The movie Hackers was released 27 years ago
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Working title is, "Defcon 30" Who wants to fund it?
https://screenrant.com/trent-reznor-atticus-ross-best-movie-...
The exact opposite of a hacker. If they instead run their own company, built their own products, or open sourced an amazing tool the yeah. Otherwise do we really want a series or movie about their daily stand-ups?
https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0133093/plotsummary?ref_=tt_stry_...
:-)
So, it's not an emergency at all. Just for funzies.
I know social media led to the phrase "Get these MFing snakes of my MFing plane!" getting included in the Snakes on a Plane movie.
I think there was a reddit post turned into a movie deal about what if modern U.S. Marines were transported back in time to the Roman era, but I don't think anything has come from it.
Does anyone know of any other social media posts affecting or turning into movies?
I used to hang out with a guy who did security freelance work and had a passing resemblance to Matthew Lillard. He like, never slept. He just like, biked around town all night, occasionally pausing at the local co-working space to do some work or play chess with this old Russian dude. There was some shit in his past, I don't know what he did or what was done to him because he never said and I never asked, he only hinted at it. But I kept thinking, man, this guy could totally be a cleaned-up Cereal Killer.
It would be awesome to listen to Prodigy or Megadeth while hackin' with the gang though. I'm still down for that if it exists somewhere in the now-corporatized tech industry.
I think it comes down to the fact that our industry has become rigid and beholden to the university education system. John Carmack and John Romero were both college dropouts. Their stories would probably be impossible today. What we have now is a world of people coloring between the lines and going straight from one set of rules to another. There truly is no more punk rock left in tech.
I'm not saying people should not work in startups - they have their place in the industry. But there is nothing "punk rock" about them.
If you want to break rules and work outside the lines, we have come full circle to the 90s - bootstrapped small businesses are the way to go.
Unfortunately... because most of the world has taken their eyes off keeping markets competitive, it's less viable now than it once was, because the table stakes capital requirements are larger.
I've worked for a big pension fund and it was exactly like one imagines. Many meetings, a quiet office, slow and boring. I've also worked for small tech-focussed companies with technical nerds as founders; they were rather different, with music, dogs, vodka and late nights.
Oh and age matters too: after I had a kid, the late nights and vodka were not something I had the energy for.
If it's too high, you're not in a technology company in the sense we're idolizing here.
... And I'm also not sure "that" sort of tech company can exist above a certain size. No corporate silo firewall is strong enough to keep the business bullshit at bay.
See: the other posters comment about small profitable bootstrapped businesses being the only way to do this now. Successful indie devs are an anomaly. But my point was more that companies are far more risk averse these days than to let a group like Romero et. al. run loose on a new product idea without strict controls in place, and that the types of people selected for by these companies now ensures that.
Punk rock is small by definition. Once it becomes large it changes to mainstream.
I think a part of the hacker sub-culture that Hackers touches on lightly is that you have to make your own space. It's not going to exist for you in some prepackaged easy to consume way and certainly not in a corporation. Cyberdelia was for & by hackers, not a club run by some guy who has a bunch of cookie cutter clubs all over downtown. I don't think this is unique to the hacker sub culture, either.
I think The Plague was having fun.
You can also find people with that ethos in corporate places, but they get swarmed out by suits and people who went to coding school because it pays well.
It might not be your exact thing, but you're likely to meet people who know about everything going on in the area.
https://www.amazon.com/Peter-Norton-Programmers-Guide-IBM/dp...
Discovery that it exists -> Fumbling -> Golden Age -> Mechanization
Mechanization is where the bean counters and optimizers get into it and make it into something boring. I'm not a software engineer but I feel like my own field is in the "Mechanization" stage. My solution is I'm just about to leave and never look back because I stopped caring. I still like the original stuff I learned but I don't care about what's become of it.
Honestly, I think who you are as a person is often going to be misaligned with what capitalism and industry does with what looks like your passions, and it's healthy to recognize that and leave while you can. You may be doing software engineering but you're not a software engineer; you're a person and you can reinvent yourself any time you want.
> I think that if I had written the book in the past decade, perhaps Bateman would have been working in Silicon Valley, living in Cupertino with excursions into San Francisco or down to Big Sur to the Post Ranch Inn and palling around with Zuckerberg and dining at the French Laundry, or lunching with Reed Hastings at Manresa in Los Gatos, wearing a Yeezy hoodie and teasing girls on Tinder.
