Hollywood Treats Hackers Pretty Well

angry tapir writes "According to Damian Gordon, a lecturer at the Dublin Institute of Technology, hackers are treated pretty well by movie-makers. Gordon studied 50 movies, produced over five decades, to help write an academic paper for the International Journal of Internet Technology and Secured Transactions. The results amazed him. In the movies, most hackers aren't teenaged whiz-kids. They're professionals, over 30 years old, who work in IT."

Comments

Yes, but

[colmore]

Too bad scenes of someone typing furiously at a computer are boring as hell.

Re:Yes, but

[uberjack]

As are command prompts, apparently. I'm still searching for that elusive hacking app with fancy graphics and controls that's portrayed in all hacking movies.

Re:Yes, but

[Anonymous Coward]

It's open source. Write it yourself.

Re:Yes, but

[The Archon V2.0]

As are command prompts, apparently. I'm still searching for that elusive hacking app with fancy graphics and controls that's portrayed in all hacking movies.

Hell, no. Have you seen the fonts on those things, they're HUGE! You get less characters per screen than a VIC-20. And you have to sit through 20 seconds of animations of lined globes and screen-filling blinking/pulsing OVERRIDE and SYSTEM MALFUNCTION and PASSWORD DENIED every freakin' time you do something. It's like the UI designer made it for an uninformed audience watching the action second-hand on a television set, not for the person using it!

Re:Yes, but

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

> "The results amazed him. In the movies, most hackers aren't teenaged whiz-kids. They're
> professionals, over 30 years old, who work in IT."

With all due respect, Robert Redford raised the average age quite a bit. :-/

Re:Yes, but

[dangitman]

Dear Die Hard,

You rock. Especially the part where that dude is on the rooftop, and you use Emacs to reconfigure his system files to cause a buffer overflow.

P.S. Do you know Mad Max?

Homer J. Simpson

Re:Yes, but

[Anonymous Coward]

It even had the middle-aged fat nerd in his mom's basement in his "command center"!
"How do we find his house?"
"Uh, it'll be the one with the lights on."

My favourite part of that movie was where the kid hacks the car using social engineering. Why would you hack hardware or take the time to crack 2048bit encryption when you can just phone some minimum wage employee and bullshit them into giving you what you want? The weakest link of ANY security system is the users.
- fractoid-with-mod-points

Stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

Why did this "study" get funding? Because it would make headlines.

Poor old Professor Knowsmath and his study of non-commutive ring structures in siberian oscillations. He'll have to make do with the money the university raised from raffling off that cat (4 euros).

News Flash!

[WrongSizeGlass]

Hollywood takes creative license ... produces more entertaining product.

Nothing to see here. Move along ...

Re:News Flash!

[WrongSizeGlass]

IMost people in any profession, if they can't let go of their insistence on reality, dislike or down right hate movie portrayals of what they do.

I'm waiting for the movie about 'Slashdot Karma Whores'. I'm positive I won't like the way those guys are portrayed. Stupid writers.

Re:You call that well treated?

[Em Emalb]

I beg to differ, I'm pretty sure Hugh Jackman's character in Swordfish was treated pretty well...during some of the "hacking" scenes, anyway.

Obligatory

[srussia]

If we are going to stare at a screen for two hours we want eye candy.

I don't even see the code. All I see is blonde, brunette, red-head...

Re:Obligatory

[FrostedWheat]

Hmm.. I must be looking at the wrong Perl program, all I saw was a big beardie guy.

Re:Obligatory

[Sechr Nibw]

No, you need to get one of those matte finish monitors, the anti-glare. You're just seeing your reflection in the monitor. It's been awhile since you showered and shaved, so you probably don't recognize him.

Re:You call that well treated?

[camperdave]

While hackers are often shown to have super-technical abilities that make no sense, so are the "good guys."

I'm confused. You say that hackers are shown to have super-technical abilities, but so are the good guys. That doesn't make any sense.

[Blink]
Wait... Are you trying to say that hackers are the bad guys?

Re:You call that well treated?

[Bakkster]

What, you mean you've never hacked the Gibson!? Just because you're a bad hacker doesn't mean they should dumb down the hackers in movies for you.

UNIX

[CAIMLAS]

The only instance of 'movie hackers' which spring to mind is:

"It's a UNIX system! I know this! "

Re:You call that well treated?

[Xelios]

CSI is particularly bad for this, "see if you can enhance that license plate"

Still waiting on my blowjob

[Chas]

Seriously. I wanna know where you go for a job interview that tests you under pressure (excuse the pun) of a blowjob.

I'd apply in a heartbeat.

Several times.

A day!

Re:Sneakers

[sootman]

The best hacking films are...

• 1983 - War Games - realistic depiction of old-school hacking
• 1992 - Sneakers - realistic depiction of social engineering
• 1995 - Hackers - Agelina Jolie briefly topless
• 2001 - Swordfish - long scene of Halle Berry topless

The best hacking film of all time, therefore, is Swordfish, followed by a two-way tie between War Games and Sneakers. Hackers comes in fourth--not even a naked 19-year-old Angelina Jolie could save that piece of shit. :-)