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Comment by J5892 | Hacker News Reader

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J5892

And I think all of us here love hacker movies.

Sneakers, Hackers, Swordfish, etc. :)

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My personal favorite https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkDD03yeLnU

...Or https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=URVS4H7vrdU

A real hacking movie would be deathly boring. My favorite hacking in movies is either when it's cheesed up to the max (visually interesting) or happens off screen (more realistic).

I love the 10 minute or so montage in wargames where David just goes to libraries to do basic honest research on falken, in order to figure out what his password is. Of course, he should have tried Joshua like a week before he actually did, but you can't have everything.

And that's not counting knowing where the school password post-it note is kept, and getting yourself sent to the principal on a regular basis so you can keep looking it up.

Or just letting your computer run for an entire day to determine which phone numbers in a given set of area codes have modems on the other end.

Wargames does take a few shortcuts for storytelling, and it is a bit silly in the best possible way, but the actual hacking is genuinely good, and not boring.

Wargames was brilliant. How does everyone feel about the remake: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0865957/? I've decided not to let it ruin my memories of the original so far.

According to the reviews on IMDB you linked to, that was a good call. Stick to it.

I absolutely hated watching Mr. Robot. Gave up after 4 episodes.

Any reasons why?

That's surprising. Mr. Robot has the most realistic depiction of hacking I have seen in mainstream media.

Same. Massive reason why I watched the show.

I remember watching the first few episodes and Elliot is doing one of his monologues about the technology he uses and his hacking activities and I was like hold on! That all mostly made sense! What's going on here? :)

I love Mr. Robot one of the best shows on TV IMO.

Yes, but we love them despite the horrible misconceptions they hoisted on the general public, and the generally horrible accuracy. :)

But RISC is nonetheless good.

Oh grief, Swordfish is laugh out loud hilarious. I cannot for the life of me think of a movie that tries so hard to be one of the cool kids.

In what way was swordfish like Sneakers/Hackers? The latter are cyberpunk-ish, a bit ideological.

Swordfish is more of a "caper" movie with a cheap tacked-on hacking bit. Bad guy wants money, uses hacker and LOTS OF CRIME to get it.

Yeah those three movies are not the same when it comes to the hacking.

I realised in Swordfish that the 'hacking' bit (with the 3D shapes rather than anything real) isn't meant to be literally hacking, but instead emotive of it, for the 98.2% of the audience who doesn't know what actually goes on.

Hackers has a couple scenes like that, I don't have a problem with the device.

But in Swordfish it's completely ancillary to the movie that it's computer hacking that's going on. The goal is money, not any part of any "hacker ethos" or anything.

Just in that they all have unrealistic depictions of hacking.

It's definitely the worst of the three.

I enjoy when older, unrealistic movies become more realistic over time.

Remotely hacking the sprinkler system in Hackers was so unrealistic when it came out but today it's scary how real that could be.

Do you consider Office Space a hacker movie?

I consider Office Space a documentary.

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