Mr. Robot Killed the Hollywood Hacker
technologyreview.com
technologyreview.com
It's a typical work day for me.
Think The Matrix: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PxTAn4g20U
Using nmap to find a vulnerable ssh server for the SSH CRC32 attack.
(I also like Eliezer Yudkowsky's theory that the Laws of Thermodynamics are an in-simulation creation by the machines, and humans-as-batteries works according to the laws of the real universe.)
Humans are just too stupid/arrogant to believe it.
If we get a little bit too annoying or dangerous they just cull us the same way we cull foxes or bears attacking livestock. We are never really a threat to them. Especially if you consider that they are a million steps ahead of us given their intelligence.
A single AI being is more intelligent than the entire human race that has ever lived; there are millions of independent AI's in the machine society. Once you look at it this way it is laughable to think that humans have even a tiny chance against an entire society of AI entities.
We think we pose a threat the same way a bear thinks it posses a threat against an armed human. The bear may get lucky against a few humans but against the entire human species it has zero chance.
Also, given that the mind of an AI is just software they are virtually immortal. Every time humans "kill" a machine it is just a piece of hardware that is being destroyed. The mind is still intact. So yeah, as soon as a sentient AI comes into being, the fight will be over before it starts. We think we are intelligent but just look at how long it takes us to study for a career. An AI will be able to learn all of human knowledge in a virtual instant. We are doomed!
If you follow this line of thinking you can fill a lot of the plot holes in the movies.
The agents are just zookeepers.
Most likely than not each single being is completely independent from each other. For all we know it is only the "zoo" that is being affected. You know, the same way that a whole bunch of animals in a herd get an infection and die.
Planet earth is big, and by this point all of it is populated by AI beings. They are probably using fusion energy and traveling to the stars already. This whole thing is probably just an isolated incident.
For all we know this is by design to keep the humans from dying off of boredom. Or maybe and most likely this is just an experiment some curious AI is running the same way we run experiments with rats and mazes. Since they are virtually immortal they can run an experiment for hundreds of years.
It could be that the fall of human civilization happened millions of years ago. The problem with the skies is just the result of climate change or changes with the sun. Since the machines live in a virtual reality they don't care what is the environment on Earth.
Even without that, batteries are a store of energy, not a source, and perhaps the machines had discovered some unknown laws of nature that involved intelligent biological creatures being the only way to store or transform some sort of energy currently unknown to man. That is no more or less far fetched than the machines and ships using some sort of antigravity capabilities to fly.
There are plenty of ways to explain the technology in the matrix that isn't completely ridiculous.
I honestly thought I'd read that CPUs were the original intention but the studios changed it to batteries but can't find any source now.
Some hint about it here[1] but no conclusive proof.
[1] http://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/19817/was-executive...
Or maybe the implants he had worked as transmitter/receivers and he was picking up on the chatter between the machines. It could be part of the reason why he could control so much of the virtual world. Maybe all implants had some form of wifi and Neo's was just unusually strong. Why the wifi? So that they could be switched to a different pod without loosing their connection to the matrix.
One can just keep going and going with alternative explanations.
Using them as batteries reduced those numbers which is a plus, and meant the machines didn't have to build a new store of energy, and could use the existing humans.
Apparently this concept was far too difficult for test audiences to understand so it was scrapped.
"Humans are batteries when the sun goes out!" Is easy for people to understand.
"Human minds are computers but in order to use human minds as computers we need to make the matrix as a semi-corporeal realm, oh and this is why people like Trinity can do impossible things like jump really far because their minds are so powerful and actually used in the calculations of the matrix that they can impact it's outcome."
Was the part that was too complex.
I really enjoyed this documentary on Philosophy and the Matrix - https://vimeo.com/53000177
The machines were harnessing the unused parts of the human brain to create a gigantic supercomputer, but one that was capable of intuitive leaps, blah, blah, blah, lost interest....double backflip scissor kick to the face. Whoa did you see that?
I'm tempted to reach back even farther, but classical Greek drama was generally completely rooted in divine miracles because that was how most people thought the world actually worked back then, and you could get in trouble for saying otherwise, as Socrates discovered. However, in Plato's Dialogues Socrates puts in a lot of time displaying or eliciting military knowledge from his interlocutors, since they were the elite of Athenian society and Plato's target audience for his ideas on statecraft.
How can we know this? Who is "most people"?
If Shakespeare wrote to please the aristocracy, might it be possible that the surviving Greek writing was written to please some other set of elites / religious authority / etc.
Edited to add: I imagine the average working class person, or peasant, what have you, might have privately said or thought "Miracles, what a load of dingo's kidneys", much like we do today about whatever we don't believe.
I imagine the average working class person, or peasant, what have you, might have privately said or thought "Miracles, what a load of dingo's kidneys"
That's because you have a host of other ideas to draw on. What if you didn't have all that scientific knowledge and people in your village started dying mysteriously? Look at how people are in undeveloped places, if they're not educated they tend to blame evil spirits or say that someone caused a curse to fall on the village and suchlike.
Yes, the reference to our contemporaries in less developed areas is a good one. I listened to an Australian ABC Radio National podcast recently that talked about tuberculosis on the islands between Australia and Indonesian and they brought up how the locals believes about the disease made it more difficult to treat.
Of course some people just won't find the show funny, and that's fine. But a lot of very experienced, talented people put a lot of work into that show; it would be unfortunate to dismiss it entirely.
