Sci-Fi Interfaces: Hackers
scifiinterfaces.com
scifiinterfaces.com
I watched it when I was starting in high school and got inspired by it. Then, I literally googled "How to become a hacker" and found this incredible page by Eric Raymond [0], which I used as an mentor throughout my high school and college years. I ended up developing the recommended hard skills (learning programming, UNIX, open source culture...) but also the "points of style" (martial arts, science fiction, meditation, music). In fact, when I was trying to search for a hacker community online, I stumbled upon Hacker News and haven't left ever since!
As expected, I didn't become a black hat hacker as in the movie but, to this day, I still believe this movie changed the course of my life.
E.g. Snow Crash, Neuromancer, Diamond Age, A Fire Upon the Deep
The exposure to the hackers manifesto was inspiring.
Obviously commie bullshit.
(Oh, 90s. And when you've got Wendell Pierce and Marc Anthony as your throw-away characters, props!)
On sci-fi, OFC I like it, but the mistery genre it's really fine as it's pretty close to debugging a problem but with real life issues.
On tech, Unix philosophy and Emacs are polarly opposite. Unix it's focused on multiprocessing parallel tools doing the work for you (preferabily scripted) where the less code your run, the better; while Emacs wants you to reuse Elisp functions everywhere, with an always-loaded philosophy and not lightweight at all if you have tons of modules in memory. Also, Emacs it's single threaded, so Emacs is very prone to be I/O locked, while Unix will spawn background subprocesses like nothing not affecting your main task at all.
That's not the goal!
It's intended to be representative of the process of interacting with a computer, not the interface itself. At a time when most viewers had little or no first-hand experience with a computer.
If you showed a CLI then, maybe 1/20 people would understand it, and they'd be bored because they used it everyday at work.
It's like when you're reading a book - you don't think about the words, the concepts and people come to life in your brain. I feel like this is the only movie to get that that happens with computers, too.
If nothing else, it's fascinating from a special effects technical standpoint, for when it was made.
https://web.archive.org/web/20180301013110/http%3A//hackersc...
Cereal Killer, Lord Nikon, and Phantom Phreak, real names not given.
Nope:
Get me arrest warrants on Kate Libby, alias Acid Burn, Emmanuel Goldstein, alias Cereal Killer, Dade Murphy, alias Crash Override, also known as Zero Cool, and Paul Cook, alias Lord Nikon. We pick them up tomorrow morning at nine o'clock.
The 90's were wild in that sense, you could imagine that the internet superhighway would be a superhighway you could literally drive on with your Avatar, and countless movies and tv-series presented things thus.
The noughties were way more grounded in reality, even the Matrix had Trinity hacking into a server using a OpenSSH exploit on a black and white terminal.
> The noughties were way more grounded in reality, even the Matrix had Trinity hacking into a server using a OpenSSH exploit on a black and white terminal.
That's a wild contrast to try to draw, since the actual direct experience of the network in the Matrix (and which is the focus of the film) was an immersive virtual reality of exactly the type you are trying to contrast the portrayal in the Matrix with, and the “hacking in to a server with an OpenSSH exploit” occurred as a simulation within that virtual reality.
But in more general terms, the representation of computer interfaces, with avatars walking rigidly in 3d pastel coloured surroundings (as presented in a variety of examples, my favorite being the corporate network in the TV Series Profit) sort of fizzled out post 2000, when everybody got to owning a desktop and laptop and realised that the internet was just text in fact, and 3D environments were not so easy to navigate (remember Second-Life).
That is, of course, if your online life did not involve being an elf in World of Warcraft, or something.
So transparency was arguably still something a true hacker wouldn't waste cycles on.
To your general point, it felt like there was a shift around 2000, when computers needed to be "serious business" and the whimsy of the 80s and 90s was scrubbed out of software.
Honestly, I think we all would have been better off if we'd turned the web to something more approachable for common people (especially if it inspired them to be creators).
Instead, we built a brutalist efficient system where most expression is limited to setting your background.
Also, heck, it was cool and pretty having some city at night while you were day and night with URxvt with links or lynx on it reading media and posting to fora.
My PC at the time was a hand-me-down white box AMD 386 (40 MHz) running FreeBSD 2.x.
and, Boy, did i waste cycles on enabling every eye candy possible on Linux/BSD on the only 150 Mhz Pentium pro with 32Mb of ram i could afford in 2001-2002...
"Instead, we built a brutalist efficient system where most expression is limited to setting your background."
