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Exploring the Hacker Tools of Mr. Robot

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Re: Exploring the Hacker Tools of Mr. Robot

#51

Post by DanBC »

moe wrote: post #25
cyanbane wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and depended on non existent technology. Exactly why people are influenced by it.

Was any technical minded person really influenced by that, other than cringing in front of the TV? Anyone who has ever worked with any kind of media editor knows that "waving your arms in the air" is about the least desirable imaginable interface for such.

Minority Report is exactly what I think of when I'm trying to guess what bizarre combinations of gestures and swipes and pinches and shakes I need to perform to get this bit of smartphone software to do whatever trivial thing it's supposed to.

The only difference is that John Anderton seems to be able to get his software to do the stuff he wants it to do.

Re: Exploring the Hacker Tools of Mr. Robot

#52

Post by pslam »

m_fayer wrote: post #27
forgotmypassw wrote: post #4

There were a few subtle slips in the show but overall they're doing a good job at keeping it as real as possible (within television's scope). Someone, for once, thought about hiring consultants I suppose.

While the technical stuff mostly manages to avoid degrading into gibberish, I find the philosophizing about "bugs in the system" cringe-worthy. The show would have the layman believe that bugs are some kind of metaphysical agents of chaos that crack the facade of reality (or something), as opposed to reality where most bugs are caused by sloppy copy-pasting while reading HN with one eye.

In a sense, this is true. The view that all bugs are static, determinable, and caused by a lack of care and attention, is old fashioned and demonstrably wrong.

In mature code bases (e.g core linux kernel), (almost) all the low hanging bugs have been picked clean. There remain only faults triggered by untested configurations, unconsidered usages, and by ordering non-determinism. The last one is particularly chaotic - you can have a system which stays up for years, but falls over due to an extremely unlikely combination of events.

Think about it this way: every statically compiled program with an unbounded loop, in which there are calls to malloc() with runtime-determined sizes, and differently ordered but balanced free() at later times, may crash. This is a possibility despite there being no leaks and worst case size fits in memory. The issue is the heap, with some combinations of allocation sizes, and order of malloc vs free, will fragment and effectively "leak", eventually exhausting resources. It is generally not determinable whether this will happen to a program. They all survive at the whim of probability, although the odds are usually very much in their favor.

Re: Exploring the Hacker Tools of Mr. Robot

#53

Post by wut42 »

adamnemecek wrote: post #40
jfaucett wrote: post #2

I've seen so many ridiculous "hacking" sequences in films that I really wasn't expecting this series to go into as much realistic detail as they do. Also most hacking stuff in films is at its worst when it comes to the dialogue which somehow always has to have something to do with shutting down a "mainframe". But this series does a great job both from a tech and dialogue perspective. There's even a scene where the ma…

> CTO of another corp Not to nitpick but he's not the CTO.

He almost was :p

Re: Exploring the Hacker Tools of Mr. Robot

#54

Post by jayzalowitz »

vezzy-fnord wrote: post #32
jfaucett wrote: post #2

I've seen so many ridiculous "hacking" sequences in films that I really wasn't expecting this series to go into as much realistic detail as they do. Also most hacking stuff in films is at its worst when it comes to the dialogue which somehow always has to have something to do with shutting down a "mainframe". But this series does a great job both from a tech and dialogue perspective. There's even a scene where the ma…

There's even a scene where the main character and the CTO of another corp (trying not to spoil anything), have a conversation about gnome vs. kde. Haven't watched the show, but this reminded me of that awful line from The Internship , a film I was baited into watching: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpdngXQOkBI

What I love about that movie is that google tried to use it to re-recruit people from my internship (I mean we all interned at google togeather so in reality it was more of a reunion but still...)

Re: Exploring the Hacker Tools of Mr. Robot

#55

Post by krainboltgreene »

pslam wrote: post #52
m_fayer wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While the technical stuff mostly manages to avoid degrading into gibberish, I find the philosophizing about "bugs in the system" cringe-worthy. The show would have the layman believe that bugs are some kind of metaphysical agents of chaos that crack the facade of reality (or something), as opposed to reality where most bugs are caused by sloppy copy-pasting while reading HN with one eye.

