It’s a computer, not a magic wand, you idiots!
First off, that scene in the series “NCIS” where Abby and Timmy are trying to fight off a computer “viris”. Abby is at the keyboard failing miserably, so Timmie puts his two paws on the same keyboard at the same time as if it was nothing more than a piano keyboard and both of them at the same time are bizarrely trying to run through either one program (or maybe two different programs-who the fuck knows???).
Now, is that the really stupid part of all this?
Oh, hell no!
Gibbs solves the whole problem by pulling the plug…on the computer monitor.
Show of hands, how many folks, on seeing the thread title, thought of that exact example?
But to keep the thread moving along, in War Games, when the computer is cracking the launch codes, it gets one character at a time. Unless the system was set up by Microsoft, no password cracking ever works that way.
The best has to in Scanners when one of the telepathic protagonists uses their telepathic powers to hack a super computer via a public telephone. This leads to both the computer AND the public telephone blowing up
That, and on another show the team breaks into some place where a bunch of computers are running some sort of hacking farm, and Gibbs tries to shut it down by shooting all the monitors, before McGee tells him to shoot the actual computers.
On an episode of CSI, there’s a computer to hack in order to solve a case; everyone pitches in! they all say what they’re going to do to help. I don’t remember them all, but one says she’ll “create a GUI.” Umm, what? save the time that will take, and use the one the OS has, which you know will be compatible with the information you are trying to retrieve.
That’s like, if people are trying to open a locked door to get into a room, and someone offered to hand-carve a new doorknob.
First of all, I’ve seen the clip in question but have never watched the show. So I was prompted to Google. The scene is apparently from Season 2, Episode 5, “The Bone Yard” and I may watch the whole episode later.
Second, I’ve seen multiple shows or movies showing someone hacking a bank or otherwise transferring money but it’s shown as if the transfer is of a large file being downloaded and not something instantaneous.
In the 1988 Parker Stevenson series “Probe” (one of those genius problem solver shows popular at the time) a mad supercomputer AI takes control and kills people by manipulating real world things, such as setting traffic lights so cars crashand kill the driver, and similar happy hooey. The AI would watch people by hijacking surveillance cameras.
Now in 1988 the world was not interconnected like that (and arguably, not even to that extent today). If you made this show today, yeah, at least it would be almost believable. But at the time? How stupid did they think audeinces were? A lot, I guess.
But the one thing the AI did, that made my eyes roll in the back of my head, was that it remotely turned on a TV and sent a message to Steveson’s character. How did it broadcast to just that tv? Would everyone watching Matlock have got the message, too? And more importantly, how did it remotely turn on a TV that has an actual pull out power switch??
I remember a show, an episode of Macgyver, I think, that didn’t quite add up. It was in the days of land-line telephones.
It’s the classic bad-guy-calling-the-good-guys-and-they-have-to-trace-the-call-before-he-hangs-up scene. The call comes in, and the good guys start the process to trace it. They get the phone number that the call is coming from, then start searching a database to find the location of that phone. But the bad guy hangs up before they get the answer. The good guys have no idea where he is.
It was probably written and filmed that way to build tension, but that’s not how it would work. Once you know the number the call is coming from, you don’t need to keep the line active to get the address. The phone he called from is still in the same place. It’s not like that number gets reassigned whenever someone hangs up the phone.
And of course, there’s always being able to “enhance” a 3x3 pixel black dot in the background of an image into a fully detailed object. Extra points if it was off a reflective surface.
On 24, everybody was really concerned about manually opening sockets for some reason. I can only assume they were streaming MIME-encoded porn images using telnet or maybe they were having problems with the server connection issues for their MMORPG game.
Nothing in this scene makes any sense whatsoever, but they are really, really worked up over it:
There have been cases where something like this happened, when the system uses a naive algorithm that compares the password one character at a time and reports failure as soon as a character doesn’t match. An attacker can determine each character of the password based on how long it takes to report a failure. X ns means the first character is wrong, 2X ns means the second character is wrong, etc. I worked on a system that had a sort of BIOS-level password that was cracked this way. (This attack doesn’t apply to systems that store a hashed password, which is what’s usually done.)
One that isn’t as common as it used to be: someone starts a computer working on a task, and to demonstrate that the computer is busy, they show the computer’s tape drive start moving back and forth. What is this, a Turing machine?
ID4 (or Independence Day) where they ultimately defeat the aliens by uploading a virus to their computer since they apparently run on the same operating system as us.
In War Games (1983), David (played by Matthew Broderick) has a voice synthesizer hooked up to the computer in his bedroom that he uses to communicate with WOPR (the DOD system he hacks into), David continues to hear the synthesized voice of WOPR even when he’s nowhere near his bedroom.
Incidentally just got back from watching the latest Jurassic Park reboot, and I was waiting all through for a reprise of the classic quote: “It’s a UNIX system! I’ve got root!”.
Yeah this was definitely a trope. Basically film makers had a problem that these computer thingys were super exciting sounding high tech devices that they wanted to include in their plot lines, but in the days before visual UIs they never actually did anything visually. They just sat there, which doesn’t make for exciting visual storytelling. Hence why they would always focus on the one part of the computer that actually did something, the magnetic tape, and make sure it moved as much as damn possible to show something exciting was happening
