More Than 20 Years of the Web on the Big Screen 536
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.'"
Oh boy (Score:3)
Besides, its more like 24 years. They forgot Tron, in which the MCP uses the net or a direct connection to break into those other computers.
Accurate or not (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Accurate or not (Score:5, Funny)
For someone who claims to love the movie, I'd think you'd know it was Joshua, not Jason! Nerd card SUSPENDED!
Re:Accurate or not (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Accurate or not (Score:2)
One of the ways I've heard the voice synth explained is that it was pretty likely that both Matthew Broderick's character and the government bought the voice synth equipment from the same place. Much like how the Windows male voice
Re:Accurate or not (Score:4, Informative)
Most of the voice synth hardware in the 80s used the same voice synth chip, the venerable SPO256-AL2 from General Instruments...so yes, everything is going to sound similar, if not the same.
Re:Accurate or not (Score:5, Interesting)
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:Accurate or not (Score:3, Informative)
Well, at home he explicitly connected it to show off for his girlfriend. As for the government computers, have you seen their accessability requirements?
Re:Accurate or not (Score:4, Insightful)
Right there it is totally unbelievable. How does a guy like that get a girl like that when he spends so much of his time trying to figure out how to connect voice synth to an accoustically coupled modem link...
-matthew
Re:Accurate or not (Score:5, Funny)
So unlike real life.
Re:Accurate or not (Score:5, Informative)
Will people please stop complaining about this? If you've read Tanenbaum's book on Operating System Design, you'd know that this was a very real hack. In the system he describes (Tandem Computer, I think?), users could attach a listener to the page fault handler to know when a page fault happened. The system also checked passwords one character at a time.
A common method of breaking the super-user password was to align the password with the page boundary. If a page fault occurred, the hacker would know that the correct letter or digit had been found. The hacker would then move the password one character back in memory so that the next digit would be over the page boundary. This process was repeated until all the characters were found.
As a result, these computers were actually capable of being hacked "one character at a time" like you see in movies. Hollywood was just slow to update to the latest methods used.
Re:Accurate or not (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Accurate or not (Score:3, Interesting)
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
Even worse on Television (Score:2)
-Eric
The Web != The Internet (Score:5, Insightful)
Subject says it all.
Re:The Web != The Internet (Score:3, Interesting)
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?
Reminds me of a Buffy scene (Score:2, Funny)
Xander: "Willow, she's only 17!"
Re:The Web != The Internet (Score:3, Insightful)
This depresses me somewhat... The real world is full of trademarks and copyrighted works. It seems impossible to film anything, save naked humans or other animals in pristine nature, without violating something. It isn't trademakr violation for me to say "I am holding a can of Coke" or "Google offers a search engine". Should it be so legally dubious to do the same via film? Is trademark the relevant law here?
Re:The Web != The Internet (Score:3, Funny)
That whould explain the popularity of porn. It's the only honest cinematography left.
Web != Internet (Score:3, Informative)
Come on, this isn't the BBC's Technology section or PeeCee Shopper magazine.
Re:Web != Internet (Score:3, Informative)
You're right - you'd still hope that even now, Slashdot submitters and editors would understand the distinction between the www and the internet.
Re:Web != Internet (Score:3, Funny)
Quite. My mother-in-law thinks that Tim Berners-Lee invented the Internet.
Re:Web != Internet (Score:3, Informative)
errr web 20 years old naaa (Score:2)
Coz it is hollywood/movie land and they do like re-writting history some.
Woah there, headline (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, just to further nitpick, I don't think Wargames even had the internet in it -- he found WOPR by dialing it up directly.
true - He was wardialing numbers with modemss (Score:2, Interesting)
Very few norad supercomputers however....
Internet > ARPAnet (Score:2)
Re:Internet ARPAnet (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Internet ARPAnet (Score:3)
Re:Woah there, headline (Score:3, Insightful)
So, Matthew Broderick didn't have 7337 typing skillz, but the filmmakers did loan him Galaga to play, so when he's playing that game in the movie, that's really him playing.
