Programmer Debunks Source Code Shown In Movies and TV Shows

rjmarvin writes "Someone is finally pausing TV shows and movies to figure out if the code shown on screen is accurate or not. British programmer and writer John Graham-Cumming started taking screenshots of source code from movies such as Elysium, Swordfish and Doctor Who, and when it became popular turned the concept into a blog. Source Code in TV and Films posts a new screenshot daily, proving that, for example, Tony Stark's first Iron Man suit was running code from a 1998 programmable Lego brick."

Comments

thats crazy

[Revek]

As soon as I find a tilt a whirl, i'm gonna build me a spaceship!

Re:thats crazy

[game kid]

Speaking of spaceships, I found it fun to contrast these fake code uses with one in the game Starbound (got it a day or few after it hit Steam as an Early Access game). When you obtain enough fuel (like coal) from your current planet there and send it back to your spaceborne ship, you can take it to another planet and enjoy a flashy warp sequence with code that scrolls on a screen. The code shown is that of...the warp sequence. (Starbound is a C++ game, and you'll notice fun things in the display like uint64_t and class names.)

Granted, it's almost certainly not a true quine, as it uses only a portion of the code; said code is in PNG form, not text; and I doubt the display will be updated for each patch, especially this early in development.

Re:thats crazy

[Beltway Prophet]

Classic Atari 2600 game Yar's Revenge does something similar -- when you beat the bad guy on any given level, the screen explodes with what looks like random static, but is actually the program code for the game represented as a bitmap.

common and fun

[Speare]

Doesn't everyone who can proram do this? Just like gun fans identify and count shots for each weapon they see?

From the (mistaken? wise?) use of a .300 in an IPv4 address in The Net, to the identification of some kind of 6502 assembly code in the Terminator's red overlay, it's always been something to try to do in the theater without freeze-frame available.

Re:common and fun

[TooTechy]

Watching 'Castle' the other night. Enjoying it for the accurate, serious show that it is. Beckett indicated the entry wound was too big for a 9mm round. Had to be something bigger. They later found a .357 which was the right size.

25.4*.357 = 9.07mm She has a good eye. Actually she has great looking eyes.

Re:common and fun

[i.r.id10t]

Which is funny, 'cause when you are reloading w/ lead bullets (non-jacketed, maybe even made yourself in a mold) you size a bullet for 9mm to .355 and for 357 you size it to .358. And .380 is the same diameter as 9mm (its "european" name is 9x17 vs 9x19 for 9mm Parabellum) and 38 special is the same diameter as .357 magnum (only difference is .1" of case length which is why you can shoot 38 special in a 357 revolver)

Re:common and fun

[gstoddart]

From the (mistaken? wise?) use of a .300 in an IPv4 address in The Net

I count that as wise. If you put a real IP address, it would likely get a lot of traffic.

Mostly, I've long since learned to go "la la la" when techno-babble happens -- either the movie is good, or it isn't, the specifics of what they show on the screen are irrelevant.

Getting mired in the fact that it's actually just a scrolling Pascal program or a web-page is kind of pointless for me.

Hell, the biggest piece of techno-babble that made me cringe in the theater made sense in the Directors cut -- and that was the use of the Apple laptop in Independence Day to take over the stuff. In the directors cut they make it clear it's radio frequencies, in the theater felt it was using Apple Talk or telnet or something.

When I saw the director's cut I was thinking, "OK, why didn't you do it like that in the theater, this actually (mostly) makes sense".

Re:common and fun

[Megol]

A .357 have more kinetic power and so causes a bigger hole. One doesn't even need to be hit by a bullet to be killed by it - high speed ammunition can tear tissue apart by the pressure differentials.

Re:common and fun

[Runaway1956]

When I read the title, I just started laughing. I have actually given a thought or two to capturing a screenshot to see what the hell the code meant. Just a thought, now and then, I've never taken it seriously enough to do it. If I had, I could have posted here, "Hey, Slashdot! The code in 'The Matrix' actually does mean something, almost, except, they screwed up right here and made it meaningless after all!" Or, whatever I actually found.

Problem is, I'm not a programmer, and it would have taken me hours to figure out what a programmer could have figured out in ten minutes. Better to just let all those cool looking squiggles remain cool looking squiggles I guess.

Re:common and fun

[Anonymous Coward]

the eyes is not the only great looking on her ;)

Re:common and fun

[kannibal_klown]

I'm a programmer.

The source code? Sometimes I might glance at the syntax to see if they just put COMPLETE gibberish in there or an actual well structured statement / for-loop / etc. But I've never bothered to see if it was trying to do anything cute or even close to what it should have been, or if the loop was infinite or whatever.

For command-line stuff, I might look to see if it looks like a real command of just gibberish.

What I DO tend to do is freeze-frame newspapers and stuff where the character is reading a story out-loud relevant to the plot. I like to see if they just copy/paste the same paragraph over and over or use the cliche lorem ipsum .... text.

Re:common and fun

[JWW]

I count that as wise. If you put a real IP address, it would likely get a lot of traffic.

Yeah, just ask the people with the phone number 867-5309.

Re:common and fun

[ledow]

Well, yes, but the point is that there's no need to do this.

If you're making a film about cars, get someone who knows about cars to help produce/edit it, at least for glaring inaccuracies. If you're making a film about guns, the same. If you're making a film about computers, the same.

To be honest, even the "555" phone number is enough to jolt me out of a movie I'm into - you instantly are reminded that it's fake things you are watching (which is not what a film director should be doing to their captivated audience).

I've always had this annoyance, too. I have it about computer movies, mathematics and science. A geneticist I live with has it about science and genetics in general (do not let her watch Gattaca or Jurassic Park!). My ex and her father (both black belts) have it about anything martial-arty. My dad (a mechanic) has it about cars and mechanics.

I just don't see how hard it is to get someone who vaguely knows what they are doing to actually step back and say "hold on, that wouldn't happen". I don't expect perfection but at least if you're qualified enough to teach, say, a film star kung fu over a year of filming, have the decency to make sure that the moves you teach are realistic and there's no "queue of baddies waiting to be beaten up, because they're too stupid to attack simulatenously" elements. Same for computer graphics - SOMEONE with computer knowledge had to make them and display them, just ask them what it would look like if they REALLY did what the actors are being asked to do.

Same for cars, guns, planes, stunts, etc. You have an expert on the movie, ask them if it's at all realistic and, if not, change it. Artistic licence is fine so long as you KNOW that's why you're doing it but too often directors go OUT OF THEIR WAY to make things "pretty" when actually the real thing would be a lot more realistic, useful, interesting, less jarring, etc. (e.g. who the hell uses text-based displays nowadays, and why do you need to "fake" loading screens or password decryptions or whatever - everyone KNOWS what a computer looks like and how display windows work).

You don't get this in theatre, except by accident. You don't get it in novels, because the amount of detail required means you can hide all the potential pitfalls behind the line "He logged on..." or similar.

You only get it in Hollywood, and you must only get it through directors who think they know what LOOKS better. While a certain percentage of the audience can't stop laughing at the ridiculous methods used, or just screen "NO! That's NOT how it works" at the screen.

I don't get why annoying your audience is a good thing, at the expense of listening to the people you hired to be experts anyway.

Re:common and fun

[rts008]

A .357 magnum may have a bigger exit wound under rare circumstances, but under similar conditions, the .357 magnum and 9mm will have essentially equal size entrance wound characteristics.

One doesn't even need to be hit by a bullet to be killed by it - high speed ammunition can tear tissue apart by the pressure differentials.

The only part of that statement that is even remotely true is the second part:
yes, frequently high velocity projectiles do damage soft tissue from tearing and rupturing...but there are a lot of variables that affect this, so it cannot be ruled as absolute.(pro tip: the bullet has to hit the soft tissue before this can even be considered--all the bullets whizzing past cause no physical harm)

But that statement that "One doesn't even need to be hit by a bullet to be killed by it -..." is so full of crap that it's ludicrous!
I'll even give you the possibility that in extremely rare (so rare as to be unheard of for all practical purposes) that some few individuals have 'died from fright' from being shot at...but [citation needed].

I have personally been shot three times:
twice with 9mm ammunition (one pistol:Soviet made Makerov, and one sub-machine gun), and once with 7.62x39 ammo (AK-47--which has a MUCH higher velocity and kinetic energy than either 9mm or .357 hand guns).

I can assure you that I am not a ghost/dead. And having witnessed hundreds of combat deaths, none happened from near misses but bullets!

I think your highest priority at this stage should be to finally stop putting off that education you should have received as a child..it's for your own good, really.

Re:common and fun

[Grishnakh]

.38 Special and .357 Magnum use the exact same bullets; the .357 is simply a lengthened version of the the .38 Special round, with that additional space being used to hold a lot more powder. The difference in numbers comes from a change in the way bullets were measured. In the really old days, when the .38 Special was made, they measured the gun's barrel between the grooves of the rifling (the maximum diameter of the barrel, neglecting the lands), whereas when the .357 came out, they changed to measuring the diameter between the lands (or, the minimum diameter, as if the grooves were all filled in). The .38Special was very popular for police departments, but they decided they wanted something with more knock-down power, which is where the .357 Magnum came from. It was very popular for police use, until semi-automatic handguns like the Glock finally took over that market.

Re:common and fun

[Grishnakh]

It causes a bigger exit wound. The entry would should be the same size, since the bullet is the same size until it actually hits something and starts to deform.

Re:common and fun

[Quietust]

If you really want to insert an IP address without it pointing to a real computer, you have a bunch of choices:

• RFC 5737: IPv4 Address Blocks Reserved for Documentation - 192.0.2.*, 198.51.100.*, and 203.0.113.*
• RFC 3927: Dynamic Configuration of IPv4 Link-Local Addresses - 169.254.*.*
• RFC 1918: Address Allocation for Private Internets - 10.*.*.*, 172.16.*.* thru 172.31.*.*, and 192.168.0.* thru 192.168.255.*

Including numbers greater than 255 just makes it look obviously fake.

Re:common and fun

[GodfatherofSoul]

That's where the ubiquitous 555-xxxx Hollywood number comes from

Re:common and fun

[malakai]

Grandparent was informative, but parent is correct. .357 has about 25-30% more velocity than a comparable grain 9mm ( 125g vs 124g).

The other difference is .357 rounds don't need to feed smoothly into a chamber via a semi-auto mechanism ( I know that there _are_ .357 semi-autos but they are rarely seen outside of a gun show). Sitting in a barrel allows their bullet geometry to be pretty much anything and not jam. The physical design of the bullet can obviously play a large part in the characteristics of the wound.

If I had to be shot by either a 9mm or a .357, I'd take the 9mm, and hope for a clean exit.

Re:common and fun

[Grishnakh]

To be honest, even the "555" phone number is enough to jolt me out of a movie I'm into - you instantly are reminded that it's fake things you are watching (which is not what a film director should be doing to their captivated audience).

There's a reason for this. Long ago, there were some cases where moviemakers (or musicians) used a realistic phone number in their work, and then people would call up that phone number en masse, making that number completely unusable for some poor random person. So the movie and TV show makers adopted the 555- standard, along with the Bell phone company which set aside that block, so they could make up fake numbers for movies without some poor schlub being deluged with phone calls.

and why do you need to "fake" loading screens or password decryptions or whatever - everyone KNOWS what a computer looks like and how display windows work).

There actually might be a sensible reason for some of these: to make things more viewable for the viewer. Unless the camera is zoomed in, the viewer might not be able to see a real loading screen or other error/status message, so sometimes they use fake ones which are really huge, so the viewer can easily see what the character is doing. If they used standard-size fonts on smartphones in TV shows, we wouldn't be able to read the text when someone calls and our character looks at the phone to see if they should answer it or not.

