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'Hackers' at 20

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Re: 'Hackers' at 20

#101

Post by bane »

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 and characters as places and people who could have come from this world. The sort of irreverent, authority denouncing, cybervandalism spoke to me. The Warez, Demoscen, ANSI art scenes all seemed to sort of be a kind of foundation that created a universe that this movie made manifest.

When this movie came out, I was still telneting, BBSing and gophering around "cyberspace". As soon as I found a writeable folder on an ftp server I'd make hidden folders and upload crap and tell all my friends. We'd stay up late wardialing and playing this soundtrack. We'd telnet to random IP addresses and then get excited when we'd hit a VAX system, just like in the movie.

It formed a kind of social scaffolding my nerd friends and I hung our digital world off of.

It's kind of laughable in many ways now, like many teen counter culture movement. But it still holds a special place in my heart.

Re: 'Hackers' at 20

#102

Post by mikekchar »

rconti wrote: post #61
jerf wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can already tell you that the idea that a phone number calls a house rather than a person is foreign to a 7-year-old.

Which is really as it should be. I also find it amusing when people are SHOCKED that a kid would have a cell phone. Sure, they don't need an extravagant $700 smartphone, but who needs a cell phone more? The adult with multiple credit cards, money, reliable transportation, and sits at a desk 8 hours a day with a telephone sitting right there on it? (and then commutes by comfortable car to a house that likely has a lan…

Perhaps they are available everywhere and I haven't noticed, but in Japan they have cellphones with 4 programmable buttons on them. You can't call anybody other than those 4 people. They are quite popular as emergency cell phones for children and the elderly (the latter because the buttons are really easy to push).

Re: 'Hackers' at 20

#103

Post by PebblesHD »

This movie may have had bad visual depictions of computers and laughable tech references but it was what kicked me in the direction im headed now. Truly, a life changing moment for me watching this as a young teenager. Mess with the best...

Re: 'Hackers' at 20

#104

Post by disbelief »

rarepostinlurkr wrote: post #79

Kind of feel weird posting this but a recent show, Mr. Robot feels like the next attempt at something kind of like "Hackers". One of the early on episodes actually has a character musing aloud if some screen writer is making the next Hackers to incorrectly portray this generations technologist. As they watch Hackers on TV in a hotel. A bit tongue in check, because the show itself is doing exactly that. It's actually…

I love Mr. Robot (even though it borrows rather heavily from Palahniuk, among others) and strongly recommend it to anyone who liked the movie Hackers. I particularly enjoyed the Hackers reference in that episode you mention. The character's contempt at the technical infeasibility of the data visualizations is well captured as I've probably heard that same criticism a million times by my "real hacker" friends who may have snorted derisively but still watched the film to its end multiple times.

Re: 'Hackers' at 20

#105

Post by Zelphyr »

tracker1 wrote: post #94
Zelphyr wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree and tend to think of it in terms of how the movie 300 depicted the Persians as monsters. They were nowhere near as monstrous in real life but the Greek saw them that way. And the only way to convey the sense of how the ancient Greek viewed them to our modern eye was to make them hulking giants. In much the same way, Hackers had to do something to depict how we felt about computers at the time. I remember thin…

I liked Sneakers a lot... loved that movie... never saw Hackers at the time of release (only first saw it all the way through about a month ago). I don't know that it was particularly more accurate (at least the device in question), but I think it was certainly closer.

True. I guess I never considered the actual device to be all that realistic. I think more about the UI they used. It was DOS and curses based which was predominant at the time. Well, except for the flight tracker scene. I guess that wasn't as true to life either.

Re: 'Hackers' at 20

#106

Post by tptacek »

nfoz wrote: post #27

One of the things I love about this movie is how much it got right . The general attitude of the time, the feeling that we had in that era. This film shows what it feels like to spend all night reading through hexdumps trying to solve a complex riddle. I don't know anything else that captures that. Of course it had to be "inaccurate" to show visually what that feels like without it being super boring. It glorifies a…

I was at Summercon the year before Hackers was released and I remember there being some kind of presentation about it, with the point being made repeatedly that we shouldn't get hung up on the technical details, and that it had the same director as _Backbeat_, which I gathered was a good thing.

It always amused the hell out of me that they had Matthew Lillard playing Emmanuel Goldstein. They should have cast Steve Buscemi.

Re: 'Hackers' at 20

#107

Post by wainstead »

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…

"Three Days of the Condor" used to make the list too, because it was alleged to be one of Mitnick's favorite movies.

Re: 'Hackers' at 20

#108

Post by rasz_pl »

superuser2 wrote: post #46
McGlockenshire wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :).

>magic box that could crack all encryption

Not all, just protocols used in the west. From the script:

"Your codes are entirely different from ours. We never had any luck in breaking them so Lord knows, I wanted that box..."

Imagine heartbleed implemented on a RPi in a box.

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