Hackers (1995) Animated Experience
hackers-1995.vercel.app
hackers-1995.vercel.app
And after 30+ years of watching Hackers, it only occurred to me recently that the biggest noob in the movie Joey beat the Gibson, twice. Sure he had assistance the second time, but still poetic imho.
Hack the planet <3
You’re in the butter zone now, baby!
I've seen the movie countless times. It was only last year that I learned it was "butter zone" and not "border zone". And I never understood why Nikon called it "border zone" as it made no sense in context. But I also had never heard the term "butter zone". So there you go.
Who hadn't?
I was a young adult back then, but the sense of adventure in the movie brought my memories of BBSs and creative misuse of telephone lines, X.400 networks, and dial-out modems. Fun times.
Also no one remembers cloak and dagger.
- I thought you was black, man. YO THIS IS ZERO COOL!
Just a few years later I dropped out of school and started my career, haven't looked back since.
My first boss who gave me my first chance, and my 2nd job through referral, he dropped out of 7th grade to start his own business. He was once interrogated by police, and they had brought in some experts from a big ISP, and these "experts" had no idea what he was talking about. :D
Wild years...
A trifle offtopic, but.....
In the 1990's and for us Gen-X'ers, the worst thing you could do was to sell out; to take the mans money instead of keeping your integrity. Calling people and bands 'sell outs' (sometimes without justification!) was to insult them.
With the rise of 'influencers' the opposite appears to be the case; people go out of their way to sell out and are praised for doing so. This is a massive change in the cultural landscape which perhaps many born in the 2000's aren't aware of. (Being aware of this helps give some perspective to Gen-X media and films like hackers).
Society sold out.
I’m reminded of the scenes in My Fair Lady where Eliza’s father comes in to money, and he’s lamenting that he can afford “middle-class morality.”
Content creators on YouTube, for example, get criticized when they literally sell their brand to a larger conglomerate. It seems people do not complain if they do sponsorizations tho.
I'd argue the very words creating "content" implies something commercial is already in mind and is a driver, rather than just doing your own thing online and not caring (such showing a video of your band/hobby on YouTube in case anybody is interested).
To a Gen-X'er, the former sounds like they are already a sell out :-)
I certainly agree with you that perceptions have shifted.
"Content creator"... what happened to artist, playwright, painter, hobbyist, etc? It makes it seem as if they were making stuff for a corporation to sell.
Note it's not even relevant whether something is commercial. Art can be commercial and not be just "content". A musician is not a "content creator" which happens to create content in the shape of music. "Content" implies it doesn't really matters, what matters is engagement and the platform (and advertisers, etc). It's not healthy to think of hobbies, art, and entertainment as exclusively about this. Imagine if Oscar Wilde, Herman Melville, Alan Moore, etc had been thought of merely as "content creators".
This is not a new idea. Stallman was already pushing back against this "content" term decades ago.
Can recommend such a mix, too. Gather select works of The Chemical Brothers, The Dust Brothers, Bassbin Twins, Crystal Method, DJ Krush, Dub Pistols, Lunatic Calm, Meat Katie... and you're Somewhen Else during it. Works for commutes/trips, too.
I had a couple of Dust Brothers (a) cassettes before they changed their name after getting a call from the other Dust Brothers (b).
Still can't believe they knowingly copied another band's name "because it sounded cool". Isn't coming up with a shit name half the fun? "I need a handle man".
I let go of fanboying on what Hollywood "did to" the story and instead just decided to be thankful something I love was given a new medium / audience / interpretation... and voila! now I have two things to love.
It's still fun to point out where things could've been done differently, but instead of actually disliking the film(s) because of those things, it's just another mechanism that lets me talk to my friends about something. Much more fun than riding home in silence in any case. ;)
Unpopular opinion amongst those who grew up on the anime, but I was late to the anime so my childhood-integrity isn't dependent upon requiring a faithful one to one retelling (or whatever would satisfy those folks - possibly nothing).
I enjoyed the "Hollywood" Ghost in the Shell as a stand-alone 'thing', unrelated to the manga / anime. The ending is quite on the nose; ultra-formulaic where formulaic has no place.
