Hacker Cinema
Hackers
1995 · Film · 105 min
Directed by Iain Softley
Along with his new friends, a teenager who was arrested by the US Secret Service and banned from using a computer for writing a computer virus discovers a plot by a nefarious hacker, but they must use their computer skills to find the evidence while being pursued by the Secret Service and the evil computer genius behind the virus.
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488 comments on Hacker News
On a whim I watched my favorite childhood movie last week, Hackers. It's goofy in some ways, but man it captures the "wild west" feeling of early and mid 90's internet. It was just you, a slow connection to anywhere, and open ports all over the place. Right after I watched it, I dusted off an old hub, connected a few external usb-to-ethernet adapters to my work PC VM's, and now run them through an OpenBSD packet filter. For no reason at all other than to feel that again: me, watching packets, having total control. Hitting a wall and having to read a manpage.
I don't really have a point I guess, other than even after being steeped in a dead internet for years (with a slow decline spanning at least a decade arguably) I need to approach what I think is the internet in a completely different way. As in, not at all besides what is absolutely required for work. We're ants in a jar now, not cowboys like we used to be.
This hobby space is bizarre and fascinating.
Somehow I feel it's important to do - cast as many concepts into 3D as possible.
It feels more physically pure, and maybe leads to more programmable realities. It's what they depicted in films like Hackers (when hacking meant traveling through 3D holographic cities of data) before people understood what "cyberspace" really meant.
We're humans though - we can do anything. If we want, if we like, if we prefer, we can do all our concepts in 3D.
I made a mix CD for my wife for her birthday last year. It was my interpretation of Cereal Killer's "Greatest Zukes Album", featuring "great artists that asphyxiated on their own vomit" that was mentioned in the 1995 movie Hackers. So to qualify for inclusion, the artist had to either have died of drug or alcohol overdose before September 1995 (when Hackers came out) or be a band one of whose principal members died in such a fashion. It was great fun to make and my wife still listens to it.
I feel like the movie Hackers should have more entries.
The original HOPE (Hackers On Planet Earth) was in 1994 and it's where the phrase "Hack The Planet" originated. The "Hack The Planet" phrase was also used in the movie Hackers and, if you look closely, you can spot some yellow HOPE 1994 stickers in various scenes.
The time difference between today and Hackers is the same as when the film was released and the year 1964. That's the year films like Dr. Strangelove, Goldfinger and A Fistful of Dollars was released.
You (we) are old :)
Why must he say Hackers is a classic film. It was a pivotal part of my life. I'm not even that old
I'm at the point where if there's a computer display, or 3D model, or any asset in a movie, I want there to be a Kickstarter to pay the producers to open source the original assets. Even if it's a super restrictive license.
I want all of the War Games original graphics. I know people have come a long way. But I want all of them.
The "Hackers" movie. "Sneakers". "The Matrix". These individual assets deserve to be preserved! They're iconic. They're art, in their own rights!
"you can’t make a great soundtrack for a mediocre movie."
The Hackers soundtrack made more money than the actual movie. There was a sequel to the soundtrack but not the movie and unless you are involved in development, almost nobody knows the movie but you still hear songs from the soundtracks at nightclubs today.
Reminds me how people on 4chan/g/ back in the day (mid to late 2000s I think?) would start threads where one user put up a livestream of a movie on some IP address, and the participants would connect and watch it together (using mplayer or VLC) while doing live commentary in the thread itself. Good times. I think I first watched Hackers like that.
We are one step closer to the terminal in the movie Hackers, and I am all for it.
I really am starting to think that the level of technical understanding on HN is so low that when readers see an exploit like this, they imagine basically the cult classic movie "Hackers" in their heads where some guy hacks into any machine of their choosing.
Last year's birthday present from me to my wife was a mix CD. I attempted to recreate Cereal Killer's Greatest Zukes Album, briefly mentioned in Hackers (1995): "All great artists that asphyxiated on their own vomit!" My criterion was that the artists featured had to have died of a drug or alcohol overdose before September of 1995 (when Hackers was released), and four of the tracks had to be by Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Cass Eliot, and the Blues Brothers (satisfying the Belushi requirement), who are named in the film.
She still listens to it when working.
You're asking the wrong person lol. I can give you a list of "objectively bad" movies that I think are incredible for a variety of defensible reasons.
Just off the top of my head as I briefly scan shit sitting on the shelves of my office:
- Joe Dirt
- Death Wish 3
- Thrashin
- Hackers
- Mortal Kombat
- Uncle Buck
- The Incredible Burt Wonderstone
- Tapeheads
- Prayer of the Rollerboys
- Weekend at Bernie's
Not exactly Fellini, and some are barely even Andy Sidaris if we're being honest, but every movie in that list is amazing for different reasons. An objective critique of any of them (especially in context with "film", as a shapeless, vague concept) misses the point and the spirit of each and every one. But I am an uncultured heathen, so ...
One of the odd things about Hackers is how it created a cultural feedback loop. When it came out, the style it showed was pretty weird and kind of campy, but I think it got integrated into actual hacker culture over time (e.g. visible in hacker spaces, conferences, online culture etc), and because of that today the movie as a whole seems less weird than originally.
> At least it is a lot more realistic than silly 3D animation approach used in many previous movies (e.g. "hacking the Gibson" on Hackers, or the much worse portrayals on Swordfish)
One of the things I love about Hackers is that it portrays the feeling of hacking and programming to someone who might not have done it. Yea I think a lot of people have the green text hackerman image when they think about hacking but it hardly conveys what's happening inside the head of the hacker, it's just something cryptic magic that solves a problem and advances the plot. In Hackers, the Gibson is a space, somepeople live there and oversee it, other's have to transport themselves (there's a montage with fast shots of a subway, then computer circuit boards, then the "buildings" of the gibson that work really well imo). Not every film has to convey all of this but I really appreciate that Hackers does.
> Gen-X was making the popular new art at the time. It was a strong reflection of the feelings of our generation.
I posted this in a thread about the 90's film 'Hackers'.....
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).
BTW: Remember the 'product scene' in the film Waynes World?
Just like watching the movie Hackers and hearing how he hacked the gibson or the 7 screens setup in swordfish : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1Ds9CeG-VY
"HCF":
"In computer engineering, Halt and Catch Fire, known by the assembly language mnemonic HCF, is an idiom referring to a computer machine code instruction that causes the computer's central processing unit (CPU) to cease meaningful operation, typically requiring a restart of the computer. It originally referred to a fictitious instruction in IBM System/360 computers (introduced in 1964), making a joke about its numerous non-obvious instruction mnemonics." (Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halt_and_Catch_Fire_(computing)
The series is a memorable instance of what any self-respecting geek ought to have watched. It's better than "Silicon Valley", although the latter has pulled one scientific stunt regarding scientific advisory that is unique in film.
What other films/series are "must watch" material for geeks?
- War Games
- Silicon Valley
- The Social Network
- The Intern
- Mr. Robot
- Black Mirror
- Hackers
- 2001: A Space Odyssey
- ...?
Hackers is weird in that the tech part of it is so obviously fake, but then you have the hacker culture part that goes to the point of actually quoting a large part of the "Hacker's Manifesto" in the movie.
I have to admit I'm flip-flopping on the topic, back and forth from skeptic to scared enthusiast.
I just made a LLM recreate a decent approximation of the file system browser from the movie Hackers (similar to the SGI one from Jurassic park) in about 10 minutes. At work I've had it do useful features and bug fixes daily for a solid week.
Something happened around newyears 2026. The clients, the skills, the mcps, the tools and models reached some new level of usefulness. Or maybe I've been lucky for a week.
If it can do things like what I saw last week reliably, then every tool, widget, utility and library currently making money for a single dev or small team of devs is about to get eaten. Maybe even applications like jira, slack, or even salesforce or SAP can be made in-house by even small companies. "Make me a basic CRM".
Just a few months ago I found it mostly frustrating to use LLM's and I thought the whole thing was little more than a slight improvement over googling info for myself. But the past week has been mind-blowing.
Is it the beginning of the star trek ship computer? If so, it is as big as the smartphone, the internet, or even the invention of the microchip. And then the investments make sense in a way.
The problem might end up being that the value created by LLMs will have no customers when everyone is unemployed.
A silly movie but I love it so much. Such nostalgia too.
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!
See, I can push back on that! Dazed & Confused barely has a plot. It knows what it's about. Hackers has one of those shake-and-bake 80s plots; it's like a Save The Cat movie. I get that people like the subculture stuff in it, but the movie was trying for something else and faceplanted.
Honestly I think Lawnmower Man might have had more cultural impact.
War games was an excellent film. Hackers was a terrible film. Not sure why people are celebrating such a cheesy film.
Also no one remembers cloak and dagger.
Tangential, but Darknet Diaries has been running a "hacker history" series to kick off 2026, starting with this one: https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/168/. The "Hackers" movie gets a few call-outs.
I think this is a good example of something you can vibe-code today. (though maybe not as good)
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.
I went to a showing of Hackers at the Academy Museum that had an interview with the director. He explained how the whole framing of the movie was that the computer was becoming the new artistic tool of a new generation, and that they framed the hackers as a band and the computer as their guitar. Explains why it feels so right even with the wild crazy stuff in it that might otherwise be cheesy if they didn't get the ethos right.
Hackers inspired me to start digging around on my FreeBSD laptop and learn how to setup a bitmap image as boot splash, just like the kids in the movie all had their own custom boot image.
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...
I was a 90’s hacker (teenager in the early 90’s deep into “hacking”). “Hackers” was clearly a movie for teenagers and released in the 90s, so it stands to reason that it captured some of that cultural moment. I did love it.
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 highly recommend Hackers Curator for fans of the movie [0] Outstanding interviews with cast and crew, prop projects, etc.
[0] https://hackerscurator.com
My take is that we lack granular punishments.
Right now we have either some form of fine, and while this can be incredibly painful, usually is not, then we go straight to like multiyear prison sentences, with perhaps a few suspended sentences in between there.
I dunno, maybe a world where "you did a small bank fraud so now you have some kind of antifraud system attached to you" is genuinely worse than the one we live in now, but the idea of being able to target more specific aspects of someone rather than just prison/not prison seems interesting.
I guess we have stuff like "not allowed to use a computer for 5 years" (thanks hackers movie!), dunno how effective or practical that is.
Thanks for this gem!
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?!
This absolutely made my week! (I still have the Hackers movie poster framed in my office.)
I’ve probably watched Hackers over a hundred times. My all time favourite movie. My first crush as a young teenager was Burn. It led to a career in software. So many kindred spirits on this thread - makes me smile.
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 hated this movie the first time I watched it. And the second. The third time I let go of the need for things to be realistic and took it all in as an artistic representation and snap... I loved it.
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.
Damn dude this hurts. My friend took his own life last year, and Hackers was our absolute favorite movie back in high school. I mean even as late as 2022 we were messaging each other the Hacker manifesto, hack the planet, you know all the good stuff. Sam Singh, you would've loved this man. I miss you homie. hack the planet.
The writer of Hackers, Rafael Moreu, went to New York 2600 meetings and talked to various members of MoD (a hacker group which had a book written about them by a local New York reporter, Joshua Quittner, who later worked for Wired and then Time/Pathfinder if anyone remembers that).
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).
Nice little blog post that looks at these interfaces in the movie:
https://scifiinterfaces.com/2023/12/11/hackers/
I grew up hacking in the 1980s and I watched this movie and I totally hated it. Me and the hackers around me were more like War Games, but with skateboards and BMX bikes. On our best days, I likened us to the characters in the movie Sneakers, but no way, they were far more elite than us.
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.
> sellout trash
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).
I highly recommend the 88 films 4k blu-ray release for those who love Hackers. I recently was able to purchase an unopened VHS tape as well. I have a brand new VCR coming so I can have a proper experience.
"Okay, we need proof that we were here... right uh... Okay, yeah, Garbage, gimme Garbage."
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.
The animation is cool, but I just wanted to note for Hackers fans and movie nerds that the scenes inside the "Gibson" that this animates were actually done via practical effects.
I still want the Gibson towers from the movie Hackers
https://i0.wp.com/scifiinterfaces.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Hackers_3D_browsing_0800-1.png
"Whiplash" uses jazz music as a plot device - it has about as much to do with it as "Hackers" does with computers. I've never even played jazz (let alone at the level depicted in the film) and every five or ten minutes of watching it I found myself exclaiming incredulously at the seemingly ridiculous bullshit I was bearing witness to. My instincts were correct; the internet is rife with actual jazz musicians talking about this film's numerous creative liberties taken in service of its plot derivative of a sports flick.
Any opinion of actual jazz musicians formed on the basis of this film can be safely disregarded ab initio. Music snobs exist, but that movie is full of strawmen. A real shame as it was otherwise very well-executed but stuff like the finger-bleeding scene ripped straight from a Bryan Adams song does it no favors.
I'm using this just because of the Doom animation. It's just too (zero)cool to start the day as if it was a scene from the Hackers movie.
Mr Beast isn’t the internet. He’s a TV show host. And there’s been exploitative TV shows for decades. This isn’t a format Mr Beast invented.
As for security, that was always an issue. Malware, denial of services attacks, etc aren’t a recent phenomena. And hacking was so prevalent that even Hollywood caught wind, hence the slew of hacker movies in the 80s and 90s (Wargames, TRON, Hackers, Anti Trust, Swordfish, Lawnmower Man, and so on and so forth).
The problem isn’t that internet etiquette has gotten worse. The problem is that there is so much more online these days that the attack surface has grown by several orders magnitude. Like how there’s more road accidents now than there was in the 70s despite driving tests progressively getting tougher (in most countries). People aren’t worse drivers, there’s just more roads and busier with more vehicles.
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.
Shout Factory and 88 Films both released Hackers in 4k recently. Commentary track as well, havent had a chance to listen to that yet. But the 4k transfer was great.
12 year old me would disagree with you. The movie hackers and the manifesto inspired me. Being a gay geeky kid in the 90s, this helped me feel not alone.
I respect your opinion, but we would have had some flame wars back in the day ;)
This is so nostalgic for me. In 1999, I watched a couple of movies, and I decided I wanted to be a hacker. I watched the movie Hackers, Swordfish and let's not forget The Matrix. These were all influntial to me, I went down a rabbit hole and found the Hacker Manifesto, which I resonated with. I slurped up all the information I could find (There wasn't much), and then came a realization that changed everything for me. Hacking was as hard as writing software to me, one was creating and inventing things and the other was tearing down what others had made...not to mention it was also illegal (White hat was not really big at the time). I was like, if I was gonna do one, I'd rather develop software and make things that made people's day and got praised for than ruin people's day and possibly go to jail. Hence my origin story as a software developer :)
Reminder to rewatch the 1995 movie Hackers :)
I used to read it quite often when I was 15, now that I am in my 40s, I think the manifesto is quite weak, even though its romantic in its attempt to celebrate curiosity and claim a new home for some.
Now I align more with Bunnie's [1] way: when you look at a thing as a thing, strip it from its social weight, a program is just a program, you can study it, understand its machinery and mechanisms, and make it do what you want. You can understand things.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KyYsVeYzbik
PS: I still think phrack 49/14 was the most iconic article I have read, and has changed the way I look at programs ever since.
Accordingly for a movie that showed aspects of phone phreaking techniques and culture, Hackers (1995) mentions at least three 555 numbers:
212-555-4240: The number of the modem at OTV that Dade social-engineers out of the security flunkie, allowing him to dial into the cable channel's systems
555-4817: Lisa Blair's phone number, which Lord Nikon recalls out of his photographic memory at the party.
555-4202: Kate's number, which Phreak connects to by rapidly pressing the prison phone's switchhook ten times (effectively pulse-dialing 0) and then asking the operator for help dialing
Given how stylized the movie is as a whole, the prominence of several obviously-fake phone numbers is the least of the things that break realism.
>I went on a binge a year or so ago
I did the same a few years ago and it was one of the few series that kept me hooked, trying to figure out how the contestants try to fool Penn and Teller. I'll need to revisit for some newer episodes that I may have missed..
A bit off topic but no one else brought up Penn's great acting as Hal the system admin in Hackers (1995), a classic movie that everyone should be familiar with (and if not, worth checking out!).
To quote the movie Hackers:
"Cool? It's not cool. It's commie bullshit!"
Yes! and Shadowrun! I remember just binging William Gibson after that, until Johnny Mnemonic, Hackers (the movie), and Strange Days, came out. What a great decade.
That ship had sailed well before the ~1997 launch of the book. See for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackers_(film) (1995) or http://www.takedown.com/ (1996)
Ya I'm shocked by it too, said as a Gen Xer born in the late 1970s, occasionally a Xennial.
I partied for 4 years of college which is something like 30 years in sober adult terms. Our ragers were reminiscent of Animal House and Revenge of the Nerds, all of those old party movies that didn't age well. Scenes from Hackers, Fight Club, The Matrix, Trainspotting, Go, Swingers, Made, 200 Cigarettes, SLC Punk, Dazed and Confused, PCU, even Undergrads (a cartoon) were so spot-on for campus life, living for the weekend. Can't Hardly Wait, American Pie, Varsity Blues, Waiting, Superbad, etc came later, and I almost consider those watered down versions of the feral partying that happened earlier just as the internet went mainstream, but still canon.
A Friday night at my city's bar scene today looks like what our Sunday or Monday was. People half tipsy on 2 drinks, even though they're Ubering home later. The faint scent of ganja now instead of basements filled with smoke and first timers trying laughing gas. Nobody puking or disappearing around a corner to relieve themselves. No sound of bottles shattering. I feel like a curator of a museum now, a derelict from a forgotten time.
In fairness, I went to college in the midwest, where there was nothing else to do. Now the West Coast has effectively legalized drugs, awakening much of the country to the full human experience, and people have done the trips and plant medicine and maybe realize at a young age that alcohol and tobacco are rough drugs that tear you up. Which is admirable, but they also prepare you for getting torn up as an adult. To miss out on learning how to make your way home on drunk logic before you black out seems like a crucial rite of passage has been lost.
And it shows. In our country's embrace of puritanical politics like we saw in the jingoist 2000s, regentrified for the antivax era. In the worship of unspoiled beauty, idolizing of influencers, pursuit of financial security over visceral experience. In the fanboyism, bootlicking and drinking the kool-aid for every new evolutionary tech that cements the status quo instead of freeing the human spirit in a revolutionary manner. I gotta be honest, most of what's happening today is laughable to my generation. Blah I sound like a Boomer. Ok cryable then. We're in mourning. We worry about the kids today. All work and no play and all that. It's killing our souls, and theirs.
I guess my final thought after writing this is that partying is one of the most powerful reality-shifting tools in our arsenal. All of this can't be it. This can't be how America ends. You know what to do.
I’m not reading thru all that, but believe me when I say the ground truth is that IBM developed REXX on its mainframes and a genius guy from that world (poor bstrd) recreated it on Amiga as a third-party product called ARexx that was, in turn, adopted and promoted by CBM Dev Relations. One of the things the fake frenching innovation team in charge of Apple for a few years did was go down in the basement where they had an Amiga in various forms of dissection and transplanted ARexx out of it, mixed with HyperCard’s vocab (which they also didn’t invent) and announced to the World their great invention: AppleScript. But I digress. Here in the (dystopian) Future, some Apple operating systems are just now gaining the kind of power that ARexx had, because these types of systems require the cooperation of the developers and they had little incentive to “donate” functions to the system just to gain integration with Siri/Shortcuts, but they can get fired/bankrupted for not doing it to integrate with Apple Intelligence (I know, I hate that identifier too). ARexx could not be ported to MacOS back in the day because it would have had to have been championed by Apple Developer Relations (Guy Kawasaki & Co —did I just wreck the “Hackers” movie reference?) and, even/especially in the 80s, they wouldn’t have approved a tech that “competed” with AppleScript. Microsoft didn’t jump on this because it descends from DEC tech (under the direction of the Cutler) which had nothing like REXX.
Given that it started appearing in 1995, I will assume it is because of the influence of the movie Hackers in the developers of the kernel source.
> It's an imaginary world which is very hard to depict to other people. It's not purely abstract like mathematics, nor it's fully physical like mechanics.
This is one of the reasons I like the movie Hackers - the visualizations are terrible if you take it at face value, but if you think of it as a representation of what's going on inside their minds it works a whole lot better, especially compared to the lines-of-code-scrolling-past version usually shown in other movies/tv.
For anyone who doesn't know what I'm talking about, just the hacking scenes: https://youtu.be/IESEcsjDcmM?t=135
Just found display3d today, too.
Maybe it was an ascii CLI video of a 3d scene that I remember seeing.
Maybe molecule visualizations? Is it possible to discern handedness from an objcurses render of a molecule like sugar or an amino protein?
Could a 3D CLI file browsing interface useful enough for a computer green scren in a movie like Jurassic Park or Hackers be built with objcurses? wgpu compiles to WASM and WebGL
Hackers does a great job at answers the question “How do you make hacking, which is literally just typing, visually interesting?” It is kind of like Pixar anthropomorphizing things like emotions. The software becomes a semi-physical landscape with viruses moving across and through that space (like the rabbit virus literally multiplying rabbits). It isn’t trying to be “accurate”, its playing with the idea and concept of hacking. I think it is a really fun movie.
I really disliked hackers when it came out, except for the sound track. Never saw it again until some twentieth anniversary watch party, and from that distance saw it for what it was and found it amusing. ... I still wouldn't call it a great movie, but enjoyable enough or at least I now get why people like it.
Certainly far better than The Net, as low of a bar as that is.
Once you accept that a movie isn't a documentary, Hackers is a lot of fun. The editor of 2600 consulted on it (and lent his nym)
I think the only part that really pulled me out of the movie was when they were testing the device and it was decrypting a dial-up feed random character by random character on the screen. It wasn't "Hackers" bad but it was still pretty unbelievable.
Accidentally great, yeah. If I allow myself to believe that the producers of Hackers knew they were making a spoof of Hollywood hackers in general, I can sit back and enjoy it as a masterpiece.
But at the time, that was not at all clear. And I'm still not actually convinced. It certainly wasn't marketed as a comedy; it seemed to be drinking the same drama-aid as The Net and other breathless wankery at the time. In which case it's a terrible movie that only becomes watchable as an exhibit of wankery.
This feels like a special case of "suspension of disbelief".
Do you love the movie Hackers? I submit there are two camps of moviegoing nerds: those who love Sneakers and those who love Hackers. I will admit though, many many years later I softened to the sheer goofness of Hackers (which offput me much initially).
I went to a showing of Hackers in 35MM in LA last year and the director said they envisioned the hacker scene as the modern Punk music scene where computers were the instruments of creativity, like their guitars. And this is why the movie is actually timeless. It got the actual core identity that makes hackers hackers. Another fun fact is that all of the shots of them navigating through the Gibson was shot practically with glass towers and projectors and putting the camera on a track which is pretty cool.
A fun way to get people into the article making the Hackers reference, as a die hard fan of the film love to see it, but some of the takes are so out there. It wasn't "incredible" or "absurdly geeky". Anyone at the time paying attention to anything sort of "PC vs. Mac", Intel vs. Power PC etc would have heard of RISC chip developments. And it's not far-fetched to think the original writers picked up a copy of Wired or PC Magazine to notice a headline referring to it. Hardly some magical insight. Any of the geeks watching the film chuckled (or raged) at the tech references but you kinda expected to see some and of course being a hollywood film expected totally fantastical tech usage as well which the film, in all its charm, delivers in droves. Dunno what that comment on 'pronounciation' was either. Think the author either showing his age (where that falls in the gen-x-millennial-z spectrum not sure) or desire to write fiction stories rather than be a reporter, shrug.
Please universe, let this be the last time Hackers is referenced in conjunction with RISC-V. Let RISC-V be free from the cringe of a terrible movie from 30 years ago.
Thanks for mentioning these books as I came across “Virtual Light” by William Gibson in jail and found it a very accomplished novel and his craft at a high level. Also it finally clicked to me why the mainframes were called Gibsons in the film “Hackers” as I grew up not being exposed to his books (though now I actively have them on my to read list).
The wife finishing your sentences is an interesting analogy... My wife and I are usually on the same page about things, so for many topics we can use short-hand or otherwise cut discussions short. It's like in the movie _Hackers_: "It's in the place I put that thing that time." We can say just enough between us that we verify we have a shared state, and if we aren't sure we can verify and adjust.
With an LLM, if what I'm starting to say gives it a direction on where I'm going, I'd like to see what it thinks, so if it's largely or entirely right I can just continue on.
For example, I just asked ChatGPT o3-mini to complete the code "def download_uri_to_file(", and it came up with the entire function including type annotations, a very reasonable docstring, error handling, and streaming download. In fact, reviewing the code I'm sure it's better than I would have written the first pass through (I probably wouldn't have done the error handling or the streaming (unless I knew up front that I was going to be downloading huge files).
Point Break ? Might as well watch Hackers (1995) to learn about hacking the Gibson.
Tim Bonython is one of many with better surfing content: https://www.youtube.com/@SURFINGVISIONS/videos
Breath (2017) is arguably a better surf movie, as are others.
