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Servers, Hackers, and Code In the Movies
Posted by
Zonk
on Fri Dec 08, 2006 08:10 PM
from the what-no-angela-bennett dept.
from the what-no-angela-bennett dept.
Billosaur writes "As with anything, Hollywood has a weird way of viewing computer technology and the people who use it. To help quantify things, take a look at The Top 20 Movie Hackers, the Top Ten Movie Servers, and the things code doesn't do in real life." From the servers article: "3. UNIX environment - Jurassic Park (1993). The UNIX environment here is a classic geek joke. Everything we saw was real - created by Silicon Graphics and called IRIX. InGen was the corporation funding the island, and from an IT perspective they let the worst possible thing happen: they allowed one programmer to design the infrastructure with no supervision. What's worse, they obviously required no documentation of what was done. The result was a kid had to hack in and gain ROOT privileges. The likelihood of a young kid knowing a way to get ROOT (and not a more experienced programmer) is pretty hard to swallow. The hardware for this server was probably minimal, running door locks and starting Quicktime movies. 'We spared no expense!' You would think that with the millions of dollars they spent on the park, they could have hired a couple newbie programmers and added a server on the backend."
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Ask Slashdot: What Movies Got Computers Right? 176 comments
boxturtleme asks: "There have been several posts recently about how movies have gotten computers, hackers, and other geeky stuff entirely wrong. A while back there was an article on Servers, Hackers, and Code In the Movies and another on Usability [of a GUI] in the Movies. Now we all know that most movies out there that have anything to do with technology get some part of it wildly inaccurate, though it often makes for a fun movie. This brings me to my question: What movies got technology right? This could range from movies about the past that represent it correctly to modern day movies or movies about the future that slashdot readers think present something within the realm of possibility. With all the complaining about bad movies, what movies do Slashdot readers think of as the good ones?"
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It's funny? Laugh? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:It's funny? Laugh? (Score:5, Insightful)
There's nothing unusual about someone with knowledge in a specialized field finding the Hollywood portrayal of that field amusing. Because they are, 95% of the time, wrong and 50% of the time they're wrong enough for it to be funny to the person who knows better.
"I know this! This is UNIX!" is funny as shit. Okay, it's not funny at all to non-computer-geeks, but neither are the Hollywood gaffs that doctors, lawyers, auto mechanics, and ninja assassins find amusing to people not in those fields.
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The same goes for Legal shows (Score:5, Informative)
You never, ever, see any paperwork, stacks of document boxes or any case files being used in any legal shows.
They make it seem(Especially in Boston Legal) that the defendant or plaintif just tells the attourneys their problem and then just go to court and argue it.
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ENJOY and EMBRACE the fiction (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:The same goes for Legal shows (Score:4, Insightful)
1. Patient gets sick with some obscure condition.
2. Doctor 1 orders standard stuff, it doesn't work/makes it worse
3. Doctor 2 orders some obscure test
4. Doctor 3 orders an MRI
5. Doctor 2 orders another weird test
6. House has some drama with his own life/leg/whatever
7. Doctor 4 makes some final off the wall test, and decides on a rather extreme course of action
8. House jumps in at the last minute and explains how all they needed was an aspirin
I mean what HMO would authorize that crazy list of tests? You gotta figure these people get back and have enormous hospital bills.
I watched it for awhile with my wife and the first few shows were interesting, but then the whole "House is a jerk" angle got kinda stale and I didn't really have any hope of trying to figure out the medical mysteries when half of the stuff they say sounds like it came from the medical version of the Star Trek Technobabble generator.
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To whoever posted this stowy . . . (Score:5, Funny)
Oh, BTW, that weminds me . . . I went out hunting this weekend and the stwangest thing happened. Weww, I saw this wabbit, you see. So, I chased him down and he wan and jumped into this howe in the gwound. I said, "I'm gonna get you, you wascawy wabbit!!". You wouldn't bewieve what he did!! He jumped out of the howe, gwabbed my big, fat cheeks and kissed me wight on the mowth!! Then he jumped up again, spinning in a compwete bwur at about a thousand times a second, to which, at his apex he jack-knifed and did a Gweg Wouganis-style dive, wight back into the howe. So I stuck my double-bawwel shotgun in the howe and said, "Now, I've got you, wabbit!!". Suddenwy, I fewt a tun on my gun, and befowe I know it I was in a tug-of-waw with him. He yanked and I yanked back. Yank . . . yank. . . yank, . . . back and fowrth. When I finawwy puwwed my gun out, it was tied in a knot!! As a wast wesowt, I puwwed the twigger and bwew my own face owff. That was the wast time I went wabbit hunting.