For all the other things, you're absolutely right. There's no excuse to make something obviously unrealistic, when it's fairly easy to consult someone and make it realistic enough that average people won't know the difference, and experts won't care too much about nit-picky details; if you're going to make things completely wrong, then you might as well call it a fantasy movie, and start adding rainbow-farting unicorns to the plot.

Re:common and fun

[Nemyst]

I tend to abstract out most of the computer speak from TV shows because it's generally woefully inaccurate, but I couldn't help but cringe when I saw NCIS put the IP address of a supposedly dangerous hacker as 192.168.1.1 (I forget the last numbers, could've been 0.[1-9] too). I assume that they did it to avoid actually pointing to a real address and causing quite a few people to go to it and cause problems, but it kind of broke the fantasy for a moment.

Re:common and fun

[gstoddart]

Including numbers greater than 255 just makes it look obviously fake.

Who cares? I expect any IP address on TV to be fake.

Sure, the nerds can sit there and say "ZOMG, teh IP address is teh sux0r". And the rest of the world doesn't give a damn (including some of the nerds).

A 555 number is also obviously fake.

Re:common and fun

[jader3rd]

I knew a guy who was an elevator repairman. His wife did her best to not watch movies with him where there was ever anything involving an elevator shaft because the movies always get it wrong. Typically the hero will enter a well lit elevator shaft; as someone who was constantly dealing with how they're not always well lit it bugged him to no end.

Re:common and fun

[Nemyst]

Movies take liberties because reality tends to be flat out boring. Nobody wants to watch a command line that just shows a progress % as it's cracking a password for two hours. They want to see action, add something tense, maybe a notification that the hacker's being traced or something. It needs to feel interactive and fit the movie's atmosphere and mood. Same thing for the vast majority of action sequences: most explosions in real life would just happen really quickly, show very little flame, and wreck stuff. You don't want that in a movie, you want bright flames, long lasting explosions that you can focus on, etc. This can be applied to every single element of a movie.

Essentially, sure, try to be as close to reality as possible, but it'll often be thrown out of the window in order to make the movie more entertaining. You watch movies to escape reality, not to be reminded of it constantly.

Re:common and fun

[RabidReindeer]

If you're making a film about cars, get someone who knows about cars to help produce/edit it, at least for glaring inaccuracies. If you're making a film about guns, the same. If you're making a film about computers, the same.

You mean, like where the first thing that happens when a car wrecks is that it catches fires and explodes?

Re:common and fun

[Xest]

"From the (mistaken? wise?) use of a .300 in an IPv4 address in The Net"

I don't know how it works in the rest of the world but in the UK there are a bunch of telephone numbers reserved for TV/Movie use so that real numbers don't get called when people see it on screen.

This is the same as with IP addresses, they don't want anyone harassing a real IP so they just make it up. Sure they could've used 127.0.0.1 instead but then geeks would've said "LOL SHE'S HACKING LOCALHOST" or whatever so they'd still get flak. It's not accident or a blip, use of IPs like that is wholly intentional and as the example of the reserved British phone numbers above demonstrates, it's an age old problem in using real addresses, phone numbers, or now IP addresses - if you do then the people owning those addresses will get harassed. You could use one you own thinking "Well, I don't use it now so it'll be fine" but what if in 20 years you forgot you had that in your film and use it? what if someone is watching old films and stumbles across it? You have to be sure you're happy with that IP not being used for anything forever.

I don't know if IANA already has any reserved IPs for this sort of purpose in the same way as reserved British phone numbers they could've used though? anyone know?

Re:common and fun

[chuckugly]

Artistic license is something I can respect, however when for instance a policeman rolls up, pulls out his sidearm and fires once and the slide locks back, that's just stupid and sloppy. I have seen exactly this, as well as variations such as he fires *3* times and the slide locks back.

Re:common and fun

[u38cg]

The thing is, they know. They have a really well paid team of people to tell them what's real and what's not and then they change it, for whatever reason. Realism is fine, but therre are other constraints.

Re:common and fun

[Anonymous Coward]

You are one unlucky ...

Re:common and fun

[lars_stefan_axelsson]

.357 is simply a lengthened version of the the .38 Special round, with that additional space being used to hold a lot more powder.

Many would think that, but the main reason is actually to make it not fit most revolvers made for .38 special. Elmer Keith loaded original .38 special to pressures and speeds that are very close to the .357 specs. So there's no shortage of case capacity, since it was originally a black poweder cartridge, you wouldn't expect there to be.

How ever, Elmer Keith used the new N-frame S&W revolvers that could take the beating. It was feared that older revolvers would blow up regularly if people started loading them with such hot .38s. Hence the case was lengthened as a safety feature.

Re:common and fun

[Anonymous Coward]

I count that as wise. If you put a real IP address, it would likely get a lot of traffic.

Sounds like somebody missed a product placement opportunity...

Re:common and fun

[tlhIngan]

From the (mistaken? wise?) use of a .300 in an IPv4 address in The Net, to the identification of some kind of 6502 assembly code in the Terminator's red overlay, it's always been something to try to do in the theater without freeze-frame available.

I think it's intentional - if you see any IP address shown on TV or movies, they're always invalid. IPv4 is either 3 groups instead of 4, or a number above 255. IPv6 they usually make it by putting a letter after F making it invalid.

Most likely it's like using the 555 prefix for phone numbers - they WANT invalid numbers, just in case the random numbers that get used actually belong to someone. (Happens with surprising frequency). Company names and other stuff are the subject of extensive trademark searches and registrations, and sometimes even on screen things like numbers are "rearranged to look prettier". so even if someone used a real IP address that belonged to no one, some set dresser or visual artist may change it because the director wanted a nicer number.

Re:common and fun

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know if IANA already has any reserved IPs for this sort of purpose in the same way as reserved British phone numbers they could've used though? anyone know?

See the comment above - most notably, they reserved three /24 blocks for use in "documentation and example source code", so those would be ideal for use in other media, and the other non-routable addresses would probably be good enough (though most people recognize 192.168.*.* as "internal", fewer recognize 172.[16-31].*.* and 10.*.*).

Re:common and fun

[Anonymous Coward]

With the small difference that a 555 number is technically a correct phone number, just a reserved one, whereas a 300 IP address is bogus, not just reserved. Good IP addresses which could be used in movies without being malformed would be from these ranges: 169.254.0.0/16 and 172.16.0.0/12 (local use, but not the ubiquitous and easily recognized 192.168.0.0/16 or 10.0.0.0/8) or 192.0.2.0/24, 198.51.100.0/24 and 203.0.113.0/24 (reserved for documentation and examples).

Re:common and fun

[Lord Lemur]

Same problem of being "fake" in the scenerio used.

Re:common and fun

[nytes]

That's what always happens to my cars.

I've lost 5 wives that way so far.

Re:common and fun

[amicusNYCL]

Doesn't everyone who can proram do this? Just like gun fans identify and count shots for each weapon they see?

For me it's an annoyance, it breaks the fourth wall. I think that a lot of filmmakers are lazy and don't bother with expert consulting, or just use whatever they have available even if it's BS. The movie Behind Enemy Lines was on TV the other day, and I was watching some of the ending of it. At the end of the movie a Navy Rear Admiral, commanding an aircraft carrier, leaves the carrier to pilot a Marine Huey helicopter armed with rocket pods, one of three heading out to rescue the pilot. Why is the admiral leaving his ship? Why is he flying a Marine Huey? Were there no Navy MH-60s equipped with Hellfires that were working that day?

Seeing that lazy stuff just breaks me out of the suspension of disbelief, the same way that seeing a bad actor makes me realize that I'm watching an actor and that this isn't real. Seeing obviously bad code is the same kind of thing for me.

Re: common and fun

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you seen the size of the credits in modern movies? And you want to make them even longer? It's painful enough now having to wait around for the post-credit specials, more so when the credits run for 25 minutes because the makers had to hire 3,142 specialists because some people don't understand the whole "willing suspension of disbelief" thing :-)

Re:common and fun

[omnichad]

But every domain name they ever mention on TV gets registered to prevent domain squatters from getting rich. Just look at hornymanatee.com (Conan O'Brien), or Oceanic-air.com (from ABC's LOST).

Re:common and fun

[omnichad]

What I DO tend to do is freeze-frame newspapers and stuff where the character is reading a story out-loud relevant to the plot. I like to see if they just copy/paste the same paragraph over and over or use the cliche lorem ipsum .... text.

Why wouldn't they take advantage of a chance to read directly from a script?

Re:common and fun

[omnichad]

Long ago, there were some cases where moviemakers (or musicians) used a realistic phone number in their work, and then people would call up that phone number en masse

Relevant examples:
God in Bruce Almighty
Jenny

Re:common and fun

[omnichad]

Well - that's more for convenience, I'm sure. You can't have much of a picture in complete darkness.

Re:common and fun

[omnichad]

At least with 10.*.*.* they would have a few more options for variety and it wouldn't be immediately familiar to everyone who's ever owned a router.

Re:common and fun

[omnichad]

There are several ranges reserved for private networks rather than public IP networks.

Copying this from someone else's comment:
RFC 5737: IPv4 Address Blocks Reserved for Documentation [ietf.org] - 192.0.2.*, 198.51.100.*, and 203.0.113.*
RFC 3927: Dynamic Configuration of IPv4 Link-Local Addresses [ietf.org] - 169.254.*.*
RFC 1918: Address Allocation for Private Internets [ietf.org] - 10.*.*.*, 172.16.*.* thru 172.31.*.*, and 192.168.0.* thru 192.168.255.*

Re:common and fun

[Smilodon]

Oddly I was just watching the original "Terminator" the other night (got a cheapie Blu-ray with extras), and noticed some of his "code" overlays were COBOL! Skynet has been around a while, apparently (or else COBOL makes a big come-back in the future).

Re:common and fun

[WuphonsReach]

From the (mistaken? wise?) use of a .300 in an IPv4 address

Wise. It's like using phone numbers that contain "555". Prevents your fans from DDoS'ing some innocent IPv4 address that actually is in use (or someone's phone number).

In general, when the IPv4 or phone numbers are valid, it's probably a PR/Marketing thing to drive traffic to a website or to get you to call for a special offer.

Re:common and fun

[WuphonsReach]

The 172.16.0.0 to 172.30.255.255 range is even more obscure (and still allowed for private internet addressing).

Also, on some cable / mobile phone numbers, you get a 10.x.y.z address via DHCP and have to NAT to get to the outside world.

Re:common and fun

[sjames]

Not to mention that an hourglass mouse cursor or a progress bar slowly creeping to 100 isn't all that visually interesting.

Re:common and fun

[sjames]

There are assigned subnets for documentation, but the same people who moan about .300 or 192.168/16 would moan about those too. If a real IP were used I suspect many of the same people would moan about that too. The rest would DDOS the crap out of it.

Re:common and fun

[JeffAtl]

What was her problem with genetics in Gattaca?

Re:common and fun

[JeffAtl]

I think the point is that the reciting of a 555 number is jarring to the viewer because we know it is a special movie/tv thing.

An alternative would be to reword the script to not require a phone number to be recited out loud.

Re:common and fun

[mattack2]

Watching 'Castle' the other night. Enjoying it for the accurate, serious show that it is.

Castle is serious? Castle is one of the fluffiest crime/mystery shows around (like "Monk" was before it). I like(d) both of them, btw.

