The girl with the ANSI tattoo
oracle-wtf.blogspot.co.uk
oracle-wtf.blogspot.co.uk
Somebody's going to say, "Man, we went to all that trouble to make it look realistic. But it doesn't work. Fuck it. Bring back the guy who did the interfaces for Jurassic Park. And the guy who writes Wesley Crusher's dialog."
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Update: I love that my comment mocking excess nitpicking now has triggered triple-redundant nitpicking.
> interfaces for Jurassic Park
Back in the mid 90's, when I was a little bit into the phreaking scene, me and my buddies used to always beige box off of a COCOT to dial into the modem for the local phone switch, so we could play around. We found a payphone at a gas-station halfway in the middle of nowhere that closed fairly early, so we'd just pile my laptop in the car, drive out there, park about 40 feet from the phone, run a long ass cable to the demarc box and then sit in the car and hack/phreak. Good times... :-)
"Type cookie, you idiot!"
This movie gets so much completely unnecessary hatred. Yeah, it's a joke, but there is plenty of little nods to "real" culture in there. To me it has always been pretty obvious that it was supposed to be silly, but that the people making it knew what they were doing.
I'm pretty sure most of the books from that scene were actually real books.
Right, that's the one I was thinking about. It definitely stands out because of the pink shirt on the cover. So they got the exact title wrong (or I just mis-remembered what they called it in the movie), but still... that scene was fairly accurate for a hollywood movie involving computers. :-)
Hackers is an absolutely fantastic and hillarious movie once you're watching it with that in mind. Especially since Cereal Killer is either named after the 2600 editor or else just uses his name in jest when he says "uh, this isn't Woodshop?"
I used to listen to the movie on repeat all day while restoring compromised accounts at Blizzard; it kept me going when my eyes wanted to go cross and my brain wanted to shut down from looking at WoW's "the Matrix" all day tracking stolen virtual goods.
Could be that something in the near future as simple as relativity was 100 years ago will solve the hardest ones, namely transporter and ftl tech.
Then again, it was funny as hell to see the flying car in Captain America.
The tech level in Captain America was all over the place, which is deserving of a rant in itself, but suffice to say it was the most annoying part of that movie to me.
As for transporter technology, I don't even think we have the beginning of the science behind that, so I think that's even more distant from today's science than warp drive engineering.
Like I said, the point of movies is to tell a story. Sometimes this means glossing over bits, getting details wrong, or even presenting things out of order, because the important part is he plot. We all do this when we tell stories, it's human nature. We want to convey how awesome/important/sad/happy/whatever a moment was, and to do that we need to properly contextualize the emotion and key bits, not every detail. When the makers of a fictional story try to get largely unimportant details right, they are showing dedication to craft, not asking for technical advice.
Maybe it's because I'm ramping my team up for demo season, where I have to remind them and the researchers they work with that the grant reviewers haven't spend the last 6 months thinking real hard about the problem, and aren't as expert in the sub-field/topics as we are (they are pretty smart competent people, but they gave us money to do the work because presumably we know more about it than they do...). To do a demo and to make a movie are very similar. You need to convey the importance of the work, without making bogus claims (in demos about research, in movies its about plot breaking), and convey the context in which it can be understood. Sometimes this means leaving out or glossing over really cool technical stuff, because it doesn't actually matter to the bigger picture. Sometimes it means saying "this part is simulated with these assumptions because we don't know yet, or it still needs more reseach, but if true, it shows our point nicely". Sometimes it means showing things happen at 10x or .1x real time, because that is how you tell the story. It isn't lying or being stupid, it is getting points across.
Well anyway, that turned into a rant. TL;DR - Detail are not the point of movies, they are just a vehicle to help the point, we should applaud careful attention to them, not nitpick.
My pet hate is people playing the piano, but playing the wrong notes (While the soundtrack is playing something different).
(It wasn't horrible, but it was not worth 6 months of learning)
From what I've seen of various shorts about the movie, the archery looks pretty good. I don't think she spent 6 months practising but she obviously spent some time on it with a good coach (a US Olympian, so she knows her stuff). The only thing they get wrong is that longbows aren't as accurate as they're portrayed, but that happens in every movie with an archer and it's just artistic license really.
He also said he sustained an archery related injury while filming which A) shouldn't happen if he'd had the proper training and B) would also affect his ability to use proper form while shooting.
I've been working to make a conscious effort over the past decade to willingly suspend my disbelief at the movies and just enjoy the entertainment for what it is trying to be, rather than what it is failing at. I've enjoyed movies much more the times I've been successful at it. Other times, like the "I guess we'll just make the new OS free since a copy of it leaked on the internet" scene in the new Tron, I couldn't get over, and I let it completely ruin the movie for me. (I found later that if I just start about 20 minutes into the movie and enjoy it as an awesome Daft Punk music video then I really love Tron: Legacy).