I remember "The Net" (Score:5, Interesting)
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
Wow (Score:5, Funny)
Honestly, that's the worst depiction of computers in film that I've ever seen
Re:Wow (Score:5, Funny)
Maybe you can't...
Re:Wow (Score:3, Insightful)
Disclaimer: I've not seen the film in years and my memory of it is a little patchy.
Re:Wow (Score:2)
I need to go breathe in a paper bag and lie down for a few minutes.
Re:Wow (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Wow (Score:5, Funny)
How did Jeff Goldblum's character figure out the alien signal?
How did they know how to fly the alien ship?
All of the characters in this film are stereotypical.
The President of the United States of America flies a fighter plane against alien ships.
The town drunk is a hero for no reason.
I could come up with more, but like a child who had been molestered by her uncle, I don't like thinking about it too much.
Possibly the most idiotic film of the past 30 years.
Re:Wow (Score:2)
Q. How did Jeff Goldblum's character figure out the alien signal?
A. Duh! He's a genius.
Q. How did they know how to fly the alien ship?
A. Captain Hiller is a bad-ass hero fighter pilot, he can fly anything. Anyway, you saw the controls - if pulling one way makes it go backwards, pulling the other way goes...
Q. All of the characters in
Re:Wow (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Wow (Score:4, Informative)
A. So what's your point? Admittedly with your current draft-dodging coward of a president, I can understand your skepticism (if you're not American, I apologise for that).
Our current draft-dodging coward of a President was actually trained as a fighter pilot (in a unit that had no realistic chance of seeing combat, but that's hardly relevant to whether he could fly a fighter plane if he needed to.)
At the time the film was made, the previous President had been an actual combat fighter pilot. So no, not unrealistic at all. Although if someone told me that either of the Bushes would be an effective pilot in combat during their presidencies, years after having flown anything at all, I'd be a bit skeptical.
Re:Wow (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Wow (Score:3, Funny)
The day I see the President of any political party fight aliens in a jet plane, I will pay double my taxes and adopt a family on welfare.
Re:Wow (Score:3, Interesting)
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 K
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Wow (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Wow (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Wow (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, in fairness to the film, if you watch the special edition/director's cut that whole part makes a LOT more sense than the theatrical release which outraged us all so very much.
In the director's cut, they add back enough footage to show that the communications of the aliens is sound/radio wave, and that he (Goldblum's character) had figured out the way their communications worked.
He didn't write a computer binary virus on his Mac and upload it to the aliens. He used his Mac which had been outfitted with signal processing gear, and transmitted a series of signals which acted on their system in the way a virus would operate on a computer. So the bar could be the same as an upload status -- "this much more signal to transmit".
As much as I thought it was a travesty when I saw the theatrical release, I thought the expanded version's explaination was plausible.
Likewise, if you want to see a film that made no sense in theatrical release but becomes clear in extended release -- The Abyss is a good example. SO much of what was cut ouf ot he theatrical release caused it to become muddled and confusing. The extended release made sense.
In both cases, the films were somewhat crippled by the way theye were initially released to the public, but SO MUCH BETTER in a director's cut.
Anyway, just some musings from a film geek.
Re:Wow (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Wow (Score:3, Informative)
Oddly enough, you picked one of the few things in that movie that was more or less accurate. The Cookie Monster "virus" (not really a virus in the modern sense of the word, just an annoying piece of code) was around in the 1970s, and would randomly pop up "Cookie! Gimme cookie!" on ttys. Typing "cookie" would make the prompt go away. Typing "chocolate chip" would remove the virus.