For me there are 2 issues
(1) I read the book. it was awesome. If the movie fails to deliver that awesomeness then it's really upsetting as it's ruining something great for everyone that didn't read the book / see the original. They're unlikely to go check the original. They're more likely to just think "That was dumb".
(2) When they change things so much that they arguably should not have used the name.
Why choose some existing fictional world/characters just to shit on them and make it something else? If you wanted to make something else, then pick a new name, make your own IP.
The PCP is absolutely nowhere _near_ the graphical wizardry of the state of this app, and the overlay of executing code atop a given directory structure is quite beautiful (practicality be damned), but I can see the inspiration.
I do wonder if, on a modern Linux system with SELinix, this model (code accessing a directory) is actually closer to viable? SELinux's contexts/labels for subjects overlaying with the same for objects can, I imagine, be visualized. The normal access patterns would be way too overwhelming, I think - but exceptions/policy violations? :ponder:
I never managed to reach your third time. Once was enough for me, at the time, to decide it was an awful movie which didn't have anything to do with hackers or computers and which was terribly overacted, and that was that. Filed under yet another "Hollywood just doesn't get it", subsection "so bad it's embarrassing".
Much later I realized I had missed a cult classic. Oh well. I still think it's a bad movie, but I'm ok with other people loving it... maybe that's my growth moment.
If you can unlock that teenage feeling of wonder at the potential size and scope of the world and, at the right age at the right time, feeling like that world is your oyster, that's the feeling in which to watch this movie.
I refuse, however, to get into that feeling-zone for other 'high school' movies; they're stupid...
(I think the movie is wildly overrated just as a piece of storytelling; the hacker fan-service in it is just fine, they clearly got some tfile kids to consult with the script.)
Not familiar with that term, and my googling has failed. What does it refer to?
people familiar with the culture
The point is to make you want to hang out with those people on those days and it does that tremendously well.
If you disagree your a flake.
Honestly I think Lawnmower Man might have had more cultural impact.
I didn’t think so.
On the other hand, something like blade runner I still think is amazing. Or the matrix (original only)
Just imagine somebody has invented a quantum computer with a production process that has a very high error rate so a second one can’t be easily produced.
https://www.discogs.com/release/1423591-Various-Hackers%C2%B...
https://www.discogs.com/release/131024-Various-Hackers%C2%B3
https://www.discogs.com/release/29127-Various-Hackers-Origin...
It's frustrating that often tracks from soundtracks like this aren't available on Spotify, such as Phoebus Apollo.
Then you have other famous bands of that time: The Orb, The Shamen, The KLF, ...
My fav. Juno Reactor live set (and album) is still hands down 'Juno Reactor – Shango Tour 2001 Tokyo' [1]
[1] https://www.discogs.com/master/782091-Juno-Reactor-Shango-To...
The best music, in my opinion, in the movie is not on the soundtrack and it is:
Guy Pratt - Combination
My people.
"This is it... this is where I belong..." I know everyone here... even if I've never met them, never talked to them, may never hear from them again... I know you all...
after all, we're all alike.
Lost a lot of my people to drugs and jail
And suicide cause we do or die
Thats the way this thing goes with my crew and i
But i guess that we all keep it moving right
Terminal eternally but you know that i ain't sick
Out here idling on my nick
While i go ahead and do another magic trick
I love this so much, thank you for sharing!
* Slow down the motion to about .5 of what it is currently, with easing/acceleration on the speed to emulate the camera dolly and jib effects used in the film
* Add a random motion setting that allows me to run it full screen just sliding through the aisles, banking around turns, flying up and then back down the aisles.
* optionally lock the framerate to 24fps to give it a film feel
* optional shaders on the main viewport to emulate lens distortion, film grain, etc
* raytracing with reflectivity on the glass, refraction, diffusion, etc.
I went to gemini, picked "cavnas". used this prompt
> There's a famous CG scene in the movie Hackers where they "Hack the Gibson". It shows a bunch of translucnt cubes with glowing edges. The textures on the cubes are live computer text. The camera slowly flyies between the cubes tilting gracfully and it searches for the main one.
