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Comment by failuser | Hacker News Reader

Up next: could have two NCIS agents typed on the same keyboard at the time to defend from a security breach in real time?

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My headcanon for that scene is that the two of them were letting a program run in the background, and at the same time were just fucking with the rest of the team. The rest of the NCIS team was remarkably tech illiterate, while Abby and Tim were definitely the type to joke around. It was just two geeks trolling their coworkers.

Could Sandra's character in The Net send an email to FBI address bcg@fbi.justice https://youtu.be/6ya9GVSPiXs?t=49

and were the Switch Mail Center settings correct? https://youtu.be/6ya9GVSPiXs?t=13

You know what we don't talk enough about about this movie? Angela was a Mac user -- and not a Mac user when it was cool to be a Mac user, a Mac user when it was extremely not cool to be a Mac user and a Mac would be the worst machine you could use circa 1994/1995 to hack into anything. (Mission: Impossible used a Mac too, but they didn't use the Mac OS 7 UI, meaning Ethan used a command line, which was wrong but "felt" more hackery.) They even shot the final sequence at a Macworld or something if my Mac-trivia-adled brain is remembering correctly.

Anyway, in 5th grade or whatever, we totally used to use the same names and icons that they had in "The Net" when chatting with one another using AppleTalk or whatever the networked chat system was that you could use in the Mac lab.

But we don't talk enough about how improbable it would be that this elite hacker circa 1994/1995 would be using a Mac in those cursed Michael Spindler times.

I wonder if that was paid placement, or was there some Hollywood types who liked Macs back then. For writing, perhaps?? Certainly no feature film editing was going on with PCs or Macs, that's for sure!

Apple did (and still does) a lot of paid placement. For the first Tom Cruise Mission: Impossible film around that same era, they even did an ad-spot tie in[0], which makes it pretty obvious that the usage of Macs in that movie was paid placement.

[0] https://youtu.be/c2J4Zuiakhk

I also remember in Under Siege II: Dark Territory, where the hero uses his Apple Newton with a modem to send a FAX on a moving train to save the day.

To anyone under 30 reading this: Yes, a fax. Yes, to a kid in the 90s this seemed like the kind of cool-ass tricks that were state of the art then and that I hoped one day would be accessible to me.

Oh, it was definitely paid! As another mentioned, a year later they spent $16 million on an ad campaign for Mission: Impossible, a movie they got the PowerBook to too late and that didn’t have any of the Mac UI in the film.

But the best part was that Gil Amelio, the CEO at the time (and the third in like 36 months or something) ignored all of his lieutenants and shipped that PowerBook, even tho it had massive problems (and later, I think exploding batteries) but it shipped late so they couldn’t get it out on shelves to take advantage of the commercials and product placement.

But Amelio did get one to Whoopi Goldberg, who called about one for her nephew or something. Almost all of them were recalled, however. Amelio shared this story in his book as if he should be proud he got Whoopi Goldberg a broken computer.

Apple still does product placement in certain films and TV shows (not just Apple TV stuff) but tried to keep it on the downlow.

Whoopi is still an outspoken Mac gamer https://ew.com/gaming/whoopi-goldberg-diablo-4-video-game-bl...

Obligatory TVTropes link: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/EveryoneOwnsAMac

Mentioned therein: Apple won't allow their products to be used by bad guys. Hence the number of movies and TV shows where you can always tell the bad guy because they're the only person not using an Apple product.

The Net is a guilty pleasure of a movie

> But we don't talk enough about how improbable it would be that this elite hacker circa 1994/1995 would be using a Mac in those cursed Michael Spindler times.

