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Impress Your Friends While Watching "Untraceable" 228

Posted by kdawson from the did-she-really-say-short-ttl dept.
Frequent Slashdot contributor Bennett Haselton writes in today with a nerd-oriented review of "Untraceable," which opened in theaters last Friday. Read on for Bennett's take on what the movie gets right — a surprising amount as these movies usually go — but be warned, his review contains spoilers.


I went into the theater planning to come out with notes for an article like "Everything that 'Untraceable' gets wrong" (feeling pessimistic after "Swordfish" and "Firewall"), but it actually doesn't do that bad. Oh, it gets stuff wrong -- I don't think the FBI can "blackhole" an IP address by clicking a button -- but the errors are for dramatic license, not technical howlers, and the plot holes fall more in the category of things that could have been accomplished more easily some other way. In fact the dialog goes out of its way in several spots to make sure we know they know what they're talking about; screenwriters can't win with these movies, because they'll get grief for getting too much stuff wrong, but if they explain things correctly, it breaks the reality when we can feel the writers telegraphing their knowledge to the geeks in the audience. But it is mostly accurate, and the movie throws you just enough softballs for you to impress your movie-mates as well as the patrons two rows in front and back of you.

The movie takes its first stab at geek realism right at the top, when Diane Lane tells Colin Hanks that his Internet date is never going to see him again because she's more attractive in person than he is. (So far, the only thing wrong with this is that Colin Hanks has exactly the kind of adorable-nerd face that appeals to girls who like to think they don't care about looks.) Then Diane Lane explains how she's ensnaring the cyber-criminal on her screen, in a set piece that has nothing to do with the rest of the plot, like the pre-title action sequence in a Bond movie. First, in a horde of pop-ups covers her monitor, and a site tries to entice her into downloading and running a program that contains a trojan horse. She runs the trojan horse on a virtual machine, where she watches it steal a file full of passwords and financial records, but she inserts her own trojan into the data that's uploaded back to the criminal's computer. In a few moments they find the user's IP address and realize that it must be a neighbor stealing that person's wireless service.

Batter up! I think that an FBI cyber crime expert would have a pop-up blocker installed, but moving on. If a criminal wanted to gain access to your machine to steal your financial records, tricking you into downloading and installing a trojan horse as part of another program, is probably exactly how they'd do it. (However, a trojan wouldn't automatically and instantly find a file full of passwords, even if she did named it "passwords.txt" as bait.) The biggest slip is that if you upload a trojan horse back to someone who was downloading data from your machine, there's still no way to force the remote criminal's computer to run it, as happens in the movie. And a criminal that smart would probably be running the operation from the compromised PC of someone in another city, not stealing a neighbor's wireless access. (In any case, while having the criminal's IP address would allow you to go to someone's ISP and ask them to turn over the records of where that person lived, the characters should not have been able to narrow an IP address down to a person's house without that extra step.) Also, if I heard right, the FBI figures out who the guilty neighbor is even though he has no priors, based on the fact that he has two registered handguns. That will offend a certain portion of the audience, so viewers of "27 Dresses" in some cinemas may hear angry gunfire coming from the next theater.

However, most of these errors were probably necessary to show what the main character does in as short a time as possible and to end the set piece with the villain actually getting caught, so this is probably the best the movie could have done. Don't point that out to your date, of course, since she'll be more impressed by knowledgeable sneering, especially if everyone in the seats around you can hear what a smart guy she's with.

Then the main villain's site is introduced, and the movie has to handle the question of how a site with its own top-level domain like KillWithMe.com would be able to remain online despite showing real-time streaming video of a murder victim being killed. (The hook in the movie is that the more people visit the site, the faster some automated murder contraption kills the victim.) Diane Lane explains how, in a virtuoso sentence designed to silence the nerds who would otherwise say afterwards that there's no way that could ever happen. You'll know the line; it's the one right before her boss says, "I didn't understand anything you said; something about 'Russia'?" Apparently the domain is registered in Russia, and the DNS servers use a low TTL (yes, Diane Lane actually says "low TTL" -- sexy!) to switch the hostname between thousands of different IP addresses, each belonging to some compromised machine.

