25th Anniversary of the Theatrical Release of "Hackers" | Hacker News Reader

25th Anniversary of the Theatrical Release of "Hackers"

hacktheplanet.com

139 pointsrbanffy89 comments

Hackers did something that very few hacker movies ever did by getting the spirit of the hacker community right.

Sure, the hacking itself is nonsense, but it depicted a bunch of people from diverse backgrounds coming together in a shared love of computers and curiosity. They hack because it's interesting, challenging and fun.

As a bonus, the rollerblade-friendly arcade bar thing—Cyberdelia—is the coolest place I've ever seen.

How a group of people... who make their living typing characters, that encode binary values, that get compiled to machine code... can be so judgemental about transformative artistic license boggles my mind. Does it not occur to people that the visualizations are intended to be a layperson's representation of what the act of coding is like, rather than what's actually on the screen?

Interpreting, modifying, and fitting together higher-dimensional structures is a pretty accurate analogy of what my average day to day feels like, at the 1,000 ft level.

Also, some Orbital, for retro kicks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bV-hSgL1R74

Edit: For those who want support from the work itself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wlMvYx11V-Y&t=4s. The writers / directors were well aware of what actual computer code looks like.

At the time people were essentially upset that it misrepresented hacking as cool, where actually it was geeky. Today it's easy to take for granted that people understand personal computing, but there was a time when most adults didn't know anything about them. Those of us who did wanted to spread that understanding, and it was nothing like the street fashion and colorful animations of Hackers.

There's also an East Coast / West Coast dynamic involved. West Coast hacking was optimistic/idealistic about depth of knowledge and engineering, and East Coast was more cynical/realistic about social groups and control. Compare Apple to Facebook, the Homebrew Computer Club to 2600 magazine, custom hardware to script kiddies. This movie is a hip Hollywood take on the East Coast scene, while War Games and Sneakers are West.

Hackers was originally a guilty pleasure, but it's aged very well. I was happened to watch it again last week, and organizing a global DDoS to take down a command and control node for an industrial control virus and prevent a terrorist attack was a bit ahead of its time. Part of the visionary magic was directly involving the community, particularly Emmanuel Goldstein of 2600.

I wish the business side of it was doing a better job though. There has always been a cult following that they aren't tapping into... The original may be a poorly typeset laser printout, but why has there never been an official "Trust Your Technolust" poster?

https://mako.cc/copyrighteous/trust-your-technolust

The hacking itself isn't really nonsense at all, IMO. It's still the only hacker movie I know of that featured dumpster diving and social engineering as primary methods of learning about and gaining entry to a system.

The actual computer bits were outlandish, sure, but that tongue is so firmly planted in a cheek that you can see it from orbit.

i've always seen the flashy computer bits as something that isn't intended to be viewed literally, but rather a way to understand the mental models they had for things. in the same sense that i would explain something as "hopping into a box and poking around systemd to see what's on fire", the movie used big flashy graphics as a metaphor for the minds of expert users. i think that was the best possible choice to bring you into their world without requiring the viewer to have an expert understanding of the inner workings of a computer.

That’s a great way to put it.

i think it was a really good choice, i'm certain i'm not the only person who saw that movie as a small child and decided thats what they want to be. it was exciting and cool back then and it still holds up now. i want to imagine that someone truly and deeply understood having a love and understanding of computer systems when they made the choice to express it with such artistic license.

Have you seen the movie Sneakers? That one gets it so right.

A lot of it was accurate in between the nonsense. I was surprised to learn that there really was a Cookie Monster virus that made you type "cookie". And the hackers are accurately depicted reverse engineering some machine code as a major plot point.

I uploaded the opening NYC flyover to YouTube in its original aspect ratio (where the city grid morphs into a circuit board): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dn8VtOAHIpk

The main character's mother wishes him a happy birthday at the end of the opening. He was 18 then, which would make him 43 today.

About a year ago, someone posed the question on Twitter: what would Dade Murphy be up to today? My guess was making a living off of million dollar bug bounties in Apple / Google / Amazon security exploits. He was probably deep into the iOS jailbreaking scene 10 years ago, and regularly gives talks at Defcon

So sort of like geohot

Or maybe he'd be making painful-to-watch corporate training videos for belaboring the point that phishing exists, like Kevin Mitnick.

This movie's DVD I bought in '99 while visiting the US was my first encounter with geo-blocking. If the movie itself wasn't enough of a motivator to dip my toes on the "dark side", that surely was.

We went to a local theater showing of this about a year ago. It really benefitted from the big screen, actually. They encouraged everyone to wear their best "hacker" costume (tin foil, punk hairstyles, even a few rollerblades) and sent us home with a floppy labeled "HACK THE PLANET".

Hackers is probably a big reason I got into computers as a kid in the 90's. I wish I still had that same feeling of awe and excitement about them today.

