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

Really?

[Ltap]

While the age of hackers in movies seems to have increased lately (Die Hard 4, the most braindead one yet when you ignore television shows them as paranoid 20-somethings), they aren't shown as particularly mature.

Re:Really?

[CharlyFoxtrot]

I guess I don't really help out with stopping the stereotype though. I often answer with "FM Principal" (F*cking Magic) when I fix something and don't know what exactly the fix was

Ah, the Proximity Of Genius effect ("hey it suddenly works now you're here") and it's dark-side equivalent the Gabriel Effect.

Re:Really?

[Ltap]

Not really. It depends on what you're doing, but an activity being criminal doesn't necessarily make it bad. Most of the less mature and less dedicated ones tend to give up when they fail to achieve some ideal they imagined. The rest either use it as a means to an end or do it for the sake of finding things out.

Re:Yes, but

[rsborg]

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

You know, I think movies like Wargames, Matrix (and to a smaller extent, Sneakers) did this pretty decently. For example, the scene where Neo is first contacted by Trinity is a great example of how powerful text can be, if used properly.

Re:Yes, but

[Rysc]

In fact Sneakers is probably the best hacker movie to date. Wargames is certainly in the top five, too.

Re:You call that well treated?

[srussia]

You call that realistic? Realistic would be an obese mouth-breathing zit-encrusted neckbeard with eyeglasses taped together screaming "LOL I troll you!" while typing furiously into a sticky keyboard, piss-bottle at the ready, bound in a semen-crusted dragon shirt and yellow skid-marked briefs. What's surprising is that Hollywood dosen't use the actual stereotype as described above. .

Jurassic Park

Dennis Nedry played by Wayne Knight (aka Newman on Seinfeld)

A cartoon image of Nedry appears on the screen and waves its little finger disapprovingly.

CARTOON NEDRY: "You didn't say the magic word!"

ARNOLD: Please, God damn it! I hate this hacker crap!

Close enough?

Re:Yes, but

[Jeffrey_Walsh VA]

check out the "ease-of-use of the Zeus crimeware toolkit":
http://www.symantec.com/connect/blogs/zeus-king-underground-crimeware-toolkits
In the YouTube video at 1:48 you can see the ZuesBuilder gui

Re:You call that well treated?

[Hurricane78]

Heck even psychology is abused in movies and that is borderline pseudoscience anyway....

WTF? Have you jumped straight out of the 19th century??

But that’s what you get, when talking about a non-computer topic on Slashdot. People think they are experts in everything.
Well, let me tell ya: You don’t know shit!

Psychology nowadays is based on neurology. The science of neural networks and especially the human brain.
If all you know is therapists and medical doctors with no degree, disguising as experts in psychology, then of course you think it’s shit. The problem is, that it’s less than 20 years, since there is a proper law that separates every man and his dog who thinks he knows how people think, from real scientists. And all you know are those wannabees.

But hey, it’s likely that it’s not your fault. So let me give you a guide:
If someone can not deduce something back to neurology, he is not a psychologist. Period. Simple as that.

Modern psychotherapy for example deals with revealing repressions and understanding and fixing mis-associations in neural networks. All thing that are based on neurology. Mail me and I give you an explanation of it all, in a nutshell. And based on neurology.

Now, how do you portray "hacking" well on TV?

[Opportunist]

Thanks for all the rants how Hollywood seriously crashes and burns when it comes to "sensible" display of hacking, how it is constantly a firework of flahy graphics and nonsensical flicker output... But, well, how else do you want to do it?

Your goal, when making a movie, is to show something that the viewer wants to see. Hacking is not exactly a spectator sport. What do you see? Some guy, reading various boards, hunting for new 0days, trying stuff against his own server (again, text only, why bother writing a graphical frontend... because none exists since, well, what you're doing SHOULD not work and is certainly not the "normal flow of operation"), then, when it's time to actually pry the juicy server open it's again a few tools and their text output that tells the (informed) hacker which exploit might work, he prods again, maybe gets some garbled output, then a few lines of scp and a few (textual) progress bars...

I think if you want to show hackers sensibly, the only way is the same you see in medical series: Concentrate on something other than the "actual" work. How often do you actually get to see some doctors operate? An operation can take hours, yet you might see a minute or so of OP time in a show, if that. The focus is elsewhere, and there's a really good reason why: You, the viewer, without a medical background, could not tell a healthy liver from one that's gonna blow in a minute anyway. You would not "get" why everyone's getting hectic even though there isn't a geyser of blood squirting from the patient's belly. Likewise, the whole "shit hits the fan and everything starts flashing" crap should be canned in favor of one of the hackers telling the viewer why hell breaks lose (to give a reason just why he explains it, have one of the non-tech guys with them so there's a reason he tells the viewer how his friend just stumbled over a tripwire in the server security) and put the focus elsewhere in your story.

Sorry, there is no "good" way to show hacking as entertaining to watch and realistic too. It just isn't interesting to watch a hacker do his magic when you have no idea what's going on. A few lines of "realistic" stuff are fine if they're there to build tension. A blinking caret can be a great cliffhanger when the audience gets explained that the next output will make or break their run.