Like a 28.8 Bps modem.
Bps. Not kBps. Just Bps. Perhaps the actor just misread the line and the editors kept it. Still makes me itch to this day.
e: actually that's probably around the speed of morse code or human speech
For those unaware of CCCamp here are some pictures; http://smtw.de/cccamp19/
We managed to steal^Wborrow the projector screen from an empty workshop tent. Hauled it across a veryvery busy whiskytasting event (called Whiskeyleaks). Got a small projector and then we rigged the sound.
A single concert speaker was our sound source, but we had no AUX cable long enough. So we found a headset with an AUX output on it and chained it together with the AUX cable :)
The end result https://twitter.com/MortenLinderud/status/116502963964076032...
Also had a screening at May Contain Hackers this year, and it was great having 30 people scream "Hack the Planet" during the movie and loudely complain when the RISC line came :)
It all started with Orbital, Underworld, Kruder & Dorfmeister, Leftfield…
Shame about the film!
Netscape 2.0 came out three days later (September 18, 1995) and included first support for javascript, java, and plugins.
The Dot-Com craze was just getting started but nobody knew how big it would become. Few worked for Internet startups and nobody had been to a launch party yet. I had registered my first domain name just two months earlier.
What an amazing time (1994-2000) to be alive and just out of school. It was our "Roaring 20's"
- Hackers (1995)
- Mortal Kombat the Movie (1995) (both of these movies used Orbital's Halcyon +On +On) song and a bunch of other electronic music
- And I remember the Windows 1995 release. That was a HUUUUUGE software release.
They set it up to look like Cyberdelia. After the movie they ran a costume contest. The showing was just weeks before the pandemic truly hit America, and we felt pretty lucky that we made it home with out anything.
Other than that - cult movie. Love it. Awesome soundtrack, not that bad acting and not that bad script for back when computers and internet were hip, not just the usual thing.
"Hackers" caricaturally but still somewhat properly presents the phreaking culture which was and is rather uncommon for non-niche movies, especially from that era.
This movie aged well.
Hackers is my go-to movie as an initial test for a home theater system.
Thirty years later, I'm still using it.
For anyone saying it wasn't a realistic depiction - that was on purpose. The hacking scenes are visual metaphors, meant to "spice things up."
An analysis of all hacks in the movie: https://medium.com/h0llyw00d-h4x0rs/hackers-b93e78b95485
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001538/
My favorite character of his was Sherlock Holmes in "Elementary"
That's a good film too.
Great movie, though. It's one of the few DVDs I've hung onto, even though I haven't watched it in years. Makes me want to skateboard in a datacenter.
Actually, I take that back. In terms of culture it was not that far off the mark. I went to college near New York City, and it turned out to be a local hotbed for activity in the MOD/tracker scene. I used to pal around with one guy who was a big deal in the KFMF, and he looked like he could have come right off the set of Hackers. Even used the handle "Phreak" for a bit and had Hackers soundtrack posters on the wall. Because you know, awesomest soundtrack(s) of all time and that.
I wasn't convinced about this hacker having problems to compile a program...
OR
There is another possible explanation but I have to check dates since I think the movie was released way before the first version of Rust!!!
The hacker stuff is pretty legit though. Characters use Termux on their phones, Kali Linux, python scripts etc
Was this a reference to Mitnick's phone calls to Tsutomo?
Startup.com is pretty good as a movie about startups (I lived just about every minute of that movie, just at a different company) but it doesn't have any actual hackers in it.
I hear Risk and Citizenfour, both about Wikileaks, and Revolution OS, about Linux and the GNU and open-source movements, are pretty good, but I haven't seen them.
The Internet's Own Boy in particular has 8/10 on IMDB, 93% "Fresh" on Rotten Tomatoes, handily beating both Hackers and Sneakers, and is under a Creative Commons license: https://archive.org/details/TheInternetsOwnBoyTheStoryOfAaro... which
I found it very hard to watch because Aaron was a friend of mine.
The Matrix is nominally about hackers (and even, like Hackers, computer security) but, as with Startup.com, hacking doesn't really enter into the movie much; instead it's all running firefights and magic disguised as computers. Like Hackers and Sneakers, it bears the same relationship to hacking as https://axecop.com/ (a comic scripted by a five-year-old) bears to law enforcement. However, it's enormously more popular than all the movies above, even if its Rotten Tomatoes ranking is lower than The Internet's Own Boy.