Computers haven't changed, but the world has. It feels like hackerspaces and certain scenes still have the same energy of the web's early days.

What's changed is that the ratio of those people to the total population of computer users has drastically decreased. And furthermore, the ratio of creators to consumers has also plummeted.

Ironically, I think that's the lesson that should be taken from TikTok's success: there's actually a surprising amount of people who yearn to be more creative than currently popular platforms allow them to be.

>t feels like hackerspaces and certain scenes still have the same energy of the web's early days.

I'm not so sure. Maybe 10 years ago. I used to be involved with the hackerspace scene in the UK but I got sick of the politics. Like all subcultures, past a certain point it starts attracting the sociopaths.

That's always been true of scenes though. Especially computing where people tend to be more... "unique."

Internal politics seems like the #1 problem for volunteer groups. But then, I guess it is for the wider world as well! Anything worth anything is worth fighting to control (for some).

same! I even read the novelisation (free tip: don't bother). Big up hackers!

I watched this movie several times as a kid - in 1998 for the first time.

Many scenes were always kind of silly, but they still managed to embed this idea in my head that doing stuff with computers could be considered "cool".

My favorite “hacker” movie is “Sneakers”.

Yes! Not to mention, Sneakers is slightly(ha!) more realistic than "Hackers." And also Swordfish while I'm thinking about it.

Now I need to watch it again.

I tried Swordfish again and just couldn’t get in to it. I’ve had that feeling about a lot of movies from my teens.

You know, when somebody mentions Swordfish the first thing I think of is the "Interview" scene. There's a joke in there somewhere about high-pressure SV technical interviews.

Didn’t swordfish have some manually “hack” 128bit encryption in 2 minutes or something stupid?

Swordfish seemed like the most out of touch of any hackers movie I’ve seen.

Swordfish is right at the bottom of my realistic-hacker-movies list.

Here's a page listing "Movies Featuring the Nmap Security Scanner": https://nmap.org/movies/

I see no one thinks IPv6 will catch on.

Well, add the nmap web site to the list of sites I can only see through a VPN while on Tesco Mobile.

Well the correct answer is WarGames I'm afraid.

Yeah, that is up there. More phreaking than hacking, though.

Mister potato head, mister potato head -- they're not mutually exclusive!

The Tron movies are up there for me as well. The most recent Tron movie is one of those movies that I can watch with no sound or listen with no video and still enjoy it.

I think sneakers was the successor to either wargames or hackers.

Either way, great movie with a realistic story and minimal hacker stereotypes.

Wargames! The writers for Sneakers, Lasker and Parkes, first encountered the ideas they used in Sneakers while doing their research for Wargames, and apparently generated a good deal of the plot for it in '81.

Great movie.

"Cattle mutilations are up."

Has Dan Akroyd ever played a bad character?

Perhaps the groundskeeper in Caddyshack II but I’m not sure who could’ve saved that role.

Setec Astronomy: https://slate.com/culture/2012/09/sneakers-trevor-paglen-on-...

Huge nostalgia wave. 25 years later, I've recently bought an analog synth and am revisiting the big beat, ambient and electronica bands on that soundtrack, who were the backing tracks to that entire period. It was at the decade mark about 10y after cyberpunk and 10y before social networks.

Funny how back then hacking was about how to get into systems, and today it's more about how to get out of the omniscient panopticon we all contributed to building in one way or another. Maybe it hasn't changed that much at all, just less rollerblades?

RISC architecture is gonna change everything!

in the mid-00's I felt like this aged very poorly.. but now?

well, if the DEC Alpha hadn't been ridiculously priced compared to a Pentium 90... and had been released to an open architecture of a dozen or more taiwanese motherboard manufacturers.

Or if motorola had done the same with powerPC stuff

Or SPARC, or MIPS, or ..

We still have ARM, and also AMD64 architecture runs i386 near-native. Itanium didn't, and neither did any of these other architectures (Alpha's i386 emulator was decent enough though).

RISC-V is a likely architecture to gain in popularity post ARM (which is also RISC). It's open source and freely licensed.

Sure ARM and the majority of the alternatives are all RISC instruction sets not just the ones with RISC in their name

Yep, and the Year of the Linux Desktop is just around the corner too...

Are you counting WSL?

I've been on the linux desktop for 15+ years and what does this mean then?

You're free to live in the year of the linux desktop, each and every year. Choose your reality.

> I've been on the linux desktop for 15+ years and what does this mean then?

I've been seeing this kind of feigned obtuseness for 20 years now. It isn't cute or funny, and linux desktop is still a minority operating system even amongst the nerds it is supposedly for.

It isn't cute or funny, nor do I care what you think it is. Why would anyone care how many other people are using an operating system? Why does it matter that a certain operating system isn't used by normal people who can't use a computer in the first place?

