Joe_Bogus

I built my first computer 42 years ago, and never in that length of time have I seen Hollywood actually portray computing accurately. Remember: It's Just a F*cking Movie!
Written on 8/12/06

My Comment:

coder2000

Anyone seen Firewall with Harrison Ford? That movie has to have the most realistic hacking and computer usage I have ever seen in a movie. Otherwise I agree with the list and say its a movie enjoy. Written on 8/12/06

My Comment:

NetWraith

Realistic computer use? Give me a break. He pulls out his laptop under an overpass, is on the net in 3 seconds, finds the website that tracks his dog's collar (the bit about the GPS in the collar is believeable, at least)and then drives away with his secretary keeping tabs on the dog while driving out of town and obviously merrily skipping from one free Wireless Access point to another without ever losing his connection. Utter Bullshit. And before anyone says well maybe he had a satelite hookup...last time I checked the smallest one of those was still the size of a textbook and needs to be stationary and pointed at a satelite.

Oh..and call the cops from your cell phone in the middle of no where, just for good measure.

That said, I will admit it's better than most. Written on 15/12/06

My Comment:

spdygnlz

Oh, especially the part where he TAPES the scanner from the fax machine (or whatever it was) to the monitor and hooks it right up to the iPod. What was the line? "A thousand songs or a thousand accounts, it doesn't know the difference." How many things can we find wrong with that? Written on 15/12/06

My Comment:

elfidomx

It's so funny, he also developed (i guess because if not i should say that the fax was made also by apple and specially designed for iPod) a driver in order to make the ipod work with the fax, and what do you think about a group of a virus that falls the network as soon as it's send even if no one had opened it, what kind of code can do that shit without have been executed. Written on 15/12/06

My Comment:

groberts1980

Ever heard if EDVO? Cellular internet access? No?

I've never seen the movie, but from what you've described, he could easily have a PCMCIA card that uses a cell carrier to access the internet. Written on 16/1/07

My Comment:

andrek

I have 3G wireless card which gives me 120Mbs access to Internet in coverage areas, which is usually the most of Sydney. Nice thing to have when catching a train to office and back for an hour each way. So yes, it's quite possible. Written on 17/1/07

My Comment:

Jaqui

Satellite connection equipment that will work on a moving vehicle is available, has been for 5 years.
the smallest ones are about the size of a toaster oven.
want to see one yourself? head to a local marina and look at the funny little white domes on the yachts.
satellite telephone systems. :)

Not a viable option for a car, but for an RV they would work. Written on 8/4/07

My Comment:

gatorpower

I have a KVH Tracvision A5 Satellite on my SUV. It's about the size of a pizza box that you put ontop of your car. It gets direcTV ;) ...and it gets the internet. Though, nothing close to broadband, it's twice as fast as a 56K. It only costs $3K (advertised to boat-owners and RVs) You can also set up your computer to get dial-up from your cell phone. I haven't done that because I really don't need to, but it's an available option. There are also HUGE wifi areas near airports and in some downtown areas.

There is 'consumer electronics' and then there's 'rich person electronics'. Rich person electronics is actually pretty cool. With my own eyes, I have seen things like a HDTV in a shower with a remote on the massaging shower head lol Written on 7/5/07

My Comment:

firestorm69

What I love is how most coders in movies know every programming language ever created. I am a PERL programmer, I have recently learned a lot of PHP mostly because of it's similarity to PERL. There have been times when I needed to fix or modify apps for a client that were written in other formats such as ASP or Cold Fusion. I can look at code written in other programming languages and gain a basic understanding of what is going on, but it takes longer to actually modify or change the code because of the differences between the way each one works. Each one has different built-in functions and different ways of using variables, and the list goes on. But in movies, they always just happen to know the language and are able to discover a hole or modify the code to do what they want. Written on 8/12/06

My Comment:

Atilaw

Some of us out there end up having to learn more than a few languages... granted I couldn't switch from one to the other instantly, but it wouldnt take a whole lot of time.

So far it's been:
BASIC
VisualBasic
Pascal
Delphi
Modula2
C
C++
C#
Java
PHP
Perl
Python

... there are more, but I can't be bothered! :)

Best Geek ever - that guy from Alias!! lol.. he was electric/maths/encryption/hacker/sysadmin/developer/physics/science in general expert... basically, he was god in human form... and he was terrible with the ladies... good stuff!! :) Written on 16/12/06

My Comment:

rcasha

I wrote a pretty similar article last month on a treeware publication. Some nice examples here too :)

http://technology.timesofmalta.com/article.php?id=2432 Written on 9/12/06

My Comment:

JaneCopland

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

Sorry, no. Just no.

But I heard that if the kids is autistic, he can do it in at least two minutes. Written on 9/12/06

My Comment:

Fluxx

Exactly Jane...he just "sees" it better than us common folk. We'll never understand. Written on 9/12/06

My Comment:

asdqweasd

He just can't communicate it to anyone else. Written on 17/1/07

My Comment:

Magicmerlin

Autistic kids do see things very diffrent from
the real worl and thats why they can break codes
but i think a 8 year old is just too young to
understand anything like that.

Signature: Silver Jewellery Written on 4/8/08

My Comment:

ScottWill

What would be even more impressive is if, using that same cat5 cable and bag of glitter, you could get your laptop to crap out toast! Written on 9/12/06

My Comment:

Oatmeal

thptttt-fffffftttt



that's what it sounds like when laptops crap toast Written on 9/12/06

My Comment:

asdqweasd

Is that what that little door on the side is for?
I thought it was a cup holder Written on 17/1/07

My Comment:

adam410

"9. People who write code use mice"

While this is true, I know a lot of coders, including myself who very regularly abandon the mouse all together when coding. A lot of people use command line and editors like vi for most of their programming, I know I do whenever I'm working on a remote machine. Written on 9/12/06

My Comment:

gpyper

I hate it when In a movie or on TV code gets projected onto faces, far walls, and everything else in front of the screen. If this happened in real life you'd be blind in a few minutes. Written on 9/12/06

My Comment:

fil

... and you wouldn't see anything from the start. Think about looking into a projector directly instead of the wall. Written on 14/12/06

My Comment:

lmb

I can agree to that. A mice can be handy, but when I work a entire day with it, it's a start of a bad evening. Written on 9/12/06

My Comment:

JimXugle

I hate to break it to you, but you can run WordPress on your toaster.



http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=25321



No glitter reqired, but you still need the Cat5e cable. Written on 9/12/06

My Comment:

soldierb

9. People who write code use mice



So you obviously didn't see the CSI episode when the guy can't type quickly enough to hack the machine... so the girl sits down down next to him and hurries him up by typing on the other side of the keyboard? Written on 9/12/06

My Comment:

gvn2fly

Really?? NO WAY!!!! Written on 11/12/06

My Comment:

missweb

Well, I think that was NCIS, but still, point taken.

Don't get me wrong, I enjoy shows like CSI and NCIS, but I'm overly analytical, so more often than not, with the assistance of my equally-overly-analytical dad, I'll be pointing out the flaws in the show.....


In fact, last night, I watched Numb3rs and there was a part where a computer recovered from an explosion, was searched for information. First of all, they connected the fried hard drive to a computer of the exact same model (what's the likelihood that they would have access to every computer model, just in case???). They couldn't access it through the computer so they opened up the hard drive and used a "magnetic reader" to display the information onto the wall (debatable whether that is even possible....I've never encountered it, but who knows what the FBI has.....). and finally, the magnetic reader thing actually worked and displayed a bunch of gibberish onto the wall, from which they found the name of a .jpg file.....and they got the pic.

Now, I don't know everything, but I think that stretches imagination a bit. But it makes for a great storyline.

Haven't seen movies with friends lately.........connection?? Written on 30/12/06

My Comment:

asdqweasd

Must have been an incredibly small magnetic reader. Written on 17/1/07

My Comment:

iamderrick

CSI is a fictional crime drama artard.. Written on 5/3/07

My Comment:

Fonseca

Best. list. ever. Written on 9/12/06

My Comment:

katz45

alot of your examples cite movies that are set in the future. they are exagerating the way coders are so we can see the way they think the future could be. so you saying that things aren't actually like that is like dispelling myths about the self driving cars in i-robot because cars don't actually do that now. Written on 9/12/06

My Comment:

Electrocat

About half the movies he is talking about have annoyed me and are set in the present. Hackerz for instance is a crap movie about teen hackers and have several of the examples in this list. Get off you high horse and join the adult world katz45. Are does your code require open gl?

I guess our author ran out of time before his deadline as I can think of at least 10 movies he didn't cover. Written on 10/12/06

My Comment:

samzen06

The movie "PI" is I think based around more of a real programming or coding. well it shows more of what people who use computers do a lot, and fill their rooms with it. Written on 14/12/06

My Comment:

EpicQuaker

Nice digital apoplexy, Electrocat...also, nice withering putdown with that misspelled OpenGL nonsense. Written on 29/6/07

My Comment:

eyeonbooks

I know, it's not coding, per se, but it drives me crazy to see a movie or TV character (such as a "Law & Order" detective) sit down at a computer they have never seen before, tap a few keystrokes, access the entire contents of the suspect's hard drive, find the exact file they need, and display it in the precise format they need ("find all the left-handers who recently bought a Toyota"). Written on 9/12/06

My Comment:

ericmoritz

What drives me crazy is when reporters think I can do that. I work as a programmer at a newspaper, and numerous times I get reporters calling me up and asking me ta find "all left-handers who recently bought a Toyota"... I think from now on I'll call that a "CSI query". Written on 8/12/06

My Comment:

asdqweasd

Doesn't everybody use computers that way? Written on 17/1/07

My Comment:

threeFiddy

I think my favorite example of one of these points is the movie Swordfish, where Hugh Jackman is the amazing hacker guy. He has to code up a worm or something in the movie, and his setup is something like a six screen machine, where the actual coding is not lines of text, but rather 3D cubes. He has to place the 3D cubes onto a bigger 3D cube that spans all his screens, and if he screws up, cubes start to fall off...