(And for the record, I personally don't find the show funny in the least bit.)
I never really understood the idea that this is meaningfully different from a canned laughter track. A live audience applauding because the applause light goes on isn't any more authentic than a editor mixing it in. It's just easier to make the end product sound like it flows realistically.
And while there may not be a "laughter" light, the audience knows that they're expected to laugh at the punchlines. Just like they know to "ooh" and "aww" at all the right moments too. In fact the crowd warm-up often tells them to make sure they laugh and laugh loud enough for the microphones to pick it up.
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In either case, the reason people bounce off of laughter in the mix is because the jokes don't land. It's the fact people would find it funny that people complaining about the "laugh track" perceive as artificial. Not because the audio is stilted enough that someone can recognize it as edited in after the fact. Getting pedantic about the colloquial use of "laugh track" or "canned" is generally irrelevant.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VSKoVsHs_Ko
Most people probably don't understand what Emacs, Apache configuration or "wget magic" is but they don't have to. Sorkin's screenplay makes, what might otherwise be a boring evening to a external observer, seem really exciting while communicating the high level ideas.
In other words: people who saw the movie partook in the excitement of watching a programmer build something cool, fairly quickly, that elicited strong feedback and reaction, which is rewarding to any programmer and they did not have to get bogged down in the details. As well, this scene also doesn't embellish in the details of hacking with absurd looking command lines nor GUIs like "Hackers" (the movie) does and, therefore, does not elicit an obligatory 'eyeroll' from the programmer/hacker community.
I've come to realize that I actually care less about the technical inaccuracies than I do about a good plot. I don't expect the general public to know a lot about hacking, and I don't care that much. Sometimes it can contribute to the plot (e.g.: prison SCADA systems being easy to break), but often it isn't that important, if it's not too ham-handed.
I care more about a good story. So yeah, the story arc matters, the dialogue matters (the conversations, the attitudes of the characters) -- all the basic elements of a good film/tv show/movie matter first. Which is why I stopped watching Mr. Robot at the beginning of season 2. I just didn't care about the characters or story any more.
Maybe it gets better? Personally, if you're looking for a good story, involving technology and morality, I can't recommend West World enough. There's some "hacking" involved and the show over all is genius. Just my $.02.
[edit] I'll add that the article does bring up the point of the societal harms technically "dumb" plots can cause -- making computing/hacking seem like magic for example. This is an interesting point, but I still think this is less important than a good plot. The potential social benefits of good writing outweigh everything else, if you ask me.
Westworld is quite brutal to the characters and you're right, mostly plot driven. And I did find much to like in the first season of Mr. Robot, but then I got bored with the story arc near the end and into the beginning of season 2.
This is somewhat tangential (although related to the "good guys" hacker trope), but one detail I loved from the begining of Mr. Robot was the reference to Enron with the Evil Corp logo. I will definitely give the show credit for its self awareness of it's 90s roots...
Interesting. The same critique you have of Mr. Robot, I have of Westworld: plot lines that are irrelevant, huge loopholes, and characters that don't develop and that I don't care for.
Then Westworld is basically science fiction, with a good bit of philosophy (which I didn't expect when I started watching it). I liked the way it shifted perspective between the guests, hosts, and operators throughout each episode so much, it left me questioning reality a bit for a few minutes after each episode.
Watching Westworld, I often find myself frowning upon a certain line of dialogue which sounds forced or 'off' in some way, or a scene which looks like it's meant to be emotional but just doesn't make me feel the sentiment. I also liked the daring, weird shots and cinematography in Mr. Robot. Sadly, in Westworld, there is less of this, as the director has opted for a more 'textbook' approach to filming and editing.
Not to say that Westworld isn't an enjoyable show, just that I too just can't seem to like it better than Mr. Robot.
That 'good hacker' exists.
Or how he tracks his psychiatrist's lover's identity by checking her (the psychiatrist) Instgram checkins, faking a reason to borrow the man's phone, then phishes his security questions and brute forces the password in minutes ("He's too old to have a complicated password, it had to be a combination of these things").
As a whole, the game was much better received. Although, Watch Dogs 2 has Hacker Vision, which lets you see people and objects through walls. The game makes no attempt to justify how that works.
Mapping/tracking with wifi signals [from special devices IIRC]? http://www.theverge.com/2015/10/28/9625636/rf-capture-mit-wi...
In real life, when people are as tormented by schizophrenia and PTSD as Mr. Robot is, their talents are of no use and of no threat to anyone. We're surrounded by such people in every city, and the only threat they pose is to themselves.
It is very dumb to argue it has no usefulness because it does not work with modern dev tools or environments
Learning C or asm gives you no insight into what the microcode under the hood is doing.
Some people learn well through certain methods than others. Some people stick with the first thing that they find and make it work for their needs. Never discovering the "better tools".
Richard Feynman, often regarded as one of the best teachers of physics to have ever lived, when asked how to teach, said he didn't know. He just tried to bring as many views to the table as possible. Some people learn from simple high-level descriptions, others need more details to build up to high-level understanding.
Pretty sure you're just being contrarian to be contrarian. Because it seems you're suggesting your way and the things you find the most value in are the only way. Which is a nonsense counter-argument to the question "Why does this thing exist."
Your criterion feels more like "I don't get why it exists. Thus it's useless."
Self-aggrandizing nonsense.
