Not again...



  • I happened to catch part of a movie on tv last night. I was't actually watching it, I just happened to see some kid in front of a computer and figured it's be good for a laugh. Apparently the kid was hacking something because they kept showing a map of the world on the computer screen with lines running across the atlantic. I guess he was tunneling from server to server to avoid being traced. In fact I'm sure he was tunneling because they kept showing a tunnel on the computer screen (complete with brickwork and torches) which the kid was travelling through. Fair enough, I thought, there's always some sort of retarded GUI interface (yes I added "interface" on purpose) when they show "hackers" on tv.

    Finally the kid breaks through and sits back at which point I realise what he's been using to "hack". It's a joystick.

    I though I was desensitised to this stuff, but really.... a joystick?

    WTF... 



  • why not? how else are you gonna steer through the tunnels?



  • @DOA said:

    Finally the kid breaks through and sits back at which point I realise what he's been using to "hack". It's a joystick.

    I though I was desensitised to this stuff, but really.... a joystick?

    LOL u no know how to *hack* wiht joystikk? Do ytou rilly fink dat hackin is done @ an borin unix shell en the udder nerdy stereotypes? LMAO n00b, I tell you taht REELS HACKERS who hack into banks and kredit cards companiez every dey stealin their money have raelly PRO tools. itz's nots a regular joystikk mah friend, itz's a specially modified joystikk for hackin, butt it looks liuke a simple joystikk zo the cops won't find it. I know a lot about thys stuff becuase I've seen my friend duin that and he really knows shi-.



  • So, was he actually hacking something or just playing a first-person shooter?



  • Or it could be that the kid was actually playing a game involving tunnels with his joystick. Preconceptions, you know.
    Or maybe I'm placing too much faith in TV screenwriters.



  •  It was an empty, straight tunnel. If that was a game, then I have I played text-only adventures on a 286 that were more exciting...



  • I know this thread is dead, but I thought I should mention that the movie is "Masterminds". He's actually hacking too, that is, he's downloading a copy of Scream II. I'm not joking. 



  • Pls send the codes.



  • @rbowes said:

    Pls send the codes.

     

    There's a virus on the Internet.  - Eureka



  • @DOA said:

    I though I was desensitised to this stuff, but really.... a joystick?

    WTF...

    So? In this gem they hack a mainframe by writing a virus on... a GameBoy Color. The protagonist just keeps pressing the A button while characters appear at a resolution the GBC definitey doesn't support. Seriously, this one is right up there with Hackers in terms of ridiculousness.

    You also get to see an imitation Stephen Hawking get electrocuted via his wheelchair's USB cable. And they even stoop so low as to having the "über hacker" kid try to shut down a PC by hitting the monitor with a baseball bat. In retrospect, Hackers was a much more credible tech movie than Terminal Error.



  • Could probably make a decent shitty FPS based on a "hollywood hack" premise.  Sometimes you have to go through tunnels under the atlantic and shoot "firewalls" that pop up, other times you have to finish your objective before "the feds write a GUI in VB to track your IP" and similar... good for a laugh.

    Its pretty funny to think if people buy this bs - I could imagine some parent seeing her kid playing at the compuyter trek'n through a tunnel using a joystick and wondering "oh no - is lil Johnny HACKING??"
    But then some woman placed her newborn infront of a grizz cub to take a photo, and the kid got picked up and carried off into the woods by the mother bear.... pretty horrific (no sign of the kid ever was found) but hilights just what goes on when people are completely ignornant on a topic.



  • @j6cubic said:

    @DOA said:

    I though I was desensitised to this stuff, but really.... a joystick?

    WTF...

    So? In this gem they hack a mainframe by writing a virus on... a GameBoy Color. The protagonist just keeps pressing the A button while characters appear at a resolution the GBC definitey doesn't support. Seriously, this one is right up there with Hackers in terms of ridiculousness.

    You also get to see an imitation Stephen Hawking get electrocuted via his wheelchair's USB cable. And they even stoop so low as to having the "über hacker" kid try to shut down a PC by hitting the monitor with a baseball bat. In retrospect, Hackers was a much more credible tech movie than Terminal Error.

    You've never coded on a GBC?



  • @DOA said:

    I happened to catch part of a movie on tv last night. I was't actually watching it, I just happened to see some kid in front of a computer and figured it's be good for a laugh. Apparently the kid was hacking something because they kept showing a map of the world on the computer screen with lines running across the atlantic. I guess he was tunneling from server to server to avoid being traced. In fact I'm sure he was tunneling because they kept showing a tunnel on the computer screen (complete with brickwork and torches) which the kid was travelling through. Fair enough, I thought, there's always some sort of retarded GUI interface (yes I added "interface" on purpose) when they show "hackers" on tv.