Now, I just wook fowawd to duck season. If that doesn't wowk out, I'ww just take up painting.
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Re:It's funny? Laugh? (Score:5, Informative)
A very noteable exception -- or maybe not since it isn't Hollywood but what you're saying is common of action movies from everywhere -- being The Seven Samurai. Everyone who uses a sword in that movie uses it to kill, and as a result most sword fights are one or two strokes long. While lacking the acrobatic beauty of a good ten-minute lightsaber duel, it did have a gritty reality that just felt right.
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MIA: (Score:3, Interesting)
2. De Niro's Harry Tuttle (in keeping with the Brazil theme posts this week).
Re:MIA: (Score:5, Insightful)
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Mice? (Score:5, Insightful)
I can code for hours without touching the mouse. What purpose does a mouse serve when writing code? What does it provide that a keyboard doesn't? This isn't photo-editing or game-playing we're talking about, it's coding.
The only benefit I could see would be for cut-and-paste purposes, but even then a couple quick keystrokes in a good editor will do the trick faster.
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Re:MIA: (Score:5, Funny)
In fact, that's why the aliens came to Earth; they were looking for Bill Gates...
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no, no they don't... (Score:5, Insightful)
It may be weird to you or I, but Hollywood does it that way because that's how your "average joe" sees it.
Re:no, no they don't... (Score:5, Insightful)
It may be weird to you or I, but Hollywood does it that way because that's how your "average joe" sees it.
It's the other way around, the "average joe" sees it that way because of the movies.
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Re:no, no they don't... (Score:5, Insightful)
rj
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Re:no, no they don't... (Score:5, Interesting)
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Actually (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Actually (Score:4, Insightful)
Remember the scene in one of those awful Matrix sequels in which Trinity nmaps and then sshnukes the power plant computer? She was a quick typer, so it wasn't any more boring than the rest of the film, and the savvy among the audience were like "omg, semi-realistic portrayal of computers".
Also, Sneakers was an entertaining film and, although I haven't seen it since I was like 10, I remember it being fairly realistic (it was my first introduction to social engineering as a cracking technique). Also, the braille terminal was really awesome, despite the fact that braille terminals actually exist. Much more impressive than the stupid 3D crap in Hackers.
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Re:no, no they don't... (Score:5, Insightful)
No, Hollywood does it that way because it servese the interests of the plot and cinematic pacing without conflicting so much with people's experience that it breaks suspension of disbelief, not because it accurately reflects the "average joe" impression of computers.
(Note, this also applies to general Hollywood portrayal of basically everything: physics, police procedure, military tactics, whatever.)
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Re:no, no they don't... (Score:5, Insightful)
Many things make more sense that way, hacker displays are just one thing. All space combat at all ranges happens in a way to frame the combat precisely in the screen, even when there are multiple ships. Real space combat would presumably take place at even greater ranges than modern naval combat; I'll be conservative and call the zone of influence of a carrier group many tens of miles. (Depends on how you measure it, I suppose.) Yet the two space ships always approach within a few hundred meters... well, they have to or there's nothing to show. Sure, I'd pay to see a realistic movie, but it'd make Serenity look like a spectacular financial success in the general market.
This presumably also explains why the good crew of the Enterprise misses so many point-blank visual-range shots; it's symbolic of the fact that at a few tens of kilometers it's a lot easier to miss.
In Serenity, the scenes with the Reavers between them and the planet Miranda has to be a little symbolic, because space junk at that density would be unstable. But the real situation would be completely unfilmable, and most of the same effect can be had with a re-arrangement of the situation.
Space combat is just one of the easier ones; a lot of things are better taken as symbolic.
This leaves you more worried about good characters, internal consistency (even with silly rules), and other more story-related issues. Taking this viewpoint has mostly satisfied my inner geek, although he still sometimes notices things that still can't really be explained this way.
