Simulating the PIN cracking scene in Terminator 2
bert.org
bert.org
I realized that JT's site was down, and went searching around, found her Twitter and Instagram, realized she had been homeless for over two years, and apparently just recently passed away. Given that she was homeless, trans, and talked pretty openly open her internal and external struggles, I have my suspicions about what happened.
I feel pretty gutted because I support a couple of people on Patreon, and if I had come across her Twitter six months ago and saw the state she was in, I would have jumped at the opportunity to became a Patron to try to help her get back on her feet.
Not much of a point here, other than to try and pay attention to people a little bit more, and help out where you can.
This is sad news. :(
I too have come across that page so many times over the years and every time I read it from start to finish.
Searching more on JT I stumbled on this Instagram post from a friend of hers that I think people should read - https://www.instagram.com/p/CFGFbAyBCgC/?utm_source=ig_web_c...
tararist: The most terrible thing has happened. The smartest, most special person I’ve ever met has died. She was a veritable genius. She taught at MIT, was a pioneer in augmented reality, did CGI for the Tron film, and started a huge design company which she gave to her ex-wife before coming out as trans. Soon after that we met by complete chance at Kathmandu in Berkeley where she was trying on a dress. She came out of the dressing room and shyly asked the nice guy working there if it was too short. I was talking to him too and said, “if you put your hands by your side and the hem is above your fingertips it means you’re a slut.” “I guess I should hike it up then,” she replied. I don’t remember how but just like that we became best friends. She was the most creative, brilliant, funny, fearless person I’ve ever met and her life ended tragically because of our disgusting society. Despite her ridiculous accomplishments she was unable to find a job. “They just see a man in lipstick,” she told me once. Still, she wouldn’t say her life was tragic. Even when her savings ran out and she ended up on the streets of San Francisco, she was still cheerful, sitting on the sidewalk in a yogic cross-legged position with a laptop on her lap, producing her brilliantly original ideas. In the SF shelter system she was a trans-activist who changed the rules so that TERFs weren’t allowed. She was always finding things to delight in and never lost her sense of humor. I’m a changed person because of her and will always be in awe that biology could produce such magic as was her soul. Somehow I have no photos of us together, but the first pic is her dressed as her hero Anne Frank, and in the second I’m wearing a netted top she bought me, wearing a kandi she made me (that I didn’t take off for like a year because looking at it always made me feel loved), and in the background is an origami crane she absentmindedly made years ago and that I always kept and hung because of the good vibes she effortlessly imbued into everything. I forgot to ever tell her that I kept it and hung it up. JT Nimoy, the greatest gift fate has ever given me.
I wonder how the hiring for that position go? "Our movie studio is looking for a programmer to code a sequence that simulates PIN cracking on an Atari which will look cool and hackery on screen."
Either way, that coder did a stellar job in making it look really legit vs the shitty hacking sequences that followed in movies of the early '00 where you could hack the DoD by typing on the keyboard random words really fast or assembling some 3D shapes on an SGI machine to break encryption.
Which, depending upon your perspective, is an attention to detail that makes the film better even if most people don't consciously notice it or it's a symptom of why studio films can be astonishingly expensive to make.
>My CPU is a neural-net processor, a learning computer.
Costly tech for a movie, but well worth it.
Costumes, sets, special effects, props, etc. all are like that. Specialised and skilled people spending a lot of time and effort for things that may or may not get a lot of screen time.
But even a short screen time can be very important for the film and have a lasting effect. Example: That very program.
At least with TeX, I can see all of the commands. Word? Best I can hope is I saw it make the change and that undo actually works.
In Google Docs a number of times I've had to copy my text out to a temporary notepad to remove formatting and re-paste it in the original doc because for some reason it was starting a numbered list over again at 1 and there was no way to convince it that it's all part of the same list.
I've returned to MSWord after 15 years, it still seems incapable of doing numbered lists consistently. Would love some 'reveal codes' for that.
How often do you cut and paste and actually want to bring over someone else’s colors and fonts? 1% of the time? 0.1%?