If you had to come up with a way to do this in a film, and if you assumed that Russian authorities could not be persuaded to go after the domain registrar (something nobody tries in the movie), this would probably be the simplest way that was semi-plausible. You need the site to resolve to thousands of possible IP addresses so that it can't be made to disappear by simply taking one machine offline. The way the movie demonstrates this, though, is for Diane Lane to make one of the site's many IP addresses go dark by clicking a button on her screen and causing it to be blackholed, before the hostname switches to the next IP. The only people who can actually do this in real life are backbone operators with an axe to grind, not the FBI (something the movie actually acknowledges with a passing reference to Net Neutrality legislation!). Ah, but here's where you can knock one out of the park: If you assume, as the movie does, that the FBI has the ability to blackhole individual IP addresses, then they could shut the site down not by blocking the site's IP addresses but by blocking the primary and secondary DNS servers for the killwithme.com domain in Russia, so that if people's computers couldn't communicate with the DNS servers, they'd have no way of resolving the hostname.

By now, the surrounding theatergoers should be threatening to jam your USB thumb drive keychain into your nostril, but you're not done yet. At one point a character targets an IP address beginning with "10.*", and everybody knows those are reserved for intranets, not the public Internet, so you can point out that that's like the 555 prefix for a movie phone number. Later, the heroine finds that a Trojan horse installed on her daughter's machine, has access to all files on all PCs in the house. That could work if (a) the other PCs were set to share out files to other PCs on the same local network, or (b) if the traffic between the other PCs and the wireless router were unencrypted, although it's unlikely the main character would make either of these mistakes.

But you don't want fellow viewers getting the idea you're too Net-savvy; one suspect is later described: "He blogged, he built web sites, he practically lived online," which sets the bar a little low for qualifying as a sociopathic online loner.

With regard to the non-Internet technical details, I have no idea if OnStar can actually help you get through a traffic jam the way they do in this movie, but I'm sure they paid a lot of money to have it appear that they could (although maybe they got a discount since the movie later shows the villain hacking into Diane Lane's car's system, during which the brand name "OnStar" is definitely not mentioned). Speaking of product placement, several in the audience snickered when the movie twice showed the heroine conspicuously logging into the Windows Live interface. But Microsoft may have gotten an even better deal: while the villain's operating system of choice is never mentioned, during closeups of his screen at the end, you can clearly see the word "GNU".

Or maybe it just fits with his overachieving character. After he ties his victims to a bedframe, he likes to elevate it into the path of the camera using a remote-controlled motorized winch evocative of a medieval torture device. Unless I'm mistaken, though, that happens before the site is actually streaming, which means he could have just as easily walked over and lifted up the bedframe. With that kind of fetish for doing simple things the horrendously hard way for no reason, why didn't he just go ahead and wear a "Got Linux?" t-shirt?
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Impress Your Friends While Watching "Untraceable" More

Impress Your Friends While Watching "Untraceable"

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  • Another way to impress your friends (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 27, 2008 @03:36PM (#22202022)
    Save your money and DON'T WATCH Untraceable. For bonus points joke that they "should've called it Unwatchable."

    Oh no, they're in my wireless network, I've got to go.
    • After reading this review, why would I need to?
    • Dude, it's DIANE LANE! A hottie! I admit I didn't watch her in that "Dog" thing, but there are limits, But a cybercrime thriller with DIANE LANE?!

      Did you see her in "Unfaithful"?

      • Dude, it's DIANE LANE! A hottie! I admit I didn't watch her in that "Dog" thing, but there are limits, But a cybercrime thriller with DIANE LANE?!
        Beauty is always in the in the eye of the beholder. I do not think she is hot, not even attractive. She's sort of just. well plain.

      • Re:Another way to impress your friends (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Chelloveck ( 14643 ) on Monday January 28, 2008 @09:57AM (#22207946)

        Dude, it's DIANE LANE! A hottie! I admit I didn't watch her in that "Dog" thing, but there are limits, But a cybercrime thriller with DIANE LANE?!

        Swordfish had Halle Berry topless. HALLE BERRY. TOPLESS. And I still walked out of the theatre wanting those two hours of my life back.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by peipas ( 809350 )
      Untraceable currently has a 14% on the Tomatometer [rottentomatoes.com]. When I don't have explicit interest in a film, that is enough of an indicator for me.

  • He's one of them (Score:5, Funny)

    by Thatmushroom ( 447396 ) <Thatmushroom@@@mille352@@@purdue...edu> on Sunday January 27, 2008 @03:51PM (#22202116) Homepage
    "If you take sexual advantage of her, you're going to burn in a very special level of Hell. A level they reserve for child molesters and people who talk at the theater."

