Sneakers was better.
Still haven't seen it though it's been regularly recommended to me for the last decade (ever since my...first or second 2600 meetup)
'Hackers' at 20
41–50 of 164 posts
Re: 'Hackers' at 20
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 think that would be premature. She's still kicking ass. At least wait until she's past middle age.
A movie that went from her childhood through her days in school to quitting school, racing, opening her store and becoming a hardware engineer up to her recent successful funding would be great. Plus we can always have a second movie for what she does later instead of yearly reboots like those Steve Jobs biopics. Pirates of Silicon Valley was completed before the release of the iPhone, right?
Re: 'Hackers' at 20
#43I 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…
The traffic light exploit still works, sort of. They didn't upgrade the sensors or the communication protocol, they just changed it so that it turns all of the lights red. Emergency vehicles can run reds, so it works for them and not you.
Re: 'Hackers' at 20
#44It's been a very long time since I've seen the movie, but I was going to make the same point that the director does: it was never intended to be realistic, just a fantasy which captured the right feelings. It's probably not a good movie for other reasons, but I think it was successful at doing that. I've heard similar criticism of William Gibson's work, that his 1980s-flavored cyberpunk makes no sense scientifically…
Some of Gibson's 80s writing is almost prophecy, like New Rose Hotel
>Set in the near future, huge megacorporations control and dominate entire economies. Their wealth and competitive advantage reside in the human capital of their employees and the intellectual property they produce. Corporations jealously guard their most valuable employees and go to great expense to keep them safe and happily productive. There is little point in traditional corporate espionage as new products are developed at a lightning pace; there is no time to capitalize on the intelligence acquired from a rival firm, it will be obsolete before it can be used. Companies now hire extraction agents to steal each other's top productive employees.
Re: 'Hackers' at 20
#45Sneakers[1] > Track Down/Takedown[2] > Hackers[3] > Sword Fish[4]
[1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105435/
[2] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0159784/
Re: 'Hackers' at 20
#46Sneakers was better.
Sneakers has held up amazingly well to the passage of time. It didn't do anything impossible, just highly improbable. If you haven't rewatched it in a while, it's worth watching again.
Eh. Sneakers' central plot point was a magic box that could crack all encryption. It was otherwise a great movie, and many of the physical "facility hacking" scenes were quite fun, but the magic box that breaks all ciphers was more than improbable. Maybe you could say it was a quantum computer :).
Re: 'Hackers' at 20
#47I 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…
It depends. Many of those systems are still IR without crypto. Some teenager was in the news a few years ago for reversing the IR signaling protocol of a nearby railroad (!!) and operating track switches at will.
Re: 'Hackers' at 20
#48"We emphasized the use of psychedelic colors that the world of hacking was a mind-expanding experience for the kids."
Awesome quote. Computers/programming/"hacking" were definitely a mind-expanding experience for me as a teen. While "grown ups" saw a boring beige box, the machine felt alive with limitless possibilities to me.
Re: 'Hackers' at 20
#49Sneakers was better.
Sneakers is not only the best hacker movie (not that there are a lot to choose from), but its themes are eerily prescient -- secrecy, encryption, mass surveillance, control over information.
I haven't revisited it since Snowden happened, but I really ought to.
Re: 'Hackers' at 20
#50Seeing this at 11 is honestly what made me interested in computers and pushed me towards my current career, so seeing that it is 20 years old is sort of a shock.
I can also certainly can relate to the portion of the audience that found phreaking much more interesting than hacking and the fact that the phreaking scene is all but dead is pretty sad.