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It's funny.  Laugh. Media Movies Programming Hardware IT Technology

Servers, Hackers, and Code In the Movies 445

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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Servers, Hackers, and Code In the Movies

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  • It's funny? Laugh? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 08, 2006 @08:16PM (#17169736)
    No, it's not funny. This sort of geek-complaining-because-it-isn't-100%-realistic crap is what gives us a bad name. No one cares about shit like this. Please stop posting meaningless "Top N" lists like this. That "Top 10 Geek Girls" article from last week was bad enough. How many decent, informative articles were rejected to make room for this dreck?
    • by Chris Burke ( 6130 ) on Friday December 08, 2006 @08:29PM (#17169844) Homepage
      Ever watched E.R. with a doctor? This is hardly a computer geek specific trait.

      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.
      • by Freaky Spook ( 811861 ) on Friday December 08, 2006 @09:00PM (#17170062)
        IANAL but I do provide IT support to a few firms.

        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.
        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          This isn't true for Law and Order. At one of the top 10 law schools in the nation, law students watch law and order specifically to try and pick out parts that are not factual. It turns into a study guide for them as the writers actually took their time and made the law in the episodes as factual as possible.
      • by djbckr ( 673156 )
        FTA...

        In the realm of computing, code [...is...]: The symbolic arrangement of instructions that a computer can understand - like "Your PHP code is shit"

        That made my day!!! Priceless!

      • by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 08, 2006 @10:11PM (#17170498)
        . . . When you were gwowing up, didn't you notice that anything was possibwe in cawtoons? Do you weawwy think Howwywood movie diwectors ow pwoducers awe any diffewent? It isn't weawity, you know?

        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.
      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by Mr. Flibble ( 12943 )
        ...and ninja assassins find amusing to people not in those fields.

        While I am not a Ninja Assasin, I am a Unix admin, and I did laugh at "I know this!". But in the same vien, I have studied martial arts for years, and whenever I see a swordfight, in a movie, it drives me insane.

        The next time you watch a swordfight in a movie, watch where the swords are being swung. Most of the time, if the opponent just dropped their sword to the floor, the attacking swing would miss completely. In hollywood, they swing the
        • by Chris Burke ( 6130 ) on Saturday December 09, 2006 @01:32AM (#17171470) Homepage
          The next time you watch a swordfight in a movie, watch where the swords are being swung. Most of the time, if the opponent just dropped their sword to the floor, the attacking swing would miss completely. In hollywood, they swing the swords at the other swords - blade to blade - instead of trying to actually hit the other guy.

          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.
    • I wouldn't mind so much if it were 90% realistic, but it isn't even close. And it affects people when they actually try to use computers.

      I work in Level 2 tech support. I occasionally have other techs ask me to help them figure out why they can't mount a CD on a customer's server they're dialed into. I always start by asking them to check with the customer to see if the CD is in the drive SHINY SIDE DOWN. You'd be surprised how often the disk is upside down in the drive. I don't blame the non-techies,

  • MIA: (Score:3, Interesting)

    by toby ( 759 ) * on Friday December 08, 2006 @08:17PM (#17169748) Homepage Journal
    1. Buscemi's Seymour (Ghost World).
    2. De Niro's Harry Tuttle (in keeping with the Brazil theme posts this week).
    • Re:MIA: (Score:5, Insightful)

      by kv9 ( 697238 ) on Friday December 08, 2006 @09:13PM (#17170162) Homepage
      i also can't believe they left colossus [imdb.com] out. tsk tsk tsk.
    • 2. De Niro's Harry Tuttle (in keeping with the Brazil theme posts this week).

      wait...wasn't he a plumber?

      well, closer to the average software engineer than the others i suppose.

      • Harry Tuttle (Score:3, Interesting)

        by toby ( 759 ) *

        Yes, "heating engineer." Actually I screwed up with those suggestions, especially with Seymour, because of course they weren't computer hackers, but just geeks (for some reason I thought that page was about 20 Movie Geeks; D'oh!).