> Reproduce this scene in Javascript. Be sure to include each of those features
> 1. live computer text which you can simulate by drawing to a canvas offscreen and uploading to a texture, adding more output as it goes. You can even use "function.toString()" of the code you write as input
> 2. a post processing step so we get a glow
> You can probably use three.js for this
Here's the result.
https://codepen.io/greggman/pen/XJKPBZW
No, it's not as good as the site linked above and it's unlikely it would be. On other hand, it got this far on the first try. Maybe a few more iterations and it could get the stuff you want.
You seem to have folks leveraging XSS against the leaderboard (classic!). Of course, the JSON is available via https://hackers-1995.vercel.app/api/leaderboard?limit=1000&o...). XSS in the top entry (purportedly completed in -1e+129ms) might be firing since I get redirected to the Hacker's Manifesto included in Phrack (issue #7, released 1986-09-25) ;-)
``` { "scores": [ { "alias": "\u003Cimg onerror='document.location = `https://phrack.org/issues/7/3#article`' src=a\u003ESHOUTSOUTTOPHRACK\u003C/img\u003E", "time_ms": -1e+129 } ...OTHER ATTEMPTS FOLLOW... ```
Regardless, thanks for sharing! Very cool!
Along the lines of ethos, there's also the narrative of freedom of information and anti big money corporation (the plague). I hope that this energy to fight the system and tyranny of control the system represents never dies. Particularly as we watch the darkness of a tyrannical government continue to unfold here in the U.S.
> We got one person online, the workload is enough for like ten users. I think we've got a hacker.
> Out of the way you hapless techno weenie.
Lorraine Bracco is great, but her delivery of that line cracks me up. That had to have been overdubbed or something.
Really missed opportunity to place a garbage file in here somewhere!
Explorers, the Ethan Hawke and River Phoenix movie from the mid-80s, is my #2 for the same reasons.
Stand By Me is in my top 5 for the same reasoning. I grew up in very small town out in the boonies where my friends and I would go exploring in the woods/creeks just without finding a body.
I was a bit too young for Stand By Me. The subject matter was just too serious for me at that age. But I also grew up in a small town in the country where exploring was a normal thing.
I would meet kids from college that were from much larger towns and they'd complain "I grew up in so-and-so and there's NOTHING for kids to do there!"
I'd think to myself, "you have no idea what you're talking about. I used to go to your town to do stuff!"
But over time I grew to love both of them. In both cases I started to appreciate how they weren't trying to be faithful representations, but rather capture a particular ethos in a cheesy & over the top way. And both of them I think hit their mark well in that regard.
When I first saw Starship Troopers, I disliked it because it wasn't faithful to the book. Over time I came to appreciate it for what it actually was, and now think it is fantastic.
Likewise, with Hackers I initially disliked it due to how inaccurate and unrealistic it was. I came to appreciate it for what it actually was over time, and now think it is fantastic.
> I think you're the one who missed the point
Like, there's not that much to the book. It's a decently written "joins the military" story with a couple of well developed characters and one unique idea about sci-fi warfare (the suits spending most of their time jumping, which in retrospect would just make you a giant target...)
None of this is bad, it's just like, there's dozens of other mil-sci-fi books and yet everyone has to jump in and go "but the book is better!!!"
A lot of liberals don’t want to admit that.
Similarly, “they live” might have tried to pretend to be liberal coded and that might be the directors intention, but it’s schizo /pol/ right wing coded too in practice. After the Epstein stuff, we need reparations for /pol/ schizos.
This is how I feel about it too. I've watched it a good 8-10 times over the decades and enjoy it every time.
"Cyberspace […] A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding." – Neuromancer
Remember seeing Raiders of the Lost Ark, watching Indiana Jones being dragged under a lorry by his whip and thinking "wow, that's a brilliant stunt"?
Remember (or did you forget) seeing the latest Indiana Jones film with a CGI motorbike and a CGI Indiana Jones jumping onto a moving train?
One will always be more impressive than the other.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Np4OojYGixI
Sure, the tank rolling at the bottom looks a bit like a model, but it isn't nearly as jarring as the part where the shot of the guy in the tank looks like it came from another world entirely and has been badly edited in on top.
“Help yourself to anything in the fridge. Cereal has.”
