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Comment by chris_wot | Hacker News Reader

I'd just like to say that there has never been a hacker/cracker movie like Sneakers, and I doubt there will ever be one like it again. It was the first time I ever learned about cryptography, it featured an awesome scene where they work out where a car is based on the sound of the car going over speed ridges, it had suspense, fully dimensional characters you could care about, math, and tiger teams! What is there not to love about this movie?

Oh, and no Hollywood cliches. To this very day, this is the most authentic hacker movie in existence. Nothing else even comes close. And this movie is about 20 years old now!

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My SSID has been 'Setec Astronomy' for a long time. I figure if anyone knows the password then they are welcome into my network. Definitely my favorite movie of all-time.

TooManySecrets?

It's certainly better than "CootysRatSemen".

I actually had an anonymous secrets site at too-many-secrets.com, which was originally cootysratsemen.com. Users in beta loved the name, but didn't tell me until it went live that they didn't want it in their employers' logs.

It's a necessary motto.

Ha, I bought the domain montereyscoast.com as soon as I noticed it was available.

I've been naming my home machines and SSID's after characters for over 10 years (Crease, Mother, Whistler, etc...) It never occurred to me to use Setec Astronomy!

Totally agreed. And you reminded me that every time I drive over a road or bridge with gaps in the pavement or transition to a different type of asphalt (with a different sound), I think back to that scene and smile. Not many movies leave that kind of lasting impact.

Well, except for all the times I get into lightsaber fights... ;)

The single-box-of-power was pretty much a Hollywood cliche.

I don't know it was a Hollywood cliche or just a general fiction trope, there's been boxes of power going back to early story days, things are hard to get away from in story telling.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacGuffin

The difference in this case is that a practical P (complexity class) algorithm for factoring is something that theoretical cryptographers worry about. It's not some fantastic or unexplained or misunderstood item, like most macguffins are.

In a somewhat overly literal sense, it is fantastic, simply because it isn't real.

The Hollywood cliche is more where the singular genius that only built the one device ended up dead, along with any notes and research hinting at how it might work.

The other big fallacy was the notion that you could magically gain access to any system as long as you could crack their encryption, along with the computer systems magically decoding to show graphics IIRC.

None of the systems required you to be running their custom client software, and all were accessible through public networks or dialup.

Didn't break the movie for me, but it's definitely something I notice.

Hate to say this because I loved the movie too. But it always bugged me that the timing of the repetitive noise helped them determine the bridge. The unknown speed of the vehicle would make it pretty difficult to determine anything based off the noise pattern.

It has been a very long time since I watched the movie so there may be something that addresses this that I'm not aware of, if that's the case please let me know!

If you had a rough estimate on time-of-day you could make an educated guess for speed based on traffic patterns. Assuming the bad guys wished to blend in with the traffic to avoid suspicious behavior that would potentially lead to being pulled over by a police officer. Even then, it's only one variable in the equation which is easily verifiable in a location with only a few bridges where some of them are eliminated almost immediately before even getting in the car.

But I don't recall them covering anything on that subject in the movie.

Watch that scene again. They adjust both the pitch of the tires on the pavement and the timing of the "bumps" from the seams. While two different bridges could have the same timing at different speeds, or the same pitch, they're betting on the combination of pitch and "bump" timing to be unique for a given bridge and a given speed.

Aw crap, you're right, I had forgotten about the sound of the tires on the pavement in between the bumps.

The pitch of which is determined in large part by the tire tread pattern, so the sound could not easily be compared / transferred between the bad guys' vehicle and the good guys' unless they knew what kinds of tires the bad guys had.

Well never say never, it happened once and it could happen again :-) I agree it was one of the few movies I had seen at the time where I wasn't groaning every time they used a computer (3 days of the Condor had this property as well)

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