They’re trying to create content solely to get people to sign up for and maintain an Amazon subscription, which means they have to fire as many arrows as possible into as many genres as possible. As with any DND weapon or spell, a spreadshot modifier reduces accuracy, impact, and/or to-hit percentage. So instead of producing content that they think deserves the light of day, they produce content to fill gaps in their spreadshot. That will automatically be less inspired, no matter how much they spend — and the more they spend, the less taxes they have to pay on their revenue. Thus a hundred million dollar adaptation that hits all the buttons with the same drab arrow that their spreadshot fires at every genre.
This leads to their unwillingness to risk alienating anyone by making good creative decisions. Endless cycles of focus groups and executive committee notes will ensure that the finished produce has maximized appeal at the cost of being polished and professional, because all of those reworks leave little time to get it right, and anything good has to be done in secret without execs realizing it and fucking it up. Disney, their elder, is quite familiar with this problem:
https://www.vulture.com/article/oral-history-of-lilo-and-stitch-a-hand-drawn-miracle.html
https://www.vulture.com/article/an-oral-history-of-disney-the-emperors-new-groove.html
If you watch, for example, The Substance (2024) or Amélie (2001) or Hackers (1995), and then watch any modern generic Amazon/Netflix streaming movie, you can usually see the difference immediately. One is laser-focused on being the work of art it chooses to be, with no regard whatsoever for whether it attracts or repels any single person, and in fact will make decisions that drive away some percentage of viewers for some reason other than genre mismatch. The other is more often like a child trying to play all the keys on the piano at once, in order to make the loudest noise possible in a room full of other children doing the same. (For contrast, consider Hulu’s exclusive movies; they somehow made a best-in-category time loop movie?!)
If your product isn’t driving some people away for being a poor fit for their needs, then your product is probably too generic. In a field where nearly everything is generic, that may seem like it’s fine; but it’ll cost you customer stickiness to get away with it, as they’ll walk away from you the instant something less generic is a viable option.
Snow Crash is the Hackers (1995 film) of Stephenson's body of work. It's so aggressively 90s and cyber techno that it seems somewhat adorably cheesy in retrospect, but there's an audience of Z-ers who are just now discovering it, and what it means to be excited about technology the way we were back then.
There are a few movies that are my immediate "go-to's" to try a new monitor, computer or otherwise multimedia-capable setup (like when I got a projector)... Ghost in the Shell is absolutely one of them (two others being Hackers and Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust) :) There is just so much unbelievably good animation and art direction in GitS that is the perfect thing to enjoy on a new screen or computer or so on.
Man. Johnny Mnemonic. I get the urge to rewatch that movie once every three of for years, and I'm reminded of it's awful greatness. Like Hackers.
Need more William Gibson movies. I'm incredibly disappointed that The Peripheral was cancelled.
The MOBA was always fun to visit after seeing a movie at Somerville Theatre. Recently I found myself wishing I were back in Somerville, because they had an anniversary showing of Hackers there in September, with special guest Renoly Santiago ("Phantom Phreak").
Fun fact: A high-quality prototype of the original PS1 Wipeout is shown in the movie Hackers (arcade scene). It was done on a high-end SGI server and allowed the dev team to try out tracks and gameplay before porting to the Playstation. There are features and graphics in the movie that do not exist in the actual game.
Now we can recreate the Hackers(1995) movie scene(s) about the files:
https://www.reddit.com/r/retrobattlestations/comments/5wl34g/the_requested_hackers_gibson_computer_wallpaper/?tl=de#lightbox.
Video: https://www.imdb.com/video/vi489014553/?ref_=tt_vi_t_1
Little Johnny who tried really hard but still can barely write a for loop doesn't deserve a place in a comp sci course ahead of little Timmy who for some reason thinks in computer code. Timmy might be a lazy arse but he's good at what he does and for minimal effort the outcomes are amazing. Johnny unfortunately just doesn't get it. He's wanted to be a programmer ever since he saw the movie Hackers but his brain just doesn't work that way. How to evaluate this situation? Ability or effort?
What a great question! Many interesting movies to check out in these comments!
My own list, I re-watch movies the same way I re-listen to music, often to get in a particular mode of thinking, as they become familiar, I mostly daydream while appreciating some particular concept and whatever new minutiae, or ways of understanding, creeps into my mind.
Hackers - 30+ times, for dreaming about a world that never was and never will be, for reminding myself how cool computers used to seem.
The Crow - 20+ times, for thinking about the world
Koyaanisqatsi - 15+ times, for thinking about my life in the world
Alien - 10+ times, for thinking about the future that passed us by
Terminator 1 and 2 - 10+ times, for examining a time that never was, or passed me by, and because Arnold is awesome!
A Clockwork Orange, 10+ times, to reflect on violence and aesthetic
Event Horizon, 10+ times, mostly for the aesthetic, and who dosen't love spaceships from hell ?
1984 - 5+ times, for thinking about humanity and society
Requiem for a Dream - 5+ times, for thinking about the value of life, and what society is
Once upon a time in the west - 5+ times, for thinking about loss, revenge and justice
Genocyber - 5+ times, to think about what life is for anyway
Stalker - 5+ times, frankly, mostly to look at the pretty pictures.
Lots of other amazing movies, I probably forgot some (time to watch again?)
Bonus:
TV Shows I've watched more than 10 times:
Star Trek TNG
Neon Genesis Evangelion
I have a handful of "regulars" that I watch repeatedly. Most of them are at the point now that I've seen them so many times that they can work as "background noise" when I'm coding or doing something else. IOW, I can turn the volume down fairly low and it serves a purpose, but I'm so familiar with the story already that I'm not likely to get drawn into actually paying attention to the movie (as opposed to whatever I'm working on) unless I'm at a point where I need a break anyway.
Some of the ones that are on that list for me:
The Matrix
The Matrix Resurrections
The Social Network
Inception
Sneakers
Hackers
Antitrust
Rad
Tron: Legacy
Vision Quest
Rocky (really the entire Rocky franchise)
The Karate Kid
Kickboxer
Bloodsport
Hard To Kill
Above The Law
hackers, office space, grandma’s boy, indiana jones are movies I’ll watch forever.
I come from the later phone phreak era of the 90's and late 2000's. The phraase "hack the planet" from the movie hackers I love. You can control anything once you understand its behavior. 5 minutes is all you need to cause a little chaos.
life is all about systems. once you understand how to break down systems, you can hack all of them. it does not matter what your knowledge or skill level is on a particular system as long as you can break it all down to its fundamental parts and understand its behavior. most things you only need to observe before understanding.
I agree with others though, the article comes across as a little cocky. its also fine to be a hacker who only focuses on one particular area. it does not make you less of a hacker. you only need to understand systems.
I’m reminded of that movie Hackers where the kid has to solve a 3D maze to authenticate with some remote computer lol
Ah, yeah, you caught me. It's not so simple as a transform from nodes to edges. What I actually have in mind is a bit stranger, but the node/edge swap was my stepping stone towards it, which is why I mentioned it.
The structs/records/tuples approach would work (I think this would correspond with "currying"), but I have this weird idea that certain types of reasoning have a "shape" and that we might be able to more heavily lean on analagous reasoning if we could easily show that shape in correspondence with explanations of our reasoning. I worry that currying everything would force us further away from the "natural" shape (if there even is such a thing).
I've been working on something called plibs (simPlical mad LIBS, since really we're showing a https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplicial_complex here). The functions are represented as tuples of the same arity, and described via sentences with blanks in them (e.g. when you run ____ code in ____ environment you get ____ from stdout). One with three blanks would then appear like a triangle and then I'd fill it in with a gradient indicating which sides are inputs and which are outputs. Functions sharing a mad lib would appear as a regular polygon in the same color (one edge for each blank). Or maybe they're sort of starfish shaped so that each leg can reach out an touch whatever the data representation ends up being.
One could imagine algorithms that generate patchwork quilts or 3D structures (like how protein folding is represented) out of such things. These could be computed only in one direction (from inputs towards outputs) but they could be traversed in any direction if one wanted to explore the relationships.
I'm hoping it will be a nice way of citing your computational sources. You would attach them to any computational result (alongside a scientific paper, perhaps) as a way if saying "here's how I came up with this, rerun it to verify my result". Aside from the computational pathway that yielded the result that's being scrutinized, you could explore adjacent plibs to understand why certain inputs were chosen or to gain other contextual hints.
Now that I'm describing it it sounds a bit like that awful zooming-through-towers-of-data visualization in "Hackers" the movie.
So the "edge" that I was using as a progress bar in my previous description is really a series of paths through a space made of these things. The details of the functions being called (and of the datasets being generated) are attached to the polygonal regions that the paths connect. The paths may merge or branch. It could get unwieldy, so the user would have to be explicit about which plibs to show and which to highlight as a chain of computation.
As for how the represent the intermediate data and their types, I keep changing my mind. Some days I like the stacks of cards thing, some days not. Hopefully something will sick soon, then I'll try to build it.
Yes, it was a SGI application. Probably used in the movie Hackers.
There was also a Doom file manager where you'd use BFG to nuke a directory. I only found one for Doom 3 but this also existed with original Doom. Nowadays, BFG is only used to nuke git repos.
“Hackers” is interesting because there’s two depictions of hacking in the same movie.
One is flying through the holographic city of files.
The other depiction is quite realistic: they show the protagonist spending all night reading through many pages of assembly to reverse engineer a virus, people do social engineering, etc. “Hackers” made this seem cool too!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4U9MI0u2VIE
https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/10997/were-any-of-the-books-mentioned-in-this-scene-from-the-movie-hackers-real
great scene.
The film Hackers starring Angelina Jolie will be 30 years old next year.
Indeed. As I understand it (ianal), insanity is a positive defense, meaning that you have to prove to the judge/jury in court that you were insane, i.e., that you were functionally incapable of distinguishing right from wrong at the moment you committed the crime. This is because a mens rea, or guilty mind, is necessary to establish guilt and thus criminal culpability, in addition to the actus reus or the criminal deed itself; you have to be in a state where you know, or could/should have known, not to do what you did. Proving a negative, especially when it comes to this, is extremely difficult. You will have to undergo an extensive psychiatric evaluation by a psychiatrist and they have to come to the very strong conclusion that you were well and truly out of your mind at the time of the commission of the crime. Otherwise, just the evidence that you did the crime is enough to establish guilt.
Oh, and if you somehow successfully plead insanity, you will spend quite possibly the rest of your life in a mental institution instead of prison, which isn't much better.
And yes, it's good to remember that police procedurals are to criminal justice what Hackers (1995) is to hacking: a lot of stuff is distorted to make good cinema/television. In the UK, judges on cop shows use gavels (that is strictly an American custom); how can we expect them to get the details of rare events like an insanity defense right?
Amazing resource thank you!
Agree regarding videos for learning technical concepts - strangely when things are over-simplified they can become harder to understand on a technical level, I guess just being so abstracted. Example: The embeddings in the video I mentioned were always visualized spatially, where I simply think about it in terms of numerical point values. Like in the movie Hackers where they're traveling through 3D "cities" of "data" or whatever is going on. On one hand it simplifies the domain for a wider audience, yet it turns it into something else entirely!
Appreciate you sharing these.
I too remember being mesmerized by the image of the black PS1 “developer” kit.
It truly captured my imagination and alongside the movie Hackers from 1995 is probably one of the reasons I ended up wanting to be associated with computers in my future as a child.
Trivia: There are HOPE flyers in the movie “Hackers”. Cereal Killer’s real name is Emmanuel Goldstein, who is the maybe-fake reactionary leader in “1984”, and from there, the pen name of 2600 Magazine’s editor. 2600 sponsors HOPE.
Also: I was able to get my work to buy me a lifetime subscription to 2600 from my personal education budget. Just in case you were looking for a way to spend yours down.
Your explanation is great except for the beginning of the story: in the 80s and early 90s, CISC cores didn't have a CISC to RISC decoder frontend - they implemented complex instructions directly (though with the help of microcode). The size penalty of that was more like 300%, and it was slower, too(!). RISC was a really big deal at the time. It was even mentioned in the, ahem, documentary "Hackers" from 1995.
Nobody's is against diversity when done right and fairly. But that's not what Disney or Google is doing. They're forcing their own warped version of diversity and you have no choice to refuse, but if you do speak up then you're racist.
Blade was a black main character over 20 years ago and it was a hit. Beverly Hills Cop also had a black main character 40 years ago and was also a hit. The movie Hackers from 30 years ago had LGBT and gender fluid characters and it was also a hit.
But what Disney and Google took from this is that now absolutely everything should be forcibly diverse, LGBTQ and gender fluid, whether the story needs it or not, otherwise it's racist. And that's where people have a problem.
Nobody has problems seeing new black characters on screen, but a lot of people will see a problem in back vikings for example which is what Gemini was spitting out.
And if we go the forced diversity route for the sake of modern diversity argument, why is Google Gemini only replacing traditional white roles like vikings with diverse races, but never others like Zulu warriors or Samurais with whites? Google's anti-white racism is clear as daylight, and somehow that's OK because diversity?
It all happened at this incredible cultural flashpoint where you knew there was something major happening, and were sort of riding the wave of it to see where it went. I don't know that anybody has ever put a name to it like "Punk" or "Flapper" or something similar, but there it was, a complete cultural aesthetic you could participate in. Clothing, music, media, ways of talking and interacting, occupations, good guys, bad guys, a mainstream, a counter culture, gathering places, and so on.
There was this incredible alignment of creative pursuit that all gave it voice, even if it doesn't really have a name. The Hackers Movie, Techno, Raves, Cyberpunk, Wired Magazine, 2600 Magazine, BBSs, Wipeout and the Playstation Aesthetic, and on and on. There was so much frenetic energy it felt like a movement. It was that bold transition in the stylings of technology where the stilted suits and ties gave in and gave way and the nerds and the democratization of computing created by early PCs and modems over POTs lines finally emboldened individuals to feel that they had a power and voice against big corporations and their giant mainframes and telephone providers. Suddenly billions in stuffy infrastructure turned into a playground if you could pass the barrier to entry and attain the right skills.
I think Cyberpunk sort of subsumed it because there's superficial similarities, but Cyberpunk was only the fiction that drove this movement, the Hacker lifestyle was real, you could actually live it.
This song is also used in the intro to the film Hackers. To me, it set the tone for the film. In middle school, I’d run and watch the film in the morning and learn to program in the afternoon to late at night. It was such a magical song and allowed me discover similar music from the era.
The Hackers movie epitomised albeit in a cheesy way much of that aesthetic.
And its soundtrack included the likes of Underworld, Leftfield, Orbital etc.
Same. I thought we were finally making Hackers (the movie) a reality.
This might still be useful in the real world. Think movie industry, where having a mock OS for showing characters doing computer things is practically a trope in its own right. I was recently in a discussion with some fans of the movie Hackers, in which one of them asked what OS they used in the movie. My reply was to the effect of, what every movie in the 90s used, which was basically Mac OS with fake UI elements cobbled together in Macromedia Director (or Flash in later films).
With film studios increasingly turning to game engines for applications like providing real-time on-set CG as a reference for a shoot, something like this may well be the modern version of that.
This movie introduced me to the Wipeout racing game on Playstation.
Scene from the movie: https://youtube.com/watch?v=ATlszssL-eI
More info: https://gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/19751/whats-the-arcade-game-kate-and-dade-play-in-the-movie-hackers
That's exactly right! I didn't see hackers until I was in my mid 30s, but when they had the initial flyover of the city representing tables in a database ... I had a moment where I said "my goodness, this is the closest representation of how I think of data".
It's like when you're reading a book - you don't think about the words, the concepts and people come to life in your brain. I feel like this is the only movie to get that that happens with computers, too.
In contrast, Hackers had a mix of "that's how it's down, IRL" and wholly created fantasy hacking. Both were entertaining films, imo, albeit with entirely different approaches to hacking.
The movie hackers promised this in 1996 and we are still waiting.
I showed my wife some Atari 2600 demos running on the MiSTer. She was impressed, and even more so when I explained to her why the effects were so impressive, the actual hardware constraints the coders had to work with/around to get that stuff on the screen. She's a big fan of movies like Hackers, so when I told her how it got started, with bored teenagers in the UK, France, Germany, Scandinavia, etc. looking to make their mark on the world through their computers, first with pirated software and later with standalone demos, it resonated with her fondness for that kind of tech-rebelliousness.
I never was and probably never will be a part of the demoscene, but it's inspired me for decades and I'm passing along that inspiration to people close to me.
Listen I watched the movie Hackers as a kid and want to throw my fist up and say yeah too but in reality that's not how it works. These sites in 'Thailand' are very seldom competing on quality in my experience.
I'll always appreciate a Hackers (greatest movie of all time) quote. :)
Good Luck! Hope you get to see the film eventually! I'd recommend to start searching Fandango for local theaters that show classics or have a 70mm/35mm projector (as they will likely use them for classics) and then keep those places on your radar so you can catch some good classics. There has got to be somewhere in NC that values the classics and has the equipment to show them!
NYC is kind of a exception since there is so much competition: you end up seeing tons of classics played here all the time. If you are ever in NYC, another place that is wonderful is the roxy theater as well as BAM. I saw Terminator 1 & 2, Hackers, Resident Evil 1 all this year in 35mm at these theaters.
Buy products that are compromised by both, and let them battle it out. Sort of like the inverse of the plot of the movie hackers.
Oh man, I can remember when the Windows 9x/Motif/Nextstep look was so modern, we thought the future of UI was going to be more of the same: huge bevels on the buttons with maybe a texture map. Think the buttons from the menus in Super Mario 64, and then go watch some old 90s scifi or other technology-themed movies and see how much their "futuristic" UIs looked like that. The Lawnmower Man and some scenes from Hackers come to mind.
It's a quote from the movie Hackers from 1995. The line is "Snoop on to them as they snoop on to us", which is actually the name of the article, and the talk, but for some reason the title on Hacker News got mangled. Not sure what's up with that.
As a young teenager learning to code in the mid/late 90s I distinctly remember two influential movies: Office Space and Hackers. It wasn’t until the dot com boom that I realized you could have a lot of fun and stay out of prison.
The labels on these buttons, FO, F, I, P, for Flash Override, Flash, Immediate, and Priority, directly reflected the nuclear C2 scheme at the time.
Wait... was this the inspiration for Crash Override's handle in Hackers? The more I look, the cooler that movie gets.
I read an early, German translated version of this in the late 90s when I was an impressionable 14yo and actually did want to become a hacker after seeing the movie Hackers. This text disillusioned me quite a bit, because I was exactly the type of person this text is frowning upon. I was using an AOL dialup connection, and I was using Windows, and had no idea how to change that. I couldn't tell my non-technical parents what kind of internet connection to get (at least not yet) and I did not know where to obtain a copy of Unix. I didn't know anybody who could explain these things to me, Google didn't exist yet and AOL chatrooms were full of pervs. My English was also quite limited. I also wasn't patient enough to invest as much time as the document suggested. So I completely abandoned my childish dream.
Instead, I went to school for physics with a minor in computer science. I got my PhD writing Fortran code, was tasked with updating the department's web portal, helped out with some 1st level Linux support for visiting scientists. I always tinkered around with different Linux distributions and different technologies in the two decades after reading that text. Most of it self-taught.
After my PhD I looked for jobs for physicists in IT and found an ad targeted at computer sciencists but also mathematicians and physicists. It was for a pentesting company. They thought me some more things on the job and I ended up not just using hacking tools but also made some (very minor) contributions to OpenSSL and nmap among other things. Published a few tools of my own, some of which I got to present at black hat USA arsenal.
So, more than 20 years after reading the text I hope I finally earned the right to call myself a hacker after all, even though I gave up the plan to become one.
PS: I find it funny that the author apparently changed his mind about hackers not using IRC. I'd say these days many real hackers are shitposting on twitter and slack while using silly or grandiose user names.
I think back to the movie Hackers with a young Angelina Jolie. Lord Nikon, the Sony game at the arcade, the fight over the late night cable channel. Mess with the best, die like the rest.
Hack the Planet !
The movie Hackers and Kevin's story were two pinnacles of me getting into computers in 1997.
A friend of mine survived it, I wouldn't wish pancreatic cancer on even my enemies. That stuff is tough. I do the Purple Stride with her every year to celebrate her battle.
RIP Kevin, hearing your stories and the movie Hackers was a huge inspiration in me getting into what we do.
I will always remember when the "Takedown" movie came out. I loved the original "Hackers" and couldn't wait for "Hackers 2" which was Takedown.
I had learned about Mitnick few years prior to the movie and was fascinated by his life story and what he had done up to that point (including his "takedown" by the FBI). It's an understatement to say that his work, character and some sort of positive social manipulation put a great influence on my upbringing and later my professional career. Back then I enjoyed playing pranks with my friends and "hacking" them with all sorts of trojans and ejecting their CD roms :)
I am very sad to hear that he's gone. RIP Legend.
I learned to touch type from the movie hackers, specifically by emulating Dade when he chose to spray-paint his keyboard.
When it had dried, I realized I didn't know where everything was. But, being a kid with no money, I figured it out. Now I'm typing exclusively on blank keyboards. WASD makes some nice ones.
You are right, and there's historical records to back you up. ;) Phrack touched on it back in 1996, at http://www.textfiles.com/magazines/PHRACK/PHRACK48 :
> First, some words on Macintoshes. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, the originators of the Apple and the Macintosh were busted for phreaking in college. The Apple IIe was used almost universally by hackers. So why has the Mac fallen out of favor for hacking? Simple. Because it fell out of favor for everything else.
before listing some of the few hacking resources available for Mac.
Still, if you go by movies, Hackers, also from 1995, has Macs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IESEcsjDcmM
A year or so later (1996), our hero used a PowerBook 5300 to help save the Earth in Independence Day.
Brought to you by Apple marketing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEMJzSVpdJM and https://web.archive.org/web/20080927051545/http://www.informedusa.com/t/independanceday.html .
FWIW, http://www.starringthecomputer.com/computers.html lists computers used in films.
Who remembers Hackers?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackers_(film)
There is a book from 1984, The Unix Programming Environment, by Brian Kernighan and Rob Pike.(https://archive.org/details/UNIXProgrammingEnvironment)
It is pretty much how I use the computer today, with few improvements with emacs and tmux. As I am teaching my daughter how to use cat/cut/grep etc, I am doing so truly thinking that this is the best way to use a computer in 2023.
The other day I was teaching her few shortcuts ^P and so on, I thought that maybe its time to re-think this whole cursor and keybinds thing. With apples vr magic goggles maybe someone can make an editor that I can follow code and write text and have 50 chats with some llm discussing various parts of the code I am working on.
All editors are limited by monitor space, the linux kernel style guide still has 80 column recommendation (not a hard limit since 2020), the way we jump into and out of code, or we step into thing, all are very limited and are pretty much the same since 1984.
I hope soon we have tooling like in the Hackers movie (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113243/) and use our eyes more to be able to follow code and systems.
The complexity of the systems has increased (e.g. cloud, hundreds of services, even LSP, tons and tons of boilerplate and generated code), but our tools are stuck.
Counterpoint, there's always been a desire to have a virtual environment as first shown in 80's sci-fi films like Hackers, Johnny Mnemonic, etc; immerse yourself in a system, have it become like a natural extension of yourself.
There was someone on here some time ago who showed and talked about his setup, he had been doing his job as a software developer reclined in VR for years at that point.
Here's the thing though: smartphones didn't have "a" killer app per sè I don't think, but they became part of everyone's daily lives in a really short timeframe. PCs and laptops didn't have "a" killer app, but pretty much everyone here has it as their day job.
I don't think it's about whether it has a killer app or not, I think it's whether it can become normalized and mainstream, and be listed alongside the TV, PC, smartphone, the car, etc; something everyone will have in one way or another.
That said, I'm cynical myself; modern-day VR and AR has been tried for a decade now or thereabouts; Google wasted billions on Google Glass, Facebook bet their whole company on the metaverse / AR / VR and has had to backtrack, Magic Leap was a mystery company that raised billions and failed to deliver, Oculus and Vive have their place now as a somewhat niche and pricey gaming implement - popular as arcade / events (I went to one for a birthday party this weekend) and middle class households that have the money and space for it.
So there's a market, mostly in gaming, but it's not become as mainstream yet as e.g. the smartphone. I don't personally believe it will, but if anyone can take an existing concept, iterate on it and make it mainstream, it's Apple.
I remember picking this book up at the university library in my second year because I had seen it in the movie “Hackers” and the cover looked really cool. I distinctly remember the parsing chapters especially recursive descent parsing. It was one of those light bulb “oh, this is how you do it” moments. Well worth spending a few weekends playing with that book, even if it’s somewhat dated, its like SICP in a sense more of a “mind expansion” device than anything else.
As someone that was born in the '90s and didn't really get access to the internet until ~2005 I feel like the "hacker culture" that I saw referenced in movies like Hackers (1995) was just a dream. I continue to feel like I haven't yet met people that even come close and continue to hope I can find them, but perhaps it was all just an illusion (or an over-exaggeration by Hollywood) and they never existed or they became extinct once the 90s ended.
Umm... are you serious? I could believe you perhaps with your criticism but then you say this is the future of web design?
The site you held up as the example I should emulate feels like some kind of terminal from the 80s movie "Hackers"... are we "hacking the gibson"?
