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Silicon Valley Security Experts Give 'Blackhat' a Thumbs-Up; Do You?
HughPickens.com writes Cade Metz writes that last week Parisa Tabriz, head of Google's Chrome security team, helped arrange an early screening of Michael Mann's Blackhat in San Francisco for 200-odd security specialists from Google, Facebook, Apple, Tesla, Twitter, Square, Cisco, and other parts of Silicon Valley's close-knit security community, and their response to the film was shockingly positive. "Judging from the screening Q&A—and the pointed ways this audience reacted during the screening—you could certainly argue Blackhat is the best hacking movie ever made," writes Metz. "Many info-sec specialists will tell you how much they like Sneakers—the 1992 film with Robert Redford, Sidney Poitier, Dan Ackroyd, Ben Kingsley, and River Phoenix—but few films have so closely hewed to info-sec reality as Mann's new movie, fashioned in his characteristic pseudo-documentary style." "Unlike others, this is a film about a real person, not a stereotype—a real guy with real problems thrust into a real situation," says Mark Abene. "The technology—and the disasters—in the film were real, or at least plausible.
Director Michael Mann worked closely with Kevin Poulsen in researching, writing, and shooting the film. Like Hemsworth's character, Poulsen spent time in prison for his hacking exploits, and Mann says his input was invaluable. "It's the first crime-thriller to hinge so heavily on hacking without becoming silly." says Poulson. "We put a lot of work into finding plausible ways that malware and hosting arrangements and all these other things could be used to advance the plot and all of that I think turned out pretty nice." I'm a fan of Michael Mann, and the previews I've seen of Blackhat make it look at least like a passable thriller. For anyone who's seen the film already, what did you think?
Director Michael Mann worked closely with Kevin Poulsen in researching, writing, and shooting the film. Like Hemsworth's character, Poulsen spent time in prison for his hacking exploits, and Mann says his input was invaluable. "It's the first crime-thriller to hinge so heavily on hacking without becoming silly." says Poulson. "We put a lot of work into finding plausible ways that malware and hosting arrangements and all these other things could be used to advance the plot and all of that I think turned out pretty nice." I'm a fan of Michael Mann, and the previews I've seen of Blackhat make it look at least like a passable thriller. For anyone who's seen the film already, what did you think?
There is only one hacker who can stop him and he is in jail.
That is all I need to not see it.
A. It's me! Timothy, your editor at Slashdot.
Q. (pause)
Q. Is Anyone else home?
Since when was the security community close knit?
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
Nice? NICE??!
Linus would hate it
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Thor is in jail because he's a hacker. But the bad guys are doing bad things and Thor is the only one who can stop them.
So people who want to help Thor stop the bad guys get Thor out of jail.
And a really hot Asian woman falls in love with Thor.
And Thor and the Asian woman race around the world fighting the bad guys. Literally fighting. Thor kicks physical ass. And he has a hot Asian girlfriend.
No "restore from backup" or "patch your servers" or "fix your firewall's DMZ". This is REAL hacking.
No really, let me see. Where's the download link?
"Unlike others, this is a film about a real person, not a stereotype—a real guy with real problems thrust into a real situation," says Mark Abene. "The technology—and the disasters—in the film were real, or at least plausible.
Where have I head this before? Oh right - Blackhat is the Interstellar of info-sec terrorism films - sigh
And the "bad guy" is able to reach "anyone" , "anywhere" , "anytime" - wow, how does he bridge the air-gap for all those disconnected networks? He must have one of those four-dimensional "tesseract" library thingys.
Director Michael Mann worked closely with Kevin Poulsen in researching, writing, and shooting the film. Like Hemsworth's character, Poulsen spent time in prison for his hacking exploits, and Mann says his input was invaluable.
Checking out the photo of Kevin Poulsen on Wikipedia, he must be thrilled to have Chris Hemsworth playing him and "us" - seriously how many hackers (elite or otherwise) look like Chris, are firearms experts and, apparently, ninjas? I didn't realize, until just this moment, how physical hacking could be.
Well as long as the security geeks in Silicon Valley (and their egos) liked it, the critics at Rotten Tomatoes that gave it a 31% *must* be wrong. I'll wait to see this on Amazon Prime or Netflix ...
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
No matter how good, I won't pay Hollywood or the mpaa. Period.
Silence is a state of mime.
without getting winded? You call that believable? :)
The directory appears to be Michael Mann, not Michael Mann. As I've never heard of the former before, that had me confused for a while.
