I found Black Hat to be unusually realistic
https://www.wired.com/2015/01/blackhat-the-best-cyber-movie/
Why can't films and TV accurately portray hackers?
41–45 of 45 posts
Re: Why can't films and TV accurately portray hackers?
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can't even imagine the rage that lab technicians and forensic pathologists must have felt when shows like CSI, NCIS and Bones were popular, and their job was portrayed as all sexy quirky people using lasers and holograms. And lawyers - the "CSI Effect[0]" has apparently made proving cases with real science more difficult. [0] https://www.thebalance.com/csi-effect-1669447
From the article you linked... "Professionals worry that jurors may acquit guilty defendants because forensic evidence is not presented by the prosecution at trial." How is that bad?
If jurors have unrealistic expectations about the quality, reliability and nature of forensic science based on tv, then they can't make rational judgements based on its presence or its absence.
Re: Why can't films and TV accurately portray hackers?
#43I feel the article is not quite fair in its coverage of Hackers. Sure, the movie gets many things absurdly wrong, but it also depicts social engineering (calling a security guard and tricking him into telling the hacker a modem's phone number), dumpster diving in hopes of finding interesting documents and guessing passwords. These could be straight from Kevin Mitnick's memoirs, Ghost in the Wires (which came out years later). I think the movie might actually get more things right than it gets wrong.
Re: Why can't films and TV accurately portray hackers?
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
I actually don't know if it's amnesia. It might be something more like denial. The idea that we are surrounded by unreliable, incomplete, and misleading information is too unpleasant to contemplate, so we just push that thought out of our minds if there isn't anything concrete to suggest it is happening in the specific case we're looking at. This sort of thing seems to happen a lot when there aren't any obvious bette…
> Which newspaper can I subscribe to instead that actually is consistently accurate? I understand you aren't actually asking this question, so this response isn't directed at you personally: I often wonder why it rarely occurs to people that they can subscribe or consume multiple sources of information in order to arrive at a more accurate conclusion? I also wonder if it has anything to do with poor research skills l…
> I often wonder why it rarely occurs to people that they can subscribe or consume multiple sources of information in order to arrive at a more accurate conclusion?
[...]
> Likely, it's just laziness and apathy.
I find that 'laziness' is generally the laziest explanation for a phenomenon. Also the least charitable, which is an aspect of interpretation that I've been trying to pay more attention to.
That said, I don't disagree with you. In fact, I'm often baffled by how bad people are, in a more general sense, at exploration and search.
I feel like half the stuff I teach junior coders is simply how to search for solutions to a problem, or how to build up a collection of sources that can help with the particular domain they're working in. Or even just how valuable it is to take an hour or so to read through some library's documentation before or while using it. Not to mention how to develop heuristics to decide which library is the best one to use for a particular task.
In a world where most necessary information is at your fingertips, the skill to focus on is how to handle and filter all this information. Even just a cursory look at most people's google search queries makes it clear that there's a lot that people can learn in this regard. Or the fact that many people I know are barely aware of their mac's Spotlight feature, and instead click around through 'untitled folder (2)' to figure out which document named 'copy of (2)' is the relevant one.
(Basically, aside from the more general value of 'learning how to learn' (for which Coursera offers a wonderful MOOC with the same name), I feel that 'learning how to find information' is something that most people are shockingly bad at.)
Anyways, I don't think laziness explains it. It's more that people are just not taught this as a basic skill in school, nor are they taught that this is a valuable skill. If you don't know how to find things, or how to learn things for that matter, or why this is something hugely valuable, how can you be expected to figure that out by yourself?
Re: Why can't films and TV accurately portray hackers?
#45There was a famous clip of a Bollywood movie where the hacking scene includes the Windows Media Player user interface: https://youtube.com/watch?v=HyDXEik3mH8
It's nice to see that Indian Ron Swanson doesn't hate computers as much as his US counterpart.