Hacker Cinema
Blackhat
2015 · Film · 133 min
Directed by Michael Mann
Nicholas Hathaway, a furloughed convict, and his American and Chinese partners hunt a high-level cybercrime network from Chicago to Los Angeles to Hong Kong to Jakarta. As Hathaway closes in, the stakes become personal as he discovers that the attack on a Chinese nuclear power plant was just the beginning.
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19 comments on Hacker News
I don't read much any more. Mostly magazine articles.
I did re-read "The Long Run" from Daniel Keys Moran (one of the very short list of books I've re-read, and this was #4 or #5).
"Were you taught to hate Peaceforcers?" "Taught? No."
The only new book that I read was "Heat 2" by Michael Mann and Meg Gardiner.
It was "ok". It honestly felt like a mashup of "Heat", "Miami Vice", and "Blackhat". So, not as fresh as I would have liked. (Mind, I really like all of those movies.)
I'll see the movie when it comes out, but the book was just "ok".
The one that interests me is inspired by the Blackhat movie.
The premise here is that the donor has an app on their phone. They load their data into the app.
Then they go to a mall, down town shopping district, someplace busy and they walk around.
When they got home they see a green dot showing the data has been transferred.
Somewhere hidden where they were walking is a BT receiver. The app and phone sniffed it out and sent the data as they walked by.
Once the data is loaded onto the drop, it’s exported out via a mesh of LORA radios.
I don’t know how to get BT radios to pair automatically without ever seeing each other, even between cooperating parties. Or maybe it could work with WiFi Direct. Not really familiar with that.
In the movie Blackhat, the Bad Guy communicated "anonymously" with his cronies by setting up (I think) a Bluetooth hot spot in an open mall.
They all virtually crossed paths at some specific spot, where there was a radio and computer hidden in a bush.
The premise is these folks have never met, and assuming that the cronies aren't familiar with the tech and told to "go to this bench, do this workflow, enter in these codes". Rather they were told to download an app to their phone, go to this area and "start chatting", or maybe they connected to the bush server, and exchanged messages without ever having to be in the same place at the same time.
Can a modern phone contact a BT device without being manually paired (assuming it has cooperating software on the phone)? A non-hacked phone? Could they have been using just raw BLE for this?
What kind of range does BT and BLE have?
Here's at least one book on him: The Mastermind: Drugs. Empire. Murder. Betrayal. by Evan Ratliff.
Another is: Hunting LeRoux: The Inside Story of the DEA Takedown of a Criminal Genius and His Empire by Elaine Shannon.
Michael Mann has the rights to turn Hunting LeRoux into a film. He did Heat, Ali and Collateral (probably one of my favorite movies). Unfortunately, he also did Blackhat.
Takedown, the kevin Mitnick story was a cool watch. Also Blackhat was another good one. Another favorite of cheesy old 80's films is Prime Risk.
Mann likes to savor the cultural and visual environments his movies take place in. That makes them (later ones like Collateral, and especially Miami Vice and Blackhat) too slow for a mass audience.
There was an essay I can't find about how non-US, European audiences appreciate that kind of thing much more.
Mann's movies don't have endless thrills and they end on a slightly positive to neutral note, not like romances or action movies where the end is supremely positive. Instead, some problem has been averted, but nobody's saved the world. Any positive elements (couple living happily ever after, wounded cop surviving) are tempered by a strong sense of malaise that nothing's keeping the same thing from happening again tomorrow.
I think the video doesn't go deep enough: the problem is not that movies teach the wrong lessons, but rather that the movies are so hyper-optimized for engagement and ROI that there's no room for nuance. He may not like the newest Star Wars trilogy, but it nonetheless made a lot of money.
That said, I think the author (and also me in the previous paragraph) uses the term "movies" to refer to "big budget movies", which are by no means the only movies out there. There are lots of good movies out there, but most people aren't watching them.
If you have the chance, I suggest everyone spend a couple weeks going to a "mystery movie night". Sure, sometimes you may end up watching "Blackhat" (or even worse, "Tracers"), but the good movies you'll end up also watching will make up for it.
Better than even WarGames, The Matrix or Blackhat? Better than Swordfish or Live Free or Die Hard? Hackers even?
I always considered Sneakers a spy movie rather than a hacker movie, properly sandwiched in a triple-feature between Three Days of the Condor and Spy Game.
Oh man happy to help! I hope you enjoy it, your comment made me list Wargames and Sneakers on my watchlist, haven't seen those in a while.
Condor and Blackhat are actually new to me so watching that first!
