I had never heard of TrustE until the RealNetworks issue came up. Do consumers really put faith in that logo? I think that people put faith in the reputation of the company whose website they are visiting, which is eaqually foolish. But TrustE is really nothing more than a marketing tool for the companies that support it.
Microsoft or AOL or DoubleClick can tell congress that privacy laws aren't neccessary, because the industry is policing itself. Regardless of how effective this policing is, big corporations can point to TrustE as "something" that the industry is already doing. But as more well publicised cases, like Real Networks and DoubleClick, come to light, hopefully it will be seen for what it is.
There is one particular mini-game in Mario Party that requires you to spin the joystick around as fast as you can. You can achieve higher speeds by using your palm to rotate it than you can by using your thumb, as the joystick was designed to be used. The ridges on the top of the joystick will really shred your palm if you use it in this manner.
Zelda, as well as most other N64 games, works best when you use your thumb on the joystick, as it was designed to be used. That's why you don't get the glove.
The great thing about this is that you could have more than one number, so you could give one to your friends and another to companies. When you start getting junk mail, you just cancel the number.
The USPS's profit, mentioned in other posts to this thread, comes directly from bulk advertising mail. That business subsidizes mail delivery to rural areas. It is junk mail that keeps postal rates so low. I can't believe that the USPS would provide a service that would directly cut in on thier profits, unless the money to be made on that system would offset the lost bulk mail business.
The answer here would be nothing, because they never lost it.
One could also say that the primary product of the $89M sales and marketing budget was the orders placed by the customers on the list, not the list itself.
I'm not saying that the list isn't a valuable asset. I'm not saying that the people who took it aren't criminals. But they didn't steal $2.5 million in cash. They didn't steal a rare jewel worth $2.5 million. They stole information. Intellectual property is not the same as physical property. There are similiarities, but there are also differences. With IP, the loss is more theoretical. Maybe, $2.5M in damage could be done to Epicor, but only if the right people were to get the information at the right time under the right circumstances. The odds of that happening are pretty slim. Another way to look at it is if the theives had stolen the list, but then had thier hard drive fail and the information was destroyed, it's not the same as if someone steals 2.5 million dollars and then burns it up. In the first case, no one has lost anything.
When "computer" crimes are reported in the media, astronomical figures are tossed around as to the value of the information that is taken. The victims can make up any number they want, and the higher the number, the more leverage authorities have against the criminals. The media siezes on this, because it makes for sensational news.
This works in the DeCSS case, where the motion picture industry can get the Norweigan police to go after a teenage computer geek, because they say billions of dollars are at stake. The only way they could actually lose billions of dollars is for pirate DVD's to become the standard distribution method for all recorded movies. That would never happen, but still, they can say it's possible, so it's worth billions.
I'm not saying that the customer list has no value. I am saying it's not costing them 2.5 million a year. That would be the cost of losing all thier customers. The two are not the same thing.
And this sort of exaggeration of the value of intellectual property has been used in the past to threaten crackers who were just poking around with stiff penalties and jail time. I'm not saying that the guys in this article weren't criminals who stole some trade secrets, because they were. And they were going to use that customer list to try and steal customers away. They were caught and should be punished. But they didn't steal 2.5 million dollars.
When you let companies get away with making up numbers about the worth of thier trade secrets, you could end up with Jon Johansenn accused of stealing 200 million dollars from the makers of "Titantic", or something equally ridiculous. The damage done to the company is not nearly as great as the exagerated monetary claims they are making.
Epicor officials said that they considered their worldwide customer list to be an extremely valuable trade secret, estimating the cost of losing the list at approximately $2.5 million per year
Another example of company's pulling numbers out of thier ass. First of all, they didn't lose the customer list. Someone had a copy of it. Second of all, it's very hard to quantify the value of something like that. It can take a company a lot of time and effort to cultivate a clientele, but if someone else knows all thier names, it does not cost that company 2.5 million dollars. If someone were to get all of a company's clients to switch to another company, maybe it would cost that much. But in reality, getting someone's clients to jump to another company, even if their names are known, is not easy to do.
This sounds like another example of a company inflating the value of it's stolen intellectual property so that an IT criminal can be charged with a greater crime. Mitnick stole information valued by Sun at 80 million dollars, and they gave away the same information to students. But prosecuters threatened Mitnick with more severe punishment based on the estimated worth of the information.