Re:common and fun

[mattack2]

What I DO tend to do is freeze-frame newspapers and stuff where the character is reading a story out-loud relevant to the plot. I like to see if they just copy/paste the same paragraph over and over or use the cliche lorem ipsum .... text.

Sometimes they write articles that are actually on topic . I do this too, and read as much of the article I can.

Re:common and fun

[Anonymous Coward]

Movies are not reality - if you want ultimate reality, put up a big mirror instead of the silver screen. So you have reality - some people sitting in chairs, wathcing.

But that wouldn't sell. Still, we want action movies that are realistic to the point that it is possible. An IP address can't have "300" but it might have "137" as a component. A car scene should not have a model that only became available many years later. Someome playing president Kennedy will necessarily not look exactly like him - but he won't be driving a SUV. Nobody fires 30 shots rapidly from a six-shooter. Nobody has an AK47 in WWII. . .

Re:common and fun

[Darinbob]

Ya, this is nothing new. The slashdot summary is stupid with its "someone is finally pausing" comment, and it's not "debunking" since everyone knows it's not real just like they know the WOPR wasn't a real computer. Ie, it was pretty common knowledge among geeks that the Terminator used 6502 assembler, not a new revelation. We were certain before the movie started that we'd never see any real advanced artificial intelligence routines. The source code is just another prop.

Re:common and fun

[Megane]

If you want to be really obscure, pick 128.xxx.xxx.xxx, where xxx are all three digit numbers. In some OSes, only 128.0.0.1 is loopback, in others, 128/8 is loopback. (Cue the joke where the script kiddie hacker was dared to hack some random 128 address.)

Re:common and fun

[Megane]

(of course I meant 127 instead of 128, it's been a long day)

Re:common and fun

[Darinbob]

It's why phone numbers have "555" in so many movies. No chance of collision with reality. These movies are not intending to display reality, especially when they involve extraterrestrials, artificial intelligence, or time travel. So it's should come as no surprise that the source code that flashes on screen for a second is not real.

Re:common and fun

[Anonymous Coward]

It sounds like he was in the military. Getting shot is one of the hazards of the job, that he is still alive after being shot three times doesn't sound too unlucky to me.

Re:common and fun

[kannibal_klown]

Well it's not just that... but sometimes the articles are funny.

Sometimes they're just the short blurb they're reading out loud.

Other times the set guys got creative and continue writing the adventure afterwards, or put other neat like articles on the rest of the paper. Like funny little Easter Eggs.

Re:common and fun

[v1]

the identification of some kind of 6502 assembly code in the Terminator's red overlay,

fyi, one of those was a Merlin Pro disassembly of the layout of the VTOC (Volume Table of Contents) of the DOS 3.3 catalog track, from an Apple ][. I don't recall if the other one was or not.

Re:common and fun

[omnichad]

I do like those. And I've noticed a few. The other headlines on the paper are usually pretty good too if you can't read the actual articles.

Re:common and fun

[techno-vampire]

...and there's no "queue of baddies waiting to be beaten up, because they're too stupid to attack simulatenously" elements.

Back in the Golden Age of The Movie Serials, the action, each week, often included fight scenes where two or three bad guys tried to beat up, and possibly kill, the hero. The fights were generally choreographed so that only one of them could get at the hero at any one time, with another one getting up and back into the action just as the hero knocks whoever he's fighting down, stunning him long enough that he only had to take them on one at a time, even though they were doing their best to gang up on him. Yes, you know that the fights were planned that way, but they came out remarkably believable and hold up better than you'd expect.

Re:common and fun

[Shinobi]

" (Cue the joke where the script kiddie hacker was dared to hack some random 128 address.)"

Joke?

During the WinNuke/Ping of Death craze, I actually did get a number of script kiddies to knock themselves offline when I gave them 127.0.0.1 as my IP on IRC etc

Re:common and fun

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you're an intensely dumb cunt who's only experience with a firearm is in call of duty. Now go to bed, kid, we're tired of your bullshit.

Re:common and fun

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been married

Now who's being unrealistic?

Re:common and fun

[hubie]

From Family Guy Stand By Me parody:

Peter: The year was 1955. And the voice in my head was that of Richard Dreyfuss.
Richard Dreyfuss: (narrating) I never had friends like the ones I had when I was twelve. There was me, Petey LaChance.
Petey LaChance: Anyone else fed up with this over-saturation of media? Three channels and still nothing on.
Richard Dreyfuss: (narrating) Then there was Joey Duchamp. The voice in his head was Roy Scheider.
Roy Scheider: How are you, Richard?
Dreyfuss: Fine, Roy, how are you?
Scheider: Good, good. We should grab a drink sometime and catch up, maybe reminisce about Jaws.
Dreyfuss: Great, you should give me a call sometime. My number's 555...
Scheider: Wait, wait. What? 555?
Dreyfuss: Uh, yeah.
Scheider: You know what, Richard, if you don't want to have drinks, just say so. You don't have to be a dick about it.

Re:common and fun

[forkazoo]

I count that as wise. If you put a real IP address, it would likely get a lot of traffic.

Which is why I've always been confused by the fact that they use fictituous IP's, rather than a production company website with trailers for upcoming projects...

Re:common and fun

[Anonymous Coward]

You forgot 127.0.0.1. :-)

Yes, I've seen a TV show where they traced the bad guy to that address.

Re:common and fun

[RivenAleem]

I was watching Bones, catching up on the current season. They tried to link Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle to why computers cannot provide the same insights that a human does (The Episode where VAL was pitted against Sweets to provide a profile of the killer). My wife (if she ever came to /.) would attest to my dismay at the blatant misuse.

Re:common and fun

[RivenAleem]

Perhaps the 300 was used the same as 555 is used for phone numbers. To deliberately not point to anybody's IP address.

Re:common and fun

[RivenAleem]

I know the feeling. I have the same problem when watching porn.

Re:common and fun

[rioki]

I like it the way they solved it in the new BBC Sherlock movies/TV-show. Actual screens are rearlly shown, the important information is hovered somewhere in mid air. Interestingly this seems like less breaking suspension of disbelieving than bogusly large UI element. But this is also used to convey information, like for example what Scherlock sees. There is so far only one instance of 4th wall braking, where Moriarty dismissively blows away the text.

Re:common and fun

[Anonymous Coward]

How about they hire people that understand physics.

Re:common and fun

[cwsumner]

One doesn't even need to be hit by a bullet to be killed by it - high speed ammunition can tear tissue apart by the pressure differentials.

The only part of that statement that is even remotely true is the second part: ...

Maybe he just had the wrong bullet. Like a 5" 38 caliber Naval cannon, where "caliber" is the ratio of diameter to barrel length! 8-)

Re:common and fun

[strikethree]

But that statement that "One doesn't even need to be hit by a bullet to be killed by it -..." is so full of crap that it's ludicrous!

For handguns and shoulder fired rifles, what you say is unquestionably true. For crew-served weapons, my understanding is that the bullets create a disturbance in the air around them that can chop off limbs and such. I am ready to be corrected if I am wrong.

Re:common and fun

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe it's just me, but I simply watch a movie and ignore the background noise.

Re:common and fun

[Anonymous Coward]

When I was younger, I was really interested in planes. Each time a plane was show in a film or TV show, I was asked what it was. At the end, I grew tired of it, and always answered "a plane". So when I see code running on a screen in a movie or TV show, it is just for show, that's it. I don' t care if it is real. I do care it feels real or fits the scene.

Re:common and fun

[pjbgravely]

My pet peeve is when the fire alarm sets off the sprinklers. I know the sprinklers set off the fire alarm and only melting metal will set off each individual sprinkler head. Almost every movie and TV show gets it wrong

Re:common and fun

[Anonymous Coward]

I was shot at, but the bullet missed. It ripped and shredded the tissue of my horse, though. The horse threw me, and broke my neck and died. I didn't have to be hit by the bullet to have it kill me...

I was shot at on the freeway, but it hit the driver, while we were doing 90, and I wasn't belted in... ....

ad nauseum.

Re:Oh My God!

[MickyTheIdiot]

Next they'll tell me that "hackers" don't get a nice big screen that says "Access Granted" or that "Swordfish" isn't a common password.

Good for him!

[Anonymous Coward]

Because I know when I'm watching movies about guys in flying robotic suits and orbital space habitats and time-travelling weirdos, I need to know that source code that's not on-screen long enough to even read is accurate and realistic... inasmuch as we have, in real life, actual examples of accurate and realistic source code for flying robotic suits, orbital space habitats and time-travelling weirdos.

Alternative Titles:

[an0nemus]

People who need hobbies! Someone to make comments about their breathing habits!

Re:Alternative Titles:

[FuzzyDustBall]

People who need hobbies! Someone to make comments about their breathing habits!

This appears to be a hobby so I would say they do not need one...

Re:Alternative Titles:

[twocows]

I'm pretty sure that this is a hobby and he is likely doing it for fun. The fact that it showed up on /. is more of a reflection on /. than it is on what he chooses to do in his spare time for fun.

Comments here are overreacting

[Anonymous Coward]

I think this was meant as a fun and interesting kind of thing, not as some kind of whistle-blowing on how "OH MY GOD TV ISN'T REEEEAAAAAL!" Lighten up.

Re:Comments here are overreacting

[Anonymous Coward]

I think this was meant as a fun and interesting kind of thing, not as some kind of whistle-blowing on how "OH MY GOD TV ISN'T REEEEAAAAAL!" Lighten up.

Shouldn't have used the word "debunk" in the title if that is the case. (I mean the submitter, not the blogger.)

Re:Comments here are overreacting

[terevos]

No, they're responding appropriately to how the story was posted. The original article is supposed to be fun. But the post says "Programmer Debunks Source Code Shown In Movies and TV Shows" and "Someone is finally pausing TV shows and movies to figure out if the code shown on screen is accurate or not." as if it's something new.

It's not new, but it is cool how deeply they investigated this stuff.

Re:Comments here are overreacting

[MikeBabcock]

Its pretty redundant to even do. The medical decisions in movies make no sense, the car jacking makes no sense, the jumping through windows, computer hacking, alarm defeating and air duct crawling are all ridiculous too.

Looking at the source code is barely even interesting on that scale.

Re:Comments here are overreacting

[Anonymous Coward]

`It was appropriate during large parts of that movie the audience was shitting bricks would there even be a plot.

Re:Comments here are overreacting

[scarytall4583]

So ... don't look at it? Nobody is surprised that these are fictional, or confusing fiction for reality, but sometimes fiction makes people curious about the underlying reality. It's not, "OMG you guys, it's not real!" but, "Huh, I wonder where that came from." Curiosity is a Good Thing.

Re:oh duh

[TWX]

Yeah, I'd have been a lot more impressed if he'd concentrated on code that was closer to right, on examples that were more realistic.

For examples, in two different films with Matthew Broderick, his modifying school records, assuming that he does indeed have credentials, is not implausible. In The Matrix Reloaded Trinity's hack is more realistic that most other movies.

Sounds to me like this guy is bitter that he can't suspend his disbelief to just enjoy the movie, and he feels a need to drag the rest of us down with him. If the movie isn't specifically about computer hacking or computer security then I'm willing to give a fair amount of silliness a pass.

Re:Oh My God!

[AdamColley]

You do occasionally get a message reading "Permission granted"

Although not full screen unless you're using a very large console font -.o

Terminator

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember when I saw the original Terminator I recognized the code scrolling over his eyes was checksum listings from Nibble Magazine.

Re:Terminator

[hubie]

Nibble Magazine used things like "Fuck You Asshole"?