I played around with using hammerspoon to send cmd-shift-v whenever I typed cmd-v but I really needed to make it change depending on which app I was pasting into and that was just past my annoyance threshold.
It's crazy, if your electro magnet is strong enough, you don't even need a tin foil wrapped credit card to put in the machine!
And the card schemes are mandating the issuers to keep track whether a card was issued with a chip and then reject authorisation attempts with a magstripe that claims "no chip" available.
That being said, in reality there are again and again still issuers who did not implement this and similar security measures [1].
[1] https://krebsonsecurity.com/2020/07/is-your-chip-card-secure...
I owned one.
edit: I should have never sold it as a student. But alas.
4.5v at probably 1000 mAh each cell? Or 5Wh. Do you recall how long it lasted for?
Also the last frame: "PIN identification number" for your "ATM teller machine"...
Also, I asked my mother to sew me a inner-pocket? in my jeans-jacket for it, so I could carry it around.
A travesty.
Think my favorite is The Los Angeles Angels - the the angels angels
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_(council)#Etymology
Much like Los Angeles, if you translate the words back to their original language they become redundant.
The "union" refers to the union of the socialist republics. You can easily have "soviets" without a union, and you can obviously have a union without soviets.
Source: born in the USSR
Based on what it said the direct translation was I had thought it was weird, but I figured the Wikipedia page would know more than I.
Thank you for that.
readln;"
OR
instead of "readln;" put "readkey;" - that one would've simply continued regardless of whatever you'd press (well, CTRL / SHIFT not included).
======================
Quote2: "writeln(''); writeln('');"
Unnecessary. If you want empty lines you can simply say "writeln;writeln;" - no parameters required.
=======================
Quote3: "while true do begin
.
.
.
if (length <= 4) then
break;
end;"
"repeat
.
.
.
until length <= 4"
So it's not necessarily fictional, sometimes it does work like that. I wasn't alive in the 80s, but I would guess that such things were very common back then (but obviously are non-existent now).
Sometimes I miss how easy things were. Passwords in type=hidden fields. Basic auth over http. Dumb hubs sending packets to everyone on the network. C$ shared drives on the Internet and, of course, Sub7.
I have actually rewatched Terminator 2 about 50 times - every day after school. My parents started getting worried at some point. I still remember a good chunk of the dialogue.
My parents sent me to my grandmother's during summer break, but they also allowed me to take my 386. I wrote DOS games in Turbo Pascal the entire time, and only saw my grandparents at mealtime. Then I got a talking to because of the monstrous electric bill a 386 running 24/7 racked up.
These days I use Android Studio, which could really take some notes from TPX.EXE.
The other thing I dearly miss: being able to read it in full sunlight.
> 128 KB of RAM and 256 KB of ROM
We can do much better nowadays with incredibly cheap microcontrollers.
I wish newer movies featured devices like Cosmo Communicator, Pro1X or upcoming PinePhone with keyboard case in the hacking scenes to give the handhelds with keyboards a second chance. Last time I saw a cool handheld in a hacking scene(movie, so no Mr.Robot) was Nokia N8 in Tron Legacy(2010), but it really should have been N9.
Portfolio/Telecomm:
Index 0 Verbose list of files in this directory (this file)
acom11.lzh 16 Terminal program
dial.lzh 2 Xterm dialer
ft.com 11 Parallel module file transfer program
pfboot.lzh 1 symbolic link to -> utilities/pfboot.lzh
port8bit.lzh 3 Tech doc describing pofo to Atari 8 bit connecting
porttost.lzh 5 GET Xterm on the Portfolio without files transfer
quick.lzh 7 Input cheques in the field and upload to Quicken later
slave.lzh 18 Host program (Pofo to any terminal supporting X-Modem)
xterm2.lzh 5 Term program, includes XMODEM file transfer capabilityIn hindsight I'm guessing I made the noob mistake of relying on a slow PRNG or similar
Novel stuff, thanks for sharing, even if of no real practical use :)