It was so bad, I wish coding really was like that, might actually be more exciting... Written on 9/12/06

My Comment:

Fluxx

I know, that scene always cracks me up. "Watch out skeezy John Travolta, don't bump the chair or the trojan cubes might all go out of alignment!" Written on 9/12/06

My Comment:

JaneCopland

So you're telling me that much of what we see in television and film that is set in the "present day" is spot-on accurate? Written on 9/12/06

My Comment:

katz45

no actually, I never said it was accurate or inacurate. what I said was that trying to debunk something that is set in the future where we don't know what will happen doesn't make alot of sence. Written on 9/12/06

My Comment:

bugmenot

You're just trolling, right katz? Nobody could be THAT fucking retarded in real life, right? Right?

Please?
Written on 8/12/06

My Comment:

JaneCopland

I wonder how 3D cubes become a worm? Written on 9/12/06

My Comment:

codeninja

Square peg... Round Hole... It clogs the tubes...

Pfft! N00b.! :) Written on 10/12/06

My Comment:

mdedmon

The best part of this multi-monitor scene was the sound effect. When Travolta opened the door and showed him the computer, it made a deep whooshing sound like it was about to take off. Of course the sound effect was accompanied by a graphic that "whooshed" around the 6 screens.

In the theatre I laughed out loud! Ridiculous. Written on 11/12/06

My Comment:

ahmadster

This may not be code but BOY do I hate this. You will always see some police officer looking over a "computer whiz"'s sholder and he says "Hey enhance that surveillance camera image". And then you hear bleppity bleep and zooming then pixilization then some more zooming and some depixilization and tadaaaaa. Like magic, the crappy 0.00001 pixel cam produces a 200 mega pixel detailed shot of the criminals eye lashes.



Way too stupid. For once I'd like to see it close to how it really is. Written on 9/12/06

My Comment:

spike

well, 2 things...



about #9...



Some have even had SEX! Holy Crap!



I've never had sex. oh wait.. yeah I have... hmph. you could be right...



but um...



about us using mice... speak for yourself. I spend most of my time in the terminal. Mice slow me down. cmd-rightarrow/leftarrow is the best for cycling through terminal windows... and when I'm in KDE or Gnome (depending on the box I'm using), I just cycle through tabs in there...



and even when I am using a mouse for computing, I position my hands in quake mode. one hand on the mouse and the other over to the left of the keyboard for quick access to modifiers and keyboard shortcuts.



just my $.02 Written on 9/12/06

My Comment:

CygnusX1

Yeah, I got one. You CANNOT phreak (hack) a pay-phone with a soda can's pop-top that you found lying nearby (see WarGames movie), in order to get a free phone call.



LOTS of Hollywood movies have taken liberties with Layer 1 (the physical layer, ie copper phone lines and such) issues, such as Hackers with the pay-phone handsets duct-taped together to create an extra layer of "untracebleness". Seriously, I've tried DUN via a payphone... not happening, especially not while using said payphone(s) as a relay for a coordinated hacking attempt. Written on 9/12/06

My Comment:

1010011010

The POTS has undergone extensive hardening since the late 1980s. Usually any hack featured in a movie is already fixed or fixed shortly thereafter. Written on 9/12/06

My Comment:

Atilaw

Yeah - they have done the same with Coke machines too now... the admin code you can access and pop out free drinks was plugged up on most modern machines... damn them all!! :) Written on 16/12/06

My Comment:

bugmenot

You could get free calls on old-fashioned pay phones with a pull tab (or paperclip or piece of wire). Like all the it-can't-possibly-be-that-easy phreaker tricks, this relied on in-band signaling; the resistance of one of the lines to ground was used to indicate payment or something, and you could spoof this by shorting one of the microphone wires to the chassis. AIUI this was a pretty-much obsolete phreaking technique when WarGames came out and it's ancient history now. Written on 10/12/06

My Comment:

JaneCopland

I only see a mention of Hackers and Independence Day. A lot of the examples don't even cite a film and many other things, like genius eight year olds, aren't likely to happen. There have been a thousand "futuristic" movies, set in the early 21st century that look retarded now. However, if we can surf into a 3D FBI database in magic coding cubicles one day, then that would be rad. Written on 9/12/06

My Comment:

CheShA

How about Jurassic Park, that little known film where the genius 8 year old cracks the 3d, flying-through-space "Unix" system? You patently haven't seen many movies if you need citations for the items that aren't cited. Written on 12/12/06

My Comment:

focker

Actually, you can surf the filesystem of a Unix system. There is a graphical program that does this. Google for it. I saw it back in 2001 in Linux Journal. Written on 19/3/07

My Comment:

beezel

i MUST know of this episode....PLZ tell me which it is. that clip will go down in my personal favorites. its just sooooo plausible!!! i mean, shit! now my typing teacher will know how my friend and i got 190wpm! Written on 9/12/06

My Comment:

beezel

so I'm not the only guy surfin the web with my fingers in WASD position? i find it makes it easier to start gaming if my fingers just never move from those positions...



on a similar note, we should lobby mavis beacon to make WASD the new home row. Written on 9/12/06

My Comment:

Psyfer

I agree, WASD is my 'home row' though, when I'm actually typing, I do use the real home row keys, I type a lot faster that way then using the 'hunt and peck' method that many of my friends use. Written on 14/12/06

My Comment:

Fulgore

How about?

*Code cannot be just 'whipped up' in a few seconds like Hollywood hackers. Well, perhaps a program that prints "hello world" can, but to write these exploits and programs that are required to hack/crack takes days, months or even years. They don't realise that most of programming is about making a change to the code, compiling it, testing it, debugging it, then changing it, then compiling it etc. Waiting for a compiler to finish compiling code alone can take hours.



Also, please make this site more compatible with Opera (I get logged out every time I click on a link) - get with the times people, Opera9 > Firefox2, IE7 and anything Apple could ever imagine. Written on 9/12/06

My Comment:

Vulcan

ha, "hello world" was from my first java book. Written on 14/1/07

My Comment:

Spikeon

yes, sure, opera 9 is also GAYER than a french crossdresser.

never liked it, and well, honestly, noone cares about it Written on 10/3/08

My Comment:

Fulgore

Exactly, but of course this conveniently doesn't work if bigfoot or an alien are in the camera's shot. It gives a great excuse for the said authorities to not believe the hero until it's too late. Written on 9/12/06

My Comment:

eas

So you are saying that in the future

1. Code will move

2. Code will be green text on a black background

3. Code will lack structure

4. Code will be threee-deee

5. Code makes blip noises

6. Code will be crackable by 8 year olds

7. All Code will be encrypted

etc



Hmmm?
Written on 9/12/06

My Comment:

jon

Depending on which Unix box I've telneted into, code is either green text on black background or amber text on a black background.

As to code lacking structure, that's not exactly rare now. Written on 10/12/06

My Comment:

CheShA

Um... That depends on the box you've telnetted in /from/? I have all mine in different shades of green so I can tell them apart ;D Written on 12/12/06

My Comment:

Oatmeal

Spike - don't get me wrong, I use the keyboard more than anyone else I know. What I'm saying is that programmers in movies NEVER seem to use the mouse even when they're doing tasks that clearly require it (like surfing the web or photoshopping something). Written on 9/12/06

My Comment:

bugmenot

[Gah, dang (lack of proper) threading] Written on 8/12/06

My Comment:

bugmenot

Oatmeal wrote...
{
Spike - don't get me wrong, I use the keyboard more than anyone else I know. What I'm saying is that programmers in movies NEVER seem to use the mouse even when they're doing tasks that clearly require it (like surfing the web or photoshopping something).
}

...Or, in the case of 'White & Nerdy', playing Minesweeper...with the whole keyboard none the less. Written on 8/12/06

My Comment:

Jameson

That one is beautiful! And in almost every case it's another example of computer people eschewing the mouse. The shoulder-beasting cop says, "Zoom in on this area" and mashes his greasy fingers all over the nice screen, then you hear the computer tech go clackety-clik-clak on the keyboard, which produces a rectangular selection, which he then moves over the area in question (again, using the keyboard) before zooming in. The hell?



Of course, my all time favorite in this area was in "Enemy of the State" (which is actually a movie I enjoyed very much). They're reviewing grainy security-cam footage of Will Smith holding a shopping bag from a lingerie store. The footage is only from one angle, the opposite side of the bag from the part they want to see. So the computer tech is instructed, "Rotate that 75 degrees around the vertical" (priceless!) and - clackety-clak - he does! The computer somehow magically interpolates every crease and wrinkle on the opposite side of the bag from the side the camera captured. Man, would that ever be useful. Written on 9/12/06

My Comment:

DirtNap

Yeah, but the opposite is true too. So much crime show drama still depends on taking three minutes to trace your phone call. ...the phone company switched to regular old digital switches LONG ago, and they know where you're calling from before they even connect you. ...sure, it's trivial to come up with your own VOIP client that fakes headers, or use a satelite phone where you just get the first over-land forwarder, but that's not what the shows are talking about. The sad thing is that all the writers, producers, actors and the grandma's who lap it up ALL HAVE CALLER ID! Written on 9/12/06

My Comment:

skullY

Actually, at the time that wargames was made, you could.



