Hackers: What On Earth?

I was for a while. I had to re-read it several times to clarify. Plus, you should maybe get a sense of humour adjustment.

No, my sense of humor is fine. I amused myself. You weren’t invited to the party.

You could make a movie out of realistic hacking, BUT an action movie it won’t be. It would be more like a dense spy thriller where most of the drama comes from unknown or shifting loyalties and who is behind a screen handle, even I know better than to focus on the physical hacking. Most online communities are already filled with endless interpersonal drama :wink:

There was a no budget online production called The Scene? where the story was told through screen capture and text that had the right idea.

We just wait for Aaron Sorkin to tackle writing the script for a Stuxnet movie.

I was going to bring up swordfish, but I remember that thread, lol.

Declan

Here’s a video by a reviewer I [del]have a crush on[/del]like that discusses most of the inaccuracies in the movie. It cemented my opinion that the only reason to watch it is that Angelina Jolie is quite hot with short hair.

The producers of Hackers hired Emmanuel Goldstein of 2600 fame, to take them to hacker meetings in New York. They must have forgotten to take notes.

Yeah, Steve Jobs used to do this sort of thing, too. It’s not possible these days. Those hacks got completely shut down by the early 80s, though a few minor hacks were still possible in the 90s. And they mostly weren’t doing the stuff you see in movies. Maybe you get some free calls but you aren’t getting intimate corporate or military secrets.

WarGames also showed some of the more realistic things you could do (games-playing AI notwithstanding) with a computer, modem, and plenty of time One of the tricks was simply trying every number in the phone book and logging the times when a modem picked up. Actually, that one is still used. Some botnets basically try every IP combination and hope an unpatched computer is connected to the other end. Brute force and far from how hackers are typically portrayed in movies.

The point is that the modern plot contrivance of a directed hack against a particular target system being accomplished in a few minutes with just a few keyclicks is ridiculous.