It features white text on a black background, overlaid on animated white text on a black background...
Then you scroll down, and it has TEXT IN A GIANT SIZE going slowly across the screen..
Then it turns to white and has a video that doesn't fit
Then it has text of all different sizes, and code examples, which is irrelevant to most customers.
I am not making this up. It's literally here, I would invite anyone to look at these images and tell me whether this is unironically what I should make the Qbix site look like: https://imgur.com/a/IMT6pgB
Are you affiliated with that site or project?
You take that back, the film Hackers is a 100% accurate portrayal of the life of all hackers.
That's fair, although that movie is itself a little bit "how do you do, fellow hackers?"
It's strange this comment is being downed, because the "Hack the planet" quote from the movie (Hackers, 1995) and the tone of the entire movie is individual hacker vs corporate hacker. There is no way the main protagonist (Dade Murphy) would have disclosed a security vulnerability to the any of the companies in the movie. The quote in question is yelled by Dade while he is being dragged away by federal agents after saying "They're trashing" as a hint to the floppy disk he hid near the trash.
Disagree with what the poster is saying if you want, but he is accurate that the quote is being misused IMO
To be honest this sounds like something the screenwriters might have given as a line for "the plague" in Hackers (1995), the movie.
Not a traditional history narrative but:
Computer Lib/Dream Machines by Ted Nelson - a fabulous exploration of the optimism of the early computing era. I imagine it's long out of print but apparently available from internet archive. Read it!
Not a book, not non-fiction, but can you go past the 1995 movie Hackers. In some ways crap, but in others a great look at the period - the end of phreaking and the beginning of remote access, back when computers were real computers, and men were real men, etc, etc.
Once I make my money I dream of opening a 90's esque hacker space like you see in movies like Hackers.
Dark warehouse, neon lighting, The Protegy playing in the background, a place where hackers can bring there machines, talk tech and rage. Coffee in the mornings, bar at night.
Very happy to see Antitrust getting a shout out. This movie is my favorite double feature with Hackers.
I have several layers of security, including an infosec mindset that comes naturally, but at the end of the day I don't really know. I have faith that if I were to be infected statistically it would be by some malware that would give itself away by mining crypto or doing something else very loud and disruptive.
Fun story but my laptop was actually hacked remotely once, without me knowing.
It was almost 20 years ago, some would call me a script kiddie. Just trying to be bad ass, trying to live the movie Hackers. Had a stolen laptop running FreeBSD, with a wicked bootsplash just like the kids in the movie.
So you can imagine I was moving with the wrong crowds online, having little defacing wars with other groups and shit like that. Caught the wrong kind of attention.
I say that infosec comes naturally to me now but pobody's nerfect and back then I had re-used a password in a weakly encrypted service database, someone hacked this service, found my password, found my ssh logins to the servers, and traced backwards to my laptop.
I don't remember the details but somehow working back from one server, perhaps to another jumpserver, they were able to get the IP for my laptop and actually login to it.
Fortunately for me they didn't do anything but gather data, they posted this on a wall of shame saying "another hacker down". I say fortunately for me because I had thousands of customer's data on that laptop, including CC#'s for the business I was running at the time. They missed all this, and the very next day I reinstalled my laptop and reset all passwords on pure coincidence. I had no idea I had been hacked, I just felt like reinstalling for some other reason.
Found their wall of shame posting later and felt very much ashamed.
This thread has inspired me to setup a tripwire for my workstation. It's something I used to use many years ago but I think it's a good setup to have some sort of alerting if files start changing.
I have ideas for a "Hackers 2" better than that. All these "30 years later" sequels are dripped in nostalgia too much imo. The Hacking scene is a lot more wilder now. It's hard to imagine either of the leads not having their own family or being divorced with kids or something. They can still be cool to an older audience I guess but you need to let the under 40 crowd relate with them.
My idea is something like "Summer Wars" (anime movie, highly recommend) meets the character building and realism of "The Joker" with the humor,fun and style of the original "Hackers". I'll use layman friendly but still technical stories of actual hacks from various threat intel reports I've read over the years that make anything you seen in movies sound boring. Most of you in tech also read these reports but what most of you don't read is the personal details of the actors behind them. APTs and their organization as part of different governemnt units (china for example have MSS and different units in the PLA) but also those guys don't always work strictly for the state. I have seen first hand guys doing whitehat security work but I also had extensive intel on APTs in their region using those very specific techniques lol, but don't take my word for it either directly or via informal association (russia amd criminal groups for example) many of the APT attacks you hear about involve regular people which always made me think of how easy it would be to weave them into a movie plot. I would also like to add a blue teamer's perspective: the shock, the awe, the excitement, the chaos, the friendly fire! Of what happens when blueteams outside of security vendor companies go toe-to-toe with APT actors.
Honestly, I am really keen on inspiring younger people because the talent shortage is real (and you do get paid well in our industry).90%+ of people I interact with these days work in infosec but I'm hard pressed to find anyone who's even heard of "the manifesto".
> it makes you think what else is not accurate?
The answer is: all of it! 100% of Stranger Things is inaccurate, because it’s fiction. ;)
This is true for all subjects, not just computer hacking. This includes non-fiction documentaries too… there’s nothing you can watch anywhere that is “accurate”, except maybe live video feeds. There are always incorrect details.
Accuracy, of course, is not the primary goal of TV show producers. They like to slip in these somewhat period accurate-ish tidbits for the enjoyment of those of us looking closely at the tangential details, but the Amiga in the show has no bearing on the story, it’s just a prop. I’m sure if you looked as closely at all the other props, you’d notice many that are inaccurate for the time & location: lamps, furniture, clothes, cars, houses, etc. It’s not possible to shoot a large production and get every single detail (and it would be unaffordably expensive to even get very close.) To me, going to the trouble of recreating the Amiga screen seems like a lot of effort to put into a prop.
So here’s a question for you: would you rather they used fictional computer brands and fictional screen shots? Would that make it more watchable for you? Can you watch computer sci-fi when it’s not trying to include period props, like Tron, for example? I do have my own line for where inaccuracies will pull me out of a show and prevent me from suspending disbelief, but generally as a computer nerd who lived through the 80s, I like a lot of the ‘hacking’ pop culture, even when it’s extremely cringe (looking at you, “Hackers”).
Here is a collection of some of the movies that I have liked the most
- The Matrix (1999) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0133093/
- Gremlins (1984) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087363/
- Hackers (1995) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113243/
- Sneakers (1992) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105435/
- Tron (1982) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084827/
- Jurassic Park (1993) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0107290/
- The Terminator (1984) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088247/
- Back to the Future (1985) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088763/
- Dark City (1998) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118929/
- WarGames (1983) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086567/
- Starship Troopers (1997) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120201/
And there are many more as well :D
It's almost completely gone in the US on Netflix also. I've had better luck watching older movies on Youtube 'Free with Ads' service, especially 80s and 90s movies, than I've had on Netflix. And there's no ads if you get Youtube's premium service (I currently don't, but don't mind the ads).
Currently on there is Wrongfully Accused (funny Leslie Nielsen movie), Glengarry Glen Ross, Robocop (1987), Ghost in the Shell, The Mask, License to Drive, The Neverending Story, Tombstone, Leon The Professonal, The Amityville Horror, Over the Top (some Stallone movie), Miracle on 34th Street, Con Air, Edward Scissorhands, Gone Fishin', Look Who's Talking, While You Were Sleeping, The Craft, Red Dawn, So I Married an Axe Murderer, Secret of Nimh, Killer Klowns from Outer Space, Revenge of the Pink Panther, Mad Max, Das Boot, Little Shop of Horrors, Hackers, .... okay, I'm just going to stop now, but t keeps going, I'm only a third of the way though the list.
So, I mean, I know that not everyone loves The Lord of the Rings movies. But I just need everyone to remember that Peter Jackson did them. And I mean, I thought Heavenly Creatures was really interesting, and I think I'm one of the dozens of people who really liked The Frighteners (yes, I'm a hipster Frighteners fan.) But if you'd asked me, "Viking, should we trust Peter Jackson to make 11 hours and 21 minutes of The Lord of the Rings (extended editions)?" I would have said, "No," and I would have, in my humble opinion, been totally completely wrong.
I mean, I just need to remind people that great movies exist. LA Confidential. The Matrix. Hell, even the Fugitive is a lot of fun (for what it is.) Mr. Robot is simultaneously amazing and also boring as shit for huge stretches - but man, they committed to that vision, and when the big moments hit, they hit hard. True Lies. True Romance. The Abyss. The Fisher King. Good Will Hunting. Inglourious Basterds. Hell, even Hackers. And Sneakers.
I think Daemon and Freedom could be done wonderfully.
Just imagine ending the series with a nice cackle...
"I do so enjoy my vork..."
My go-to topic to test it with is talking about characters in the movie Hackers. I noticed in someone else’s session that it would take their correction but still hang on to the incorrect contradictory belief. In my session it came up with a seeming rationalization. So I tested it just now, trying to provide the correct information and directly contradicting the incorrect information (x is A. x is not B). That helped, but eventually it just choked. It seems to be handwaving and guessing (bluffing, bullshitting) at the most likely and generic answers when it doesn’t know something.
I’m thinking ChatGPT is best used for generating ideas, not factual information.
Kind of a tangent to what you said... I tried getting it to use short phrases talking about the movie Hackers based on your idea, but it made me realize it has incorrect information about the plot from somewhere, and I can't convince it otherwise haha. Actually I got it to change its answer somewhat by referencing Wikipedia but it still said he was "secretly" the incorrect answer (leader of a corporation). Almost like motivated reasoning. I gave it several more corrections after that but it usually just incorporates the new information (although before that it actually kept saying I was incorrect) without letting go of the incorrect information...
Prompt:
What was The Plague trying to do in Hackers?
Answer:
In the 1995 movie Hackers, the corrupt corporation known as The Plague is using a virus to steal sensitive data from the government. The main character, Dade, and his friends, who are all skilled computer hackers, team up to stop The Plague and prevent the data from being stolen. The hackers face many challenges and obstacles along the way, but in the end, they are able to stop The Plague and save the day.
[...]
Prompt:
Wikipedia calls him "computer security officer Eugene 'The Plague' Belford", not leader of the company
Answer:
I apologize if my previous answer was not accurate. According to Wikipedia, Eugene, also known as "The Plague," is a character in the 1995 movie Hackers. In the movie, he is a computer security officer who is secretly the leader of a corrupt corporation that is using a virus to steal sensitive data from the government. He faces off against the main character, Dade, and his friends, who are all skilled computer hackers. In the end, Eugene is defeated by the hackers and his plan is thwarted. I apologize if my previous answer was not clear. Let me know if you have any other questions.
I'd just like a sofa that looks like the Cray used in the movie Hackers...
I really don't think you got the joke. Software development at a large company isn't a montage from the movie Hackers, you don't rewrite an entire direct messaging back-end in an evening. I'm sure there are people who believe it works like that, but those people are the butt of the joke. I mean we saw this with our own eyes with Twitter Blue checkmarks. A feature Elon Musk's new hardcore Twitter had to deliver in a weekend. What happened? A shitshow for 2 weeks that ended in Musk entirely rolling back the whole effort and completely re-evaluating the schedule.
This exact quote (with the "Huh? Right? Manifesto?" bit) as well as mindcrime's reply is from the 1995 movie "Hackers" [0] which, while full of hollywood absurdity, has a touch of more "real" references like the quoted manifesto that give it a nice charm.
"Yeah. RISC is good."
[0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113243/
I searched "full movie" on YouTube and the first result I had was for Home Alone. Looks like it is the full movie and the account that posted it does not seem connected to Fox or Warner Bros or any "official" movie studio. Seems like a random person who claims in the video description that uploading Home Alone is "fair use".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owDd4zify-A
I am not a copyright or intellectual property or legal expert - but my intuition says that Home Alone is probably as copyrighted as the movie Hackers (both older movies). Home Alone has been up for 3 weeks on YouTube with 435k views. By contrast, the tweet linked above showing that "Twitter is breaking" has already been removed (less than a day).
Perhaps Home Alone is public domain or something, or whoever owns the intellectual property wants it shared like this. Not sure how I would check that, but I have seen lots of movies and TV shows like this on YouTube (sometimes with modifications to the sound or image to avoid automatic filtering). If Home Alone is free I'm sure I could find another example.
That's a program name that I haven't heard in a while and which brings back memories :D
When I was a teenager, sometimes around 1996 or 1997, I watched the movie "Hackers" for the first time and my immature mind was immediately drawn to the idea of using computers to sneak into places you weren't supposed to. (The pretty graphics helped too.) I went online and I found an early version of John The Ripper and thought "yes, this is exactly what I want!" It would be a few years before I even learned what Unix and /etc/passwd were, but it felt so cool to have a real hacking tool on a floppy disk.
Now dub that over the guy from the 90s movie Hackers, and you've got yourself a TikTok! Or "Freedom Short" as they might be rebranded soon once they get banned
I literally started in this industry because of that movie (I was 8 in 1992) and similar like Hackers / War Games. Amazing movie in so many ways.
The vast majority of files on Textfiles.com came from BBSs in the 1980s and early 90s. The founder, Jason Scott made an awesome documentary about the BBS days. Steven Levy also covers the time and the scene somewhat towards the end of his fantastically detailed book “Hackers”
No so broad a notion of 'culture', mainly cultural 'content'. This can be, and it is tweaked (worldwide), as needed. Cinema/TV in US has always been a leading indicator of societal change, rarely a lagging indicator. So it has always been, in a sense, understood and used as a pedagogical platform.
They actually tried this in US starting in late 80s and 90s, when we got a slate of 'geeks who get babes, and social acceptance' movies - War Games, Real Genius, Revenge of the Nerds, Weird Science, Hackers, etc.
[p.s. didn't finish that thought! /g]
But imho this was the wrong set of adjustments. The inducements - sex, money, and social acceptance -- are certainly attractive, but any kid with half a brain can note that there are far easier and certainly more exciting ways than learning -- culturally celebrated ways, yo -- to get that very same set of inducements. It did however get us to the geek hero celebrity stage, with Jobs and now Musk.
[edits]
You know, I was told to watch the movie Hackers if I need an idea for a challenging exploit... and that works most of the time.
In the movie Hackers, knowledge of computers didn't just save lives and put criminals behind bars, it got people laid.
I like the idea but I am a little confused about the status of this project. Is it correct that there is not commentary, yet?
On two unrelated notes: I still remember the "Lions commentary on UNIX" that I bought in 1997 only because it was mentioned in the movie "Hackers". Being able to read through lots of pages of annotated source code was very entertaining. Besides its content, the book also stood out in my shelf (pun obviously intended) due to its unusual dimensions.
I also remember the kernel 2.0.36 mentioned on the page. For some reason, this was the last kernel version that I conciously was aware of. (I think I even used its release as an excuse to not attend a party. A fact, that some of my friends still remember today (I still consider this a rather good reason)).
>I don't see any indicator that he thinks there are only two
there are only about 10 other isms that would have more accurately described this, and "communism" is used in the 1995 film Hackers for a reason, but it might not be the one you're picking up on.
>communism but not quite.
so in other words, capitalism but not quite
To be honest... no idea. :D I think it was inspired some time around the release of the movie "Hackers" in the 90-s. I was writing a short script for something, when the arrangement of letters and numbers made sense together, and still fresh after watching the movie, I came up with it. Been more then 20 years now. Kind of always sticked with it.
Hackers is still one of those films that are influential and still resonates to this day. If you haven't seen it yet, I would advise to get the Region B (UK) Blu-ray release from 88 Films since not only it has the better surround mix (5.1 compared to 2.0 on the Shout Factory US release) it also has a director commentary track only seen in the UK release.
It's pretty easy to get a region free Blu-ray player these days.
That movie is on Archive.org, so maybe you could try to look for subs for those specific titles.
https://archive.org/details/23-nichts-ist-so-wie-es-scheint-1998
https://archive.org/details/Hackers_-_23_part_-II_-
The second one says part II but is the complete movie.
I do suspect that the scene changed by the mid-90s. Although, it might also be that the American scene was a bit different from the European scene? It's worth mentioning that the movie Hackers was made by a Brit, and perhaps his vision was more influenced by the European scene at the time, despite the movie being based in NYC?
I came of age during the height of the demo scene in Europe, and enjoyed the pre-warez offshoot where pirated games always included exciting intros/cracktros. So hackers making electronic music and cool visuals was the baseline that every noob had to meet to be "elite". Of course in real life we still all wore "normal clothes" and lived careful, quiet lives - but the dream was to be these rockstars that the movie Hackers turned to 11.
the hackers soundtrack is fantastic and includes some of the best electronic music from the era. the version of halcyon and on is in my opinion almost as good as the original 11 minute 12" uk promo edit [0], which may not have fit on this soundtrack.
in 2020 varese sarabande released an expanded 2xCD of the hackers soundtrack [1]. the second disk includes full length versions of the instrumental electronic music composed for the film by simon boswell [2] but not included on the 1 disk soundtrack and is absolutley essential listening while rollerblading to the payphones at penn station.
[0] https://www.discogs.com/release/42711-Orbital-Halcyon
[1] https://www.discogs.com/release/15991139-Various-Hackers-Original-Motion-Picture-Soundtrack
[2] https://www.discogs.com/artist/68855-Simon-Boswell
I was just entering my teens during those years. Few things I remember vividly were
- Hackers (1995)
- Mortal Kombat the Movie (1995) (both of these movies used Orbital's Halcyon +On +On) song and a bunch of other electronic music
- And I remember the Windows 1995 release. That was a HUUUUUGE software release.
Saw a post about Hackers being 27 years old on the front page. While that movie is fun and flawed, I think Sneakers was better in every way...
Everyone knows Angelina Jolie, but did you know Jonny Lee Miller (Zero Cool) has had a prodigious acting career after Hackers?
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001538/
My favorite character of his was Sherlock Holmes in "Elementary"
I am really curious: what do you find interesting about this movie in comparison with Sneakers (advised by Leonard Alemán [1]) and War Games? I don't remember any takeaway from Hackers.
[1] https://molecularscience.usc.edu/sneakers/
Best movie ever.
For anyone saying it wasn't a realistic depiction - that was on purpose. The hacking scenes are visual metaphors, meant to "spice things up."
An analysis of all hacks in the movie: https://medium.com/h0llyw00d-h4x0rs/hackers-b93e78b95485
During Chaos Communication Camp in 2019 we held a veryvery improvised screening of Hackers. The people at the Norwegian hackerspace I was with had never seen the movie, clearly this was a mistake we needed to fix!
For those unaware of CCCamp here are some pictures; http://smtw.de/cccamp19/
We managed to steal^Wborrow the projector screen from an empty workshop tent. Hauled it across a veryvery busy whiskytasting event (called Whiskeyleaks). Got a small projector and then we rigged the sound.
A single concert speaker was our sound source, but we had no AUX cable long enough. So we found a headset with an AUX output on it and chained it together with the AUX cable :)
The end result https://twitter.com/MortenLinderud/status/1165029639640760322
Also had a screening at May Contain Hackers this year, and it was great having 30 people scream "Hack the Planet" during the movie and loudely complain when the RISC line came :)
Back in the 70s there was actually a piece of malware running on the PDP systems of the time called "Cookie Monster" that actually would halt the user's session and display "GIVE ME A COOKIE"; the only way to clear it was to type "cookie". This only worked temporarily, however, and some versions of the program demanded cookies more and more frequently.
The Cookie Monster program was a part of hacker lore, including the Jargon File, at the time of the release of Hackers. I remember recognizing the reference when I saw the movie. Many of the other viruses and malwares in the movie ("Arf Arf Gotcha", the "Da Vinci Virus" being a reference to the Michelangelo virus scare of 1992) were also references to legendary real-world hacker lore. Even Zero Cool's crashing of 1507 systems in one day was a reference to Robert Morris's worm of the late 1980s.
I tend to describe Hackers as depicting what coding feels like on the inside.
All those great visuals, the pumping music, it captures the emotion of getting your teeth into a really gnarly problem, and the exuberance of eventually coming up with a solution. People watching over the shoulder of a developer at work are just going to see a bunch of scrolling text and tedious iterations of red, red, red, green, reload, alt-tab, change a thing, wait, red, red, red, green, and so on. But that workflow - if you dig the work - is enthralling. And when you solve the problem, it's worth throwing your hands up with glee, and (internally) belting out a cheesy action hero oneliner.
Not to mention when you are real-time dealing with attackers trying to compromise your systems, the chaos and exasperation and desperate attempts to block them very much match the climactic scene of The Plague and his hapless techno weenies typing "cookie".
I'm probably biased because of my age and the time in my career when I first watched the movie (around the same time as my first job) but to me it still feels like the most authentic silver screen portrayal of what I do. More modern shows often capture the cold, hard reality of the work better, which admittedly is just a bunch of text scrolling on a screen. And there are definitely works that better satirize the office culture, like Office Space and Silicon Valley. But there still hasn't been much that captured the excitement of the time, and can really explain to people outside of the industry why at least a certain subset of 1990s teenagers felt compelled to get into this apparently boring and nerdy career.
I suppose it's very "of its time", because nowadays everyone understands why kids want to get into IT - it's one of the most flexible and lucrative careers there is.
My wife and I went to a showing of Hackers at DNALounge in 2020 - https://www.dnalounge.com/calendar/2020/02-28.html.
They set it up to look like Cyberdelia. After the movie they ran a costume contest. The showing was just weeks before the pandemic truly hit America, and we felt pretty lucky that we made it home with out anything.
I often tell people that if they want to see a fun movie, see Hackers, but if they want to know what hacking is like, see Sneakers.
... though the all-nighter scene in Hackers where they just "flow" out some code while techno plays over the montage is also pretty accurate.
Hackers is a fun movie. It has a fantastic time capsule soundtrack, fun sets (the arcade, the computer room) and some fun little performances (Matthew Lillard! Fisher Stevens!) It's interesting what the show gets right (little bits of phreaker culture, social engineering) and what it gets wrong (almost everything about how computers actually work). From a realism perspective, Mr. Robot blows this out of the water, but it's still fun.
> Awesome soundtrack
Hackers is my go-to movie as an initial test for a home theater system.
Hah. Just yesterday I was contemplating how awful Angelina Jolie's character's handle "Acid Burn" was. Like - who the fuck would choose such nickname for themselves?
Other than that - cult movie. Love it. Awesome soundtrack, not that bad acting and not that bad script for back when computers and internet were hip, not just the usual thing.
"Hackers" caricaturally but still somewhat properly presents the phreaking culture which was and is rather uncommon for non-niche movies, especially from that era.
This movie aged well.
I'd recommend The Internet's Own Boy, Buckaroo Banzai, Real Genius, Office Space, or Bret Victor's Inventing on Principle ahead of Hackers and Sneakers.
Startup.com is pretty good as a movie about startups (I lived just about every minute of that movie, just at a different company) but it doesn't have any actual hackers in it.
I hear Risk and Citizenfour, both about Wikileaks, and Revolution OS, about Linux and the GNU and open-source movements, are pretty good, but I haven't seen them.
The Internet's Own Boy in particular has 8/10 on IMDB, 93% "Fresh" on Rotten Tomatoes, handily beating both Hackers and Sneakers, and is under a Creative Commons license: https://archive.org/details/TheInternetsOwnBoyTheStoryOfAaronSwartz which
I found it very hard to watch because Aaron was a friend of mine.
The Matrix is nominally about hackers (and even, like Hackers, computer security) but, as with Startup.com, hacking doesn't really enter into the movie much; instead it's all running firefights and magic disguised as computers. Like Hackers and Sneakers, it bears the same relationship to hacking as https://axecop.com/ (a comic scripted by a five-year-old) bears to law enforcement. However, it's enormously more popular than all the movies above, even if its Rotten Tomatoes ranking is lower than The Internet's Own Boy.
I hear Masters of Doom is pretty good but I haven't watched it.
Part of what made this movie so startling when it came out is it was the first (and really only) film that was plainly aware of hacker subculture at the time and is loaded with easter eggs demonstrating that. It was at once a ridiculous parody of it and an homage to it. It’s like a love letter to small-h hackers.
Hackers and Sneakers are maybe the only decent movies about so-called hackers.
You may like Takedown (2000) and Antitrust (2001) a lot more than Hackers. Takedown, sometimes referred to as Hackers 2, has nothing to do with the Hackers movie (which in my opinion is pure crap that became popular only thanks to a young Angelina Jolie in it) and tells the dramatized but true story of Kevin Mitnick and how he was captured.
I think "Sneakers" from 1992 is also a popular hacker movie. However, the aesthetics are very much unlike Hackers; it's much more realistic, though (not 100%, but a lot).
If you're interested in the "hacker genre" of movies (or its history or various interpretations), imho both Wargames and Sneakers are worth a watch. I personally like Sneakers more.
I find it hard to believe that most people on HN reuse the same e-mail and password. That practice has always been known to be stupid. There's a whole thing about it in the movie Hackers... from 1995.
In 2022, your data isn't safe. It's widely known your data isn't safe. You need to take steps to make it matter less when its mishandled.
