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Why can't films and TV accurately portray hackers?

bbc.com

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Re: Why can't films and TV accurately portray hackers?

#11

Post by sircastor »

While most of these examples are spot on, I will argue the point of the Jurassic Park Hacking scene:

The 1992 world of computers and networks was much different than our world today. The author uses the analogy of familiarity with a browser and gaining access to a gmail account. I remember 1992. I remember the systems that didn't have lock screens, and didn't have log in passwords. Couple that with a theme park's computer system that's still being built and debugged.

I think it's totally rational that a kid who's familiar with a unix filesystem and a navigator could poke around a system until she found some security scripts.

I take much more issue with the "video feed" of the Dock with the worker Nedry was talking to - and the video playback bar on the bottom of the window.

Re: Why can't films and TV accurately portray hackers?

#12

Post by vanderZwan »

LordKano wrote: post #4

Because they're in the business of providing entertainment and most of "hacking" is mindnumbingly boring.

At least programming doesn't try to copy the practices from the movie. If you're in IxD there's always a few idiots who think movie interfaces are a good example of usability. No, they're a good example of what looks sleek and amazing on screen, and what is compatible with the narrative need for exposure. That rarely works out well for usability .

Re: Why can't films and TV accurately portray hackers?

#13

Post by bitwize »

vanderZwan wrote: post #10

> Jurassic Park – In the midst of a velociraptor attack, Ariana Richards sits down at a computer and says, “It’s a Unix system. I know this.” Then she somehow hacks the entire Jurassic Park security system in a matter of seconds and takes control of the automatic doors. This scene is filled with tension, but what she does is analogous to someone loading a browser on a Macbook and then saying, “It’s Safari. I know thi…

I interpreted it as, she could probably recognize the directory structure in the visual tool as belonging to a Unix system, and from there guess that it responds to standard Unix commands. It would take a bit longer than is depicted, but she could probably cd into some interesting-looking directories from there and find the programs used to control the park's facilities.

Re: Why can't films and TV accurately portray hackers?

#14

Post by smitherfield »

* Because almost all “hacking” is boring, and/or conceptually dense and/or non-cinematic.

* Rule of Cool.

* Because screenwriters typically have little knowledge of the subject.

* For the same reasons (the ones above) films and TV can’t portray lawyers or doctors or teenagers or police officers or drug dealers or scientists or bartenders or art thieves or Wall Street or soldiers or college students or anything else accurately.

Re: Why can't films and TV accurately portray hackers?

#17

Post by bronzeage »

Because we're here in hacker news, we're biased to think that's the only thing screenwriters get wrong. The truth is, nearly every single profession is misrepresented by Hollywood. From doctors, to chemists, biologists, physicists, mathematicitians, psychologists, policemen, detectives, nearly every single profession looks absurd from the perspective of people who actually understand it when it's staged in a movie.

There's a reason why films about directors and movie making seem more realistic than the rest - they are the only movies designed by people who actually understand the subject.

Re: Why can't films and TV accurately portray hackers?

#19

Post by mcguire »

vanderZwan wrote: post #10

> Jurassic Park – In the midst of a velociraptor attack, Ariana Richards sits down at a computer and says, “It’s a Unix system. I know this.” Then she somehow hacks the entire Jurassic Park security system in a matter of seconds and takes control of the automatic doors. This scene is filled with tension, but what she does is analogous to someone loading a browser on a Macbook and then saying, “It’s Safari. I know thi…

"... While most people troll this scene for its usage of 3D graphics on screen, she’s actually using a real 3D filesystem called FSN."

That's not a filesystem.

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