You see, payphones at the time didn't usually give you a dialtone until you deposited money. By grounding the microphone to the coin box he completed the same circuit that gets completed when you drop a coin in, thus fooling the phone switch into thinking he had actually deposited a coin. He was then free to call the operator to complete his call.



There are plenty of movies to bitch about, but Wargames is more accurate than most. About the only unlikely things in the movie are the voice synthesizer and listing the games before he had even logged in. Written on 9/12/06

My Comment:

chill

The voice synthesizer in Wargames was S.A.M., or Software Automated Mouth. It was popular in the early 1980s and ran on Apple II, Atari 400/800 and Commodore 64 computers.

The hardware component was twaddle, unless he was flipping on a speaker, but I will never forget that voice. Written on 9/12/06

My Comment:

strider72

According the Wargames DVD, the voice is that of the actor who plays Prof. Falken.

The way they got the computer-like disjointedness is they had him read all the words in reverse order so he was effectively reading lists of words instead of sentences. Written on 19/12/06

My Comment:

Unrealious

Code is rarely read or stored on magnetic tape drives anymore (which it seems to be in many movies and perhaps will be again in the future after the fall of civilization:) but when it was the drive was not always fast forwarding or rewinding as in the movies. I think it would actually be cool to see the tape in movies find the marker, stop, back-up a little while the heads engage and begin to read at a much slower rate, skipping ahead only to the next marker where it would read again. A write cycle would be even more entertaining. I tire of endlessly spinning tape drives and twinkling lights representing computers. Oh and unless the lights have groupings or labels how can they tell us which instructions the computer is processing currently? They call it code for a reason. It's supposed to actually be decipherable. Written on 9/12/06

My Comment:

thedave

Ah, see the movie Dreamscape (Natalie Wood's last I believe).

They stored dreams on silver real to reals, and they would seek-set-and-play.

Written on 8/12/06

My Comment:

focker

It wasn't Dreamscape, that had Dennis Quaid in it. You are thinking of Brainstorm.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0085271/ Written on 19/3/07

My Comment:

Exillo

Is there a P4 in there? they get hot enough to make toast =oP Written on 9/12/06

My Comment:

SpiderBoy

On the topic of ridiculous scenes in Swordfish:



An effective way of testing a hacker is to get some gorgeous babe to suck his dick when he's working.







Come to think of it, let's keep that one :-)


Written on 9/12/06

My Comment:

mikeytag

My next favorite Swordfish BS computing part is how the development environment tells Hugh Jackman how far along the code is. The computer spits out that the worm is 70%,80%,90% done. If the computer knows how close Hugh is to finishing, then the computer knows how to finish it! Why is he coding in the first place?! The computer obviously already knows what to code! Written on 9/12/06

My Comment:

simdiab

This isn't really related to the topic, but I thought it might be fun to share. An old Arthur C. Clarke short story, written in about 1950, tells the story of an alien scout ship which travels around conducting a galactic census.



So they arrive at the earth to discover that the sun is about to go nova, and the increased temperature has melted all signs of human civilisation off the earth's surface. Eventually they find massive underground libraries, built by the last surviving humans. These libraries contain the entire catologue of human history. Every single book written, law passed, song composed, and video shot, are all stored in row upon row of boxes filled with PUNCHED CARDS!



Imagine being the coder tasked with that job... Written on 9/12/06

My Comment:

roqueweb

hey, do you remember the name of the story?. Sounds like interesting reading to me. Thanks! Written on 9/12/06

My Comment:

Clarky

This is a typical trojan horse argument. You make a bunch of good points which are observably correct, then you try and sneak the whole "Some [coders] have even had SEX!" thing in down near the end. Come on. Some sort of citation or other evidence is needed here. Written on 9/12/06

My Comment:

mrwhoohoo

Careful - he didn't say sex with anyone else ... solo's plausible. Written on 12/12/06

My Comment:

Moose

Doesn't he also have about 3 keyboards, and continually drink wine throughout?



Superb example of cinema-nonsense hacking. MORE KEYBOARDS + MORE MONITORS = MORE VIRUS! :) Written on 9/12/06

My Comment:

Tabs

The TV show 24 is INSANELY bad with this stuff. The entire CTU building is basically a group of "agents" having some sort of ego driven hacker war with each other right in the middle of some huge crisis etc - it is so freaking hilarious.



There was one absolutely insane part in the last season where this total tool administrative guy from a supervising agency comes in and suddenly starts hacking away at a terminal, uttering ridiculous phrases such as "I'm hacking the machine code matrix." etc. They're also very fond of screaming nonsensical things across the room at each other such as "Tony, I need another socket!"



They also have these totally unrealistic GUIs that seem to always have exactly the perfect app for whatever extremely specific scenario is happing. There's one that was particularly hilarious in the second season where they call a (bogus in real life) "25th Amendment vote" to remove the President from office and the chief of staff whips out his laptop and there's some totally custom animated GUI 25th Amendment voting software on it sitting there ready to go as if it came with the OS or something. My friends and I were joking that it was "Microsoft ActiveImpeach" lol...
Written on 9/12/06

My Comment:

cgxmode

Oh my god, that was funny. I do believe this is the first time my sense of humor matched almost every bit of what I read. Thanks for the grins.
Written on 9/12/06

My Comment:

Montag

"Yo. Check this out guys, this is insanely great, it's got a 28.8 BPS modem!" (Dialog from Hackers.)



Because in the future, in order to keep school-aged hackers from flying around inside your three dimensional code, high speed internet connections will be banned. Written on 9/12/06

My Comment:

srangara

I swear, you just made me spew my orange juice all over my 1's and 0's. Written on 9/12/06

My Comment:

srangara

David Strathairn's character in Sneakers was blind. He used sound (somehow) to locate security holes and a Braille machine (with moving letters) to read code. Not a bad violation of a couple of your rules, there. No bippity-bip, at least. And no mouse, obviously.



I'm surprised this didn't make the list:



Encrypted documents, phone numbers, passwords, pictures being resolved (visually) one letter, digit, character, pixel at a time, generally in random order. How does the program know that it got the third digit of my phone number right?



A few offenders:



The Matrix - tracing Trinity in the opening scene for @#$%'s sake

Wargames - W.O.P.R finding launch code

Sneakers - displaying the home pages of 'unhackable' sites
Written on 9/12/06

My Comment:

inane

{
Encrypted documents, phone numbers, passwords, pictures being resolved (visually) one letter, digit, character, pixel at a time, generally in random order. How does the program know that it got the third digit of my phone number right?}

i was going to write a huge speil here, but instead,

thing about simpler cyphers,

once the machine works out that an X = a Green pixel or 0011001010 = the letter "A" it can be graphically represented, and the machine can then apply that rule, so it would appear to be a random order but in actual fact is mathematically based.

I have seen it done with some simple cracking, although its really not worth the while.

Written on 9/12/06

My Comment:

tighthead

The cliche that gets to me is "keep him on the line while we trace the call." This hoary old beast still shows up occasionally. It may have been true in the days of mechanical stepper switches but hasn't been for a very long time.



These days, the calling number is passed as part of call setup signaling. Even where caller-id is blocked, the telephone company has access to the originating number and can pass it on.



They could at least update the cliche to trying to triangulate the location of anonymous (spoofed SIM?) prepaid cell phones, though I suppose even that is less likely with the increasing use of GPS in cell phones. Written on 9/12/06

My Comment:

dzieger

I've actually seen this on a recent Law & Order. A long sequence in the episode involved tracking someone on a cellphone in a (slowly) moving vehicle by triangulating their position based on which cell towers the signal was being routed through. I'm not qualified to judge whether they got the details right -- I probably didn't even use the right terminology to describe my memory of the episode -- but it was definitely an attempt to bring a certain amount of realism to the story. Written on 11/12/06

My Comment:

Exillo

I laughed until I cried. I've been meaning to address this same topic for some time now, but never got around to it. They did manage to get a few things right in that movie with pretty-boy Ryan Filleppe or however it's spelled.

Thanks for the great post, will be linking you soon. Written on 9/12/06

My Comment:

ChrisG

I don't know where it belongs on the list, but until recently many movies used the sound of a Mac 128/512/Plus floppy drive accessing data as a "computer" sound to indicate processing, decrypting, cracking etc. Having grown-up on Macs since 1984, the sound of its 3.5-inch floppy drive (and the constant floppy shuffle) is burnt into my brain. Written on 9/12/06

My Comment:

MartinMuehl

Thank's for mentioning the Independence Day virus - that's what I call cross-plattform compatibility. That really is a classic. But hey, if people can learn to fly a warplane within hours... Written on 9/12/06

My Comment:

androsia

The "hacker" portrayal just ruins some movies for me. The Italian Job is a good example where Seth Green's character is supposed to have been this great programmer who was the real author of Napster and had it stolen. Throughout the movie it's supposed to be funny how pissed off he is that he never got credit for being the real coder. Yeah, whatever... Written on 9/12/06

My Comment:

Sougent

Do you mean to tell me that it's not possible to, after attempting to log in and failing, download an entire encrypted hard drive to your iPod so you can take it back to your place and hack into it like Chloe did on Smallville?
Written on 9/12/06

My Comment:

Atilaw

Even my non-techy girlfriend had a laugh at that one!!! Written on 16/12/06

My Comment:

Sougent

What? You've never heard of object oriented programming? Just drag and drop the objects you need and voila, instant worm. Written on 9/12/06

My Comment:

Jiminator

1) You are not going to break into a network in 2 minutes. You cannot write a program to break an encryption code in 2 minutes.