Don't get me wrong, the Plex infra team should feel bad about themselves, but if this breach in anyway compromises anything else in your life other than your media center -- and if your hashed password gets cracked -- then that's on you in my opinion.
I got on the internet in the mid-90s. The early internet was used for:
- E-mail
- Personal websites
- Porn
- Instant messaging via ICQ
- Chat via IRC
- Multiplayer video gaming
- Communities via Messageboards
- Downloading software and music
- Searching for aliens (SETI)
It all felt very wholesome. Although there was a movie about hacking for fun and profit (Hackers), so I'm sure there was some of that too - but eCommerce and social networking didn't become a thing until the mid-2000s, which gradually brought the real masses and along with them, scams galore.
Too bad I couldn't go this year :'( I went to 2017 and I had booked for 2021 which was cancelled due to COVID. But this year it clashed with other commitments.
But very glad to see it succeeding.
Ps: The event can probably be described as DefCon with a second interest point of the maker community, to which it has been targeted more in the later years. Originally it was purely about security, it's been run since the 90s. The event is outdoor with most participants staying in tents.
Normally it happens every 4 years except this one which is an odd one out due to Corona. Each time the event gets a different name and 3 letter acronym, one of which is Hack, Hacker, Hacking etc.
Previous events were HAL2001 (Hackers at large and the design was inspired by the space suits from the movie). And What The Hack in I believe 2009. And these are just some examples, there were many others. SHA2017 (Still Hacking Anyway) was my favourite. It was such a success that they reused the same field again, this has never happened before. And they're right because it's an amazing location by the water, you can even arrive by boat!
Usually these events have amazing energy and collaboration. I really miss not being able to go this time.
I worry when people think of the 3D website they think of the 90s era like the movie hackers.
Technology has progressed so far since then, yet nobody has really tried making 3D websites. Websites that integrate with glasses.
WTF was google glass doing? They could have integrated the glasses with websites but no they had to make it work with the real world which is 1000x more difficult.
If anyone cares, I actually like a lot of the vaporwave/outrun/whatever it's called now stuff when coding.
I can listen to music with lyrics when I'm writing code, but not when I'm reading. So coding calls for metal or hip-hop for me most of the time, but reading usually demands synthwave, darkwave, horrowave, retrowave, classical, etc. If I'm sitting at my electronics bench working on hardware stuff, I particularly like to do the "put on a movie that I've seen so many times that I won't get drawn into paying attention to it" thing. Lately I've been using Iron Man, Iron Man 2, Iron Man 3, Hackers, Sneakers, etc. for that.
This reminds me of the movie Hackers where the plot involves tipping a tanker with a virus.
“Hack the Gibson”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Gibson_(computer_programmer)
> What you ever see 'hackers'?
to be fair that movie follows a group of teenagers showcasing illegal activities that finally culminate into their federal arrest.
yeah, they're later exonerated because 'Movie-FBI' has a heart and a sense of justice, but that's probably not the best movie to try to pull criminality psych from.
my guess : Eric Corley injected a lot of his own personal ethos into that movie. He was apparently an unpaid consultant.
The characters signing in with their unique splash screens at NYC pay phones in the movie Hackers was quite cool to 12 year old me.
Didn't you have to clip a resistor in the handset or something to make a red box work?
Another film comes to mind: Hackers. "It's in that place where I put that thing that time."
There was a payphone installed in the vestibule of my high school.
Hackers is ok. If you want to re-calibrate your cringe-o-meter with respect to movies that involve "hacking", see Swordfish (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swordfish_(film)).
Sneakers is an unambiguously fantastic thriller with god tier cast.
But Hackers is a classic too and always meant as over the top fun. I don't think it's aged badly, it was ludicrous at the time too. It's now a period piece that captures the imagination of the moment. If you can't find joy in people hacking while roller blading as The Prodigy blasts man... I don't know, shame. The 90's sure feel like a lot more fun than today. There are a lot of things that work in the film and have stayed with me over the decades. Whether it's Joey at AA for computer addiction, everyone geeking out over a laptop, "ugly red book that won't fit on the shelf" or "It's in that place I put that thing one time".
I showed Hackers to my girlfriend a few years ago. I am a software developer who has seen it multiple times. She isn't into computers at all and had never seen it before. But we both really enjoyed it. It's a fun movie that fantastical enough to be fun and engaging while grounded enough to be believable. The less-realistic parts didn't break the immersion for her but were a source of amusement for me that didn't ruin the overall experience
I have a younger partner who does infosec - she's never seen Hackers and I skimmed it, thinking about showing it to her. It's fun, but it's aged poorly to the point that it'd be too cringe to show her. Sneakers, in contrast, has aged really well. It's the only film I've seen that "gets" the hacker ethos, its culture and history... and has relatively realistic depictions of hacking (a lot of social engineering, research and a bit of computer hacking).
A lot of fantastic actors, and a real treat to see one of the handful of films River Phoenix did (taken far too soon).
Sneakers is one of the most fun and often under appreciated geek movies out there. Hackers got some points for including the Hacker Manifesto but was over the top to the point of comical. Sneakers captured the mindset, the vibe, and some of the mechanics.. a bunch of slightly odd guys driven by curiosity and skepticism.
The fact that they got Redford, Poitier, Aykroyd, and many other greats made it shine.
Edit: And from the article, just learned that the screenplay was written by Lawrence Lasker and Walter F. Parkes who also wrote War Games.
Since we're talking movies, I'll throw in a handful of movie titles that I find inspirational and /or uplifting as well:
Rocky, Rocky II, Rocky III, Rocky IV, Rocky Balboa
Vision Quest
Tin Cup
The Pursuit of Happyness
The Social Network
Rad
Hackers
Wargames
Iron Man
The Man Who Knew Infinity - based on the book of the same name, which I also recommend.
In the analogy to the naked short, the option is "called" when the known deficiency causes catastrophic consequences. Example: The file system is so large it takes 60 days for the backup to finish, and thus the "call" would be a multiple drive failure requiring a full restore. Example: NFSv3 with "system" security, i.e., whatever the client says it's uid and gids are, we accept that, and thus the "call" would be a malicious client declaring arbitrary unauthenticated uid/gids. See, e.g., possible publicity stunt for the movie "hackers". These are naked shorts because there are no plans to fix them.
Hackers was a good movie. But hacker culture is a bunch of overweight dudes.
And that’s not what mainframes look like.
Real Genius (1985) is a pretty good one. Apollo 13 has some hardware hack stuff. Wargames (1983) a little bit. Hackers (1995) did a good job of capturing what it felt like online during the tail end of the HPA BBS thing. Halt and Catch Fire is a good TV show. Others have mentioned Silicon Valley, Office Space and Mr Robot. The best related thing I’ve seen lately is Apple TV’s Mythic Quest, lolling right now thinking about it. Watch all of these.
Wow! Hackers (1995)!! No one else mentioned it.
What context is the use in "hacker news"? We see news of security research and attacks but also peope findinf ways to use technology in an unintended or non-obvious way.
The first movie (only?) that I have heard them mention the hacker manifesto is there. Nothing else comes close in spirit (although some do better in technical detail or good plotline).
I thought I won this argument with everyone a long time ago, I see there are those of you I have yet to convert.
Reminds me of Hackers (the movie)
Iain Softley, a Brit who had worked for the BBC, did music videos before directing feature films. One of his first films was a biopic of the early days of the Beatles. He filmed his movie largely in Buckinghamshire, but also all over New York and into New Jersey. That included a location of Stuyvesant High, which is the high school of certain members of MOD.
Rafael Moreau is the son of an architect and a painter, nephew to a CIA asset, rodeo rider, and film student under none other than David Mamet. He actually came under FBI surveillance after writing the script for Hackers.
There were production groups in the US and the UK. One of the location unit directors had worked on Hair, Desperately Seeking Susan, and Ragtime. There were multiple consultants including Goldstein, Mitnick, Dave Buchwald (who is also an art photographer), and the one credited as "hacking consultant" is Omar Wasow, PhD in African American Studies from Harvard.
The graphics portrayed in the film and the representation of the mainframe are meant to be unrealistic and represent the characters' thoughts and feelings about the data and events, not to be examples of real-life things. People often pick at that part of the movie after accepting the intro with the circuit board city, the spinning phone booths when the phone are clearly in a bank along one wall, and a lot of other inconsistencies with real life.
The whole vision for the movie from Moreau and Softley was a highly stylized, visually interesting version of the subculture. Softley added the rollerblading specifically so the movie would have more motion and a little less sitting at terminals. I don't think we can expect it to be anything other than an artistic representation of eclectic, bright styles.
It was bits and things - I think the writers of Hackers leant fairly heavily on the CDC, from the US, but certainly for me the hacker subculture of that era crossed over with rave stuff originating out of the UK and the film makers picked up on that. We used to use BBSes to find parties.
Related link I found, re. Cybercafe BBS which was important: https://hansonaniboon.wordpress.com/2018/03/31/semiotext-and-the-cybercafe-bbs/
And from there: http://www.irational.org/cybercafe/xrel.html
Tweeted by Steve Wozniak on April 7, 2022:
> Here is a digital (.pdf) version of the book:[0]
> Woz - being who you are, I'm sure people ask you for all types of things. My only asks to you were the podcast interview and the Foreword to the book. And you so graciously provided them.[1]
[0] https://cybersecurityventures.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/Hackers-Movie-Guide.pdf
[1] https://twitter.com/stevewoz/status/1512092062761426944
One of the famous lines from the movie Hackers (1995):
“Hack the Gibson!”
Must have been a call-out :)
The movie "Hackers" prophesied that RISC was going to "change everything". And it did, but not in these workstations, but rather in smart phones, raspberry pi's and other projects that have made RISC viable again.
I’m not sure. I also definitely remember everyone thinking that it was very likely the government was spying internally also. The scale was a surprise, but not that spying happened internally. It was quite in the popular culture as well, with shows like X-Files and movies like Hackers and Sneakers and others touching on it.
It was anyway for sure not limited to Art Bell types.
I still have the memory card with my track times and everything completed with a gold trophy. Many many hours with PSX and WipEout when I was studying in Sheffield. One of the best zero gravity racing games of all time IMHO. Where to start from.. the soundtrack with all these electronic/techno tracks by the biggest names at the time, the artwork and aesthetics of the game (by The Designers Republic who were based in Sheffield), the gameplay and how the game feels (developed by Psygnosis otherwise known as Studio Liverpool) or the fact that the prototype of the game was featured in the cult film Hackers. There is an online leaderboard for all wipeout games: https://www.wipeoutrankings.com
It’s rather straight forward: You first get in touch with Razor and Blade, you can find them DJing at the local night club, and they make a series of calls and the hackers of the world unite around them.
This was covered in the 1995 documentary “Hackers”
This was the one site that helped me get the Hackers (1995 movie) references and culture and made it real. It was freeing to be able to pursue your passions and be seen for what you say and do instead of whatever social, religious or ethnic group or box you were put in and to also know and connect with others that shared a similar interest.
Unfortunately, those days are gone. It wasn't profitable for the powers that be to not be able to divide us by demographic groups, nationality and associations. How else could we be good little consumers and "voters". Forget free and critical thinking, these days, outside of rare sites like this I can't find anyone that hasn't fallen down some youtube or facebook rabbit hole. They all talk in propaganda. To the point where I don't even care what they think, I just try to get them to ctiticize or disagree with the propaganda they have fallen for even a little.
The old internet was cool but I also get that nostalgia isn't accurate. Most communities were very unwelcoming and hostile (anti-women,racist,bullying,etc...) but that was just people being naturally shitty. I had some of the best interactions and learned from people that would never get along with me IRL.
I think a lot of these hackers or their modern successors moved to twitter. Very unfortunate since clout and acceptance is all that matters there. It means you more or less have to communicate in a public arena where even if you take measures to be anonymous all the cool hackers now use their real names and are forced and force others back into our social cages. Back to speaking in politically conformant speech and to being seen as a label or group instead of as an individual.
But that's the world, can't stop change.
Late on the followup here, but yeah. What I observed at the time is that Hackers had a decidedly bimodal reception. There were folks who thought it was the most k-rad depiction of real leet hackers ever to hit the screen, and there were folks who rolled their eyes and wondered if the filmmakers even realized it was a parody of itself.
And the two groups barely realized each other existed.
I've gone back and watched Hackers recently (actually there was a 25th anniversary retrospective with some of the original actors on Twitch, kind of fun) and I still can't watch the whole thing, it's just uncomfortably bad. Has a few golden lines -- "it's in that place where I put that thing that time" remains a favorite -- but overall it's just one Sandra Bullock away from being the worst tech film ever.
> Both are not set in the real world, remember. Hackers is a semi-idealized Generation X view of disruption and techno (technology AND music)-fueled youthful exuberance.
All of the hacks in Hackers are based on the most well known hackers (and their most infamous hacks) of the time. The culture portrayed in the movie was also shockingly similar to my own experiences at the time, right down to meeting in arcades to discuss exploits, dumpster diving for passwords and modem numbers, and stealing manuals/handsets out of NYNEX vans. The FBI also acted just as cartoonishly in real life as Richard Gill did in the movie.
The hacking visuals were as cheesy as Hollywood has ever produced, but the movie will never get enough credit for being accurate to real life for young hackers of the time.
I can't speak for everyone, but for me Hackers was the first time I was told that being a teenaged computer nerd (I was 15 when it came out), was not freakish. The only options in my experience until then were: Freak (in the should be outcast sense) or Freak (in the look at this genius no one can understand sense). In fact, it can be actually cool!
Sure the movie is cheesy (in all aspects except music really - a lot of that music was independently loved), but the part where it somehow validated my existence made it super important personally. I suspect this is true for plenty of others too - to this day you can go to Defcon (etc) and hear "Hack the Planet!" and more obscure quotes ("its in that place i put that thing that time" or "ugh hardcopy" for example). Even from people who aren't in their late-30s/early-40s.
I had a video game store when Hackers came out, and one of my regulars, a kid, came in and said he wanted to get a modem so he could start hacking just like in the movie.
I don't know that anyone walking out of Hamilton wants to be Hamilton.
tl;dr: I love Sneakers, and I love Hackers, and I love The Matrix, for entirely different reasons, and I don't think your criticism is warranted.
I hear what you're saying, but I'm a completely uncool nerdy software engineer, and I *ADORE the Hackers and Matrix aesthetics.
Both are not set in the real world, remember. Hackers is a semi-idealized Generation X view of disruption and techno (technology AND music)-fueled youthful exuberance.
And the hackers in the Matrix were hackers that saw through the Matrix, and literally hacked their reality to know kung fu, gunplay, and change the world around them.
When done right (and Swordfish is a good example of when it isn't), it can be a hyper-stylized love letter to the concepts. Not all cinema needs to be "realistic" and "grounded".
I never really got why Hackers was always lumped in with Wargames and Sneakers. The vibe of Hackers always seemed way different, with all the "cool dudes wearing sunglasses" and skateboards and flamboyant outfits and EDM music. I mean I like the movie, but it was less of a realistic "computer hacking" movie and more of a "too-cool people partying" movie, much more like Swordfish.
I love the idea that Hackers is actually self-aware, but I think it’s more of a ‘The Room’ situation; where retroactively we can view it as a comedy and find some appreciation for an otherwise almost inexcusably awful piece of film.
I would’ve been like…10(?) when it came out, so having seen it for the first time only a couple years ago (I’m 32 now) - it was just a hilarious experience I could never imagine having been taken seriously, even when it was made.
It seems to be a movie about hackers made by people who have never actually used a computer.
And Hackers had Emmanuel Goldstein, and Wargames had Willis Ware as consultants.
But all three were still Hollywood films, which means they mixed in a heavy dose of nonsense alongside some technical accuracy. Doing it 'knowingly' doesn't particularly matter.
Hackers is just really fun and light-hearted. There’s something wholesome about the affection which the young hackers have for one another. Also, first Angelina Jolie movie, to my knowledge. The technical aspects are laughably absurd, to the point of being enjoyable (for me).
I think you should give Hackers a chance... it is silly and full of hollywood tropes, but it definitely captures the hacker culture of city hacker kids in the 90's. I also think the film pays homage to well known hackers from the 80's and 90's, all the handles of the characters in the movie are named after real people and there are even references to the types of textfiles/books we all shared at the time. If you can suspend your disbelief it's great.
But I do have a soft spot for the movie. It was filmed in the HS I went to (thought I attended a few years later) - there's a scene where one of the characters was redboxing on one of the school payphones, and I got to do that from the same phone as a student in that school - how cool is that?
I think that Sneakers was, at its heart, a heist movie and generally heist movies need to have a technical element and be generally believable. There was the "crew" and each member had their expertise.
It's strange how Sneakers never got the nerd love like Wargames and Hackers did. Maybe because the cast were older, established actors and not young people?
Sneakers is one of the few hacking-related movies that I can really enjoy, because it doesn't come off as pretentious the way that others do (to me, at least).
It was unapologetically nerdy; it doesn't try to "be cooler than it is". The filmmakers didn't feel compelled to include a scene filmed in a nightclub (like Swordfish or all 3 Matrix movies). They didn't feel compelled to gussy up their characters in absurd costumes (like Hackers or, again, all 3 Matrix movies). The plot and the characters were interesting enough on their own.
The result was that I never felt like they were talking down to me or pandering to me. As a side benefit, I'd argue that Sneakers has aged much better than other hacker movies have.
I've always just said Hackers is a comedy whether or not they knew they were making a comedy.
Sneakers is a drama and might as well be a documentary except for two scenes, which I'll accept would've bored audiences to tears if they weren't graphicalized.
I still tell people that if they want to see a fun fantasy computer movie, see Hackers. It's hilarious.
... but if they want to see a hacking movie, see Sneakers. The real people trying to break into your company and rifle through your shit look a lot more like the ones in that movie than the ones in the other movie.
Yeah its probably not fair to compare them really, because I think Hackers (and Wargames) are great too. Just in terms of the movie itself (and cast... I mean my god) its great.
I sympathize 1000%.
The last 20 years have been very hard on me as a software developer and environmentally/politically conscious person. I've watched just about everything not work out the way I had hoped for. I believe that we've hit an inflection point where enough people have realized that the emperor has no clothes that we have a real chance to start over and correct our course.
I don't know how to help with your specific situation, but I can share mine. I went to college from 1995-1999 and it was similar to movies like PCU, Hackers, Dazed and Confused. I got to watch the internet go mainstream, which I wouldn't trade for anything. Anyone could make money then doing web development, and I was working on a shareware game business. It was just such an alive time, vivid in my memory. The future was so bright we had to wear shades.
Then the DMCA. The Dot Bomb. Bush v. Gore. 9/11. The PATRIOT Act. Middle East wars. Who Killed the Electric Car. The death of research. Outsourcing. Privatization. 100,000 US factories closed. The student loan crisis/bankruptcy exception. The housing bubble. Underemployment. Wealth inequality. Clinton-Trump. COVID-19. Billionaires..
In the hangover of the early 2000s, I felt guilty for partying it up in the 90s and ended up moving furniture for 3 years to support my floundering shareware business. Which shook my faith in humanity and almost broke me. Then a good friend passed which gave me PTSD. I was in financial ruin by the 2010s. Worked a bunch of dead end jobs under continuous burnout and depression to survive. Almost found myself homeless a few times. I continued self-flagellating all the way until the 2020 pandemic, when finally the whole world seemed to break too.
Now a lot of people landed on either side of these issues and hundreds more. Half the people reading this won't share my context or conclusions. But as a whole, I feel that the last 20 years have been a textbook example of what not to do. They're the dying gasp of 20th century thinking. For a long time, I felt that they ruined my life.
But all trauma all the time is no way to live one's life.
I've been going through a healing and growth process due to some health issues, a spiritual awakening and a dark night of the soul.
Now I see:
Faith, hope and love. Service to others. The divinity of all living things. Communication. Boundaries. Mindfulness. Meditation. A forgiving and supportive inner monologue. Showing up for yourself so that you can show up for others.
I have my sights set on solarpunk, decommodification, basically lengthening my runway outside of the status quo because I no longer believe that tech as we conceive it now serves the human condition. Somewhat ironically, we've become slaves to idiology and dogma under this secular system.
My current approach looks like listening for anxiety when I'm troubled by a choice, and leaning into the choice that expands possibility. So many of our choices each day are in conflict with what we feel is our life's purpose. But I've found that when I make the choice aligned with my heart, reality reforms around me to support it. Now I look back and see that much of my suffering was due to my own attachments, that I held on too tightly and dwelled on the negative, and didn't see the miracle of life unfolding. I didn't know that we had the power to manifest our dreams.
When in doubt, it's good to turn attention from doing to listening for a calling. That's where I found my faith again.
It's been a hard two decades, I still get overwhelmed and exhausted sometimes, but I truly feel optimism for the future in spite of everything looming over us and the planet. Hope something in this helps you give yourself the permission we all deserve, to start over again and be here now in this moment together.
There's also Starring the Computer ( http://www.starringthecomputer.com/ ): A list dedicated to naming the computers used in movies and TV shows, including perennial favorites like Hackers and Jurassic Park.
>Better than even WarGames,
Well, WarGames was early, so it has that, but otherwise is a naive 80s teen movie, and the hacking is... well...
The Matrix is decent, but is basically an action movie with some wholesale "philosophy" thrown in.
Swordfish is not even worthy of a mention. And Live Free or Die Hard is downhill of Swordfish.
Hackers is decent-ish, if one ignores the depiction of hacking.
Sneakers is not very good, but better (and with better actors) than all the above.
>I always considered Sneakers a spy movie rather than a hacker movie
Well, one of the main hacker employments is spying, no?
I was interviewing for a job recently, and I got asked what got me into coding. It’s not the first time I got asked that same question, and it’s one of my favorites. I love to see the person’s reaction who asks me the question when I tell them the answer.
For me there wasn't one single "thing" that got me interested in coding, but there's no doubt that the book The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder played a key role.
It’s the movie Hackers from 1995! I’m not joking. That’s the movie that made me fall in love with computers, coding, and hacking. Many people consider it cheesy, but I don’t care. I watched it probably twenty times, if not more. I watch it any time I find myself feeling down and unmotivated. It reminds me of those first days, that initial spark. Just like you would reminisce about a beautiful beginning of a past love affair when you feel lonely and unloved.
Yes, "Hackers" is cheesy as hell, but it's simultaneously a great movie in a certain sense. Like the author of TFA, I consider it one of my "comfort movies". I've probably watched it 20+ times, and can always default to watching that when I'm feeling down, strung-out, overwhelmed, etc. Doing so always puts me in a better mood. A few other movies that fall into the same category for me include "Antitrust", "The Matrix", "The Social Network", "War Games", "Tron: Legacy", "Rad", and maybe one or two others.
Hackers is still one of my favorite movies. Forgetting the Hollywood exaggerations, that is pretty much how the culture was in the late 80s and throughout the 90s. It was entirely nerdy, a little punk, there were a lot of arcades and pizza deliveries and dumpsters involved, and there were some incredibly douchey self-described villains suffering from megalomania.
The wild west hacker days were pretty amazing, and that movie portrays all of the insanity pretty well, if cheesily.
Edit: Got caught up in the nostalgia and forgot to mention that the hacking moments, however cheesy, are all based on real hacks. The TV station take over, Kevin Mitnick's social engineering, John Draper's (Captain Crunch) phone phreaking and others. Not to say that those people are the originators of those methods, just the most infamous ones at the time the movie was made.
Haven’t heard about this before but it reminds me of a scene from the 1995 movie “Hackers”.
Scene in question: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mdha_OV5saI
IMDb page for said movie: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113243/
I wonder if the scene in Hackers was inspired by the real world hacks that the OP article talks about.
Get them to watch the 1995 movie Hackers, and see what they've taken away from it. I know it inspired me to buy a bunch of coding/compsci books after that scene where they brag about the books they've read.
It depends on what I'm doing. If I'm reading/studying and trying to mostly absorb material, I usually listen to either synthwave (and related: darkwave, horrowave, retrowave, whatever you want to call it), or classical.
If I'm writing code or doing something active like that, the above applies, but add heavy metal to the list of things I might be listening to. But if I'm listening to metal it's almost always only bands and songs that I'm extremely familiar with (eg, have listened to a given song hundreds or thousands of times in my life) as those are less likely to be distracting to me, as opposed to something new where I feel obligated to really pay attention to the music.
One other option is I will sometimes put on a movie that I've watched many, many, many times (eg, The Matrix, Hackers, Antitrust, Tron:Legacy, The Social Network, Rad, Vision Quest, etc) minimize the viewer window and just have the audio in my headphones.
Very rarely I might go with some sort of basically "white noise" track like
"Howling snowstorm and crackling fire" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=volQGswo3dg
"Cyberpunk city sounds" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5zX1eRKEDM&
"Twin Peaks Double R Diner" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npVellnR6D8
"Coffee shop" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMAPTo7RVCo (unless I'm actually sitting in a real-life coffee shop, which I quite often am)
etc.