Epicor officials considered the list of user IDs and passwords to be very confidential information which they had taken significant security measures to protect
What "significant" security measures allow a widely known freely distributed security program to crack all the company's passwords? How about putting some restrictions on the password formats to make them resistant to such tools?
The music in that movie was so great. The Broadway showtune music contrasted perfectly with the filthy lyrics. The juxtaposition of these two incongruous elements produced great comic results.
One of Microsoft's pioneering ideas was the uses of PR in the high tech world. From the early days with MS plants in news groups, to the Linux FUD page on thier website, MS skillfully uses the media to promote thier vision.
Linux has always been about making the operating system work right. Solid code is the foundation, not marketing smoke and mirrors. Do flamers hurt the cause? Maybe, but what got us where we are today is not media savy, but better model for writing software.
One thing about open source is that anyone who wants to write the code and post it can do that. No one is going to sue them for copyright infringement or disclosure of trade secrets. There is no one preventing the use and modification of the code.
The flip side is there is no one controlling the "message", as they say in the PR biz. No one is going to get fired or lose a promotion if they rant to a reporter about something that is "off message". In a big company, only certain people are authorized to speak to the media. In the movement, there are no such limitations, and everyone is free to say what they want. The advocacy HOWTO is just a guide, and there are no penalties for ignoring it, except maybe some bad press for the open source.
Flamers are going to be part of the package in an environment that is as inclusive as this. What you can do is show that there is more to the open source world than just flamers. But you don't have to if you don't want to.
The Crusoe has staggeringly low power consumption. The article says that even running at peak loads (during DVD playback), it uses less than half the power of a PIII. Depending on use, this could double or triple battery life. Also, because the it uses less power, the Crusoe will run cooler, enabling more compact designs. This kind of space and power saving in portables seems pretty revolutionary to me. The article may be correct in it's conclusion that the Crusoe won't make huge inroads onto the desktop soon, at least until VLIW processors become more developed, but there is a market for what the Crusoe offers.
You write a lot about being a "geek". This has many connotations, but on/. it is generally used to mean a computer geek, or Linux geek, or programmer geek, something like that. You admit that you are really not that, so where does this geek mentality come from? How would you describe yourself, and what personal experiences have shaped your understanding of the persecuted outsider?
It's amazing what AOL thinks they can get away with by having people agree to a EULA. If David Smith had included a EULA with the Melissa virus, would he be a free man today?
Hijacking DUN and TCP/IP control from your computer is not a feature that people want or expect from thier AOL 5.0.
Just as you don't expect your MP3 player to scan your hard drive for files and secretly report them to a corporation. If Kevin Mitnick can be arrested for stealing information from a computer, why not the executives at RealNetworks? The only difference in thier activities is that Real Networks tricks you into agreeing to a EULA before they hack/crack your computer.
And don't take users to task for not reading thier EULA's. Those things are written in lawyer language, and the industry has done it's damndest to promote them as innocuous, industry standard paperwork that you have to deal with before you use any software. And they are using them to protect increasingly egregious, borderline criminal behaviour.
"And we all have unreasonably high expectations of MS"
What is unreasonable about expecting a product that works? Microsoft touts the security and the stability of their products in the press all the time. Is it unreasonable, therefore, to expect that the product is secure and stable? Or have we gotten to the point when it's taken for granted that what a company says about it's product is a lie?
"if that user has agreed to receive personally-tailored ads"
What that means is you would have to read every privacy statement of every website you visit, and if even one mentions something in the fine print about viewing "personally tailored ads", DoubleClick can identify you and your web browsing habits.
The odds are pretty good that you have "agreed" to that somewhere, since DoubleClick has such a large percentage of the banner ad business.
"A "film geek" would not have gone from 1977 to 1999 without having directed a single movie"
I've read in articles that George Lucas views film making as a collaborative process, which is why he focuses on producing. Directing is just one part of the process. Producing lets him get involved on many levels, and his ego doesn't demand that his name be at the top of the movie poster.
MS will sit on it's arse until someone else makes a better product that might make inroads into "their" territory. They were perfectly happy with DOS until apple came out with a GUI interface. Then they hyped the hell out of Windows for a couple years while they made an actual product.
They didn't even have a browser until long after Netscape had created that market. Then they went out and bought a browser, bundled it with their OS and worked on it until it was actually a decent product.
They haven't been improving Windows at all since '95 came out. (Who really believes Windows'98 was an improvement?)Maybe having Linux as a modifiable, virtually crash-proof OS, they will improve their product in those respects.