2) It kills me every time I see a show where they start tracing calls and they show a world map that has big red lines moving from one part of the world to the other. Because of the speed of light thingy moving a call through all of those way-points would take time that would accumilate at each stop. If it takes more than a few seconds for the person on the other end to hear a response then the conversation becomes impossible.



3) I especially hate grainy photos that they enhance multiple times in order to discover more details. (There is technology for moving videos.) Secondly, taking a company photo and blowing it up will not eventually give a photo of their retina that can pass a retinal scanner... Written on 9/12/06

My Comment:

GaryDowning

"Secondly, taking a company photo and blowing it up will not eventually give a photo of their retina that can pass a retinal scanner..."

laughing my ass off! Written on 30/4/08

My Comment:

CygnusX1

[edit] bah, what part of 'reply' does this comment system not understand? This is in reply to: "skullY - 'Actually, at the time that wargames was made, you could.'" [/edit]



wow, you sure you wanna admit to knowing that? Most kids these days don't even know what ESS meant to the scene...



Also, a suprising portion of payphones were already upgraded by the time the movie came out, but the telcos got extra pressure to finsh the upgrades after a million or so impressionable kids ran out to try it for themselves. [edit] Most urbanites discovered it didn't work, but those in rural areas were much luckier. [/edit] Written on 9/12/06

My Comment:

Paul_D

Well in the 70's You could hack a phone for free calls just like in the movie War Games. You know why I know this? Becasue I did. The movie was released in 1983. So Yes around that time you most certianly could. After the movie came out, that ability slowly went away :) Written on 9/12/06

My Comment:

Atilaw

Well in the late 90's Orange ran a 10 free sms campaign on their pay-as-you-go mobiles... and some how I got unlimited free international calls (and my friend) for no reason... then they closed it down.... :( Written on 16/12/06

My Comment:

derek

Gah! In reply to: adam410

{

"9. People who write code use mice"

While this is true, I know a lot of coders, including myself who very regularly abandon the mouse all together when coding. A lot of people use command line and editors like vi for most of their programming, I know I do whenever I'm working on a remote machine.

}

(PS. Theres this thing that has evolved through the ages called "threading". Its this mystical ability to KEEP COMMENTS THAT ARE REPLIED TO IN SOME SORT OF READABLE FORMAT. I had a dream about it once. It could also be handy here. Get some goats blood, eye of a newt, and some grave dirt, throw all those things in a fire, and then code fucking threading into this blog.)





Amen.



I hardly ever use a mouse. Although I can't say remote coding without subversion or another RCS is advisable. Why isn't there a religion based around vi? I think there's one for Textmate. Written on 9/12/06

My Comment:

asdqweasd

The threading seems to work for me - but that could be because I haven't had sex Written on 17/1/07

My Comment:

derek

In reply to: Phusion

{

I laughed until I cried. I've been meaning to address this same topic for some time now, but never got around to it. They did manage to get a few things right in that movie with pretty-boy Ryan Filleppe or however it's spelled.

Thanks for the great post, will be linking you soon.

}



Ah yes! Antitrust. I remember that. The thing they got right in that movie in my mind was Rachael Leigh Cook.



$awesome = $RLC + ${a monitor full of C}




Written on 9/12/06

My Comment:

lnk

Actually tighthead, this is still somewhat necessary. If someone is connected to a broken enough telco, they can spoof their caller ID so you can't trust the number you see.



Secondly, the telephone network is laid out via a large number of switches handling a certain region. I can nail up a few trunks here or there, and yes, you would have to keep me on the line in order to trace my origin switch (not necessarily my physical address).



The real problem with this cliche is that it's always done by a single person sitting at the Terminal of God! This magical terminal gives them access to every single switch, operated by different phone companies. When in reality, you need the cooperation of every single phone company that call is being routed through.



The chances of this amount of cooperation happening between rival telephone companies on the fly while tracing the good guy/bad guy is slim to none. Unless you are NSAT&T. Written on 9/12/06

My Comment:

lnk

And finally, I do love when they are tracing a wily hacker via the Internet and show a really bad traceroute with invalid IP addresses (312.424.124.17, etc.)



At the end of this magical traceroute, the wily person's address magically pops up on the screen. Here's looking at you, NCIS. Written on 9/12/06

My Comment:

mintsauce

Resident Evil Apocalypse.



My friends and I literally LOL'd in the cinema when Milla Jovovich (or whoever it was) "hacks" a machine by simply typing "Hack Search" into a UI. Written on 9/12/06

My Comment:

Mastiff

Alright, I'm a HTML and design guy, not a programmer, so let me ask all you haXX0rs this: why the hell do evil geniuses (genii?) always put a backdoor into their ingenious devious Doomsday Machines? The one that no amount of Top Secret government-funded programming experience can detect, but a 15 year old WoW freak hopped up on Jolt Cola and Funions can zero in on with a mere glance? "Waitaminute, that tertiary janitor sub-routine... Baron Evill must have left a Back Door into his Apocolypso-Ray!



Sorry, I should'nt post on three hours sleep... Written on 9/12/06

My Comment:

bugmenot

Dude, your toaster doesn't run Wordpress? You need to upgrade, man. I've got a whole blogfarm on mine. Written on 9/12/06

My Comment:

bugmenot

For the record, that stupid virus thing in Independence day was stolen from Arthur C Clark (3001--to kill the monolith, no less), as was the idea of giant flying spaceships hovering over all the cities. Made more sense when he did it, of course. Im saying this cause the blantant plagerism pissed me off in that crapfest of a movie



Funny stuff-- reminded me of this list "the hollywood OS"



http://nand.net/~demaria/hollywood.txt



(Different bugmenot guy)
Written on 9/12/06

My Comment:

gancheff

You're just missing the point, dude. Everybody knows that hackers movies show stuff that is not real. But if you use your imagination for a while you'll find the movie fun.



For example I don't want to watch a movie that will show me the gay terminal of a geek like you with a dick stuffed in his ass. I want to see a good movie. Written on 9/12/06

My Comment:

lordelph

You know what I want, what would really make me feel like a movie hacker?



I want one of those monitors which actually projects the code onto your FACE! Yeah! Written on 9/12/06

My Comment:

jefff8

No 4. This code *is* 3 dimensional, and you can fly around a city (in a helicopter) to navigate the code: http://www.toontalk.com. It looks like a game, but by laying tools out and connecting them, you construct programs. Written on 9/12/06

My Comment:

Sephira

I would like to add "UNIX does not look like that."



Think back to Jurassic Park and you will understand what I mean. Written on 9/12/06

My Comment:

MadTechie

LMAO, Let me install an update
In Jurassic Park they used 3D File System Navigator for IRIX 4.0.1+

IRIX is a System V-based Unix computer operating system with BSD extensions developed by Silicon Graphics (SGI) to run natively on their 32- and 64-bit MIPS architecture workstations and servers.


Check here http://www.sgi.com/fun/freeware/3d_navigator.html Written on 18/12/06

My Comment:

funwithstuff

Anyone else remember "It's a UNIX system. I know this!"? Written on 9/12/06

My Comment:

rocketsocks

That's hardly a representative display of the typical UI of a UNIX system, but you might be surprised to learn that there really is such a thing as a 3D filesystem navigator (http://www.sgi.com/fun/freeware/3d_navigator.html) program for SGI IRIX systems, such as those depicted in the movie. Not the most convenient way to navigate a filesystem, but it's a real program, and it's a lot more useful than trying to use a text editor which displays your file contents on the sides of a rotating icosahedron, for example. Written on 9/12/06

My Comment:

Sephira

You're absolutely right - after the movie was came out, they released a version based on the representation in the film (reportedly because so many people said "That's not UNIX!!!") However, it did not exist during the film, so no, UNIX did not look like that. Written on 9/12/06

My Comment:

Peter

No, fsn doesn't look like the program in Jurassic Park, fsn *was* the program in Jurassic Park, so obviously it did exist. Written on 9/12/06

My Comment:

Lola

I've fallen a little bit in love with you after this post. That is all.



Lx Written on 9/12/06

My Comment:

jschadwell

I don't see your point. The only two movies mentioned are "Hackers" and "Independence Day", and neither of them are set in the future. In fact, for every single one of his points, you can find movies and/or TV shows set in the present that validate his examples. Written on 9/12/06

My Comment:

jschadwell

The Braille machine with moving letters is actually fairly accurate. When I was a programmer for the government, one of my colleagues was blind. He had one of those Braille machines and he used it to read code. He also had a pretty decent setup that allowed him to use Windows (via keyboard shortcuts). Written on 9/12/06

My Comment:

Jyn

From Casino Royale, seen just this week: Bond uses a trace to pin down the location of a mobile phone. We see this happen as a series of maps (in green and black, natch) which the trace program zooms in on, until it pinpoints the location. In Hollywood, everything the computer is 'thinking' happens on the screen, graphically.
Written on 9/12/06

My Comment:

chill

With a telephone system, that is SORT of realistic.

Country code denotes country. Area code denotes a region. Exchange denotes a building (the CO), more realistically a city area. None of which means squat with a cell phone. :-)

If it zoomed right to the location, across the ocean, he wouldn't have any context for the location. Look! A bar! Somewhere in the world!

Finally, I've seen displays in cell-phone COs that show locations of a cell caller. They light up the panel on the antenna which is receiving a signal. (Cell antennas are usually a triangular array of panel/sector antennas.) If the signal is being received by more than one antenna, it shows and also indicates which tower is active and the relative strength. This is for showing hand-off between towers, etc.