Re:Terminator

[KernelMuncher]

I remember seeing that ages ago when I was young and wondering what it was. Thanks for the info.

Re:Terminator

[Anonymous Coward]

"Hey buddy... you got a $DEADBEEF in there, or what?"

Re:Terminator

[Pope]

Nibble Magazine used things like "Fuck You Asshole"?

Yeah but it was little endian so it looks like "You Fuck, Hole Ass" in the source.

Re:Terminator

[hubie]

It is funny that 30 years later, that one-liner sticks with me more than "I'll be back" or "Hasta la vista, babay". When you say it with the Arnie accent you can't help but laugh.

Re:Terminator

[omnichad]

Well...hearing spanish from an English-speaker in an Austrian accent is enough of a mess that it can't help but be funny.

Copyright implications?

[Bradmont]

So if the code is taken, used, and redistributed without acknowledgement, is that copyright abuse? I imagine tiny snippets would fall under fair use, but if a substantial block of code from, say, a GPLed project is reproduced without acknowledgement or attaching the license, what are the chances the filmmakers could be held liable?

Re:Copyright implications?

[mark-t]

Fair use equally applies to copying from GPL projects as well. The GPL does not trump copyright law. If you wouldn't have needed permission to copy something from a non-GPL'd work (because it fell under fair use), you wouldn't need to include or adhere to the GPL license when copying the same amount from a GPL'd work, since you never a actually needed any permission to copy that amount in the first place.

Re:Copyright implications?

[Anonymous Coward]

But but but, some evil corporation is making money off of showing GPL'ed source code in proprietary movie! That's not fair! They should be required to release the entire film under the GPL!
*Runs to bedroom in mother's basement crying, and slams door*

Re:Copyright implications?

[Anonymous Coward]

Recall that Oracle's case in Oracle v. Google had a fair amount of discussion over whether a 9-line rangeCheck function infringed. As it turns out, it did (per the jury), but the damages were found to be nil.

Re:oh duh

[CamelTrader]

This is cool because he isn't just calling out as bogus, but identifying the source, such as python julian calendar library, or C image library. It's pretty nerdy to know that the scene in the matrix where he's scrolling through code is the source for netstat.

Re:Oh My God!

[fisted]

Only by stupid programs which don't follow the golden rule of shutting the hell up as long as nothing goes wrong.
Therefore you're much more likely to see a message reading "Permission denied", if anything

Re:oh duh

[angel'o'sphere]

Oh shit, when I saw The Matrix I assumed it was nethack :-/

Debunk?

[JohnGrahamCumming]

Hmm. I am the person who created that Tumblr. I'm not trying to "debunk" anything. Just showing what it really is: sometimes it's nonsense, sometimes it's there's an amusing juxtaposition, sometimes it's a fun Easter Egg.

Re:Debunk?

[HoldmyCauls]

Found your site yesterday linked from Yahoo! Shared some of the things you found with friends, who also thought it was cool. Don't mind the people saying it's needless, as I found it really entertaining, especially where you identify commonly found code being presented, as in the Iron Man case or how it would actually be interpreted, as in the Malbolge from Elementary. It's a little educational but mostly fun, which is what it should be. I look forward to what else you and your subscribers find!

Re:Debunk?

[Anonymous Coward]

well, kudos anyways. You made me laugh so you're entitled to 1 (ONE) free beer next time you're in Portugal.
( posting as AC 'cause I once had the nerve to say /. is not the /. I remember when I was in my 20's )

Re:Debunk?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, the Slashdot editor staff has decided you are debunking. Therefore you have been debunked.

Re:Debunk?

[LongearedBat]

It's one thing to pause, recognise and test the code. But I'm truly amazed that you manage to find the origins of those snippets, especially as some of them would have to be very hard to find.

I'm very impressed. :)

Re:Debunk?

[Anonymous Coward]

well, kudos anyways. You made me laugh so you're entitled to 1 (ONE) free beer next time you're in Portugal.
( posting as AC 'cause I once had the nerve to say /. is not the /. I remember when I was in my 20's )

Is that 1 (ONE) free beer per Anonymous Coward, or 1 (ONE) free beer for the entire Portugal trip?
It could make a difference. Just sayin'.

Re:Debunk?

[Anonymous Coward]

So now you're debunking that you debunk things? That makes you a debunker, and therefore I've just debunked your debunking of your own debunkering.

Re:Debunk?

[Anonymous Coward]

The guy running the website responded upstream saying that he's not interested in debugging, he just thinks it's fun to try to figure out what the source code from TV and movies actually does. The debunk label was added by the dumbass that submitted the article.

Re:Debunk?

[acroyear]

heh. I do wonder if their use of these is considered 'fair use' or if, like in the case of the Obfuscated C entry, it really is a copyright violation and the coders should get compensated? :)

Re:Debunk?

[omnichad]

Keep it up. Someone needs to start a sister site that does the same to technobabble.

Re:Debunk?

[omnichad]

I think you just won the Daily Pedantry Award.

Re:Debunk?

[oreiasecaman]

Yo dawg

Re:Debunk?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is it that AC posters are almost universally the ones who score -1 posts? Maybe because you're a fucking fuckass.

Re:Debunk?

[gmhowell]

Keep it up. Someone needs to start a sister site that does the same to technobabble.

Or Slashdot article summaries.

Re:oh duh

[aitikin]

For examples, in two different films with Matthew Broderick, his modifying school records, assuming that he does indeed have credentials, is not implausible..

Interesting factoid about those, as I recall, Broderick actually learned to code the 8080 for his role in Wargames and saved some time in filming because of it.

This guy

[Anonymous Coward]

This guy is in desperate need of a life.

Re:This guy

[Anonymous Coward]

sez AC posting on /.

pshaw! harumph!

[Thud457]

If I recall correctly, I'm pretty sure "ASSHOLE" is a perfectly cromulent argument for the "FUCK YOU" opcode in 6502 assembly language.
At least the way I coded.

Re:pshaw! harumph!

[jeremyp]

All 6502 opcodes are three characters long e.g. LDA (load accumulator), ASL (arithmetic shift left). So the opcodes you are thinking of are the AHL and FKU opcodes.

We need a new Entertainment Awards Show

[Anonymous Coward]

The "Tacos", with categories such as "Best Source Code Shown On-screen in a Movie".

The tweet please...

Re:Oh My God!

[93 Escort Wagon]

Next they'll tell me that "hackers" don't get a nice big screen that says "Access Granted" or that "Swordfish" isn't a common password.

... Or that you can't find someone's IP address by making a GUI with Visual Basic!

Re:oh duh

[zippthorne]

It's not bogus, it's homage or easter egg. Like the stereogram in Mallrats that is not a sailboat of any kind.

Unless they used a special compiler

[StripedCow]

But what if they used a special compiler that works roughly as follows:

if(code == "insert code from programmable lego brick")
  return "insert binary for iron-man suit";
else
  return compile_ansi_c_code_as_usual();

Re:Unless they used a special compiler

[TangoMargarine]

The Lego code wouldn't be running on the suit after compilation. Either that, or they decided to store the Lego source code on the suit as well just for shits and giggles.

Re:oh duh

[TWiTfan]

My favorite is when cracking/hacking is shown to be ridiculously easy. As in: leet hacker guy types a few characters and clicks this one thing...and.....WE'RE IN!

Finally!

[Anonymous Coward]

FINALLY, somebody has done this!

Re:Oh My God!

[east coast]

It's only fake because they lack the skillz...

Now me, on the other hand, actually did create a woman from a Barbie doll with the help of a NORAD computer. It's really not that hard.

Monty Python Knight Doesn't Taunt in French

[retroworks]

I did not realize how huge this "Hollywood" scam went. Kudos to Graham-Cumming for uncovering it. In other news, many foreign language scenes appear not to be spoken correctly. E.g. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LhVg2uLVDtk

Re:Monty Python Knight Doesn't Taunt in French

[i.r.id10t]

Better example - skip ahead to 0:45s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MAYt6dpCgOI

Re:Monty Python Knight Doesn't Taunt in French

[angel'o'sphere]

What I never really get is why an american movie, especially world war two movies, the original german spoken by the "germans" either has an american accent, or is simply completely wrong. I mean: how retarded is it in an "english spoken movie" to have "german sequences" and then have those be either "nonsense talk" or with an exagerated american accent?
In a german movie where a few scenes are in the original language, e.g. a texas guy speaking to a scotch, they would take extra care that the texanian speaks in a texas accent/dialect and the scotisch with a scotisch dialect.

Re:Monty Python Knight Doesn't Taunt in French

[Anonymous Coward]

Det är en "Easter Egg" för att roa dem som är både villiga och kapabla att förstå. Betraktarens sinne för humor är testad av denna sort av dialog, der børk børk børk.

Re:Monty Python Knight Doesn't Taunt in French

[Anonymous Coward]

When your scotch has a Scottish accent, you know you have had too much to drink.

Re:Monty Python Knight Doesn't Taunt in French

[c0lo]

In a german movie where a few scenes are in the original language, e.g. a texas guy speaking to a scotch, they would take extra care that the texanian speaks in a texas accent/dialect and the scotisch with a scotisch dialect.

Gosh, how wrong this could be.
1. texans would never speak to a scotch, even if it may happen to them to speak to a bourbon whisky
2. there's no such thing as a scotisch dialect. At most, there could be a minor speach impediment (like in "a serious slur") caused by excess of schnaps (yeeahh... you may be onto something... Scotish may sound like that)

Re:Monty Python Knight Doesn't Taunt in French

[gx5000]

You mean a Texan speaking to a Scott ?
and a dialect is a subset of a language that is peculiar to a specific region or social group.
If you can't get any of this right why would they ?

Bloody Yanks, ça m'fait chier vos erreurs....

Re:Monty Python Knight Doesn't Taunt in French

[rts008]

*semi-serious joke ahead!*
All you foreigners sound the same to us, in the USA.

Really, we have dialect barriers to hurdle here in the USA, and now you want us to jump MORE hurdles?

But all joking aside, I have noticed the same things you pointed out and always chalked it up to some combination of ignorance and/or arrogance.

We assume that everyone in the world watches the same movies we do, but at the same time, we seem to forget the rest of the world is out there, and not culturally identical to us.

Re:Monty Python Knight Doesn't Taunt in French

[Quirkz]

I didn't follow the link, but I'm assuming French + taunts means Holy Grail. To me the real hilarity is whenever they speak to each other in French, they never understand each other. They're always saying "eh?" and "what?" back and forth.

Re:Monty Python Knight Doesn't Taunt in French

[angel'o'sphere]

If you have to correct something than do it.
But answering something you feel incorrect with giberisch does not help anybody.
For an linguist "Texanian" might be ot a dialect, for a german certainly it is.
And scotish "english" (not scotisch as the scotisch language) is a dialect.

Re:Monty Python Knight Doesn't Taunt in French

[TangoMargarine]

On the other hand, when they throw in snippets of German on tv shows and some movies (The Bourne Identity springs to mind), I *do* understand what they're saying and it actually makes sense.

Re:Monty Python Knight Doesn't Taunt in French

[Anonymous Coward]

Tangentially related tidbit. Iron Man may not have legit code, but it did have terrorists speaking proper Urdu, which was sorta realistic. While Zero Dark Thirty, which was supposed to be "authentic" had marines warning Pakistanis in Arabic.

Re:Monty Python Knight Doesn't Taunt in French

[gx5000]

Nice try...
And French isn't gibberish even though my keyboard trashed the first word.

Re:oh duh

[MightyMartian]

Perhaps we can write a GUI in VisualBasic to help angry literalist programmers get into the spirit of technical scenes in films.