As it happens, I tend to agree that utility is where you find it. But that's not at all the same as saying that TempleOS is a good teaching tool. Perhaps it is. But thus far I see nothing save repeated assertion to support that claim, and it would be nice to see a bit more by way of substantiation.
For example, someone claimed that, because you can draw circles at the command line with TempleOS, it is simple. But I can do that too, with a terminal and a gnuplot build that include sixel graphics support. (I did it the other day for grins.) Does that mean my setup is simple? Obviously not. Why does it mean that TempleOS is? What does the existence of the capability say about TempleOS's suitability for teaching? Does it say anything? If it does, no one has seen fit to explain how. The same goes for the fact that TempleOS is written in C and assembly. Lots of things are written in C and assembly. Are they all good teaching tools?
(Also: A throwaway, for this? Why?)
And is it so strange for a lead character in a movie or TV series to represent an outlier?
John Forbes Nash Jr. ?
After his first hospitalization in 1959 Nash only wrote two more papers in the 60s. Nash's schizophrenia definitely put a stop to his work.
I watched such a disorder do its stuff to my ex-husband. He always showed signs of it, but neither of us knew. It was more like a slew of personality quirks. Stress would get to him and he developed quite a temper. It got fairly bad before the diagnosis. I thought he had a drug problem (partially true, but you know).
And then one night he was convinced his spit melted concrete. And so on. Finally a diagnosis: A few years later he couldn't work. Sometimes, even while medicated, he had a flimsy grasp on reality, but most of the voices stopped, which helped tremendously.
The suffering after it takes hold can be a beast of suffering, which was so much differnt than before it really 'took hold'. The hardest period was the time between it becoming serious and the diagnosis.
As far as I know, it's not something your born with, it's something your born more likely to develop.
I'm sure everyone here remembers the term 'suspension of disbelief' or related.
The reason a Hollywood virus or universal decryption key doesn't allow technical people to suspend disbelief is because both are immediately absurd in multiple ways, often to the point of being unintentionally funny.
It isn't hard for me, at least, to suspend disbelief that people with psychological challenges can do big things, because there are examples in which people with psychological challenges have accomplished big things.
Suspension of disbelief is tricky when approaching domain-specific knowledge. Really, the "hacker's complaint" is no different than lawyers complaining about, well, every courtroom drama ever.
I won't argue whether "Elliot's" PTSD is so severe that he couldn't function. It is fiction, and arguing about personal investment in fiction is a mug's game, outside of friendly bar talk.
I will simply note that you're vastly overgeneralizing the range effects of both PTSD and schizophrenia. PTSD, for instance, has in fact led to horrific violence, and, well, go google 'famous schizophrenics' if you'd like to see what people have accomplished.
So when the movies and television shows portray mad geniuses who threaten to destroy life as we know it, it covers up the sad reality, which is severe schizophrenics are only a challenge to our sense of decency, and little else.
I don't think it is anywhere nearly so simple as "dumb people believe fiction is real." There is a complicated interplay between lived experience, class, personality, education, desires and other priors driving how people process both fiction and nonfiction.
Or as a brief counterfactual, sure is nice how the murder rate has dropped now that we've banned violent video games, amirite?
And it is a real problem wrt applying such acquired "knowledge" to the real world. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSI_effect is a well-documented instance, and there are numerous reports by lawyers of juries making unreasonable assumptions (e.g. about the accuracy of DNA matches), or giving undue weight to "expert" evidence like bite mark analysis (which is fraudulent pseudoscience: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2016/09/07/...). All this stuff has effect on outcomes of real world criminal cases, sometimes literally with people's lives at stake.
As Cory points out in this piece, the same is true for information security. It all ultimately translates to a very skewed public picture of what the threats are and how they can be mitigated, and that, in turn, affects public policy and laws. That is a real problem.
Bite mark analysis is a great example. It isn't just that CSI: Market Segmentation Unit convinces people science can do something it can't. The legal world (outside of some lonely voices to which nobody listened until pretty recently) was telling juries it was valid. Defense attorneys might have taken the odd run at expert testimony in a particular case if it looked promising, but their job is to win particular cases, not take principled stands in general. Meanwhile, the rest of the attorneys in the room (people with reputations for being serious, whom you might expect to have carefully considered the value of different types of evidence, given their careers) were taking bite mark analysis seriously. What, exactly, is a juror in that situation to do?
It is worth asking if the CSI effect is just a cultural feedback loop. Criminal law[1] has always wanted magic unassailable evidence. It just makes everything so much easier. Fiction sometimes still portrays fingerprint evidence as close to infallible, but who has spent generations treating it as such in the context it for which it matters most?
So at the risk of sounding cynical, I'll note that doubts about bite marks, fiber analysis, and now even fingerprints are legally acceptable now that a new magic guilt-certifier is available.
[1] I'm being somewhat flip with language. All of these topics are much more complicated than portrayed. Please take my broad generalities about legal topics in the spirit offered.
But the same applies here! The general public wants to believe, for example, that if terrorists use encryption, some really smart guys from NSA or wherever can "hack" it somehow (but nobody else). Or at least that we could regulate encryption such that only the "hackable" varieties are available to terrorists. It makes them feel safer. And so you have 44% supporting legislation to mandate backdoors.