If you're only hitting one tower, it can limit you to a couple-block area. If you're hitting more than one tower it will triangulate and can limit you to a few dozen feet.

If you have a modern phone, like with GPS in it...

Of course, they don't have architectural layouts of every building in the world and can display blinking dots next to the potted palm in the lobby... Written on 9/12/06

My Comment:

3rdalbum

Two more for your list:
* the GUIs on military computers always have a dark widget theme (black background with green lines and green text), and window management is provided by Enlightenment 16 with all the 90s-style special effects turned on :-)

* Every piece of code, whether it's a part of a hologram or a spaceship's hyperdrive system, is a "subroutine". Don't they use Object-oriented programming in the future? Maybe all these futuristic programs are written in FORTRAN, and none of the functions return any values? (I know methods are technically also subroutines, but outside the movies every programmer calls a method a method). Written on 9/12/06

My Comment:

Floyd

IIRC UIs on real military "heads up" displays (in planes) are mostly monochrome. Red is good for night vision, I forget what they use for day displays. Other colors are used sparingly to get the pilot's attention.

Old time programmer here...

Military style consoles might be green on black, red on black (preserves night vision), or full color with windows. It depends on the age of the equipment.

On "Subroutines"--they're also the same thing as methods, procedures, or functions returning NULL. Syntactic sugar... Objects are not something most movie viewers have even heard of; they might as well be listening to Startrek bafflegab.

Lots of high powered code out there is still written in Fortran, because the codes are old, stable, and blindingly fast. Fortran handles array manipulations better than any other language because each array is stored in a single memory block, and indexing can be done with integer arithmetic instead of following pointers. Written on 9/12/06

My Comment:

timjowers

Wiipedia knows. Nowadays the TV and movie people can find out anything about anybody with 10 clicks or less.

Oh yeah, the rs-323 to the spaceship had to be the most hilarious moment in Independence Day.

Great list. Cheers,
TimJowers http:/www.serviza.com/ Fully Loaded Linux. Innovation inside. Written on 9/12/06

My Comment:

Zappepcs

Have you ever seen Stargate Atlantis? How did the interface all those laptops to the ancients' computer systems and not have 4 episodes dealing only with interfacing problems...

Never once is a bad line of code responsible for turning off the life support systems or anything that needs more than needing some cable and 5 minutes on the laptop to fix. Written on 9/12/06

My Comment:

timjowers

Yeah, those alien devices always have some chord-driven input panel or keyboard where within like 3 presses one can command the ship to take off or open the important door. Must be telpathically controlled.
TimJowers Serviza Monster Linux Computers. Innovation inside. Written on 9/12/06

My Comment:

Atilaw

To be fair tho they had help from the Asgard! :) Written on 16/12/06

My Comment:

asdqweasd

Universal adapters - what about starwars - If R2D2 can tap into the federations star ship and control garbage disposal and prison cell blocks - why can't he just hit the off switch and send the starship spiralling out of control into a fiery planet atmoshperic burn-up

Oh yeah - that would be too easy and make the movie too short.
Better just leave r2d2 to hande the garbage shoot. Written on 17/1/07

My Comment:

Casandro

Actually code does make noises on most computers now.

When your processor gets out of it's "idle-loop" to print a character it will execute certain instructions. Those instructions will cause your processor to let through more or less current. On a real voltage supply this will mean that the voltage will drop in sync. Now obviously there are capacitors to prevent that from happening, but still those can only dampen the voltage drop. Anyhow, this voltage is then used to power the reference voltage source of the D/A converter of your soundcard. Depending on how it's buildt, it will more or less compensate the variations.
So in fact computers do make sounds when they have loudspeakers, though those are often incredibly dampened, typically to a level below the noise of the computer itself. However if you have a budget computer like mine, you can actually hear what your computer does. If you would then use a terminal programm on a 300 bits/sec line you would hear sounds simmilar to the ones in movies. Written on 9/12/06

My Comment:

robertkillen

The worst thing is when trying to crack a passsword and the characters are changing rapidly. Then when a character is found it stays steady as the rest are calculated. What program will tell you which characters are right or wrong if you type in the password incorrectly? That would have to be the worst password program ever. Written on 9/12/06

My Comment:

earlylate

1. In "The Net" Sondra Bullock's virus, on a diskette just inserted into the floppy drive, wipes out a whole network of mainframes and all their software when the bad guy hits the Escape key.

2. In "Under Seige 2", bad guy Eric Bogosian takes control of a secret government satellite via his laptop on a moving train. Of course I have no problem with that. But Steven Segal's way of aborting the satellite's already-programmed nuclear attack on a city is to put a bullet through the laptop. Those clever writers must have put a lot of thought into the project. Written on 9/12/06

My Comment:

asdqweasd

Yeah - it would have been better to put the laptop into the microwave oven and watch the oven cook itself Written on 17/1/07

My Comment:

Sir_Pony

Yeah, that whole "I've found three characters of the password so far" thing? No. You either have to find the whole one or not. I don't think there is any widely used password checker out there which has the password in plaintext somewhere on the drive. It's all done via encryption or hashing, meaning if you can't guess the entire thing at once, you got diddly squat. Written on 9/12/06

My Comment:

bolene

Youse guys are to young to know about binary it seems, I have never coded in binary since there was a high level language (or format) called hex in the mid 60’s that could be used for machine language but I think someone may have. There were cases where I had to fit the code onto a 80 column punch card, each column being 12 holes representing a 16 bit word. Ah the good old days, lol, since then I have found higher level languages such as assembler. Written on 9/12/06

My Comment:

Cornered

Like binary, hexadecimal is a numbering system. It's not a language at all, much less a high-level one. Written on 20/12/06

My Comment:

asdqweasd

awe come on now - hexadecimal is definitely higher than binary Written on 17/1/07

My Comment:

JaneCopland

I love these "actually, you're wrong, and you're stupid" comments. Isn't it rather obvious that this article was meant to be funny? I wish people would stop splitting hairs over the one or two exceptions to the things presented here. Written on 9/12/06

My Comment:

trebor

I had a great laugh at the original article, and many more laughs from the responses. I think they're great! If I can just figure out how to write code in hex I might be able to get my rs-323 interface to connect with my toaster... finally! Written on 16/2/07

My Comment:

TheMutt

What, no mention of Mission: Impossible? I don't blame you. I got totally lost too. Wireless Internet while in the Chunnel? Sure.

BTW I have had sex WHILE writing code. I'm just saying. Written on 9/12/06

My Comment:

imipak

I'm not going to go through the whole list, that would be stupid, but what I can say is that there have been examples of all of them. Extremely few examples, for most of them, but examples nonetheless. I'll stick to the more significant ones, here. I've paraphrased the points.

"Code is not 3D". Well, let's look at this one for a moment. True, most code is written/edited in a 2D environment, but that's just convenience. If you want to visualize MIMD, MPP or even merely sickeningly threaded code, 2D won't cut it. Nor can you design code in a strict 2D manner - coders gave up on flow charts in the 70s and you can't draw an object in a Jackson Structure Diagram. These days, if you draw an entity-relationship diagram for any decently-complex program, it'll bear more than a passing resemblance to a map of the US electrical grid (at the level of individual wires). It is simply no longer possible to map meaningful problem spaces on a single side of paper.

"Code is not green on black". It is if you have a green fluorescent cathode-ray tube! Seriously, I program in monochrome. I wouldn't use green on black because it's a really poor combination to use, but I deliberately disable all colour-coding. If my code is THAT badly structured that colour will add anything, then I need to fix the code, not the colour. Anything that distracts, anything that requires a change of mental focus, has no business being in a program or editor.

"Code is stationary". True, we don't generally use physical implementations of Turing Machines, and punch-tape has declined a little in popularity, but pattern-recognition has always been a key component of programming and pattern-recognition does not require character-by-character interpretation. Compilers are much better equipt to handle syntactical flaws, coders are infinitely better at semantics. Most (but not all) errors at the character level are syntax and a decent syntax checker should pick those out. Most (but not all) structural errors are semantic and if the structure is correctly visualized, the eye should have no problems picking those out even at fairly high speed. Fixing them is another matter. Fixing bugs is almost always slow. "Non-fatal", non-catastrophic, non-obvious, intermittent, environment-sensitive cumulative bugs are the real nasty ones, though, as those are the ones that you're just not going to find without good debug tools, a handful of hardware manuals, a formal specification, exceptional software engineering skills and perhaps as much as a decade or two.

"Code is not meant to be understood". It is meant to be understood, but sometimes it either can't be put in a form that can be read (some embedded machines are too damn small, and really tight code - compact enough to fit entirely in L2 or even L1 - is just not going to be written according to the approved conventions) and sometimes it can't be put in a form that can be comprehended (MIMD, MPP, highly multithreaded, etc). There is a big difference between intending something to not be understood and solving a problem that can't be understood.

"Real Programmers Use Mice". No, we don't, except to switch between panes on the text editor after binding the keys that would do the switching to some more common function. Typing is much much faster than point-and-click, drawing with a mouse is frankly pathetic (you need a graphics tablet if you're going to do a decent job), gaming with a mouse is sick and the only really useful thing a mouse can do extremely well (drag and drop) is often badly designed, absurdly primitive and pointless. If drag-and-drop ever got written correctly, I'd probably use it. Until then, I'll go with the fastest way to do things well.
Written on 9/12/06

My Comment:

ColisionBend

Here's one that got to me: in Clear and Present Danger, Jack Ryan (Harrison Ford's character) storms into his office and accesses a WordPerfect (blue screen) doc on another guy's computer over the office network. The other guy sees that he's accessing the file (not!), and then deletes it. Ford is trying to print the document as evidence against the other guy, but the other guy deletes the file before more than one page can be printed (not!). The killer? It's a mega-beast laser that would have the entire document in its own memory while printing -- not to mention that the only the computer that issued the print job would be able to kill the job. Not only that, but once the document was opened on Ford's computer, he would be able to print it as many times as he wanted to -- and he could save it anywhere his tiny little mind desired.