Re:oh duh

[Anonymous Coward]

maybe you can submit a better article instead of just complaining all the time

In Jurasic Park...

[Anonymous Coward]

In Jurassic Park there is unknown but real looking source code (possibly for an SGI UNIX machine)

Of course its a Unix system, even a small girl would know that.

Re:In Jurasic Park...

[omnichad]

And the 3D file browser is an actual SGI program:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fsn

Tech movies

[bveldkamp]

Any tech movie that goes beyond the usual teletype interface with accompanying telex sounds, and doesn't have the full-screen blinking access granted/access denied message is already quite an accomplishment. And if those movies showed actual source code and not, say, a directory listing in a command window, even better. Bonus points if that code is genuine and has some kind of easter egg.

Re:Tech movies

[drinkypoo]

I have vision, but I imagine those noises are helpful to blind people who are watching movies, as a placeholder to tell you that some text is being printed on the screen.

I further imagine that there's some sort of system that helps with that information, but that it's not widespread.

Re:oh duh

[TWiTfan]

One of the many things that impressed me about Wargames (aside from showing social engineering and the actual hard work and research going into a serious hack) was that David could type fast, as you would expect from someone who spends all his time on a command-line computer. It's just one of those many little details that made that movie so impressive, and still makes it fun to watch even 30 years later.

Beep boop

[Russ1642]

They can't get computers to stop beeping, booping, and whirring. Text messages are transmitted one character at a time and show up that way. Every piece of information EVER is linked to one central easily searchable government database. And you're fucking looking at the source code that you're not supposed to read anyway?

Re: oh duh

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually Trivity's hack was covered here. I'll have to rtfa when I can get on a computer, tfa isn't working on this phone

Re:oh duh

[hubie]

I think the fast typing has less to do with attention to detail and more to do with not wanting to break the flow of the movie so that we can watch him painfully hunt-and-peck commands.

Re:oh duh

[Anonymous Coward]

There is the term script kiddies for a reason. Alos, those of us who have to interact with many and/or complex systems all the time, have scripts to do most stuff is almost a requirement to keep us sane.

Re: oh duh

[Anonymous Coward]

Why does everything have to be useful? It's amusing.

Re:oh duh

[Si]

As is usual with /., ignore the written-by-illiterate-simians summary and click through to the article/ website (I know, I know) and your concerns will be put to rest. The blog is less about 'code in movies is wrong' and more (and more interestingly) where did the code shown come from? Knowing that Iron Man's suit is powered by code written for a lego brick gives the concept more verisimilitude - at least if you've played been playing Lego Marvel Superheroes as much I as I have recently.

Well now that this is "a thing"

[RevWaldo]

Filmmakers should now add real obfuscated code to the computer screens that do or say something clever if someone sits down and tries to run it.

(Just not this.)

.

Tony Stark is a genius!

[doggo]

No wonder Stark Industries is so successful. If Tony can modify Lego code to control an armored flying suit, imagine what he could do with... I dunno, the source code for... Emacs!

Re:Tony Stark is a genius!

[gaudior]

Yeah, he might even be able to edit text.

Re:Tony Stark is a genius!

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe, but he'd ruin his hands in a few days...

Re:Tony Stark is a genius!

[Anonymous Coward]

That joke is unbearably old. (I remember reading the exact same joke here on Slashdot a thousand times before. (It is not even accurate. (Emacs Lisp is a domain-specific language. (For text-editing operations. (Just because there are a million other features (in Emacs (and Emacs Lisp (not to mention hundreds (or thousands) of (sometimes good (sometimes not)) libraries (of Emacs Lisp code (to extend Emacs))))) does not mean that it cannot (by default (as in without any (Emacs) Lisp added (including the default set (of code that comes with Emacs)))) edit text.)))) (That being said, the (unbearably old) joke can (still) be funny.))

Re:Tony Stark is a genius!

[doggo]

Yeah... I should have said vi.

Re:Oh My God!

[boristdog]

Yeah, everyone knows that "Password123" is probably what will get you into most corporate systems.

Knight Rider

[Anonymous Coward]

My favorite was the episode that shows KITT was programmed in BASIC .... lot's of GOTOs

Re:Knight Rider

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.aldenbates.com/archives/2007/01/28/kitt_was_programmed_in_basic.html

The Matrix Reloaded

[UnknowingFool]

The scene where Trinity is hacking into a power grid using nmap was actually accurate. Too bad the Matrix never had any sequels.

Re:The Matrix Reloaded

[Anonymous Coward]

They maybe sequels but they were mere zionist propaganda about the superiority of the israelite against the goliath and how they finally returned ''home''.

The Matrix Did it Right

[Kagato]

The matrix was one of the few movies to get it right. There's a scene where they are sabotaging a computer. The screen showed the output of a real rootkit.

Re:The Matrix Did it Right

[ledow]

It was nMap if I remember rightly, finding an open port, and then applying a rootkit to it. But it was something like 10 years old at the time of filming. Because of the "we don't know what year it is", you can sort-of get away with it, but how hard would it have been to just change the numbers, tweak the name, etc. to have it do the same thing, convincingly.

Oh, and display it on a fecking WIMP-based system rather than a text console and it would look infinitely better, more modern and also not be quite so stupid (hell, put it in an SSH window, ffs).

Re:The Matrix Did it Right

[TangoMargarine]

This is *The Matrix*. Why the hell would they have GUIs?!

Re:The Matrix Did it Right

[gl4ss]

you have to remember that the world in matrix is fake and as such the timegap doesn't even matter.

watch matrix 1 again - the special effects seem perfect, because they portray a fake world!

anyhow, the sploit used in the sequel got it quite a lot of nerd press back in the day... so using it was a good move.

Terminator was Apple ][ ROM

[swm]

some kind of 6502 assembly code in the Terminator's red overlay

I knew a guy (Hi, Tom!) who identified the code as coming from the Apple ][ ROMs (which were 6502)
He said he recognized some of the code comments.

Re:Terminator was Apple ][ ROM

[crgrace]

In the same scene there were some plots on the display of the frequency response of an under-damped second-order system... most likely the performance of some internal clock. Presumably there was frequency hopping involved because the Terminator was obviously optimizing his frequency acquisition time at the expense of clock period stability.

The Terminator had some analog circuits in there! Oh yeah!

Re:oh duh

[c0lo]

Why would anyone go to the trouble to even think that analyzing "source code" posted in movies is a useful endeavor? YAWN.

On the same line of rationing (not that I agree with it): why would anyone think posting on /. is a useful endeavor?

Re:oh duh

[Anonymous Coward]

Just like when an actor is playing a piano on-screen, you can tell the difference between real typing and fake typing when you watch it. I haven't watched Wargames in a long time, but I do not recall feeling like Broderick was faking it.

Re:oh duh

[drinkypoo]

Just like when an actor is playing a piano on-screen, you can tell the difference between real typing and fake typing when you watch it.

There is a middle ground where the timing of the keystrokes is used for the display of the keystrokes. They don't have to hit the right keys, but it still helps. And you can do it after the fact with timecodes, or you can code it into the demo. The fact that so many movies fail at it even though they have two perfectly good options for implementing it is particularly pathetic.

Re:oh duh

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not a sailboat? What the hell is it, then?!??!?!

So they are stealing?

[Bender Unit 22]

Would they steal a car?
Unlike people who download their movies, they are making money from theft.

Or perhaps they finally figured out why copying isn't the same as stealing. :D

Iron Man is made of LEGO!

[steam_cannon]

Quote: "So it appears that Iron Man is either powered by Open Source software or made of Lego. I’m not sure which is cooler." http://deeperdesign.wordpress.com/2010/02/26/is-iron-man-made-of-lego/ I agree with this sentiment. This is both cool and enhances believably. If I was stuck in a cave, with a magnet in my chest and I had some code I know is reliable, I might not spend too much time building a new code-base.

Debunk?

[rnturn]

One of the first times I noticed "realistic"-looking code/console output in a movie was the scene in Robocop when they first "boot" Murphy. (It looked like he/it was booting MS-DOS or CP/M.) But who in the world thinks that that code should be realistic? Nobody's going to consider walking out of a movie after saying "Hey! That doesn't look like robotic control source code!" So "debunk"? Geez get a life. (Of course shortly I'll be off to that web site to see what movie source code they're writing about today.)

Re:oh duh

[CamelTrader]

IT'S NOT???!!

On a related note...

[Alioth]

On a related note, many shows (including modern ones!) have been using a snippet of tape loading sound from the 1980s Sinclair ZX Spectrum computer which made its way onto some special effects library somewhere. The latest sighting (sounding?) was on an episode of The Wire a few years ago. With some effort (there's lots of other noise in the clip) it was decoded and turned out to be part of the loading screen for a game made by Ultimate: Play the Game (of Knight Lore and Jetpac fame). Ultimate became Rare before being bought out by Microsoft.

Re:On a related note...

[omnichad]

Shh!! Next you'll have Microsoft suing film and TV producers for using their copyrighted code without a license.

Re:oh duh

[jellomizer]

Back in the 1980's there was much more interest towards programming.
It was a topic taught in Elementary Schools, the general conception was the future of computing is where everyone will program the computer to their needs, they never really though about having a large supply of existing application to pick and choose from.

I am not surprised about this fact, it if people are to read code like any other language it would be considered as silly showing wrong code, as it is for an actor to talk in a garbled tongue and pretend to be a french man.

However things have changed, most people don't read code, and the code they show on the screens are just to make it look complicated, and usually only show for a few seconds, too short for even good coders to go back and say oh this code does this. Usually in that period of time, I may be able to get the language, they are using, or the OS. But for the most part I turn myself off and focus on the plot, not the detail on what is on the screen.

The Lego Ironman plausibility

[netsavior]

The lego source code is completely believable in the context of the story IMO. This is a program he used to run the prototype that he built in a cave in a war-torn country. He probably told them "I need a robotics kit" and this was in the bin of crap that they got him. If I was secretly programming an exo-suit in a cave, a mindstorm kit would be a boon. It sends signals based on several kinds of input... what else do you need?

The mindstorm program is a lot more believable than anything state-of-the-art.

Re:oh duh

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a schooner.

Re:oh duh

[Marxist Hacker 42]

First link is slashdoted. You'd think somebody criticizing other people's code, would be able to write more robust code.

Re:oh duh

[Anonymous Coward]

After a while, you get used to it. All I see now is dog, dragon, floating eyeball...

Another movie showing "code numbers"

[GodfatherofSoul]

I can't remember the title, but I think it was Executive Decision. They were trying to pull some kind of brute force code breaking hack with tons of passwords scrolling up the screen. But, if you paid attention, the codes were all hexadecimal and just ONE of the nibbles was always a '4'. I had just worked on an RFC-specced library so I recognized them as GUIDs where some of the bits are reserved for type/version information. Not that GUIDs can't be used as passwords (they'd probably serve pretty well depending on the type you use).

Accurate example

[PPH]

... in TFA from the movie "White House Down": A progress status popup giving percent complete with 9 decimal places.

Yep. Pretty much standard programming practice from what I've seen.

Re:Accurate example

[ImprovOmega]

Hell, I would just be impressed at the building of an actually accurate progress bar. If it worked like most of them in real life it would run super fast to about 25%, basically stop for 10-15 minutes, progress steadily for about an hour until inexplicably spinning at 70% for another hour and then instantly jump to 100% complete.

Re:Accurate example

[oneiros27]

And then you sit there waiting 20+ minutes, and when it gets to 100%, it then goes back to 0%, because that was just the time to complete one file ... but there's no indication of how many files need to be processed, so you're just left hanging.