        But there were "computer hackers" in Brazil [imdb.com]; the real hacker was Sam Lowry, who used quite a number of techniques including social engineering: "ERE I AM JH." The funnier candidate would be Harvey Lime, who had the memorable lines, "Computers... are my forte" and "I'm a bit of a

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Rick17JJ ( 744063 )

      They also left out the Paper Man [amazon.com] which was a good movie about hackers from 1971. That was made back before personal computers existed. In the movie a group of college students in a computer lab use a networked computer create a "paper man" and get a charge card in his name to temporarily help pay some of their bills. Somehow their paper man mysteriously seems to take on a life of his own and starts trying to kill them by causing computer controlled hardware such as elevators to malfunction. It even alte

    • Where was Dave Bowman? How can they leave out the guy who took down HAL?
  • by User 956 ( 568564 ) on Friday December 08, 2006 @08:18PM (#17169758) Homepage
    As with anything, Hollywood has a weird way of viewing computer technology and the people that use it.
    It may be weird to you or I, but Hollywood does it that way because that's how your "average joe" sees it.
    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Your "average joe" sees it that way because that's the way Hollywood presents it.
    • by euice ( 953774 ) on Friday December 08, 2006 @08:25PM (#17169812)

      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.

      • by Deadstick ( 535032 ) on Friday December 08, 2006 @10:08PM (#17170480)
        You can often see that effect in news coverage of a shooting. Some earwitness will say "I didn't think it was a gunshot because it didn't sound like one"...meaning it didn't sound like a movie gun.

        rj
      • by tooyoung ( 853621 ) on Friday December 08, 2006 @10:20PM (#17170544)
        I find this outlook somewhat humerous. I studied computer vision as a grad student, and yet whenever a face recognition story is posted on slashdot, sure enough, all of the +5 comments reflect Hollywood misconceptions. Digging through the articles, I generally find that people with real experience in the computer vision field have their comments relegated to a 1 status.
        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by Tim C ( 15259 )
          You get a similar effect, although not as pronounced, on pretty much any specialist technical subject; you see a lot of common misconceptions modded up fairly high, while some actual facts are languishing down at 1 or 2.
    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by IAstudent ( 919232 )
      You're speaking the proverial chicken and egg here. Does "average joe" really see it that way to start out with or did Hollywood plant that image? And if the latter, isn't that just reinforcing the image that Mr. Joe and Mrs. Jane expect?
    • Actually (Score:3, Insightful)

      by geekoid ( 135745 )
      they do that because it is quicker. Actual computer work is boring as hell to watch in a movie.

    • It may be weird to you or I, but Hollywood does it that way because that's how your "average joe" sees it.

      Not only that, but showing the -reality- would just be too damn boring for a movie!
    • by DragonWriter ( 970822 ) on Friday December 08, 2006 @09:22PM (#17170214)
      It may be weird to you or I, but Hollywood does it that way because that's how your "average joe" sees it.


      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.)
    • by Jerf ( 17166 ) on Friday December 08, 2006 @11:02PM (#17170740) Journal
      I find I'm generally happier when I consider what we see on the screen to still be a little symbolic, more like a book than a true "what a guy on the scene would see" documentary style.

      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.)
      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Chris Burke ( 6130 )
        more like a book than a true "what a guy on the scene would see" documentary style.

        Which is interesting, because one of the strengths of books is that they aren't limited by what can be presented visually and what looks interesting that way.

        For example, I've read several sci-fi novels (Stephen Donaldson's Gap series being a favorite) that depict space combat occuring at realistic ranges -- ranges where even using light-speed weaponry it takes several minutes to reach the target. In a novel, the tension of
        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by Jerf ( 17166 )
          Part of what led me down this road was the recognition that many of my favorite science fiction novels were intrinsically unfilmable, including Dune. Well, they filmed it anyway. (I speak of the Sci-Fi miniseries, not the movie.) If you take that miniseries as theater, it actually works pretty well. If you take it as a documentary of real events, it's shit. This probably explains much of the difference in opinions it evoked, depending on how literally people took it.