Anybody with any office experience would know this. Written on 9/12/06

My Comment:

Fluxx

This seems to be splitting hairs, really. Written on 10/12/06

My Comment:

Atilaw

Splitting hairs, or dividing them using some form of seperation device! :) Written on 16/12/06

My Comment:

EpicQuaker

Out of all the nitpicking going on here, you settle upon ColBend's comment as splitting hairs? Absurd.

As for saying programmers have active social lives, well, the author sure picked an odd way to bolster his argument. He seems like that particular brand of douche who would call a foul in a pickup game. Written on 29/6/07

My Comment:

seismicmike

The crazy thing though is that as soon as the bad guy tried to delete the file he'd get this message:

"UNABLE TO DELETE FILE IN USE" Written on 26/3/07

My Comment:

australian1

Wait till you see what they can by triangulating satellites to get a second by second footage of something that happened in the past (4 days ago) in any building in the USA from any angle using a machine that when running at full speed blacks out half the Continent, but circuit breakers reset in seconds. This happens in DEJA VU starring Denzel Washington... Present day, not in the future! Written on 10/12/06

My Comment:

bugmenot

Didn't read all the comments, too many of them :)

Anyway, few months ago I saw a cracker cracking some one drm in 42 secs. It was the first time he saw that drm and I out of curiosity timed the cracking. He doesn't even consider himself to be too good at it, says he knows someone better. This is only to say that cracking/hacking can be done in matter of seconds if you know what to do. Anyway, there wasn't any 3d cubes or cities or bad virtual bots he needed to defeat, "only" some assembler. Written on 10/12/06

My Comment:

Ally

I do not understand why everybody has such a problem with Independence day. The guy had the alien computer (from the scout ship) and knew the instruction set. He created a virus for that instruction set. How many of us have written a program on one computer for a different architecture.

I guess the real problem is the program uploader and the actions it took on the laptop as it was transmitting the virus to the alien mothership!

Geesh already! Written on 10/12/06

My Comment:

australian1

Yes it is possible because they had the Alien Spacecraft, probably dismantled it and analyzed every part... Anything is possible in movies, which is what makes it fun, entertaining and an escape from Reality...Even if it's only for a short time. Written on 10/12/06

My Comment:

Vorin

Something that amazed me after Independence Day: aliens to know TCP/IP !
Written on 11/12/06

My Comment:

australian1

Maybe they did... there is a natural flow, alien or human, things get invented or made because we think of them, so, maybe ALien's got there first or after. They just called it a different name... Before there was communication between early humans, some progressed quicker than others on another continent.
Just my thoughts... Written on 11/12/06

My Comment:

Atilaw

Well it is a US military invention to help prevent communication loss, and they probably stole it from alien technology they found at a crash site in the first place! lol Written on 16/12/06

My Comment:

thefrog

well,the second point is the most sharpest poin,but,i do not think all of the film will be make the wrong,EG:firewall!!!it`s an good film. Written on 11/12/06

My Comment:

Geistbear

In other late breaking news drinking Lite beer will not make supermodels flock around you. Written on 11/12/06

My Comment:

JaneCopland

Heh heh... I feel a "things that are true in movies and not in real life" post coming on. Written on 14/12/06

My Comment:

Debaser626

I'm surprised that no one's mentioned TRON. I mean, fitting an entire virtual world on a floppy disk? C'mon.... But... since everyone is talking about stuff that we can't do, what about things we now can do. i.e. the "Self typing computer" used to scare the bad guy in GHOST. For a few dollars and a coupla minutes access to someone's computer, you could totally do that with ease. If my computer started typing words by itself, I wouldn't get scared, I'd just yank the network cord. OF course, if it continued typing after that. Well, that might be another story. Written on 11/12/06

My Comment:

australian1

I did think of Tron, but thought no one would know what I was talking about!... In the movie, the virtual world was not on a floppy, but actually inside the computer. Racing around, trying to beat each other. And when he comes out, he was looking for a port to get out...If one has a good imagination, then one can write scripts for movies and with a few millions and a "super" they can produce the wildest of scenes. Written on 12/12/06

My Comment:

seismicmike

Man, dude... You're not *THAT* old! lol

anyone who calls themselves a programmer and doesn't know about that movie is a poser!

besides, thanks to Kingdom Hearts 2 it is a bit revived :) Written on 26/3/07

My Comment:

strider72

"[W]hat about things we now can do. i.e. the "Self typing computer" used to scare the bad guy in GHOST. For a few dollars and a coupla minutes access to someone's computer, you could totally do that with ease."

You can go over a network and make the keys of another computer _physically move_? Wow, that's a neat trick.

I think what freaked the guy out wasn't so much text on the screen, as _what_ the text was. Written on 20/12/06

My Comment:

Spikeon

ever heard of VNC?
i use it all the time to use multiple computers at once. Written on 10/3/08

My Comment:

graham_k

A nice little post. It makes it point, manages to remain humorous and doesn't dissolve into a arrant.

Just one thing - you are way wrong on #9 - I have been coding for 30 years and would never sue a mouse. What's the point? Even text selection takes too long, if you have to take a hand from the keyboard.

I'm not saying that mice are A Bad Thing, just a waste of time when coding.

Good blog, though. Keep it up.
Written on 12/12/06

My Comment:

Oatmeal

When you clicked the link to add this comment, did you use the mouse?

My point being in film hackers are depicted as NEVER using the mouse, even when they're performing an activity that clearly requires it - like photoshopping or surfing the web. Written on 14/12/06

My Comment:

logicfish

Coders cant read binary? ha!
In the old days (ZX-Spectrum,C64,Amstrad) I knew some coders who had memorized the bit patterns for the instruction set on the Z80, 6809 etc.
chips - those guys probably could program with only 1 and 0 on the keyboard.
I also met a guy who built a computer where you inputed each byte on a set of 8 switches. There were proper led`s to indicate the state of each bit and a key to advance to the next address. I didnt see any running software on it because the only way to store a program was to write down the bytes and type them all in again after a reboot.
It looked just like startrek.
Mice? well i hardly touch mine but I read an article from Bell Labs where they claimed that in tests the mouse is actually faster, it just feels slower. There os (plan9) uses radically different ui strategies compared to other oses.

Written on 14/12/06

My Comment:

exit104

Actually, computers like SWTP 6800 and IMSI had a full set of bat-handled toggle switches and lights. I got good enough to recognize the bit patterns for most of the common 8080 op codes. I could, and sometimes had to, patch programs in the machine using the front panel.

Up until the advent of the IBM 3090 and DEC's VAX almost every computer had front-panel switches and lights for reading and writing data directly into memory. Heck, most pre-1975 computers HAD to have the switches and lights, that was the only way to enter and run the "boot loader" program that then loaded a paper tape or card deck to run the program you were interested in.

Written on 16/12/06

My Comment:

Winawer

"they've morphed a little stuffed teddy bear into a cybernetic polar bear covered in christmas lights and phosphorescent hieroglyphics with a fog machine pumping rainbow smoke out of his ass."

Just as a point of geekiness: Ancient Egyptian (along with other languages of the same form) is known as hieroglyphic, not "hieroglyphics". Hieroglyphic is the name of the language - saying "hieroglyphics" is like saying "I speak Frenchs", or "I'm fluent in Italians". Individual characters of the language are hieroglyphs, so the quote above would properly be "covered in christmas lights and phosphorescent hieroglyphs with a fog machine..." Written on 14/12/06

My Comment:

spdygnlz

One of my favorites is in Antitrust where they are able to hack into and reposition satellites with XML! The director was probably looking on the internet for a good example for "Source Code", found the "View source" in IE and said, "Wow, so THIS is what code looks like." LMAO. Written on 15/12/06

My Comment:

Verwahrlost

I hate to upset you guys but Movies are a subset of Fiction. Written on 17/12/06

My Comment:

neg2led

You know what REALLY pisses me off?

That the movie people seem to be able to fit ANYTHING (even a five thousand terabyte virtual universe) onto a SINGLE DOUBLE-DENSITY (not even 1.44mb!) floppy disk! or a zip disk, CD etc....WHAT THE HELL?

and FYI, CD's do NOT burn in mere milliseconds! even a 1kb file on a CD takes time - lead in and lead out must be burned!

bloody hollywood.... Written on 18/12/06

My Comment:

jz00hj

Looks like Jakob Nielsen has been reading this post. See his latest article in his Alertbox website:

Usability in the Movies -- Top 10 Bloopers

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/film-ui-bloopers.html

Still, I think he makes some points that seem to have been bypassed here and draws some interesting conclusions to this whole idea of "what code doesn't do" Written on 18/12/06

My Comment:

jart

Interesting article but I have a few qualms with (1. Code doesn't move) and (9. Programmers use mice) as they don't apply to elitist unix hackers. We are a minority in the programming world but our coding style sometimes mimics what is shown in movies.

Many of us use editors like emacs that discourage the use of the mouse. With a variety of sophisticated keyboard shortcuts that take months to learn, we can often be found moving around in source code rather quickly. Sometimes when I'm writing code that involves small inserts at various points in several files, I bounce around analyzing the code so fast that spectators tell me that I make them feel dizzy.