I wonder why people even other trying to give estimates on time to completion.

http://xkcd.com/612/

Re:Accurate example

[iluvcapra]

I worked on WHD (in sound, not the visual effects). The thing about 9 decimal places is it means there's always going to be a few numbers ticking away a dozen times a second, so the visual is still exciting, even for a process that's going to run 3 hours.

Other screens in that movie have some Cake PHP templates... During the video conferences between the vice president and the Pentagon, there's code running constantly in the corner of the screen, it's just more raw socket boilerplate...

Re:Accurate example

[Anonymous Coward]

And then you sit there waiting 20+ minutes, and when it gets to 100%, it then goes back to 0%, because that was just the time to complete one file ... but there's no indication of how many files need to be processed, so you're just left hanging.

I wonder why people even other trying to give estimates on time to completion.

http://xkcd.com/612/

Because marketing demands it, but doesn't actually care enough to demand we do it accurately.

Re:Accurate example

[Anonymous Coward]

If my manager hears about 9 decimal places, he's going to insist on it too.

Re:Accurate example

[PPH]

The thing about 9 decimal places is it means there's always going to be a few numbers ticking away a dozen times a second,

Which is why many progress bars include some sort of animation (spinning hour glass, clock face, etc.).

I wonder if anyone, just out of sheer cruelty, has ever taken a nine digit progress display and added a ramp or sinusoidal function to the last few digits. For the people not paying close attention, the numbers are still changing. But half the time, they are sliding backwards. Overall, the displayed percentage is accurate enough.

Re:Accurate example

[iluvcapra]

Which is why many progress bars include some sort of animation (spinning hour glass, clock face, etc.).

Not kinetic enough. It has to seem like the computer is working hard, as if it's undertaking frantic, nervous activity -- same reason game clocks show tenths of a second in the last minute-- it makes no difference, it's just Shiny to put people in a certain emotional state, to enhance drama. The progress is making a story beat, it's not there to enhance user experience.

Re:oh duh

[Quirkz]

Wait, is the Mallrats stereogram intelligible to viewers? And what is it?

It can work that way...

[Junta]

If you work for the NSA and the vendor has conveniently backdoored the target for you...

Re:Oh My God!

[Quirkz]

IP address ...

No, they call it an IPA. I was watching Dexter last night, and that's what they called it.

Hackers did it right

[Dr_Barnowl]

The visuals in Hackers were completely unrealistic - but they avoided the ire of programmers, and the inevitable dating of their film, by instead mostly going for a kind of interpretive mindscape video, instead of attempting to realistically represent the process of hacking.

I like to think that someone in production design actually went out and researched what hacking looked like.. and instead decided to talk to people about what hacking FELT like.

Re:Hackers did it right

[Anonymous Coward]

Hackers got that part right, but it also has this: "Check this out, guys. This is insanely great. It's got a 28.8bps modem!"

Re:oh duh

[TangoMargarine]

And then they casually mention Oracle in Iron Man and I throw up a little in my mouth.

Re:oh duh

[nitehawk214]

I think the fast typing has less to do with attention to detail and more to do with not wanting to break the flow of the movie so that we can watch him painfully hunt-and-peck commands.

Yet so many TV shows have the "computer geek" doing two-finger typing. I suppose it is less fake looking than "fake computer typing" by hammering on the keyboard. But seriously people, learn to fucking type.

Re:oh duh

[nitehawk214]

Perhaps we can write a GUI in VisualBasic to help angry literalist programmers get into the spirit of technical scenes in films.

This would be an appropriate response.

Re:Oh My God!

[i kan reed]

"Operation successful" is a common and useful message that doesn't meet your rule.

Re:oh duh

[Anonymous Coward]

There is no 'right' way to type, as that's subjective. I type with two fingers and can type at around 70WPM, and maybe I could type faster if I changed my typing style, but I don't care enough to do so.

Re:oh duh

[ThatsDrDangerToYou]

My favorite is when cracking/hacking is shown to be ridiculously easy. As in: leet hacker guy types a few characters and clicks this one thing...and.....WE'RE IN!

Actually, it almost always works on the third try.

you got it!

[Dr. Zim]

I was just thinking the same thing... If the guy was just complaining about bad code in movies, there'd be no interest in his site. The fact that he tells you where the code came from and perhaps why it was chosen is what makes it interesting to me, at least.

Re:you got it!

[omnichad]

But it's also interesting just how many movies use HTML as if it were a programming language. Maybe that's what most non-nerds recognize as "computer code" because they accidentally hit view source on a web site once.

Re:Oh My God!

[Anonymous Coward]

""Operation successful" is a common and useful message that doesn't meet your rule."

Sure, but can it beat "Mission Re-accomplished" ????

Re:oh duh

[Anonymous Coward]

Why the hell would you want to reinvent Windows?

Re:oh duh

[Zero__Kelvin]

A) He didn't criticize ANYONEs code

B) You probably shouldn't criticize anything in high tech, not even writing on technical matters, as you seem to have so little grasp of how it works that you think they guy must have coded the entire software stack of his website from the ground up, and don't know that you can have perfectly good code that performs poorly due to poor configuration by a less than qualified sysadmin.

Re: oh duh

[Anonymous Coward]

But... But... Why did he shoot the monitor? Was he afraid it'd give him a photosensitive seizure?

Re:oh duh

[laie_techie]

Really? How is this a slashdot conversation piece?

Every person here has seen a freeze frame from a stupid news story or Hollywood movie that is obvious simple HTML, a directory listing, a CSS file, or something inconsequential. Not a surprise to anyone who even know what slashdot is.

I totally agree that most geeks I know have already pointed out the bogus code from movies. Would it be better to show the source code of a real virus if John Q. Public can't tell the difference and some script kiddie decides to try it out?

Re:oh duh

[Alioth]

Computer geeks do do two finger typing. Personally, I touch type like a proper typist, but a younger colleague of mine types almost as fast as me using a rather frantic two finger typing method. I reckon he'd be good for about 70wpm if he tried one of those typing test things.

Re:Oh My God!

[fisted]

No it's redundant because the information is already conveyed via the program's exit status.

Besides, you forgot to mention what (relevant) program farts out that particular message, I can't think of any.

Re:oh duh

[minstrelmike]

Why would anyone go to the trouble to even think that analyzing "source code" posted in movies is a useful endeavor? YAWN.

Probably for the same reason they do it in real life. Belief in the ability to think.
imo, for the amount of time it takes to analyze code, you're probably better off having three different people write the code from scratch.
Or work on better testing. Seems to me most hacks are done from a black box pov which is the direct inverse of source code analysis.

Re:oh duh

[minstrelmike]

I don't know why people care about bogus code in movies.
The people in the movies aren't real either. They are actually actors.
They aren't even speaking their own lines.
It's all a plot I tell you.

Re:Oh My God!

[minstrelmike]

Yeah, everyone knows that "Password123" is probably what will get you into most corporate systems.

And for govt nuclear weapons, the code is 123456.

Lorem ipsum translated

[tepples]

I like to see if they just copy/paste the same paragraph over and over or use the cliche lorem ipsum .... text.

Or if they include H. Rackham's translation of the "Lorem ipsum" passage of Cicero's De finibus as an in-joke. (Latin dolorem ipsum means "pain itself".) I've done that myself when making a demo of a font renderer for an 8-bit computer platform. From lipsum.com:

But I must explain to you how all this mistaken idea of denouncing pleasure and praising pain was born and I will give you a complete account of the system, and expound the actual teachings of the great explorer of the truth, the master-builder of human happiness. No one rejects, dislikes, or avoids pleasure itself, because it is pleasure, but because those who do not know how to pursue pleasure rationally encounter consequences that are extremely painful. Nor again is there anyone who loves or pursues or desires to obtain pain of itself, because it is pain, but because occasionally circumstances occur in which toil and pain can procure him some great pleasure. To take a trivial example, which of us ever undertakes laborious physical exercise, except to obtain some advantage from it? But who has any right to find fault with a man who chooses to enjoy a pleasure that has no annoying consequences, or one who avoids a pain that produces no resultant pleasure?

On the other hand, we denounce with righteous indignation and dislike men who are so beguiled and demoralized by the charms of pleasure of the moment, so blinded by desire, that they cannot foresee the pain and trouble that are bound to ensue; and equal blame belongs to those who fail in their duty through weakness of will, which is the same as saying through shrinking from toil and pain. These cases are perfectly simple and easy to distinguish. In a free hour, when our power of choice is untrammelled and when nothing prevents our being able to do what we like best, every pleasure is to be welcomed and every pain avoided. But in certain circumstances and owing to the claims of duty or the obligations of business it will frequently occur that pleasures have to be repudiated and annoyances accepted. The wise man therefore always holds in these matters to this principle of selection: he rejects pleasures to secure other greater pleasures, or else he endures pains to avoid worse pains.

Re:Oh My God!

[i kan reed]

Oh, yes, it's not like any program is ever dealt with on the user level, with multiple interactions along the way. Literally everything is a shell script. I had forgotten.

As to what programs, any number of web apps are an easy example. I forget what slashdot uses as it's message, but when I'm done and hit submit, I'll see an informative message.

192.168 means inside job

[tepples]

I couldn't help but cringe when I saw NCIS put the IP address of a supposedly dangerous hacker as [somewhere in the 192.168/16]

I wouldn't immediately cringe. Instead, I'd think "must be someone on the premises. Try the guest subnet first."

Diverse double compiling

[tepples]

This sounds like a Ken Thompson "trusting trust" attack. Someone in that universe ought to have used David A. Wheeler's "diverse double compiling" construction (bootstrap the compiler through several competing compilers and compare the binaries after self-compilation) to expose the compiler's publisher as untrustworthy. It'd be more believable if Mr. Stark's original prototype suit was jury-rigged from a LEGO kit, and the LEGO code was carried into further revisions.

Re:oh duh

[iluvcapra]

One of the many things that impressed me about Wargames (aside from showing social engineering and the actual hard work and research going into a serious hack) was that David could type fast, as you would expect from someone who spends all his time on a command-line computer

In the DVD commentary I think it's Walter Parkes who points out that the 8080 in the film was running a program that would always spit the correct character for the scene on the terminal, regardless of what keys he pressed. It only appeared that he could touch type. :)

Everything else in that movie, and the other film those two wrote, Sneakers, is remarkably accurate for a film. The drama comes out of the characters and the situations, not waiting for a dialogue box blinking decrypting...

Re:oh duh

[iluvcapra]

Larry Ellison paid a lot of good money for that placement!

PS. Were you aware two of Larry's kids are movie producers? His son produced MI: Ghost Protocol, and his daughter produced Zero Dark Thirty, True Grit, and American Hustle...

Re:oh duh

[laie_techie]

I think the whole point is that TFS makes it sound like no geek has ever analyzed code shown in movies or on TV. There are geek points available for identifying the language shown (bonus points for identifying the project). I would be concerned about anyone who thought it was a revelation that the code displayed almost never does what the characters say it does.

Area man debunks sex shown in movies and TV shows

[Anonymous Coward]

GFC... why is that even news?

...wub wub wub dee dee buh buh bow Bangarang

[tepples]

They can't get computers to stop beeping, booping, and whirring.

It's called "dubstep". Ask your kids about it.

Every piece of information EVER is linked to one central easily searchable government database.

Mr. Snowden revealed that at least that part's plausible.

And you're fucking looking at the source code that you're not supposed to read anyway?