Until they do, they will continue to hype the crap out of their current, substandard products, so at least some people will think they already have.
"You will like our integration. Microsoft's decision to make Internet Explorer a hard-to-remove feature of Windows 98 -- in direct defiance of an earlier order by Judge Jackson -- has..."
"I don't think there were earlier rulings by Mr. Jackson about not integrating Explorer in Win98. Perhaps he means another judge."
It seems what is referred to here is the 1995 consent decree between MS and the Department of Justice. The DOJ says that MS bundled their web browser with Windows, thereby leveraging their OS dominance to control the browser market. MS said that browsers are the future of the OS, and including them is just that natural evolution of the OS. The dispute over whether or not the browser is an integral part of the OS is what started the whole anti-trust suit.
I'm not sure that I would like to see a dark, serious take on Spiderman. He has always been this geeky kid who had trouble paying the rent. When he fights super-villians, he is constantly making wisecracks. Todd McFarlane made a darker, serious Spiderman book for a year and a half, and it did reinvigorate the series. But I still like my Spiderman old-school. He is not the gloomy Dark Knight of Gotham. He is the wisecracking kid with real life problems. I wouldn't mind more fun and less angst, and I think something more along the lines of Evil Dead III would be great.
This wookie song is available from Rhino records on a CD called "Christmas in the Stars: A Star Wars Christmas Album." An entire CD of Star Wars Christmas songs!
On Amazon at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0000033VG/ 103-3408443-2652606
This is kind of amusing. ESR speaking for the Linux community, says that China doesn't speak for the Linux community.
Well, why is ESR any better qualified to speak for the Linux community that China? Doesn't anyone who works to use and improve Linux have as much right as anyone else to be a voice for Linux, even China, if they want to get involved?
There are lots of different reasons why people use Linux. Why should a country's appreciation for some of the movement's ideals be ruled out as a valid one? Because it might make the OS look bad to fortune 500 companies that some people want Linux to one day dominate? Because it might give MS one more bullet point to put on it's Linux FUD website? Because some in the movement don't like their politics? These reasons all seem, to me at least, to have nothing to do with what Linux is about.
But, then again, who am I to say what Linux is about?
We've seen ample examples of the media using anyone who works on a computer as an "expert". Now they don't even have to track down someone with a PC. They can just go online, find the most sensationalistic flamebait post, and increase their ratings, or subscriptions or whatever. After all, if someone is smart enough to post to/. they must be a computer expert.
This is a problem with copyright laws in the US. They demand that the owner of a trademark do a lot to defend it or else the owner loses it. This puts a damper on a lot of fun stuff.
In Japan, for example, there is a thriving market for fan-created comic books using the characters of well-known and popular publications.The fan publishers charge for their books, and are able to recoup a bit of the cost of producing them. Some even make money. It is a phenomenon mainly confined to the hardcore fans, and probably enhances a comic's prestige, rather than hurt a big publishing house's profits.
Such a thing could not occur in America, as any company that allowed that to go on would lose it's trademark and it's characters would become public domain.
well, I might be breaking some security rules by sharing this, but I have to disagree. As a professional secret agent, I find that my job is portrayed dead-on in the movies. Not only that, but much of the computer cracking that I do on the job is also portrayed accurately. Like this time I had to break into this secret volcano hideout of Dr. Evil (BTW, Mike Meyers does a hilarious and dead-on parody of Dr. Evil in his Austin Powers movies). I had to break through the security doors with my computer cracker watch that Control gave me. I've seen that in tons of movies!
And a lot of times, I have to deactivate computers that are going to detonate some WDD (World Destroying Device), and they generally have digital counters ticking off the seconds. Most of the time, counter gets down to three or two or even one before I can figure out the evil superboss' secret password.
Finally, that movie Enemy of the State, really does a good job of showing the CIA's survelliance techniques. Among other activities, the CIA constantly monitors 7-11 security cameras to detect any threats to national security.
So don't judge movies too harshly just because they show a side of hacking you don't normally do.
I know warning labels frequently seem obvious, but maybe not to everyone. For every sticker that says "warning: do not stick hand into rotating blades", there is a person with no common sense and no fingers. McDonalds didn't put warning labels on their coffee until someone spilled it on themselves and sued.
