Sneakers Film Promotional Floppy | Hacker News Reader

Sneakers Film Promotional Floppy

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177 pointsdcminter54 comments

One of the best hacker movies ever. The involvement of Leonard Adleman (the A in RSA) in the movie [1].

He said: "I would do the scene if my wife Lori could meet [Robert] Redford"

[1] https://molecularscience.usc.edu/sneakers/

Thanks for that, it’s interesting. It seems that his involvement was just for the one lecture scene though? The movie itself is chock full of references to nerd, hacker, conspiracy, and security knowledge. Anyone know how they did all the research for this film?

Many writers/studios get a technical consultant. Sometimes your writer friend will ask for help, other times you'll get an introduction from some VFX house you're working for and others it's your wife's-friends-husbands-boss.

I’d love to watch the directors commentary, but it looks like I need to get some legacy media for that.

I have a pretty high quality blu-ray, it's not just on legacy media.

EDIT: it occurs to me that "legacy media" means "not available through streaming/rental services/stores", my bad.

You could argue it's legacy media if you can pass it on to your descendants...

As always, legacy means "it makes money and it works and it has customers", as opposed to the new thing that may or may not work or make money.

lol. I sent that post and didn’t think twice about it, but of course you are right! I’ve started to think of physical media as “legacy”, but it is not of course!

How much they listen to their consultants differs a lot, and it shows in the production output.

Two Chiefs of Staff of the United States Air Force guest starred in Stargate SG-1, General Michael E. Ryan and General John P. Jumper,

while SG-1 was getting technical advice from Air Force Entertainment Liaison Office.

For example, Silicon Valley, had a handful of co-producers who went to niche tech conferences like dweb camp and got attendees on consulting contracts for the upcoming seasons they were writing.

I presume the conference circuit was still where they picked up the contacts in 1992

Coincidentally, staff of the internet archive co-produced and sponsored dweb camp :)

The screenwriters Lawrence Laskar and Walker Parkes talk about the research for Sneakers and War Games on a recent episode of Star Talk with Neal DeGrasse Tyson:

https://startalkmedia.com/show/how-storytelling-prevented-nu...

I transcribed the great number theory jargon from the film-- which your link describes but fails to include in its entirety-- in this post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31379273

In contrast, Hackers had a mix of "that's how it's down, IRL" and wholly created fantasy hacking. Both were entertaining films, imo, albeit with entirely different approaches to hacking.

I love this movie. Frankly, it holds up pretty well.

Yes, the tech is dated, but it is the right tech to support the story, which is not dated much at all.

And what a cast!

Epic film, and one I tend to watch a few times per year.

Should I call you or nudge you?

I had to get a wiser roommate to explain that one. So naive.

That first scene in the phone trunk is still probably the best hacking scene in any movie.

Indeed! So good. They captured the dynamics of it all quite well.

I haven't seen it since it came out. But if my memory serves (and likely it does not) it was a meh film.

No one yet has done anything for hacking like "Real Genius" did for nerdy Physics majors. (And even that film is flawed in a number of ways.) I would love to see a film set in the 80's that gets hacking/phracking right. The "Stranger Things" fans would go nuts for the cultural references.

Something like "Densha Otoko" (Train Man) meets "American Graffiti". (Holler if you're interested in me writing your script, ha ha.)

I'll find and watch the film again though. I may have relaxed a bit on my criticism of films depicting computer users.

The main appeal is the ideas. If you evaluate the tech specifically, there is a lot to complain about.

I generally don't bother because that is not the intent of the film.

And it is the people. How they are. Why they are.

> I would love to see a film set in the 80's that gets hacking/phracking right.

War Games

Kinda reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_(video_game)

The game has no instructions, and starts off with a password that you have to guess to continue.

You don’t happen to remember the name of an Amiga game where you navigated a little robot around via CCTV while avoiding security guards, in order to break into a safe?