It gives us insight into Cyberdyne's design tendencies, such as the fact that Arnie's content-addressable memory is powered by a 6502-compatible microcontroller running a checksum program derived from Key Perfect.

Re:oh duh

[whitroth]

And I found Wargames *very* unbelievable (and I'd been programming professionally for several years at that time). I mean, first of all, the kid had what must have been something like $30,000 in early eighties dollars worth of computer equipment. And he was war-dialing... and in the days before "unlimited" calls per month, his parents never notice their bills...

Oh, and in the same time period, when most folks were *just* getting credit cards, and kids didn't get them, his 16 yr old girlfriend could pop what, many hundreds of dollars? A $kbuck, on airfare to fly them half-way across the US?

Right. Manhattan Project was *much* more believable... (Scene: the state science fair in NYC, other kids: hey, we get that you guys are in trouble, and we've put together what money we can all spare, which is enough to get you two bus tickets home to upstate NY.

                    mark "and people working for the DoD put huge back doors in mainframe code, during the Cold War...."

Re:oh duh

[khellendros1984]

You can see it here, about 20 seconds in. Pause and fullscreen the video. It's a set of geometric shapes.

List of privileges

[tepples]

In a way, not having root-equivalent access is "something going wrong". So it'd be plausible for a program that grants authorization to state what privileges have become available, just as the user control panel page on Bugzilla or Stack Overflow or the inventory system that my employer uses states what privileges a user account has. "Member of groups: sales, purchasing; can edit prices; can edit quantity on hand; can view customer orders; can edit purchase orders."

Re:List of privileges

[fisted]

While that sounds good, it really does not work that way.
There isn't really a 'permission granting' step when, say, exploiting some program. You typically 'just' get to run your code in the context of the exploited program. No permissions 'become available' or 'get lost' in the process, at least as far as the OS can tell.

Now if the vulnerability is know, you could program something like that around it -- but then you could just fix the vulnerability in the first place

24

[nensondubois]

A lot of source code is shown sporadically in the final season of 24.

Re:oh duh

[Anonymous Coward]

NCIS was twice as good when they had McGee and Abbey typing at the same keyboard at the same time to show how "computer geeky" they are.

Walled gardens dating back to the NES

[tepples]

Back in the 1980's there was much more interest towards programming.
It was a topic taught in Elementary Schools, the general conception was the future of computing is where everyone will program the computer to their needs

I know precisely what killed that, and it was the introduction in the mid-1980s of home computers that run only applications approved by the computer's manufacturer. The biggest culprits were the North American version of the Atari 7800, whose IPL used an RSA signature to verify that Atari had approved the program, and the North American and European versions of the Nintendo Entertainment System, which used a pair of synchronized CICs (checking integrated circuits, essentially pseudorandom number generators implemented on microcontrollers) in the Control Deck and Game Pak to verify that Nintendo had approved manufacturing of the PCB. (Later consoles, such as Microsoft's Xbox and Nintendo's Wii, would use an elaboration of Atari's method.) These cryptographically enforced walled gardens helped to erode elementary school students' interest in programming.

Re:Walled gardens dating back to the NES

[IamTheRealMike]

I'd love to believe that, but I think what did it is more like what the OP said - lots of apps could be bought off the shelf for not much money, that did everything interesting. I mean, I learned programming on a BBC Micro in the 80's, which was a great machine back then, but it was *handwave* 10x as expensive as the game-price-subsidised NES boxes and I couldn't write competitive or even interesting video games for it as a kid, because I didn't have enough skill. So not surprising that most people lost interest.

Re:Walled gardens dating back to the NES

[Megane]

The biggest culprits were the North American version of the Atari 7800, whose IPL used an RSA signature to verify that Atari had approved the program

Yeah, except for the part where the 7800 was a complete failure because (after releasing only a couple thousand in 1984), Atari put them on the shelf for two years. They only sold them again when they got tired of them taking up warehouse space. Besides, what REALLY happened was that the C64 and IBM PC killed off consoles from 1984 to 1986 because they had floppy drives, and you could pirate games much easier than from cartridges.

But yeah, the 7800 used a 960-bit RSA encryption of a hash of the game contents, which provided the delay to watch the shiny Atari logo during start-up. There were potential ways around it, but in the end it was the Atari ST signature program being found on a hard drive in a dumpster that opened it up. (IIRC, the first time it was found along with the Lynx and Jaguar signature programs, then a few years later found again on another dumpster hard drive.) The CIC chip is a whole other story, but it eventually got reverse-engineered, thanks in part to Tengen's clone chip.

Re:Walled gardens dating back to the NES

[tepples]

what REALLY happened was that the C64 and IBM PC killed off consoles from 1984 to 1986 because they had floppy drives, and you could pirate games much easier than from cartridges.

Then how did the NES manage to kill off the C64 and IBM PC? I was told that it was because IBM PC had no smooth scrolling until around the time the Super Famicom came out, and C64 had loads and loads of loading.

Re:Walled gardens dating back to the NES

[Megane]

Then how did the NES manage to kill off the C64 and IBM PC?

Why are you so obsessive about this? The crash was also due to crapware flooding the market in the console space, and companies like Atari and Coleco trying to double down on 8-bit home computers. And it was nobody wanting to invest in making consoles because the business had been declared dead. It could even have been due to market changes from the last of the baby boomers going to college. I was one of them, graduating from high school in 1982, right on the line between baby boomer and GenX.

Home computers (the C64/PC being the last of them) replaced the consoles of the 1978-1984 era, then in late 1985 the NES brought back console gaming to the US. The NES and PC both killed off the C64. It didn't matter to me, though. I went straight from TRS-80 to Macintosh and didn't even have a game console for years until I started collecting game cartridges back in the mid '90s.

Of course I am talking about the US market here. Europe and Japan didn't have the crash of 1984, and 8-bit home computers and (even cassette tape in the UK, apparently!) kept going for quite a while.

Re:Walled gardens dating back to the NES

[tepples]

Why are you so obsessive about this?

Certain game genres are historically shut off to indie developers because they don't work well on PCs with their small median monitor size, and console makers haven't made an effort to reach out to indies until very recently. I'm trying to find the best route to market for a startup video game developer with a local multiplayer game in development.

Re:Walled gardens dating back to the NES

[meerling]

Learning to program is in many ways like learning to design and build a car. It's not for everyone, nor should it be, though having an understanding of how it works is probably a good idea to dispel the notions of magic pixie dust.

Re:oh duh

[iluvcapra]

And he was war-dialing... and in the days before "unlimited" calls per month, his parents never notice their bills...

It's implied in the film that he's somehow either passing the phone company the right signals to make his calls free, or he'd figured out how to places his calls through someone else's PBX. There's a line where Ally Sheedy sees the wardailer and says, like "Isn't that expensive," and he says, in so many words, "Oh there's ways around that!" She says, "you can go to jail," and he says, "Only if you're over 18!" The issue is lampshaded.

Oh, and in the same time period, when most folks were *just* getting credit cards, and kids didn't get them, his 16 yr old girlfriend could pop what, many hundreds of dollars? A $kbuck, on airfare to fly them half-way across the US?

She only buys a ticket for him, she drives herself down from Seattle. As she says, "It's was only a three hour drive anyway!" She drives a motor scooter, she has a personal phone in her room in 1983, these would imply that her family is of means.

mark "and people working for the DoD put huge back doors in mainframe code, during the Cold War...."

More or less believable that L'Affaire Snowden?

Google mallrats stereogram

[tepples]

If the video is blocked in your country: Someone decoded it. It's not a sailboat. (Found via Google mallrats stereogram)

You never know!

[spaceyhackerlady]

A few years ago I was doing some development that involved AES encryption, and needed to create some test tools.

One evening I was watching some program about the misdeeds of some computer hacker, and the screen background was perl. It mentioned Crypt::Rijndael.

I had my test tool the next morning... :-)

...laura

Re:You never know!

[strikethree]

That is incredibly awesome. Thank you for sharing. I love hearing about weird random things like that. It makes the universe seem less... boring, evil, out-to-get-you, etc. Very very cool. :)

Nuke password is 00000000, really, seriously ...

[perpenso]

Yeah, everyone knows that "Password123" is probably what will get you into most corporate systems.

And for govt nuclear weapons, the code is 123456.

From Ars Technica: "Well, for two decades, all the Minuteman nuclear missiles in the US used the same eight-digit numeric passcode to enable their warheads: 00000000. That fact, originally revealed in a column in 2004 by then-president of the Center for Defense Information Dr. Bruce G. Blair, a former US Air Force officer who manned Minuteman silos, was also mentioned in a paper by Steven M. Bellovin, a computer science professor at Columbia University who teaches security architecture. Both of these sources were cited this week in an article on the site Today I Found Out written by Karl Smallwood, as well as in an article in the UK's Daily Mail."

6502 code in Terminator

[perpenso]

For examples, in two different films with Matthew Broderick, his modifying school records, assuming that he does indeed have credentials, is not implausible. In The Matrix Reloaded Trinity's hack is more realistic that most other movies.

In the original Terminator some 6502 code scrolled by. At the time a friend throughout he recognized it from the Apple DOS Read/Write Track Sector function.

Lighten up, it's entertainment.

[DerekLyons]

I don't get why annoying your audience is a good thing, at the expense of listening to the people you hired to be experts anyway.

That's because you don't get that on any particular topic, there's only a small subset of people who'll be jarred out of their suspension of disbelief by it. Sufficiently small that there is no real point to trying to get everything possible accurate to the nth degree. (Doubly so when being so accurate would render the events of the plot impossible in the first place.) Hollywood knows this, OCD suffering experts and /. posters seemingly do not.

Re:oh duh

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the fast typing has less to do with attention to detail and more to do with not wanting to break the flow of the movie so that we can watch him painfully hunt-and-peck commands.

Yet so many TV shows have the "computer geek" doing two-finger typing. I suppose it is less fake looking than "fake computer typing" by hammering on the keyboard. But seriously people, learn to fucking type.

Meh.

I do two finger typing. In my experience if the rate at which I type is the bottleneck, something has gone horribly wrong. It helps that I'm pretty practiced at it so I'm not terribly slow (though nowhere near "bragging speeds")

Re:Oh My God!

[omnichad]

Sure you can:
http://guivbip.codeplex.com/

You wouldn't need to. But Visual Basic can sure run a shell function and grab the results of nslookup. What's silly is that getting the IP address of the web site was the trivial part. From there, you'd likely have to subpoena the web hosting company. Or you could subpoena the domain registrar. You're not getting anywhere with an IP address of a server.

Re:oh duh

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope. It's a schooner.

Re:oh duh

[AlphaWolf_HK]

I remember in the Matrix I was impressed that they used an actual IP address instead of something like 345.734.342.925.123.

Re:Oh My God!

[fisted]

Oh, yes, it's not like any program is ever dealt with on the user level, with multiple interactions along the way. Literally everything is a shell script. I had forgotten.

Bit of a weird assumption that only shell script execution would yield an exit status when every program (actually: every process, even on Windows, which you're obviously using) does that.

As to what programs, any number of web apps are an easy example.

Gosh...

I forget what slashdot uses as it's message, but when I'm done and hit submit, I'll see an informative message.

Now this isn't even true, and I'm pretty sure you felt quite stupid after submitting.
The 'success message' you get from /. is your comment actually showing up, that's it.

Re:oh duh

[JeffAtl]

Your colleague probably just has the most common commands in "muscle memory". I doubt that he could type a letter very fast at all.

Re:oh duh

[Spiridios]

Computer geeks do do two finger typing. Personally, I touch type like a proper typist, but a younger colleague of mine types almost as fast as me using a rather frantic two finger typing method. I reckon he'd be good for about 70wpm if he tried one of those typing test things.