Common people being creative was MySpace, remember the eyesore?
Just being sarcastic, i think the "Ugly" web of early HTML was actually wonderful, and we should encourage people to go back to it, but let's not delude ourselves too much, FaceStagram will always win the appeal of the masses.
As far as the state of the web today, you can thank commercial entities. Yes, they did/do contribute to the web's existance, but at the same time, they make it much worse.
Those gestures were completely unknown in commercial UIs of the time; in fact you were lucky to find a touchscreen that didn't take three forceful stabs of your finger before it registered.
IMO "The Expanse" got futuristic UIs extremely right.
I just rewatched it again recently and find it a thoroughly enjoyable film.
It doesn't look like this site has done a review of Sneakers yet but I recommend they do. The interfaces are much more realistic for the time (even if the cryptography mathematics do suffer a bit)
It still saddens me irrationally to see the state of UX today. It isn't cool and i have many visions of doing all this stuff with webgl and more (not 3d boxes but futuristic yet practical UI). Modern UX feels like art majors designed it by a committee and MBAs+lawyers were the target audience. I no longer even see anyone in tech thinking out if the box with radicallu new windowing systems and alternatives to hypertext and browsers.
WebGL file management doesn't seem to hard to implement, I'm guessing it would be a weekend project to make a demo, now that one doesn't actually need math to draw 3D stuff.
Even for camera movements/projection stuff? News to me, haven't messed with 3d since around 2010.
Most of the libraries seem to just be "Put X object on the screen at Y coordinates and rotation and size with Z texture and material", it's not like you're dealing with how rendering actually works by hand and figuring out what color each pixel should be.
But I've never done much of anything in 3D, aside from CAD work so idk.
Regardless, I knew she'd be "a thing" when I saw that movie
Oops. Joey's computer is an Apple IIgs.
The IIGS actually had a Mac-like interface called GS/OS, but it looked real grotty compared to Mac OS, to accommodate the IIGS's lower resolution.
As a filesystem browser it was not useful. Someone with Unix system experience would prefer a 2D browser, which IRIX also had.
We only used the 3D browser for our demo setup for visitors.
It's not even too much of a stretch to imagine she has never seen the file browser, but is able to figure it out on like one can with modern GUI apps.
fsv (the 3d file browser) was not shipped with IRIX, the 2d file browser was.
It's a pretty big stretch.
The point is though most mock the scene as though the software they show was entirely fictional and made up, when it was in fact real and was in fact still UNIX.
(Minor correction: it was not shipped with IRIX but a free demo you could ftp. After 30 years I had forgotten that until looking at https://web.archive.org/web/20070409024417/http://www.sgi.co... and similar sites just now.)
OK, please do.
but he only has one single IT guy in oncall during the emergency :-)
- the storm evacuates most people, essential staff only
- Nedry deliberately creates the IT emergency situation to lock out the other IT people still on the island
- The book has more details about how the IT system was over budget/rushed/flawed as another example of the hubris of the whole endeavor.
The book has a detail I especially liked: theres an automatic dinosaur counting system but it was written such that it stops counting once it finds all of the expected dinos (because the spec said they couldn't reproduce), which delayed them realizing that the dinosaurs were actually mating and in a bunch of places they weren't supposed to be. Classic example of a bug caused by software working correctly exactly to the spec.
Familiarity with 4dwm doesn't really transfer to NeXTStep or SunView, which were two other Unix window managers of the time.
The people she interacted with would surely distinguish between different Unix vendors - Apollo, Ridge, SGI, Sun, etc. - we certainly did.
I'm explaining why someone in the early 1990s, knowledgeable about Unix, IRIX, and fsn, would mock the adults who created that scene about a fictional 12 year old.
If the makers of The Matrix gets credit for its realistic looking use of nmap and a fictional "sshnuke", then Jurassic Park should get jeers.
We don't credit Trinity for that scene, we credit the creators of that scene.
It's the people mocking the scene as unrealistic, most of which do so because they didn't know the software seen on screen was real, deserve jeers.
Knowing Unix is not the same as knowing to use a program which only exists on one version of Unix, and which was not distributed with the OS, and which was less helpful at file system exploration than both the 2d file manager [1] and 1970s-based Unix shell tools [2].
You specifically called out "older people even working in IT", which includes me. Just because you want to jeer at people who don't know what you know doesn't mean there aren't other reasons to jeer at the same scene.