    'nuff said.

  • Millennium (Score:5, Interesting)

    by BenjiTheGreat98 ( 707903 ) on Sunday January 27, 2008 @03:55PM (#22202146)
    Did anybody else see this movie the first time it was released when it was an episode of The Millennium several years back? The plot line is exactly the same. Another forum even posted that some of the lines in the movie match up with the episode.

    • Re:Millennium (Score:4, Informative)

      by darkitecture ( 627408 ) on Sunday January 27, 2008 @05:06PM (#22202656)
      Did anybody else see this movie the first time it was released when it was an episode of The Millennium several years back? The plot line is exactly the same. Another forum even posted that some of the lines in the movie match up with the episode.

      Yeah, I got the same feeling too. The episode you're thinking of was called "The Mikado" - Series 2, Episode 13. I never watched too many episodes of Millennium but I did catch this on tv years ago and found it thoroughly entertaining. Definitely very, very, VERY similar to the premise of Untraceable.

  • I think you mean... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 27, 2008 @04:01PM (#22202186)

    With that kind of fetish for doing simple things the horrendously hard way for no reason, why didn't he just go ahead and wear a "Got Gentoo?" t-shirt?
    there fixed that for you. Then again he'd spend the entire movie + his whole prison sentence trying to get it installed.
    • Speaking of movies that just plain get it wrong, what movies are there that get it right, or right enough? The only two tech movies, that I can think of at the moment, that haven't made me grown have been Sneakers and Anti-Trust. I'll also admit that Hackers holds a special place in my heart. It's amazing that you can possibly get a movie that wrong. It was the most spectacular pile of crap that mankind has ever created. But I digress. Any other recommendations for actually good tech movies?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by elrous0 ( 869638 ) *
        Wargames is the most technically accurate major film I ever saw (by a longshot). A bit dated now, though.
        • Except for the titanic flaw that a core national defense computer is NOT going to have dial-in ports on the PSTN.

          "We're in!"

          In your dreams, hacker monkey.

          • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

            by paganizer ( 566360 )
            without going into too much detail, I have to say you are wrong on that point.
              Any other "operation sundevil" survivors out there?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by plover ( 150551 ) *
        "Sneakers"? With its magical decrypt-everything-regardless-of-algorithm chip? That central gaffe made it almost unwatchable for me.

        It was kind of like the basic assumption in the Matrix that humans would make good batteries to power robots (we don't.) At least the Matrix had both bullet-time AND Carrie Anne Moss in PVC so you always had something uber-cool to watch. But when the second and third movies built themselves further around this extremely lame assumption, they too became crap with respect to

        • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

          by Draconius42 ( 751172 )
          Maybe it was only me, but I always thought the theory of using humans as batteries was something the humans came up with.. and that they were wrong about, but that it was the only thing they could come up with. I think the Machines actually put the humans in the matrix as an act of mercy. Having defeated them in a war, they decided to imprison them in an artificial reality rather than commit genocide. The machines, oddly enough, were too moral to do that. Seems like something I saw in the Animatrix made me

        • AND Carrie Anne Moss in PVC
          I just don't get the attraction to Carrie Anne Moss. She's an uninteresting looking plain girl. Putting her in PVC just makes her look like a pissed off unhappy plain girl trying to look hot. Not compelling at all.

      • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

        by 1u3hr ( 530656 )
        what movies are there that get it right, or right enough?

        "Pirates of Silicon Valley"

        Jobs: We're better than you are! We have better stuff.
        Gates: You don't get it, Steve. That doesn't matter!

  • Untraceable? Try Unwatchable! (Score:4, Interesting)

    by downix ( 84795 ) on Sunday January 27, 2008 @04:02PM (#22202188) Homepage
    It is really sad when Matrix Reloaded got hacking more accurate than a movie about hacking!

    these writers should log into IRC sometime and chat with people that know how this stuff works. I could have rewritten portions of this movie to be more plausible as well as more compelling.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Right, but frankly the movie would be boring as shit. Movie makers aren't avoiding accuracy in this area because they're ignorant or wanting to spread mistruths -- they're doing it because they know the real thing is pretty boring and drawn-out.
    • Seriously. Just go watch Rambo instead.

