How to hack like in the movies | Hacker News Reader

How to hack like in the movies

mrcracker.com

12 pointshell7 comments

You know I understand the motive behind Hollywood's attempts to propel the story with flashy interfaces and completely bogus mechanics behind a 'hacking the mainframe', but there are times where attempts to engage the audience go from "an honest attempt to blur the line between fantasy story telling and a surreal experience meant to obfuscate the non-geeks" to complete and total cruft (pun intended).

Even after seeing the movie Hackers a thousand and one times, Swordfish still remains my all-time favorite offender.

And apparently the motion graphics artists who create those interface animations are paid a killing. Maybe I'm in the wrong industry?

'Swordfish' was 9 years ago and 'Hackers' was 15.

'The Social Network' made me giggle in geek happiness when every glimpse of technical detail the was a legitimate tech shoutout. The following is a screenshot from 'Tron: Legacy' http://images3.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20101111213709/tron/im...

When computers were exotic, any hack could invoke utter wizardry and magic. The creative types behind modern movies are sufficiently aware and sufficiently confident the median American will be aware that the serious shit that happens to make computers work is a lot of typing plain text on flat, stationary screens, and some wonderful dramatic devices have been developed to extract accessible engagement from technical scenes beyond the old attempts at whiz-bang shiny awe (which never really worked anyway). So today you see a lot of bash, because the producers need text, and the graphic artists are like "why not make this legit?"

My original comment actually referenced that very scene where you see a genuine CLI. That was a big moment for me, actually (well, that and the Daft Punk cameo)

'The Social Network' had realistic dose of hacking. Loved the part when the lead actor pulls out emacs and uses perl script to scrape the data.

"The answer's not in the box, it's in the band" - Antitrust

Sneakers did a fairly good job however

Die Hard 4

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