Hmm I don't recall any game where the object was to to break into a safe... There was Quadralien, where you control robots to repair the central solar system reactor "Astra", which has begun to break down. You have to repair circuits and clean up the radiation leaks before the station blows.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFEiK4w26rM

The next closest I could think of is Infestation (one of Psygnosis' lesser known games), where you are sent to investigate a space colony that has been wiped out by an alien life form. Even getting into the station itself before running out of oxygen is a challenge.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yzoZCrn7wc

Impossible Mission?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impossible_Mission

That sounds sorta like Cholo, but it was never on the Amiga:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cholo_(video_game)

"I want peace on earth and goodwill toward men." "We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing."

The team's demands were a great way to end the movie.

For anyone interested, the full output of the floppy's "Print Full Press Kit" command (35 printed pages) is

https://jasomill.at/sneakers.txt

This gem alone deserves a sizeable donation to the upkeep of the Internet Archive <3

My voice is my passport. Verify me.

Cattle mutilations are up.

How prescient that scene is in some way - it's so easy to clone voices now.

This made it into the hacking game Uplink :)

Are there any more modern film analogs of Sneakers with similar quality? Such a hard hitting cast... I still watch this movie at least once a year.

Mr. Robot had some of the same vibe, but stretched out a bit at times. It'd be amazing if they could condense some of that into one movie very much like Sneakers but with more modern hacks.

One of the few movies with a mathematical consultant, Len Adleman.

If the name sounds familiar, he's the A in RSA.

Awesome! Love this movie, and had no idea this existed.

Same - I just now discovered it existed; it was mentioned on the Sneakers wikipedia page and I just love that stuff like this has been archived.

Oh, man. It's basically a diskmag. Very much in keeping with the theme of Sneakers, right down to its relative technical and communitarian realism in depicting hackers/hacking.

The "Print Full Press Kit" button helpfully offers to print to LPT1, but I don't have one. Has anyone succeeded in extracting that document?

Yes. With DOSBox-X when you print, you get one PNG file for each page on its working directory.

That's with the Epson matrix printer emulation. You can also use the Postscript printer and get a .ps or .pdf file.

Here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38592180

I remember downloading this from a BBS I think...

I didn't have an official floppy, I'm sure those were limited quantity, but the contents got around...

Under "Great Moments in Hacker History" they mention Masters of Destruction (MOD). Do they mean Masters of Deception?

Weirdly I decided to download this to watch today

Love this movie. Great cast!

1992. It was relatively safe to run an .exe from a reputable company. Surely a reputable company wouldn't mess with your computer.

2005. I'm playing this music CD in my computer. Sony: hang on, I'm install a rootkit on your computer without your knowledge.

2017: Open source web browser company silently to users, not even any discussion on bugzilla or anywhere else - installs a plugin made by an advertising company for a media conglomerate's TV show about hackers into everyone's Firefox installations.

The project manager responsible who used to work in the advertising industry tries to damage-control things and locks/hides the ticket. Another mozilla staffer unlocks/unhides it and states it was improperly hidden/locked.

The ticket is then made uber-double-super-secret so that not even mozilla staff can view it: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1423003

Other tickets about it are locked because of "off topic comments."

Coverage: https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/16/16784628/mozilla-mr-robo...

Then there was the Cliqz incident:

https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/74yo19/cliqz_and_m...

They actively worked to hide the plugin's true nature: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1392855#c5

Cliqz was a division of Burda Media.

2023. HP: Our printers are made to be less hated

Because you didn't have an internet connection there was little they could to that would benefit them, not so much anymore.

(FWIW, in the 90's there were a few instances where commercially produced software managed to go out carrying viruses. :( )

Viruses propagated just fine through BBSes and stuff like AOL and CompuServe. Also: sharing disks.

Sure but companies didn't have a reason to intentionally send them to you-- nothing to gain when they can't steal your data, only erase it.

I vaguely remember a game that deleted data from your hardrive if you triggered the copy protection. The developer got quite a flak!

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