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."
Yes, but (Score:5, Funny)
Too bad scenes of someone typing furiously at a computer are boring as hell.
Re:Yes, but (Score:4, Funny)
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It's open source. Write it yourself.
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> "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."
With all due respect, Robert Redford raised the average age quite a bit. :-/
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I'm still searching for that elusive hacking app with fancy graphics and controls that's portrayed in all hacking movies.
We should get that woman from CSI to write one in VB.
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.
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John McClane didn't have a daughter in the last Die Hard Movie!
http://xkcd.com/566/ [xkcd.com]
Yes it's the matrix but POINT STILL STANDS!
Re:Yes, but (Score:4, Funny)
Dear Die Hard,
You rock. Especially the part where that dude is on the rooftop, and you use Emacs to reconfigure his system files to cause a buffer overflow.
P.S. Do you know Mad Max?
Homer J. Simpson
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You might be able to pass off an established botnet's command and control system as being decked out with Hollywood-friendly graphical control systems (even twinkling with their mundane activities being monitored) while also allowing for a realistic example of someone typing really fast for a few seconds and exerting immediate visible control. Even without going to massively split-screen mode, you could have some of zombified machines in the same room just to confirm his latest code works before it is unlea
Re:Yes, but (Score:4, Funny)
As are command prompts, apparently. I'm still searching for that elusive hacking app with fancy graphics and controls that's portrayed in all hacking movies.
Hell, no. Have you seen the fonts on those things, they're HUGE! You get less characters per screen than a VIC-20. And you have to sit through 20 seconds of animations of lined globes and screen-filling blinking/pulsing OVERRIDE and SYSTEM MALFUNCTION and PASSWORD DENIED every freakin' time you do something. It's like the UI designer made it for an uninformed audience watching the action second-hand on a television set, not for the person using it!
Re:Yes, but (Score:5, Interesting)
http://www.symantec.com/connect/blogs/zeus-king-underground-crimeware-toolkits [symantec.com]
In the YouTube video at 1:48 you can see the ZuesBuilder gui
Re:Yes, but (Score:5, Interesting)
You know, I think movies like Wargames, Matrix (and to a smaller extent, Sneakers) did this pretty decently. For example, the scene where Neo is first contacted by Trinity [youtube.com] is a great example of how powerful text can be, if used properly.
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In fact Sneakers is probably the best hacker movie to date. Wargames is certainly in the top five, too.
Re:Yes, but (Score:4, Insightful)
In fact Sneakers is probably the best hacker movie to date. Wargames is certainly in the top five, too.
Heretic.
Wargames in the top five hacker movies? Nonsense. Wargames is the greatest film ever made. No need to restrict the statement to "hacker movies." Get out of here with your foolish Sneakers superiority complex.
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My question is, why do hackers always type so slowly? In fact, the only time I ever see people typing quickly on a keyboard is when they're obviously faking it. This always bugs me.
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You call that well treated? (Score:5, Insightful)
The person's themselves may be realistic in terms of age and profession, but nothing else is well treated. Movies continue to routinely portray unrealistic and nonsensical computer interactions and capabilities, which is particularly harmful to a depiction of a hacker.
Re:You call that well treated? (Score:5, Insightful)
While hackers are often shown to have super-technical abilities that make no sense, so are the "good guys." I think to some degree it kind of counter-balances the whole thing.
Computers/technology isn't accurate in films but that is a small part of a much larger science rant in which all of the fields of science are abused for your viewing pleasure, biology, chemistry, engineering, and psychics.
Heck even psychology is abused in movies and that is borderline pseudoscience anyway....
Re:You call that well treated? (Score:4, Funny)
I'm confused. You say that hackers are shown to have super-technical abilities, but so are the good guys. That doesn't make any sense.
[Blink]
Wait... Are you trying to say that hackers are the bad guys?
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You my friend, have never watched Numb3rs.
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Computers/technology isn't accurate in films but that is a small part of a much larger general rant in which all of the fields of anything are abused for your viewing pleasure.
The above modified statement is, in my opinion, much more accurate.
As a software developer/general nerd, I cringe whenever someone on screen starts talking about technology. As a private pilot, I cringe whenever someone on screen starts talking about aviation. I've watched movies with people from all kinds of professions who cringe when their particular area of expertise is represented on screen. And don't get me started on those painful scenes in which actors who obviously have never picked up a musical in
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Re:You call that well treated? (Score:5, Funny)
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Please tell me, how psycho-analysis traces back phenomenons to neural networks? Or transactional psychology?