          From there it's a short leap to basically
  • by iteyoidar ( 972700 ) on Friday December 08, 2006 @08:21PM (#17169778)
    While I realize this list is written for folks who enjoy this kind of stuff, I don't think *anyone* would find that adding another half hour of film devoted to showing how Jurassic Park hired computer experts and documenting their security systems would benefit the movie.
    • While I realize this list is written for folks who enjoy this kind of stuff, I don't think *anyone* would find that adding another half hour of film devoted to showing how Jurassic Park hired computer experts and documenting their security systems would benefit the movie.


      Why not? Crappy prequels made a mint for George Lucas!
    • 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.

  • Maybe it's just me (Score:5, Insightful)

    by porkThreeWays ( 895269 ) on Friday December 08, 2006 @08:21PM (#17169780)
    Maybe it's just me, but I seem to find the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park a little less believable than a kid getting root.
    • by thewils ( 463314 ) on Friday December 08, 2006 @08:24PM (#17169806) Journal
      Yeah, Cretaceous Park more like.
    • by suso ( 153703 ) *
      I think that most people hate it when they hear the little girl say "I know this". I didn't like it much either, but ironically, a lot of computer geek kids (and some adults) say stuff like that. Mostly because their lives aren't interesting enough and they need to exagerate a lot. When I was in elementary school, after War Games came out, I remember some kid saying "Dude, my brother hacked into the school's computer with the password pencilsharpener". Sigh. Another kid tried to tell us that his dad tu
    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by h4rm0ny ( 722443 )

      Maybe it's just me, but I seem to find the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park a little less believable than a kid getting root.

      I disagree. You see UNIX I know about. If they do something stupid that contradicts my knowledge then it damages my suspension of disbelief. Recombining DNA with modern day creatures? I don't know much about that. I know I don't see dinosaurs outside my window so I can deduce that there are major stumbling blocks that the movie glossed over, but it doesn't contradict my experience and k

  • I haven't been this shocked since I found out pro-wrestling was fake!

    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!

    • by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Friday December 08, 2006 @09:01PM (#17170068)
      Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • by Rick17JJ ( 744063 ) on Friday December 08, 2006 @11:11PM (#17170786)

      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?

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        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?

        This was mostly bullshit, but not total bu

  • by Timesprout ( 579035 ) on Friday December 08, 2006 @08:25PM (#17169816)
    Take Swordfish for example where he hacks into some top secret site whilst having a gun pointed at him, a gorgeous blonde giving him a blow job and Halle Berry looking on. In my entire working career that's only ever happened to me twice (ok probably cos I live so far from Halle Berry). But still.
    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by coolGuyZak ( 844482 )

      There was one part of this move that I really enjoyed: The portrayal of someone really into writing their code. When I complete a significant portion of a project, I celebrate. From time to time, I also spin around in my chair and clap my hands like an ape.

      So, I guess my point boils down to this: Jackman portrayed being a computer dork rather accurately ;)

      And I believe this even though the visualization of code was entirely unrealistic. Aside: That gives me an idea... Someone should write a program that

  • They forgot the earth in the server list [vibrant.com]!

    I always loved that turn in the HHGG. I still think it's a brilliant idea to think of the earth as a huge supercomputer to calculate the question to the answer "42" - and thus to actually formulate the question about life, the universe and everything - I think it's much more interesting than the Matrix version where the earth/reality just isn't the reality.

  • Why was WOPR connected to a modem that a kid could dial-in to from home? I guess the NORAD folks needed to run thermonuclear war simulations from home sometimes...

    A good list of fictional computers is available on here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Fictional_co mputers [wikipedia.org] of course.
    • by geekoid ( 135745 )
      I thought that was covered in the movie? didn't it's creator leave that backdoor on purpose?

