31–40 of 164 posts
I watched it on netflix the other day, and it still makes me cringe when phreak says "twenty eight point eight"
I wonder if that's possibly an east coast vs. west coast thing. We always said point (south east).
If you don't document things yourself, you don't get to write history. There just isn't that much material out there of how things were. In hind-sight I also think it was more accurate than given credit for. Partly because a lot of the things it described, like phreaking, isn't a thing anymore. So technical accuracy is no longer that important.
The people who made the movie to some extent understood hacker culture better than the hackers themselves. They realized that it wasn't the technical details that was important, but describing the sentiment among hackers. Otherwise they could have made a movie about security researchers at Microsoft.
PS. Regarding hacking traffic lights, back in the day you could supposedly flash a light at the same frequency as emergency vehicles to turn the lights green, or at least that's what the textfiles said.
It's funny to think in another 20 years kids might see this movie and wonder what are those weird small rooms with phones that people go into all the time. And they have to pay money to make a call!?
Good soundtrack, even if the film did make me cringe. When it came out I was knee deep in oodles of Perl on a shit-hot upgraded SPARCstation 10 machine (not camo painted I will add). Whacked the soundtrack in my external caddied CD drive and plugged my headphones in, then spent 2 hours of frigging #defines trying to get the fucking thing to compile a CD player that worked on SunOS 4 OpenView that I'd downloaded off Usenet via a 14.4k Hayes SmartModem (which I still own)
And that piece of crap cost more than my car at the time...
Edit: I just realised one piece of tech I still use daily survived from back then; a lowly TI-85 calculator.
Sneakers was better.
If you haven't rewatched it in a while, it's worth watching again.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
He looks at his sandwich before he says it; he's showing that you don't even need accurate information to get people to do what you need. sound potentially important, hurried.. and desperate for a favour- and people will try to help
Okay... How many times have you watched it to notice that minor detail? Just curious.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ugh why them? The main characters in Hackers were teenagers who went out to explore cyberspace and see what was there and hack into it. They had a "Hack the Planet" message in that movie.
I know. I was just referring to how Swordfish was so much worse than Hackers, even with the latter's inaccuracies. It's time for a Jeri Ellsworth biopic anyway. With Flying biology books and car racing!!!
I was never that upset about Hackers, but I've had my fair share of laughs at it over the years. I've had some revelations since then though. If you don't document things yourself, you don't get to write history. There just isn't that much material out there of how things were. In hind-sight I also think it was more accurate than given credit for. Partly because a lot of the things it described, like phreaking, isn't…