If I recall correctly, they did this idea better in “No Way Out”. Been a long time since I saw it, but I seem to remember that they had a program running for hours and hours working on enhancing a photo to try to ID a suspect.
In college, I had a project where I wrote a program to do a similar kind of thing (on a much smaller scale). Taking a picture (black and white), where it was just rectangles drawn in black on a white background, then “fuzzing” it up by randomly flipping a lot of pixels. The idea was to do an algorithm that would attempt to “clean up” the picture and try to restore it closer to its original form (starting only with the knowledge of the “fuzzy” version). This was back around 1989, on a Mac, using Mac Basic. And the program ran for hours – all night – to achieve the desired result. I remember seeing No Way Out shortly after, and what they did with the photo in that movie reminded me a little of that project.
I had a boss who tried to “motivate” me (i.e. wanted me to do something that defied the laws of physics) by saying that he’d get me the computer from Swordfish with all the screens. I responded by saying that I’d rather have Halle Berry.
I was fairly meh towards the Swordfish hacking. The one that really blew my brain was The Net with Sandra Bullock.
She is sitting at her desk and needs to fix someone else’s bugs, so she opens the project and proceeds to do a bunch of mousing and clicking on the screen. Okayyyy…
Now, probably not very many people have seen a programmer programming, so sure, might as well have it be all done with a mouse. But THEN she opens up her internet browser and proceeds to do all her browsing with JUST THE KEYBOARD. :smack:
Really? I thought that the Raptors had built a crude suspension bridge linking the Island to Venezuela, and that at least one of them was planning on moving there and taking on a series of odd jobs under the name “Mr. Pilkington”.
But perhaps I’ve said too much.
There’s an episode of The X-Files called “2shy” about a kind of vampire stalking women he meets in Internet Chat Rooms, and people in the episode casually discuss the FBI putting out Online Alerts on the Internet- Alerts which people not only take seriously, but which are not questioned by anyone. After all, the Government wouldn’t lie to people now, would they?
I’ve got an MS in Computer Chemistry. One of the things I did while I was working on that was go to Germany thanks to a student exchange. This was back when computers didn’t have video cards.
Oh wait, no. It was back when a computer brand had just invented the notion of having a video card… a processor dedicated exclusively to graphics. Silicon Graphics, it was called.
So I get to Germany and well, nobody has thought of getting me computer access, but I happen to hit it off with the old prof who’s in charge of processing email requests and suchlike: he gives me his passwords and a key to the servers’ room. We go there and I see a blow-me-out-of-this-world Silicon Graphics; after managing not to slobber too much on it, I get to work and start some simulations. And it acts funny: it runs the simulations quite fast but takes forever to actually draw anything. So I look at the system specs.
No graphics card. I got a Silicon Graphics and it has no graphics card? WTF?
I asked the old prof and he said that yes, there was some fancy piece for the video stuff but they asked SG to take it off because they didn’t see what the heck it was needed for. This saved them $500. On a six-figures machine. RITE.
You know, after getting that from people who were supposed to make their living on computers, I’ve just learned to kind of switch my eyes and brain off any time a computer screen shows up in fiction. I simply don’t expect them to get anything right.
In “Disclosure” (1994), Michael Douglas play a computer expert. At some point he is looking for a hardware bug. He then takes a pair ofpincer, grabs an IC, pulls it out of the board (no spldering needed, off course), looks at it under the light, and announce: I have found the problem. Everybody gathers around, look at the IC, and congratulate him on his success.
I’ve had ICs that a visual inspection showed problems with. Who knew they could get so hot chunks of black, ceramic packaging blow off?
Like the time I tried to buy a replacement vacuum tube but the shop guy wanted to make sure I replaced the right one, asking, “How do you know this one is bad?”
“It was arcing inside. It’s not supposed to do that, is it?”
I hate the fucking shows where diagrams and graphics magically appear for the hacker after 5 intense seconds of random keyboard single finger plinking programming.
Hacker punching in code on keyboard and reciting “Bippity bippity bippity bop, writing a virus makes me hot…”. I want to hear the incantations recited while plinking away, before we visit the fantasy world that this hacker lives in.
In the future at least upload the program from a USB drive and execute it. Don’t show the 5 second fantasy hack unless your willing to go all the way, and claim he did it by magic.
The virtual reality environment used in that movie was hilarious.
But what I came in here to mention was the recent movie where someone stole something like $10 million using a bank computer. So they show an onscreen counter actually incrementing from 0 to 10,000,000, as if each dollar needs to be downloaded separately.
Now in his defense, he might not realise that the number of screens you have is not directly proportional to the number of times you can defeat physics.
And what kind of computer could support that many screens?!?! When I want to plug to monitors at once into my 256mb graphics card (which is way the hell better than any POS that the Swordfish computer had) it freaks out. So how could they even plausabily do that?
I also doubt any super program that would defy bank security would be saved on a reel-to-reel magnetic tape computer across the country.
You’ve never seen hacking until you’ve seen Chloe O’Brian from 24 hack her way into ANYTHING in a few minutes. If it wasn’t for her the world would have ended a half dozen times already.
The one that drives me crazy is where the user types for about 5 seconds to return exactly the record they were looking for from a random database (Law and Order, I’m looking at you).
“Who’s owned a green '98 Mazda B2500 truck in the last two years with a missing grille?”
click click click click (Notice that the mouse isn’t ever needed).
“Here’s two of 'em, with pictures of the owners and their drivers licences.”
Unless the database was specifically designed to track autos, their repairs, and pictures of the owners, from my experience I’d say this would take at least of couple of days to compile data from multipe databases.
Let’s not even discuss all of the horribly stoopid plot lines from Double Jeopardy. But remember the scene where the chick gets out of prison after six years (for murder, no less), and sees these new things called “computers”? She then establishes a dialup connection in about .0324 seconds, then surfs the Web to see some rich guy’s personal art collection – in about 4 seconds.