Sorry to disappoint you but the science that researches neural networks is not psychology, but machine-learning. Psychologists don't know shit about neural networks.
On the other hand psychiatry dwelves into bio-chemistry and in the anatomy of brain, but it's a completely different profession, they're basically doctors, not some liberal-art majors. They might have more knowledge about neural networks a
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.
Re:You call that well treated? (Score:5, Funny)
I beg to differ, I'm pretty sure Hugh Jackman's character in Swordfish was treated pretty well...during some of the "hacking" scenes, anyway.
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If by treated well you mean got his winky whacked. Sure.
Still waiting on my blowjob (Score:4, Funny)
Seriously. I wanna know where you go for a job interview that tests you under pressure (excuse the pun) of a blowjob.
I'd apply in a heartbeat.
Several times.
A day!
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On the plus side, I found a place that does that.
On the down side, it's the IT dept. for Big Gay Al's Big Gay Animal Sanctuary, and Al does the interviews himself.
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Movies are entertainment and what 'hackers' do, no matter what the definition of the word you feel like using, is really very boring to watch.
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What, you mean you've never hacked the Gibson!? Just because you're a bad hacker doesn't mean they should dumb down the hackers in movies for you.
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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.
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What... like this [youtube.com], this [youtube.com], this [youtube.com] or this [youtube.com]?
Re:You call that well treated? (Score:5, Insightful)
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This is true but I think the degree to which computers are portrayed unrealistically is much greater then for most things.
Cars in movies are generally depicted with four tires, a steering wheel, windows, a radio, etc.. People are familiar with them so mistakes in this area are not common. Computers, however, are rarely depicted accurately. In the last decade or so the physical device has gotten better--mostly, though why all people need three 20+ inch LCDs is beyond me--but what's on the screen has remained
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Have you ever used a system with 3 20" LCD monitors? Don't knock it until you try it. It is hard to go back to just one!
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Every time I see a news article on something I have first hand knowledge of it's a distorted if not outright false depiction of events.
Every time I see a news article on something I don't know about it must be true, since it's in the newspaper.
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You call that realistic? Realistic would be an obese mouth-breathing zit-encrusted neckbeard with eyeglasses taped together screaming "LOL I troll you!" while typing furiously into a sticky keyboard, piss-bottle at the ready, bound in a semen-crusted dragon shirt and yellow skid-marked briefs. What's surprising is that Hollywood dosen't use the actual stereotype as described above. .
Jurassic Park
Dennis Nedry played by Wayne Knight (aka Newman on Seinfeld)
A cartoon image of Nedry appears on the screen and waves its little finger disapprovingly.
CARTOON NEDRY: "You didn't say the magic word!"
ARNOLD: Please, God damn it! I hate this hacker crap!
Close enough?
Stupid (Score:5, Funny)
Why did this "study" get funding? Because it would make headlines.
Poor old Professor Knowsmath and his study of non-commutive ring structures in siberian oscillations. He'll have to make do with the money the university raised from raffling off that cat (4 euros).
News Flash! (Score:3, Funny)
Nothing to see here. Move along
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Re:News Flash! (Score:5, Insightful)
Most people in any profession, if they can't let go of their insistence on reality, dislike or down right hate movie portrayals of what they do.
Re:News Flash! (Score:4, Funny)
IMost people in any profession, if they can't let go of their insistence on reality, dislike or down right hate movie portrayals of what they do.
I'm waiting for the movie about 'Slashdot Karma Whores'. I'm positive I won't like the way those guys are portrayed. Stupid writers.
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Too bad you don't get Karma for Funny posts ;)
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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:News Flash! (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't think this is true at all. Movies like Wargames manage to be decently realistic
Yes, a kid having conversations with an intelligent computer, who then evades authorities and escapes from the Cheyenne Mountain NORAD facility, and nuclear war is averted which the computer is convinced of the futility of war... is decently realistic. For unusual values of "realistic."
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We've seen those so apparently no other movie about or related to the subject can ever be made.
That might be because someone sitting and thinking is not inherently fun to watch. Make a movie about your day at work and let me know how well it sells.
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It's called "suspension of disbelief" and you need it for damned near any movie or TV show, especially action flicks.
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Really? (Score:3, Interesting)
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I would argue Independence Day still has the most absurd hack of all time.
