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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.
I usually avoid any mass-media portrayal of computers and computer crime, because it usally ends up being unadulterated drivel. But when I first saw WarGames last year, I was shocked and (quite frankly) impressed. Sure there was a lot of drivel in there, but a lot of it could be considered as artistic license. The teen had to turn on a voice synthesis unit the first time the computer talked, so the talking computer wasn't magic. At least not in Lightman's room. They were quite clear that Lightman's computer sequentially tried numbers to find an access point and they found other interesting systems before getting into military systems. Again, magic was not involved. Breaking into systems usually involved some sort of research, may it be swiping passwords from the school office or doing some hard research on the people involved. He didn't magically guess the password after two failed attempts. Sure the computer had a personality, just like HAL in 2001 had a personality, but it's not as though he was dumped into some flakey virtual world. Movies are a balance between what will entertain, and what will suspend the viewers disbelief. WarGames is no exception, and I think that WarGames struck a decent balance between both. After all, how many people would want to watch a Soviet computer expert being fed information from a few spies. Who would want to watch a movie where that spy, once caught, would have a near-zero chance of escaping. Boring. Right. At least for most people.
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
If a politician says "I took the initiative in creating the Panama canal", they are NOT claiming that they personally broke out a shovel, flew south and dug something. They are NOT saying that they invented digging or canals. They are NOT saying that the canal was their idea or that they drew up the plans or any such thing.
Equating "I took the initiative in creating the internet" with "I invented the internet" marks the one who is doing the equating as lacking in very basic reading comprehension.
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