10 Terrible Portrayals of Technology in Film

Luke Hachmeister writes to mention a light piece at GideonTech on some of the truly terrible portrayals of technology in film. From Hackers to AntiTrust, Hollywoood just can't stick to reality. From the article: "Harrison Ford plays a security expert at a bank. He falls prey to a scheme to steal money for a gang that has taken hostage of his family. The film tried very hard to keep it a rollercoaster ride of thrills. From the beginning, you have Harrison Ford typing furiously to stop a hacker by writing new firewall rules. At least this time, these rules didn't float around in a rainbow of colors ala Hackers. What really puts Firewall at the top of the list, is the dumbest and non-believable use of an iPod to date. This is 2006, not 1995, you can't just make stuff up like this anymore. In the middle of the film, Harrison Ford happens to not only be a security expert, but an Apple hardware developer too."

Re:I think the all time classic is........

[AuMatar]

Agreed. There's no way in hell an advanced intelligence would be Windows compatible.

Re:I think the all time classic is........

[B3ryllium]

I have to laugh at all the people responding "He used a mac!" ... they totally missed the point of what you were saying. Namely, that the Alien AI would be adaptive and self-healing, and would totally block out Windows, leaving Mac as the only option ... :)

Re:James Bond (The World Is Not Enough)

[glittalogik]

Maybe you could render it useless by installing WinCE on the nuke itself.

And the server is GONE!

[Anonymous Coward]

Ladies and gentlemen, a big round of applause for The Slashdot Effect!

Re:HACKERS WAS THE GREATEST FILE EVAR!!

[WittyFool]

"Oh sweet, her laptop has a 28.8 modem! Whoa!"

Non-Science Fiction?

[MrFlannel]

Since when are half of those films NOT science fiction?

Jurrasic Park? War Games? Independance day?

Could they please give me tickets to their dinosaur park? And, while they're at it, give the ID4 aliens my number, I'd like to have lunch sometime.

Re:Jurassic Park

[B3ryllium]

The line is delivered with such egotism and authority that she can't NOT know unix! In fact, *only* Unix admins can be that cock-sure and arrogant.

(Sidenote: I am a Unix admin, at times.)

Re:I think the all time classic is........

[mookie t mookle]

Indeed, they used Mac OS
(Wouldn't it be System 7 around that time?)

Of course, Goldblum used the Powwerbook 5300- the one with the exploding batteries, so the aliens were doomed either way

Re:Non-Science Fiction?

[ebuck]

While you're at it, how about a nice game of chess?

Re:I think the all time classic is........

[pyrote]

the Alien AI would be adaptive and self-healing, and would totally block out Windows, leaving Mac as the only option

They have been watching us for years and protected themselves from the known operating systems of the world... thus, they completely missed seeing mac as noone had any :) well other than jeff goldbloom.

Re:James Bond (The World Is Not Enough)

[coleblak]

Actually, I'm pretty sure that device driver conflicts would activate the countdown.

Re:Jurassic Park

[bladesjester]

Hey, after a day of being effectively dropped off of a cliff in a car, chased by dinosuars, snotted on by a dinosuar, almost being run over by a "flock" of dinosuars, seeing your little brother get electrocuted, and come close to being eaten by dinosuars a couple of times, I have to say that, personally speaking, *I* might come off as a bit cocky if finally faced with something that I know I've got nailed. =]

The Slashdoting

[EEPROMS]

#Shot 1 of glass office building
Narrator: She was a innocent data entry operator, he just wanted to finnish his perl program.
BUT! they were destined for a roller coaster ride from hell
#Shot 2 Close up of smoking server, flickering lights
Male Geek 1 with shocked voice: "Whats happening"
#girl screams
Male Geek 2: " I dont know I just posted a link to an article on one of the servers to slashot"
Male Geek 1 shouting: "Oh my god it's going to blow"
#Shot 3 Glass Office Building on fire lots of smoke and running people
Narrator: if you have never seen a movie about computers this movie shouldnt be missed
#Shot 4 Little Girl with Del Computer
Little Girl "Daddy I can turn on your laptop"
Father screaming "NOOOO"
#Shot 5 Little girl getting blown to bits.
Narrator: the slashdotting coming to a cinema near you, just pray you never get linked.

Re:Hell yeah. Worst list ever

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, it was a dystopia.

Re:Bah

[edunbar93]

You know the scene in Hackers where Joey logs into that one computer, and rainbows of stars and other shit come streaming across the screen?

Somehow, I think the audience would have gotten the point if we just got a zoom-in of "Login successful. Welcome to Cyberdyne systems model 101." Especially if he started doing the victory dance.