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      It wasn't like there was a 300 baud modem hanging off the back of WOPR - the army guy asks how the attack happened and the techie replies "he got into our network through a dial up at one of our remote facilities" - or something to that effect.

      They go on to mention that this had now been diabled and wouldn't happen again. From that point on, it's WOPR phoning David back to continue the "game".
  • 20. Jack Stanfield, Firewall (2006)
    firewalljack_stanfield_400
    19. J-Bone, Johnny Mnemonic (1995)
    jbone
    18. Lazlo Hollyfeld, Real Genius (1985)
    lazlo
    17. Wyatt Donnelly, Weird Science (1985)
    wyatt
    16. Milo Hoffman, Antirust (2001)
    milo_400
    15. Dennis Nedry, Jurassic Park (1993)
    nedry
    14. Gus Gorman, Superman III (1983)
    gus_400
    13. Kevin Mitnick, Takedown (2000)
    mitnick
    12. Boris Grishenko, Goldeneye (1995)
    borisgrishenko
    11. John 'Captain Crunch' Draper, Pirates of Silicon Valley (1999)
    crunch
    10. Michael Bolton & Samir Na
  • They referenced the movie "Hackers" that pretty much nullifies any authority on this article. Not to mention they can't even spell antitrust.
  • My favorite bit (Score:5, Insightful)

    by $RANDOMLUSER ( 804576 ) on Friday December 08, 2006 @08:47PM (#17169962)
    Was Barnard Hughes as the I/O port in TRON (systems programming as allegory, all "Through the Looking Glass") all covered with patches and patches and patches so that he was literally an imobile tower... Somebody who got it wrote that scene.
  • Ever see attempts to represent computers in movies from the '50s and '60s?

    Lots of obsession with punch cards, belief that big mainframes were omniscient, operators who were comic-relief hysterics.

    In addition to being flat-out wrong, the lessons and morals we were supposed to learn were totally inane.
  • by iabervon ( 1971 ) on Friday December 08, 2006 @08:51PM (#17169992) Homepage Journal
    The screenshot for Jurassic Park looks like a normal Irix screen. But what anybody who actually watched that part of the movie noticed was that the screen in the movie was some weird flying-through-a-virtual-reality-landscape thing, which the kid immediately recognized as UNIX. Almost everybody with actual UNIX experience just laughed at that, because it was classic a Hollywood computer representation. Except that it really was Irix, but running a window manager only available to people whose UNIX system had superfluous accelerated 3D graphics in 1995 (i.e., movie CG folks). What the audience couldn't see, but the kid would have been able to, was that the landscape had, written on the ground, things like "sbin" and "usr", clear signs of a UNIX system of some sort. As for breaking in, when dinosaurs are taking over your facility, chances are you aren't patching sendmail every day. And, in '95, that would have been a problem.
  • by The Famous Druid ( 89404 ) on Friday December 08, 2006 @08:51PM (#17169994)
    ... that projects the back-to-front green text onto the face of the user.

    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.
    • by MoralHazard ( 447833 ) on Friday December 08, 2006 @09:09PM (#17170134)
      ...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...

      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!
      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        [OT]
        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)

          by MoralHazard ( 447833 )
          Yep. I was amazed by how fast the cops and the city backed off from the bullshit charges, when they realized how extensively people had documented the actual goings-on. When I started getting calls from friends to help get bail money together, I was pretty worried about some of the folks that I knew had been popped, but it mostly turned out fine in the end. The cops weren't even that rough--only a few serious injuries, most of the physical incidents just left bruises. I didn't know anybody in Times Squa
          • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

            I was amazed by how fast the cops and the city backed off from the bullshit charges, when they realized how extensively people had documented the actual goings-on.

            I tend to think that they would have backed off anyway, maybe framing it as a show of mercy or something along those lines. The reason being that the cops' bosses got what they wanted - freedom of expression was successfully restricted. The event was over, so no point it dwelling on it. The sooner the whole thing was swept under the rug the les
      • by Tim Browse ( 9263 ) on Friday December 08, 2006 @10:40PM (#17170638)

        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

        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!