    • Re:Untraceable? Try Unwatchable! (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Dun Malg ( 230075 ) on Sunday January 27, 2008 @07:42PM (#22203608) Homepage

      these writers should log into IRC sometime and chat with people that know how this stuff works. I could have rewritten portions of this movie to be more plausible as well as more compelling.
      Let me let you in on a dirty little secret about script writers: they're mostly idiots. Granted, many are far more literate and intelligent than most people, but those tend to have a really bizarre streak of arrogant self importance that monkey-wrenches their ability to recognize their own fallibility. The works of those very few screenwriters that are diligent in their research don't turn out much better either. Once the script gets into the hands of the director and the producers, it often gets "fixed" so that it "won't be so confusing". Really, it all goes back to the primary problem with the entertainment industry in general: nepotism. There are too many blockhead writers, directors, producers, and general studio executives that got where they are because of who they know and/or who they are related to, rather than any particular display of skill at their craft (JJ Abrams, I am looking in your direction!). By the time a script goes from Final Draft Pro on the writer's iMac to the projector at your local UA GoogolPlex, it's passed through the hands of so many potential cow-eyed idiots that it's a wonder if the film contains any technical sophistication at all. Seriously, if I had a nickel for every time I've heard of (or personally experienced) a studio exec suggesting utterly asinine changes to a script before accepting it, well... I'd have a lot of freakin' nickels! The voiceover in the first release of Blade Runner? Fox execs asking Joss Whedon to make Mal in Firefly "less dark, more cheerful"? It happens all the time. It's sad, really, but because the industry is so intellectually inbred, there's just no place for meritocracy to take hold. How do they react when a movie somehow manages to do well because there were somehow fewer idiots involved? Do they say "we need to get more smart, competent folks in here to make movies"? No! They simply copy it relentlessly, somehow thinking the public is simply "hungry" for that genre, not that we want to see good movies. How many abysmal space movies came out after Star Wars was a hit? How many movies with stupid "twist" endings after The Sixth Sense*? The endless plethora of fantasy dreck following the successes of Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter*? It's a mass of idiots and fools, all patting each other on the back, telling each other how smart they all are. If they weren't smart, they wouldn't be paid so much, right?

      * themselves not particularly good, but they made enough money to induce the cloning process
      • I own a bound copy of a screenplay for a movie called "iRobot". The screenplay has absolutely no relation to the movie of the same name. I believe it was an early draft to show producers. However, I'd much rather see the movie if it had followed this screenplay.

  • Remote Execution: google more (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 27, 2008 @04:04PM (#22202204)
    "The biggest slip is that if you upload a trojan horse back to someone who was downloading data from your machine, there's still no way to force the remote criminal's computer to run it, as happens in the movie."

    This is actually how many worms have spread in the past, actually. If you can get files onto a windows box, you can probably execute them remotely (easy mode: you have acquired logon credentials or the box accepts null sessions).

    http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897553.aspx [microsoft.com]

    • Re:Remote Execution: google more (Score:5, Informative)

      by n0-0p ( 325773 ) on Sunday January 27, 2008 @04:41PM (#22202498)
      Uh, no. First off, null sessions have never granted the rights necessary to execute a remote shell (unless paired with an exploit). You need admin rights to kick off an exe via the SCM or scheduler. If you have that access already, copying a file is a foregone conclusion because you can just open a share.

      Of course, all of that assumes you have Netbios connectivity... over the Internet. That may have been plausible 5 years ago (probably more more), but someone in between will be blocking it these days. On top of that, current Windows XP and better have a lot more restrictions on Netbios traffic, in particular disabling the default null sessions.

      One final point: This scenario is actually quite reasonable if you assume they're exploiting an application on the attacker's system. There's likely to be exploits against the trojan itself if the binary is available for analysis, or if you can identify exploitable bugs in code shared between the client and server components. There's also the possibility of attacking any services he exposes, or perhaps file parser attacks against whatever he uses to read the content he nabbed. The details of such a counterattack are more complex, but well within the realm of reason.
    • I wouldn't even go that far. Just assume theres another exploit similar to the WMF picture exploit [ciac.org].

      Want to trojan them? Throw something in the data that will buffer overflow something parsing the data and execute code for you. You might not even need them to open it when you consider things like Desktop Search and similar features willingly parsing all the data on your harddrive with potentially vulnerable(or backdoored..) parsers.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by MadJo ( 674225 )
      But the villain wasn't running a Windows box, unless GNU has released a Windows version that we don't know about...