I hear Masters of Doom is pretty good but I haven't watched it.
... though the all-nighter scene in Hackers where they just "flow" out some code while techno plays over the montage is also pretty accurate.
All those great visuals, the pumping music, it captures the emotion of getting your teeth into a really gnarly problem, and the exuberance of eventually coming up with a solution. People watching over the shoulder of a developer at work are just going to see a bunch of scrolling text and tedious iterations of red, red, red, green, reload, alt-tab, change a thing, wait, red, red, red, green, and so on. But that workflow - if you dig the work - is enthralling. And when you solve the problem, it's worth throwing your hands up with glee, and (internally) belting out a cheesy action hero oneliner.
Not to mention when you are real-time dealing with attackers trying to compromise your systems, the chaos and exasperation and desperate attempts to block them very much match the climactic scene of The Plague and his hapless techno weenies typing "cookie".
I'm probably biased because of my age and the time in my career when I first watched the movie (around the same time as my first job) but to me it still feels like the most authentic silver screen portrayal of what I do. More modern shows often capture the cold, hard reality of the work better, which admittedly is just a bunch of text scrolling on a screen. And there are definitely works that better satirize the office culture, like Office Space and Silicon Valley. But there still hasn't been much that captured the excitement of the time, and can really explain to people outside of the industry why at least a certain subset of 1990s teenagers felt compelled to get into this apparently boring and nerdy career.
I suppose it's very "of its time", because nowadays everyone understands why kids want to get into IT - it's one of the most flexible and lucrative careers there is.
I also like Swordfish for this. Him dancing at the keyboard while programming is very much what it feels like when you have a good hack going.
I came of age during the height of the demo scene in Europe, and enjoyed the pre-warez offshoot where pirated games always included exciting intros/cracktros. So hackers making electronic music and cool visuals was the baseline that every noob had to meet to be "elite". Of course in real life we still all wore "normal clothes" and lived careful, quiet lives - but the dream was to be these rockstars that the movie Hackers turned to 11.
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.
I'm going to borrow this, it will make many future discussions much shorter than with my current approach of floundering around this sentiment.
https://archive.org/details/23-nichts-ist-so-wie-es-scheint-...
https://archive.org/details/Hackers_-_23_part_-II_-
The second one says part II but is the complete movie.
in 2020 varese sarabande released an expanded 2xCD of the hackers soundtrack [1]. the second disk includes full length versions of the instrumental electronic music composed for the film by simon boswell [2] but not included on the 1 disk soundtrack and is absolutley essential listening while rollerblading to the payphones at penn station.
[0] https://www.discogs.com/release/42711-Orbital-Halcyon
[1] https://www.discogs.com/release/15991139-Various-Hackers-Ori...
I can remember as a kid downloading executables that claimed they would do this for you. In retrospect they were probably just malware…
I used it on a much younger co-worker of mine when he was having an issue with a website and it turned out to be a problem with cookies.
It was clear to me from his facial response that he had never seen the movie. It didn't go over well.
The Cookie Monster program was a part of hacker lore, including the Jargon File, at the time of the release of Hackers. I remember recognizing the reference when I saw the movie. Many of the other viruses and malwares in the movie ("Arf Arf Gotcha", the "Da Vinci Virus" being a reference to the Michelangelo virus scare of 1992) were also references to legendary real-world hacker lore. Even Zero Cool's crashing of 1507 systems in one day was a reference to Robert Morris's worm of the late 1980s.
All so bad, its agelessly bad, like only a true cult film can be.
But there is one huge redeeming thing for me, and that is I find it a really fun caper.
One of my favs:
The Plague: We are samurai. The keyboard cowboys. And all those other people who have no idea what's going on are the cattle. Moo.
Lord Nikon's Laptop [1] is really what I consider a true _Cyberdeck_.
P.S. Hackaday is running a Cyberdeck competition [2] if you're into that kind of thing.
[1] https://youtu.be/uxY6CUimZ9M
[2] https://hackaday.io/contest/186672-2022-cyberdeck-contest
We took it from the local movie rental shop, remember those?
"Of course 5 years from now that will be different, but 5 years from now everyone will be running free GNU on their 200 MIPS, 64M SPARCstation-5."
It's pretty easy to get a region free Blu-ray player these days.
Somehow hacking computer things wasn't as appealing as shooting intelligent bugs. Would you like to know more?