In a sense, this is true. The view that all bugs are static, determinable, and caused by a lack of care and attention, is old fashioned and demonstrably wrong. In mature code bases (e.g core linux kernel), (almost) all the low hanging bugs have been picked clean. There remain only faults triggered by untested configurations, unconsidered usages, and by ordering non-determinism. The last one is particularly chaotic -…

> (almost) all the low hanging bugs have been picked clean

This has never ever been true. Every new framework has to design mass-assignment protection hopefully. Every new language needs to handle file access. Every new authentication library will have to rediscover reams of textbooks/whitepapers.

Re: Exploring the Hacker Tools of Mr. Robot

#56

Post by TeMPOraL »

tsunamifury wrote: post #50
TeMPOraL wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and depended on non existent technology That itself ain't bad. Star Trek: The Next Generation pretty much introduced the world to the concept of touchscreens, back in the time when they pretty much didn't exist. Also, somehow the "internally incoherent" movie UIs still feel order of magnitude better than what we use in the real world, especially on mobile, which is mostly a mess of crappy and incoherent design.

Actually the TNG interfaces were very coherent and based on technology that could be replicated at that time. The designer of LCARS, Michael Okuda, needed to make a set of interfaces that could display readable information, be used for over a decade worth of shows, and be believably interacted with in a variety of modalities. He likely can be credited with making the most inspirationally accurate SciFi UI ever. Star…

As far as I know, we didn't have many touchscreens at the time TNG was shot; while the interface was indeed believable, it was also inspiring. I'm very happy to see touchscreens on the newest Dragon, and I would really love it if they were running LCARS :).

I wholeheartedly agree with your evaluation of LCARS. That's why I still keep sketching out LCARS-equivalents of UIs for existing devices (it's actually quite hard to do right; you can't go there half-way - LCARS mixed with non-LCARS elements looks like crap) and want all my home automation to be run by one :).

Another thing Okuda was a master at was logos and insignia. They set a quality standard that is very rarely met in the real world.

Re: Exploring the Hacker Tools of Mr. Robot

#57

Post by bduerst »

burger_moon wrote: post #14
smoyer wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel sorry for the lead character and he obviously has problems, but the wannabe CTO of EvilCorp reminds me more of Dexter. This is the first TV show I've enjoyed enough to schedule for it in a long time but that character (Tyrell Wellick[1]) is a bit too dark for comfort. [1] http://www.imdb.com/character/ch0514444/?ref_=nm_flmg_act_2

Tyrell seems more like Patrick Bateman than Dexter.

Yeah, he's a dead ringer for American Psycho, but with the added twist of his wife being an antagonist.

Re: Exploring the Hacker Tools of Mr. Robot

#58

Post by crs »

tsunamifury wrote: post #15
cyanbane wrote: post #11

Always been a fan of this Tumblr for cataloging movie/tv UIs - http://fakeui.tumblr.com/ I think some of the entries could serve as inspiration. Think about the effect Minority Report's UX has had. It was an idea that wasn't new, but seeing it (I think well done) in a movie gives it a more concrete goal for a lot of people (tech) and a reference point for other people (non-tech).

Minority Report had almost no effect on UI as it was both internally incoherent, ergonomically untennible, and depended on non existent technology. In fact in many ways it set back the dreams of UI by teaching a generation to value nonsensical interactions and poor ergonomics over usability

Just as an FYI, the designer of the Minority Report UI/UX created a company (http://www.oblong.com) and actually built the system. Boeing (my former company) actually has a patent using the system to control a swarm of UAVs.

I'd checkout John Underkoffler's Ted Talk: http://www.ted.com/talks/john_underkoffler_drive_3d_data_wit...

Re: Exploring the Hacker Tools of Mr. Robot

#59

Post by ericjang »

Actually, I'm pretty sure a lot of security professionals don't use Kali Linux because 1) they only need a subset of the pentest tools, 2) many companies' internal monitoring systems trigger alerts if they detect someone is using Kali Linux/BT (via OS fingerprinting).

This is only my anecdotal experience though - thoughts?

Re: Exploring the Hacker Tools of Mr. Robot

#60

Post by adamnemecek »

atmosx wrote: post #23
bayesianhorse wrote: post #8

The lead character feels to me like "Dexter as a Hacker".

I totally disliked the series... It's poorly written, disconnected and the lead character doesn't convince enough. Even the story-line is totally poor IMHO. So the only good thing is the realistic hacking scenes...

can you give some examples of the poor writing?
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