Just about everywhere I've ever worked, I've worked with someone that types fast (for a programmer) with only 2 fingers. There are also the dvorak-wielding snobs. Just because we all sit in front of a keyboard doesn't mean we all use them exactly the same.

Excuse me...., but,

[sgt_doom]

aren't we talking abou fiction here? Like the movies, dood?

Now, if serious people would better occupy their time descerning who the controlling stockholer is of America, or the UK, perhaps we would actually learn something?

Re:Oh My God!

[i kan reed]

Now this isn't even true, and I'm pretty sure you felt quite stupid after submitting.
The 'success message' you get from /. is your comment actually showing up, that's it.

I did, didn't I?

Re:Nuke password is 00000000, really, seriously ..

[volmtech]

I worked with a guy who in his younger days had a job maintaining those missiles. One day he told his supervisor he knew what the entry code to the bunker was going to be the next day (he was good with numbers) and wrote it down for him. The next morning my friend was escorted off the base and was not allowed to work on nuclear systems again.

Iron Man 3

[DarthVain]

Well the first thing that I thought was implausible was: "Sir, the Oracle cloud has completed your computations"
Clearly a total fabrication.

Though one of my favorite quotes on this topic is Super Troopers: "Enhance!"

Also there seems to be a certain period where all hackers clearly used Apple products, well then again everyone used Apple products.

English movie with dialog in accented English

[swb]

The thing that always bugs me -- when an English language film is set in a non-English language country, why do the actors have to speak local-language accented English when presumably the characters are all "local" to whatever foreign locale the film is in (ie, Germans speaking to Germans). This seems to happen all the time and it first struck me after watching "The Reader" and for some reason I tend to think its most common with Germans but it also seems to happen with Russians, too.

I guess it makes sense if you have an English speaker speaking in English with a non-English speaker, especially if they're trying to sell the non-English speaker as being of the specific ethnicity they play.

But overall, have them all speak in a common English accent/dialect (ie, whatever most of the cast speaks), presumably the film is just as good if everyone just speaks 'normal' English. If you really, really need that local feel then have them actually recite their dialog in the actual foreign language and subtitle it (which I know won't fly for an entire feature-length Hollywood film due to mass-audience distaste for subtitles).

Once this dawned on me it became really hard for me to suspend disbelief. And it's especially annoying, in an existential way, when they aren't consistent about it. You never see ancient Romans speaking in Latin-accented English, for example -- they usually have a BRITISH accent.

Debug

[DarthVain]

One thing that always bugged me (heh, pardon the pun), is that every hacker A) typed perfectly, and B) never made a mistake.

Yes I know they just want to move the movie along, and yes occasionally they would insert a "Permission Denied", but those times where rather than running some predefined application they built in the past, but are doing some mad clickity-clacking on a keyboard to much dramatic effect, I would love to see a syntax error, or even just a debug based on a missed colon, comma, quote, or bracket which is impossible to find, and causes much swearing. It would make anyone that has ever coded anything giggle a little. You can even make it something obvious that the audience can figure out and feel all superior (which it usually is anyway to much chagrin). You don't have to waste a lot of time of the movie of the "hacker" blankly starting at the same code forever, just pan back for a second at a time to hear swearing, then back to others doing something else. You could also just insert a "2 hours later" text... :) Then have the next hacker that walks by spot it in 2 seconds, and then lord it over the poor wretch. Bonus points if you have the first hacker promise to do it in like 2 minutes easy.

Re:oh duh

[sjames]

Sounds to me like you didn't RTFA.

If you had you'd see that 'debunk' was a poor choice of words. It's more like going frame by frame to figure out where the code came from (if it is code) just for grins.

After all, I already know that the source code streaming by in Terminator didn't come from an actual Terminator form some bizarre alternate reality, but it's mildly amusing to know it was a partial listing of Apple DOS.

Re:oh duh

[TripleE78]

That was my thought. I read the headline as "Pedantic Asshole Can't Watch a Movie For What It Is"

Re:oh duh

[constpointertoconst]

I type 130wpm using only 6/10 of my fingers.

I sometimes use different fingers for the same key - entirely subconsciously. I find it fascinating how my brain automatically computes the movements needed based on the word I'm about to type. That's the catch, though - I actually need to know ahead of time what I'm about to type, so I'm not nearly as good at copying material as I am at typing put my thoughts.

"Touch typing" is hardly the only "correct" way of typing.

Re:oh duh

[locopuyo]

Better than 4 handed typing on the same keyboard. http://youtu.be/1Y2zo0JN2HE

Apple ][ ROM in Terminator

[maddog42]

IIRC, the HUD display in the original Terminator contained a scrolling dump of the Apple ]['s Integer Basic ROM...

Re:oh duh

[reboot246]

70 words per minute is relatively slow. A good touch-typist with a good keyboard could nearly double that. My late aunt Elizabeth spent her life as a legal secretary and could type 120 wpm on a typewriter (remember them?), and carry on a conversation while doing it. You're merely hunting and pecking at 70 wpm compared to somebody like that.

Re:oh duh

[porges]

That's my problem! I always try twice then give up. Thanks!

Re:Oh My God!

[fisted]

Did not you?

Re:oh duh

[Anonymous Coward]

Then you bothered to neither look at the guy's blog, read what he says for himself, nor read the comments of people who have done one or the other. Why should we give the slightest shit about your opinion?

Re:oh duh

[Anonymous Coward]

No, no, the guy who wrote the blog built the entire code for tumblr and for the servers it's running on and for the ISPs people use to connect to it!

Re:oh duh

[minstrelmike]

sometimes the code in real life doesn't even work. At least, that's been my experience.

Re:oh duh

[TWX]

Even more importantly, one doesn't have to necessarily type very fast if there's very little code compared to how well it's conceived of.

Dad was a COBOL and FORTRAN programmer on an MVS machine. His programs were deceivingly simple as he learned his craft in the sixties and seventies when efficiency was very, very important, and he spent a lot more time plotting out how to make the program efficient than he did on typing it in. He's still a two-finger typist, and it served him well.

It is a movie!

[hotfireball]

But who sane would f*ck care what the code is actually doing? The movie is the same thing as in the theater! This "research" is coming from the pricks that they do not really care about the movie itself, but living in their own world, completely detached from the main story. John is going to press Enter to execute his bad-ass work destruction in the sake of saving humanity and kissing Anne, saying he loves her, yet some geek-prick does not gives a shit about the story line, but starts arguing that the code is actually not about bad-ass work destruction, but is essentially a copypaste chunk from the FreeBSD audio subsystem. Oh, this is the same stupid as trying to prove that they are actually do not killing actors during filming some shooting scenes... "Oh, this is sudoku game! I am right!!". Yes, you are right, and the bullets were actually blank and that nuclear explosion was actually a CG.

Re:It is a movie!

[robsku]

Oh, get a life already :D

It's a hobby. You know, for fun? You would if you had one...

...or just maybe you didn't RTFA before writing your insanely frantic rant ;p

Rhubarb

[LQ]

You know, its fiction and artifact. When actors want to simulate background hubbub they say "rhubarb, rhubarb". The code does not have to be real, really. Anymore than the spaceships or the latex makeup.

Re:oh duh

[hotfireball]

Yes, pretty nerdy. And stupid. Because this is all what he can do during watching the movie: instead of enjoy the entertainment and accept the conventionality of the theater on the screen, focusing on hugging his girlfriend watching with him, instead he starts proving that the nuclear explosion in the movie was actually a CG. Pathetic.

Re:oh duh

[Anonymous Coward]

I am not surprised about this fact, it if people are to read code like any other language it would be considered as silly showing wrong code, as it is for an actor to talk in a garbled tongue and pretend to be a french man.

French? Probably not. But different Asian countrymen? You bet.

As an Asian who can understand, or at least recognize, a few Asian languages, such as Mandarin, Cantonese, Korean and Japanese, I always find it funny in American movies when supposedly Mainland Chinese or Taiwanese mafia from Shanghai speaks Cantonese (which is more common in southern China and Hong Kong) instead of Mandarin, etc.

Re:oh duh

[TripleE78]

First off I feel like it's been an old joke here for the last 15+ years that nobody on /. reads the articles.

Second, it was merely a comment on the headline. After reading the comments and realizing that, the second oldest joke on Slashdot is also true -- the summary was wrong, I took a peek. It was enjoyable, yet everything I had to say has already been said since it's now a day later, and moved on.

Third, you either didn't bother to log in or have no ID whatsoever, so I find it hilarious that you're calling me lazy.

Re:oh duh

[TWiTfan]

If movies are any indication, there is always some clue or connection that will hit you just as you are right on the verge of giving up.

Crazy thought...

[mgcarley]

Couldn't/shouldn't the entertainment industry pay for a license or have to give attribute to the code as if they were actually using it?

Especially in the case of the WHD movie, the code appears to be pretty much lifted directly, so one would imagine that under most licenses some compensation should be due to the original author (assuming they can be found, which may or may not be a trivial task) unless the author specifically states otherwise.

If nothing else, they'd expect it if the tables were turned (and they'd probably sue you in to oblivion if you took some code they'd produced and failed to pay for or attribute it) - especially since the code is being used for commercial purposes (I think a big budget movie counts), in the same way that one is supposed to take a license and/or permission for photos and videos when used for commercial purposes.

I'm not necessarily talking about making the author a gazillionaire, just something reasonable - or is this too crazy a thought (considering this is Slashdot)?

Independence Day code

[bobvious]

I thought it was nice that the aliens that were taking over earth were also using C, let alone ascii characters.

Spies Like Us!

[ulatekh]

When I was but a teen, and saw the movie Spies Like Us in the theater, I recognized the "decrypted transmission" shown by Dan Ackroyd's character as a hex dump from the Apple //e's monitor program (i.e. what you got by typing "CALL -151" at the prompt).

Re:oh duh

[strikethree]

Yeah, I'd have been a lot more impressed if he'd concentrated on code that was closer to right, on examples that were more realistic.

Dude. Why so negative? Relax. He found something that interested him and investigated. That is all. He is not trying to prove anything or change the world. He is just "scratching an itch". That itch is his and his alone. Some other people thought it seemed kind of cool and that kind of snowballed into this article. He does not owe you any awesomeness, so just relax and take it for what it is worth or ignore it.

Did you ever check to see how much Maggie Simpson is worth when she is scanned at the register? This is the same kind of thing.

Re:oh duh

[demonrob]

It's implied in the film that he's somehow either passing the phone company the right signals to make his calls free

- this needs to be even mentioned on slashdot? oh dear, where has the geek cred gone? And you say 'somehow' - this was standard cracker practice back then.

Re:oh duh

[robsku]

Yeah, just because you might not be able to chew bubblegum and walk at the same time doesn't mean others can't - also, making a "memory note" such as "remember to check that later on your own time just for fun" does not eat that much from enjoying the movie (at least I would not think...).

You're just being a pathetic ass... what's the matter with you anyway?

Re:oh duh

[meerling]

In most movies, they never even hit the enter/return key.
Often the same with the spacebar.

Re:oh duh

[meerling]

Of course, back when Wargames was made, the computers were so slow a fast touch typist could easily overload the keybuffer. Yes, you could type faster than the computer could handle. On my computers I would change the size of the keybuffer to give me more leeway. I'd type till I filled the buffer, then take a drink while waiting for the buffer to catch up. I hated that slow speed. And now it's popular in games to display text in a super slow teletype one character at a time thing that is even slower than computers in the 80s.