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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....
I suppose next you'll try to convince everyone that Al Gore did in fact NOT invent the Internet.
No sig for you!!
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.
If you're spending $5,000 for a modem (or an entire personal computer, for that matter), you're spending far too much.
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.
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.
"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.
You don't use an acoustic modem?? How'd you get on this board?? Sheesh.
And those 8-inch single-sided 160k floppies are *perfect* for storing pr0n! I use mine to store my collection of ASCII-art pictures of Playboy playmates. Drool, drool. You can get a really good selection if you know the right boards to call.
> I think I'll go home and play some.
Spoiler alert:
The only way to win is to not play the game.
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
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.
...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.
Pity that they've stopped getting advisers for movies.
The list of movies with factually correct technical details is small.
It was nice that they did it properly for The Matrix though.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
"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.
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
If I was a teenager alone in my room with Ally Sheedy, the computer would get very little attention.
No. He didn't.
But I wouldn't be surprised if he did say something along that lines before the PC - because we spent so much time with 8-bit 64K machines. You know... He is not a very good futurologist.
He still insists people will conduct searches by voice recognition. I can almost imagine people whispering to the computers at the office "Paris Hilton Sex Video"...
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
No, he's referring to the "look in the drawer in the principal's office where they write down the password for the school mainframe" trick :)
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.
Not just prison...Federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison!
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.