Regardless of what you took it as, I don't own any Windows/Mac operating system computers personally and the statement wasn't funny. I've only used linux/Plan9/BSDs for well over a decade and they work pretty well. I completely do not understand why computer use has to be a popularity contest. Consider instead that once an OS has too many simple users who want GUI cruft and bloat, it then ruins the OS with slow bloated "simplifications."

There were many years in which I tried to get all my friends and family to use linux and the reality is, eventually I just realized most people don't actually wish to really use a computer. Those people who just browse social media and email and can't fix anything borked, they are not computer users anyway. The skewed stats really show that there are so many millions of Windows computers out there but really hardly anyone uses those computers to do any computing/programming/scripting/

Anyway, I didn't find your little passive-aggressive quip to be funny whatsoever, either.

NVidia buying ARM just make this point much more likely in the next 5-10 years.

RISC is good.

It kind of did. I'm writing this on a handheld computer running a Unix-like multitasking operating system.

I remember watching it with friends and commenting "I have read this, this and this" when, in a well researched scene, the group of hackers casually shows off some famous CS books.

The movie also helped to popularize the essay "The Conscience of a Hacker", more commonly known as the "Hacker's Manifesto" [0]. Portions of it were read in the film.

[0] http://phrack.org/issues/7/3.html

Soundtrack for background nostalgia: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4VD06iQuXulKarrsIHia40?si=...

The soundtrack still holds up.

Hackers and Tony Hawk Pro Skater have soundtracks that will always be near and dear to me.

That'd be Orbital's Halcyon & On & On which contains a sample from Opus III's It's A Fine Day, sung by Kirsty Hawkshaw.

There's also tracks by Leftfield, The Prodify, Carl Cox, Underworld, ... [1] [2]

Pretty much the alternative (electronic) music at that time. And what a time 90s electronic music was.

[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113243/soundtrack

[2] https://www.discogs.com/Various-Hackers-Soundtrack/release/4...

The soundtrack was fantastic, and had a wide variety of music. I started a lifelong love of electronic music because I was gifted the soundtrack on cassette.

I watched that movie as a teenager like 50 times!

Same. I can pretty much recite the script from memory.

Never fear, I is here! :)

I disguised myself as an Alabama State Trooper and penetrated the FBI NCIC.

Pool on the roof must have a leak.

Lord Nikon, is that you?

It has a 28.8 bps modem!

this reminds me of a quote from this awful movie Fled (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0116320/):

"So fast, it's like the Ducati of computers."

Still inspiring hackers today! Behold the movie in C: http://bloerp.de/code/tempel/hackers/hackersFinal.c.html

Hack the Gibson.

I always loved Penn Jillette's (one half of Penn and Teller) character . The 90s sysadmin vibe is on point especially with the random earing in only one ear.

Starring Jonny "Crash Override" Lee Miller and Angelina "Acid Burn" Jolie, both very early in their career.

Also, I believe some of the scenes contain SGI's fsv [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_System_Visualizer

I watched this as a kid and I remember being very inspired by it and a few other movies. This together with Diablo 2 cheating/modding was the thing that made me interested in computers to begin with.

Hackers features some early rendered footage from Wipeout by Psygnosis. https://youtu.be/ATlszssL-eI?t=52

Still the epitome of cool.

Zero Cool

I find it ironic that this does not render in Firefox Focus.

I was Zero Cool.

Man, I thought you were black!

Time for a reboot then!

oh hell no! time to rewatch the blu-ray. :) A reboot would get it wrong.

I completely agree. This is a mosquito trapped in amber, a jewel from a different time. It must be appreciated in its context.

I was online and I was programming back then. Why am I not a billionaire?

Because you didn't express your frustration about women by building a photo rating website and going from there at the time. I think you did well.

Touché

Hollywood computer movies are the worst, between the tropes and the stereotypes they are just Weird Science without the road warriors and Bill Paxton. The original Wargames is probably the least campy and most watchable of the bunch. From there you take he express elevator straight down to absurd and fantastical stuff like Tron and Colossus: The Forbin Project. Anyone remember Disney’s The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes? Yes, computers are magic and touching one gives you all their super powers - like doing hard math and making perfect hoop shots.

To be fair, we now have robots that throw perfect pointers and do hard math. If anything, they were ahead of their time! :p

I think you’re right about tropes and campiness. But there’s one thing that the movie did other than being realistic and that’s capturing the “feeling” of a thing.

I think hackers did a good job of capturing the “feel” of mid-90s computer users. It was a new frontier, mostly celebrated by outcasts and was inherently anti-authority.

I still get the same vibe from the CCC as I got from the first time I watched the movie Hackers.

Also, people tend to forget about Acid Burn, best hacker in the movie who is only “beaten” because the other members took pity on the main protagonist. That flies a bit in the face of others in the same genre.

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