Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

'Hackers' at 20

passcode.csmonitor.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 164 posts

Re: 'Hackers' at 20

#131

Post by buffoon »

rjsw wrote: post #71
buffoon wrote: post #35

Memories... 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 down…

I'm guessing your CD player was workman.

It wasn't unfortunately. The SPARC 10 had no built in CD drive like the newer 5 and 20 models so that couldn't control the audio interface and it didn't issue the right incantations to the CD drive I had. I was cheap so it was a non-Sun drive. There were no standards back then past things like MCI which only worked on PCs running DOS and windows 3.1.

There's a whole thread on Usenet somewhere with me complaining about this. I tried to find it but couldn't now unfortunately as it would be funny :)

Re: 'Hackers' at 20

#132

Post by buffoon »

mrspeaker wrote: post #92
buffoon wrote: post #35

Memories... 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 down…

This post made my day... can I subscribe to your newsletter?

I have very few anecdotes past that; very soon after that, I bought a Compaq pentium pro, a thinkpad and a volvo, used NT and became a boring enterprise monkey.

I bought a massive fully stacked Sun Enterprise 1000E and storage array in 2001 in a crazy nostalgia trip. £500,000 of kit and I got it off yahoo auctions for £350 and it was only 5 years old. That's depreciation for you. It was noisy, made the lights dim when you booted it up and wouldn't run anything other than old Solaris releases so it was used as a seat for a bit then sold.

I think I'm out of anecdotes now :)

Re: 'Hackers' at 20

#133

Post by DCoder »

fein wrote: post #111
bane wrote: post #101

There's three really great hacking movies: WarGames, Hackers and Sneakers. WarGames really nails the solo bedroom hacker of the 80s but then mixes in the DoD and general purpose AI to turn it into a coldwar thriller. Sneakers is a clever, quirky, thoughtful adult hacking film. Hackers though, teenage me ate up the feeling of the hacking culture that it espoused. When I read cyperpunk books, I pictured the environment…

Antitrust wasn't bad either, but I'm not sure if it goes too far into drama.

Antitrust's "I think my girlfriend is trying to poison my food, so I'll cut myself, expose the cut to that food and see if I get sick" scene ruined the movie for me. I know that's basically how allergy testing works, but it was still cringe-worthy.

Re: 'Hackers' at 20

#134

Post by LoSboccacc »

McGlockenshire wrote: post #55
superuser2 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :).

If you substitute "all ciphers" with "all known ciphers" and don a tin-foil hat, it works.

then again 'recommended' ciphers from last round came with a backdoor - which was in the press all over again in 2014 for whatever reason, but I remember Schneier talking about it immediately in 2007 after the preliminary results came out.

Re: 'Hackers' at 20

#135

Post by efdee »

simoncion wrote: post #82
jedberg wrote: post #76

This movie came out when I was 18 and I very much related to the characters in the story. My friends and I definitely stepped up our "hacker" game after seeing this film. I also bought the soundtrack on CD (that's something you did then) and it was what got me into techno/house music. Funny side story: I grew up in LA and one of the things we got to do as teenagers was see pre-screenings of movies. This was usually b…

> ...20 years later that scene is horribly sexist and a sign of the times. IIRC, (and I may not RC) that scene is Jolie and Miller engaging in sexual role-play. A few moments later, we cut to what's actually going on: the pair is making out on a bed, and their friends have just walked in to deliver good news, but are currently gawping at the spectacle. Jolie notices the gawpers, gets up, calls them something off-colo…

I thought (but I'd have to watch the movie again) that the sexual Miller/Jolie scene was a dream Miller was having. He was alone in his room and woke up to cops (or possible the Plague) busting in and threathening him.

Re: 'Hackers' at 20

#136

Post by txrit »

fein wrote: post #111
bane wrote: post #101

There's three really great hacking movies: WarGames, Hackers and Sneakers. WarGames really nails the solo bedroom hacker of the 80s but then mixes in the DoD and general purpose AI to turn it into a coldwar thriller. Sneakers is a clever, quirky, thoughtful adult hacking film. Hackers though, teenage me ate up the feeling of the hacking culture that it espoused. When I read cyperpunk books, I pictured the environment…

Antitrust wasn't bad either, but I'm not sure if it goes too far into drama.

Antitrust was great, a longtime favourite of mine. They at least had some focus on coding etc. rather than just mindless bashing on a keyboard to "hack" random systems.

Re: 'Hackers' at 20

#137

Post by nailer »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #118
bane wrote: post #101

There's three really great hacking movies: WarGames, Hackers and Sneakers. WarGames really nails the solo bedroom hacker of the 80s but then mixes in the DoD and general purpose AI to turn it into a coldwar thriller. Sneakers is a clever, quirky, thoughtful adult hacking film. Hackers though, teenage me ate up the feeling of the hacking culture that it espoused. When I read cyperpunk books, I pictured the environment…

The biggest thing I like about WarGames as a geek/hacker movie is that it has one of the more realistic depictions I've seen of the critical skill required for security research (or doing many other worthwhile things): a giant pile of research, trying many different things, most of which don't work, eventually leading to success. All shown in an montage cutting between a library and a computer, with this awesome musi…

> it's far better and more realistic than the majority of movie-style "hacking" scenes.

In Ex Machina the main character appears writes a field sieve in Python to break some crypto. The code doesn't actually do that but it's still decent.

A bunch of older movies featured nmap.

Re: 'Hackers' at 20

#138

Post by aaronbrethorst »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #118
bane wrote: post #101

There's three really great hacking movies: WarGames, Hackers and Sneakers. WarGames really nails the solo bedroom hacker of the 80s but then mixes in the DoD and general purpose AI to turn it into a coldwar thriller. Sneakers is a clever, quirky, thoughtful adult hacking film. Hackers though, teenage me ate up the feeling of the hacking culture that it espoused. When I read cyperpunk books, I pictured the environment…

The biggest thing I like about WarGames as a geek/hacker movie is that it has one of the more realistic depictions I've seen of the critical skill required for security research (or doing many other worthwhile things): a giant pile of research, trying many different things, most of which don't work, eventually leading to success. All shown in an montage cutting between a library and a computer, with this awesome musi…

    Hackers is dripping in 80s cheese
2015 - 20 = 1995

Re: 'Hackers' at 20

#139

Post by qznc »

bane wrote: post #101

There's three really great hacking movies: WarGames, Hackers and Sneakers. WarGames really nails the solo bedroom hacker of the 80s but then mixes in the DoD and general purpose AI to turn it into a coldwar thriller. Sneakers is a clever, quirky, thoughtful adult hacking film. Hackers though, teenage me ate up the feeling of the hacking culture that it espoused. When I read cyperpunk books, I pictured the environment…

What about

Tron http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084827/

The Net http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113957/

Firewall http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0408345/

Blackhat http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2717822/

Who Am I http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3042408/

Re: 'Hackers' at 20

#140

Post by lotsofcows »

LargeWu wrote: post #51
superuser2 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :).

But they got the implications of it right. "There isn't a government in the world that wouldn't kill us all to get their hands on this." That is absolutely true. Whether or not such a device exists, or could possibly exist, is irrelevant.

And then the USA got it's hands on it and turned out to be super altruistic! I'd managed to maintain the illusion up to that point...
Post reply on HN