More Than 20 Years of the Web on the Big Screen

Carl Bialik from WSJ writes "WSJ.com has compiled clips from a dozen movies over the past 23 years that depict the internet, with varying degrees of accuracy. Among the selections: WarGames, Sneakers, .com for Murder, and Mr. & Mrs. Smith. The Matrix Reloaded used real Linux code, while Mission: Impossible had the improbable email addresses Job@Book of Job and Max@Job 3:14. In a related article, WSJ.com reviews some of the more-absurd Hollywood conventions when it comes to the web. Harry Knowles, of Ain't It Cool News, says, 'The thing that always gets me is watching people send emails. You click "send" and the entire document begins to fold into an envelope and disappear into the screen. I tend to send around 300 to 400 emails a day, and that would drive me insane.'"

I remember "The Net"

[daviddennis]

Not my kind of movie, seeing that the hapless heroine spent the whole bloody thing running away, without any kind of respite or comic relief or joy.

That being said, I seem to remember it used a perfectly authentic looking traceroute, even if they had to give each row different colours to make it more visually appealing.

Maybe my memory is failing, but the chat program used there didn't seem any more hokey than AOL chat or the average myspace profile. My theory is that most people quite like hokey.

D

Re:The Web != The Internet

[PsychicX]

On a related note, from TFA:

Filmmakers must sidestep delicate trademark issues when setting a scene. Prominently showing an AOL email screen or Google search page, for example, requires approval from the companies, so some production designers create a variation that avoids the red tape.

Yet showing a coke can prominently is ok? Well duh, coke paid them for it. So why can't Google pay to show up on a computer screen in 24 or something?

computer noises & slow displays

[check6]

Not really web- or internet-specific, but regarding general computer usage: The thing that bothers me most about computer use on movies is how movies' computers generally make a noise for every character displayed on a screen. A close second is how they display the characters slowly enough that you can actually watch them appear serially on the screen. I guess even modern, high-tech computer systems still use 300 bps modems after all.

Anyone else rember Electric Dreams?

[LWATCDR]

I actually enjoyed that movie alot.

true - He was wardialing numbers with modemss

[Lanboy]

..And looking for backdoors. Pretty accurate for the time, you could get into a lot of telephone switching systems like that back then.

Very few norad supercomputers however....

Re:Accurate or not

[ccandreva]

For 1983, I think WarGames got far more right than it got wrong. You really could get free phone calls by shorting out an old-style rotary pay phone.

You really can fake out any system that communicates via DTMF tones by recording and playing them back. Anyone remember hearing tones when you put money in early touch-tone payphones ? If that lock did communicate to a central system via DTMF, you could get out that way.

Poor passwords used to be far more common. From 2006 Joshua looks like an obvious bad backdoor, but that's only because it used to BE so common.

What did they get wrong ? WOPR was already an antique at the time, but they wanted something with blinking lights. There couldn't be a voice synth with the same voice everywhere. Often overlooked that complaint is the fact that they bothered to introduce it as a device at all.

I always thought they presented it correctly as a cinematic device, sort of like a scene starting in a foreign language with subtitles, to establish the characters are foreign, then switching to English so the audiance knows what is going on.

Progress bars to build suspense

[dpbsmith]

One example in which Hollywood is somewhat realistic is in their depiction of progress bars to build suspense. I rather like this device.

In "Under Siege 2", Steven Seagal is desperately trying to send a fax from an Apple Newton (!)... which he has wired into the satellite transmission system on a moving train using, if I recall correctly (not), some nailclippers and his native SEAL instincts to identify the correct wires. The progress bar moves slowly, slowly, slowly as we hear bad guys coming closer, closer, closer to Seagal's hiding place.

EnHANCE that image!

[Rob T Firefly]

My family and I always love it when someone will zoom in ion some distant face in a scratchy webcam sht, get basically a twelve-pixel image, and magically "enhance" it to get a crystal-clear picture of some important bad guy or something, often when he was even facing the wrong way.

Re:3-400 emails per DAY???

[slashbob22]

He not only finds time to Post Once on slashdot. But at least 2 articles in 24 hours!

More Than 20 Years of the Web on the Big Screen [slashdot.org]
Videogame Remake of 1986's World Series Game 6 [slashdot.org]

Re:Accurate or not

[AKAImBatman]

Often overlooked that complaint is the fact that they bothered to introduce [a voice synth] as a device at all.

And yet it was still surprisingly realistic. The Intellivoice [wikipedia.org] module (a voice synthesizer with its own built-in speaker) was released for the Intellivision console in 1982, and the Macintosh "introduced" itself in 1984. It received a standing ovation from the crowd. And that's just what the public saw. The actual research into Voice Synthesis goes back to the 1930's [wikipedia.org]!

So it was perfectly reasonable to include voice synthesis in WarGames, even if its purpose was to allow the viewer to read less text.

Re:Could you even shoot a computer screen?

[dsci]

Which, I believe, was first done (at least for TV) for the show "UFO," one of my childhood favorites and made by the same folks who brought us Space: 1999.

