Enjoy may your day or evening where ever in the world you may live be awesome one.
Kimberly
TV REALITY MOM
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http://media.bemyapp.com/top-five-true-hacker-movies/
5 movies Hollywood got right about Hackers
Hollywood gets hacking wrong; nobody is surprised at it
anymore. The movie industry figured out quickly that realistic
depictions of computer hacking, like any hard science, is boring to
watch, so they spiced it up. Now we have Matrix-style green Unicode rain scrolling down the screen and CSI techs babbling about making a GUI interface with Visual Basic to track the killer’s IP address. Doubtless from a “Sam’s Teach Yourself…” guide.
When it came to trying to find realistic
hacking in movies, we had to give up. It’s not that we don’t have any
writers who understand technology; it’s that audiences just won’t sit
still watching anything more involving than a flash of copy-pasted code
on a screen to say “computer things are happening here.”
So this list is instead the top five movies which capture the spirit of hacking, in the truest possible Jargon-file definition.
As you’ll see, the movies that do this best sometimes don’t even touch a computer.
1. Sneakers
This 1992 classic makes the top of the
list mostly for being a hysterically fun flick with an all-star cast. A
team of rag-tag misfit security consultants gets mixed up with an
international intrigue over a master-decryption rig. The trailer makes
it seem a lot more action-packed than it really is; it’s actually more
of a cozy cyber-mystery. There’s a clever puzzle to unravel in every
other scene, while we watch some extremely clever people play a global
game of cat and mouse. It’s funny, witty, and far under-appreciated
today.
It’s also eerily prescient: There really
are teams of security experts who stage mock-penetration attempts to
find holes in systems; the Jargon file calls them “Tiger Teams,” but we
know them today as simply “white-hat security consultants.” This was one
of the first movies to look ahead to our modern-day concerns over the
NSA and encryption years before we had Julian Assange and Edward
Snowden. Ben Kingsley’s line saying modern warfare being about who
controls the information rather than the bombs rings true today. Indeed,
the recent news story about the FBI trying to strong-arm Apple into
supplying them with a backdoor to bypass iPhone encryption just goes to
show how valuable the “black box” of this story would be.
2. Catch Me If You Can
Here in this 2002 Academy Award
nominator, we see a movie which captures the hacker ethos on so many
levels without ever once showing a computer. It’s even set in a time
before computers were commonplace. It’s a fairly faithful biopic of the
real-life con artist Frank Abagnale, and how he was caught. Mr.
Abagnale, today working as a security consultant and lecturer for the
FBI as well as heading a financial fraud consultancy firm, oversaw the
film’s production.
It’s also chock-full of hacker tropes,
which just goes to show that you don’t have to use a computer to find
holes in the system. Frank Abagnale starts out exploiting holes in the
international banking system to kite bad checks; he graduates to posing
as a number of professional characters mostly by lying to everybody he
meets. He’s repeatedly cornered and caught by his FBI pursuer, but keeps
getting away. Meanwhile Tom Hanks as the FBI investigator hot on his
tail shows us that catching a con artists involves just as much
psychology as technology. We get to see the brilliant deductions that
tell him that his target is a kid from New York based on his choices of
fake names and his wisecracks about the Yankees baseball team. Ask any
banker – the stuff about MICR and Federal Reserve float periods is very
accurate, although modern day systems have since plugged some of these
holes. As for Abagnale’s adventures, most security experts – of either
color hat – will tell you that the biggest vulnerability in any system
is still to find a young, gullible intern who will believe any lie.
3. The Conversation
This 1974 Francis Ford Coppola flick is
probably the pick that everyone least expected. There are two people in
the world who agree that this is a science fiction movie (at least by
1974 standards): one of them is author Harlen Ellison and the other is
your humble blogger.
Gene Hackman plays a security consultant –
a “bugger” as he is described – who snoops on a conversation. As he
screens the resulting tape, filtering out background noise to tease out
the words, he uncovers a government conspiracy with deadly consequences.
His character is obsessed with technology details and his work, but
maintains a huge blind spot when it comes to dealing with people.