(It probably helps that I still read and enjoy science fiction from the 1950s and back; the rules are very silly by modern physics standards, but as long as they are consistent, I still can find the stories interesting and entertaining; in fact in our zest for realism we've lost some interesting story worlds.)
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I don't think you could fit that in Jurassic Park (Score:3, Funny)
Re:I don't think you could fit that in Jurassic Pa (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm always vaguely confused by the Jurassic Park complaints. The Jurassic Park movie had almost nothing wrong with its presentation of computers or technology in general. (I'm not including the sci-fi cloning in that. I'm sure there were problems with that.)
First of all, yes, that's a real Unix system. A very stupid one, but a real one.
Secondly, the system was crap. And the point is?
It's a very badly designed system. It was designed by one person, and it's not finished. No one was trained in it yet, and the only person who understands it dies early, and it was sabotaged. Of course you have crazy stuff like not automatically switching the power over or the fences going down.
I mean, yeah, some stuff was slightly improbable, but it's the kinda shit that actually does happen in emergency situations, at least the first time...you discover that, hey, the damn generator didn't come on line or that the carefully constructed key-card security system is not, apparently, on the battery backups This is why you don't test with live data, or, in this case, live dinosaurs.
Again, unfinished, crappy system. Sorta like the actual park itself, when you think about it. Remember it was being worked on by someone who, at least for a short period of time, knew he was going to fleeing his job with a boatload of money for selling them out, and ask yourself if you think he really was working on fixing bugs during that time?
About the only thing I actually have issues with is the 'We can't get a phone line out' plot. But I guess, logically, those couldn't be 'real' phone lines, it's not like the phone company ran lines to the island. No, they have a sat or underwater cable connection with somewhere, and a PBX, and Nedry screwed up the PBX, and they don't know what the hell they'll talking about, all they know is they can't get a dial tone.
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Maybe it's just me (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Maybe it's just me (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Maybe it's just me (Score:5, Funny)
Let's just say you and I are equally annoyed for completely different reasons.
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Hollywood? Not accurate? I'm shocked, SHOCKED! (Score:5, Funny)
If Hollywood isn't accurate regarding computer technology, I shudder to think what else they've depicted might be wrong. Next you're going to tell me good guys don't have unlimited ammunition, you can't trick a killer to confesing to a murder on national television, and that ugly women can't be transformed into supermodels merely by taking off their glasses!
Re:Hollywood? Not accurate? I'm shocked, SHOCKED! (Score:5, Funny)
I have some news for you about porn movies
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Re:Hollywood? Not accurate? I'm shocked, SHOCKED! (Score:5, Interesting)
A number of years ago, I remember seeing a movie on TV where the cockpit of a large passenger jet was totally destroyed in a mid-air collision (or was it an explosion?). The pilot and co-pilot were dead and all of the controls, instruments and radios were destroyed so there was no way for the passengers to fly the jet. Fortunately, there was a bundle of wires hanging down into the passenger compartment and there was a geek with a laptop sitting nearby. He calmly explained that all he had to do was hook the wires to his laptop computer and he would be able to fly the jet from a program on his computer. When someone questioned whether he could really do that, he explained that of course he could do that because "he was from Silicon Valley." They safely landed the jet of course. What was that stupid movie called?
As I recall, he did not mention ever having worked with aircraft avionics equipment before, he was just an ordinary computer expert from Silicon Valley. They did not have radio contact with any experts on the ground and did not have access to any wiring diagrams or manuals. How likely is it that he would have been able grab some bundle of wires and within several hours get them hooked up and working with some program on his computer? Would those be some common type of wires using some common protocols that are well know outside the aviation industry? Perhaps he might have had to quickly use some boolean algebra to reverse engineer what the circuits were doing and then within several hours quickly write, debug and compile some C++ code and interface that with a flight simulator or game program on his computer. He is good!
As for non-computer movies, I recall seeing one where Arnold Schwartzeneger was being chased by dozens of solders with rifles. They shoot at him for about 10 seconds with their rifles as he is running and miss. Then he suddenly turns around and kills them all in 2 seconds with his machine gun. I have never been in the military and don't know much about guns, but supposedly dozens of trained solders with rifles were almost useless against one man with a machine gun.