[1] Here's what the IRIX 2D file browser looked like in 1990: https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=IRB2MkMxgy0
[2] On a related note, The Great CHI ’97 Browse-Off was a non-rigorous head-to-head contest between different hierarchical browsers. The Hyperbolic Browser was the clear winner, with Windows Explorer coming in second, and the DOS command-line doing pretty well until it came to comparison questions like "Which planet is also the name of a car brand?" where both categories in the ontology needed to be compared.
No, lol, I'm not. I'm just disagreeing with you, and pointing out that IMO your point doesn't have much merit. I don't think that's a ridiculous response to what you're claiming at all.
> Knowing Unix is not the same as knowing to use a program which only exists on one version of Unix
She didn't say she knew a program which exists on one version of Unix, she just said she recognized the type of system. That's it. That's the claim she was making.
It's pretty similar to the hypothetical situation of a kid finding a mac and saying "This is a Macintosh, I know this" and using the finder to browse and look for a program to run. Same thing, with the only difference being Unix refers to a variety of operating systems not just one particular OS.
And you're making a big deal about how she probably wouldn't have known IRIX and all this, but that doesn't really make sense and it's extremely nitpicky. Others have explained why.
> You specifically called out "older people even working in IT", which includes me. Just because you want to jeer at people who don't know what you know doesn't mean there aren't other reasons to jeer at the same scene.
As I said though, most people who jeer at the scene do so on the mistaken assumption that the software scene on screen didn't exist.
I've not actually ever come across someone like yourself who doesn't refute that, but is just basically being very nitpicky and IMO unrealistic.
She's related to Hammond, who owns an island. I'm sure he could get her an old box and some manuals to play with, if not outright a state of the art system.
> As a filesystem browser it was not useful. Someone with Unix system experience would prefer a 2D browser, which IRIX also had.
But isn't that exactly the sort of thing a clever kid with access to fancy stuff would mess around with?
> We only used the 3D browser for our demo setup for visitors.
Which would perfectly explain why it popped up on the production systems. To make it look fancier for Hammond/any investors/the people visiting in the movie.
The 2D file browser for IRIX was pretty nice, with vector icons. https://sgi.neocities.org/1.png shows an example from https://sgi.neocities.org/ .
I made a mistake when I said we used it for demos. We did not use fsv for that. I was thinking of buttonfly - see example to the left of http://www.sgistuff.net/software/irixintro/images/irix-4.0.1... .
I did try out fsv, but again, it was slow on the desktop machine I had, and not useful.
I'm old enough that my college-freshman "intro to computers" and Fortran classes were taught on a CDC Cyber running NOS.
sudo systemctl restart gates
I don't think it's weird for a kid with some computing knowledge to use a filebrowser to look for where a program might be.
I wouldn't think even teenage Kevin Mitnick on Mountain Dew can himself bypass the terminal security (if any), prompt his way to the safety mechanisms, and override their behavior. All while being assailed by a velociraptor.
This was a pretty critical system though so why not just place this particular program inside /etc/inittab ?
sudo service gates restart
It's mainly for SecOps team tho, can't go full matrix yet on your home network.
3D interfaces are quit different without the 2D screen barrier and either your are inside the experience (VR) or the experience is outside around you (MR/AR).
A s/TV network/Three Letter Agency/ that wishes to remain nameless
We have no names, man, no names. We are nameless. Can I score a fry? Thanks.https://usegpu.live/demo/geometry/binary
and it reminded me of the city of text.
Reminds me of pointing the viewport address to a block of code on the Amiga 500, and watching it run.
https://codisec.com/binary-data-visualization/
And here is a talk about binary visualization by the legend Christopher Domas, which is where I first saw it used:
There are translucent lower receivers for AR-15s that are both light and durable[0]. Perhaps there is still hope.
With so many great and much more accurate hacker movies like Sneakers, this one was just so much fun to see evry aspect of hacking amplified to the "X-treme!!!"
They literally just used Linux and Emacs, and it looks beautiful.
A fun movie
I wonder if it was filmed 10 years later if everyone would be wearing Crocs and not rollerblades.
Scene from the movie: https://youtube.com/watch?v=ATlszssL-eI
More info: https://gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/19751/whats-the-a...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37082304
“Rewriting wipEout”: https://phoboslab.org/log/2023/08/rewriting-wipeout
As I wrote at the time: “WOW! Just a `git clone`, download and unpack the .zip with the assets (end of the blog post), type `make` and it compiles on Linux without warnings into `wipegame`, run it and it works first time!” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37086874