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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
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!
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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