Slashdot Mirror
I had never heard of TrustE until the RealNetworks issue came up. Do consumers really put faith in that logo? I think that people put faith in the reputation of the company whose website they are visiting, which is eaqually foolish. But TrustE is really nothing more than a marketing tool for the companies that support it.
Microsoft or AOL or DoubleClick can tell congress that privacy laws aren't neccessary, because the industry is policing itself. Regardless of how effective this policing is, big corporations can point to TrustE as "something" that the industry is already doing. But as more well publicised cases, like Real Networks and DoubleClick, come to light, hopefully it will be seen for what it is.
There is one particular mini-game in Mario Party that requires you to spin the joystick around as fast as you can. You can achieve higher speeds by using your palm to rotate it than you can by using your thumb, as the joystick was designed to be used. The ridges on the top of the joystick will really shred your palm if you use it in this manner.
Zelda, as well as most other N64 games, works best when you use your thumb on the joystick, as it was designed to be used. That's why you don't get the glove.
The great thing about this is that you could have more than one number, so you could give one to your friends and another to companies. When you start getting junk mail, you just cancel the number.
The USPS's profit, mentioned in other posts to this thread, comes directly from bulk advertising mail. That business subsidizes mail delivery to rural areas. It is junk mail that keeps postal rates so low. I can't believe that the USPS would provide a service that would directly cut in on thier profits, unless the money to be made on that system would offset the lost bulk mail business.
Another method of calculating the value might be:
How much to recreate it?
The answer here would be nothing, because they never lost it.
One could also say that the primary product of the $89M sales and marketing budget was the orders placed by the customers on the list, not the list itself.
I'm not saying that the list isn't a valuable asset. I'm not saying that the people who took it aren't criminals. But they didn't steal $2.5 million in cash. They didn't steal a rare jewel worth $2.5 million. They stole information. Intellectual property is not the same as physical property. There are similiarities, but there are also differences. With IP, the loss is more theoretical. Maybe, $2.5M in damage could be done to Epicor, but only if the right people were to get the information at the right time under the right circumstances. The odds of that happening are pretty slim. Another way to look at it is if the theives had stolen the list, but then had thier hard drive fail and the information was destroyed, it's not the same as if someone steals 2.5 million dollars and then burns it up. In the first case, no one has lost anything.
When "computer" crimes are reported in the media, astronomical figures are tossed around as to the value of the information that is taken. The victims can make up any number they want, and the higher the number, the more leverage authorities have against the criminals. The media siezes on this, because it makes for sensational news.
This works in the DeCSS case, where the motion picture industry can get the Norweigan police to go after a teenage computer geek, because they say billions of dollars are at stake. The only way they could actually lose billions of dollars is for pirate DVD's to become the standard distribution method for all recorded movies. That would never happen, but still, they can say it's possible, so it's worth billions.
I'm not saying that the customer list has no value. I am saying it's not costing them 2.5 million a year. That would be the cost of losing all thier customers. The two are not the same thing.
And this sort of exaggeration of the value of intellectual property has been used in the past to threaten crackers who were just poking around with stiff penalties and jail time. I'm not saying that the guys in this article weren't criminals who stole some trade secrets, because they were. And they were going to use that customer list to try and steal customers away. They were caught and should be punished. But they didn't steal 2.5 million dollars.
When you let companies get away with making up numbers about the worth of thier trade secrets, you could end up with Jon Johansenn accused of stealing 200 million dollars from the makers of "Titantic", or something equally ridiculous. The damage done to the company is not nearly as great as the exagerated monetary claims they are making.
Epicor officials said that they considered their worldwide customer list to be an extremely valuable trade secret, estimating the cost of losing the list at approximately $2.5 million per year
Another example of company's pulling numbers out of thier ass. First of all, they didn't lose the customer list. Someone had a copy of it. Second of all, it's very hard to quantify the value of something like that. It can take a company a lot of time and effort to cultivate a clientele, but if someone else knows all thier names, it does not cost that company 2.5 million dollars. If someone were to get all of a company's clients to switch to another company, maybe it would cost that much. But in reality, getting someone's clients to jump to another company, even if their names are known, is not easy to do.
This sounds like another example of a company inflating the value of it's stolen intellectual property so that an IT criminal can be charged with a greater crime. Mitnick stole information valued by Sun at 80 million dollars, and they gave away the same information to students. But prosecuters threatened Mitnick with more severe punishment based on the estimated worth of the information.