Code Rush is one of my go-to's when I need inspiration. I was in tech when it came out and it really inspired me how much a group of dedicated programmers could do. https://archive.org/details/CodeRush_616
Same for Triumph Of The Nerds and its follow-up, Nerds 2.0.1 - A Brief History Of The Internet. Fascinating to hear what went on in the back rooms and halls of the people creating the Internet and Web. https://archive.org/details/nerds-2.0.1-a-brief-history-of-the-internet-1998
Hackers Definitely some unrealistic Hollywood effects but, it's fun and is a good representation of how tech in the 90's felt.
Antitrust It's fun to see the obvious digs at Bill Gates. John "Maddog" Hall consulted on this film which is why you see things like Gnome on all the screens. I got to talk to him in the hall at a conference once right after Antitrust came out. Really interesting guy.
Sneakers: One of my all-time favorites. The premise wasn't super-realistic (guy figures out a back door to all encryption and murder ensues) but the technology of the time was otherwise pretty accurately represented, and the acting is superb.
You'll notice that all of these came out over 20 years ago. I haven't seen much since that captures the feeling of what being in technology felt like to me. People still had that sense from the 60's and 70's that technology could be used to make the world better. People really did want to use technology for more than making money off of ads and personal data.
Documentaries
- Citizenfour 2014: Actual interview between Glenn Greenwald and Edward Snowden
- Voyage of Time: Life's Journey 2016: Voyager probes development and deployment
- Zero Days 2016: The background story and effects from Stuxnet
Films
- The Challenger Disaster 2013: Dramatization of Richard Feynman and his investigative work of this event
- Batteries Not Included 1987: When mechanical-based lifeforms descend into NYC to help an elderly couple
- Pi 1998: Fun film with lots of computers and wiring
- I Am Mother 2019: Post-apocalyptic robotic "rejuvenation" of the human race
- Gravity 2013: Fairly accurate dramatization of what space is really like
- Real Genius 1985: Silly film of college hackers before the 1995 film Hackers
- The Abyss 1989: Aliens under the sea, somewhat related to the 1998 film Sphere
- Innerspace 1987: Fun scifi version of Honey I Shrunk the Kids!
Hackers (1995)
Not joking, it's a silly and campy movie but it captures the enthusiasm I had as a kid for making computers do things.
Not about coding, but about achieving something through persistence and hard work: Fitzcarraldo (1982)
The Matrix, yes. Absolutely iconic even to this day. Hackers was known by no-one I knew. Sneakers was a much better movie and still relatable.
Huh? People refer to corny one liners from Arnie movies too, that doesn't mean they had a philosophical impact on the way those people think about guns, or whatever.
Hackers is a hilarious and fun over the top movie but I don't think it changed the way anyone thinks about technology.
> I was one of these young software engineers that saw Hackers back in 1995 and was totally blown away by the potential shown of network technology.
> … Hackers (1995), which after more than 20 years, holds still up amazingly well.
I’m not sure you’re demonstrating any appreciable sense of objectivity here.
Hackers was an absolute joke of a movie; an exaggerated snapshot of ridiculous, misinformed 1990s pop culture thinking on technology.
Ready Player One is pop culture fan service, played out amidst a dystopian corporate future. It’s not even really trying to discuss technology at all.
> I also start every semester off with the opening scene of Hackers - the best hacking movie ever made :)
Great soundtrack. Respect.
> I'm 28 ... adjunct professor ... We talk about this still.
I'm a decade older, and am relieved to see this.
> Hackers - the best hacking movie ever made :)
Counterpoint: _Sneakers_: the thinking person's hacking movie.
Human, I'm 28, been in InfoSec for ~10 years. Granted, I was lucky enough to be interested in and peruse this as a professional branch when I graduated college in 2016. I am also an adjunct professor at my local university, where I make it a salient point to remind my students of the history of hacking. We talk about this still.
I also start every semester off with the opening scene of Hackers - the best hacking movie ever made :)
Hopefully everyone here has seen the movie Hackers, where a similar, but slightly more destructive prank involving the school's sprinkler system took place.
> 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.
Yea IDK, back then everyone I knew called all of them disks or 'floppy' (since as pointed out the actual recording tape of the 3.5's was still 'floppy').
Man the good ol days. I remember when the movie Hackers came out we all loved it for its bullshit, the way it made the scene 'cool' and not just for us dweebs. But but we also hated it as hacking could definitely be some of the most boring time until something happens.
The floppy conversations always make me think of Johnny Lee Miller throwing a floppy in the trash yelling 'they're trashing our rights!' or Angelina Jolie pretending to pee in the men's bathroom to get the one hidden there.
It even made floppys seem cool somehow.
When in reality even installing Eye of The Beholder was 20+ disks and several hours. And God help you if you lost/damaged/rewrote one!
I know it’s a movie, but in Hackers they were also seen as the scum of the earth: “Hackers penetrate and ravage delicate public and privately owned computer systems, infecting them with viruses, and stealing materials for their own ends. These people, they are terrorists.”
A fantastic film indeed, and personally quite important to me as it well and truly inspired my deep interest in networks and computing when I first saw it as an early teen years after it came out. No film that I’ve seen since managed to capture that sense of exploration and freedom in computers that Hackers did, and for that it will forever be one of my favourites.
Not to mention, it too had a pretty amazing soundtrack..
A prototype version of Wipeout appeared in the seminal 1995 film "Hackers" [1]... the very same film that involved future Shaggy actor Matthew Lillard sporting a red Motorola pager and a pre-"Tomb Raider" Angelina Jolie declaring that "RISC architecture is gonna change everything". What a fantastic (in the literal and figurative senses of the term) film.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ATlszssL-eI
On the surface, they serve decently good food and an array of cocktails and other beverages, and it generally isn't overpriced. They have great milkshakes and they'll bring you warm cookies just as soon as a giant bowl of popcorn with parmesan.
But that stuff isn't strictly unique anymore; there are other dinner-and-movie chains.
What really makes them special is all their auxiliary stuff. Before a movie, instead of ads they show relevant obscure video clips that are funny and/or interesting. Before a superhero movie they might show relevant action figure commercials from the 80s, or clips of goofy unlicensed knockoff movies that they found on YouTube, etc. Famously, you're not allowed to talk/text once a movie is playing [1]. They'll have themed cocktails and food for movies that are currently showing. Every month they pick a selection of classic movies and do showings of those throughout. Sometimes they'll bring in an actor or the director for after-screening Q&A. For cult hits they'll do themed "movie parties" where everybody's encouraged to quote/sing-along, and often there are props. We went to a Monty Python and the Holy Grail party where everyone was given, among other things, coconut shells to clap. We saw Hackers on the big screen (which was incredible in its own right), and everyone was encouraged to wear their best hacker-punk getups and then they had a costume contest (and we got to take home floppy disks with "HACK THE PLANET" emblazoned on them). We saw Akira on the big screen (!!) and they had a synchronized laser-lightshow in the theater. We went to an "anime brunch" they did several Sunday mornings in a row where they'd pick a genre of anime and show four or five episodes from different shows and you could order coffee and stuff and it only cost $5 at the door.
And the person hosting/organizing these events always comes up to the front and talks about the thing you're going to be watching. They're personally invested. They geek out, telling anecdotes from their own life and giving background on why people love this thing so much. It gets you excited even if you've never heard of it before.
Everything - even the decorations and marketing - gives you the distinct sense that everyone calling the shots at this company is super into movies, and their enthusiasm is contagious even if you don't consider yourself an enthusiast
[1] Except at movie-parties, which are all about audience participation
Pretty interesting article overall, but I was struck by this bit:
It’s also worth pointing out many companies are still early in their cyber journey
It's hard not to go "waitjustaminute" about that. Computers have been highly prevalent, if not ubiquitous, in corporate life for near on 40 years now. The first computer virus[1] is older than I am (I'll be 48 in a week). Hackers as a sort of public threat seemed to enter the public vernacular largely around the release of WarGames[2] in 1983. The Morris Worm[3] caught the public's attention in 1988. Kevin Mitnick[4] was notorious as "the world's most wanted computer hacker" by the mid 1990's. Hackers[5] came out in 1995.
There's really not much new about the need for a focus on cybersecurity, other than the specific details of newer vulnerabilities and exploits, and the general shift towards profit-motivated malicious hacking. Anybody who is "just starting" to focus on cybersecurity really hasn't been paying attention.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creeper_(program)
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WarGames
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_worm
[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Mitnick
[5]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackers_(film)
> Satisfying, but not exactly must watch tv.
What's in your head could be though. That's my pet theory on the movie Hackers, what we're seeing on the computer screens isn't what's actually there, it's the characters' mental constructs visualized.
> I re-watched Hackers recently and it isn't that bad. They clearly did the research,
It's aged very well; it was slightly cringe-worthy in its time. I watch it over about once a year now.
I believe Emmanuel Goldstein consulted on the film.
I'm not sure why, but the two hackers fighting to get control of a tv station's tape robot is simultaneously the greatest and most ridiculous thing in that whole movie.
https://youtu.be/2efhrCxI4J0
> Hackers is awful. I don't get the appeal at all.
Angelina Jolie's bare breasts. I'm confident that's the appeal.
Everything else is just dancing around the issue.
Otherwise, it's a very annoying movie.
Hackers had a lot of influence from the scene and the vibe from 2600 meetups and even one of the characters is named Emmanuel Goldstein. The soundtrack was so good they released a second soundtrack with songs which were not even in the movie.
Wargames is a great hacking movie. The ending is a little meh, but the old-school tech is fantastic. It inspired the video game DEFCON.
Sneakers is another great movie. It seems a lot more faithful to how hacking works in real life: as you said it's mostly about social engineering, not how fast you can type. And the device in the movie is at least somewhat plausible. A mathematician could in theory discover a critical vulnerability in cryptography and build it into a standalone electronic device.
Hackers is awful. I don't get the appeal at all. I'll never understand why this movie is so popular. I'd put it right up there with Swordfish in terms of nonsensical computer voodoo.
I remember laughing when I first saw what the villain of the movie Hackers was plotting.
Now almost 30 years later it seems prophetic.
https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0113243/
I hope this ransomware called itself the Da Vinci virus? Because this sounds a whole lot like the plot of Hackers [1].
The greatest movie of all time, btw.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackers_(film)
> Also when did “techno” become an umbrella term again?
I would guess in the '90s, when there was a lot more crossover between electronic music and other genres. Rock and hiphop oriented stuff like the Prodigy and Chemical Brothers were topping the dance charts, and other more conventional techno like Aphex Twin and Underworld were getting decent media coverage as well.
Plus movie soundtracks at the time tended to include a lot of techno. Trainspotting, Pi, Hackers, The Jackal, The Saint....discovered a lot of artists thanks to these.
I love this! When I was around 10 or so I remember watching War Games and then rushing to my BBC Micro Model B and trying to write a program that would draw a wireframe map of the USA and Russia and have missile trails fire between them. I got as far as drawing a bad map but still have fond memories.
Movies, no matter how bad, do have the potential for inspiration.
TBH I still enjoy watching Hackers and War Games.
Also see the original Tron.
No joke: I watch the movie Hackers, yes the one with Angelina Jolie and hacking the gibson. Or maybe Wargames, or similar. Not because they have anything to do with what I do (I'm not in security, any more at least), but it reminds me of a time when I thought computers were magical things that could do anything with a bit of creativity.
The fly mode reminds me of the 3D scenes from the movie "Hackers" from 1995 where they "flew" through the system looking for interesting files
> He is one of the most ethical people in the information security industry.
What does this statement actually mean? To my mind both cryptocurrency and cypherpunk culture have set some fairly low bars for ethical and moral conduct.
There appears to be a bit of a pattern of idolisation in crypto and cypher areas. A developer who fits the media mould of the 1995 Hackers film is spotlighted as saving the world. The spotlight brings attention and drives a project forward. Eventually the spotlight reveals these people have the same motivations as most people. Onlookers are disappointed.
> 3D visualization of file systems
> I didn't know how to use it
Skateboard around thorough virtual file systems like "Plague" in the movie Hackers[1][2]
[1] https://youtu.be/kV_i8AefT8I
[2] https://youtu.be/LkqKFamTkME
I definitely hear you. As a heavy gamer myself, and a person who likes to do things fast to avoid slowing down my train of thought, our current tools are insanely slow.
The researchers telling me I don't notice 100ms delays are smoking something. Yes, human reaction time is 200ms on average but we process information much faster than that. Moreover, the delays make it impossible to do "learned" chains of actions cause of the constant interruptions.
Hackers typing insanely fast and windows popping up everywhere in movies? The reason why that looks very unrealistic is just that our tools do not behave like that at all.
Back when I still had a landline I used to "impress" people with my ability to call their cell phone using only the hook switch on my desk phone.
I'm pretty sure I was made aware of this trick from the 1995 Hackers movie, so there is at least one accurate thing in that movie.
> I'd watch this movie. Especially if it somehow had Hackers-era Angelina Jolie, Mathew Lillard, and Jonny Lee Miller. Or, plot twist: Those 3 are now the old/lame parents of the young hacker(s).
Maybe I should revisit that script then... I've definitely gotten more ideas about where it would go now that we're in 2021 and I have way more to work with to flesh it out. It probably wouldn't end up appealing to the Disney crowds like the original, though. Ha.
How is the book app going?
I found more old scripts in boxes I want to update when I have the time, some of my other fan art pilots are digital but lack the proper format of a script and your project sounds interesting for amateur writers as I imagine you have specific templates for the specific type of writing one would use.
All of my formatting is all off and looks like I just wrote long format stories in paragraph with quotes for dialogue as I didn't know any better and just did what I saw in books and wrote with total abandon in a way that only made sense to me.
What would be cool would be able to denote where the arcs and acts are as you're writing to be able to go back to after long pauses.
I'd pay for that! ;)
Sidenote: I think I enjoyed finding out out Ray Bradbury wrote Farenheit 451 on a rented typewriter at UCLA just as much as reading the book, and especially more than watching the movie.
I'd watch this movie. Especially if it somehow had Hackers-era Angelina Jolie, Mathew Lillard, and Jonny Lee Miller. Or, plot twist: Those 3 are now the old/lame parents of the young hacker(s).
There is an entire pixel world created where participants can walk around and share video and audio. There are also sessions, music and other stuff happening that attempts to recreate the experience of being at CCC.
Here is me in an assembly that belongs to some friends. They have tried recreating the Cyberdelia club from the movie Hackers (1995) among other things.
https://paste.xinu.at/sweRSnfJwMo4vDXHzmo/
I was inspired by the Hackers movie to pimp my laptop in the late 90s, early 2000s.
IceWM was a great candidate but I don't remember using it as much as Fluxbox or IonWM.
Of course I also modified the boot splash in FreeBSD to display the Duke Nukem nuclear logo when the computer started.
That scene in Hackers where all the kids setup their laptop in a phone booth and each of them opens up a customized laptop really stuck in my mind.
It gave me a fantastic sense of pride and belonging to a sub-culture everytime someone saw my custom laptop. :)
- They got caught so maybe don't plan on pulling any heists, etc... - Hackers (movie) almost made it seem like a right of passage, glamorizing the mugshots a bit. - I'm sure others would say: depends on the candidate.
Still inspiring hackers today! Behold the movie in C: http://bloerp.de/code/tempel/hackers/hackersFinal.c.html
At the time people were essentially upset that it misrepresented hacking as cool, where actually it was geeky. Today it's easy to take for granted that people understand personal computing, but there was a time when most adults didn't know anything about them. Those of us who did wanted to spread that understanding, and it was nothing like the street fashion and colorful animations of Hackers.
There's also an East Coast / West Coast dynamic involved. West Coast hacking was optimistic/idealistic about depth of knowledge and engineering, and East Coast was more cynical/realistic about social groups and control. Compare Apple to Facebook, the Homebrew Computer Club to 2600 magazine, custom hardware to script kiddies. This movie is a hip Hollywood take on the East Coast scene, while War Games and Sneakers are West.
Hackers was originally a guilty pleasure, but it's aged very well. I was happened to watch it again last week, and organizing a global DDoS to take down a command and control node for an industrial control virus and prevent a terrorist attack was a bit ahead of its time. Part of the visionary magic was directly involving the community, particularly Emmanuel Goldstein of 2600.
I wish the business side of it was doing a better job though. There has always been a cult following that they aren't tapping into... The original may be a poorly typeset laser printout, but why has there never been an official "Trust Your Technolust" poster?
I think sneakers was the successor to either wargames or hackers.
Either way, great movie with a realistic story and minimal hacker stereotypes.
That'd be Orbital's Halcyon & On & On which contains a sample from Opus III's It's A Fine Day, sung by Kirsty Hawkshaw.
There's also tracks by Leftfield, The Prodify, Carl Cox, Underworld, ... [1] [2]
Pretty much the alternative (electronic) music at that time. And what a time 90s electronic music was.
[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113243/soundtrack
[2] https://www.discogs.com/Various-Hackers-Soundtrack/release/498401
I think you’re right about tropes and campiness. But there’s one thing that the movie did other than being realistic and that’s capturing the “feeling” of a thing.
I think hackers did a good job of capturing the “feel” of mid-90s computer users. It was a new frontier, mostly celebrated by outcasts and was inherently anti-authority.
I still get the same vibe from the CCC as I got from the first time I watched the movie Hackers.
Also, people tend to forget about Acid Burn, best hacker in the movie who is only “beaten” because the other members took pity on the main protagonist. That flies a bit in the face of others in the same genre.
Hackers did something that very few hacker movies ever did by getting the spirit of the hacker community right.
Sure, the hacking itself is nonsense, but it depicted a bunch of people from diverse backgrounds coming together in a shared love of computers and curiosity. They hack because it's interesting, challenging and fun.
As a bonus, the rollerblade-friendly arcade bar thing—Cyberdelia—is the coolest place I've ever seen.
The year was 2000, and the 14 year old DusteD had just watched Hackers (1995) for the sixth billionth time, and decided the only way forward was to paint his computer like they did in the movie! That included his keyboard, he learnt how to type after that.
Today I have a wasd keyboards model with blank white keys and red cherries, looks fantastic and always a fun conversation starter at LANs and in the office :)
Before that I had the Filco Majestouch Otaku with blue cherries, but unfortunately it broke.
First, the Last Starfighter. My mom said this was the first movie I stayed awake for the entire time as a toddler, and while I don't remember seeing it in a theater, I think this made me instantly interested in everything computers and space, and I eventually became a rocket scientist (kinda). Yay!
Network - It was made a long time ago, but it's really about Facebook. Watch it.
Requiem for a dream - I'll never forget this movie, ever. This will make you want to quit all your drugs.
Hearts of Darkness (A Filmmaker's Apocalypse) - This is the making of Apocalypse Now, and it's amazing. It's so much more than a documentary about how to make a movie, it's about life, movie making, and youtube, long before it existed.
Wargames - still relevant about how technology could destroy us. I feel like this is the Ferris Bueller's Day Off for Hackers.
And lastly, who could forget, Hackers.
Solutions of hundreds of dollars? For what exactly?
Reminds me of the movie Hackers where they used buzzers. And why not? The only thing you gotta do is use pre-planned keywords/acronyms.
I went to several (music) festivals, big ones between 2002 till 2004 with a few smaller gigs later until 2009 or so. Back then we just used SMS or phone call. I didn't even always have a plan during the mentioned years. Especially outside the country (and NL is small) it was always a surprise to get the next phone bill (one time I paid something like 30 EUR per megabyte, in Serbia). Within the EU, these work with your normal plan nowadays.
I don't know how it is nowadays, but back then on large festivals providers would put up extra (mobile) GSM antennas at the location. I assume they still do that. I can imagine there's a lot of smartphones up in the air to record the magical moment (and ruin it for the people behind you). That alone is a reason why I wouldn't wanna go.
A dumbphone seems still clever if you go outside the country. A rugged one goes for say 30-50 EUR or so. It won't contain or give access to your whole life if it gets confiscated, no social media means you can focus on your stay, and you can still contact authorities or friends if required. Just make sure you add the personal information of those you need to contact (should be on your SIM, though possibly that's too much info as well). Oh, and the screen won't break or get damaged (if it does /care), and who cares if your dumbphone gets stolen. I suppose people generally take the risk, but I got burned once (got a digital camera as birthday present worth ~300 EUR in 2004 and it got stolen after I had it for less than a week). You can always give it away or sell it afterwards (like a real burner) or reuse it for the next journey.
Now, back when I went to music festivals, you'd sortof stay together cause you could find each other but it was a bit annoying. If you could automate it, like you can give your position with WhatsApp, then that'd be great. However, with WhatsApp you decide who can access your location, while with this solution its available to all. That might not be what you want.
Other sports like hiking, skiing I can imagine to use this technology. Even people who live "In The Wild" could meet up with other total strangers, if that's your thing. I mean imagine using this in some huge forest in Canada, or on Greenland where you suddenly notice another life form.
In the 1995 movie 'Hackers' there was a scene (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RL9yCWv7NS0) where they're talking about RISC being the future. The hype about RISC was strong at the time but a few years later that scene seemed dated. Now here we are in 2020 and ARM keeps taking over more and more of the world.
65% - "I've seen the movie Hackers, and it contains bad language and cookies"
Idk, maybe having two decades of terrible hacker movies made people appreciate the old ones more. Personally I have always loved both Hackers and WarGames, but admittedly i wasn't around when they came out.
> Wasn't this literally the plot to the Hackers movie?
Except it was an inside job.
When life imitates art. Wasn't this literally the plot to the Hackers movie? Complete with the 5 million dollar ransom to an oil company...
After research labs big oil has always been the 2nd largest client for supercomputers for decades. It's even mentioned in 90s films Hackers[0] as "The Gibson."
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackers_(film)
I can relate - the movie Wargames was ultimate cool to me when I was a kid, not "Hackers". Though I cringe-loved Hackers too.
Hackers...the movie. "their only crime was curiosity". I suspect that line was lifted from this.
As for the Manifesto itself, for the most part, looking back, this rings true. I was there... in the 80's...with colourful boxes, acoustic couplers, and pages and pages of phone numbers. I never had the sense of community this document describes...it seemed like a much more solitary pursuit, but you picked up things if you know where to look...and clearly, trails were blazed by those that went before. To paraphase Dali... It wasn't better than drugs, It was drugs.
I remember when I was a kid and thought that hacking was this intense activity of "breaking in". Movies like Hackers really captured my imagination. Some vulnerabilities and hacks truly are incredible like Stuxnet[0]. However, after creating software for many companies for many years you start to realize that most of the "hacks" were just someone not being careful enough. A PM dropped the ball on a project, security wasn't even informed of the project, there was no security team, or some other simple mistake. One of the companies I worked at hired security experts to train us how to write more secure code and you wouldn't believe how bored the room looked. Almost no one was paying attention, even the junior engineers who were the primary reason for the training.
Anyways, as long as humans are writing code and organizations function the way they do today these exploits are going to continue happening.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuxnet
I've learned this from that movie hackers. #hacktheplanet
It's the UI from the film Hackers that we've all been waiting for.
That was from "Hackers"[1][2].
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackers_(film)
[2]: https://youtu.be/h_Awe6CI91k?t=41
Don't forget Orbital! This is one of my favorite movies as well, for similar reasons. I grew up in the 90s with BBSs, and I think the film captured the subculture pretty well.
I also remember reading the detonate.net parody of Hackers at the time, and thinking it was one of the most hilarious things ever.
Hackers makes the top of my list of "Hacker" movies, not for any kind of technical/realistic chops, which they deliberately eschew, but purely for its artistic direction.
Reasons why I love this movie:
- Has the best costumes: Leather, Spandex, cheetah print, that fluffy cat tshirt Phreak wears in one scene. They contribute to a colorful portrayal of a 90's New York overrun by Club Kids, which no other movie except Party Monster really touches. It reminds me a lot of the Fifth Element in some ways.
- Has the most memorable characters and talent. Acid Burn, Zero Cool, The Phreak, Cereal Killer, and Joey, not to mention Agent Gills, Razor and Blade, and of course still-dressing-in-the-dark Eugene (Don't call me Eugene)
- Has the best soundtrack: Massive Attack, Prodigy, Underworld, Stereo MC's, and more. This movie served as a gateway to high-school-aged me to a whole world of 90's trip-hop and electronica that I still enjoy.
- No other hackers movie can claim to have a "Hack the Gibson" level influence for its one-liners and references, except maybe War Games.
- Hilariously corny lines and delivery. Perfectly toes the line between being funny-bad and just bad-bad. No matter how many times I see this movie I die every time Gills says "You are floating, and I'm about to flush yo ass!"
You can probably tell I've seen this movie way too many times, but I'll never get tired of watching it.
Sneakers is the best hacker film ever made. Hackers was maybe number 2 in my book.
"The movie's plot is based on the true story of a group of young computer hackers from Hannover, Germany. In the late 1980s the orphaned Karl Koch invests his inheritance in a flat and a home computer. At first he dials up to bulletin boards to discuss conspiracy theories inspired by his favorite novel, R.A. Wilson's "Illuminatus", but soon he and his friend David start breaking into government and military computers. Pepe, one of Karl's rather criminal acquaintances senses that there is money in computer cracking - he travels to east Berlin and tries to contact the KGB."
A bunch of dorks get online and talk about fandom stuff and it's all just playing around until Pepe contacts the KGB. So... uhh... that like... actually happened.