That always cracks me up. Like he had to have walked out of the room, spun on his heel, and marched straight into the kitchen and raided the fridge. He couldn’t have taken more than 5 breaths after leaving before he was eating something.
I was also so inspired by this Gibson supercomputer interface when I created my little game prototype for js13k games contest 10 years ago:
https://invadium.itch.io/cybergrid-13
Now I think I should've used flight mechanics like in flight simulators instead of walking, but the cyberspace and viruses are still there. Maybe I will refresh it one day to give a more Hacker-like ambient flight feeling.
Amazing stuff, nevertheless!
I even brought my PowerBook Duo 280c along with me
A couple years ago my friend and I dressed as FBI agents. It was great fun.
I made a Tron lightcycle game: https://new.af/tron
Now that AI accelerates dev so much, I suspect we'll get to see a lot of cool throwbacks.
Did it really exist ?
Then where's the massive explosion of software?
In Firefox is there a way to play this without FF popping up the search box on every key press? Maybe there's a way for the JS to override the default FF search functionality?
"Search for text when you start typing"
I have to say, I do like this setting enabled, but can see how it conflicts with the page. And let's be fair, how much time and I saving over having to press Ctrl+F when I want to search a page?
Bonus points if you pause to watch the movie and wonder "how have I seen this movie countless times and only just now noticed there's a 6th hacker in the 'main' crew?".
Or how about when you realize you never see Phreak again once he makes his call from the jail?
Yes exactly.
types furiously
[ACCESS DENIED]
types double furiously
[ACCESS GRANTED]
dramatic turn to camera
"I'm in."
Then this Hackers movie came out and it seemed like a laughable clown caricature of hacker culture. It was insulting, like I imagine Big Bang Theory is to many.
Then I went to the Bay Area, and hung out at places like New Hack City and 2600 meetings, and I loved those people and the movie made more sense:
- War Games was a movie for 1980s hackers.
- Hackers was a movie about 1990s hackers.
So I re-watched the movie. I still hated it. But, I get it.
And no, I've no idea which movies are a similar anthem for 2000s/2010s hackers. Let me know.
There's a list of similar films at the bottom of https://telehack.com/telehack.html
Great on the technicals and also a complete mind fuck.
The names and handles of the movie reflect this - Cereal Killer, Plague, Joey, Razor - all handles of local New York people. Phreak in a sense too. Some of the kids went to Stuyvesant high school, where scenes were filmed. The kid getting raided in his shower happened locally. The plant worker almost getting shot by a flare gun held by people trashing happened locally. As did other things.
Some other national things made it in, like the Hacker's manifesto written by an LoD member.
Some things were invented for the movie. There was no attractive 19 year old Angelina Jolie type hacking along with the boys as shown in the movie. These guys were not rollerblading through Manhattan together. There was no Cyberdelia nightclub everyone hung out at, although some of the guys might have gone together once in a while to the nightclubs popular at the time (The Tunnel /Limelight / Palladium / Club USA / Webster Hall).
LoD and MoD's heydays were more in the 1980s. By the first year or two of the 1990s, both were pretty much defunct, if my memory serves.
I was acquainted with several members of both groups, and I don't remember them really resembling the Hackers movies in appearance or personality. But I lost touch with them in about 1989-1990 or so, due to the next phase of my life kicking off.
However, Sneakers was also released at around the same time, and that really captured my imagination and had a real lasting impact on my life. Hackers was fun, but Sneakers was aspirational.
I really like Halt And Catch Fire but it doesn’t count since it also depicts the 80s. So, since Mr. Robot already got its mention, how about Silicon Valley? ;-)
In the spirit of hackers I have to share this - I just asked Claude 4.6 to make a file system browser that works kinda like this, and it took 5 minutes to make something that actually works. Directories as skyscrapers with files as text on the side, moving around by wasd.
It uses three.js and a browser so it's just a toy of course but still, I can navigate my filesystem like they do in Hackers (1995) and it was a 5 minute interaction with a computer, using natural language. Another few hours and I'm sure I can copy garbage files too.
I've never felt more obsolete but still had to laugh. What a time to be alive!
Once I joined, I had theories on who wrote it and got it on my first try. :)
My ankles don't.