Visual Incremental Password Decryption (Score:5, Funny)
My favorite: the odometer/slot machine password cracking software, whirring the last few places as you hear the Bad Guy® coming down the hall...
computer noises & slow displays (Score:2, Interesting)
Absuridty (Score:2)
Now don't get me wrong, I loved Independence Day [imdb.com], for the premise, the special effects, and a pretty damned good cast. But was any idea more absurd than Jeff Goldblum hacking into an alien computer system and planting a virus in it to destroy it. Did I miss the part where a crack team of hackers cracked their system and reverse engineered root access and the aliens' virus detection software? Is it possible a race with such militaristic intentions would miss the idea of trying to infect a computer system? It
Re:Absuridty (Score:2)
Anyone who's ever seen the error message "Quicktime(tm) and a TIFF(LZW) decompressor are needed to see this picture" knows what I'm talking about...
Doogie Howser and SATC epitomize pop 'puters (Score:5, Insightful)
As a narrative device it's lame, okay, but frankly I'll take that over the postmodern delayed deus ex machine of the geek's solution to a technical problem: Oooh, our brainwizard has been working away steadily at a problem all plot long, and now that we're ten minutes shy of the ending, she's finally broken through the security system/discovered the answer to the riddle/broken the code. The writers may as well have Geordi adjust the trust old modulation on the phase transponder, it's the same plot device.
Lately we're up to the level found in the funnies (other than FoxTrot): names get dropped. Ooh, she "googled" that term! That's about how far we've gotten with the Web in movies and TV... and the brain dead comic strip "B.C." for that matter.
Could you even shoot a computer screen? (Score:2)
Wouldn't you get the same flicker on Movie film? Or is there some trick that TV/Film people use to get around that?
Re:Could you even shoot a computer screen? (Score:2)
Re:Could you even shoot a computer screen? (Score:2)
Re:Could you even shoot a computer screen? (Score:3, Interesting)
This is nothing... (Score:2, Informative)
A scene of blood transfusion is going on. Mother needs blood. The blood from her 3 sons is getting in a bottle 6 feet above ground defying all rules of gravity. The blood is mixed online and then comes down through 4th tube for their mother.
There are many, but this one was classic.
Re:This is nothing... (Score:3, Funny)
Was it a trap?
New Spam King in Town? (Score:3, Funny)
Just the thought of sending out 2,000 e-mails per workweek would drive me a bit apeshit as well. Is he the new distributor for Matthew Lesko's wares?
Chloe O'Brien - Master H4Xx0r! (Score:5, Funny)
CHLOE: Jack, I'm going to open a socket to CTU so you can use your phone to upload the data from the thumb drive.
JACK: I can't upload it. Something's wrong!
CHLOE: It looks like the terrorists are trying to overload the router with IP addresses.
JACK: Can you find out where it's coming from?
CHLOE: I can't Jack, they're using a level 4 encryption algorhythm. It'll take me a few hours to decipher it.
JACK: Maybe you can use some of the bandwidth from the FBI servers to help break the encryption!
CHLOE: That might work, but I'll need level 5 network access from the FBI. I'll call you back!
It's a damn good thing that show has other good qualities...
Re:Chloe O'Brien - Master H4Xx0r! (Score:3, Funny)
-Eric
Re:Chloe O'Brien - Master H4Xx0r! (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Chloe O'Brien - Master H4Xx0r! (Score:2)
Chris Mattern
Anyone else rember Electric Dreams? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Anyone else rember Electric Dreams? (Score:2)
-Eric
not only the web (Score:5, Funny)
Don't forget the "small screen" too (Score:3, Insightful)
Comic book action stuff aside, one of the things that kicks the belief out, are the frequent computer superheroics. "Oh, I just machine coded up a thing-a-ma-bobbie to frammit the security on that secure line." (Ok, that's not a direct quote from the show - I said I watch it, not that I was an obsessive quote collecting fan.)
I am sure the same thing happens in just about any field that takes any expertise - entertainment media is bound to get things wrong, because their expertise is entertaining, not the subject matter of the plot vehicle. (Often on purpose - I mean who wants to watch a "real-time" show on a long drawn-out legal battle, for instance.)
In the end, the patient needs to be better at the end of the hour, the case solved, and the Internet deliver whatever lines it needed to to finish the story.