I even programmed a rotating cube for my desktop that has the sole purpose of making things look more complicated.

With enough training at reading certian types of data and output, epsecially on the shell, you can work pretty quickly; and depending on the commands you use, you can generate enough superfluous text to impress the layman.

Of course, if by "programmer" you are referring to the typical pragmatic engineer, who uses a mouse to navigate the visual studio IDE, then the article would be 100% true. But don't forget about the "true" programmers (and by "true" I of course mean truly eccentric) who forego bleeding edge commercial tools and live in a world of text. Written on 19/12/06

My Comment:

strider72

I personally love the scene in Star Trek IV when Scotty is in 1986 on a Mac Classic. After he realizes that the computer is _not_ voice controlled, he mutters "a keyboard... how quaint", and then starts typing so fast that his hands are practically a blur and images and text are flashing past his eyes faster than his companion can follow.

Okay, first, if you don't regularly use a "quaint" keyboard, then you certainly can't type at speeds approaching light speed; and second, that crusty old Mac certainly cound't keep up with you if you could.

Then there's the scene in the post-apocalyptic TV series "Jeremiah", in which the titular hero, upon seeing a working computer for the first time in at least 15 years, immediately sits down and starts touch-typing.

In Hollywood, everyone is a touch-typist and computers are pretty much unlimited speed (unless the plot calls for them to be slower, in which case all software puts a large and absolutely accurate progress bar right in the middle of the screen while it thinks). Written on 20/12/06

My Comment:

tripledL

just thought you should know....http://www.thegeneva.com/wordpress/what-code-doesnt-do-in-real-life-that-it-does-in-the-movies/ Written on 23/12/06

My Comment:

connieu

It is also posted without attribution here:

http://moronland.net/moronia/moron/1073/ Written on 24/12/06

My Comment:

amazingannie

Slightly off topic: when people in films use the computer to chat with each other, every character they type immediately appears at the other person's screen. They make no typing errors either. Written on 26/12/06

My Comment:

bugmenot

Yea, the other person can slowly see the message coming across. That always pisses me off. Written on 9/4/07

My Comment:

bugmenot

i think almost all the professions gets misrepresented(in accuracy/reality) in movies...u ask a cop, he'll have similar stories to tell abt it...doctors, lawyers...even actors say how misrepsented(in accuracy, not morally) they are on the screen! (i wish there was a gladiator alive lol!)i dont thinnk its stupidity, ignorance or carelessness...may be thats what they call entertianment ;) Written on 27/12/06

My Comment:

GxIxJesus

I remember I was watching some movie a while ago, might have been 'Hackers,' when our lovable yet masculine hero, after defeating his equally-matched villain with the help of the woman that taught him to love again, decided to do something romantic, so he hacked into an office building and somehow managed to hack into the lighting system, thereby being able to spell out 'I love you' on the side of the building. I just laughed and laughed. Then I wept for the future. Written on 28/12/06

My Comment:

loup17

Guys (and Gals [as myself]),

I just wanted to let you know that you just made my day!
I'm still a college student, but with some industry experience... although most of you probably would still consider me a noob

Lots of my friends are non-techi and don't understand y get so upset about these movies and TV series!!!

So thx again for saving me after a horrible day of studying and preparing for my DBMS exam :o) Written on 8/1/07

My Comment:

REA_ANDREW

I have to say, that has just made me laugh from start to finish. Cheers for an exellent article. lol absolutely superb.

I will be forwarding this on so many times. Written on 11/1/07

My Comment:

BWolf

The computer virus scene from the ID movie was pretty humorous. Over the years, I used to have an intense off/on interest in computer viruses. I've always noted a number of follies that make this scene extremely unrealistic:

1) NO System call documentation, system manual, detailed hardware docs, OS manual, etc (and CPU instruction manual if coding in assembly)
---------

Ian Malcolm in one night managed to code up his virus. In order to code ANY kind of program, one needs to know the OS running on the target machine along with the system calls offered by it. He had 0% familiarity with the mothership beforehand.

He also needs to know how his code would get run... There needs to be an vector, an entrypoint via which his code will get run. Uploading the son of a gun is only half the battle.

Would he exploit a flaw in their web browser? Would he upload a file with a benign looking name? He'd have to have information on the file format for case #2 and detailed information about the flaws and intracacies for #1. Of course these are aliens so I highly doubt they'd have web browsers. My point is that if you only upload the virus, it stays dormant in suspended animation until action is taken to make it run.

2) NO debugging
---------------

Yeah, he had a fully working virus in one night. Even if he had all of the above, plus a compiler (will get to this), it'd be pretty rare to have completely working code in one shot. In general, even in real life one who's got extensive coding experience on the Mac with none on Windows will not be able to start doing Windows coding immediately right off the bat. This will entail some time getting to know Windows and putting in alot of practice.

Because his mac laptop would be different from the alien computers, he'd need an emulator to test his code. Again somebody would have to code that emulator and well, that person would need all of the stuff from #1.

3) NO cross compiler
There is no way he would've gotten a floppy diskette from the aliens saying something like "Alien Ship C++: Designed for Apple Macintosh, compiles for Alien Ship 4.0"

He'd have to do one of three things:
a) Port the GCC programming tools to target the alien mothership computers: I have no experience in porting GCC, but I imagine it's a thoroughly involved job no matter what.

b) Write his own HLL compiler: have fun dude. You'll be in for tons of debugging and head banging. There's an entire science to compiler design. No way he could do this in one night.

c) Write his own assembler: this would require a CPU instruction manual and while probably not as hard as building an HLL compiler, it's still rife with lots of debugging and head banging. Not doable in one night either.

3) NO mutual communications protocol between mac laptop and mothership
-------------
I find it very weird that the alien mothership would just happen to possess modem technology compatible with ours. Plus modems have to agree to a communication protocol before transmission/receiving.

4) Binary code
----------------
An alien race far advanced to ours from zillions of miles away would just HAPPEN to be running on binary code. Yeah right!

5) Anti-virus software
-----------------
My older bro mentioned this. Don't forget that anti-virus soft isn't perfect and even today anti-virus soft can't always detect malware it hasn't seen before. I say "can't always" because sophisticated anti-virus software also use other techniques when a simple comparison between the critter and what's in their database doesn't work. They also perform algorithm analysis, check for similarity between the unknown threat and previously cataloged viruses, use emulation to combat against polymorphic viruses (they change their self-encryption/decryption code on every infection), etc. Metamorphic viruses on the other hand are designed to change their ENTIRE BODY, not just the self crypto/decrypto code. Don't know much about techniques against this but they exist.

Of course I was talking about anti-virus soft designed for use within the human world. Nevertheless, I'd think even alien antivirus soft wouldn't be perfect. Written on 14/1/07

My Comment:

curiosity

Ok, I think trying to dissect the whole alien-virus thing from ID is utter mental masturbation, but it makes me laugh. I will be hypocritical and offer this: it all sort of hangs together if you buy that when David whatever-his-name-is first discovers that the aliens are A) communicating to each other using our satellites and B) have a countdown going, it's plausible within that fiction that he picked up enough of what their "codes" were so that needing an emulator or cross compiler was irrelevant. (This is not a point the filmmakers ever needed to make anyway - I'm just sayin') I would characterize what he was doing as more of a man-in-the-middle attack. Like the whole "let's send a command to make the Borg sleep!" shtick in Star Trek. He didn't need to "connect" to the aliens if he could just broadcast his own signal alongside theirs. And he wouldn't have to know what precisely would shut down their forcefields (or whatever) if he could just disrupt stuff.

That kind of tactic reminded me of Core Wars, where I could write a small program that does nothing more than pseudo-randomly overwrite memory space, hopefully clobbering whatever/wherever your opposing program was/was doing.
http://corewar.co.uk/vogtmann/first.htm

I'm also glad Exit104 mentioned the IMSAI's and other late-60's era homebrew computing club-type computers (Altairs I guess?) that you had front panel toggle-switches that required you to set up stuff in binary (no, I'm not that old - just that much of a geek). The worst I probably had to do (outside of coding in assembly) was to use MS-DOS debug to low-level format MFM/RLL harddrives using hex when I was 13.

And yes, I agree that there are a lot of things about computers/hackers protrayed in movies/tv that are just plain hilarious. What prompted me to post at all was the one example I saw that's stuck with me about a show that actually seemed to get something believable (not completely cuz, well, you'll see... and notice, I didn't say 'right'.)

I am referring to the TV show La Femme Nikita. I don't remember the episode but way before there was Jack Bauer's CTU on 24, there was Section 1 and their geek-boy Bryce. In some episode I don't recall the major details of there were some bad guys who had built a bomb of some kind and it was computer controlled (that's the edge of believability bit) but when the good guys (Nikita) busted into their hideout mere moments before it was to go off she got on a computer and called Bryce for help. Instead of some crazy Hollywood OS, the conversation was actually about a UNIX-like OS. The gist of it was he had her type a 'ps' command and using her always-handy-superspy-personal-video-feed watched the names of the processes scroll by until he found one he didn't recognize and told her to basically use a 'kill' command to stop it. (Don't remember if it was kill -9, but I was impressed otherwise...)

So yeah, for the most part, these things are just escapist fantasy so they don't have to be 'right', but it's nice when it gets close. (a personal hacker-related LOL for me was when the phone booths started rotating during the big 'Gibson' hack in Hackers)

I also laughed out loud in a theater when I saw the first preview of the movie GATTACA when they finally showed the film's title at the end. I guess I was the only one who got the joke. Written on 4/2/07

My Comment:

trebor

g=c800:5 ;) Written on 16/2/07

My Comment:

rediron

Who cares ?