Epicor officials considered the list of user IDs and passwords to be very confidential information which they had taken significant security measures to protect
What "significant" security measures allow a widely known freely distributed security program to crack all the company's passwords? How about putting some restrictions on the password formats to make them resistant to such tools?
The music in that movie was so great. The Broadway showtune music contrasted perfectly with the filthy lyrics. The juxtaposition of these two incongruous elements produced great comic results.
One of Microsoft's pioneering ideas was the uses of PR in the high tech world. From the early days with MS plants in news groups, to the Linux FUD page on thier website, MS skillfully uses the media to promote thier vision.
Linux has always been about making the operating system work right. Solid code is the foundation, not marketing smoke and mirrors. Do flamers hurt the cause? Maybe, but what got us where we are today is not media savy, but better model for writing software.
One thing about open source is that anyone who wants to write the code and post it can do that. No one is going to sue them for copyright infringement or disclosure of trade secrets. There is no one preventing the use and modification of the code.
The flip side is there is no one controlling the "message", as they say in the PR biz. No one is going to get fired or lose a promotion if they rant to a reporter about something that is "off message". In a big company, only certain people are authorized to speak to the media. In the movement, there are no such limitations, and everyone is free to say what they want. The advocacy HOWTO is just a guide, and there are no penalties for ignoring it, except maybe some bad press for the open source.
Flamers are going to be part of the package in an environment that is as inclusive as this. What you can do is show that there is more to the open source world than just flamers. But you don't have to if you don't want to.
The Crusoe has staggeringly low power consumption. The article says that even running at peak loads (during DVD playback), it uses less than half the power of a PIII. Depending on use, this could double or triple battery life. Also, because the it uses less power, the Crusoe will run cooler, enabling more compact designs. This kind of space and power saving in portables seems pretty revolutionary to me. The article may be correct in it's conclusion that the Crusoe won't make huge inroads onto the desktop soon, at least until VLIW processors become more developed, but there is a market for what the Crusoe offers.
You write a lot about being a "geek". This has many connotations, but on /. it is generally used to mean a computer geek, or Linux geek, or programmer geek, something like that. You admit that you are really not that, so where does this geek mentality come from? How would you describe yourself, and what personal experiences have shaped your understanding of the persecuted outsider?
It's amazing what AOL thinks they can get away with by having people agree to a EULA. If David Smith had included a EULA with the Melissa virus, would he be a free man today?
Hijacking DUN and TCP/IP control from your computer is not a feature that people want or expect from thier AOL 5.0.
Just as you don't expect your MP3 player to scan your hard drive for files and secretly report them to a corporation. If Kevin Mitnick can be arrested for stealing information from a computer, why not the executives at RealNetworks? The only difference in thier activities is that Real Networks tricks you into agreeing to a EULA before they hack/crack your computer.
And don't take users to task for not reading thier EULA's. Those things are written in lawyer language, and the industry has done it's damndest to promote them as innocuous, industry standard paperwork that you have to deal with before you use any software. And they are using them to protect increasingly egregious, borderline criminal behaviour.
"And we all have unreasonably high expectations of MS"
What is unreasonable about expecting a product that works? Microsoft touts the security and the stability of their products in the press all the time. Is it unreasonable, therefore, to expect that the product is secure and stable? Or have we gotten to the point when it's taken for granted that what a company says about it's product is a lie?
"if that user has agreed to receive personally-tailored ads"
What that means is you would have to read every privacy statement of every website you visit, and if even one mentions something in the fine print about viewing "personally tailored ads", DoubleClick can identify you and your web browsing habits.
The odds are pretty good that you have "agreed" to that somewhere, since DoubleClick has such a large percentage of the banner ad business.
"A "film geek" would not have gone from 1977 to 1999 without having directed a single movie"
I've read in articles that George Lucas views film making as a collaborative process, which is why he focuses on producing. Directing is just one part of the process. Producing lets him get involved on many levels, and his ego doesn't demand that his name be at the top of the movie poster.
Not that it's all that great;)
MS will sit on it's arse until someone else makes a better product that might make inroads into "their" territory. They were perfectly happy with DOS until apple came out with a GUI interface. Then they hyped the hell out of Windows for a couple years while they made an actual product.
They didn't even have a browser until long after Netscape had created that market. Then they went out and bought a browser, bundled it with their OS and worked on it until it was actually a decent product.
They haven't been improving Windows at all since '95 came out. (Who really believes Windows'98 was an improvement?)Maybe having Linux as a modifiable, virtually crash-proof OS, they will improve their product in those respects.
Until they do, they will continue to hype the crap out of their current, substandard products, so at least some people will think they already have.
"You will like our integration. Microsoft's decision to make Internet Explorer a hard-to-remove feature of Windows 98 -- in direct defiance of an earlier order by Judge Jackson -- has ..."
"I don't think there were earlier rulings by Mr. Jackson about not integrating Explorer in Win98. Perhaps he means another judge."
It seems what is referred to here is the 1995 consent decree between MS and the Department of Justice. The DOJ says that MS bundled their web browser with Windows, thereby leveraging their OS dominance to control the browser market. MS said that browsers are the future of the OS, and including them is just that natural evolution of the OS.
The dispute over whether or not the browser is an integral part of the OS is what started the whole anti-trust suit.
I'm not sure that I would like to see a dark, serious take on Spiderman. He has always been this geeky kid who had trouble paying the rent. When he fights super-villians, he is constantly making wisecracks. Todd McFarlane made a darker, serious Spiderman book for a year and a half, and it did reinvigorate the series. But I still like my Spiderman old-school. He is not the gloomy Dark Knight of Gotham. He is the wisecracking kid with real life problems. I wouldn't mind more fun and less angst, and I think something more along the lines of Evil Dead III would be great.
This wookie song is available from Rhino records on a CD called "Christmas in the Stars: A Star Wars Christmas Album." An entire CD of Star Wars Christmas songs!
/ 103-3408443-2652606
On Amazon at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0000033VG
This is kind of amusing. ESR speaking for the Linux community, says that China doesn't speak for the Linux community.
Well, why is ESR any better qualified to speak for the Linux community that China? Doesn't anyone who works to use and improve Linux have as much right as anyone else to be a voice for Linux, even China, if they want to get involved?
There are lots of different reasons why people use Linux. Why should a country's appreciation for some of the movement's ideals be ruled out as a valid one? Because it might make the OS look bad to fortune 500 companies that some people want Linux to one day dominate? Because it might give MS one more bullet point to put on it's Linux FUD website? Because some in the movement don't like their politics? These reasons all seem, to me at least, to have nothing to do with what Linux is about.
But, then again, who am I to say what Linux is about?
We've seen ample examples of the media using anyone who works on a computer as an "expert". Now they don't even have to track down someone with a PC. They can just go online, find the most sensationalistic flamebait post, and increase their ratings, or subscriptions or whatever. After all, if someone is smart enough to post to /. they must be a computer expert.
Matthew Hawk,
computer expert
This is a problem with copyright laws in the US. They demand that the owner of a trademark do a lot to defend it or else the owner loses it. This puts a damper on a lot of fun stuff.
In Japan, for example, there is a thriving market for fan-created comic books using the characters of well-known and popular publications.The fan publishers charge for their books, and are able to recoup a bit of the cost of producing them. Some even make money. It is a phenomenon mainly confined to the hardcore fans, and probably enhances a comic's prestige, rather than hurt a big publishing house's profits.
Such a thing could not occur in America, as any company that allowed that to go on would lose it's trademark and it's characters would become public domain.
well, I might be breaking some security rules by sharing this, but I have to disagree. As a professional secret agent, I find that my job is portrayed dead-on in the movies. Not only that, but much of the computer cracking that I do on the job is also portrayed accurately. Like this time I had to break into this secret volcano hideout of Dr. Evil (BTW, Mike Meyers does a hilarious and dead-on parody of Dr. Evil in his Austin Powers movies). I had to break through the security doors with my computer cracker watch that Control gave me. I've seen that in tons of movies!
And a lot of times, I have to deactivate computers that are going to detonate some WDD (World Destroying Device), and they generally have digital counters ticking off the seconds. Most of the time, counter gets down to three or two or even one before I can figure out the evil superboss' secret password.
Finally, that movie Enemy of the State, really does a good job of showing the CIA's survelliance techniques. Among other activities, the CIA constantly monitors 7-11 security cameras to detect any threats to national security.
So don't judge movies too harshly just because they show a side of hacking you don't normally do.
I know warning labels frequently seem obvious, but maybe not to everyone. For every sticker that says "warning: do not stick hand into rotating blades", there is a person with no common sense and no fingers. McDonalds didn't put warning labels on their coffee until someone spilled it on themselves and sued.