Hollywood Hackers...

#hollywood #hacker #fail #glorified #crap

As a youngster when I saw or thought about computers, it was the lovely windows desktop, the rolling green hills, and the vibrant start button.  I started with windows 95, and worked my way up to now on windows 8.1, there were flukes and faults all along the way.  Before I gave a damn about command line, scripting, or really anything to do with actual computers beyond the generic GUI desktop, you could've thrown anything on the screen and I would've eaten it up.  Luckily for me somehow I escaped most of the monstrosities on the silver screen before I gave a damn, somehow.  Sure I watched a handful of the complete and utter crap, and some of the movies were completely on point, well within reason of course.  Time to give the Goblin Byte breakdown of Hollywood.

I'm going to start with the first complete crap fest I watched by accident.  At this time I was studying for my CCENT (still haven't gotten that yet), fell in love with all the command line stuff, all the video's I was watching were talking about how important the CLI was.  I'm in this mind set of CLI over everything right?  And I saw "hackers" the movie was on Cinemax or something.  Hell yeah, I'm knee deep in command line stuff, plus Angelina Jolie?  How can I lose?  Hacking, Cracking, Angelina Jolie, and no need to wear pants, I'm in heaven.

I click over in complete excitement for the film I'm about to indulge in, this is going to be GREAT right?  Hmm... well we start with Angelina Jolie looking a bit like Bruce Lee... some dude with bleached hair... another dude with weird braided pig tails... ok so hackers look like this?  According to Hollywood.  Ok I dont' care about appereances, that's not what I'm watching, I'm waiting to see some fast paced hacking based high jinx.  I'm new to the hacking reality, I know of it, I've seen it, I've touched it, this movie hackers, its called freaking hackers, I can't WAIT to see them do something awesome.  You know reroute all email to themselves, or having all websites on a server forwarded to some prankster website.  It's going to be great right?  No... this movie ended up shattering any hope and dream I had remaining in my youthful soul.  3D space shuttle traveling through a digitally rendered three dimensional motherboard with unusual towers and sparks shooting around.  They were saying "we need to take down the firewall" and started shooting lasers and crap.

I'm young, I want to hack one day, I want to be a command line super wizard, type type crack crack, I want in to the hacker community.  Was this movie supposed to be an entry point for me to go "now that's something I could get into."  If so, the complete and utter disgust I felt the entire time I was watching it just made me reconsider what I wanted to do with my life.  Maybe this movie was a blessing for the hacker community?  Showed everyone that being a hacker is weird and being a hacker is dumb so less people ventured down that path?  Exclusivity brought to you in part by, Bruce Lee Jolie.

Next up on my list is swordfish.  My desire to learn how to hack and learn tech is well known among my friends, family, and co-workers.  This lead a co-worker of mine one day to say "Hey Ryan you love hacking, have you seen Swordfish?".  A second co-worker chimed in saying "yeah you should watch it, that movie is great, and Hugh Jackman plays a hacker, you'll love it."  No matter what I do I always see swordfish on TV but never had the time to watch it, but hey I'll make time this time around.  Two people reviewed it on my behalf, what could go wrong?  To be honest these people aren't technical, so I don't really have high expectations, so whatever I'm about to put myself through I already know is going to be painful.  But out of respect for the individuals who think they know what I want to watch, I'll give it the benefit of the doubt and give it a good ole fashion try ya know?

First off who does this appeal too?  Halle Berry, Hugh Jackman, and John Travolta, ah yes the trinity of geekyness and hacker appeal right?  Didn't see these three and think good things, maybe Travolta after he did battlefield earth had some form of geekyness in him, but the other two?  Just because you're both X-Men doesn't get me all wobbly knee'd to see them in anything geeky.  But that's not my problem, oh no, its Hugh Jackmans hacking thingy... what is it?  Well with hackers we had a three dimensional space shuttle, what could swordfish do that's any different?  Oh how about a three dimensional cube thingy that moves around and really just does nothing.  It says stupid crap like "assembling port scan objects" what is that?  What is a port scan object?  Shit lets make it easier and just say "scanning ports no assembly required because I'm not using a stupid cube."  Oh god did this irrationally piss me off.  Yeah Hackers was complete crap and it didn't really try any harder, but swordfish came out more recently and the director stated he didn't care if the hacking scenes were accurate, the hackers weren't the target demographic.  So before this movie even was released the director said "you know who wants to watch a movie about hackers?  Everyone but hackers."  Idiot didn't incorporate the demographic he should've targeted, or at least gave a nudge to and make happy.  Instead he made a technology based crap fest, but you got to see Halle Berry in a bra that has to account for something right?

There is some hope though, even though this movie I'm about to bring up wasn't all about hacking, it was about smarts and technology.  I don't know how spot on the science is, but they did keep true to the computer stuff within reason.  And I'd like to say its older than the other two movies, crazy right?  And to top it off its only one scene that made me go "well done" just one, an entire movie about technology and smarts, never really diving into the nitty gritty, but one single scene made me laugh in the faces of "hackers" like Seth Green in the transporters faces.  What movie is it?  Real Genius from 1985.

One scene they are trying to crack a 40 bit password to a military grade laser set up designed to take out individual people from space.  Yeah doesn't exactly sound plausible at all, but the password part, 40 bit, hmm off to a good start 1,099,511,627,776 potential passwords.  I'm liking where this is going, after watching other hacking movies I have a predetermined idea I know whats going to happen, and I'll hate it, but lets keep up faith shall we?  I wasn't let down, it wasn't a click click, type type, solve situation, no when the idea came up of hacking the password and asked how long it would take, the guy Lazlo said it would take a couple hours.  Yeah not this Hollywood bull crap of 13 seconds, hit the L key really hard for no reason, and pull your arm back like a Karate Chop in slow motion.  No it was going to take hours.  Yeah this one single sentence for me made the movie, the attention to detail excited me, although it may not have the flashy doo dads of the other films, this one was awesome.

The reason I made this whole post is with Who Is Mr Robot coming out soon, I'm a bit optimistic, on the same note concerned as to how it'll be portrayed on screen, I've heard that he fails, I've heard he succeeds, I've heard he actually does in person social engineering attempts to squeeze information regarding passwords and times their houses are empty.  I really like the way its coming off sounding, but with the previous travesties Hollywood has brought us, I'm really hoping for something a bit more realistic and a bit more catering to those who do it.  Will we get a full drama series with accurate hacking tools and terms?  Or are we going to get nothing but sword fish and Angelina Bruce Lee?  Really hope they stick with accurate.  And as always, be safe my goblins.

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