From the article: "A Mac hacking into an alien operating system and loading a virus. That's Steve Jobs' dream: The power of the Mac"
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I would argue Independence Day still has the most absurd hack of all time.
I concur. Like any alien race would be using anything less than a 256 bit instruction set architecture. When's Apple gonna come out with one of those, huh? I thought so. I'm still waiting for a 256 bit FSB!
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He had plenty of time! Maybe he did it when he was drunk.
Or, maybe he downloaded a trojan toolkit from the interwebs. Probably found it on limewire, that's where all the other viruses are!
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He had plenty of time! Maybe he did it when he was drunk.
Sounds plausible. [youtube.com]
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Maturity in IT really means that you're at the point where you finally realize, 'there really is no magic'.
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Maturity in IT really means that you're at the point where you finally realize, 'there really is no magic'.
Huh? Why would you think there was magic in the first place? Does anybody start a career in IT believing it is run on magic?
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I guess I don't really help out with stopping the stereotype though. I often answer with "FM Principal" (F*cking Magic) when I fix something and don't know what exactly the fix was
Ah, the Proximity Of Genius effect ("hey it suddenly works now you're here") and it's dark-side equivalent the Gabriel Effect [penny-arcade.com].
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As for mature, they are (mostly) doing something criminal for
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Hollywood isn't reality - we want it that way (Score:2)
Hollywood figured this out a long time ago. If we are going to stare at a screen for two hours we want eye candy.
Obligatory (Score:5, Funny)
If we are going to stare at a screen for two hours we want eye candy.
I don't even see the code. All I see is blonde, brunette, red-head...
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Re:Obligatory (Score:5, Funny)
LA (Score:2)
Either there are too many hackers or almost none in LA (I think almost none). It is pretty scarce to find free internet or even reliable internet in this town, or even anyone who know what their talking about unless they are holding up a company. Then again, I'm from the SV.
Oh really? (Score:2)
I'm hacking the Gibson. Your argument is invalid.
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?
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Who had hacker movies in 1960? Can anyone name a hacker movie off the top of his head before War Games?
This was well explained in the article.... kids these days...
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1960s movies aren't my thing. Tron was the only pre-War Games movie that I thought of. You should RTFA because we have all seen 4 of the 6 listed before War Games.
- doug
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"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: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.
Sneakers (Score:5, Insightful)
Sneakers is the best hacking movie ever.
Re:Sneakers (Score:5, Insightful)
"War Games"
Serious subject.
Culturally significant.
Perhaps the most realistic "hacking" in Hollywood history.
All tech involved was just a small step removed from the real thing.
Dated today, but holds up very well.
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All tech involved was just a small step removed from the real thing.
Except it also has the most overused and silly computer-related tropes ever in it : the logicbomb [tvtropes.org].
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Except it wasn't silly, it was one of the best examples of defeating a computer through logic ever. It wasn't just some self-contradictory piece of logic that made Joshua go into an infinite loop or go offline while saying "does not compute". It was a challenge to beat itself at Tic-Tac-Toe with a lesson which Joshua learned and then intuitively applied to Thermonuclear War. It wasn't a logic-bomb, it was logic. Joshua learned that nuclear war was futile.
Compare with all the examples from E.g. Star Trek
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All tech involved was just a small step removed from the real thing.
Um, you do realize that you're talking about a movie with a sentient computer, don't you? Also, the war dialing wasn't even realistic, because the computer had no way to disconnect the phone between calls. He just picked it up off the cradle and put it in the modem, and it magically made a bunch of separate calls.
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I think he was referring to the cracking techniques not the AI, e.g. war dialing, which is the only cracking technique I can remember from the movie. But that was realistic - a brute force attack on a search space, logging hits on solutions.
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Re:Sneakers (Score:5, Funny)
The best hacking films are...
The best hacking film of all time, therefore, is Swordfish, followed by a two-way tie between War Games and Sneakers. Hackers comes in fourth--not even a naked 19-year-old Angelina Jolie could save that piece of shit. :-)
UNIX (Score:4, Funny)
The only instance of 'movie hackers' which spring to mind is:
"It's a UNIX system! I know this! "
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The worst thing is "Jurassic Parc" is on his list but he counted Nedry (the fat nerd who locked out the system) but not the little girl in that infamous 'I know UNIX' scene. Pretty bogus.
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That 3d box software is a real thing for IRIX - called fsn (filesystem navigator). At least that was real. It's even conceivable you could use it to run a shell script that would do whatever it was they needed.