Reality generally requires surrealist fiction to capture. It's too weird for conventional narratives.
I'm not saying they are a good thing per se, just a reassuring thing. It means we still need to be in control of our systems, and can't blindly let our systems control us, because indeed they are fallible. It's of course rather philosophical.
There's also a big difference between these sort of vulnerabilities, and the sort of problems that enable for example ransomware, which is a serious issue that has a more difficult solution than simply designing more robust hardware.
Anyway, if you're intrigued maybe check out Ghost in the Shell sometime (not the one with Scarlett Johansson, although it is enjoyable, it's not really the same thing), if it needs to be Hollywood, then maybe the Hackers movie would also work a bit (with Angelina Jolie).
It's a quote from hackers the movie from 1995.
The drinks at Alamo aren’t distracting like at a dinner theater.
And that isn’t the allure anyway. The people who run Alamo have concentrated so hard on customer experience that it’s almost embarrassing to the other theaters.
1) Nobody takes your ticket. Buy it online and walk directly to your seat.
2) no advertisements for liposuction of real estate before the movie starts. The media playing while you wait is interesting clips that are relevant to the movie you are about to watch. When I saw “hackers” there, it was a bunch of hilarious old computer ads from the 90s, music videos of the soundtrack, etc.
3) if you talk, text, or arrive late you get kicked out. People follow this rule.
4) There might be some alternative revenue stream[1] but it doesn’t feel that way. It feels like you exchange money for a ticket to a movie.
Honestly Alamo feel less hip, and more like it’s run by cranky old cinema buffs that want you to shut up and pay attention during the movie. It’s like a theater for adults.
[1] at other theaters it feels like they don’t care about you buying a ticket, and the ticket is really just an excuse to sell you extremely expensive popcorn.
Fans of the movie Hackers (1995) will recall Dade Murphy reading the first line of Howl in his advanced English class.
The Beat culture of the 1950's was absolutely the predecessor to the hacker/cyberpunk culture of the 1990's.
"Soundtracks."
That isn't a genre, but each soundtrack offers has its own themes and style. Depending on mood you can have techno (Hackers/Matrix), fantasy (LOTRs/Interstellar), Pop (Greatest Showman/Guardians of the Galaxy), Regional Styles (Last Samurai/Moana), or even just calming/relaxing (Sims 3: Pets).
PS - Try not to dismiss soundtracks just because you never liked the movie/game. I never played the Sims 3, let alone the "Pets" expansion, but the soundtrack remains me of SimCity's sound.
Largely regardless of ones definition of a hacker it was a subculture in the '80s, '90s and even early '00s. Because of the scarcity of information and resources there was motivation to organize, form groups and publish things in a way that you don't have today. A hacker was therefor at the time (regardless of the underlying activity) largely defined as someone who took part in hacker culture. In that sense it was about curiosity and exploration. You are trying to learn things that aren't readily available or necessarily considered worthwhile.
Once the Internet became widely available there wasn't the same need for a culture to being able to do that (at least in theory). Who is considered a hacker therefor changes from people engaged in hacker culture to people who for example do information security. You can to some extent go to university, never talk to anyone and come out of there being considered a hacker. While previously being a hacker would be quite distinct from academia (though there would of course be overlap among people). As the point was that you were doing something different from what was already established. Whether that was coding, security or community.
I wouldn't personally judge someone who was consider a nefarious hacker when hackers were more of a subculture, as most of the activities would be considered relatively mundane today and there motivations often benign. I would judge someone for running a dark market, distributing malware or even just run an unethical data business today however.
As a further tangent, I do think it is curious how most people (myself included) thought that the plot of the movie "Hackers" was a bit ridiculous. But then 20 years later Maersk gets hit by ransomware.
I'm sad that you failed to mention the original /Hackers/ movie as well as /Swordfish/ -- two staples of Defcon movie nights.
The movie Hackers started it all for me. 11 year old me thought it was the definition of cool.
Another interesting part of that movie is the salami slicing plot line. Salami slicing is the name for collecting factional cents off thousands of transactions to accumulate a big payout without people noticing. It's featured in a bunch of movies:
- Superman III
- Hackers
- I love you Philip Morris
- Office Space
I mention it in my talk about how to program database systems safely when handling money to avoid situations like that. It can also happen by accident when converting between floats and Decimals incorrectly while programming.
https://github.com/pirate/django-concurrency-talk
I love this about older hacker movies. Watching The Net, Hackers, and Enemy of the State back when they came out resulted in many laughs about how unrealistic their portrayal of tech was. Ordering food online? A remotely hackable sprinkler system? Real time video monitoring from the sky? Ridiculous! Now these things are normal.
Remember the movie Hackers when the DiVinci virus capsized those ships?
I believe that is a reference to the movie "Hackers"
> I take representing digital culture in film very seriously in lieu of having grown up in a world of very badly researched user interface greeble. I cringed during the part in Hackers (1995) when a screen saver with extruded "equations" is used to signify that the hacker has reached some sort of neural flow or ambiguous destination. I cringed for Swordfish and Jurassic Park as well.
Jurassic Park's infamous scene was actually UNIX though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fsn_(file_manager)
There was a Linux port too - but not used that in something like 10 years so no idea if it still compiles.
Hackers is, in my opinion, something that was written by someone who was very knowledgable about the subject matter and directed by someone who very clearly was not. Every spoken line of dialogue in that movie is pretty accurate and realistic - it's only when you get to the direction and the visuals that things get wacky.
I love Hackers. I also love snickering at all of the technical lapses throughout the movie. 28.8 kbaud? Yeah...you're streaming that 3d Gibson interface over that... Yeah, I know, they had to Hollywood it up, but still...
I find it hits a bit close to home, so much so as to ruin the comedy sometimes... it’d be funny if it weren’t so true, which is depressing.
Still watch it, and love it though. And super impressed that a Hollywood production finally understood Northern California. That never happens (see: The Social Network, Hackers, every Steve Jobs movie, etc.)
It's a reference to the 1995 cult movie "Hackers".
It's a reference to the 1995 film Hackers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackers_(film)
A always thought Hackers movie style animated boot-up screens would be awesome.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qiQlZU5oWTQ
I'll have to rewatch. I saw it when I was much younger too.
In defense, I think "weird" is overly dismissed in film. The intent of some sequences like this is to make the audience surprised or uncomfortable (the soundtrack at Do Long Bridge in Apoc Now?), which gets dismissed as a director simply making bad choices.
My personal bugaboo is programmers chuckling knowingly at the CG in Hackers: "That's not what code looks like."
Well, no shit Sherlock, maybe it was an artistic choice to try to convey the experience of debugging to an audience who wouldn't be able to understand C on the screen?
Being trans isn't limited to the bedroom. It's not related to sexuality, although there are correlations. The sort of "human playing a human" argument is exactly what is talked about in the Riddle scale. Watching cis people play trans characters feels like watching Hackers, the terrible 90's movie.
Very Hackers. (The movie.)
The book was released in 1984. Could it be that his descriptions of tech were just true to the times? I imagine his stylistic embellishments were also important in the same way older movies about technology (e.g. Hackers[0]) stylize digital events.
[0]: https://youtu.be/Bmz67ErIRa4?t=69
Hackers was one of the two movies that got me into development. The other was Antitrust (2001) [1]. I ended up taking AP Computer Programming in high school that year (back when it was C++) and had dreams of going to UIUC and starting a startup in the garage with my good friend.
[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0218817/
My fascination with computers started when I watched the movie Hackers (1995) [1]. I just liked the idea of the underdogs upping the ante over their well-funded bureaucrats and being smart and stubborn. Even though this was rather a bland movie (by today's standards), I appreciate the fact that this movie pushed me into the realms of software and computers in general.
[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113243/
As someone who also sort-of idolized these groups in the past, I think it's more about what they used to represent instead of just who they actually were.
When I was still discovering the computer and internet world, they were already "giants" in the space, so of course they would seem like the epitome of what I wanted to achieve.
"I want to be like them and be able to do the stuff they do", i.e your standard role model feeling.
Which of course sounds silly once you grow older and realize you can be like them if you study and put the hours on it, but at the time, being so much younger, it just seemed magical.
I compare them to what the movie "Hackers" made me feel. I knew it was a completely fantastical representation of what hackers actually were (and you could even argue it was a bad-ish movie), but the fact that I could imagine myself being able to break into a TV network and putting the show of my choosing felt like magic. I guess it's the analogue to what Dungeons and Dragons was for a lot of people, imagining being a wizard and killing dragons.
So while I agree with you that they were just a group of people that got together to share knowledge and explore this new frontier, it was so ahead of what I could achieve at the time that it was hard not to look up to them.
Kind of how I (and I would guess, a lot of other HNers) look up to what you (and e.g. Project Zero engineers) can do with security and cryptography stuff :)
It's not that I think I'm not capable or competent enough to do it, just that I haven't walked the thousand miles you have. But of course, I'm now an adult that can rationalize these things, instead of an impressionable kid with dreams of grandeur :).
Sometimes I listen to metal (my default favorite genre) and sometimes I prefer various forms of electronic music: techno, house, trance, EDM, etc. Other times I go with classical: Dvorak, Wagner, Bach, Fauré, Handel, Vivaldi, Philip Glass, Carl Orff, etc.
But a lot of times what I actually prefer is to put on a movie, one that I've seen like 100 times, so that I know it so well that I don't really get drawn into the story and lose focus. I'll turn the volume down moderately low, enough to be audible but not overly distracting, and play The Matrix, Hackers, Antitrust, Sneakers, War Games, Tron:Legacy, Rad, The Social Network, Inception, or something like that and let that serve as my background noise.
How hard could it be? Make a movie like "Hackers" with a gender balanced cast and a hot, badass female lead. Heck, Angelina Jolie in Hackers was enough to pull me in.
If Experian were really sneaky they'd pay teams of hackers to steal personal data from businesses so the affected businesses would then have to buy huge contracts for free credit monitoring for their users from Experian. That's not what's happening here, obviously, but it'd make a great Hackers-esque movie.
Vaguely reminds me of the virus in the movie Hackers.
Just like in the 1990s PowerPC laptop was even mentioned in the movie Hackers not to mention Apple's own devices.
I feel the article is not quite fair in its coverage of Hackers. Sure, the movie gets many things absurdly wrong, but it also depicts social engineering (calling a security guard and tricking him into telling the hacker a modem's phone number), dumpster diving in hopes of finding interesting documents and guessing passwords. These could be straight from Kevin Mitnick's memoirs, Ghost in the Wires (which came out years later). I think the movie might actually get more things right than it gets wrong.
It varies. Sometimes I listen to my "stock" music - hard rock and heavy metal of all varieties, with a special focus on 80's era glam metal, speed metal, and thrash metal.
Other times it's various forms of electronic music. House, trance, europop, Hi-NRG, synthwave/darkwave, etc.
And then sometimes I go with classical music. Bach, Vivaldi, Verdi, Wagner, Strauss, Orff, etc.
As far as specifics go, here's some stuff I've listened to lately:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b8OELzmpgZo&list=PL7F37BB1A67E0238D
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9oTQzwXYXk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hd8Or1RrYs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4oZZhpMXP4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NyfL9LC1DC4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajF2NOuYkjk
https://youtu.be/-7Q61fH-03E
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGMJ2b-3eCk
One other thing I'll sometimes do is put on a movie in the background, with the volume turned down fairly low... just enough that I hear some babble and noise, but not enough that I get caught up in what's going on. This only works if I use a movie I've seen / heard many times, so I already know what's happening and won't get drawn into the story. So, something like The Matrix, Antitrust, Tron:Legacy, Hackers, Sneakers, The Social Network, etc.
This author is the founder of winrumors.
While he was running an exchange server, I was learning to program because I couldn't afford server software. I wanted to be the guy running an exchange server too. I wanted to run all sorts of stuff I couldn't afford. But I got my hands on visual studio 97 instead.
I home schooled, and worked as a tech at a sort of server junk shop in Dallas (what many may not know about Dallas is that it's city built on telecom). They would purchase computers from companies going out of business, refurbish, and resell them. I was 14, and paid in cash or store credit. My room was also full of servers and networking equipment. I bought as many of the servers that weren't selling as I could.
My friends and I watched the 1995 film "hackers" on repeat as if it were a new religion. We had LAN parties most weekends, and a lot of my equipment became "mobile". At any one time, I always had a "best" server that was stripped down for transport (which changed every time I could get my hands on something more powerful) and a bucket of switches and ethernet cables. Reminiscing is fun.
By the time the iPhone released, I was 7 years into my professional programming career writing desktop and server software. I completely ignored the iPhone. The idea was cool, it certainly looked cool, but the system itself was an appliance. I didn't believe in computing appliances. I still have little to no interest in mobile as it currently exists, and I don't regret it.
In my opinion, Apple's innovation wasn't the iPhone. It wasn't the app store. It was getting carriers to subsidize a $1,000 pocket computer and call it a phone. It makes sense, if you were building a $1k computer (that is actually worth a grand) to fit in consumer's pockets that you'd want to build in a store so you can make your money back. This business model already existed in gaming consoles (in consoles a majority of their money is made in licensing software). It was obvious it was going to sell like hotcakes. Unfortunately, this cemented the iPhone's appliance nature. They HAVE to be accessible. They HAVE to be secure. They HAVE to have long battery life. Those elements can only be maintained if they are viciously protected. I can get my windows machine to do whatever I want. The limit is physics and my imagination. I can get an iPhone to do what apple approves.
From a consumer perspective I understand that mobile is awesome. Everything is bite-sized and convenient. From a programmer's perspective, I can't help but see your phone as a toy computer, and "apps" as software appetizers. That may change, and I would welcome the change. As it stands, the walled garden, battery life, and touch inputs keep it at toy status for me.
I'm 34 now. When I started my career, the young programmers were 34. I was mentored by greybeards in their 40's and 50's. Now 34 is the beginning of being old. I don't meet many programmers over 40 anymore. I do the work the "young" guys are afraid of. I write the heavy math. I do the memory optimization. I do the complex multi-threading. I build the novel features. I write the code you can't copy and paste from stack overflow. I fix the fuck-ups. Maybe that's because the iPhone never killed my inner nerd.
When I was young I programmed because I couldn't afford the real stuff. Now when I program (outside of paid work) it's because the next real stuff doesn't exist yet.
I'll be really sad if the future truly is your phone as an interface streaming data to and from cloud processing. I can't help but feel like it's a step back.
A shipping company being attacked by malware worm designed to steal money is literally the plot of the movie Hackers.
You mean like State sponsored hacking? Sure... I don't know I would say that it's something else entirely.
The core mindset still comes from the same place. Understanding everything. Understanding the implications of bugs and features of known systems, using that for grand exploitation to achieve things they weren't designed for.
What inspired them to start hacking in the first place may or may not have come from a place of not having everything. Perhaps their trigger of interest were movies or TV shows: War Games, Hackers... or James Bond or the nerdy guy from NCIS, 24, Bourne Identity, MI5 or countless other TV shows and movies where hacking is glamorized.
The start of that career path is the same, regardless of what brought you there - a need to understand your tools, deeply.
My thinking was same as the parent. Preventing access would involve telling someone who owns a computer and could, for example, connect to public wifi, that they are not allowed to do that and will be punished for doing so.
I think this would be relevant to someone who has committed a crime using a computer and remains banned from using the internet even after finishing a prison sentence (like the kid in the movie Hackers). It doesn't sound like that can happen now.
Maybe a reference to the protagonist from Hackers: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113243/
Hackers has a couple scenes like that, I don't have a problem with the device.
But in Swordfish it's completely ancillary to the movie that it's computer hacking that's going on. The goal is money, not any part of any "hacker ethos" or anything.
I enjoy when older, unrealistic movies become more realistic over time.
Remotely hacking the sprinkler system in Hackers was so unrealistic when it came out but today it's scary how real that could be.
In what way was swordfish like Sneakers/Hackers? The latter are cyberpunk-ish, a bit ideological.
Swordfish is more of a "caper" movie with a cheap tacked-on hacking bit. Bad guy wants money, uses hacker and LOTS OF CRIME to get it.
And I think all of us here love hacker movies.
Sneakers, Hackers, Swordfish, etc. :)
Interesting because alot of modern day pirates/hackers are exactly the same. Co-opting their identities from movies like "Hackers" and "Sneakers". If you read any of the interview sections of Phrack articles these movies and their aesthetics are all referenced heavily. I think it was ironic/toungue in cheek at first but then turned into something sincere as new generations looked up to the old without context.
> The stars are not about "enjoyment" factor, they are about perceived quality.
For you. But are you representative of the whole or even a majority? I personally use it to reflect whether I enjoyed it or considered it a waste of time.
I give some of my favorites - like Hackers - 5 stars but would never consider it a "quality" movie. It's awful and silly but that's the fun of it.
It was cheesey. The focus of the conspiracy was the political assassination of a musician, except whenever movies try to fictionalize a wildly popular artist, it usually deflates the premise because you're forced into imagining why the artist is so popular.
The music is contrived and laughably bad, so while you might really want to imagine the profound tragedy of losing the artist while being a fan of the music, your just left with blah.
Hackers and Johnny Pnemonic (ostensibly from the same essential genre or style and period) are more fun to watch, simply because those movies don't frame the story arc as supposedly shocking and worrisome, even though they suck probably just as much.
With Strange Days, your supposed to care about something for some odd reason.
Here's what you're missing:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPrUmViN_5c
Followed up with the best attempt at a pickup line by a hacker in the movies. Back before the movies had them making out with random women in bathrooms over job offers involving sex, alcohol, bombs, and Houdini tributes. Hackers got really cool really fast. ;)
The line "RISC architecture is going to change everything" is a quote from a film (Hackers, 1995) that you're expected to know by heart if you want to be in this treehouse, or something.
I wrote Mr. Robot off the moment i watched the first preview. Psycologically troubled, hooded protagonist that blackmails a guy about a pedo exchange running out of the back room of a restaurant. No matter how accurate the computing may be, that just got too ham fisted for my tastes.
As for Hackers the movie, i wonder if one best treat it similar to Streets of Fire[1]. a fable that happens to be set to New York.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streets_of_Fire
I think this, what you have stated, is the appeal of that scene in the Social Network where Mark Zuckerberg is building Facesmash:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VSKoVsHs_Ko
Most people probably don't understand what Emacs, Apache configuration or "wget magic" is but they don't have to. Sorkin's screenplay makes, what might otherwise be a boring evening to a external observer, seem really exciting while communicating the high level ideas.
In other words: people who saw the movie partook in the excitement of watching a programmer build something cool, fairly quickly, that elicited strong feedback and reaction, which is rewarding to any programmer and they did not have to get bogged down in the details. As well, this scene also doesn't embellish in the details of hacking with absurd looking command lines nor GUIs like "Hackers" (the movie) does and, therefore, does not elicit an obligatory 'eyeroll' from the programmer/hacker community.
I felt that, overall, Sneakers holds up fairly well for the technology of the time and nowhere near as silly as Hackers. The article's only complaint on Sneakers is the universal key that breaks crypto, just American crypto per the movie and not all crypto by the way, which was just the macguffin.
Am extremely disappointed that this scene in the movie Hackers has not been referenced:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4U9MI0u2VIE
Like many others I don´t consider HTML and CSS programming. To some PHP isen´t even a programming language it´s a scripting language. But I ended up programming/scripting PHP. I like it, I feel at home in it, and it does what I want to accomplish. Make stuff for the web. 14 years ago I started learning HTML, I wanted to make websites, after that I had delusions thanks to movies like Operation Takedown, Hackers and Antitrust about being a hacker. I learned the basic concepts in C++, C# and Java, but I diden´t know what I wanted to do, so I froze, and stopped learning in those languages. There is a term PHP is forgiving and it is, some of what is natural to PHP might bite you in the ass if you go on to C# for instance or Java. But you´ve still got a bunch of programming concepts down that you can reuse. If you can find a drive, something you want to accomplish in the language, be it a web or desktop project. Then you will learn. I hope you find this useful. Whatever you decide to do good luck on your journey to becoming a programmer.
>I had a boss once that thought programmers just typed away for hours, how hard could it be
Just look at the movies. "Hackers" always manage to break in to remote systems by typing lots into a terminal very fast. The more difficult the system, the faster they need to type. (Mr Robot has been a refreshing change to that stereotype).
I quite enjoyed Hacker, albeit to laugh at. But I've seen far worse "Hacker" themed movies. Though it party helps that Hackers has aged pretty well compared to many of the others.
Going back to your point about being angst: if it's any consolation, that's how I felt as a teenager as well. I didn't come across your manifesto until quite some years after it was written but it definitely resonates with how I felt at the time as well.
Every time I read this I hear it read in the voice of the villain from the movie Hackers. Which I have to admit was totally a guilty pleasure of my teenage years.
How did you feel about it showing up in the critically acclaimed film, Hackers? That was my first exposure to it.
There's a lot of interesting story in this article, but this sentence caught my eye:
" Our email is completely secure. . . ."
Why would Bill Gates say that? Surely he knew their e-mails were going plain text through a host of providers, network operators and mail relays, or weren't they? Apparently PGP is from 1991, but they are using msmail (judging from the headers) so I don't reckon they were using that.
The movie "Hackers" would come out about a year after that. The cyberpunk genre had been going on a full decade, did Bill really believe no one could read their e-mail? Of course Bill knew about security issues, but was it just not on his mind? Obviously it's not very smart to talk about the sort of thing that is a fundamental threat to business of internet technology to a journalist, but to state outright that it was completely secure seems to be a be going a bit far.
I always wondered why it took so long for Microsoft to develop a proper security story, or even properly developing anything Internet related properly in that time. They could have been twice the company they are now if they took it as serious as this article makes it look Bill took it. Microsoft wasn't anything on the Internet but the company who built your OS and let your mark up your documents for the next ten years after this article.
I think it's a reference to the movie Hackers.
I don't watch anything specific in response to being "stuck", but a lot of times when I'm coding and want something in the background for stimulation and to occupy idle moments, I'll put a movie on with the sound turned down real low. I like to use something I know so well that I can practically recite the dialogue, so I am not going to actually get interested in what's going on, since I already know it so well. So usually, that turns out to be The Matrix. Occasionally it's The Social Network, Tron:Legacy, Hackers, or Inception. Something about having those going seems to help inspire me on some level.
I really like this, too... I have this movie (and others including Antitrust and, yes, Hackers) in my "night time playlist" for when my wife goes back home to visit family for a few weeks each summer and Christmas. It is a very comfortable movie for me.
This reminds me of the "Da Vinci" virus form Hackers movie, which threatens to capsize an oil tanker fleet. Who would have thought that movie was so visionary!
Interesting; I've always had a bit of an issue with the lines between Science Fiction and Fantasy, in that the former is far more interesting to me than the latter. For instance, I enjoyed the movie Lucy as entertainment using a science fiction anchor, and was utterly bored with Guardians of the Galaxy which is a fine and dandy space/fantasy type of thing. I love Hackers as entertainment in spite of its drastic flaws that were obvious then and still are in the 'scientific' context.
Asking for a buddy: Would a computer/technology driven crime and character driven story be applicable in the 'science fiction' wide definition?
Hope you get what you're after and help break some new folks into the scene. Nice that you're up front about the rights too. I know my buddy would love to get paid and then take that money and register his story with WGA West in case of screenplay potential.
Recently re-watched this movie thanks to Ready Player One: so great to see plausible hacking in a movie (as much as I enjoy Hackers for the entertainment value) - I love this behind the scenes snippet about the movie and its real world impact!
Movies about hackers came after hackers had existed for a while. They were mostly male and so it makes sense that that is who would be cast to play those roles.
Anyway, Acid Burn and Trinity are iconic Hollywood hacker characters.
What movies/tv shows are you watching? Try Supernatural. Try the old movies from the 90's like Hackers and The Net. Even the Matrix. All of them featured women hackers as well as men.
I was not given "the focus" by default. My Jr. High and High School did not have a CS program at all. I taught myself how to program (Pascal and Assembly) by READING BOOKS, because we lived in a rural area and dial-up internet is slow!
Is it so wrong to believe that if I can do it, so can others, regardless of their gender? Maybe I have a higher confidence in women than they do!
Finally, 'Hackers' the movie style 3D interfaces for managing networking infrastructure.
In all seriousness. As networking structures become more modular, it might not be a bad idea to have systems where the architecture can be modeled and monitored visually.
I have come across presentations of some custom/proprietary systems that provide interesting visualizations of networking interactions. It would be awesome to see a generalized platform implementation.
Tron is one of the great movies of all time IMHO. It was one of the first to do a fantastic job of the "world within a world" idea on film, had an incredible aesthetic and a reasonably fun film. But it's not really a hacker movie.
The Net always came across to me as a movie made by people who had never touched a computer. Without knowing what to write about (and after exhausting as many technical inaccuracies as possible) it just turns into a run of the mill thriller. It's kind of painful to watch. Hackers tosses out some jargon, but lots of the actual computer interaction stuff is completely obfuscated and contained in the fantasy of the world itself.
Can't say I've seen the rest, but I've added them to my list!