I don't know about you, but if the "Login successful" screen did the stars shit every time *I* logged into a computer, I would drag the developer into a dark alley and beat him with a crowbar for a couple of hours.

Of course, that wouldn't excuse the other egregious hackery that comprised much of the dialog. You gotta love a line like "Run Antivirus!"

Re:Bah

[B3ryllium]

Yesterday, my dental hygenist attempted to create an analogy of "not brushing my teeth" as being the same as "not updating my antivirus on the machines at work".

She didn't get my point when I said they run "Linux".

Too bad my mouth doesn't, though. Heheh :)

This was 1993

[joggle]

Back in '93, it would be very unlikely a 10 year old girl would understand UNIX since it practically didn't exist at home computers and kids usually don't have access to UNIX servers.

Bonjour

[Gordonjcp]

Standards compliance is a wonderful thing.

Re:The worst movie about a computer hacker

[klang]

...while dancing like a retard in front of 15 screens, drinking red wine ..

Re:Armageddon

[Wellington Grey]

And most unbelievable, a president who understands, and gives a speech in favor of, science. Man, that scene brings a tear to my eye every time.

-Grey [wellingtongrey.net]

Re:Funny as hell

[rilister]

Oh! Oh! You're gonna love this one:

In gawd-awful NBC show "Surface" http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0452718/ [imdb.com], there was a scene when the heroine had to release the hero/nut-job from a prison cell locked with a retinal scanner. The buildings gonna blow, so she's in a hurry. Tries pressing everything, no dice.

There just happens to be CCTV displays in the same room! yay! She manages to find full-face security footage of a guard on one of these displays (lucky!), and zooms it (say 10,000X) so just the eye is showing. No, really.

Resourcefully, she then rips out the LCD display showing an image of a big eye and holds it up to the retinal scanner. The door pops open.

At this point my disbelief got up, left the room and shot itself.

Re:Armageddon

[sidb]

It has a space shuttle that noisily swoops and accelerates into a crash landing on an asteroid with its main engines still burning at full power -- even though it has no fuel tank. That's just about every spaceflight rule in the book broken in a single scene. It's a triumph of art over reality... OK, actually, it just sucks.

I guess that makes Linux equivalent to superteeth

[blorg]

...or dentures?

Re:I think the all time classic is........

[drolli]

Yes, ideed. This was still the time when the idea of malware did not pentrate society to a deep level. I only asked myself: WTF the extraterrestrians build starships as big as cities but they do not protect theyr system at all (they did not even talk about skipping an protection).

Maybe they send a mail like this:

Dear Extraterresrtian friend,

you have not heard of me up to now but i am sure i can trust you. I am the son of the late ruler of this planet and twenty others. However, rihgt now i can not access my power, since enemies of my family have grounded our operations. I now come with a offer to you which i make to you only because i heard of your good morale. If offer you a significant share of my imperium if you can help me to regain power on earth....

Re:I guess that makes Linux equivalent to supertee

[B3ryllium]

Superteeth! Repelling Plaque at every turn, by virtue of being completely incompatible with it!

Re:Bah

[DarkAxi0m]

ive allways look at hackers as an art-house kinda movie
and the "rainbows of stars and other shit" that come streaming across the screen are more what he is 'feeling' inside his mind rather than whats really happing.
Though i do agree that showing Login successful, him doing the victory dance would show the point, but common... think of the physical effort! hehe

So, uh, what's your interest in Kate Libby, eh? Academic? Purely sexual? ...Homicidal.

Re:We are smart, most people are not

[Anonymous Coward]

The fun part of this is that you guys actually spent time trying to "track down this item". (Oh, I forgot - you are smart, most people are not. Right.)

Re:Missing option

[Spad]

Well the little guys inside my PC thought it was pretty spot on.

Re:Bah

[Lumpio-]

Now that's just a blatant lie, a lot of white text on a black background can be very interesting!

...then again, I guess most other people don't get excited looking at emerge logs.

That's nothing compared to Simone

[DurendalMac]

Dunno if he mentioned it as the site is Slashdotted straight to server hell, but Simone was fucking horrid. Okay, so the guy has software and a wicked computer that can render photorealistic CGI in realtime. Okay. Then it has a goddamned 5.25" floppy drive in it. The fuck it would! Then he puts in a 5.25" disk called "Plague" which wipes it. Okay, that's plausible. Then he pulls all the drives, discs, basically everything with a record of this software and destroys it. Then his daughter somehow brings it all back with a keystroke, even though the damned drives were GONE!! Not to mention they were completely scrambled before they were gone! Oh yeah, and the rest of the movie sucked ass too.