DUH! (Score:2)
If your a movie studio and you believe there is a worldwide consortium of hackers [wikipedia.org] that can call on each other to attack a specific target you are going to tread VERY lightly in poking fun at said group.
HPAV Crowd Then and Now (Score:2)
Time wise, if we assume Hollywood lags about 10 years behind the times then they are accurate suprisingly. Back in the days when ACiD, TRiBES and iCE were waging a holy war of ANSI art packs across the BBS era and when USENET was full of useful information rather then spam and people still cared about blue boxes the scene was largely '))>>{
P.S. Anyone know where I can find the old ANSI animation "The Slug"?
HACK THE PLANET! (Score:2, Offtopic)
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They're TRASHING our rights! They're TRASHING the flow of data! TRASHING! TRASHING! TRASHIIIIING!!!
Now, how do you portray "hacking" well on TV? (Score:3, Interesting)
Thanks for all the rants how Hollywood seriously crashes and burns when it comes to "sensible" display of hacking, how it is constantly a firework of flahy graphics and nonsensical flicker output... But, well, how else do you want to do it?
Your goal, when making a movie, is to show something that the viewer wants to see. Hacking is not exactly a spectator sport. What do you see? Some guy, reading various boards, hunting for new 0days, trying stuff against his own server (again, text only, why bother writing a graphical frontend... because none exists since, well, what you're doing SHOULD not work and is certainly not the "normal flow of operation"), then, when it's time to actually pry the juicy server open it's again a few tools and their text output that tells the (informed) hacker which exploit might work, he prods again, maybe gets some garbled output, then a few lines of scp and a few (textual) progress bars...
I think if you want to show hackers sensibly, the only way is the same you see in medical series: Concentrate on something other than the "actual" work. How often do you actually get to see some doctors operate? An operation can take hours, yet you might see a minute or so of OP time in a show, if that. The focus is elsewhere, and there's a really good reason why: You, the viewer, without a medical background, could not tell a healthy liver from one that's gonna blow in a minute anyway. You would not "get" why everyone's getting hectic even though there isn't a geyser of blood squirting from the patient's belly. Likewise, the whole "shit hits the fan and everything starts flashing" crap should be canned in favor of one of the hackers telling the viewer why hell breaks lose (to give a reason just why he explains it, have one of the non-tech guys with them so there's a reason he tells the viewer how his friend just stumbled over a tripwire in the server security) and put the focus elsewhere in your story.
Sorry, there is no "good" way to show hacking as entertaining to watch and realistic too. It just isn't interesting to watch a hacker do his magic when you have no idea what's going on. A few lines of "realistic" stuff are fine if they're there to build tension. A blinking caret can be a great cliffhanger when the audience gets explained that the next output will make or break their run.
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Off course they do!!!
$ apt-get install r2d2
Re:Search burbling, no cursors, huge fonts (Score:4, Insightful)
I try to allow for artistic license, but real computers DON'T MAKE CUTE R2D2 NOISES WHEN THEY'RE SEARCHING!
Well, they CAN, you know, if you want them to. I once had a boss named Dave and changed all his Windows sounds to samples of HAL from 2001. "I'm sorry, Dave, I'm afraid you can't do that."
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The Wii makes little beeping sounds that grow and fade in volume when it is connecting or downloading.
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...They obviously did not see Swordfish or Hackers as they would understand what REAL hackers are.
And you obviously didn't see the list of films. [comp.dit.ie] they studied.
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Probably depends on where you live. I'm not sure the tech company I work for has a single asian man working for us, nor did my last one. A few Indians, African-Americans, all nature of white guys.
I knew plenty of asian programmers in college, but they weren't the majority by any means.
This is in Columbus, Ohio, though, where pretty much the only asians who grew up here have parents working at the Honda plant.
Wonder if the movie studios are trying to shy away from the more obvious stereotypes.
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Welcome back to the mid-90s. Do these teenaged whiz-kids do their personal computer hacking on-line?
No, dude, they use.... TERMINAL ENTRY [wikipedia.org]. Hackers AND terrorists! It's two great tastes that taste like Z-movie together!
(For the truly bored, a semi-dramatic reading of box blurb available here [loadingreadyrun.com], 4:20ish-5:20ish, after annoying commercial message.)
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Now I feel like washing out my mouth
You typed that with your tongue? EWWWWW!