  • On behalf of everybody everywhere... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 27, 2008 @04:05PM (#22202212)

    ...please do not actually try to tell people this stuff. I'm geeky enough to be able to spot all this already without any help, but if somebody tried to explain it to me when I was trying to watch a film, I'd consider them a loser with zero social skills and never watch a film with them again. This kind of thing isn't entertaining or interesting, even to people who live and breath computers.

    • my thought exactly, nothing bothers me more than hear people brag about their technical exploits all the while I'm left to guess the only thing they really know about computers is how to poke around in Windows Control Panel and install RAM. Its my belief the smarter you are, the more you realize you know nothing. Kind of humbling really.

  • article title missing a set of quotation marks... (Score:5, Funny)

    by majorgoodvibes ( 1228026 ) on Sunday January 27, 2008 @04:06PM (#22202230)
    ...around "impress"
  • I would be laughing my ass off if the bad guy ran something on the hurd kernel.
  • I think the only thing worse as far as "hacking" or tech movies would be the one released recently whose plot revolved around getting killed by a text message or something equally ridiculous. The sad thing is that it will probably rake in millions because the general public doesn't care about plot, just how pretty the explosions are and that everything is dumbed down [mutilated] so that they can understand.

    • I think the only thing worse as far as "hacking" or tech movies would be the one released recently whose plot revolved around getting killed by a text message or something equally ridiculous.

      That was a horror movie, ala The Ring. It was meant to add the supernatural to the commonplace to be scary.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by yabos ( 719499 )
        There was the Ring which was a VHS tape you watch and then the dead girl kills you magically. Then there's another one basically the same where you get a voice mail message but your phone doesn't ring or it rings with a different ringtone or something. Then you die from that magically. Fucking stupid and it's basically the same movie with a few details changed.
    • You obviously haven't been on Myspace recently. Getting killed by reading messages is actually quite common but luckily the antidote is simple: get your friends to read the deadly messages. By golly no dead clown children with axes whose boyfriends dumped them will kill me at midnite!
    • I think the only thing worse as far as "hacking" or tech movies would be the one released recently whose plot revolved around getting killed by a text message or something equally ridiculous.

      Not sure which one you mean there, but it gave me the idea of sending the killer video from Ring on my mobile and then Bluetoothing it to people at random. Even more fun than 2girls1cup!

  • Yeah, I agreed [bbspot.com] that there weren't too many technical groaners in the movie, there were more implausible non-technical things that happened in the movie. Like why didn't she secure her car before getting back into it, especially when she suspected someone was in there? Oh well, what do you expect from a January movie.

  • As a public service... (Score:4, Funny)

    by jpellino ( 202698 ) on Sunday January 27, 2008 @04:25PM (#22202402)
    ... I say the next techno movie plot shows how forwarding insipidly cute emails about kittens doing something pukingly cute causes your head to explode.

    • ... I say the next techno movie plot shows how forwarding insipidly cute emails about kittens doing something pukingly cute causes your head to explode.
      You fool! There are sick, sick people out there who would try it, just to see what happens!

  • They know he's in Portland. Once they know that, he has to be on either cable or DSL, or mooching off someone else's nearby connection.

    The FBI could ask the cable company to reboot, in sequence, the router for each cable segment. When the right cable segment went momentarily offline, the streaming video would stop for a moment. Similarly, each DSLAM could be restarted. That would narrow it down to a hundred houses or so.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by esper ( 11644 )
      Of course, if the FBI's going to ask the ISPs to do that in a fashion such that the ISPs would agree to do so, I'd really hope that someone at the ISP would be bright enough to suggest that, instead of interrupting service for a huge number of customers, they could try looking up which of their subscribers is currently authenticated on that IP address, then check their customer records to get the subscriber's name and address. This would have the additional benefit of taking less time and narrowing it down

  • Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Sunday January 27, 2008 @04:31PM (#22202440)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • A stereotype of the downright annoying geek explaining what is wrong in the film DURING the film. Mind you the same stereotype exists for the physic / chem. / bio / math geek explaining why what you are watching is impossible (bullet ricochet with sparks anyone ?). Although I had a friend like that, she never did it in the cinema itself , always afterward or while watching tv.
  • <sarcasm>

    "Don't point that out to your date, of course, since she'll be more impressed by knowledgeable sneering, especially if everyone in the seats around you can hear what a smart guy she's with."

