Hacker Cinema
Live Free or Die Hard
2007 · Film · 128 min
Part of Die Hard Collection
Directed by Len Wiseman
John McClane is back and badder than ever, and this time he calls on the services of a young hacker in his bid to stop a ring of Internet terrorists intent on taking control of America's computer infrastructure.
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14 comments on Hacker News
>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?
Better than even WarGames, The Matrix or Blackhat? Better than Swordfish or Live Free or Die Hard? Hackers even?
I always considered Sneakers a spy movie rather than a hacker movie, properly sandwiched in a triple-feature between Three Days of the Condor and Spy Game.
Society glamorizes hackers hard. Have you ever seen War Games? The Matrix? Live Free or Die Hard? Mr Robot? Blackhat? Any recent spy movie? What about the multitude of other movies/shows where hackers aren't the focus, but are certainly glamorized, a la NCIS, CSI, Limitless, etc. There's an entire genre of film & television about hackers and they are almost always portrayed as cool, attractive, powerful people with the world at their fingertips.
The movie "Live Free or Die Hard" explores this idea in the context of terrorism - the plot revolves around a "fire sale" in which transportation, transcommunication, and power/utilities are effectively shut down. It is a Die Hard film though so it's not quite based in reality.
I used the gnome theme for the movie Live Free or Die Hard on linux back in 2008 or so
https://www.gnome-look.org/content/show.php/Die+Hard+4.0+-+Matthew+Farrel's+theme+(E?content=66714
for reference this is what it looked like in the movie:
https://nmap.org/movies/diehard4/nmap-diehard4-crop-600x300.png
Have you seen live free or die hard? It was a heist flick and a crappy movie in general.
It utilized scary "cyberweapons" as a plot point but the goal was to steal.
The remote start function appeared the in fourth movie, Live Free or Die Hard with the plot revolving around a "fire sale" cyber attack. Die Hard 3 features Sam Jackson and the theft of gold under cover of binary fluid bombs.
I always laughed at the movie Live Free or Die Hard, but now I'm thinking it's more and more likely that hackers can completely bring down society from behind a keyboard.
Did you miss the part in that Die Hard movie where they have to physically break into a power plant because the network is not accessible from the outside? http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0337978/synopsis?ref_=tt_stry_pl The third stage will be to take out the power grid; this cannot be done remotely but requires intervention at the actual physical plants.
Live Free or Die Hard is the movie.
> Drones are bad news, especially armed drones in the hands of governments watching over their own citizens.
What I don't understand, is why when John McClane was shot at by an F-22 Raptor in Live Free or Die Hard, why there wasn't a big outcry at that time. There were no complaints, no HN threads that I remember, and certainly no filibusters in Congress.
None of the reviews talked about some "dystopian future America", they said that shit blew up and it was otherwise an action movie.
Why is it OK for the American military to use an F-22 Raptor on one of their own citizens but drones are no good?
Mind, I understand completely why people are concerned about why the military could or could not be employed domestically; I just don't understand why people are fixated on drones as opposed to black helicopters, rocket launchers, bazookas, motorized anti-aircraft weaponry, bum-standard rifles and carbines, etc.
These are some movies/tv series that I deeply enjoyed and (some I) wish I had known about earlier.
9.9 Hitchhiker's guide to the universe, BBC TV series
9.9 Contact (1997) based on a novel by Carl Sagan. Very few people seem to know about this movie.
9.3 War Games
9.0 most Akiro Kurosawa movies:
Seven Samurai
High & Low
The Bad Sleep Well
Ikiru
Red Beard
9.0 Terminator 1 (watch again)
8.8 Terminator 2 (watch again)
8.7 Pirates of Silicon Valley
8.7 Matrix 1 (watch again)
8.7 The Italian Job (featuring Napster's original inventor)
8.7 Live Free or Die Hard
8.5 Track Down or Takedown (about social hacker Kevin Mitnick)
8.5 Revolution OS (2001)
8.5 Dr. Strangelove
8.5 2010 A space odyssey
8.3 Antitrust (2001)
8.3 Sneakers
8.3 COSMOS
8.2 Minority Report
8.2 2001 A space odyssey
8.2 Paycheck (2003)
8.0 The Thirteenth Floor (1999)
8.0 The Net
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.
I was going to ask the second part of your second question. The answer is, that by the time anyone knew a "cyber 9/11" was happening, the President himself could do nothing to stop it.
Further, this sort of security theater (or is it Security Burlesque?) doesn't really do anyone much good. It's far better to work toward policy and protocol that improves security a little bit across the board, rather than nit-pick little specific threats. For instance, throwing a lot of time and money at locking down SCADA at nuclear power plants isn't going to help as much as making sure there's a sane firewall review policy in place.
The answers to #1 would probably be: a. Infiltration of networks belonging to Federal Government, Military, and private defense organizations. Maybe other massive-scale breaches of smaller government entities, hospitals, etc. - Communications shutdowns, leakage or destruction of data, etc. It's really hard to tell. I don't believe in a "Live Free or Die Hard" movie-plot "Firesale" scale of carnage, though.
b. If you look at Operation Aurora, though, and consider the fact that a dedicated team of skilled attackers could potentially sit in wait, persisting without causing much trouble, over long periods of time... you see where it could go.
c. Folks who don't like the U.S. but have strong technical skills. As you can imagine, that's not exactly a TINY group of people. They'd also need someone or a group of people who are good at coordinating things.