It is the ideal move of transport! (if cars were less common and hills less steep).
I've got weak ankles from rolling them regularly playing other sports, but the inline boots strap em in nice and tight.
If you need some motivation, or just like to watch some decent skating, check out The Stuttering Skater on YouTube. I'm nowhere near even thinking about being that good, but he's great to watch weaving through NYC traffic.
My wife and I both love this movie. I thought it was cheesy and unrealistic when it dropped, but it's reflective of a mid-90s era when technology was something to be excited about and there was a lot of hype about "cyberspace" and such nonsense. That's also when I got into internetworking, Linux, and all that stuff. And electronic music. Hackers made people with my interests seem way cooler and sexier than we really were.
Every now and then when the opportunistic situation arises, she'll announce at me: "Crash and Burn".
Just listening to Halcyon & On & On is putting a lump in my chest. That era in time was just so fantastic and I don't think it's just because I was 21 and utopian.
I think I could perma stay in 1995/96, Groundhog Day style. Just relive those same "halcyon" days over and over perfecting and absorbing everything over and over.
"We have to go back!"
I don’t remember the last time I saw this film and this is the 2nd time that it’s popped back up into my life recently, so it’s a sign that I need to watch it.
I wish I could go back in time to watch the movie for the first time.
It’s like prog rock. By and large, hot chicks are interested in bands like Motley Crue and Bon Jovi.
But prog rock never got chicks wet. It was always music by nerds for other nerds.
I think a realistic movie about hacking would be the same. By and large.
For the cool stuff, well, the Demoscene it's like that. Or stuff from https://t3x.org, or the small tools from gopher://hoi.st and tons of weird 9front new tools such as the GeFS filesystem, the future gpufs, using remote devices as if they were the local ones in the computer and whatnot. Ditto with Subleq and EForth which is perfect foror something like Jarre.
Would be nice to get one from Johnny Mnemonic too.
Undoubtedly a film that inspired a generation.
This brings back _memories_! I think I won't even stand out from the crowd here mentioning me and the gang watched the hell out of the VHS back when, in our circle it was a different world than I suppose even for people in the West who loved it. We're so far removed this became a cult classic long before it became cult classic everywhere else. Needless to say, Angelina Jolie's character made quite an impression on this young mind :-) Damn, quotes from this movie live rent-free in my head. I was already quite a fan of Orbital when I saw Hackers for the first time. It was also at the end of "Mortal Kombat", by the way -- but Hackers used it marginally better still IMO.
Hacker had HEART, man. It was cheesy but the feeling it left in an entire sub-culture of a generation, cannot be underestimated. I am reading some of the other stories here, and it brings smile to my face knowing me and my gang weren't the only ones the movie imprinted on.
Woha, this isn't woodshop class?!
As in train station hacking scene
2. Monitor inside the glasses. was it real?
They didn't have accelerometers, so it was just a dumb screen on your face.
Love the movie, got a spray can and sprayed my whole keyboard army green after watching it then realized I can't 10 finger type. What a golden age of interesting young people in computer security. Roughly one year later (iirc), I read "Smashing the Stack for Fun and Profit" which might have been my most influential IT related read. It's probably tied with "Man-Computer Symbiosis" :)
Regarding RISC, kind of, there have been compromises in the instruction sets.
Me also: yah RISC is good!
/root/.workspace/garbage
(was that it?) and a VJ mode that scrolls around to the beat and you have something for the next party!
Strange days OTOH...
If you objected to the premise or technical content of the movie, you weren't the intended audience.
Hollywood tried to make a bunch of computer movies at the time and had to figure out how to make things on a computer seem exciting, even though in reality, it's just someone sitting and typing for long periods. The producers decided on 3D mainframes and artistically rendered hacker tools (some macintosh progz at the time were not too far off).
At least at the time, they were up to the task of using some creativity to address the challenges of making a compelling, at least visually if not intellectually, movie set in a place and time with technology that effectively shrinks time and space. Now they simply set all their movies before smartphones existed.
Skunkanansie cameo too.
There many details in the movie, like the sound of electricity going through the circuit, the camera path is more like a spline with rotations in more axis, etc.
It does perform really good on mobile.