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'Hackers' at 20

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Re: 'Hackers' at 20

#141

Post by CPLX »

nailer wrote: post #137
JoshTriplett wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And newer ones too. This is a fun link if you haven't seen it: https://nmap.org/movies/

Re: 'Hackers' at 20

#142

Post by throwaway7767 »

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.

I always assumed the "device in question" was a hardware DES cracker. Assuming that, the story makes a lot of sense for the time.

Re: 'Hackers' at 20

#143

Post by throwaway7767 »

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 :).

I always mentally substituted that for "hardware DES cracker", figuring that was what they were going for but didn't want to bore audiences with technobabble.

If you do that, the whole thing makes a lot more sense.

Re: 'Hackers' at 20

#145

Post by bane »

qznc wrote: post #139
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/

Tron is one of the great movies of all time IMHO. It was one of the first to do a fantastic job of the "world within a world" idea on film, had an incredible aesthetic and a reasonably fun film. But it's not really a hacker movie.

The Net always came across to me as a movie made by people who had never touched a computer. Without knowing what to write about (and after exhausting as many technical inaccuracies as possible) it just turns into a run of the mill thriller. It's kind of painful to watch. Hackers tosses out some jargon, but lots of the actual computer interaction stuff is completely obfuscated and contained in the fantasy of the world itself.

Can't say I've seen the rest, but I've added them to my list!

Re: 'Hackers' at 20

#146

Post by tempVariable »

chisleu wrote: post #123
bch wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like having Swordfish in there at all skews your "weak side" of that list to the gutter. Not fair to Hackers to be so closely associated with Swordfish. Edit: typo

Having swordfish in there at all, and not War Games, invalidates the list. Ferris Bueller's Day Off deserves more credit than swordfish on social engineering alone!

Not to band-wagon it up, but I agree that Swordfish felt like an overly produced Mad TV sketch of a techno-action movie. Expensive cast - cringe worthy though.

Re: 'Hackers' at 20

#147

Post by ascagnel_ »

xhrpost wrote: post #6
dec0dedab0de wrote: post #3

I watched it on netflix the other day, and it still makes me cringe when phreak says "twenty eight point eight"

Come on, he's the king of Nynex!

How old is Hackers? Not only does Nynex no longer exist as an independent entity, the company that acquired Nynex (Bell Atlantic) no longer exists as an independent entity (it exists as part of Verizon).

Re: 'Hackers' at 20

#148

Post by cguess »

Gracana wrote: post #43
gozo wrote: post #33

I 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.

The article talks about how that actually was not possible when the movie came out in '95, but it is now. Back then most of them were on mechanical timers I believe.

They actually quote the researcher that figured out the flaws, apparently in SF the lights are still unpatched.

Re: 'Hackers' at 20

#149

Post by cweiss »

FWIW - The 20th edition Blu Ray release has some great documentary materials talking about the cast attending computer meetups in character to get context. Also some bits with the costume designer talking about creating the the 'look' of the hackers.
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