  • Ever since I saved Tron from Master Controller, he does all my hacking Pro Bono.
  • FTA:
    "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."

    What actually happened was that the island was being left with a skeleton crew for the weekend. After the Nedry character sabotaged the system, the first thing the other characters do is try to phone "his people". With the phone system out however having the engineer say "I can't get Jurrassic Park back online w
  • Hey - it was IRIX (Score:2, Informative)

    by rainer_d ( 115765 )
    A kid could r00t it.
  • The systems in Jurassic Park (the book) were running on a 680x0 Mac. It was obvious from the dialog boxes and the font (Geneva, IIRC).

    That Mac and the "Land Rovers" were placeholders indicating where the studio could negotiate sponsorship deals. (With SGI and Jeep, respectively).

    Crichton's such a shill -- I hope the studio "forgot" to give him his cut.

  • The guy in the article about "What code doesn't do" really needs to take a deep breath. Anyone, of any specialised field, will always see their field represented in a movie as silly. Doctors the first, engineers, whatever. Some fields are better represented than others, but still.

    I'm a professional software engineer, have been for almost a decade, and I can still enjoy these movies :) Leave work at home.

    That being said, number 10 cracked me up, because thats true, expert in programming or not (I found
  • by cgreuter ( 82182 ) on Friday December 08, 2006 @09:14PM (#17170164)

    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?

    • by weston ( 16146 ) <westonsd@@@canncentral...org> on Friday December 08, 2006 @09:24PM (#17170222) Homepage
      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.

      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.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Kaenneth ( 82978 )
      I think the implication in the movie, is that technologies from the recovered craft were recreated, and marketed as products.

      Perhaps that is exactly what would be intended, the aliens send a craft specifically to be captured, allow the civilization to become dependant on that set of technologies, then swoop in and take over (using human made communication satelites, etc.) Since the target would be using systems effecivly designed by the attacker, they don't stand a chance.
  • Ugh (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Kabuthunk ( 972557 )
    This reminds me quite thoroughly of how movies depict video games as well. No matter what game, what system... most of the time, it's nothing but beeps and blips... usually not coinciding in the least with button-pushes on the controller.

    Hell, half the time I recognize what game they're playing from a quick glimpse of it, and I'm thinking to myself "Oh come ON! I know that part, and there's nothing even CLOSE to those sounds there."

    According to Hollywood... video games as well are stuck in the 80's.

    HEY HO
  • Overlooked 'The Net' (Score:4, Interesting)

    by cgreuter ( 82182 ) on Friday December 08, 2006 @09:20PM (#17170198)

    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.

  • by Opportunist ( 166417 ) on Friday December 08, 2006 @09:26PM (#17170234)
    Let's even ignore for a moment the fact that real hacking is boring to look at. What's interesting for Joe Average to watch a guy live on Chips and Jolt for hours and days while typing cryptic commands?

    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.
  • by __aaclcg7560 ( 824291 ) on Friday December 08, 2006 @09:40PM (#17170304)
    In the six years that I worked as lead game tester in the video game industry, I had never gotten drunk, stoned, titted or laid because of my job. "Grandma's Boy" is such an unrealistic movie that I laughed all the way through.
  • I feel old... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by AWhistler ( 597388 ) on Friday December 08, 2006 @09:41PM (#17170314)
    I read the list about things code doesn't do in real life. The one about text not making noise when it is typed on the keyboard struck me that the one making the list is just a kid. Anyone who has used a real VT100 terminal, or a clone of such (remember Wyse terminals???) had a keyboard with a very quiet touch...so quiet that people were uneasy about typing on it, so they added an artificial key click on the keyboard, with a volume control. Every key pressed made a very short beep, at the same time it appeared on the screen.