Mr Roboto was good to me, I love BD Wong so hard- I don't know if anyone out there has seen Focus (Will Smith movie) but he is Fantastic and steals the movie though he's only in it for 10 minutes.
> Man the good ol days. I remember when the movie Hackers came out
I had to look it up; I can't believe I have never heard of this movie, I should have been interested back then. Wargames (1983) was the film that my computer friends and I associated with our activities, and I was disappointed for years after that nothing came close to it, maybe Sneakers (1992), and 3 Days of the Condor (1975), though that is more of a spy intrigue genre, but it included a fascinating introduction to phreaking. More recently, I enjoyed Blackhat (2015) and Mr. Robot also scratched that itch. I'm going to look for Hackers (1985). Thanks for mentioning.
Society glamorizes hackers hard. Have you ever seen War Games? The Matrix? Live Free or Die Hard? Mr Robot? Blackhat? Any recent spy movie? What about the multitude of other movies/shows where hackers aren't the focus, but are certainly glamorized, a la NCIS, CSI, Limitless, etc. There's an entire genre of film & television about hackers and they are almost always portrayed as cool, attractive, powerful people with the world at their fingertips.
Ex-hacker is in desperate situation, agrees (reluctantly) to perform one more hack in exchange for getting out of said desperate situation, is the Neuromancer-ripped plot of many a bad hacker movie (Swordfish and Blackhat certainly qualify). Take away the tech and you have a pretty standard heist-film plot going back before Neuromancer.
Your topic is kind of wide-ranging and it's difficult to know if something will be off-topic or not. Let's try:
In terms of someone hacking the system, not for himself, but for the benefit of the people, there's this guy Edward, with a documentary made about him called 'CitizenFour' (2014). It's pretty good! It doesn't end like 'The Founder' though.
In terms of continuously hacking an invention to find new ways of exploiting it, I'd say the hard sci-fi indie movie 'Primer' (2004) pretty much revolves around that (although it might not be completely obvious during the first viewing).
I have to mention 'Spin' (1995), about the 1992 US election candidates. The hack here is not really the subject, but the documentary itself: it is entirely made of unauthorized satellite feeds of pre- and post-interview scenes not meant to be broadcast, i.e. you see all politicians talking unfiltered and off-the-record, as they were all unaware that, even though they were not being broadcast at those very moments, the cameras were still on and transmitting over satellite -- and their feed could be easily intercepted.
Rant on actual/software hacking movies: it might be different for some other medium, but I don't know of any movie that depicts hacking in a realistic way and is a decent movie. In my opinion, this is because there is nothing cinematic in hacking. As far as I know, the only one that marketed itself as 'realistic' on this topic was 'Blackhat', but that aspect of the movie was boring, and almost everything else was lazy and/or dumb. Maybe something on TV?
Blackhat should probably be on there for being about only one to get hacking right in recent times.
"Because the screenwriter loosely based the character around her husband. Who was her husband? Alan Kay. Tron's protagonist is Alan Kay."
Had no clue his wife wrote it or portrayed him. That's neat! Brings in some irony given Tron character is fighting the slavery of MCP but Kay told me here on HN he loved Burroughs B5000. Also implied its lead creator, Bob Barton, was a genius and revolutionary overturning all the bad software, hardware, and engineering that came before it in one fell swoop. As in, the movie could've just as easily had MCP as the hero. ;)
Disappointed that nobody has mentioned Blackhat yet. Although it was a terrible movie overall, the computer hacking parts were astoundingly accurate.
When the character needs to elude a police escort that can track his ankle bracelet with their smartphone, he tricks them into letting him have the phone for a sec and surreptitiously drops the update frequency in the tracking app to 24 hours.
When he needs to hack into the NSA, he uses insider knowledge of an employee's name/email and their boss's name/email to write a plausible spearphishing email with a 0-day PDF attachment.
I think there is also some good command-line activity on screen, though it's been long enough that I don't remember.
blackhat had some problems (when Helmsworth apes the "you son of a bitch!" scene from Manhunter I groaned in pain) but overall is, if only for the type of person that might browse this site, worth watching.
What about
Tron http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084827/
The Net http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113957/
Firewall http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0408345/
Blackhat http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2717822/
Who Am I http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3042408/
yes, I have recently seen it being used in a movie. I think it was in Blackhat :D
It's certainly being used as a pretext to lock down legal control of independent computation. The proposed updates to the CFAA and Obama's siding with Cameron on the intolerability of government-opaque communications have more credibility as a result of it. And it lends credibility to the steady reports from "a government official with knowledge of the matter" that US infrastructure is only an exploit away from being disabled by a hostile nation state, and to possible anti-hacker propaganda like the movie "Blackhat."