As for Science fiction, I don't even know where to begin. In the old television series "Space 1999" a nuclear waste dump on the moon exploded with enough force to seen Earth's moon flying through space past a different solar system each week. The nearest star is over 4 light-years away, so the moon must have been traveling faster than the speed of light. Fortunately, the crew of the moon base survived the rapid acceleration.
On one of the various CSI type programs on TV, a crime was recorded by a security camera. They noticed a small reflection in on of the victims pupils so they zoomed in and enhanced the picture. There was the reflection of the killers face visible in the reflection. I have zoomed in on a few digital images on my computer and the image very quickly becomes a useless collection of large individual pixels. Who has security cameras that record at that kind of resolution?
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Its not a true reflection of reality (Score:5, Funny)
My favorite bit (Score:5, Insightful)
They weren't paying attention to Jurassic Park (Score:5, Informative)
Re:They weren't paying attention to Jurassic Park (Score:5, Informative)
More information on this page [sgi.com]
Similar systemes do exist [nooface.net] like the linux clone [sourceforge.net] called fsv
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Look it up. it was pretty cool but ultimately not very useful. You can download the source code and port it if you would like.
I want one of those monitors... (Score:5, Funny)
Oh, and the image processing software that takes a poor quality security camera image, and 'enhances' it so you can see the villains face reflected in the sunglasses of the victim.
Re:I want one of those monitors... (Score:5, Interesting)
While your point is well-made (I love the CSI episode where they "rotate" the security camera still to see the front of the guy's face, when the camera caught him from the back), you'd be surprised what can be done with heavy math and a LOT of processing power to improve the quality of digital images.
Depending on the type of images (stills versus video), and whether compression has been used, it's potentially possible to extract more information from the datastream than was intended. There's a neat trick that can be used on video, where the algorithm enhances one frame by analyzing the preceding and succeeding frames, recognizing the actual objects in the picture. It combines several seconds' worth of video information to provide a much clearer image of what's in a single frame. Of course, this doesn't always work, it depends on what you have to work with.
A guy I sometimes work with got hold of a cellphone camera video, shot freehand during a demonstration in New York City, of some cops pulling people down and roughing them up. Because of the crappy camera work, and the fact that the cellphone was such a horrible source, and the video had been compressed to hell, it wasn't possible initially to make out the faces of the cops or protesters. After tweaking the algorithm parameters and running the original stream through a LOT of processing, he had the video clear enough to identify most of the people present, AND read an officer's badge number.
This was originally prompted by the cops charging the protesters with resisting arrest and assult, all of which were thrown out of court for other reasons. But a couple of people won civil suits against the city on account of the video enhancement, and I think at least one cop lost his job.
I love telling people this story when they complain that higher math is useless except in theoretical physics. Power to the people, man!
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Was that at the RNC in 2004? I used my video tape to get BS charges against myself (and possibly a few others arrested in Times Square) dropped. Hell, my ACLU lawyer didn't even have to show up in court. I just had the tape in my hands.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I want one of those monitors... (Score:5, Funny)
Sounds like Enemy of the State.
I often think in CSI that they should have a 'Bullshit Lab'. I mean they have a DNA lab, a Fingerprint lab, a Trace Analysis lab, a Ballistics lab. Wouldn't that be a great ace in the hole the next time Grisson or Horatio is up against it? "Ok, people, we need to take it to the next level. Let's go to the Bullshit lab." Then they march in to watch some totally made-up 3D animation of victims bouncing off walls and cars and the tech guy says "Here's that bullshit you wanted, guys!" and hands them the retina scan from a reflection of someone's face from a car mirror taken by some ATM cctv footage, and it has the eye colour right and everything.
Case solved!
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The Mac in Indepedence Day (Score:5, Insightful)
Indepence Day has flaws--many, many, many flaws--but the whole virus-on-a-Mac is not one of them. What Jeff Goldblum's character did was standard cross-platform development. He wrote the virus on his Mac, compiled it to an EvilAlienOS binary and uploaded it via the EvilAlienNetwork port on the captured spaceship.
This is more or less exactly what you'd do if you were developing for, say, an embedded microcontroller. The host computer doesn't need to be compatible with the target.