Hackers was a landmark in my youth. I also really enjoyed the movie "23" about Karl Koch: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0126765/
The biggest thing I like about WarGames as a geek/hacker movie is that it has one of the more realistic depictions I've seen of the critical skill required for security research (or doing many other worthwhile things): a giant pile of research, trying many different things, most of which don't work, eventually leading to success. All shown in an montage cutting between a library and a computer, with this awesome music to accompany it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFAGE4rs71M
It's not exactly a sophisticated effort (using a wardialer and guessing a backdoor password), but it's far better and more realistic than the majority of movie-style "hacking" scenes.
Sneakers, by contrast, has some interesting depictions of social engineering, as well as the amusingly low-tech yet effective approach of "point a camera at someone's hands while they type a password" (which remains a realistic danger today).
Hackers is dripping in 80s cheese, but that was what made it fun. And it captures how people thought hacking worked and what kinds of things people thought it could do: type something into a computer and take over a city's streetlights.
Hackers was one of the first movies I bought on DVD. I still have it around here somewhere..
I love Mr. Robot (even though it borrows rather heavily from Palahniuk, among others) and strongly recommend it to anyone who liked the movie Hackers. I particularly enjoyed the Hackers reference in that episode you mention. The character's contempt at the technical infeasibility of the data visualizations is well captured as I've probably heard that same criticism a million times by my "real hacker" friends who may have snorted derisively but still watched the film to its end multiple times.
There's three really great hacking movies: WarGames, Hackers and Sneakers.
WarGames really nails the solo bedroom hacker of the 80s but then mixes in the DoD and general purpose AI to turn it into a coldwar thriller.
Sneakers is a clever, quirky, thoughtful adult hacking film.
Hackers though, teenage me ate up the feeling of the hacking culture that it espoused. When I read cyperpunk books, I pictured the environment and characters as places and people who could have come from this world. The sort of irreverent, authority denouncing, cybervandalism spoke to me. The Warez, Demoscen, ANSI art scenes all seemed to sort of be a kind of foundation that created a universe that this movie made manifest.
When this movie came out, I was still telneting, BBSing and gophering around "cyberspace". As soon as I found a writeable folder on an ftp server I'd make hidden folders and upload crap and tell all my friends. We'd stay up late wardialing and playing this soundtrack. We'd telnet to random IP addresses and then get excited when we'd hit a VAX system, just like in the movie.
It formed a kind of social scaffolding my nerd friends and I hung our digital world off of.
It's kind of laughable in many ways now, like many teen counter culture movement. But it still holds a special place in my heart.
I don't understand the hate. Hackers was a really great niche film. It wasn't going for the Oscar but when I saw it for the first time when I was 14 it got me excited about computers. Movie was fun and soundtrack was great. When I managed to compile and use my first exploit it felt like I was one of "them". Made a few friends online that I only knew by their "hacker names" and I even formed a team. Now that I think about it those were the fun times.
I liked Sneakers a lot... loved that movie... never saw Hackers at the time of release (only first saw it all the way through about a month ago).
I don't know that it was particularly more accurate (at least the device in question), but I think it was certainly closer.
Kind of feel weird posting this but a recent show, Mr. Robot feels like the next attempt at something kind of like "Hackers".
One of the early on episodes actually has a character musing aloud if some screen writer is making the next Hackers to incorrectly portray this generations technologist. As they watch Hackers on TV in a hotel. A bit tongue in check, because the show itself is doing exactly that.
It's actually quite good and surprisingly "accurate" on the technology bits and even some of the personalities.
-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Robot_(TV_series)
23 (the German original, not the similarily-named holkywood turky!) is great. Fwiw I love Hackers too, but they are so different, it's hard to compare them.
I also like "Hackers 2"/"Takedown" despite the various controversies (the book being a rip off of another book, the script being a rip off, both book and script being factually inaccurate etc).
Still now that Mitnicks own autobiography is out, while the movie might not be a kind treatment of him, or his friends. I still think it's quite a good hacker film, with some traces of accurancy (think "inspired by true events" rather than "based on").
Btw, the name "Hackers 2" was just an attempt at marketing - the two films have nothing to do with each other.
This movie came out when I was 18 and I very much related to the characters in the story. My friends and I definitely stepped up our "hacker" game after seeing this film. I also bought the soundtrack on CD (that's something you did then) and it was what got me into techno/house music.
Funny side story: I grew up in LA and one of the things we got to do as teenagers was see pre-screenings of movies. This was usually before they were finished and rated, as a way for them to tweak the final product.
Hackers was one of those movies. They didn't change much except that Angelina Jolie unzips her jacket all the way to show her breasts. They cut the scene most likely to get their PG-13 rating, but 20 years later that scene is horribly sexist and a sign of the times.
Hackers is pretty much The Craft for people in my trade: very silly, very 90s faux-edgy, and very fun. Originally I hated it, but then I was a dormmate in college with a skinny Russian kid who looked like he could walk straight off the set of this movie -- and he used the handle "Phreak". (He was into the MOD/tracker scene.) So eventually I came around to see its validity as an artifact of the cyberpunk zeitgeist.
And in a few ways it was accurate: it predicted (perhaps inspired?) the rise of case-modding.
I was an extra in this movie - some of the school scenes (eg. the hallways during the sprinkler scene, which was great fun to film!) plus some interior classrooms too - were filmed on a sound stage at Pinewood Studios in London [1].
[1] http://www.pinewoodgroup.com/production/hackers
I agree and tend to think of it in terms of how the movie 300 depicted the Persians as monsters. They were nowhere near as monstrous in real life but the Greek saw them that way. And the only way to convey the sense of how the ancient Greek viewed them to our modern eye was to make them hulking giants.
In much the same way, Hackers had to do something to depict how we felt about computers at the time. I remember thinking how silly it looked at the time but I also remember it resonating.
Though, I have to say, I was much more inspired by Sneakers a few years earlier which was much more accurate from a visual and technical standpoint.
Sneakers[1] > Track Down/Takedown[2] > Hackers[3] > Sword Fish[4]
[1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105435/
[2] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0159784/
[3] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113243/
[4] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0244244/
I was never that upset about Hackers, but I've had my fair share of laughs at it over the years. I've had some revelations since then though.
If you don't document things yourself, you don't get to write history. There just isn't that much material out there of how things were. In hind-sight I also think it was more accurate than given credit for. Partly because a lot of the things it described, like phreaking, isn't a thing anymore. So technical accuracy is no longer that important.
The people who made the movie to some extent understood hacker culture better than the hackers themselves. They realized that it wasn't the technical details that was important, but describing the sentiment among hackers. Otherwise they could have made a movie about security researchers at Microsoft.
PS. Regarding hacking traffic lights, back in the day you could supposedly flash a light at the same frequency as emergency vehicles to turn the lights green, or at least that's what the textfiles said.
Ugh why them? The main characters in Hackers were teenagers who went out to explore cyberspace and see what was there and hack into it.
They had a "Hack the Planet" message in that movie.
love the film to pieces, never for the accuracy (tho it did accurately introduce many to the concepts of phreaking etc, simple stuff, tonedialing etc.whether technically displayed properly.....oh gosh it's all coming flooding back now)
There was a quote from Softley in the Art of the Title article about the opening titles http://www.artofthetitle.com/title/hackers/ where he says it was a Bridge. Being of a certain age, this totally was part of it. It was for the most part the peak of the modem/bbs days... and there was a transition between the more analog days to the real digital days, the days of the internet - where alot of the hacker culture, and things like the demo scene etc...became diluted. Anyways, never took it that seriously, I mean the characters alone are so out there, but it was inspiring from the whole computer thing to the music (legendary soundtrack, introducing a lot of ravey/UK type stuff to ppl, on the cusp of the whole electronica thing) and just the 90s nostalgia/tech nostalgia - it's great! And come on! Angelina Jolie and Jonny Lee Miller alone...the former going on to such massive success....
I once heard a story of a firefighter that used to love to watch the movie Backdraft just so he could point out all the inaccuracies. This was somewhat of my interest with Hackers in my younger years. Today, I get caught up in the 90's nostalgia. The article makes an interesting point that the movie is "one of only a handful of movies in the cybersecurity film canon". On top of that, I can't think of any cyber-ish movies that come close to matching the era and attitude of Hackers.
Just started watching this show tonight - so far I find myself wanting to like it, but man, the socialist bullshit is laid on so heavy it's ridiculous. :-(
Still, at least it is a show about hackers that shows "computer stuff" in a semi-realistic light. No crazy 3D "inside the computer" visuals like in Hackers or most other movies and television programs about this stuff.
The Gnome vs. KDE bit was a nice touch. As soon as that scene was over, I was already thinking "I'm probably going to like this show". Anyway, I'm impressed enough to keep watching and see how it all develops from here.
For all the shit Hackers gets as a movie, I feel it does capture the zeitgeist of the hacker culture of the time better than just about any other movie out there.
Yes, people forget that Emmanuel Goldstein of 2600 fame was a consultant on Hackers. If you thought that was unrealistic (and OK, it was), revisit the other '95 hacker movie: The Net.
It's art imitating life. Old school warez, demoscene and hacker groups have always had a very "campy" countercultural aesthetic to them. Hackers the film doesn't hold a candle to the real-life cDc. These types of groups are a dying breed, though.
> They said Avid Life employees first learned about the breach on July 12 (seven days before my initial story) when they came into work, turned on their computers and saw a threatening message from the Impact Team accompanied by the anthem “Thunderstruck” by Australian rock band AC/DC playing in the background.
This reads like a scene straight out of Hackers or some other campy tech movie. Life imitates art.
Hackers is a movie that I thought was terrible when it came out (even as a youngster!), but now seems like a wonderful 90s period piece. It snapshots the whole hacker/raver/"burner" techno-counterculture axis of the 1990s really well, and the schmaltz and cheeze is actually pretty clever and entertaining. It sort of makes fun of itself in an also very 'period' way.
I sort of like movies that start bad and then age well.
Sneakers is also incredible. It's far more objectively cinematically good than Hackers, and it snapshots a slightly earlier era in hackerdom. Sneakers is about the time immediately before Hackers, basically before the youngsters flooded in and started hacking web apps and doing 'E'.
When I was a kid: Hackers (watched it around 30-40 times when I was a kid), War Games, Matrix, Sneakers pushed me into being developer, but the most impact on my current life had American Beauty as it made me thinking about working less. Another movie that I can think of is Social Network - It motivated me to on my side projects harder.
Hackers, from 1995. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113243/
It is funny to think about it now, but I can remember clearly how this movie got me so excited at the time. I shifted all my focus to computers.
Two movies, Sneakers and Hackers led me to my career. They're still two of my favorite movies, each for different reasons.
Sounds like we're one sweet OS boot screen away from the movie 'Hackers'.
My friends in the industry seem to like it a lot, but I couldn't make it through the first episode. It's like the sterile hybrid of BBC Sherlock and Fight Club, with the computer plotline of the movie Hackers and DDOS substituted for Gibsons.
If you're watching Mr. Robot now and haven't watched at least the first two seasons of BBC Sherlock, stop what you're doing and switch shows.
Halt and Catch Fire was, I thought, a lot better than some of the reviews I'd read.
because they had previously tested it and knew what each function was doing. this was the Hackers movie with them flying around a computer and poking and prodding random things.
> These guys are elite, their demo was badass, and I've done stupider things on I-40 for no reason.
"Elite," seriously? Is it 1995? Is the movie "Hackers" some type of inspiration to you? I'm almost surprised you didn't go all l33t speak.
They endangered people's lives. It is as simple as that. If you too endanger people's lives "for no reason" on I-40 I hope they get you too.
Maybe there's a stock market hacker flying around on planes...kinda like in the movie Hackers. Of course, in that movie they had no trouble cuffing him without grounding the plane. :)
Time to show my age here!
Others have listed some great, entertaining reads already:
Hackers,
Soul Of A New Machine (which won a Pulitzer),
Cringley's PBS series Triumph Of The Nerds (available on YouTube),
Where Wizards Stay Up Late
Some not mentioned so far (as I write):
The ancient, online Jargon File is a large glossary that captures a lot of early computer subculture through its lexicon. Eric S. Raymond maintains it today, but it originated way back in the 1970s: http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/
"American Experience," on PBS, did a stellar documentary on the origins of Silicon Valley and the pervasive startup mentality there. It's all about the rise of the semiconductor industry, starting with transistors. Watch online: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/silicon/
Dropping LSD was, it turns out, crucial to the origins of personal computing! This I learned from Jaron Lanier and Kevin Kelly, who recommended John Markoff's What The Dormouse Said: http://www.amazon.com/What-Dormouse-Said-Personal-Computer-ebook/dp/B000OCXFYM/ref=sr_1_3
The Difference Engine: Charles Babbage and the Quest to Build the First Computer is a short book but also a fun read. Doron Swade, technology historian and assistant director of London's Science Museum, races to build a copy of Charles Babbage's "difference engine" before the anniversary of said machine; he tells his travails in building it while giving Charles Babbage's story at the same time: http://www.amazon.com/Difference-Engine-Charles-Babbage-Computer/dp/0142001449/ref=sr_1_2
No one has mentioned books covering the dark side of hacking. There are some great reads out there, and infosec is a crucial part of computer history.
CYBERPUNK: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier covers Kevin Mitnick, the Chaos Computer Club, and Robert Tappin Morris (who, somewhat inadvertently, wrote the first Internet worm). Mitnick disputes his section of the book, but it's fascinating nonetheless. Worth it for the Morris part alone: http://www.amazon.com/CYBERPUNK-Outlaws-Hackers-Computer-Frontier/dp/0684818620/ref=sr_1_5
The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage by Clifford Stoll is a fun read. Stoll is an astronomer by trade, and his analytical thinking can be an inspiration: http://www.amazon.com/The-Cuckoos-Egg-Tracking-Espionage/dp/1416507787
The Watchman is a true crime thriller you won't be able to put down. The author set out to write a book on Mitnick but wound up detouring to do a story on Kevin Poulsen, who is now an excellent infosec writer at Wired. You will not believe what Poulsen does in this book. http://www.amazon.com/Watchman-Twisted-Crimes-Serial-Poulsen/dp/0316528579/ref=sr_1_6
The Hacker Crackdown by acclaimed sci fi author Bruce Sterling is a great work on an infamous cross-country bust of many hackers. You'll get a look into the BBS subculture, Phrack Magazine, and the phreaker scene. http://www.amazon.com/Hacker-Crackdown-Disorder-Electronic-Frontier/dp/055356370X/ref=sr_1_1?
And let's not forget gaming:
Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture gives a great history of ID Software and the origins of the FPS: http://www.amazon.com/Masters-Doom-Created-Transformed-Culture-ebook/dp/B000FBFNL0/ref=sr_1_3
Here's where I put on my old-man hat. You youngsters reading this might be flabbergasted, but this is how things worked in the olden-days, before the Internet.
An example, there use to be this guy names Fred Fish who would compile Amiga freeware onto floppies and trade them at Amiga user group meetings. I believe he lived in Idaho. Where he got the freeware was anybody's guess. But through a thin network of people trading software, the Fish disks (as they became known) spread far and wide. I didn't have an Amiga, but one of my friends did, and he had probably 30 Fish disks, which composed most of the library of software he used (there were about 1000 of these disks).
Generally, they weren't transmitted by BBS, nobody had internet. These were literally n-th generation copies of the original disks Fred Fish first put together on his computer and gave out at his local group and to his friends. People from around the world ended up with Fish disks, which are usually reverently numbered according to the release packages that Fred put together.
People used to organize "copy parties" where we'd all haul our huge computers, tower-CRT monitor, sometimes speakers, over to somebody's house and we'd spend all night copying floppies and sharing software and .mod files and whatever else. Showing off games and drinking and smoking and doing all other kinds of crazy things. Fish disks were common sights at these parties and everybody wanted to fill out their collection or get the latest one...which may have percolated thousands of miles and over oceans -- by hand to get to this party.
The movie "Hackers" is a terrible movie from a technical standpoint, but it really nails the feel of this culture. Competitive and cooperative, doing something a little bit wrong, mostly at night. Viruses in those days were designed to spread in this kind of environment of social sharing, embedding themselves in weird spots on floppy disks and taking up just hundreds of bytes.
Modems started to kill lots of it off, and widespread Internet killed off the rest. But it was an amazing time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Fish
Very cool storyline but the excessive voice-over can be a little grating. Fight club meets Hackers meets Men in Black
Here is the full episode (without the hoops) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JpxvvnWvffM
Sure, Hackers came out in 1995. That's 20 years ago. And after that movie came out, if not before, using 1337 speak online was already a joke.
But the article did make the distinction that this is about the "mainstream internet". I kind of agree, but not completely.
> For the first fifteen years of the mainstream Internet, the main way language changed was at the level of the individual word.
I guess the argument there is if the impact was solely on vocabulary at first, and is now starting to change grammar. I think an earlier example of internet grammar would be verbing a noun. It is certainly not unique to the internet, but I remember it being common online in the 90s. It struck me back then as a shift in language that was spreading more quickly online than offline.
The movie hackers. I'm a software developer :)
Haven't seen hackerspeak that forced since the movie "Hackers".
I love it because it has almost everything that makes a cult movie: bad and punchy dialogs, great soundtrack and an unbalanced cocktail of cool things (including subcultures) the director likes (hackers, rollerblades, cyber). It's as if all these things are more important than the plot itself.
These movies always age well. At that time it was lame. Now it's just a joke about itself.
I think what makes it so appealing is that it isn't just an action movie with lots of keyboard action. It's actually about hackers and their subculture. The heroes enjoy understanding new things, share books on BSD and compilers, have an annoying wannabe that they nurture, value merit over superficial traits, and have a low tolerance for artifice. It's as if they came out of a jargon file hacker template.
When I said that this movie is more or less a Carmack movie, it's because of how teenage Carmack is described. He's arrogant, but not so much he'd surround himself with idiots. When he meets other smart programmers at Al's company, he's elated.
So yeah, it is cheesy, but it does more justice to the hacker subculture than anything else I've seen. It certainly has more to do with actual hackers than hacker news does.
For anyone who doesn't get the reference, "Crash Override" was a handle used by the male protagonist in Hackers[1].
1. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113243/
Compared to Hackers (1995) and the Matrix (1999) (and countless others), I could watch this movie over and over again. I supremely enjoyed it.
Every time I hear "RISC Architecture" I think of the movie Hackers.
Hackers. (watch it as a movie, not as a technical reference)
Runners up : Johnny Mnemonic, Ghost in the Shell, Armitage
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/
The Matrix is probably my favorite movie of all time. I've watched my DVD copy so many times that the DVD is wearing out (eg, has scratches, etc.) and I just had to buy a new DVD of it.
Otherwise, I like Hackers a lot (despite the unrealistic aspects), as well as Anti-trust. War Games is another of my favorites. Also, Tron and Tron:Legacy.
Swordfish is also entertaining in its own way.
It's a good film, if a little amateur.
Reminds me a bit of the style of Primer.
Much less cringeworthy than Hackers. 6/10
With the recent popularity of 20th-Century period dramas in the US, it seems like the market has never been more fertile for a film or series about the age of phreaking. It would be quite something to see a movie set around the time that Hackers came out that actually had well-researched, realistic hacking!
Immediately reminds me of Hackers 90's movie and hackers establishing "turf" over public resources.
You are being impatient and at risk of giving up prematurely.
Read .. Mastery by George Leonard
http://www.amazon.com/Mastery-Keys-Success-Long-Term-Fulfillment/dp/0452267560/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1397435380&sr=8-2&keywords=mastery
Get a mentor
Write code every day
http://norvig.com/21-days.html
Ask for feedback
Learn the culture. Watch the movies Hackers. Learn perl, C, or BASIC.
Install Linux on your main computer.
Find an open source project and contribute to it. Even if it's just documentation.
http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/09/overwhelming-force/
I think it is part of the opposite.
I think that the "hacker" ideal permeated American media, rather than the other way around, with everything from books to movies (Matrix, Hackers, etc). It became something that was not limited to the intellectual elite anymore.
Oddly enough, this is exactly how a 1940's Superman radio program is attributed for being a major player in bringing down the Klu Klux Klan. They would air the KKK secret codes as part of the kids program, and it took away part of the "exclusiveness" of the KKK community.
And Crash Override/Zero Cool at 1995 for the Hackers movie reference.
I thought it was so cheesy that it had to be fictional, because of all the misrepresentations of computer interfaces in other movies like "Hackers." This is apparently a common assumption.
It's admirable that SGI was experimenting with interfaces. However in this situation having to navigate such an interface created a very real safety hazard. I suppose she could have used the regular file browser instead - or perhaps the substantially less exciting XTerm.
Witches were burned at the stake, basic human reactions have not evolved since dark ages. So basic premise of somewhat trivialistic movie "Hackers" the one with Jonny Lee Miller holds right - rest of the world is sheep(and it will get worse as we migrate from general purpose computing to specialized devices). Most of the world is made up of unwashed masses that consider computing something that resembles magic - you only scare and confuse them talking all the smart things that they do not really understand or grasp.
I'll conjure up respected Arthur C. Clarke - Third law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Put scared people and magic together and you got bonfires going. This why hackers rot in jail for longer than murderous psychopaths.
But then again I was more of a black hat for most of my life than white.
my 2c
I'm quite the fan of Steve Gibson, infact I use grsec on my boxes, sadly we only noticed this after our initial release, when it really was too late.
If Steve Gibson hears of this, or reads this, my apologies, this was not intended.
(also this was a reference to the movie Hackers, which in turn a reference to William Gibson)
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?
Interesting that the main character in the movie Hackers - Dade Murphy - may well have been inspired, at least in part, on the Morris Worm story. I've never heard any official commentary to this effect, but it seems plausible.
The defendant, Dade Murphy, who calls himself "Zero Cool", has repeatedly committed criminal acts of a malicious nature. This defendant possesses a superior intelligence, which he uses to a destructive and antisocial end. His computer virus crashed one thousand five hundred and seven computer systems, including Wall Street trading systems, single handedly causing a seven point drop in the New York Stock Market
It's a quote from the movie Hackers. If you haven't seen it yet, do it! Just don't hope for realism ;)
I have no idea what this is. d3 meets Hackers, the movie?
Back in the old times there were hackers and programmers.
Programmers had a degree and understood malloc and bitwise operations. They were engineers, but they were not "cool". "Programmer" wasn't a good word anyway, so they called themselves "Software Engineers". They worked for big companies, creating boring software for managing numbers and creating graphs in a fancy way. Yep, there was only IE4 back then and nobody ever thought that you could create JS script more than 100 lines, which does something good, so they had to learn and use Delphi, Visual C, etc.
Hackers were people that understood security flaws and exploited them ( also they were the guys that steal from someone's credit card and similar. ) Pretty much the hackers were those people who dropped out of school and didn't want to go back, because they hated programming complex stuff. This didn't make them non-experts. In fact back in those days hackers didn't need to work for a big company and made money with doing fancy network-routing kernel-hacking stuff for a local internet provider, buying / selling three-letter domains ( old times remember! ), creating and supporting websites for pirated software, MP3s, etc ( Imagine Morpheus' matrix team ... ) Hacker was more like a criminal. ( Remember the first movie, titled "Hacker"? )
Nowadays :
Now I see some different perspective here. You got your CS degree for a couple of years and you see that the technology from your uni is obsolete. Yep, C, C++ are here for good, but if you want to deal with Web applications and web development you'll have to know Zepto, Backbone, Angular, LESS, SCSS and nothing of this is old enough ( and perhaps will never be ) for university.
So in summary ( IMHO ) :
Engineer for me is someone who does low-level programming ( C, ASM, C++, etc. ) and knows what Hz is by definition. Developer (web) is someone who develops some stuff and don't predict Memory flaws and doesn't do flow-charts for most of his work ( Although, he does some testing :D ). Hacker (nowadays) is a Developer on the edge - He is a developer, but also wants to enhance his work into an art. ( writes plugins, frameworks, etc. )
Don't worry, Dade Murphy will clean up.
Next, enter a password. This will be used to allow you to login. Minimum 5 characters. If you don't make it a good password, Dade Murphy from the movie Hackers will come in and steal your "garbage files".
Varies, but a common favourite is:
Time: Nighttime, preferably after midnight.
Location: In bed, with my laptop propped on my knees and waist, and my head up against some pillows.
Temp: Thermostat set on about 65.
Light: Just the glow of the laptop screen, maybe a lamp sometimes.
Beverge: A pot of strong coffee on in the kitchen. Usually a Sumatra or Columbian of some sort.
Music: Queensryche, Motley Crue, Def Leppard, Savatage, Dokken, In Flames, Children of Bodom, Iron Maiden, Testament, Godsmack, Vains of Jenna, Emperor, Nocturnal Rites, Blind Guardian, Iced Earth, Crashdiet, Bon Jovi, Borknagar, Bonfire, KISS, Kix, Journey, Lacuna Coil, Lizzy Borden, AC/DC, Annihilator, Agnostic Front, Armored Saint, Alice Cooper, Cinderella, Twisted Sister, Morbid Angel, Deicide, Death, Van Halen, Voi Vod, Vader, Warlock, W.A.S.P., Whitesnake, Five Finger Death Punch, Exodus, Overkill, Sepultura, System of a Down, etc.
