In this week's Cinematical Seven, Alison Nastasi writes about those figments of screenwriters imaginations - the hackers. From the ridiculous to the implausibly miscast, these guys and girls litter films with their fingers flying over keyboards, and their allure showing through their quirky costumes.
Every movie with a character who is a hacker is touted as being the world's uberest of all uber hackers. While certain films try to maintain some semblance of reality when it comes to portraying their leet haxors, other movies beg you to completely suspend your disbelief -- arming their geeky geniuses with an array of outlandish talents and tools of the trade. I don't have a particularly nerdy background in computers, so I'm ok with letting this kind of film take me where it wants to -- but there are some instances where the ridiculous segues into the absurd.
Suspiciously absent from the list is the movie, Hackers (pictured above, ©MGM/United Artists). Every hacker character in this movie is an over-the-top stereotype that should not be taken seriously. Link to article.
Take Live Free or Die Hard for instance.
You know, the movie where the team of hackers can hack into, access, and control any system with even a remotely tenuous connection to electricity.
TV and cell networks, security cameras, traffic control systems, military jets, the stock market, gas mains and any bank known to man to name a few.
And as soon as one is made - I'll plant an icepick in my brain and sign up for a Facebook account to write about it.
Jack Stanfield of firewall is at the most an ethical hacker (penetration tester). He's the network security engineer in charge of protecting the bank's assets, he's doing his job. He does pretty much what any admin in his position would do, though it has been dramatized to make it movie-worthy.
Real hacking is hours and hours of typing, reading, studying, diagramming, etc. the most boring thing on earth to watch. People doing their jobs are not hackers. I work in IT, but I'm not a hacker, I've been allowed to or granted myself access to the systems I manage. A hacker breaks in. The same as you have a key to your house and a burglar busts a window.
@MrMichael and dbios: you're both right. Phreaking and Hacking are the same and different depending on who you consider the expert on the subject. Steve Wozniak (later of Apple fame) is generally regarded as the person who brought them both together by being both a computer hobbyist and a blue-boxer.
It's SO absolutely ridiculous, but it's still fun.
Hacker movies aside.
What I don't understand are tv shows and movies STILL insisting that computers need to make little boops, beeps, zings, whatever whenever someone does something on it.
Looking up an internet site? Well, the window opening makes a nice little zing or beep or whatever other stupid ass sound.
UGH it irritates me to no end.
So, sorry Johnny... that would be why that movie would most likely be absent from the list.
As with most movies it took liberties (the "Gibson" supercomputer is actually an inside reference to William Gibson, one of the fathers of the cyberpunk movement) but the movie doesn't belong on a list of terribad hacking movies from a technical standpoint.
As hilarious as some things in this movie are (the nemesis riding the skateboard, lol), it does have many things ground in reality ("Dragon book. Compiler design", hehe).
The funny thing is that what annoys people in the know most sometimes becomes reality (and could later be considered visionary, hehe). Remember the scene in The Net (shudder) where Sandra Bullock's character is on some awesome looking (at the time) website with animations and multimedia (I remember an animated character playing a guitar or something)? It wreaked of utter bullshit at the time, but that could easily be done in Flash today (the movie still sucks, hehe).
HACK THE PLANET!!!