If you want to quibble, you could ask where he got the EvilAlienOS programmer's reference manual or the EvilAlienCPU's architecture description or how he managed to find an exploitable vulnerability in EvilAlienOS so quickly. But enough about the frickin' Mac, okay?
Re:The Mac in Indepedence Day (Score:5, Funny)
EvilAlienOS is actually Windows95, which they, like everybody else in the universe, were forced to install on their hardware by Microsfot.
This is actually the reason they invaded in the first place.
Fortunately, once Jeff Goldblum figured this out, finding an exploitable vulnerability wasn't a problem.
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Overlooked 'The Net' (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm surprised that The Net [imdb.com] didn't make it onto the list. After all, this is the movie where the bad guys kill a guy by hacking into the computer controlling his car's anti-lock brakes.
Really.
DARE make a "true" hacker movie! (Score:3, Informative)
Imagine someone actually did a "true" hacker movie. Let's imagine a documentary. A "show hack" if you want, where someone who really knows what he's doing is giving us a 90 minute rundown of a hack. Using real tools, trying real exploits. How long do you think 'til certain three letter orgs step in and round up everyone who had even remotely anything to do with it?
Hacking isn't a funny game anymore. As more information and money is dealt through electronic channels, the stakes rose considerably. Hacking is a business, more than it ever was. And it has become a problem to the powers that be, more than it ever was.
Movies already tell BS in certain other areas, for example when it comes to chemicals used in bombs or how certain tools can be (ab)used to cause havoc, just to deter wannabe copycats. You think anyone would be allowed to do a "true" hacker movie in this climate?
Besides, nobody would want to watch it. Except maybe geeks, but you can hardly make a blockbuster that way. I mean, when was the last time your computer blew up due to a botched hack? See? No explosions, no gunfights, not interesting.
Grandma's Boy has unrealistic game testers... (Score:3)
I feel old... (Score:3, Insightful)
And the part about the Gibson in Hackers being a 3D city and having a problem with it just means this guy has no imagination. Anyone remember the movie Disclosure? There was a "cutting edge" operating system being rumored to be developed in real life that was a 3D world that people walked around in and interacted with files, etc in a virtual reality. That metaphor was used in several movies. How else can non-geeks understand anything about what we geeks do without clear visuals? It's called artistic license.
What bothered be about movies is when they substitute one thing for another. For example, in Tron, when Flynn gets "lasered" back into the real world, the printer starts printing. The printer was a daisy-wheel printer, and it made sounds like a dot matrix printer.
Oh well. Lighten up!
The window manager is real (Score:3, Informative)
Something he missed. (Score:4, Funny)
I remember watching "The Lone Gunman" one day (thank God that show didn't make it!) and they needed more processing power to crack a password to take over a hijacked plane. "We could do this if had one of those new Octium 4's!" Well, they get one, right before the plane hits the building, they pull out their existing processor and drop in the Octium 4 (without so much as powering the machine off) and BAM! They had their password and saved the plane. (Oh, and no processors had any type of thermal anything!)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Yes. Then you'd very quickly be snuffed out by everyone who has to be anywhere near you.
Re:That fake computer sound! (Score:4, Informative)
From the beep [johnath.com] man page (in Debian):
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Re:Programmers don't do 1&0's?? (Score:3, Insightful)
andl $0xfffff2ff,%eax # Set rounding mode to nearest.
orl $0x00000200,%eax # Set precision to 64 bits. (53-bit mantissa)
pushl %eax
fldcw (%esp) # Recover modes.
popl %eax
is not binary. Writing something that is easily translated to machine code is not the same as writing machine code.
Re:The blip noise (Score:5, Informative)
A statement:
I am a sound designer and a programmer. I have on many occasions intentionally, even without being asked, cut "blip" sound effects for code scrolling across a screen -- not just code, but any sort of stdout/text output/situational awareness display.
I do not do it because I'm stupid, or am trying to dumb down the audience, it for a few specific reasons:
We put blips on a computer screen for the same reason ipods chirp when you press a button. Psychology.
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Re:terminator kicked ass with COBOL (Score:4, Funny)
Wow. That's way cool. My parents only spoke English.
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