific virtual addresses, at final link time. Final link can be at program load time for dynamically-linked binaries, or before that for statically linked binaries.
--JoeProgram Intellivision!
No qualms there. They give Gore credit for pushing through a lot of good initiatives, which I don't dispute. My qualms are with the padding of the resume and inflating of magnitude. Simply put, one cannot "create" something that already exists. Al Gore did more service to repairing his verbal mistake by parodying himself than any of you guys on here defending his exaggeration to the Nth degree.
Incidentally, there was a BBS that you could dial into, don't remember what it was, but it simulated the movie computer. The following is from fuzzy memory, not precise, perhaps someone can supply an accurate version of the dialog.
You have connected NORAD. It is a violation of US
Login accepted.
Defcom 4
Congratulations! You have initiated Global Nuclear War.
-- Each tock of the Planck clock is a new world and here we are still life. --
Ronald Reagan invented the modren Internet. It is a byproduct of SDI.
Too bad he didn't push the whole high speed connection aspect as well.
You say that like it's a bad thing...
Hasn't got much to do with the story, but a couple of days ago I actually picked up a copy of WarGames: The Epic PC Game from Oxfam. It's full 3-D and asks me "Shall we play a game?" in a voice resembling a rubbish keyboard every time I start it. Best game ever.