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.
'Hackers' at 20
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Re: 'Hackers' at 20
#62Sneakers[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/
Re: 'Hackers' at 20
#63Re: 'Hackers' at 20
#64Re: 'Hackers' at 20
#65Earlier 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…
Re: 'Hackers' at 20
#66Earlier 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
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
#67One 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…
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
#68Earlier 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…
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
#69It'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!?
Uh...
Re: 'Hackers' at 20
#70Thanks Steven. (And Greg.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackers:_Heroes_of_the_Compute...