Re:I guess that makes Linux equivalent to supertee

[ducky101]

No, I think it makes Linux equivalent to bad hygiene.

Re:I think the all time classic is........

[gbobeck]

Apparently, the Aliens forgot to read this security advisory: CERT(sm) Advisory CA-96.13 [meyerweb.com].

Re:The worst movie about a computer hacker

[clickclickdrone]

>Creating a worm doesn't involve moving little 3-D blocks around on a computer screen.
Pah! You clearly don't get object programming ;-)

Re:Bah

[LiquidCoooled]

They could even have an X-factor type competition to decide who plays him.
Of course the winner will be the guy who gets his PFY to rig the votes.

Re:Bah

[maxwell demon]

I guess they didn't want to bore the viewer with technical details, the book The Cuckoo's Egg does say the hacker used trojans in that manner.

The hacker used trojans to bore the viewer with technical details? I guess that's a new sort of DoS attack: Instead of attacking the computer, attack the people in front of it by giving technical details ... :-)

Re:Um....

[flinkflonk]

>In a world where they're cloning dinosaurs, I think it's perfectly acceptible for them to also have unrealistic technology.

Especially their version of Unix.

Uhm, you mean like Irix running on a Sun? (* shuffles swiftly back into his hole *)

true story

[circletimessquare]

i am a film buff. so i knew about the movie swordfish a few months before it came out (from fan sites like aintitcoolnews.com, etc.), and i knew sketchy plot points about the movie, namely that it would be about illicit transfers of illicit funds

i also used to work for a large multinational bank as a programmer. and a few months before swordfish came out, i was developing a system used by the bank for monitoring internal transfers. on a lark, i code named the system in development as "swordfish" for my own personal use as a joke

but in email conversations with my boss, i, um, kept calling it swordfish. oops. my boss wound up raving about the system, to his bosses, to other middle management, to everyone. he started telling everyone who would listen about it because the basic idea behind the project was a sound one and it was important for the bank. unfortunately, he kept calling it "swordfish," and the name stuck and went into general use

awareness of the swordfish project just happened to peak when the movie came out. to widespread media coverage and exposure and advertising. and the basic details about a hacker breaking into a financial computer system to transfer funds became common knowledge, even to people who didn't see the movie. and at the same time, here was my boss making an internal push to distribute this program to wider use for testing, and trying to drum up support for it amongst the higher ranking middle management... and it was called swordfish

he stopped raving about the program, and my boss got in the habit of shaking his head and smirking every time he saw me. but we never spoke about the "coincidence". he must have gotten laughed at pretty hard on my behalf

so the plot guys get the technical details wrong sometimes

i am living proof that sometimes the technical guys get the plot points wrong

Not true

[patio11]

If the had wanted to break *every* rule in the book, NASA would have *missed* the asteroid for a change.

Re:Bah

[flumps]

"Run, antivirus, run!!" "Life is like a box of worms, you never know which one you're gonna £"£$"ERWL.."

Re:I think the all time classic is........

[DA-MAN]

If the Aliens had used Windows..they wudn't have taken off their planet in the first place

Or perhaps we now know why they crash landed in Roswell. . .

Re:Link does not work:Who is the admin

[Lars T.]

What a terrible portrayal of a working web server.

Re:Fantastic

[Lars T.]

It's your fault for reading TFA. I mean this is slashdot, nobody ever does that! ;-)

Then why is it Slashdotted?

Re:I think the all time classic is........

[hey!]

Maybe that's feasible, but on the screen it shows the machine establishing a TCP/IP connection to the mothership.

And "Vint Cerf" sounds like a name actual human beings would give their offspring?

Re:I think the all time classic is........

[Fred_A]

Don't you know that in US English, you can substitute any vowel for any other ?

Re:I think the all time classic is........

[jeremyp]

TCP/IP, wireless LAN, both invented after the alien spaceship crashed at Roswell. Where do you think we got the ideas from....?

Re:I think the all time classic is........

[rbanffy]

So, it's safe to conclude the only Mac virus that ever existed saved the world from an alien invasion. ;-)

Re:We are smart, most people are not

[ajs318]

Heh. I once created a fictitious item to test a stock control system (a Sanderson running PICK) at the last place I worked. The order code I created was CIG-B&H/20 and the description was "Cigarettes, Benson and Hedges, pack of 20". When the system was replaced with a new (but reckoned inferior by everyone who had to use it) Sage Tetra system, we had to get in temps to re-enter everything from the old system into the new one (open source would have made it too easy to create our own import filter). As far as I know, CIG-B&H/20 is still on the stock control system there although there were never any kept in stores.