Fast forward to 2011 where The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo also uses a Mac for hacking, a bit cringe but not as impossible like Mission Impossible, then in the same movie she uses Nokia 770 and that thing had some genuine superpowers compared to Nokia 9210

You are right, and there's historical records to back you up. ;) Phrack touched on it back in 1996, at http://www.textfiles.com/magazines/PHRACK/PHRACK48 :

> First, some words on Macintoshes. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, the originators of the Apple and the Macintosh were busted for phreaking in college. The Apple IIe was used almost universally by hackers. So why has the Mac fallen out of favor for hacking? Simple. Because it fell out of favor for everything else.

before listing some of the few hacking resources available for Mac.

Still, if you go by movies, Hackers, also from 1995, has Macs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IESEcsjDcmM

A year or so later (1996), our hero used a PowerBook 5300 to help save the Earth in Independence Day.

Brought to you by Apple marketing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEMJzSVpdJM and https://web.archive.org/web/20080927051545/http://www.inform... .

FWIW, http://www.starringthecomputer.com/computers.html lists computers used in films.

It’s funny: an archaeologist stumbling across movies of the mid 90s would conclude with near certainty that everyone in the mid 90s was using a Mac

I think you need to take a closer look at the list. ;)

For 1995 there's 9 or so Macs but there's also: Amstrad PCW 9512, Apple IIGS, Apple Newton MessagePad 100, Commodore 64, 4 Compaqs, DEC VAX 11/780, IBM AN/FSQ-7, 6 IBM PCs, two SGIs, a few Toshiba laptops, and a Zenith Supersport.

That's nearly twice as many PCs as Macs in the list.

She put the disk in upside down :(

On a related note, could the leader of the team have shutdown a supercomputer by shooting the monitor?

Depending on how it was wired, maybe? A bullet going through the screen is going to create some nasty short circuits.

At the video cable, no. Both sides assume the other side can short to ground or spike or whatever. This is basic circuit protection that you don’t trust the other side.

At the power though, I guess if you shorted the high voltage long enough to pop the breaker and the computer was on the same breaker sure. But this would be tough to do for enough time to pop the breaker I think.

> At the video cable, no. Both sides assume the other side can short to ground or spike or whatever. This is basic circuit protection that you don’t trust the other side.

Unfortunately, this still leaves the software side. I've had computers freeze or crash on me when plugging / unplugging an external monitor, and even one recent case of the EMI generated by the gas piston in my office chair regularly causing my work laptop to bluescreen when there was an external monitor plugged in (with HDMI cable acting as an antenna). This tells me that it's quite possible thar shooting a monitor would cause the computer to freeze or reboot itself.

he just unplugged it he didn't shoot it. It's still a dumb scene though

The scene in question: https://youtu.be/msX4oAXpvUE

Thanks so much, I hadn't seen that before- I'm one of today's 10,000!

The comments were better than I could have hoped for.

Of course. All you need to do is link their minds together like in Pacific Rim. So then it's like one person using four hands on a keyboard to type twice as fast.

You mean a 4 way crimp? It has never been done before Naboo.

Wait, is this how you use the three seashells?

It's ridiculous as portrayed, and doesn't match the visuals, but one could write a combined netstat and top that allowed simultaneous navigation of net connections and process tree with wasd and hjkl respectively. If one were a super hacker.

Could the screen have displayed "hacked" after a hacker successfully broke into a network?

Yes, there are monitoring tools for detecting attacks by looking for things like outgoing transmissions for control

They were using a keyboard driver that treats each half of the keyboard as it's own separate chorded keyboard allowing parallel use. Pretty standard I think you'll find.

They were probably using a MIDI controller with polyphony enabled

This will always be my favorite "whats a compooter" scene

Could be apocryphal, but I swear I read something from the writers on the show saying that they would take turns coming up with the most ridiculous computer interaction they could think of.

The story I heard was that the NCIS writers had an informal competition with CSI writers on who could get the most ridiculous tech shit on screen.

Even at that time: https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/274444.274447 and others. I worked in this area a bit, too, around the same time. It was really interesting stuff then, even if it's rote now.

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hah nvm. i didn't think they actually typed on the same keyboard. that's the future, for sure.

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