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'Hackers' at 20

passcode.csmonitor.com

61–70 of 164 posts

Re: 'Hackers' at 20

#61
post #34
post #32

It's funny to think in another 20 years kids might see this movie and wonder what are those weird small rooms with phones that people go into all the time. And they have to pay money to make a call!?

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 landline.. or at least used to when I originally formulated this argument)? Or the kid who rarely has access to a landline, no credit card, no transportation of their own, relies on others (school bus, parents, etc) for transportation to a schedule that might vary each day of the week, and who is much more likely to be "stuck" somewhere?

Re: 'Hackers' at 20

#62

Sneakers[1] > Track Down/Takedown[2] > Hackers[3] > Sword Fish[4] [1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105435/ [2] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0159784/ [3] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113243/ [4] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0244244/

Sneakers is a better film: better written, better acting, and better expression of the motivations of real people... but it also falls down on technology.

Re: 'Hackers' at 20

#63
post #41

Sneakers was better.

Still haven't seen it though it's been regularly recommended to me for the last decade (ever since my...first or second 2600 meetup)

Do it. I've only seen Hackers once, maybe 15 years ago, but Sneakers is an all-time favorite.

Re: 'Hackers' at 20

#65
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is true, and an Arduino and a switchable strobe will let you figure out the frequency. The important thing is to know which direction it lets go first after the light goes away :-) I read an advertisement for a red light camera system that offered this as a feature (traffic management for emergency vehicle (EV) ingress and egress) it had the feature that you had to have red and blue lights, so it wasn't fooled e…

Oh, using the same system but taking advantage of the additional signals already present on emergency vehicles... that's pretty clever thinking.

Re: 'Hackers' at 20

#66
post #57
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Whether or not such a device exists, or could possibly exist, is irrelevant. It is a little bit relevant in a post that is replying to another post that says nothing in Sneakers is impossible. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10223284

Putting on my tin foil hat ... one could imagine a box the size of a phonebook (or just a laptop) that could, when it encounters packets or encrypted data, send signatures and packets to the NSA data centers, and do the kind of matching/etc that they are building towards.

Heck, even having it try to decrypt the packet(s) in a distributed manner with $ALL_THE_KEYS that might have already been collected via nefarious means, and then return the key + plaintext that is most likely, certainly seems possible if the box was created by someone with the resources of the NSA.

I would be extremely surprised if someone were not already working on (or had not already created) something very much like that.

Re: 'Hackers' at 20

#67
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 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 thinking how silly it looked at the time but I also remember it resonating.

Though, I have to say, I was much more inspired by Sneakers a few years earlier which was much more accurate from a visual and technical standpoint.

Re: 'Hackers' at 20

#68
post #66
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Whether or not such a device exists, or could possibly exist, is irrelevant. It is a little bit relevant in a post that is replying to another post that says nothing in Sneakers is impossible. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10223284

Putting on my tin foil hat ... one could imagine a box the size of a phonebook (or just a laptop) that could, when it encounters packets or encrypted data, send signatures and packets to the NSA data centers, and do the kind of matching/etc that they are building towards. Heck, even having it try to decrypt the packet(s) in a distributed manner with $ALL_THE_KEYS that might have already been collected via nefarious m…

The box in Sneakers is a valuable theft target, implying it is not merely a frontend, or if the Russians got it the NSA would simply revoke its API keys, so to speak. It's also the product of a stroke of genius by a single cryptographer.

It has to be a breakthrough in factoring large numbers very quickly, like what quantum computers are promised to be. So maybe possible after all, I guess. It's also very clearly a device, not an algorithm, so probably not a Von Neumann machine.

Re: 'Hackers' at 20

#69
post #32

It's funny to think in another 20 years kids might see this movie and wonder what are those weird small rooms with phones that people go into all the time. And they have to pay money to make a call!?

My 7 year old recently asked me, "What were iPhone's like when you were a kid?"

Uh...

Re: 'Hackers' at 20

#70
Or we could celebrate another 'Hackers' at 31 -- the 1F-th anniversary of Steven Levy's "Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution", a fantastic book on the origins of hacking, which also helped me get my first job as a programmer. (My employer-to-be had just finished reading the book too and we talked about it during the interview.)

Thanks Steven. (And Greg.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackers:_Heroes_of_the_Compute...

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