In this case, no, they aren't. A better comparison would be to a general contractor hiring an electrician. A prosecutor is likely to have no more formal education or hands-on experience with forensic science. But, as professional "consumers" of expert testimony, and a motivation (professional duty) to win, you can't evaluate their scientific ignorance the same way you'd evaluate a juror's. I don't think the reason bite mark analysis lasted so long is because Judge Goodsense watched cop shows, any more than you can say a GC can't be blamed for shoddy wiring because they weren't a member of the Electrician's Local.
To swap contexts, nontechnical people who work with programmers may not be able to give you the big-O cost of a loop, but they tend to know when a programmer is bullshitting about something.
This goes to my contention that the CSI effect isn't just 'I believe it 'cause I saw it on the toob'. Education, lived experience, class, personality and other priors play in to it. In the case of criminal evidence admissibility, I think there is at least motivated reasoning as there is true belief in methods. The motivation is in part the same as with how plea deals have evolved - the current criminal justice system would collapse if trials were needed for more than a tiny fraction of cases. Magic evidence is a performance hack.
I don't disagree that ambient falsehoods matter. I am saying that comparing motivated professionals in a field with random MOPs misses a lot of the picture, and that even your MOP is going to react to ambient falsehoods they can't evaluate differently, based on priors.
I don't think that is the case in general, either.
The problem is that "I saw it on the toob" has secondary effects, that attenuate as they propagate, but can still go a long way. Basically, you might not believe that DNA testing is 100% correct because you saw it on TV; but you you believe it to be 100% correct because "everybody knows it", and the reason why they do is because "everybody knows it", and so on, until you actually get to a much smaller minority who believe it because they personally saw it on TV.
(In general, it's amazing how many popular "common sense" things are blatantly false, but they keep getting repeated and propagated as part of ambient noise of society, because "everybody knows it".)
Except, oddly enough, My Cousin Vinny, which lawyers apparently love [1]. The fact that I can name one movie known for this probably proves your general point, though.
[1] http://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/entertainment/movies/New-...
Mediocre source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q5pggDCnt5M
I don't claim you are wrong, but be very careful about the Barnum/Forer effect when reading such descriptions:
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnum_effect
BTW: I'm personally rather immune to this effect, since I'm not a person who fits "the profile of a typical citizen".
Depression is a (very common) mental disorder. I highly recommend talking to your doctor/a therapist about this if you're self-identifying as such.
Suspension of disbelief is one thing but when characters who are experts have to explain to each other what they should already know to me a real groaner in TV and movies.
One character on Mr. Robot at the security company didn't know what a rootkit was, really?
Maybe we should bring the intertitles back.
Maybe not, but you're damn right I've rickrolled hackers trying to access our servers and steal user data.
And some keygens (or malware pretending to be a keygen) have pretty whimsical designs with music and animation.
I immediately thought of Bonzai Buddy.
;)
"Case was twenty-four. At twenty-two, he'd been a cowboy, a rustler, one of the best in the Sprawl. He'd been trained by the best, by McCoy Pauley and Bobby Quine, legends in the biz. He'd operated on an almost permanent adrenaline high, a byproduct of youth and proficiency, jacked into a custom cyberspace deck that projected his disembodied consciousness into the consensual hallucination that was the matrix."
When the character needs to elude a police escort that can track his ankle bracelet with their smartphone, he tricks them into letting him have the phone for a sec and surreptitiously drops the update frequency in the tracking app to 24 hours.
When he needs to hack into the NSA, he uses insider knowledge of an employee's name/email and their boss's name/email to write a plausible spearphishing email with a 0-day PDF attachment.
I think there is also some good command-line activity on screen, though it's been long enough that I don't remember.
Not sure exactly where they were wrong, I think I found bot the plot uninsteresting as well as the characters. Also Hollywood tendency of casting jocks and models as hackers :/
Though as you mentioned they weren't quite cast to type. And in Wei's case acting in a second language probably doesn't help. Still the whole thing really underperformed.
That's not ridiculous at all: go back and re-watch the film. If the MacGuffin did what the film said it did, it would effectively act as a universal key.
As a MacGuffin, it is still entirely plausible. But the actual use of any such magic box would never be visually exciting enough for Hollywood.
"Ok, so I ssh in to the box, feed it the hash, let it run for 450 hours, and then we get the result and spend Satoshi's Bitcoins into accounts we control."
"Does anything blow up?"
"No."
"Blinky lights at FBI headquarters?"
"No."
"Car chases?"
"No."
"Break in to a secured building?"
"No."
"So who's going to watch this movie?"
"How about we just get some laser pointers and some cats while we wait?"
There is another movie called "Travelling Salesman" where a few mathematicians solve P vs NP and explain the possible implications to a federal agent who wants to exploit their breakthroughs.
ps. Awesome script to play hacker while people is looking at your shell https://github.com/bartobri/no-more-secrets
Smart coders design elegant solutions that don't require frantic typing (and the same would apply to elegant hack-scripts).
Seeing an online gamer crank at WASD is more in-line with "hack faster by typing more".
Also the "GUI interface in Visual Basic."
That said, I once worked with a guy who could type, switch windows, desktops, etc - at what seemed like lightning speed. I mean, when he was at it and "in the groove" - his screen, fingers, etc - were a blur of frantic activity. In some ways, it even reminded me of "hollywood hacking". He was expert at what he did, though - more often than not, his solutions and designs were spot on, and even these "quick fixes" or whatever - would work right first time out the gate.
When at normal speed the increase in productivity may seem minimal, but after a while, when you get that groove moment, the benefit compounds.