Mass Mailing (Score:3, Funny)
Man, that's nothing. You should see Jim Carrey sending email in 'Bruce Almighty'
Visuals bother me (Score:2)
I also love how, even when the movie is trendy and has its actors use iMacs, people seem to always TYPE everything because a mouse isn't computer-ish enough. Sometimes, the computers are even green text-mode terminals, even in modern TV shows.
24 (Score:2)
300 to 400 emails? (Score:2)
Who sends 300-400 emails a day? Really?
Assuming he takes 2 minutes per email and an average of 350 emails, that's like 700 minutes per day sending emails. That's almost 12 hours!!
And you say Hollywood is not realistic.
Progress bars to build suspense (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
BEEP! (Score:4, Informative)
Forget the absurd computer representations (Score:2)
o All the fire sprinklers going off in a building when only one has been activated.
o Car tires that "squeal" on dirt roads.
o Cowboys shooting indians with pistols, from horseback at a gallop (with 100% accuracy)
o (Not 100% sure of this one) The placement of periscopes in the main control rooms of submarines
The list goes on and on. After all it *is* Hollywood.
EnHANCE that image! (Score:5, Interesting)
Ewwww! (Score:4, Funny)
What about SkyNet? (Score:2)
If you look closely at the code that scrolls through Ahnold's head you'll see it's Atari 8-bit DOS.
Pretty cool, considering when the movie was released.
Movies For Nerds Stuff That Entertains (Score:2, Funny)
They probably all read slashdot now. Hi Guys!
robocop equivelent (Score:2)
In Robocop 2, the bad guy made into a robot was a Mac based machine.
Envelopes and other corny visuals (Score:2)
Average movie-goers still don't get computers, and probably won't for a while.
Surveilance camera's (Score:5, Informative)
Surveilance camera catches a blurred, grainy, black and white image with a 2x2 pixel head on it, software enhances the face into a highly detailed 3D model and even autodetects the name of the person.
Amusingly - (Score:2, Funny)
How was I to know it was also her kid's name?
My favourite moment (Score:4, Funny)
> DELETE ALL SECRET FILES
SECRET FILES ARE PROTECTED. CANNOT DELETE.
> OVERRIDE
DELETING ALL SECRET FILES...DONE!
Re:My favourite moment (Score:3, Funny)
The result will look like this:
$..=$_ for( qw(^,?y,(.),:^ y?y ?@xz?:^
+'',(ebmv%
+^1^2::));
$_=$.;y*^y: @wx fez %db uvm?*$q; auc ysh top jil=*;eval;print for($q,$
+;,$
(From Perl Monks Obfuscated Code Web page.)
Transferring Funds (Score:3, Interesting)
And don't forget the Obligatory Announcement (Score:3, Interesting)
The one that always gets me is... (Score:3, Funny)
from Clear and Present Danger - "We're wayyy beyond birthdays now. I'm gonna have to write... a special program, here."
Sneakers (Score:3, Informative)
Throughout the film, technology behaves properly (pretty well). TV cameras do what TV cameras are supposed to, security systems are bypassed by breaking into wiring closets and such. The worst scene for accuracy, by far, was the telephone trace.
Re:Click click click (Score:5, Insightful)
All true geeks use a Model M [wikipedia.org].
Re:Click click click (Score:2)
Awesome keyboard, totally indestructible. Quite maintainable, too, and great keyfeel and audible feedback. Like the vaunted Model M above, except compatible (with the flip of a DIP switch) with the Amiga, a huge selling point for me back in 1990.
Re:Click click click (Score:2)
Only until they tell me the secret of infinite-resolution photography.
Naaaah (Score:2)
Re:Naaaah (Score:2)
Re:jurassic park (Score:5, Informative)
Re:jurassic park (Score:4, Informative)
It was actually fairly useful.
Re:jurassic park (Score:3, Informative)
Re:jurassic park (Score:4, Funny)
Re:3-400 emails per DAY??? (Score:3, Interesting)
More Than 20 Years of the Web on the Big Screen [slashdot.org]
Videogame Remake of 1986's World Series Game 6 [slashdot.org]