Sorry Michael Mann, but the hacker movie that represented hacker culture best was the Swedish original The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo".
thumbz up from all teh hatwearers in teh computer security industry.
I guess this just means we still have quite a few fuckwits in the IT Security arena (Exception: Chris S.).
Cuz, according to TFA, it seems the "experts" spent a good bit of the movie laughing at some of the dialog and characterizations of NSA types. Generally, I don't think that the audience reaction that a filmmaker is looking for to a crime thriller.
Advertisement? Nah.
There are ads on Slashdot (they're easy to spot, and they are what keep the lights on), but Nah -- this is just a topic of interest. Or, if there's a conspiracy of the kind you'd like, no one is in on it, which means ... there isn't ;)
But perhaps if this were a Michael Mann film, there would be.
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Is Feng Shui deadly?
If you angle a mirror wrong it will FUCK UP someone walking into the space.
Not to mention that just one of the precepts of Feng Shui is that you not sit with your back to any openings in a room. They say it's for "good energy" but really it's so you can gun down every motherfucker that comes for you before they even see your face.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Terrible. It insulted my intelligence at every opportunity. To pick just three:
This movie insulted my intelligence at every turn. I have a long (and spoilerific) list of all the what-the no-they-didn't good-Christ moments I saw in the movie; if there's interest I'll post them here.
How much does it cost for an advertisement like this?
In Trailer #2 ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?... ), 1:52 ....HAHAHAHA
Yeah, that's totally what happens. I mean, they say it's the most realistic hacker movie since Sneakers, but all I see is a bunch of cheezy CG and an overwhelming desire for the movie to portray hackers as either criminals or criminals-turned-nsa-helpie-people.
Oh, but there's a bash prompt! That makes up for it, right?
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
1) still take a very good looking guy able to go into "action scene" mode as heroe (not to count all trope which comes with it rsp the female lead)
2) the hacking is... Well as hollywoodian as ever
3) the film villain reach is unebliavable and cartoonish
4) it ends with ana ction scene.
Let us get real a real hacker film would be boring for your average hollywood audience. But that does not excuse the rest above which is your average poor heroe trope full film with just "hacking" thin coated over.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
NO ONE shown in the trailer seemed like anyone I've known who had technical knowledge. They ALL seemed like people who have made being cute the most important thing and maybe only thing in their lives.
Also, what about EXPLOSIONS is supposed to make someone want to see a movie? Is the intention to recommend the movie to those who feel attracted to violence?
The Imitation Game, a ~true story about Alan Turing and how he hacked Enigma.
That's the movie to watch--not this cheesy Blackhat flick.
Haven't seen the actual movie myself, but the horrific mis-casting of the main protagonist wasn't the only thing that put me off this movie was when I saw the trailer. Basically the film begins with a hacker actually breaking into the control system of a Chinese nuclear power plant and literally blows it up and the plot summaries the movie revolves around catching those behind this.
If you know how systems like this actually work, you'd know that not only are the control systems completely isolated from any outside networks, there's also at least one level of emergency failsafes to shut it down the reactor if it begins to heat up in a dangerous way. Mind you, these failsafes take a significant amount of effort to shut down. Even Soviet built reactors have these failsafes and the Chernobyl disaster had been avoided if these hadn't been turned off for the test that ended up going horribly wrong.
Box Office Mojo reports that it took in $1.4 million on Friday, which puts it into eighth place, and it "could wind up with less than $4 million over the three-day weekend, which would be one of the worst debuts ever for a movie playing in at least 2,500 locations."
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
That comment didn't have a $29 byte before it, did it? That'd be a length-prefixed literal string, which a lot of Pascal implementations and classic Mac OS used heavily.
"Track Down" (2000) ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Track_Down ) is a *dramatization* of Kevin Mitnik's hacking exploits. The film slightly intensifies some of the events, but all aspects of the film are plausible. I think this film might be the most realistic and comprehensive depiction of a typical elite hacker, including lifestyle, habits, activities, principles and motivations. This film is relatively low key, and almost resembles a journalistic documentary, but maintains the tension of the chase from beginning to end, with a few nice hacking thrills along the way. All characters are likeable, and hackers will like the excellent hacks and heckles against the establishment.