Re:I guess that makes Linux equivalent to supertee

[jrobinson5]

Linux would be dentures. They don't come with the system, you have to install them.

(I know, the analogy fairy is going to kill me now. I'm sorry.)

Jurrassic Park

[brunes69]

When whizkid sits down by the fence control computers.

Starts flying around in some 3D interface. In 1996.

"This is a UNIX system! I know this!!!".

Yeah. Real UNIX like...

Re:Bah

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux is kinda like flossing. It keeps everything clean, but it's uncomfortable and no one really likes it.

Re:Bah

[nickco3]

I have mixed feelings about War Games. Some of it was good and realistic, the text logins and the war-dialling, like you say, but some of it was pushing things a little, like computers are alive and one them has been put in charge of the nuclear button.

And some of it was just complete fantasy-land, like the cute girl wanted to hang out with the class nerd while he played a computer game in his bedroom. I ask you.

Re:Bah

[kfg]

And some of it was just complete fantasy-land, like the cute girl wanted to hang out with the class nerd while he played a computer game in his bedroom. I ask you.

Indeed. Reality would be if the cute girl kicked his ass in Global War. Turns out those cute girls can be vicious little killers.

KFG

Re:Hell yeah. Worst list ever

[fuzzybunny]

You had modems?

Young'un. Spoiled brats with their newfangled tech. IN MY DAY, WE SPEEDREAD ACOUSTIC PHONE SIGNALS DIRECTLY INTO THE DAMN RECEIVER. KZZZCHHHHZKKKKZHHHTTTTKKKCHZZZZZZZZBLEEEEEEP. Hoarse for days, I tell you. And all that clicking on connect? That's an obscure Bantu dialect of Swahili. I tell you. When you said you learned a new language, it was a real language, not that that object-oriented fiddlesticks you have today. Internet? We'd just SHOUT PACKET CONTENTS at each other REAL LOUD.

That is, when we weren't busy touching live wires together to program in binary. There's a reason why a lot of 1970s hackers had huge frizzy hair. I tell you. Computing got a lot more interesting after electricity was invented.

Man, I'm an old fart too, but I so hate old-school technology downmanship :-)

Re:Bah

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course, they kept it realistic. The class nerd couldn't think of anything better to do with the cute girl in his bedroom than play a computer game.

Re:Bah

[Blakey Rat]

The line I loved the most is, "what kind of jerk lives in Seattle their whole life and doesn't learn how to swim?"

Yes, Hollywood movie producers, Seattle is actually in a deep swamp. Our secret is out. It's impossible to go to the corner drugstore without swimming at least a mile. You'd think they'd build the city on the huge rolling hills, but, no, on the swamp where everyone has to swim.

Re:I think the all time classic is........

[rk]

That's rediculous!

Re:Bah

[HiVizDiver]

Brilliant, I'm going to steal that. Since you posted as AC, I don't feel too bad about it. ;-)

Re:I think the all time classic is........

[Agripa]

It could have worked the other way as well. We know the aliens had visited earth earlier so maybe Microsoft licensed Windows to them. This also gives them a great motive for the attack. WGA also pissed me off when it screwed up my system.

P.S. I know Goldblum used a Mac. Why would I let that get in the way of a story about revenge on Microsoft?

Re:Bah

[poot_rootbeer]

You know the scene in Hackers where Joey logs into that one computer, and rainbows of stars and other shit come streaming across the screen?

I know that scene, and I found it to be very realistic.

It reminded me of my days dialing into local BBS'es run by 16-year-olds, where every successful login was accompanied by a three-page-long piece of blinking eight-color ANSI art.

Later I would log into more mature systems, where the login message was instead a single-page long fortune, usually an excerpt from a Monty Python script.

Re:Jurrassic Park

[poot_rootbeer]

Starts flying around in some 3D interface. In 1996.

Everyone knows that computers were only 2-dimensional in the 1990's. That's why Y2K was such a big deal. When the third millennium began, and brought with it a third dimension, the old 2D computers couldn't handle it.

Re:Bah

[robbkidd]

Seattle is actually in a deep swamp. Our secret is out. It's impossible to go to the corner drugstore without swimming at least a mile. You'd think they'd build the city on the huge rolling hills, but, no, on the swamp where everyone has to swim.

Listen, lad. I built this [city] up from nothing. When I started here, all there was was swamp. Other [people] said I was daft to build a [city] on a swamp, but I built it all the same, just to show 'em. It sank into the swamp. So, I built a second one. That sank into the swamp. So, I built a third one. That burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp, but the fourth one... stayed up! And that's what you're gonna get, lad: the strongest [city] in these [lands].