    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!
  • by Shadow-isoHunt ( 1014539 ) on Friday December 08, 2006 @09:51PM (#17170378) Homepage
    The window manager showed in Jurrasic Park is actually real, it's fsn. There's a linux port, fsv at sourceforge. [sf.net] As you'll notice, the view does make it possible to tell that you're in a *nix enviornment.
  • by ArcherB ( 796902 ) on Friday December 08, 2006 @10:45PM (#17170654) Journal
    All hardware is compatible.

    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!)

  • by kpharmer ( 452893 ) on Friday December 08, 2006 @11:15PM (#17170812)
    You know, the first language I learned way back when was COBOL. I didn't love it much, but that's only because nobody ever told me that you could create a Terminator with it!

    Of course, even as a junior programmer I probably would have been sharp enough to send information directly to the brain on the cyborg rather than just doing a printout to the eye. But you know how it goes - machine generated code is always crap.

  • by Punto ( 100573 ) <puntob&gmail,com> on Saturday December 09, 2006 @12:43AM (#17171286) Homepage
    like infinite resolution (can you enhance that?), or clients that pull every available record on the database from the server and flash them on the screen while searching for dna/fingerprints/faces (no wonder they constantly complain about the network and servers being slow on 24).
  • What he got wrong. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by SanityInAnarchy ( 655584 ) <ninja@slaphack.com> on Saturday December 09, 2006 @03:29AM (#17172028) Journal

    I'm hearing a lot of people pointing out where they've seen this list in action, where they (surprisingly) haven't, and what TFA missed -- but I don't see anyone disagreeing. I do.


    6. Code cannot be cracked by an 8 year old kid in a matter of seconds

    Depends what it is. If said 8 year old is looking at binary, hex, or moving random text, then no. But if said 8 year old is looking at a Windows 98 login screen, he might try the unthinkable and hit "cancel". Or even the esc key. I did this, and I was maybe 12 or 14 or something.


    9. People who write code use mice

    While it's true that our environments could be a little more realistic -- maybe a web browser with some documentation -- I actually don't use the mouse much while coding.


    I mean, I'm on a Mac at work, and it is kind of unusual to see a real OS in a movie, but I mostly am ssh'd in to a Linux box writing the actual code, and the Mac has a wonderful keyboard shortcut of command+left/right to switch between open terminal windows. It's not the same thing as tabs -- I can fit four 80x24 terminals (all green text on translucent black background, because I like it that way) on my screen at once. On my Linux, I have to twitch my mouse, which is annoying, even with sloppy focus.


    But yeah, as I learn more about vim, I'm learning that the keyboard is pretty much all I use when editing and testing most of my code. And it actually does look kind of like the movies -- between my vim setup, and my typing commands in, and my seeming to type insanely fast (due to tab completion), and my kernel compiles and whatever scrolling past (which I do understand some of, enough to ctrl+z it sometimes if I'm curious)...


    Which brings us to:


    1. Code does not move

    Yes and no. Code does not move, but output does. I watch logfiles with tail -f, I watch compiles (kernel and otherwise) and actually get an idea of the gist of what they're doing, I watch IRC discussions, and I watch the debugging output of my programs to get an idea of their progress.


    It's not the same as Hollywood, where code is 3D and flying all over the screen, and I'm using VR gloves to put stuff together. Snow crash had the right idea -- even when the primary computer interface is 3D, we still go to Flatland for some things, including source code.


    But, many of his points are weak, and most we've seen before. The #1 mistake I see is them dumbing down the computer stuff -- can you name a single hack that's actually been explained to you that made any real sense, without you inventing huge amounts of crap to fill the gaps?


    I mean, even classic stuff, like that grabbing-the-fractions-of-a-penny stuff? Come on, what's stopping you from just doing a debit from one account and a credit to another -- shit, what's stopping you from simply making up a bunch of deposits from cash, and claim you got it from an unnamed Swiss bank account? Or how about the "Send Spike" of Goldeneye: "It jams their modem so they can't hang up" -- well gee, if it can do that, you've already 0wned them, why not just have their box traceroute one or two hops and give you that IP, then let them hang up and trace some random server that no one cares about?

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