As an alternative:
Place: Barnes & Noble cafe or Starbucks or similar
Time: Saturday, from about noon, until ...
Temp: Whatever
Light: Whatever. I usually sit near the windows, and if there's a lot of sunlight glare on my screen, I roll down the blinds to nix that.
Beverage: a bottle of Fiji water and a venti sugarfree mocha w/ whole milk, sugar-free caramel flavour and no whip.
Music: Same as above
In either case, I may sometimes switch up the music for trance / electronic music of some sort, preferably with no lyrics, or classical music.
If I'm home in bed, I'll occasionally forgo the music and put a movie that I've already seen 100 times (The Matrix, The Social Network, Sneakers, Hackers, etc.) on the big monitor across from the foot of the bed, and turn the volume down fairly low. I basically ignore it, but when I need a break from looking at the screen, I can look up and focus on that for a minute or two.
Interesting, so we're finally getting virtual reality helmets? I've been waiting since the early 1990s. They seemed to be right around the corner and were featured in several films like Lawnmower Man (1992), that Aerosmith video (Amazing, 1993), Disclosure (1994), Virtuosity (1995), Johnny Mnemonic (1995), Hackers (1995).
I suppose it makes sense, every technology seems to take about 20 years to reach the consumer market. I wonder if it has anything to do with patents lasting for 20 years.
I grow weary of reading these "hacking," "cyberspy," etc articles. They always read like a plot of a bad action movie (Hackers, Swordfish, etc) rather than what people who actually work in the sector (IT, Security, even programming) have to deal with day to day.
Just once, I'd love to read an article that talks in specifics, like how they got in (e.g. via exploit XYZ), how they spread (e.g. via hole in network policy XYZ), and what was done about it.
Also, if this super-top-secret information is so vital to the US's national security then why was it in the hands of a private company? I might be misunderstanding something here, but it seems less like information vital to national security and more like information vital to that company's future success (i.e. industrial espionage).
I cannot help but wonder if someone at this company (e.g. former CIA director) made a few phone calls and turned an industrial espionage incident into a national security incident in order to cover their arses.
It was definitely lol'd at but was the only film I can remember that showed how overzealous and paranoid the feds were cracking down on kids just looking for information.
A friend of mine was arrested then for owning the cellular hackers bible which was considered forbidden knowledge. Crazy how far we've come now, you now longer have to go through an elaborate scam to social engineer a telecom employee just to get some basic information on how a POTS works.
Most people I know who were active in that "scene" from that era (even those who think Eric Corley is an annoying hot-air bag) love "Hackers", mostly because of how ridiculous it is.
But I mean, c'mon, you've got Penn Jillette there, one of the best soundtracks of any movie out of the mid-90s there, Angelina Jolie's boobs there, what's not to like?
I was around and active at that time, reading T-Filez, phrack and using those giant phreaker and hacker chatrooms. I did go to a club in NYC that was very similar to the one in the movie which were freq by Patrick K Kroupa and Corrupt, plus other hackers before they threw me out for being underage.
I seem to remember in the film the two guys Razor and Blade who had that pirate broadcast 'Hack the planet' actually existed as well.
It gets made fun of a lot, but personally I believe Hackers had the most realistic depiction of what hacking is like to hackers of any movie. Definitely one of my favorites.
No hackers the movie? No zerocool? No emmanuel goldstein on his rollerblades in that terribad NYC nightclub (which sort of actually did exist).
Well, words do change with the times. The world hacker once meant the guy with an axe, hacking things.
But it's not like its diluted to the point where it can mean "anything and everything".
Now, the original meaning that the parent laments (something like the historical MIT hackers), has been long gone (as an exclusive meaning).
All through the late eighties - nineties "hacker" in the mass media meant the computer intruder. Like the movie "Hackers" and all. Geeks have tried for years to get them to use "cracker" instead.
Later (circa 1998-2000), it was mostly re-associated with the OSS crowd, Linux, the Mozilla guys, et al.
Nowadays, it seems to mean the developer in general (when used casually) and the more "adventurous" kind of developer --e.g one that dabbles in multiple languages, knows his Lisp etc (when used in a more positive way).
Perhaps the only kind of developers disqualified by the current use of the terms are "corporate drones", Java/Visual Basic guys making tedious enterprise stuff and the like.
depends on the movie - old favorites, can help set the mood (your brain already knows whats going on-screen).. documentaries where you don't have to look at them all the time seem to be good too.
Anything new and action oriented will probably will make you loose your attention track.
Sometimes my brain is musiced-out and I need something else in the background. Some that I know by heart: Star Treks, Real Genius, Tron, War Games, Hackers, True Stories, Koyaanisquatsi, Slackers, Clerks. Working at home the idle/predictable conversion in the background sometimes helps.
Some industries or professions are male-dominated because the industry itself has been around for a long time and thus has historically been male-dominated. Weirdly, those industries are probably diversifying faster than IT because they were the first obvious targets for women wanting to "break the glass ceiling" - being the first female lawyer, professor or general in a particular firm/university/country is quite a prestigious achievement, and books and movies are made about those kinds of people (though actually this makes me realise that I'd love to read a book or watch a movie about a woman who does something cool as a software developer - and no, Hackers doesn't count). It's easier to bring external political pressure on those industries partly because everyone regards them as important, and locking women out of 'important' industries was probably regarded as a major problem to solve for politicians. Also, the first women to achieve something close to workplace equality with men were probably relatively high-status women to begin with, and they would have wanted to break into prestigious professions.
Programming and IT has not, until recently, been regarded as particularly high-status, and it was not regarded as a problem for society at large that most of the people doing it were men. But now people regard software and IT as very important - people like Steve Jobs or Aaron Swartz or Mark Zuckerberg or Tim Berners-Lee have a similar order of influence in society as, say, senior judges, politicians or scientists. It now seems unreasonable that, if "code is law" (in Larry Lessig's phrase), the law is being written mostly by men.
I guess those are the political reasons why people regard the gender balance in software as 'problematic'. There are other reasons too - greater gender diversity may lead to greater diversity of thought, and this is generally a good thing; women may bring different skills and attitudes which may be beneficial (though this is by no means guaranteed, and certainly doesn't mean that any given woman is going to do this); purely personally, I've worked well with women in project management, business analysis and other roles and I'd like to see similarly talented women doing programming too.
The question of why Etsy are doing what they're doing is intriguing though. If one believes that sexism is rife, and that self-interest of the firm concerned argues against spending money training female developers who aren't necessarily even going to work for you, then it is almost impossible to explain the behaviour described in the OP. One of the assumptions must be wrong, I guess.
Didn't I hear most of this in the Hackers movie that I seem to rewatch time after time?
Loved when this was quoted in the Hackers movie. Loved.
I wish there was another movie like Hackers. Accurate depictions are boring.
We really enjoyed having everyone out. We'll be having these bi-monthly from now on, so expect another in late january.
I'll also try to do other nice things for members. For instance, we will have a free lottery for an after-hours secret showing of the movie "Hackers" at The Roxie.
The hacking scenes in most movies are atrocious. Remember that movie Hackers back in the 90's? There's a few scenes where they hack into a supercomputer using (at best) 28.8bps modems on Mac laptops and they're presented with GUI's that represent them graphically flying through a filesystem while searching for some files.
It's like tangue says, geeks in front of a shell just wouldn't be sexy enough.
Or how Hackers was a riot because of how hilariously wrong it got ... well ... everything that matters?
Compared to some TV shows, Hackers is accurate. I give you 2 people typing on the same keyboard to try to fight off a hacker. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8qgehH3kEQ
This looks fantastic. The "Gibson" view is also an awesome little bonus for those of us who still love the movie Hackers.
I have been reading HN for years, and I disagree with the premise that there is a "downward slide". For people like me, it might be helpful to provide some sort of evidence to support your claim.
The solution you are proposing also would silence users accounts permanently without any chance for redemption, those users would become disaffected and resentful, and with the trivial nature of account creation here, might cause new problems.
HN is a community, and I think a system that promotes corrective behavior (like the current one) works best when it exerts negative social pressure for "bad" posts and helps new users integrate themselves into the community.
If you've ever seen the movie "Hackers", the character "Joey" is a total noob, and the other characters are constantly giving him negative feedback when he does something stupid, eventually he learns a few things and becomes more useful.
I just realized that this is my fault. I'm not new to the internet by any means, but I'm (relatively new) to the geek world. Now that the jokes on xkcd and imgur actually make sense, and I can laugh at n00bs and answer a few questions on Freenode, I feel like I can identify with the hackers. In fact, I just watch the movie Hackers yesterday and it was awesome. I would have had very different sentiments a year ago, or I would have tried to fake what I feel now.
In any case, this sense of elitism I now feel entitled to, has carried over to Hacker News and I feel justified in snarking.
To the OP: Thank you for posting this. In addition to attempting to being a good human being offline, I will double my efforts to being a good human being online so that you may once again love this community.
1983 I was in College (one year course right out of high school) and we has access via a teletype terminal pool to a ICL 2903 running George. The operator console had a journal file and discs back then were the drum type and rotated to spread the wear and tear. These were not zero erased and you could create a file specifiy the size in buckets of all values how large and zeroing the space was optional. With this knowledge you could basicly go fishing, creating large files and looking to see if it was anything interesting. I was able to get the admin(aka root) password which was 5588. So I did chuckle when I saw the film Hackers and dumping the garbage file on the gibson.
Though I also had great fun with the spv command on george and knowing all the terminal ID's, but thats another story.
It's both better than and worse than it appeared/feared. It turns out it wasn't a password hack, it was a social hack against Apple. Looks like someone recently watched the movie Hackers and wanted to see if that stuff still works. Hint: It still works.
Update Three: I know how it was done now. Confirmed with both the hacker and Apple. It wasn’t password related. They got in via Apple tech support and some clever social engineering that let them bypass security questions. Apple has my Macbook and is trying to recover the data. I’m back in all my accounts that I know I was locked out of. Still trying to figure out where else they were.
The 80s.. hmm how about Jeff Bridges character in the movie Tron? Or the star character in the movie Wargames? If you've seen either of those, the main character being male could have been an influence (the movies certainly were for me). It wasn't until '95 that Angelina Jolie was in Hackers. Besides such movies, the other role models in popular culture would be the archetypical Einstein (Christopher Lloyd in Back to the Future), etc. In the west, engineers aren't held in as high esteem as eg China (where the president is an engineer), at least not until recently (with Zuckerberg as the modern archetype).
There are historical female role models: Madame Curie, Grace Hopper, and Ada Lovelace probably the top three (and for a modern one, how about the founder of Adafruit? and so on and so forth). Showing their wiki pages to any young females, if the topic comes up, is a helpful contribution IMO.
The best part about Hackers is that they hired Emmanuel Goldstein to serve as a consultant to get the technical details right... and he decided it would be fun to completely troll the movie producers, giving us what we got.
Hackers is an absolutely fantastic and hillarious movie once you're watching it with that in mind. Especially since Cereal Killer is either named after the 2600 editor or else just uses his name in jest when he says "uh, this isn't Woodshop?"
I used to listen to the movie on repeat all day while restoring compromised accounts at Blizzard; it kept me going when my eyes wanted to go cross and my brain wanted to shut down from looking at WoW's "the Matrix" all day tracking stolen virtual goods.
I don't see this as nitpicking really. I definitely don't see it as negative. Sure there is a bit of nitpicking but the author seems to have laid down some genuine comments about the movie on top of it.
To be fairly honest, if I noticed something like this I'd crack a big grin and I'd wanna share it, like I just cracked a big grin whilst reading the post.
I think, overall, this a compliment to the detail in the movie. They're using real technology and (kinda) believable commands/code. It's only after deconstructing the scene it's been found they haven't got it 100% right. Most of the time, when someone is 'hacking' at a computer it's a load of nonsense and usually makes me cringe seeing it. I remember one totally shocking clip where a guy was 'hacking' and you could plainly see it was Windows Media Player. Let's not even mention Hackers.
Things like this make me smile and I find them really, really interesting when I either notice them or they are pointed out to me. I could probably waste a whole day reading an archive of these.
Had a fuzzy feeling when I started playing it and Orbital is playing as the intro for the podcast.
And suddenly I was in the 90's, seeing Angelina Jolie during the movie Hackers.
Subtle touch at least on the nostalgic side.
It depends on which 'hacker' you mean. The 'Hacker News' hacker or 'the movie Hackers' hacker? Though I bet you could shoe-horn reverse engineering into both without any trouble. That's a big part of the problem. People pick which part of the 'hacker' label they want to apply to themselves while discarding the undesirable parts. The end result is several related terms and multiple definitions, often overlapping or contradicting.
The movies "Hackers" and "The Net" were released in 1995. "Hackers" used the term to mean "someone who penetrates computer security". The one use of the term in in "The Net" [1] was ambiguous as to whether it meant this sense, or Paul Graham's sense of the word[2]; but 90% of the movie was about security and counter-security. So I'd say that the [counter]security connotation was common usage by that time.
[1] http://www.script-o-rama.com/movie_scripts/n/net-script-transcript-sandra-bullock.html
[2] http://paulgraham.com/gba.html
All I have to say after looking at your site is:
1) thanks for msbetatesting hackernews, 2) did you even test your site for BS errors, you noobs, 3) not a bad idea, but srsly, what's wrong with github (that everyone and their mother uses)?
This website is like the movie, 'Hackers'. I would appreciate an explanation.
I assume the op is much like myself in that I need some sort of background noise, and movies can be a great source. I personally enjoy Anti-Trust as well, and Tron: Legacy, but stuff like V for Vendetta or Hackers where I have seen the movie enough times to know the lines are great background noise that I don't have to pay attention to.
this reminds me of the movie hackers.
"Yeah but don't forget God. System operators love to use God. It's that whole male ego thing." ;-)
While not exactly what you're looking for, I find myself going back to http://nanocrowd.com quite often for movie recommendations.
They don't do TV shows, but their niche categories are usually pretty solid.
It works well if you can give them an example of the type of movie you feel like watching. For instance, I wanted to watch a cheesy, nerdy, thriller earlier tonight, something along the lines of Hackers and it suggested The Net, Antitrust, TRON, Live Free or Die Hard, The Matrix, Swordfish, etc. Exactly what I was in the mood for.
Every time I read a story like this, I picture the opening sequence from "Hackers". I wonder if that isn't one of the most realistic portrayals (of anything) in that movie?
_Hackers_ never really did it for me, but _Sneakers_ was an under-apprecciated hacker movie of the early '90s with Ben Kingsley, Robert Redford, River Phoenix, Sidney Poitier, and President Roslin from _BSG_.
That is a line from "Hackers" one of Angelina Jolie's first movies!
The hacking scenes in 'Hackers' are completely off, but it's still one of my favourite movies. Maybe because of the age it's set in, or the 'feel' of the movie.
I'm a fan of computer interfaces in film across the board. From the intentionally tongue-in-cheek 'Hackers' to the downright unintentionally awful and the occasionally vaguely bordering on something close to reality.
I haven't seen this movie, but I'm actually impressed by what I see in the article. It raises the question, however, whether it's something that actually pays dividends. That is, when you employ any sense of reality in this specific domain, does anyone who isn't intimately familiar actually notice? Is the subset of people like ourselves who notice even worth catering to in such small ways? I know my mother, sister, grandmother, and most of the other people in my life wouldn't recognize if it was accurate or not and I suspect 95% of the audience falls into that category.
On the other hand, small things can make a big difference, when you catch them. They're like seeing a loose thread on a piece of clothing that you can't unsee again. Or a stuck pixel on your LCD. For instance, I was watching a marathon of Roswell on Netflix this week (hey, shaddup -- I've never seen it before and wanted something awful to go along with feeling under the weather!). At one point, a guy says to another who is holding a revolver "you might as well just fire every bullet in your chamber!". Of course . . . a gun only has one bullet in the chamber at an time, as far as I know. Most certainly only one in a revolver. And it has bugged me ever since.
http://movieclips.com/DByG-hackers-movie-kind-of-feel-like-god/
Reminds me a moment from the movie Hackers.
"You hacked a bank across state lines from your house?"
"...Stupid..."
'Swordfish' was 9 years ago and 'Hackers' was 15.
'The Social Network' made me giggle in geek happiness when every glimpse of technical detail the was a legitimate tech shoutout. The following is a screenshot from 'Tron: Legacy' http://images3.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20101111213709/tron/images/f/f9/Tron-Legacy_SolarOS-frame.png
When computers were exotic, any hack could invoke utter wizardry and magic. The creative types behind modern movies are sufficiently aware and sufficiently confident the median American will be aware that the serious shit that happens to make computers work is a lot of typing plain text on flat, stationary screens, and some wonderful dramatic devices have been developed to extract accessible engagement from technical scenes beyond the old attempts at whiz-bang shiny awe (which never really worked anyway). So today you see a lot of bash, because the producers need text, and the graphic artists are like "why not make this legit?"
You know I understand the motive behind Hollywood's attempts to propel the story with flashy interfaces and completely bogus mechanics behind a 'hacking the mainframe', but there are times where attempts to engage the audience go from "an honest attempt to blur the line between fantasy story telling and a surreal experience meant to obfuscate the non-geeks" to complete and total cruft (pun intended).
Even after seeing the movie Hackers a thousand and one times, Swordfish still remains my all-time favorite offender.
And apparently the motion graphics artists who create those interface animations are paid a killing. Maybe I'm in the wrong industry?
I've never really understood why it matters. I appreciate accuracy in a movie or show based on something very closely tied to technology (for example, in a movie titled "Hackers" I'd expect at least a little accuracy on the subject), but Star Trek is obviously not a technical show. It's about the people.
This video is really cool, designing looks so much cooler than coding when time-lapsed :) -- then again, coding looks pretty awesome in movies like Hackers.
OT: Funny how perceptions differs. I liked the movie for its entertainment value, even though it was naive and used cliches about hackers.
Thanks! Now I get what the hell Hackers (the crappy 1995 movie) was trying to portray albeit really badly.
I gave it a go back in 2000 .. I've never learnt so much so quickly and had loads of fun and hair pulling moments. One tip, when you get your system up and running to "init 3", modprobe your soundcard driver and spin up "Orbital - Halcyon" .. If you're a fan of the Hackers film that is ;)
I never done anything else with my build at the time, but I did join the Arch Linux community which is a distro based on LFS with a package manager. So I effectively went from knowing very little about Linux to being a package maintainer for a distro over the course of a weekend.
I've seen a lot of coverage of Zuck as a "genius computer hacker", reinforced by the Hackers-style montage in the film which makes it look like what he did was really hard (oh no, he busted out emacs! He must be a genius!).
Actually, Facebook's core functionality, at least at small scale, is trivial. It's a database of people, with CRUD on top. All the really hard technical problems Facebook has solved -- and there were many, don't get me wrong -- have to do with scaling that system, and those problems were solved long after Zuck was no longer hands-on with the code every day.
That's not to say I don't think Zuck is really smart. What I think he's really smart at, though, is interface design and user experience. The film touches on this, noting that Facebook's exclusivity was key to its early popularity. However, the reason Facebook really trounced Friendster and MySpace was that it was a much, much better experience. Everything worked perfectly and each screen was carefully thought-out in terms of information density and placement.
Of course, Sorkin's narrative for the film is that Zuck is an aspie geek who built a website because he doesn't understand people, so the counter-evidence -- that Facebook's design is clearly built by somebody who understands people very well indeed -- has to be downplayed.
My first thought was "Hackers" (the movie). I am appropriately ashamed :)
From the educational documentary Hackers:
JOEY That was me. That was me. I did that.
DADE You did this from your house.
Joey takes a drag from his cigarette and just nods, with a big grin on his face.
PHREAK What are you, stoned or stupid? You don't hack a bank across state lines from your house, you'll get nailed by the FBI. Where are your brains, in your ass? Don't you know anything?
CEREAL Stupid, man. It's universally stupid.
Google indexed all the sites on the web when they started out, even though this was against 'the rules'. According to the book "The Google Story", this can be compared to knocking on everyone's door - bound to piss off more than a few people, but ultimately everyone benefited (well maybe not Yahoo and MSN search).
Recently Wired liked to a Pirate Bay torrent for a movie that got buried in some studio vault because a legal dispute - "Hackers Wanted". I guess they wanted people to experience that movie whether it's makers could agree or not.
To be an entrepreneur means breaking the rules, and stepping on toes. There's a bigger chance that your friend's app won't get noticed than it is that he'll get sued. When you get successful, that's when you get sued. Getting your content to a receptive audience is a bigger problem IMO than jealously hoarding up content.
All the same, you should probably consult a copyright lawyer.
Some? Try most.
People fear the unknown and sadly the world of technology and computers are still very much a black box for the vast majority of people on earth.
My dad, ivy educated phd, still thinks that coding is like the movie hackers.
I asked my father to teach me basic in 5th grade after seeing the movie WarGames. My efforts were soon doubled after Angelina Jolie stared in Hackers. Since then, everything I have done has been out of sheer curiosity, but I'd be lying if I said these two pop culture movies had nothing to do with my initial motivations.
(P.S. Jurassic Park I was on yesterday. "It's a Unix system." I couldn't help but smile. I was 9 or so when that movie came out, and I remember thinking I should get a Unix system.)
It's the mythos - breaking out hackers as something 'cool' - despite all the dumb hollywood stuff in the movie.
I'd probably argue that it was "bad shit," good times ;)
I know hackers is basically a bad movie, but it does have a special place in my heart. I'm not exactly sure why....
the movie "hackers". that was some good shit. good times, good times.
I've got bets on "god" - I mean, it worked for that organisation in that hackers movie right?
Of course it's possible! Haven't you ever seen Hackers? The same thing happened to the guy in the movie. duck
It's most likely a condition of his bail. After he serves his sentence it will likely be a condition of his probation. I don't think this is uncommon for large scale computer crimes.
Every time I'm watching "Hackers" with someone, I can't help but point out which of those books I own. Inaccurate as hell, but still a fun hacker mindset movie.
When I was young, I thought mechanical engineering would be my ticket to the space race, but after seeing the movie hackers for the 1st time on the engineering floor in college, I thought hacking was COOOOL.
I know it sounds lame, but I have to think that that movie got me fantasizing about it.
So, later on when I was struggling with Statics and Dynamics my teacher recognized that I was really a hacker and not an engineer. He asked how I did all of that stuff on my calculator, I then showed him my serial cable mod for the TI-82, and the other software i had written to make his class easier, because S&D was so hard. He suggested I change majors.
I AM SO HAPPY I DID, and today I have a job where I get paid to design the OpenWeb, and work on side projects. Maybe one will break out.
I still think I owe the campy fantasy of hacking to the movie 'Hackers,' for letting me think i had a better chance of getting a girl via hacking. I guess today i am still hopeful.
You already had the best (Primer) After that, in no particular order:
Sneakers. Brilliant film.
Hackers - I think it's old enough now to be allowed but it was really laughable at the time - in the kind of way swordfish will be almost respected 20 years from now.
Wargames is the Hackers of the early 80s.
Pirates of Silicon Valley is also worth a watch.
Three Days of the Condor is a fantastic film if you're even slightly old school.
The nines is one of those films you'll either get and love or won't - I loved it.
Battle Royale is an amazing film that happens to have some hacking in it.
2001 is the ultimate hacker film, even though there's not much that you could associate hacking with it. The way it's put together, the dedication to realism, the way the special effects were implemented a year before man went to the moon defines it as a hacker film for me, although YMMV.
He still had a copy of the disk, that's how they were later able to figure out what Mr. The Plague was up to, and subsequently stop it.
Hackers is a great movie.
For me, I think working on systems and programming comes down to two different types of music. If I'm performing some system maintenance or deep system work or related programming, I find that techno/dance/trance helps... specifically soundtracks to some of my favorite movies that had techno in them are great for getting the draining mood effect that system programming can sometimes have on me. Miami Vice soundtrack has some great tracks that when listening keeps me feeling like I'm /solving a problem/ when I'm deep into the mix... Hackers, the movie soundtrack, is another good one that I like; Swordfish is another good one.
When it comes to creativity and problem solving at the development level, I find that like others here, either no music or classical music on low volume assists the concentration. Beethoven, Bach, and Mozart, etc. I truly find classical helpful... I read once that it actually stimulates the proper receptors in the brain that involve critical thinking, but I'm unable to find that link as a source. I stumbled upon classical years ago at random I think... I never liked it before then and I'm certain for some it can be an acquired taste.
Cheers
Watch Hackers. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113243/
I've got one I use for demos, since my main work laptop is cluttered with stuff which I may or may not want customers to see, and since it runs XP in "look like Windows 2000 mode" or as I like to think of it "emulate the last version of Windows that actually was useful". It isn't much for eye candy.
I've rejigged the EEEPC with some of the enlightenement eye candy like the Entrance display manager with a nice theme I've designed. It's about as close to the laptops used in the film "hackers" as you can get in real, useful software.
I really like the eeepc. It isn't good for the same stuff as my work laptop is. I couldn't really do any serious work on it, but it's great for doing browser based demos on. It's not a terribly butch machine processor/RAM wise. But it's attractive in hardware and in software if you work at it.
When was the last time you saw the movie Hackers? I LOVE this movie.