There it is right in the trailer: “a
world where nothing is private.” Well, hello again, Julian Assange and
Edward Snowden! What were you doing back in 1974? While once again we
have a hacker movie without computers, there is no shortage of
techno-babble in this movie. Sound engineering and phone “phreaking”
technology are thoroughly explored. We even see a collection of
“spooks,” as the parlance of the times would call them, attending a
convention where they explain some of the cutting-edge spying technology
of the era. The Watergate scandal was still unfolding in the newspapers
at this time; this movie was practically ripped from the headlines even
before Richard Nixon resigned. While computers were yet on the horizon,
technology was already a growing source of paranoia about the ways
privacy could be invaded. You need only imagine gene Hackman’s character
as a computer forensics engineer in the modern-day NSA, and it would
all ring true today almost without changing any other details.
4. Pi
This was director Darren Aronofsky’s 1998
debut indie film, and it’s a mind-blower today. So far it is the single
entry in the category of “mathematical thrillers.” The movie tells the
story of “Max,” a mathematician obsessed with penetrating the mysteries
of nature using mathematical patterns. Max is also in far less than peak
psychological health, and his quest takes him to the brink of madness
and beyond. No end of protagonists are out to invade Max’s privacy and
exploit his findings for their own gain. The movie is a treat for its
techno-pop soundtrack, acidic high-contrast photography, and psychedelic
scenes. (NOTE: We know, there’s a mathematical error in the script.
Yes, you couldn’t have time since the beginning of the universe to
intone every 216-digit number. Max was bluffing there.)
It’s also a movie about the true hacker
spirit because it’s a big valentine to all the hacker preoccupations.
Max lives in a hacker den; he’s all but merged with the giant system of
computers which takes over every square inch of his apartment. The movie
is pure love of math through and through; if you mean “STEM career
intellectual” when you say “hacker,” look for a copy of Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
on the hacker’s bookshelf. Max’s character is practically cut and
pasted from the Jargon file’s appendix on hacker personalities:
paranoid, insecure, antisocial, disdainful of modern society, and living
only to understand the secrets of the world. If you’re a computer
expert and you can’t empathize with the sickening but obsessive
fascination Max feels when he’s penetrating the boundaries of science,
you’re probably in the wrong line of work.
5. WarGames
We just can’t leave this 1983 classic off the list, even though it’s about as realistic as The Matrix
when it comes to hacking depictions. Matthew Broderick and a
pre-brat-pack Ally Sheedy start out with the old “hack into the school
computer to change your grade” routine – already a tired joke in 1983 –
and end up jacked into the national defense system, where they almost
start WWIII while playing a video game. In retrospect, they should have
picked “checkers” from the game menu instead. The rest of the film is,
as reviewer Leonard Maltin put it, “Fail Safe for the Pac-Man
Generation,” as the whole US government scrambles to stop a buggy AI
from launching global nuclear war. And sound effects straight out of a Galaga arcade machine.
“This computer is totally secure… or is
it?” While this movie might be justified only as the scapegoat for bad
Hollywood hacking cliches, it gets onto the list for being the great
grand-daddy of all bad Hollywood hacking cliches ever since. Watch this
movie again, and you’ll see that Hollywood never moved a step past 1983
when it came to computer hacking. Nevertheless, it is culturally
significant for capturing the spirit of the times; this movie forms a
bridge between the Cold War world and the modern day. It came about
right at the dawn of the home computer age. By 1984, modems were selling
off the shelf at the Radio Shack at the mall and Americans began
getting Compuserve accounts. No less than then-president Ronald Reagan
saw the movie and was inspired by it to enact new cyber-security laws;
it would be he, with his plea to Soviet leader Gorbachev to “tear down
this wall,” which would end the Cold War era and plunge us into the
international scene we have today, where it’s all about the cyberpunk
terrorists.
In conclusion…
Why is it so hard for the film industry
to understand the computer industry? We’ll grant that it’s more
entertaining to watch CGI battleships whizzing around than it is to see a
CISCO tech pop open a Blade server and start shuffling circuit boards
around. But still, even where getting the simplest detail right wouldn’t
detract from the entertainment value, film writers just seem to insert
gratuitous errors out of pure laziness and even a little spite. It seems
to be the case that the hacker, like the cowboy and the caveman, is
doomed to be a stereotype cut-out figure when it comes to the media.
Culture falls in love with the romanticized illusion while caring
nothing for the realistic substance.
Break time’s over, everybody get back to
your Visual Basic GUIs! The weather forecast for tonight is cyberpunk
with a chance of raining green Unicode characters.
What do you think? Did we miss any Hacker movies on our list? Let us know in the comments!
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