Another way to see it is that the less time and effort you spend on actually doing the thing the less it stays in the way of your mental process.
I'm a designer first and foremost, have been for well over a decade. Started coding (Basic) a decade before that.
However, circumstances have led to me being more than that. I'm a copywriter, social media manager, web developer. Content manager, product designer and manager. This means a TON of switching tasks.
But sometimes, I have to do something small, like spend a couple of days launching a WordPress site. Switching between the mockup PSD and the template files, the various browser tabs where I have the CMS open, the FTP client, etc.
I've always loved keyboard shortcuts and all the tiny little hacks, hidden double clicks and ctrl+alt+right-clicks that made this go faster.
And when people watch when I'm plugged in like that, "magic" is the word most people use to describe what I'm doing. (Even some medium level devs do!)
Not boasting btw. Just happy about life in the industry. We're lucky fucks.
Wait, you don't use green "matrix" text?
Now when it comes to coding, I also tent to type fast, but mostly because I'm a vim user and that's how you navigate and edit around. All the braces and brackets are something that I don't fancy typing fast and rely on auto-complete.
Also, I do type fast in the command line when necessary, though it's mostly boring stuff like switching directories, running programs like make and git and starting vim.
I've met young coders, new to the Bay Area, who actually did try to impress me with their frantic keyboard skills. Being able to rapid-fire keyboard shortcuts is some kind of signal to some subset of technical people. To me, it just demonstrated that they were really bad at the communication thing and understanding social context.
And also tilting the office chair up to the upright position.
Two things. First, that's going to depend on coding style and how you operate. Personally I'll give great thought to the particular problem and then hammer away at the keyboard as I crank things out.
Second, the world of hacking isn't some grand operation where folks are working in some lab run by the Russian Mafia or whomever. I work for a cyber security company, albeit as a software engineer, but a lot of this shit is taking pre-built kits (which often times are not not that great either) and changing some configs, adding a little extra functionality or whatever.
I don't see this so much in Mr. Robot but I saw a good point is that a lot of movies and shows uses hacking as an action sequence instead of just using it to move the story forward.
"We've found a phone in the room Bourne is in! Hack it and then hack the laptop next to it!"
> typey type type typey type click type
"Done."
Groan.
Use alphabet to write this comment!
The Model M is a designation for a group of computer keyboards manufactured by IBM starting in 1984, and later by Lexmark, Unicomp and MaxiSwitch. The keyboard's many variations have their own distinct characteristics, with the vast majority having a buckling-spring key design and swappable keycaps.
Hacky's nostalgic reverie about IBM keyboards was suddenly interrupted when a voice spoke, chillingly close, coming from the other side of the server hall. "Drop that keyboard McHacky" it said menacingly.
Mr Robot exists as it does because there are now enough people familiar with computers and the relevant concepts to constitute an audience, rather than due to any sudden insight on the part of screenwriters (of which I am one). We know, and have always known, that there's a distinct hacker subculture with its own linguistic tropes, ethos, etc. etc. and that there's been a big gap between reality and how it's portrayed in movies.
We also know (or learn the hard way) that there's a big gap between including enough detail for verisimilitude that will satisfy people who are competent in a particular field, and what the general public wants to watch - which is why you'll continue to see shallow or outright stupid portrayals of hacking in the entertainment industry's output. Why? Primarily [1] because the mass of people are just not interested in any given field that requires nerd-level commitment to understand. The larger the budget required for the film, the larger and more general the audience has to be, and the more accuracy and authenticity will be sacrificed in favor of spectacle and symbolism, which is the most reliable method for getting people to fork over their money in the first place.
Take a recent example from a different context - Jurassic World. The 'plot': capitalists and scientists employ DNA technology to produce a bigger, smarter, more aggressive dinosaur than has ever existed in nature; said dinosaur escapes from confinement and menaces everyone in the vicinity, especially the attractive hero, anti-heroine, and small children that are introduced early in the story. It's basically Frankenstein only with dinosaurs. Spoiler alert, the attractive proxy for the family unit survives and the bad dinosaur is defeated, though not before killing off the most ethically deficient characters by eating them like ham sandwiches.
Now, any biologists worth their salt would cringe at many scenes (if they watch such nonsense at all). Any genetic scientists had to suffer through yet another scene of an annoying smartass mumbling a few meaningless phrases about 'advanced gene splicing' while screens in the background display animations of double helixes and molecules. I think they might have mentioned CRISPR, I'm not sure and have no intention of watching it again to check.
Would Jurassic World have been better if it was more like Primer or Mr Robot, with in-depth discussions of structural factors and real-world constraints, and a hard-science approach that admitted of 1 (one) speculative assumption, from which the rest of the plot flowed organically? Sure,,,if you wanted to make Gattaca - Herpetology Edition. But though gattaca is one of my all-time favorite sci-fi films, neither it nor Primer will ever appeal to a mass audience and so films like that will never have the most recognizable actors or the most astonishing visual spectacles or the same sort of short-term existential anxieties that would result from having to run or your life from a creature the size of an apartment building.
People go to Big Movies to allay their quotidian existential anxieties (about which they often feel helpless) by seeing them safely reflected [2] in contexts that are outside normal human experience. How far outside is primarily inversely proportional to the budget and corresponding box-office performance requirements, while being secondarily proportional to the depth of the underlying existential anxiety.
