Hacker Cinema
Freedom Downtime
2001 · Film · documentary · 121 min
Directed by Emmanuel Goldstein
A feature-length documentary about the Free Kevin movement and the hacker world.
8 positive1 neutralfrom 9 commenters
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10 comments on Hacker News
That's certainly one opinion, and is even right, to some degree. But there's also movies like the Imitation Game about Alan Turing, which is a movie, and not a documentary, but there are also countless documentaries about him. There's no shortage of hagiographies about Steven Jobs, in both book and film and tv miniseries format, along with Pirates of Silicon Valley which includes Microsoft's part. There's a movie about Aaron Swartz (The Internet’s Own Boy). The movie Antitrust(2001) is fictional, but in the same area.
Hackers (1995) is fictional but a cult classic. Freedom Downtime (2001) is about Mitnick and hacking culture. There's smaller documentaries too. There's that one about Wikileaks, that one about Cambridge Analytica. There's books like The Dream Machine (Mitchell), Unix: A History and a Memoir (Brian W. Kernighan), The UNIX‑HATERS Handbook (Simson Garfinkel et al.). There's http://folklore.org about the early days at Apple. Asiometry has https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ffh3DRFzRL0, a 20 minute bit about the Unix wars.
The source code to the original Microsoft DOS is at https://github.com/microsoft/MS-DOS. The Anarchist Cookbook is on Kindle, https://www.2600.com/Magazine/digital-back-issues goes back to 2010.
DefCON got too big for the Riv and the Sahara, and is now at the LVCC. Yeah it's not the same. It's never going to be the same, but some still gather for their yearly mecca and watch Hackers and get drunk in hotel suites paid for by corporate sponsors. Others stay home for various reasons.
Do we still keep what we're doing? I mean, I don't program in Z80 ASM assembly anymore. There are still classes in my code by the focus on OOP isn't what it once was. I'm not sure if I want to call it progress, but I don't program Win32 applications anymore. I can spin up a web app with an LLM in an afternoon, and have it web-scale to the whole world in less time than it used to take to get a computer racked in a colo.
It's not 1979, the cable I use to go from USB-C to HDMI is more powerful than the computer that took us to space. By like, a million times.
Look, I'm not saying we shouldn't respect our elders. By this point, though my beard's not yet grey, relatively speaking I am an elder. I learned to program from paper books. Before ChatGPT, before Stack Overflow, before Google. There are some here that predate me by decades. If you're competing with a $10 million Oracle db system, and going from 6 ASM instructions to 5 in the inner loop will eke out that extra percent of performance, and win you the contract, by all means, sit down, roll up your sleeves, and hand optimize assembly in order to figure out how to get rid of that one instruction.
The joke is oft made, that other fields stand on the shoulder of giants, while in computer science, we stand on their toes. And it's not wrong. I can't wait to for the next new language to pop up and reimplement a DAG solver for their package management woes, and to invent a better sandbox for running untrusted code. That's still an unsolved problem. If this stuff interests you, the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California is worth the visit. The only problem is that at the end of the tour is computers I grew up with, which has a certain way of making a fella feel old.
The travesty that is happening right now, is in the wake of Paul Allen's death, is the debache with his surviving sister and the Seattle Living Computer Museum.
John Markoff was the one that made everything up.
Freedom Downtime is a documentary that explains it.
Alas the book (and the movie) were trash, rather like Shimomura. Anyone who knew Kevin, knew that Takedown was egotistical BS.
If you really want to know about "the pursuit of Mitnick," watch Freedom Downtime.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_Downtime
https://archive.org/details/FreedomDowntime-TheStoryOfKevinMitnick
Sad to see. Pancreatic cancer is one of the scary ones, since there are so few symptoms before you hit stage 4.
For those who haven't seen it, Freedom Downtime is a movie by the 2600 gang which is mostly about Mitnick's imprisonment, and the whole Free Kevin movement.
(I wonder who wrote the obituary, it's especially wide-ranging, and poetic in parts.)
Watch "Freedom downtime".
There they make it clear that the New York Times columnist and book author John Markoff made up absolutely everything.
The movie "Track Down" (US) / "Takedown" is also full of BS.
This movie is known as Takedown in the rest of the world, and it is not fun to watch, nor does it cover Mitnick's side of the story: "Track Down (also known as Takedown outside the United States), is a 2000 film about computer hacker Kevin Mitnick, based on the book Takedown by John Markoff and Tsutomu Shimomura."
Watch the documentary Freedom Downtime by Eric "Emmanuel Goldstein" Corley and read Mitnick's book, Ghost in the Wires. Written by Mitnick after his probation terms were expired. Dude's got humor, and its written in a way which is both fun and suspense. Whether it is accurate, who knows, but it is from his perspective.
The last time people got this crazy about a hack, Kevin Mitnick was thrown in solitary confinement for months because they thought he could "whistle nuclear launch codes into prison telephones". 2600 made the documentary about it, Freedom Downtime, and I strongly recommend watching it if you never have.
So what if North Korea did it (of course I'm skeptical of this, anyone with a computer can conduct the same activities, with the motivator of trolling the entire world for fun). It's not a big deal, it's not something that requires US presidential intervention. It's not even remotely as big of a deal as the CIA torture report that just came out. The CIA report threatens our legitimacy as a world power. The Sony hack just costs a corporation some money, maybe (free publicity FTW). Big. Deal.
If this is the worst a hacker can do, I'd love to see all future wars replaced with hacking. I'll take that over agent orange and torture any day.
This sad, sick notion that hackers are terrorist enemy #1 and this is the most important thing governments should be working on is, like this movie will probably be, shitty fiction, a self-fulfilling prophecy perpetuated by Hollywood in movies like War Games that make it look like we're all going to be nuked thousands of times if we don't stop the Hacker menace. Help me change the media's perception of hacking before we start throwing more whistleblowers and e-graffiti artists in prison.
TLDR: Sony got hacked, too bad, learn a lesson and fix your computer security, let's not start WW3 over it shall we?
Wargames
Hackers
Revolution OS
Freedom Downtime
Any/all Jason Scott movies
Short Circuit 2
I also made a short ~8min piece about GNU with Stephen Fry that I'm still fond of. http://gnu.org/fry/
One of my favorite 2600 covers ever: http://www.2600.com/covers/sp981.gif
And does anyone else remember 2600's feature-length film "Freedom Downtime - The Story of Kevin Mitnick" [VIDEO] -- http://archive.org/details/FreedomDowntime-TheStoryOfKevinMitnick
On the documentary side of things (all of which are available free/legally online):
1. "Code Rush", documentary about Netscape open sourcing Mozilla.
http://www.viddler.com/explore/coderush/videos/1/
2. "Revolution OS" was a pretty interesting documentary on Linux and the free software movement.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7707585592627775409&ei=xYF-ScDeJZPCqAOfkJizBA
3. "Freedom Downtime", a documentary about Kevin Mitnick. There's also "Track Down", but that's more of a fictional portrayal loosely based on him.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6746139755329108302&ei=fIF-SceYCKS2qAO52Py1BA