The stupidest little nitpick that I have, which shows up in nearly every movie and television show, is that someone makes an outgoing call, gets hung up on, and then the foley team adds in a new dial tone. I don't know why I continue to let it bug me, but I do. Joss Whedon complained in one of his commentaries (Joss Whedon does the best commentary tracks, by the way, check them out sometimes if you care about this stuff at all) that he always has to go back and cut out about 70% of what the foley artists try to add to every scene. Sounds exhausting, for everyone.
I have listened to some of Joss's commentary (Serenity and Firefly, unsurprisingly), although I hadn't heard that particular part. It does sound exhausting, but I guess refusing to budge on that sort of thing is what makes him a great writer/director.
Yeah, that was a good movie, but Ridley Scott is so much better than most Hollywood directors that it's not a fair comparison. (Never saw Jarhead)
Occasionally they hire experts to be sure they get it right, but that is more the exception than the rule, and mostly happens when a feeling of realism is considered important for the part.
If only they had hired a computer geek to write the crap about the Turing test. ;_;
Then I realize that these same people report the business and political news, and realized that I probably don't have a clue what's actually going on in the world.
To be fairly honest, if I noticed something like this I'd crack a big grin and I'd wanna share it, like I just cracked a big grin whilst reading the post.
I think, overall, this a compliment to the detail in the movie. They're using real technology and (kinda) believable commands/code. It's only after deconstructing the scene it's been found they haven't got it 100% right. Most of the time, when someone is 'hacking' at a computer it's a load of nonsense and usually makes me cringe seeing it. I remember one totally shocking clip where a guy was 'hacking' and you could plainly see it was Windows Media Player. Let's not even mention Hackers.
Things like this make me smile and I find them really, really interesting when I either notice them or they are pointed out to me. I could probably waste a whole day reading an archive of these.
This is not made up, folks. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DURk7VQhW-k
Movies want to keep you in the suspension of disbelief (that the storyline is real) and as a programmer it's been hard to do that with most "hacking" scenes in movies.
The only other blockbuster movie I can think of with a reasonably believable hacking scene was when Trinity used an openssl exploit in one of the Matrix sequels.
best of all was the end of _Veronica Mars_ (yes, not a movie) which is the only even vaguely realistic decryption plot i've ever seen.
hackers ⊈ developers
I've watched a few penetration testers at work - they have to have a very broad knowledge base and work at speed. They're not sitting around wondering if their query is going to work in 1s or 0.1s - it just doesn't matter.
Awesome to see 'real' sql in action though.
Speak for yourself ;-)
FYI I'm referring to 'trying to break into a system, possibility illegally, with time pressure, hackers', rather than HackerNews hackers. Which I thought was reasonably obvious from the context.
If you're actually trying to crack a system, you're generally trying a lot of different things very rapidly. Tweaking performance and nicely formatting code you're going to immediately discard is... a misappropriation of resources.
On the movie, also, the girl was not trying to crack into a computer - she seemingly had full MySQL console access.
(Actually, the way usually explain it to non-techies: duct tape. Everyone understands what duct tape is meant for: it won't necessarily win any awards for style[1], but it's powerful, and it sure as heck gets the job done in a pinch, and quickly too! I find that analogy generally holds well enough, whether we're talking about black-hat hacking or 'real' hacking.)
[1] Most of the time, that is: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=duct%20tape%20cloth...
hackers ∩ developers ≠ ∅
For the record since you never see the entire query so it is likely that the SQL is not as wrong as the author suggests. There is an extensive use of ORs in the query so the conditions that are said to defeat the outer joins are not mandatory and the 'R' and 'L' checks are clearly not required to pass. I think it is pretty good representation of how you might build up query from scratch, piling up conditions in OR clauses to finally get what you want. Yes, provided the table that starts with V is aliased as v the v.SEX condition does defeat the outer join, but that might be exactly the sort of thing you would stick in after you had already established a working FROM clause and not bother changing the outer to an inner. Solving the case was after all by definition a one-off.
I enjoyed this article because it points out an occasion where a movie really did try to get it right. Someone who knows something about databases had to have made those screens up.
The first time I saw real stuff in movies was in Antitrust, then in Tron: Legacy and finally here.
Imagine sitting beside a big horse nerd and every time a horse is on the screen and makes this typical horse noise they would comment "the horse didn't make the sound" or white walkers are killing the night watch behind the wall and "this horse is not really frightened but relaxed and listens curiously" or every time there is a mighty black Frisian horse in a movie, which believe me hey are a lot!, they would comment how wrong and stupid it is that Zorro/Prince of Persia/the Spartans are riding Frisians.