Hacking in films has simply been a proxy for magic, in line with Clarke's observation that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Magic serves an important dramatic function as the source of the unknowable solution to the Intractable Problem with which the story's characters are presented.Thus, magic and its various proxies (specialist bodies of knowledge, from hacking to legal procedure to medical knowledge) is not a black hole which encapsulates the ignorance of the writer (although many inferior or lazy writers abuse it for that purpose) but a singularity which offers the possibility of escape from the otherwise-inexorable logic of the story world; it symbolizes the hope of a future discoverable solution to an otherwise insoluble problem.
A few examples from popular films may illuminate this. In Star Wars the insoluble problem is a spaceship that can blow up an entire planet. The magical device is The Force, a limited but still useful psychokinetic ability. In the Alien films the insoluble problem is an ambulatory disease; the magic device is an artificially intelligent android that can approach the alien closely enough to observe a weakness of some kind (but which has to be temporarily decommissioned first, like Dumbo losing the magic feather). In the Terminator films, the insoluble problem is nuclear conflagration as the crystallization of war in general; the magical device is industrial capitalism's promise of reducing economic inequality (represented by the vast technological superiority of the Terminators themselves).
To wrap up, Mr Robot hasn't killed the Hollywood hacker at all; it has just crushed his dreams and forced him into getting a day job, which is the function that television shows perform relative to movies. You'll still see hackers in movies, but strictly as lip service to a real and increasingly less aspirational employment demographic. This might seem like an odd conclusion to draw, but it's worth bearing in mind that that serial television dramas are general occupational comedies (I'm using the term 'comedy' in the technical sense of everything basically going back to normal at the end of the episode, even if the subject matter isn't funny at all). Consider cop shows; they follow a nice steady formula with an initial outrage, a bit of detective work, an uncomfortable moral confrontation, a setback, and finally a little bit of legal procedure. On the other hand if you watch a movie about cops, they almost invariably take place at the beginnings or ends of the lead characters' careers, and the Best Person in the movie almost invariably has to die.
1. there are other reasons but I don't want to turn this into an essay on screenwriting.
2. A few films address this dichotomy as their subject matter, albeit indirectly. All films have a political dimension insofar as the choice of subject matter and its portrayal reflect some aspect of their originating policy which the creators aim to praise or criticize, but relatively few dramatize the critical process itself; invariably, the subtext of such films is that critical awareness forces us to choose sides in an ongoing moral conflict; or put another way, moral agency comes at the price of other kinds. Generally in these films the lead has to either die or give up the old life completely in an anti-hero pattern.
Jurassic World is science-fiction, which makes it a hell of a lot easier for subject matter experts in the audience to suspend their disbelief when it comes to the technical parts. Furthermore, said technical parts take up maybe a few minutes of the film at most, keeping the need for the suspension of disbelief to a minimum.
Mr. Robot, on the other hand, is drama, and the main character is a hacker who hangs out with other hackers. In order for it to be viable as a show, it needs to be technically accurate.
(Mind, I'm being very literary theory here, rather than using entertainment industry shorthand. From this standpoint Law & Order is a restorative comedy despite the grim subject matter and lack of humor, because in a restorative comedy everything goes back to normal at the end. The show revolves around the lives of the cops, not the perps and victims, who are simply props for the police officers to relate to in each episode. If a recurring character dies or two cops go from being friends to enemies, that individual episode is a tragedy. But if the cops end an episode with equal or stronger bonds than they began it, then the episode is a comedy even if the subject matter was horrific.)
There's no one 'correct' way to analyse a film's symbolism/ideology, not even the author's intention. Many films have been written to express one point of view and been interpreted a completely different way by the majority of the audience. An interesting example is the Hunger Games series of books and films. Left-wingers consider it a metaphor for plucky workers oppressed by selfish capitalists, right-wingers consider it a metaphor for decent country folk being oppressed by degenerate city-dwellers.
Can you anyway though?
But if you're hungry for more of this, check out Slavoj zizek's film criticism, I think The Pervert's Guide to Ideology is on Netflix.
My thesis is not that Hollywood doesn't know stuff or won't hire experts, but that Nerds (in various fields) don't appreciate the business necessity to dumb the story down for the widest possible audience. Nerds are very interested in their specialist subject and often lose sight of the fact that too much detail is boring.
stories are ultimately about emotional identification, and too much intellectual detail can be just as boring as too much action (eg Michael Bay's Transformers films are often criticized for fight scenes that are so long and intense that people lose track of who's winning and after a while stop even caring, because it's just one big explosion after another).
If I made an accurate movie about lawyers at work, lawyers and paralegals would love it, and I might even have a small indie hit on my hands if the other elements were good. But most people would be bored to tears because they don't have all the background knowledge and experience to fully appreciate it, and they want to be entertained more than they want to be educated.
But would you really want it any other way?
Let's face it: we will forever be viewed as either wizards, or plumbers.
Isn't this analogy great?
I'm extremely confident that if you trained me, I would be an exceptionally good plumber. I am extremely unconfident that if you trained me, I would be an exceptionally good neurosurgeon.
I'll extend that - I am confident that the majority of adults could be trained to become competent plumbers. I am not at all confident that the majority of adults could be trained to become competent neurosurgeons.
Some people react to the reality of vastly different education, patience, effort and talent requirements in job occupations by being condescending. That's not fun for anyone, but it also doesn't make sense to be smug about that reaction as though those people are being condescending towards a skill they fundamentally couldn't learn how to do even with great effort, time and intelligence. They are being condescending towards a skill that is very low in terms of the percentile required to do it competently.
But it is funny.
I actually believe it would be possible to build a coherent and effective story around technical ideas but it would require a writer of great skill, who just happened to have a very technical background.
The way it would work is that the plot would be driven by a technical obstacle/issue. Instead of focusing on the details of the technical issue, the key would be to elucidate the conceptual background to it. Obviously, this has to be done in a way that respects character and which eschews heavy-handed exposition. Which is hard. It would have to be a much slower burn in terms of action. I think you'd have a single hack maybe taking an entire season :)
I think though this approach has been successfully used in Film and TV when representing politics. They manage to show how big issues break down into specific pragmatic issues and then how those pragmatic issues in turn feedback.
It's been a while, but as I understood it, the "dat file" was (ostensibly) part of a professional forensic dump of a filesystem on a compromised server, and the IP was buried somewhere in the malware itself as the address from which commands were accepted.
If Cory Doctorow had done his homework he would know that Leonard Adleman (the 'A' in RSA) worked in that part: https://www.usc.edu/dept/molecular-science/fm-sneakers.htm
I always assumed the original script called it a DES cracker but the studio people dumbed it down. But sneakers is unique among hacker movies in that it needs very little retconning to make sense from a technical perspective.
Another movie similar to Mr Robot is Algorithm which I'm surprised nobody has mentioned:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6qpudAhYhpc
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/21/movies/wargames-and-cybers...
What annoyed me about Mr Robot is the stereotype / trope of a hoodied punk teen wielding their talent with a computer which has been done to death already in other movies (I class Mr Robot as an extended movie with episodes).
Hackers can be anybody infact, and it doesn't help that the hoodied punk stereotype is perpetuated. Think Stallman, Zimmermann, & Eric Raymond, not Zero Cool or Neo.
As for Hackers the movie, i wonder if one best treat it similar to Streets of Fire[1]. a fable that happens to be set to New York.
But I think the computers, however well realized, are just the backdrop. It's really about questions of identity, morality, and sanity.
Much of the hacking is hacking the self, often through drugs and/or psychological manipulation.
By contrast, if we ever did get true human-level AI... uh... are quite sure that "magician" wouldn't be appropriate at that point...? It's not entirely dissimilar to "demon summoner", though there probably won't be actual pentagrams involved. Although you never know; just as my UNIX system has an awful lot of "demons" in it it would only take one AI researcher with a hacker sense of humor to program in an last-ditch emergency "containment via drawing a pentagram" routine in the base OS for the successful AIs....
Quantum computing is likely to have a large impact on crypto (making the crypto we rely on now easier to break). A large part of the Hollywood hacker is someone who breaks into systems with relative ease.
>"By contrast, if we ever did get true human-level AI... uh... are quite sure that "magician" wouldn't be appropriate at that point...? It's not entirely dissimilar to "demon summoner", though there probably won't be actual pentagrams involved. Although you never know; just as my UNIX system has an awful lot of "demons" in it it would only take one AI researcher with a hacker sense of humor to program in an last-ditch emergency "containment via drawing a pentagram" routine in the base OS for the successful AIs...."
Again, the angle I was going for was more about the power of hackers. The type of opinions people had when they denied Mitnick his phone call from jail because they thought he could launch nuclear missiles.
We're only starting to see the widespread impacts of AI. Wait until the impacts on day to day life are undeniable. At that point, people who can control AI will be seen as a little beyond the ordinary.
I think a lot of "rationalist" guff about super-optimizing AIs is just recycled crap we used to use religion to deal with. It's one thing to pose a thought exercise about an entity who can reliably predict what you are going to do and think 99% of the time. I can see how that's a useful exercise. The thing is, I think I'm seeing a lot of people go from that to essentially believing in such imagined entities as prophesied gods-to-be. (Or perhaps devils.)
Our current notion of such entities is probably as spot-on as Ada Lovelace's notion of personal computing. Our current notion of such entities is probably much more inaccurate than 1950's notions of what computing would be like in the 2nd decade of the 21st century.
What makes you think those who are interested in AI expect we will be able to predict the future with 99% accuracy? The closest example I can think of from sci-fi is Minority Report, but that isn't exactly a pure AI solution, nor particularly realistic.
The coming impact of AI will be on jobs. You don't need godlike AI in order to do human work in all its forms. That's the type of change I think will re-ignite imaginations about AI.
I encounter people online and in person who pose logic puzzles involving such a hypothetical entity. I also encounter people online and in person who engage in futurist thinking about where humans would fit into a world with such entities.
The coming impact of AI will be on jobs. You don't need godlike AI in order to do human work in all its forms. That's the type of change I think will re-ignite imaginations about AI.
In "The Matrix" and sequel movies, human beings seem to react to machines in a way analogous to how we have historically reacted to different ethnic/religious groups. I hope "ignition" isn't apt.
I'd see that as a valid thought experiment, but one that had very little basis in reality. The level of invasiveness needed to bring about anything close to that would make it highly improbable, you'd basically need a swarm of sensors at the nano-scale covering the entire planet just to have enough raw data to work with, and the processing power required to interpret that raw data would be ridiculously high.
>"I also encounter people online and in person who engage in futurist thinking about where humans would fit into a world with such entities."
