Tool Recreating the “Decrypting Text” Effect Seen in the Movie “Sneakers” | Hacker News Reader

Tool Recreating the “Decrypting Text” Effect Seen in the Movie “Sneakers”

github.com

216 pointsrfreytag54 comments

Seriously, this is the smartest, most interesting, and oddly the most accurate movie I've ever watched about computer and network security. And it was hugely entertaining, compelling and exciting!

This movie introduced a lot of people to cryptography, tiger teams and ethical cracking/hacking. Also, it had Sidney Poitier, Robert Redford, Dan Ackroyd and River Phoenix.

One of my all time favourite movies.

If you want to do a road trip, the Sneakers office was in the second floor of the Fox Theater in Oakland. No idea where Seatec Astronomy was. Maybe Fremont.

I don't own an acquatic car that has enough mileage to get from Sydney to Oakland :-(

IMDb has a nice list of filming locations: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105435/locations

Was Setec one of the locations? Is that where they did the handoff with the fake FBI folks?

I remember Playtronics was the one large building they broke into.

Setec Astronomy is just a code name of the project, not an actual place.

Playtronics was the office they were headed to.

Oh, now this I like! Now I just have to 3D print Whistler's custom braille keyboard...

He should have published it under a github organization called Setec Astronomy.

For the people who want to try this on OS X run `locate ncurses.h` to see if you have the ncurses library. If you have Xcode installed, you should have it in a few places. Then update the Makefile, set `NCURSES_H = {dir}` and it should make and install just fine.

Maybe added that to their github?

This could be done with a single VT100 escape: print multi-line junk, move the cursor back, print less junky junk, repeat.

(Even with some optimization: for any line that is not changing any more, just emit a CR-LF).

You don't even need to put the TTY into raw mode; no termios calls needed, and \n is your CR-LF.

If you have a better implementation, ship it. Don't trash someone else's work from the sidelines.

edit: OP removed the snark from the comment.

Oooh, good one! Do I have your permission to use it in the code review I'm going into in 30 minutes?

If you were releasing your tool to the reviewer free of charge, absolutely.

Specifically, I removed the text "Seriously?"

brew install no-more-secrets

Works.

Sweet, thanks! I'm not sure why I didn't think to try that. Worked for me!

'What did it sound like?'

I loved that film. Loved it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KuIheGaiFLM

I really like this, too... I have this movie (and others including Antitrust and, yes, Hackers) in my "night time playlist" for when my wife goes back home to visit family for a few weeks each summer and Christmas. It is a very comfortable movie for me.

I did, as well.

-sneak

Very cool! My favorite movie.

See also: https://github.com/jtwaleson/decrypt although yours much more faithfully recreated the Sneakers scene.

I loved that movie too, and I find it holds up far better than a lot of technologically-minded fare from the early 90's. It was one of those allstar casts that really got some mileage from the various personalities and styles, I think.

Given the current government war on encryption and the snowden revelations, we might say it's as timely today as it was in 92' if not more

It certainly proves the thesis of the film, which is that the "good guys" are not so good as to be trusted with everyone's secrets.

Yeah this is some fun, cool code.

I just finished re-watching _Sneakers_ last night and while it didn't hold up to my memory, I was again mesmerized by Whistler's reconstructing the route taken by the car in which Bishop had been abducted.

I racked my brain but couldn't figure out which bridge Bishop's abductors had crossed. The web came to my rescue.[0]

[0] http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2012/09/sneake...

EDIT: grammar, URL

Kinda reminds me of what I did at school in about 1980 while dicking around on a Commodore PET 3016.

One of my earliest machine language programs was an experiment to see how fast a 1 MHz Apple II+ could count to a million. The code initialized some characters in the display buffer to ASCII '0' and then incremented them directly.

Sneakers was just as much about social engineering as it was its technical nature. I love this movie. I think I must listen to is as I work a few times a month.

One thing I took away from this movie is Whistler able to solve pieces while listening. It showed me that I should always listen first and interject my input after :-)

Sneakers came out before I was even born but now I feel compelled to watch this old, and perhaps cringe-worthy hacker movie. Hope it does not disappoint.

"Cringe-worthy"? Hardly. You owe it to yourself to watch it. It's easily one of the best hacker movies.

it's the best one, by far.

I'm partial to operation takedown which is a pretty solid representation of Kevin mitnick.

No way.

In that movie Mitnick was outright violent towards Shimomura (he wasn't in real life) , along with a few totally ficticious real-life encounters between the two.

Also, this movie depicted Mitnick destroying files and evidence (didn't happen).

The script was leaked during his defense. No good.

I understand movie magic and drama, but what a kicker to be trying to defend yourself legally while a Hollywood production glorifies you as a criminal while simultaneously injecting fiction into the true story.

It's not cringe-worthy. You'll enjoy it.

Anyone feel like creating an xscreensaver hack using this?

Nah, The Matrix code was the last screensaver we ever needed. Even nostalgia for Sneakers doesn't make the effect cooler. Probably just that the Matrix makes better background noise, tricking your mind into spotting patterns.

And of course, the anagram software they used (as mentioned in the commentary) was most likely NAMEGRAM, an old DOS program.

Dang I thought it would be the one that changed the characters into a line drawing of a map.

Your C API seems to take a null-terminated string without a specified length.

I feel suddenly motivated to work on my telnet bbs to put this to use... :-)

'Tis very nicely done.

I wish I had the time or talent to turn this into an actual shell.

Doesn't work with screenfetch and neofetch :'(

but... https://gfycat.com/WanSecretGyrfalcon

Why are we adding (2016) to current year submissions now?

Why is ~1 user doing it is the question. I guess there is a good chance they just prefer it.

Because when searching in 2017+ knowing the year of the article might be nice. With the Wayback Machine and its ilk around the Internet is not ephemeral.

Most posts are contemporary, which means you can use the post date to figure out the year of the article without clogging up the list of titles with (2016)

So time travelers feel more comfortable. You know how offended everyone gets these days.

Goddam fateless tickers. Why can't they just stay put?

At first sight I thought the movie was from 2016, since "Title (Year)" is a very common way of mentioning movies, but this movie is from 1992, so that's not it.

I haven't seen the movie, so I went looking for a movie named Sneakers that was released this year.

It turns out that it was just CGI /so advanced/ that it took humanity 24 years to reproduce in real time.

Wow, I didn't realize it came out in 1992, I thought it came out a few years later. Now I'm really starting to feel old.

In 1992, I was still using the Hayes command set to connect to the broader world.

+++

ath

We're not, so we've (belatedly) taken that out.

I love this. I love the movie. It's geeky and I went on a date to see this movie with a female friend of mine at the time (we weren't girl/boy friend at that time). Now she is my wife of almost 20 years (2017). IT was playing at the Midway Theater in Forest Hills NY.

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