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Comment by anonymouz | Hacker News Reader

The network scanner NMAP has appeared in a lot of movies before. Fyodor has a page on it: http://nmap.org/movies/ . Apparently it even made an appearance in a soft-porn movie...

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Actually, do we have a list of good computer movies?

I liked the movie hackers when I was a kid and first came out with Jolie and everything but it's kinda ridiculous and the approach is very hollywood-esque.

I found Sneakers to be a great movie.

War Games was kinda old to get me involved when I first saw it. Tr0n is unwatchable (at least the latest version).

I like the matrix (imho best karate one-on-one fighting scenes ever made to date) for a variety of reasons and of course for the ssh root exploit and nmap.

Any other movies we should know of? Is this one any good actually?

23 is the best hacker film I know of. It's German and based on the Karl Koch story. It's not exclusively about hacking, necessarily, but it is far more realistic than any other I've seen.

Reboot from 2012 is a short film that features a whole lot of real world penetration testing tools and security lingo, but was overall poorly executed and nonsensical. Still worth a look just to spot all the references.

Antitrust is a programmer film. It's somewhat slow-paced and mediocre, but it has a nice scene with the Unix shell and overall tries to mimic the work environment at Microsoft.

Takedown, which although not that good, is a watchable telling of the Kevin Mitnick saga.

Travelling Salesman is based on computer scientists solving P = NP and creating a crypto weapon for use by the U.S. government. Actually quite intellectual, much like Primer.

That's all I can think of right now.

+1 for Antitrust. It's one of my favourites.

I'm watching the P = NP right now and it is amazing. Thanks for the hint :-)

  The Internship (2013)

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2234155/

Good and funny movie, and realistic (if you don't mind the Google logo everywhere)

  Antitrust (2001, also known as "Startup")

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0218817/

Good movie that shows some C, Java and HTML code and also explains "open source". Miguel de Icaza helped them, so you see GNU/Linux desktops and GNOME shell and bash.

"The Internship" is less realistic than you'd think.

It's true. Getting a "cold one" with employees is somewhat common place.

The Internship has nothing to do with how the internship program at Google works in reality.

I really enjoyed Pirates of Silicon Valley, which covers the early history of Microsoft and Apple.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0168122/

Dot (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0371647/?ref_=fn_al_tt_3) is a satire of the dot com boom. Even though it's a comedy, it's by far my favorite movie that has anything remotely to do with tech.

So far I remember only one movie that shows "hacking" plausibly: Fincher's Girl with the Dragon Tattoo [1].

Most of the time in other hollywood films, it's downright bogus. [2]

[1] http://oracle-wtf.blogspot.ru/2012/05/girl-with-ansi-tattoo....

[2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aApTVqeGJMw Hacking scene from Skyfall, ugh.

Finsher's "The Social Network" shows some real Perl code too. In several scenes with monitor closeups - downloading images via Perl calling wget from Harward dorm websites.

hacking scene: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odOzMz-fOOw

Jurassic Park. If for nothing else than the 3D file browser being an actual SGI file system visualizer, rather than some hollywood 3D UI.

The name is "HaXXXor Volume 1: No Longer Floppy" for anyone searching through the page.

It is on archive.org too: https://archive.org/details/haxxxor_volume_1_dvd

Thank you for this. It's hilarious.

> Apparently it even made an appearance in a soft-porn movie...

Not surprising, considering that the movie is most likely about penetration.

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