Generally, cracking (as opposed to hacking, which is a positive thing wherein one is clever with technology) is a team effort. I am skeptical of the notion of a "super cop", "super detective", "super computer cracker", "super soldier" or "super whatever". At some point, these super people need to sleep, urinate, defacate, eat, and so on. No one can stay on top of everything at all times. On top of that, no one acquires skill/knowledge in a vacuum, you need a community. Particularly when you are talking about specialized knowledge. So the idea of one person taking on an agressive collective is unrealistic. There has to be a lot of backing, both on the physical and tecnology sides with the same leves of exposure to danger. This provides a challenge to story telling in a film content because it is harder to have a character to relate to when you portray a group. However, if you want to depect these kinds of things in a realistic way, you need to highlight the importance of a team, a community, and a supportive environment. If you bring up any "cracker", you also need to bring her/his community into the picture. I saw the trailers, and it reminded me of Steven Segal/Van Damme film trailers--only the latter do it better. I would sooner believe JCVD as a super cracker than this thespian.
"SO we bide our time, waiting for a purer kick to bloom and the future is still bleak, uncertain and beautiful" -GSYBE
The lone hero can have servants, and they can be very capable, but without the hero they have no purpose in the story.
It's a fun little fantasy but it reeks enough of old world aristocracy that the sheer volume of it would probably have Washington rolling in his grave.
So Hollywood doesn't do teams much. Television is not quite so bad and many series have plot points where the hero goes to see the X guy and outsource the difficult task of X as part of catching the bad guys or whatever.
They do - in those it's generally a set of tasks that require a specific narrow skillset over a short timeframe.
Even that A-Team split the unlikely superskillmonster into several characters and it was not pretending to be anyway remotely near reality.
At least in Hackers, they portrayed and referenced over 80 real-life hacking techniques or hacking lore (some friends and I watched it and counted, and we likely missed a couple). Starting right off with the lead character being a reference to Robert Morris, and moving on from there.
Yeah, Dade Murphy (Jonny Lee Miller) has a thing for the hot chick Kate Burn (Angelina Jolie), but doesn't bang her in the movie. It probably has more of a realistic plot that Blackhat, given the recent hacks of Sony and revelations of Snowden.
What about The Avengers? It took all of them to defeat the bad guy. Well, except for the Hulk which threw Loki around like a rag dog (one of the funniest scenes in the movie, IMHO).
Why don't you have a look yourself?
Because it was too blurry for me to read at 480p.
I followed the link to the trailer for Blackhat, but it was only 1 minute long and I couldn't seek in it. Then I realized it was showing the trailer for Blackhat as the advertisement before the full trailer for Blackhat (but why?), so I pressed Reload. I had to watch another ad because somehow YouTube couldn't save the fact that I had already watched an ad before that video, and it showed me another ad. And after skipping that ad, it would pause and play only audio whenever I would try to seek. I tried again later and it worked, kind of. At 1:45, all I saw on the screen was blur, not readable text. Even going up to 480p didn't make it exactly readable without squinting and puzzling out what each letter is.
Another reason I think "Hackers" is a better hacking movie. Besides all the real-life hacking references, they had to work as a team to defeat the bad guy.
I'm confused, timothy. Are you implying the only form of advertisements on /. are the served ads? Companies don't occasionally pay for articles about their products?
I am Audience.
The one thing that drives a thriller is a plausible Evil Plan, so that part needs to be right. SPOILERS SPOILERS Evil Guy is able to directly manipulate the stock market to get $74 million in cash, but then sets up an elaborate plan to cause a catastrophe so he can bet on the futures market. Why doesn't he just keep manipulating the stock market directly? It was a fun enough ride as long as you don't tear yourself out of the story by letting your mind object to the implausibilities that keep stacking up. "Why did they get OUT of their car and just stand in the street to fire handguns at guys with machine guns?" "Because Thor needed motivation to make it personal." Bleah. I'm really tired of movies that murder innocents so the main character is motivated to do what he does.
I try not to post, really I do. I watched Sneakers until the moment the characters went back to their offices after the heist. Yeah. Right. I'm going to climb into bed with the Government and Organized Crime, then after I shafted everyone I'm going to go home.
I couldn't get to the off switch fast enough.
Meh, rarely pay ten bucks to see a movie nowdays, and this is why. The write-ups on this one caught my interest, but god it was awful. Long, boring, little to no tech involved. "Do you have an Android phone"? hehehe..., brief mentions of DD-WRT, Onion routing, Bluetooth gadgets. All in all it's an average "Made for Lifetime TV" movie. Idiots hyping this movie are obviously on someone's payroll.
I know I'm a bit late to prevent a flood of highly upvoted "Hackers can't do action stuff" comments... BUT:
Eric S. Raymond.
Gun nut. Sword fighting enthusiast. Martial arts practitioner. Author of Hacker's Dictionary, and one of the main OSS founders.
http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=6568