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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.
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 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!
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.
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.
I was affected by it because of how realistic it was, obviously accepting the things they did to make it actually watchable.
We're talking acoustic modem, with realistic soundbit (from what I remember). Social engineering and research to figure out passwords, not just staring at a screen for 10 seconds before magically punching in the correct one. Back doors. 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).
I agree with the article, the movie works even today. It's only a few years since I last watched it myself, and thoroughly enjoyed it.
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.
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.
They were slightly older tech in 1983. But that only makes it more likely a teenager would have one.
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.
Actually all I liked was the line at the end of the movie: "Strange game, the only winning move is not to play" or something similar. It's obvious, simple and not a major breakthrough but coming from the computer and put in that context it felt so right. It just struck something in me, something very few movies can do these days.
The rest of the movie was similar to the movies for children that they make today like spy-kids and others (OK, maybe a bit better): some kid that can do anything and that is not believed by elders because he's so immature and inexperienced so he has to take matters into his own hands.
ics
...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.
That's from the Weekly World News. It was a parody of tabloids. The sad thing is that tabloids are already so outrageous that many didn't realize that the WWN was a spoof.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
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
"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.
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
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.
Sorry, but no.
Straight from the horse's mouth:
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/biztech/gatesivu.htm
http://www.wired.com/politics/law/news/1997/01/1484
And part of the reason it's misattributed:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/15180#fn*
He *implied* that 640k was a fair amount "for the time being" but that it would need to be significantly increased as technology proved more demanding. He never implied that "no-one will ever need more than 640k".
Homonyms are fun!
You're driving your car, but they're riding their bikes there.
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.
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?
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