You're all so serious about reality, then ? Oh, Independence Day, it was sooooooo believable except for that computer virus thing. THAT, was so fake.

Please, stop going to movies if you have a problem fiction.

Written on 16/1/07

My Comment:

BWolf

Who cares rediron? I have no problem with fiction but I felt this post was quite fitting with the thread. Look at all the earlier posts. Evidently you cared enough to write up a comment here LOL! Written on 21/1/07

My Comment:

seismicmike

We care, rediron, not because it makes us mad and we get offended or anything like a Jew watching someone eat a sausage. We just think it's hilarious. Written on 26/3/07

My Comment:

MrStitch

I didn't have time to read all the comments, but just in case nobody pointed this out....

#5 is slightly incorrect -

The company I work at uses AS/400 terminals, instead of full fledge pc's. Every time I type, the little box next to the screen go's *beep* for every button.

Quite annoying..... Written on 24/1/07

My Comment:

Here2dispute

Not only movies:

Did anyone read Digital Fortress by Dan Brown?

It's been awhile since I read it, but I remember that at the NSA there was a giant, 3 story computer used to break codes and then the guy let in a virus with the password being "3" to stop the virus from destroying all computers.

I dont remember exactly what happens but i know that the big fat virus dude and the girl were flying through breaking codes by the second. I think Dan Brown is a great author but everything he writes is so ubelievable, but written as if possible

Written on 24/1/07

My Comment:

AvrgWhiteGuy

Oh man, I love it. We software engineers want to burst as the eye sockets watching how Hollywood bullocks up our job functions.

If we programmers get that Hollywood is inaccurate about coding, imagine what other industries notice. Written on 1/2/07

My Comment:

Sylocat

Well, remember, a lot of these movies take place in the future, and since technology is getting revolutionized about 6 times a decade now, I'm not sure we should hold some creative license against them. After all, even the experts have no idea what their job description will be in 50 years.

Am I taking this too seriously? Yup ;-) Written on 20/2/07

My Comment:

nonprophet

My point to add:

There is no BIG, RED, FLASHING "ACCESS DENIED" that takes up the whole screen when you fuck up your login.


My top 3 haxx movies:
1. Swordfish. Damn right I can code while getting ubar blowjobs.
2. Hackers. Skaters + angelina jolie + l33t hacker names = win.
3. Jurassic Park X. Because little gurls know haxx. Seriously. Written on 13/3/07

My Comment:

alen3k

lol iu type bed and immediately notice the obvious coool bb now gotta eat Written on 14/3/07

My Comment:

rip-ped

8. Code isn't just 0100110 010101 10100 011

Reads : 010011001010110100011 which makes:

8. Code isn't just L Written on 14/3/07

My Comment:

rip-ped

And to put that in Binary:

0011100000101110001000000100
0011011011110110010001100101
0010000001101001011100110110
1110001001110111010000100000
0110101001110101011100110111
0100001000000011000000110001
0011000000110000001100010011
0001001100000010000000110000
0011000100110000001100010011
0000001100010010000000110001
0011000000110001001100000011
0000001000000011000000110001
0011000100001101000010100000
1101000010100101001001100101
0110000101100100011100110010
0000001110100010000000110000
0011000100110000001100000011
0001001100010011000000110000
0011000100110000001100010011
0000001100010011000100110000
0011000100110000001100000011
0000001100010011000100100000
0111011101101000011010010110
0011011010000010000001101101
0110000101101011011001010111
0011001110100000110100001010
0000110100001010001110000010
1110001000000100001101101111
0110010001100101001000000110
1001011100110110111000100111
0111010000100000011010100111
0101011100110111010000100000
01001100 Written on 14/3/07

My Comment:

seismicmike

24 is the worst! How about season 3 where Nina got Jack to start a worm hacking their firewall over the phone??

But the worst example is when they managed to hack into a computer that was disconnected from the network using the AC power chord.

I suppose if it's all 1's and 0's it's possible, but who actually knows how to do that????

Great list!! I laughed the whole time! Written on 26/3/07

My Comment:

AdamP

I have to disagree with number nine. I rarely use the mouse while coding, I don't like changing to something else, ADD I guess, I lose interest when I grab the mouse. Hot keys are fine with me. And while I don't play WoW I do enjoy hot pockets. Written on 25/5/07

My Comment:

Lucanos

11. The God Complex
Programmers are not always so in awe of their own skills and technical ability to consider themselves God (think that Russian bloke in GoldenEye - yeah, the \"I am inwincible\" fella.)

12. Code Never Projects Onto Our Faces
Again, another legacy of \"Hackers\" and nearly every movie since which involves people coding on computers have ended up using some shot of a person working on a terminal with mirrored source code displayed on their face (typically in the green text on black background fashion). Never happens.

13. Social Malcontents
Whilst some programmers do have problems with the establishment, and work against it, we are not all shadow-dwelling, oily-skinned virgins who have no contact with the world beside that which we manage through a keyboard, mouse, credit card and box of tissues. Some of us have lives - in fact, alot of freelance programmers I know have lives which make extreme sportsmen look like weekend lawn bowls enthusiasts. Written on 28/5/07

My Comment:

EpicQuaker

"alot of freelance programmers I know have lives which make extreme sportsmen look like weekend lawn bowls enthusiasts. "

Hyperbole much? I've never been of the persuasion that all programmers are malformed hermits, but making outlandish claims, especially in a thread populated by compulsive geeks whining about outlandish scenarios, kinda strains your credibility...just sayin'. Written on 29/6/07

My Comment:

Recetas

Jejeje, this is one of those topics you'll always hear (or participate on) in the IT department a Friday afternoon. I bet I did, the two best ones were:

- What is and what isn't art?
- Does god exists?

A bunch of geeks

Buscar recetas

and a few others discussing for hours trough those hours when you have no mood for work but cant leave the office yet. Written on 30/6/07

My Comment:

yhancik

Nullsoft (from the Winamp fame) had made a small software that makes the computer beep like in movies : http://www.nullsoft.com/free/nbeep/ Written on 10/7/07

My Comment:

rm-rf

too bad i didn't read this before choosing a career path... i thought i would be able to read binary whipping by on the monitor by now :)


(btw: check out the movie 'takedown' - its pretty good and not too corny -- http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0159784/ ) Written on 20/7/07

My Comment:

RobGoretsky

I never understood why computer rooms in movies and television are always so dark (see 24's CTU). It seems that operating all day long in a dark room with the only light being from the monitor would put a real strain on your eyes... Then again, I guess its tough to set the scene for drama with large white flourescent tube lights ... Comment by Robert H. Goretsky of Hoboken, NJ Written on 19/9/07

My Comment:

blastedt

"If real life were like film I'd be able to port wordpress to my toaster using a cat5 cable and a bag of glitter."

Toasters don't have usb ports yet. Written on 5/12/07

My Comment:

Spikeon

noooo... but they DO have cat5 connectors. there are two of them, right on top. they also work as penis masagers, you should try it sometime Written on 10/3/08

My Comment:

Todd

OK, I'm late to the conversation, but that's ok.

I've always found movie hacking pretty funny as well, but I think I look at things differently than most of you. Well, maybe I do.

I don't see things and think, "OMG! That's impossible!" (Unless it's syncing data between an alien mother ship or some such nonesense of course.) I think..."I wonder if I can make that happen?"

I mean, isn't that what we do really? Progress? Innovation? New gadgets and gizmos? Written on 8/1/08

My Comment:

Agata

Great article! Just few days ago I decided to see again "weird science" and your article is what I was thinking about during my viewing. It was enough to make a cat laugh.

signature: If you use electric adult toys near water, you will come and go at the same time.
Written on 21/7/08

My Comment:

obstreperous

I just had this conversation last night, after watching 3 of the top 20.

Hollywood can't show what code is like in real life because 95% of people at the theater would be lost. As it is, everyone goes "wow, that's really cool. nerds are awesome." Written on 18/1/09

My Comment:

bubba_uck

What, no mention of Mission: Impossible? I don't blame you. I got totally lost too. Wireless Internet while in the Chunnel? Sure. BTW I have had sex WHILE writing code. In fact, that's all I ever do nowadays: eat live sex and write code. I'm just saying. Written on 13/2/09

My Comment:

dannymac77

The average coder/programmer makes up maybe .05 percent of the movie viewing population, and that is probally being very generous. Movie directors have to display complex and possibly boring aspects of the 'cool' lifestyle of hacking and coding in an interesting, visual manner that is going to move the movie/storyline along without having to explain what it is that the character is doing. I mean, me and you might be tickled pink to watch someone typing away on a computer and being able to announce to the clueless individuals that we are watching the movie with what is going on but I don't think most people will enjoy it. Written 2 weeks, 5 days ago

My Comment:

dkaye

Usually I don't really notice these kinds of things because I've come to expect them but when the hacker in Swordfish cracked the 128-bit encryption in 60 seconds (hey, he had a gun to his head!) I spat out my coffee. My poor girlfriend had to hear about that one for days.

One you forgot: Computers cannot zoom in on that little tiny smudge on the window glass and clearly see Bob the Villian's reflection from 9 days ago. Written 1 week, 6 days ago

My Comment:

dkaye

P. S. I don't usually comment on these things because it's usually one guy making a kind of interesting point in a somewhat interesting way, but I was laughing at both the original post and most of the comments all the way through. Written 1 week, 6 days ago

My Comment:

My Comment: