Hollywood Treats Hackers Pretty Well 216
angry tapir writes "According to Damian Gordon, a lecturer at the Dublin Institute of Technology, hackers are treated pretty well by movie-makers. Gordon studied 50 movies, produced over five decades, to help write an academic paper for the International Journal of Internet Technology and Secured Transactions. The results amazed him. In the movies, most hackers aren't teenaged whiz-kids. They're professionals, over 30 years old, who work in IT."
50 years? (Score:3, Informative)
Who had hacker movies in 1960? Can anyone name a hacker movie off the top of his head before War Games?
Re:News Flash! (Score:3, Informative)
I don't think this is true at all. Movies like Wargames manage to be decently realistic (at least not offensively unrealistic) and not boring at all. Best part of that movie is when he has to spend time researching his target.
Re:Really? (Score:1, Informative)
It was Kirk's idea.
KIRK
Clear the bridge.
SPOCK
Well, at least we know he doesn't
have Genesis.
KIRK
Just keep nodding as though I'm
still giving orders. Mister Saavik,
punch up the data charts of Reliant's
command console.
SAAVIK
Reliant's command...
KIRK
HURRY.
KHAN
Forty-five seconds!
SPOCK
The prefix code?
KIRK
It's all we've got.
Re:You call that well treated? (Score:3, Informative)
I think even the "realistic" parts of the portrayal are accidental. I mean a white male of professional age in a setting with lots of computer equipment isn't exactly a stretch. It's probably the opposite: most hackers fit into the most boring stereotype known to man.
Re:Yes, but (Score:4, Informative)
To be fair, Trinity not only used the command prompt, but a real, actual security tool. However, the exeption does prove the rule, doesn't it?
The last Die Hard movie was unbelievable in every respect (just like the previous three) but it was a great homage to us nerds. In fact, the only characters in the movie who weren't nerds were McClain and his daughter (and possibly the assassins as well, but those characters weren't developed enough to tell).
It even had the middle-aged fat nerd in his mom's basement in his "command center"!
"How do we find his house?"
"Uh, it'll be the one with the lights on."
It had the extra-nerdy attraction of two of the main characters played by Tim Russ and Robert Beltran (Tuvok and Chakotay). If you have enough suspension of disbelief, it's an incredibly nerdy and entertaining movie. Just get the unrated version, the theatrical release was crap. "She's at the bottom of an elevator shaft with an SUV crammed up her ass". How they thought a Die Hard without "yippiekayay motherfucler" would be a box office hit was beyond me, but they fixed it in the unrated DVD.
Re:Sneakers (Score:3, Informative)
Re:50 years? (Score:3, Informative)
"Colossus: The Forbin Project"
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064177/ [imdb.com]
An artificially intelligent supercomputer is developed and activated, only to reveal that it has a sinister agenda of its own. The scientists scramble to hack into it.
Re:Yes, but (Score:2, Informative)
Re:50 years? (Score:4, Informative)
Who had hacker movies in 1960? Can anyone name a hacker movie off the top of his head before War Games?
The Original Italian Job from 1969. In that movie they hack the traffic computer in Turin to create a traffic nightmare allowing them to escape in their Mini Coopers.
Re:You call that well treated? (Score:4, Informative)
(a) The practice of clinical psychology ranges from evidence-based (e.g. CBT) through to "Lets go into the safe room and I'll wrap you in a blanket and regress you through your past lives". Evidence based practice is based on science, random placebo-controlled trials and so on, so it's as scientific or unscientific as any other medically aligned field.
If you ever need a psych., get a referral from a doctor or a hospital, check that they are registered with the professional body in your country, what their quals are and - at the first session - ask them to describe the treatment plan, how many sessions it usually takes, what the prognosis is for the method they use and so on. STAY AWAY from anyone who talks about "repressed memories", thinks "dream analysis" is a science or who uses the words "deep" "buried" "unconscious" and "mind" in the same sentence. These people are a dying breed, fortunately.
(b) The theoretical basis of psychology is basically that human behavior is determined by your biology interacting with a complex social and physical environment within a framework of the habitiual responses you have learned in the past. So different researchers focus on differnt part of this complex system e.g cognitive neuropsychs look at the architecture of cognition, brain models etc, physiological psychs look at neural networks, hormones, brain structure, social psychs look at the social influences and how these moderate behaviour, evolutionary psychs speak circular crap in the popular press and so on.
BTW, psychology may well be a "liberal arts" major in the USA, but that's not the case in my neck of the woods - at my university its taught in the same department which teaches nursing and other allied health fields, although it vaires from uni to uni.