    </sarcasm>

    i know you are being sarcastic, but a sentence like this pretty much explains the social life with a straight face of a good amount of slashdotters here, so your sarcasm might be wasted here, and actually encourage this sort of behavior

  • Here are a few screen shots [imageshack.us] from the high (non-HD) movie trailer [apple.com]. I wonder if those IP addresses are valid. It looks like they use Vista.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by pikine ( 771084 )

      If a number in the IP address has only 1 or 2 digits, we never zero-prefix it to make it three digits. The IP address 192.010.125.120 really hurts my eyes. It actually is a real IP address that belongs to "Symbolics, Inc." The address 127.131.101.180 is the same as 127.0.0.1. All 127.* prefixed IP addresses are reserved for localhost. The third one, 010.191.100.122 is a non-routable intranet IP address. Whether it's valid or not depends on where the computer is.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by pikine ( 771084 )

        All in all, the movie does a good job using non-public IP addresses, like the 555- telephone number that the reviewer made an analogy of. However, 192.168.* are all class C networks, and not all addresses prefixed with 192.* are private. For example, 192.169.* is not private, and it belongs to someone in Hawaii according to its whois information.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by kv9 ( 697238 )

      I wonder if those IP addresses are valid. It looks like they use Vista.
      I wonder how come her ping.exe can do traceroutes. and print little country flags for private IPs. should I install Vista?

  • The biggest slip is that if you upload a trojan horse back to someone who was downloading data from your machine, there's still no way to force the remote criminal's computer to run it, as happens in the movie.

    My first reaction was to make the password file a Word document, and write the trojan as VBA macro, but at this time and age I don't know if that's still feasible. The most plausible way would be to craft a malformed Word document that causes buffer overrun when Word reads the file, executing arbitr

  • - I don't think the FBI can "blackhole" an IP address by clicking a button...

    Actually, I used to work for a company that sold products that did just that... sort of. I haven't seen the movie and don't plan to, but for traffic on their own enterprise network our goal was to give users a "big red button" they can hit to blackhole traffic that matches a given signature. This could be an IP, or it could be traffic from a given IP, to another IP on a specific port, or even matches packet content. We had another product for big ISPs that allows them to do the same (but I think it only w

  • The Net (Score:4, Funny)

    by Torodung ( 31985 ) on Sunday January 27, 2008 @05:18PM (#22202744) Journal
    Too bad she didn't have Sandra Bullock on her team to type "UPLOAD VIRUS." ;^)

    --
    Toro

  • "will offend a certain portion of the audience" (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Quila ( 201335 ) on Sunday January 27, 2008 @05:35PM (#22202844)
    Now why point this to the Michigan Militia? That is insulting.

    Owning a gun isn't just legal, it was encouraged by those who wrote the Constitution, and protected by it. Owning a handgun should provide zero suspicion of any other action. In fact, owning a registered handgun is a sign of a law-abiding citizen, since a criminal would likely not have his handguns registered.

    Either this section is completely bull, or it's a sad but true description of a government that sees legal handgun ownership as a sign of criminal leanings. Unfortunately the latter is more likely.

    • Re:"will offend a certain portion of the audience" (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Scutter ( 18425 ) on Sunday January 27, 2008 @06:37PM (#22203194) Journal
      Owning a gun isn't just legal, it was encouraged by those who wrote the Constitution, and protected by it. Owning a handgun should provide zero suspicion of any other action.

      You're not the only person who's noticed that Hollywood vilifies gun ownership while at the same time zealously worshiping it.

      Leaving aside the guilt of the person in the movie, this kind of database trolling is exactly why gun registration is a bad thing. Fortunately, my state (and many others) do not require gun registration.
  • This looks like another Hollywood marketeer ploy. Sounds like "Hackers" was better, and AJ always delivered woodies (those lips, that smile, whiplash body, breathless seductions keeping the heart pumping even in a mediocre movie or dead-body. So, if "Untraceable" is lacking in 5|!115, then ... I'll just watch Hackers again at home.

    If "Untraceable"is 2007 nerd-oriented ... where are the babes/bitches, booze/beer, caffeine/meth ... more pink, splattering red, and seditious seductive black. (Technology Experie
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • If you need a badly written article on Slashdot telling you how to "impress your friends" with your technical knowledge about a bad techno-thriller, then maybe you should stop reading Slashdot, stop trying to impress people, and read a book or something to learn a damn thing or two?

    -Bill

  • Anyone else remember the episode The Mikado [fourthhorseman.com] from season two of Millennium? Based on the trailer, looks like the writers of this movie did too.

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