    Finally the kid breaks through and sits back at which point I realise what he's been using to "hack". It's a joystick.

    I though I was desensitised to this stuff, but really.... a joystick?

    WTF... 

    That's not all that bad. I mean, atleast when he was hacking he was tunneling though other servers to mask his location. You have to give some credit for that. He can't help it that his tunnels seemed so archaic to you; I mean, grow up. Not everyone can afford cement and electric lighting.



  • I don't know, i rather have a movie that fakes it and doesn't even try to be anywhere near real (like say hackers). Then to have a movie try and be technical and fail miserably at it.



  • Must been using a custom client that used network queries to find the next hop. Did you happen to see any cleaverly disguiced bruteforcing tools that looked like uhm whatever they should look like.



  • Most hollywood movies try to make cracking into systems look exciting and interesting, and not the boring lines of text which would be closer to reality; To put it another way, if you are a normal, non-tech person, which one would seem cooler to you, and more exciting to watch?



  • Yes, but random scrolling green Japanese characters representing the contents of memory is one thing, hacking by using a joystick to navigate a tunnel is just completely ridiculous. I'm sure even non-technical people would laugh at that.



  • @j6cubic said:

    So? In this gem they hack a mainframe by writing a virus on... a GameBoy Color.

     

    My favorite in this department is Independence Day, where they write a virus on a (Earth) laptop and then upload it to an alien mothership's mainframe.



  •  It really is a bunch of tubes!



  •  Let's even be more clear, it was a Mac and the virus was written in Java. That is, for a probably quantum super computer running an ungodly OS and software.



  • @TGV said:

    @j6cubic said:

    So? In this gem they hack a mainframe by writing a virus on... a GameBoy Color.

     

    My favorite in this department is Independence Day, where they write a virus on a (Earth) laptop and then upload it to an alien mothership's mainframe.

    Actually, to be fair the military did have one of their space ships. It's not entirely unreasonable to assume that in the many years they had it that they could have found out how the alien computers worked. The real WTF is that the aliens never heard of virus scanners.



  • @DOA said:

    I happened to catch part of a movie on tv last night. I was't actually watching it, I just happened to see some kid in front of a computer and figured it's be good for a laugh. Apparently the kid was hacking something because they kept showing a map of the world on the computer screen with lines running across the atlantic. I guess he was tunneling from server to server to avoid being traced. In fact I'm sure he was tunneling because they kept showing a tunnel on the computer screen (complete with brickwork and torches) which the kid was travelling through. Fair enough, I thought, there's always some sort of retarded GUI interface (yes I added "interface" on purpose) when they show "hackers" on tv.

    Finally the kid breaks through and sits back at which point I realise what he's been using to "hack". It's a joystick.

    I though I was desensitised to this stuff, but really.... a joystick?

    WTF... 

     

     

    Have you not read any of the Tom Clancy's Net Force books?  Hacking is all done in VR! 



  •  @Jedaz said:

    Actually, to be fair the military did have one of their space ships. It's not entirely unreasonable to assume that in the many years they had it that they could have found out how the alien computers worked. The real WTF is that the aliens never heard of virus scanners.

     If you recall they said something like "We can't duplicate their type of power, so when these guys showed up all the gismos inside turned on." I imagine it'd be very difficult to reverse engineer an alien computer, especially it's software, if it's turned off.



  • @helpfulcorn said:

    I imagine it'd be very difficult to reverse engineer an alien computer, especially it's software, if it's turned off.
    True, but when the computer did turn on it was easy to get access. The pilot had undoubtfully left a post-it with the password.



  • @helpfulcorn said:

    Let's even be more clear, it was a Mac and the virus was written in Java.
     

    And that's the explanation: Java runs everywhere. Obviously the alien invaders realized how utterly powerful and elegant Java is and immediately ported the JRE to their systems.



  • @j6cubic said:

    And that's the explanation: Java runs everywhere. Obviously the alien invaders realized how utterly powerful and elegant Java is and immediately ported the JRE to their systems.
     

    Are you sure it isn't the other way around, and that Java isn't alien technolgy?

    The company [b]is[/b] called Sun, you know.



  • Here.

    @helpfulcorn said:

    I know this thread is dead, but I thought I should mention that the movie is "Masterminds". He's actually hacking too, that is, he's downloading a copy of Scream II. I'm not joking. 



  • @zonker said:

    Here.
    Damn, I had only caught a small part of that. I didn't know how lucky I was.


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