Of course now he's got me doing it too...
The slide just never seems to lock back like it should unless the hero has two guns that need to be thrown on the ground before he/she walks forward defiantly and grabs two MORE guns.
Obligatory 9gag http://9gag.com/gag/4026146
And audio impact.
They're not reporting fact. They're weaving a fantasy.
Whatever your field is, if you want to got stark raving mad, watch a movie made about it.
At the very least, the people writing, acting, and directing your world have little or no idea of what it's really like. And even if they do, they're taking deliberate liberties to embellish or interpret the realm to make it more telegenic.
An interesting exception: movies looking in on themselves -- at movies, TV, and entertainment. There's frequently embellishment, still (people and events are more glamorous / beautiful / hip than they are in reality), but there's often a lot of real insight.
Best example in a field I'm familiar with - "Strictly Ballroom". Sure, everybody was over the top, but anybody who was ever involved in competitive ballroom dancing will recognize all the archetypes and be able to relate to the various things said about dancers.
For some reason, it's easier to swallow that characters are exaggerated, instead of facts. (This being HN, I fully expect a reply within the next 15 minutes explaining the exact psychological effect, complete with links to relevant papers ;)
http://www.riverford.co.uk/feed/in:news/ploughing-spielberg-...
But really, nobody ever says things like "I need a dedicated Linux box running Apache with a MySQL back end" outside of an Aaron Sorkin script.
When all else fails, make shit up.
SolarOS 4.0.1
http://tron.wikia.com/wiki/SolarOS
[NB I have the relevant screenshot as a desktop background]
solaris is still internally called sunos (and the versioning is the same as the stupid java one, solaris 11 is really sunos 5.11)
- a bunch of nmap appearances (notably Die Hard 4 and the Bourne Ultimatum, also one of the Matrix movies)
- some default OpenBox with XTerms in a few series
- KDE quite a number of times too
- SSH, bash and Unix FS exploration (cd, ls -l and its output, find, grep) at times
In fact it's sad that so much of the computer scenes are bad, but I've seen enough actually good attempts at being realistic that I can't remember where I saw them. What's sure is that the trend is upwards.
(I think it's a file explorer for an old SGI box; which makes sense as SGI was commonly used in the production of movies.)
Aye it's FSN/Fusion: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fsn
There's even a screening of fsn in action on youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zaRHU1XxMJQ
https://twitter.com/hoorayimhelping/status/19888796339917619...
As for WOPR, he is based on a real cold-war program called SIOP (Single Integrated Operational Plan), under which the President could tentatively select nuke targets and run computer simulations of what might happen. WOPR, unlike a lot of movie AIs, is not even particularly malicious; he is just running what he thinks is a simulation, blissfully unaware of the stakes, as any computer program without sufficient "common sense" would be.
Probably the biggest exaggeration in that movie was the shots of the NORAD command center, which NORAD officials at the time stated was what they wished they had rather than what they actually had. The filmmakers were not permitted access to the insides of NORAD so again, they had to make shit up.
Where the image are hosted, is now off-line, because of this.
You can use imgur, minus, or even blogspot itself instead.
Naturally I couldn't help stitching a few screenshots together in Photoshop
First time I've seen that...
Really amazing!
Mysql defaults to inner join. See http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4418776/what-is-the-defau...
My pet peeves in shows/movies, are normally around the fact that it takes more than a few seconds to do anything useful on a computer. And yet on film even idiots seem to command their gadgetry with aplomb.
They should show failed password attempts. Computer lock ups. Anti-virus software blocking any meaningful use of the computer. Frustration of users as they are prevented from booting due to system updates etc.
I'm also not a fan of fake search engines - and video streams that appear in flawless hi-def!
I wish computers were omitted entirely sometimes - they are pointless props, and just age the movie. Couldn't they just say - 'I searched for blah'?
It's not like I'm loosing sleep over it though. I would rather TV wasn't such an insult to the imagination (I can - and enjoy - filling in the gaps myself.)
True, it exits from a Mac-like GUI to a DOS prompt, but I loved the depiction of office software as finicky, time-consuming, and frustrating.
I hated this movie, but one thing I'm glad of is they actually showed computer use more sparingly than in the book. The book was rife with "Hollywood hacking", and was otherwise a pain in the ass to read.
Don't wish for that! In the Hulk 2008 movie, you can see Norton Antivirus scanning the computer right before he uses it.
Any excuse for this? :)
Edit: never mind the moralizing, it was his own domain that he linked to :)