Transferring Funds

[blaster151]

Another example I've seen a couple of times is when someone is attempting to transfer funds (usually under intense time pressure, of course) and the computer screen shows a progress bar moving across the screen with a quickly changing counter showing how many dollars have been transferred! As if an electronic wire transfer sends one dollars at a time and your status could be at $748,282 of $1,000,000. Atomic transactions, anyone?

And don't forget the Obligatory Announcement

[ishmalius]

Now matter how hard you work to break into a computer, the hacking is not completed until you say the magic words, "We're in!" I challenge you to find a script that does not have that statement, or something like it.

Re:My favourite moment

[linvir]

1.2, improved efficiency

#!/bin/bash

protected_files()
{
echo SECRET FILES ARE PROTECTED. CANNOT DELETE.
echo -n '> '
read line
if [ $line == 'OVERRIDE' ]; then
echo DELETING ALL SECRET FILES... DONE!
else
echo INTRUDER DETECTED, SCRAMBLING ENCRYPTION.
fi
}

if [ "$1 $2 $3" == 'ALL SECRET FILES' ]; then
protected_files
exit
fi
if [ "$1 $2" == 'ALL FILES' ]; then
echo DELETING ALL FILES...
sleep 2
protected_files
exit
else
echo Usage: DELETE [how many] [type] [what]
fi

Hey, I'm finally learning shell scripting!

Re:BEEP!

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.nullsoft.com/free/nbeep/ [nullsoft.com]

Nullsoft Beep is an application that makes your computer sound like computers sound in the movies.

Incredimail

[RinzeWind]

You click "send" and the entire document begins to fold into an envelope and disappear into the screen. I tend to send around 300 to 400 emails a day, and that would drive me insane.

The client for insane nuts [incredimail.com]. A teacher of mine at the university used this one. And yes, he was completely out of his mind.

Re:Wow

[Kombat]

Q. How did Jeff Goldblum's character figure out the alien signal?
A. Duh! He's a genius.

Wasn't his character falling-down-drunk mere minutes before hacking the alien code and writing a cross-platform virus?

It's not just computers that Hollywood takes liberties with. People in movies sober up instantaneously, and are almost never hungover. See "40 Year Old Virgin" for another example. He's utterly wasted at the end, goes back to some random's apartment, then sobers up and rides his bike to tell Katherine Keener he loves her (smashing through a mobile billboard in the process).

Or how about the laughable driving stunts in "Transporter 2?" Or the way minute amounts of explosives can demolish entire buildings in movies? Or how airplanes run out of fuel, then crash into the ground, creating a massive fireball? What exactly is burning, in that case, hmm?

Hollywood has conditioned us to turn our brains off when we go to the movies. We just notice the glaring computer flaws because, well, we're computer geeks. I'm sure automotive engineers laugh at all the new tricks James Bond's car can do. Or pilots laugh at the things airplanes get away with in movies.

Re:Accurate or not

[HTH NE1]

Also, the wardialer shown in the movie really is a useful tool.

Indeed, I wrote one myself, but quickly realized that sequential dialing was a bad idea, so I rearranged the last four digits to "avoid detection". I also found out that in my home town there were really only 3000 assignable phone numbers in the prefix, that a number beginning with 3 or 9 could also be called beginning with a 9 or 3 respectively, and that the system would allow you to dial 8 indefinitely. The town was also small enough that I could eliminate all published numbers.

The town was also small enough to not have anything of interest to connect.

"The CSI Effect"

[Greslin]

Very, very true. It makes forensic testimony on criminal court cases a blast, though.

I've got a good friend who does DNA analysis for the state of Florida; I hear the stories all the time. Ten years ago, the challenge was convincing a jury that the evidence was ironclad, because most of them didn't know anything about the science. Now, thanks to CSI, the challenge is to explain that it's not magic. There's no magic computer that instantly identifies a perp based on a hair follicle. In the real world, it's all about statistical analysis and minimalizing margin of error. All math. But thanks to ridiculously unrealistic programs like CSI, we have one huge jury pool that now expects 100% certainty - a mathematical impossibility - in all cases of forensic analysis.

It still boils down to education. In the old days, it was about educating juries that the science was valid. Now, it's about educating them that the science is actually science.

Re: Votrax

[KC1P]

I assumed at the time that the speech synth was a Votrax Type-n-Talk. It was popular back then (at least among people who had $400 to blow on a gimmick, so count me out -- I built my own with a cheapy GI SP0256 chip from RadShack, but it didn't do text-to-speech itself, so I wrote some PDP-11 FORTH code to make it swear and then lost interest). There were ads in Byte, and you could get the SC01 speech chip separately to build into your own stuff. The Type-n-Talk was a stand-alone text-to-speech unit with a serial input so it would have been trivial to hook it up as shown in the movie (but it wouldn't have worked that well, I don't think the text-to-speech algorithm was very smart).

It did bug me in the movie how the incredibly crude SWTPC video terminal was suddenly able to do fancy color graphics (just like Boz's VT100 on Riptide). Also as someone said, acoustic couplers can't dial. And I like how he gets the tic-tac-toe program to play against itself by typing Z-E-R-O (not 0) at the prompt for # of players.