You probably do, but considering that there's plenty of online discussion from the same communities about basic income and suchlike, there clearly are those who are attempting to come to terms with the expected impact of AI on humans.
>"In "The Matrix" and sequel movies, human beings seem to react to machines in a way analogous to how we have historically reacted to different ethnic/religious groups. I hope "ignition" isn't apt."
Ignition?
Aside from that, the changes in our society that AI is due to bring us soon will be resisted, that's completely understandable, it's happened numerous times in our past when human work has been replaced by a machine.
Unfortunately, it's not something that can be effectively resisted without changing centuries of conditioning about the role that new technology plays in shaping our future. The best we can hope for in the near term is damage limitation.
Not to the point where it has a sizeable impact on day-to-day life.
>"quantum computers are vaporware"
Are you just basing your opinion on D-Wave alone? Plus, they're likely to have a decent impact on crypto, which definitely has meaning beyond mathematicians.
Of course we've seen the difference between "hackers" in Holliwood movies and Mr.Robot, thats precisely why this TV serie worked in the first place. Of course future movies will have to up their acting if they want to compare, WTF.
Next article "usb 2.0 killed usb 1.0"?
Comically bad/cliche companies that are polluting the earth, killing innocent people, and robbing the poor. A closeted gay, masochist antagonist and a smug, patronizing protagonist that regularly demeans the people around him and feels they are less intelligent than himself. This was all in the first few episodes.
I assume the characters and plots have changed since the first season, but not by much.
I felt like the writers were ignored in high school and used the show as a way to passive-aggressively get back at their perceived enemies.
Also minor nit - I'm pretty sure Tyrell's wife is aware of his escapades. But you're missing the point about it...Tyrell and his wife are concerned solely with power.
The protagonist isn't always right.
Either way, if you don't like it then there's plenty of other good shows to watch these days.
From a certain perspective, Mr. Robot is a critique of the very thing you are complaining about. Elliot is able to justify doing many things because of the comic-bookish way in which he perceives his world. He is mentally unstable and a central theme of the show is that the things you see (through him) may or may not reflect the reality of his world, and his actions which, while internally consistent with his reality, may not be as noble or righteous as he thinks they are.
What I've heard about the second season only made me more glad of my decision to stop watching.
At some point, the obfuscation has to resolve. I felt like it resolved reasonably well in S1, though S2 definitely did the LOST thing and just left you hanging for S3. I'm hopeful, though, as Sam Esmail has apparently written the whole story from start to finish, so he hopefully knows where it's going well enough to give it a graceful resolution.
I couldn't even make it through the first episode of season 2.
The Wolf of Wall Street employs a similar trick for part of the film to great effect.
I also find the 'evil corp' thing to be immersion-drainingly adolescent, given that there's no other direct replacement. Everything else is 'gritty and real', and then there's this Loony-Tunes bit in the middle of it.
When Elliot isn't present, things are certainly more reliable, though we have to remember that our context for this world is through Elliot, which colors how we perceive these non-Elliot scenes, as well. We have to accept that at some artistic level, there have to be scenes without Elliot present, but we know that it's still colored by Elliot's reality through tells established in E1 - ie, characters referencing "Evil Corp" in conversations between themselves when he isn't present (it's not the company's name, it's the name that Elliot tells us he has explicitly replaced the real name with in his mental processes.)
"Evil Corp" is adolescent, but I think that's the point. It's not a lack of intellectual rigor on the part of the writers, but on the part of the characters. If you latch onto it literally as Esmail railing aginst dem eeeeeviiiilllll bigcorps then yeah, it would be tedious and silly, but Elliot goes out of his way in S1 to tell us that he that in regards to Evil Corp, he actively rejects reality and substitutes his own.
We all think that we have an objective view of the world, and that it's the other people that must have it wrong. I can only conclude that I would be very foolish to believe that out of seven billion people on the planet, I'm the one that got it right.
(That being said, the extremist hacktivist is sort of necessary for a show like this. A responsible, measured one wouldn't make for nearly so engaging a story.)
I disagree that the caricature protagonist is necessary. I think a more nuanced hacktivist character could have made the show much more ambiguous, and in my opinion, interesting, maybe approaching some of the complexities inherent in the material.
>Mr. Robot is that it's told through the eyes of an unreliable narrator //
When they drop the bombshell of that reality in the second series, that the narrator is unreliable, was a great moment that had me giggling with glee. I'd been guessing "oh, that guy is another element of his own dissociated personality", but never quite guessed the full gravity of it.
The "breakdown" episode [there's just one!?!] where his family are on vacation in pseudo-flashback with smaltzy sitcom styling whilst not great to watch was a real testament to how different this show was IMO.
(spoilers) The Fight Club parallels were there from the very first time he saw Mr. Robot in the episode one. So I kind of expected what was coming.
It worked for comic books, back in the day.
Yes, the protagonist is smug and intelligent but that's common in a lot of TV shows for a good reason. Would you watch Suits if the character is an inept lawyer? Or House if the doctor is a mediocre doctor doing routine checkups?
And besides, I'd say that most programmers do feel a bit smug in the same sense about your average person clueless about technology.
Don't you mean sadist?
He's just a dude suffering from schizophrenia. Hackers, for starters, are playing in the autism-asperger spectrum.
They're utterly opposite and incompatible psychological traits.
And the whole wiping her fingerprint part was extremely stupid.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8qgehH3kEQ&t=13s
In case you need to do it yourself: