Sneakers
1992 · Film · 125 min
Directed by Phil Alden Robinson
When shadowy U.S. intelligence agents blackmail a reformed computer hacker and his eccentric team of security experts into stealing a code-breaking 'black box' from a Soviet-funded genius, they uncover a bigger conspiracy. Now, he and his 'sneakers' must save themselves and the world economy by retrieving the box from their blackmailers.
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269 comments on Hacker News
In the movie Sneakers, a whole scene is taken up sending some guy on a date with Mary McDonnell so she could record clips of his voice. Today she'd just need a phone call or his Instagram. It's getting harder to keep up with who _people_ are online, much less organizations and domain names.
Identity is hard y'all.
On the 'help' page, the Cray-like machine from the film Sneakers is listed under "Honourable mentions":
https://www.starringthecomputer.com/help.html
From the site:
> The following films do not appear on the site because I believe the computers they feature are mock ups and therefore do not qualify.
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!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refreshable_braille_display
The technology hasn't changed at all since the 1992 film Sneakers with the blind character Whistler. https://youtu.be/GS3npSv8iuM?t=124
I had just started getting an interest in computers and went to the cinema with my boyfriend at the time who was (and remains) a classic computer programmer. I remember sitting in the cinema with him, both of us laughing histerically at the ridiculousness of it all. I felt like I was in the in-crowd to understand the film was all artefact and fashion, but for all that it captured something accurate about the community's need for belonging, in spite of the anarchic messaging. I feel that hasn't changed much and maybe it's why we still love this movie, along with Sneakers and War Games.
I’ve said this before on hating news but the best movie that stands up is sneakers.
Just imagine somebody has invented a quantum computer with a production process that has a very high error rate so a second one can’t be easily produced.
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 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.
I never realized; thanks for pointing that out. Sneakers is one of my favorite movies.
whenever i hear about a Cray, i'm always reminded of the scene in the movie Sneakers where they sit on one to have a conversation
Not my repo. This is modeled after the decrypting scene in the movie Sneakers. [1a][1b] Seems appropriate to link given the interest in Cool Retro Term. [2]
[1a] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F5bAa6gFvLs [video][3 mins]
[1b] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=coDtzN6bXAM [video][3 mins]
[2] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46036895
If only the CIA had given that guy in Sneakers a Winnebago then the movie could have been longer.
What a loss. Sneakers inspired me to pursue my dream of being a penetration tester.
I first discovered his acting via a long forgotten torrent site.
I used to go onto Suprnova[0] and sort by "most seeded" and alongside a sea of pornography, up filtered gems like the 1992 cult classes we all know and love. (As well as, at the time, a lot of really got big beat electronic albums, but the uhn tiss tiss is a conversation for another thread.)
I had been a big gamer growing up, but found that folks weren't growing out of toxicity, and migrated to being a film/tv geek. More art galleries, less LAN parties, that sort of thing.
I guess he's jammin' revolvers into Russian dude's backs at the opera in heaven now...
I haven't found another film that captures the feeling of blowing past building security, the front desk, and the CEO's secretary to inform them if you were the guy who'd been threatening their NGO, they'd be dead -- and oh, by the way, here's a list of the systems I could own without setting foot in your building.
Nowadays, you're weird if you socialize offline and eschew social media, but back in the day being a hacker was not considered cool or interesting -- if anything, we were scary.
Truly a film before it's time, truly a loss.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suprnova.org
Sneakers is one of the main factors that got me into computing from Mathematics. Cryptography was new to the main stream when this movie came out. RSA was big time. Spy Games, Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid and especially Jeremiah Johnson all bad ass.
I think it is one of the more realistic hacker movies. You can read also about Leonard Adleman's participation in the movie[1]. Adleman is the A in RSA.
Also, Lawrence (Larry) Lasker[2] was the writer of Sneakers AND War Games!
[1] https://molecularscience.usc.edu/sneakers/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Lasker
just a few days ago I had an idea for a shirt and sent it to a designer on fiverr. I was very pleased with what I got back. "Secrets are Power" was my nod to one of my favorite movies Sneakers! Rest in Piece Mr. Redford.
http://bit.ly/3Ip3tr3 link to the shirt if you want to look at it. there is a message encoding in the background.
My first thought when I saw his name. I love many of his movies but Sneakers has to be my favorite!
Oh no - we’ve lost a great defender of democracy and the environment. Throughout his personal life and professional film career, he consistently sought to spotlight government, corporate, and military-industrial corruption while shining a light on the importance of democracy. The world has lost a remarkable person!
Do yourself a favor and watch some of his most important movies that represented his ideology "Truth", "Brubaker", "Sneakers" or "Spy Game".
"Sneakers" is such an entertaining watch for anyone that's never seen it. Well worth your time.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105435/
Fiction, but interesting nonetheless: the 1992 film "Sneakers", with Robert Redford among others. The MacGuffin is a mathematician who discovers another way to factor large numbers.
>This mechanism was defeated in a hacker movie from the early 90s
Sneakers (1992)[0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneakers_(1992_film)
It didn't get much attention when I posted it earlier this week, but I made an SSH movie player:
ssh ansi.rya.nc
(currently shows Sneakers, complete with subtitles)
I really love “Sneakers.” It’s one of the best classic “hacker” films. This essay also does a nice job of breaking down a scene you might not have otherwise noticed, which has some lovely filmmaking technique and subtle sound design at play:
https://slate.com/culture/2012/09/searching-for-playtronics.html
The ensuing despair over how to proceed is interrupted by the voice of Whistler (David Strathairn, Bay Area native), the team’s blind technician. “What did the road sound like?” he asks. “Did you go over any speed bumps? Gravel? How about a bridge?”
I nearly stood up in the theater from excitement. I’d never seen anything like it: the geography of San Francisco turned into a puzzle to be solved.
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).
One of the great things about Sneakers is that the McGuffin's core concept still holds up as reasonably credible 30+ years later.
I first saw this movie in the mid-90s, and it sparked a mild fascination with how cryptography (specifically, RSA) works, that arguably influenced my career path.
Fun fact: Leonard Adleman (the A in RSA) drafted the words and slides used for the lecture scene: https://molecularscience.usc.edu/sneakers/
I feel like those films were sort of "along side" the hacker world. Sneakers to me was more on point.
Plenty of good Sneakers comments, but I was also excited to learn from this article that Uncle Buck has also recently gotten the same treatment!
https://www.blu-ray.com/movies/Uncle-Buck-4K-Blu-ray/342214/#Review
I saw Sneakers when it first came out in theatres and at the time I was in high school and working part-time in a shoe store..
I had learned from the store owner that you can tell so much from someone's shoes, often more than from their clothes.
Combined with that line in this very formative movie (for me), I still to this day can't help but check someone's shoes when I first meet them.
Sneakers is a very popular movie in the HN community. It's a great movie, well written, well cast, well acted, suspenseful, interesting, funny.
It beautifully captures the golden age.
When I was a kid we had a VHS recording of Sneakers, with the beginning of an episode of Letterman at the end. I remember my mom liking it. Fond memories. I need to watch it again.
A couple of scenes:
Carl: We've got customers. Martin: Shoes? Carl: Expensive. Martin: *fixes tie* Look busy, guys. And another:
*after apparently inconveniencing Liz, the group is walking out* Cosmo: We'll call you a cab. Liz: "Thank you. This is my last computer date." *Cosmo stops walking, falling behind* Cosmo: "Wait." *the group stops and turns* Cosmo: "A computer matched her with him? I don't think so." *Liz's face falls as Cosmo's henchman start slowly walking up behind her.* *dramatic music as we cut and zoom in to Cosmo's face* Cosmo: "Marty." *Cosmo turns and runs toward his office*
Related. Others?
Sneakers – The Team's Demands [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41493927 - Sept 2024 (2 comments)
Sneakers Film Promotional Floppy - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38585213 - Dec 2023 (54 comments)
No-more-secrets: recreate the decryption effect seen in the 1992 movie Sneakers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36799776 - July 2023 (257 comments)
Happy 30th anniversary to ‘Sneakers,’ a cult classic that was ahead of its time - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32788136 - Sept 2022 (47 comments)
Cracking the Code: Sneakers at 30 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31378418 - May 2022 (76 comments)
Memories of the “Sneakers” Shoot (2012) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29840802 - Jan 2022 (198 comments)
Sneakers: Robert Redford, River Phoenix nerd out in 1992’s prescient caper - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29620095 - Dec 2021 (7 comments)
Sneakers (1992), the Film - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26111977 - Feb 2021 (2 comments)
Tool Recreating the “Decrypting Text” Effect Seen in the Movie “Sneakers” - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11643270 - May 2016 (54 comments)
Sneakers - movie about pen testing, crypto/nsa, espionage, and deception (1992) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6196379 - Aug 2013 (5 comments)
What it was like shooting the movie Sneakers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4498985 - Sept 2012 (46 comments)
Sneakers (Film, 1992) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1499298 - July 2010 (1 comment)
Joybubbles: the blind phreaker whom Whistler was based off of in Sneakers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1443241 - June 2010 (1 comment)
The link points to a Full HD Blu-ray review. Here is the review for the highest quality 4K Blu-ray review: https://www.blu-ray.com/movies/Sneakers-4K-Blu-ray/343185/
Nope. Awareness will inoculate people. “Authenticating” someone via the mere sound of their voice was always broken, anyway… Ever see the great movie Sneakers (1992)?
The quote is from “sneakers” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneakers_(1992_film) which is actually a fantastic film.
It would be fun to read a detailed writeup for just one successful infiltration. All the small details, step by step.
Anyone have any movie recommendations for a more modern version of Sneakers (great movie)?
Whenever the line „they don’t make them like this anymore“ comes up wrt movies, I think of „Sneakers“ and „The Hunt for Red October“.
I forgot he was in Sneakers! Fantastic movie.
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
Some that haven’t been mentioned yet: Matinee, The First Great Train Robbery, Dave, Ghibli movies (Laputa, Mononoke, Totoro, Kiki, …), Mad Max 2, Nightmare Before Christmas, Edge of Tomorrow, Tremors, Godzilla Minus One, Watchmen, The Fly, Dark City, Passengers, Predestination, Strange Days, WarGames, Tron, Timecrimes, Sneakers, The Frighteners.
I "grew up" on BBSs in the >=2400 baud era. It was about that time, as modems became faster, and as the average personal computer came default with some kind of GUI, that it was only natural that BBSs started to move into the graphical world also. One of the first BBSs I ever accessed was Prodigy [1] when a friend/neighbor bought a bundle at Sears (of all places) that included an external modem and the Prodigy software.
At some point we came across and downloaded BBS lists like Focke's and software like Telix, and realized we didn't need to pay $9.95/mo for access to interesting communities. The local BBS's were way more interesting and niche (and longtail) than anything found on the moderated Prodigy anyway. The pressure of not pissing off "mom" for spending extra time on Prodigy, which had a pay-by-the-minute, access plan at the time was extra appealing even if we could only spend 30-45 minutes on a local board at a time. It was all so reasonable.
But local boards were ANSI and later ASCII and the graphics on Prodigy [2][3] were sorely missed -- which were about the equal of even the best EGA graphics of the time. Games were descriptive instead of graphical. But the local communities (who you could meet up with), the forums, and the price (free) were an appealing draw to an early teen with no money. RIP Graphics BBSs eventually arrived a couple years later but they were few, fussy, and were more representative of the (by then) aging Prodigy graphics than the new VGA and high-res Windows 3.x GUIs we were growing used to.
We had a buddy, the next town over, who was a major Apple Macintosh enthusiast. As a result, he generally eschewed the gross and primitive ASCII scene, but was as cash strapped as we were. IIR RIP BBSs sort of bypassed Macs, but a bizarre sort of Galapagos technology appeared in the form of full GUI BBSs. I remember one client called "FirstClass" [4] that basically just extended the resource of the BBS onto the Mac desktop. It was absolutely mindblowing, and included a primitive ability to request simultaneous data streams allowing you to view a forum and download an image or a file at the same time. There wasn't a good MS-DOS/Windows client so we spent hours and hours and hours at that friend's house blowing up their long-distance bill dialing in to any first-class number we could come across.
As a parallel track, in the early 90s, (maybe '91 or '92) my Mac buddy ended up with access to a dial-up Unix shell through their parents, who had it for work. We memorized the password and ended up freaking out as we learned how to gopher, ftp, and telnet to sites all over the world. The semantic binding of protocols://servicestypes made an astonishing kind of sense.
I found out about the demoscene around this time on dial-up BBSs, but I found the actual demoscene on open access anonymous ftp sites in Florida and Finland and other places around the world. The amazing movie Sneakers came out about that time and it dropped into our developing digital milieu like warm socks out of a hot clothes dryer on a winter day. My friend's father eventually discovered our account usage (because we were blowing up his corporate account bill), and we were locked out. But I knew at that point, that BBSs were now the second tier in the information landscape. Cyberpunk novels entered my life and I knew the internet = cyberspace, not BBSs.
I ended up in a special program through my school district that happened to include access to my own gopher/shell dial-up through the district. I had a luxurious 20 minutes a day and 1 or 2MB of storage to play with. But as a high-schooler, getting access to what I had only known as the realm of top universities or global corporations was thrilling. I learned how to exit the default gopher menu and use the other unix tools to ftp, telnet, and do everything else I needed to connect to what I inferred as other digital pioneers around the world.
I graduated in '95, lost my access to the internet, which felt like the loss of a limb and spent a a year relegated to the local BBS scene, which was still going strong. RIP had stalled, and the Mac gui BBSs were only a distant ideal of what could be. Modems were 14.4 or 28.8 baud.
I found out that some other friends were starting an ISP through some miracle, and I secured a job with them, quit everything else, immediately transitioned to living off of a T-1 8+ hours a day. I carried a hard drive in to work with me, connected it to a spare IDE port in my day-to-day desktop, downloaded what I wanted, and brought it home...like it was a thumb drive. It was a drug. BBSs died for me at that point -- I just...stopped dialing in to them. Very quickly we adopted this software called Mosaic, tied to yet another semantically aligned protocol called HTTP. It just slotted in the mix of telnet, ftp, nntp, smtp, gopher, and others. It was cool, but it took forever to load a page vs a gopher site or a telnet site. Usenet was the vibrant global forum that was the "big-boy" version of the local BBSs I had been using. I remember when Amazon first put up their website and sold only books. I didn't trust sending my credit card over the internet, so I'd find out about new books then go to local bookstores to buy them. For a year, I lived in the future.
At some point we decided to distribute Mosaic, then quickly after than I remember an early Netscape to new signups (along with dial-up sofware, email software, and Usenet software) -- the entire kit fit on two 1.44MB floppies, a version for Windows and Macs (copied by my old Mac First-class BBS buddy). The rest of the semantic protocol internet, other than email died then -- even if we weren't quite aware of it. Gopher became a ghost, ftp lived a while longer, telnet sort of existed, Usenet was a constant "should we still mirror it" question. We would have killed the rest except the dial-up software, email client, and Mosaic needed slightly more than 2 floppies, so we filled the rest of the second disk with more software.
Modems at 28.8 became normal, and we started get requests for 56k and ISDN.
I started using my access in the ISP to create unlimited time dial-up accounts for my friends. Girls I like dated me because I got them internet access, and members of the U.S. Demoscene suddenly could talk to their peers in Europe because of it.
Mosaic drove up bandwidth demand to astronomical levels. It was the Macintosh first-class BBS software realized to the nth degree. We move the ISP to the same building as our tier n-1 provider, drilled a hole in the concrete between floors and got rid of the t-1 by
We dropped usenet, ftp, and telnet clients off the disks. Dial-up software + email + Mosaic became the norm. ISDN turned out to be kind of a bust, DSL was on the horizon and we saw that it was the end of the mom-n-pop ISP because of how the technology worked. We sold the ISP and moved on elsewhere -- but Mosaic + email + dial-up became "the internet" from that point forward.
To be honest, I'm kind of sad to see PROTOCOL-OVER-HTTP came to erase the other semantic protocols. The way in which the browser kind of erased the rest of the internet has caused later generation from forgetting what could be possible over the internet. There's no reason at all that somebody can't come up with an entirely new protocol for a specialized service -- but the entire industry is stuck trying to figure out how to shove a square protocol into a circular HTTP(s) hole. This has allowed browser makers to really centralize and control large portions of the internet. It's like being told you must stick to specific roads when you are standing in the middle of an easily traversable, open, recently mowed, field.
If there is one thing I could will back into existence from OG internet is that concept. The Web IS NOT the internet.
1 - https://youtu.be/FNxKg6ZXax8
2 - https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/07/where-online-services-go-when-they-die/374099/
3 - https://archive.is/vVRQQ
4 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FirstClass
This is the premise of Sneakers[1], my favorite hacker movie, where a pen test team is hired to steal a hardware module that can defeat any encryption system.
Sidney Potier’s character Donald Crease has an apropos line: “There isn’t a government on the planet who wouldn’t kill us all for that thing”
1. https://youtu.be/G_XRqJV2zdk
The movie Sneakers sure would get a lot less interesting with voice cloning. And I’d miss out of one of my favorite/most funny scenes in the movie “I would really like to hear you say the word ‘Passport’” [0]. I cannot hear the word “Passport” without thinking of that scene and then I always have to say “My voice is my passport, verify me” in my head to complete the circle.
[0] https://youtu.be/WdcIqFOc2UE?si=tP2HxVEskl9szuKO
Same. Probably from playing too much Uplink, where calling the sysadmin was the easy way to circumvent the voiceprint authentication.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uplink_(video_game)
"I am the systems administrator. My voice is my passport. Verify me."
(Which is itself a callback to the 1992 movie Sneakers.)
Sneakers is one of my favourite hacker movies. I have always loved the scene where they trace his travel path based on sound. And it was the first time I saw how an interface for blink people worked.
I remember seeing this movie when it came out and, while I enjoyed it, I chuckled at how silly the UI graphics looked. However, after rewatching it years later I really enjoyed it even more because I realized that, yes, the UI graphics weren't realistic, the movie did a great job of capturing what tech felt like at the time.
I just rewatched it again recently and find it a thoroughly enjoyable film.
It doesn't look like this site has done a review of Sneakers yet but I recommend they do. The interfaces are much more realistic for the time (even if the cryptography mathematics do suffer a bit)
My favorite line from the movie - they are huddled around someone's new computer and a character compliments them with: "Killer refresh rate!"
With so many great and much more accurate hacker movies like Sneakers, this one was just so much fun to see evry aspect of hacking amplified to the "X-treme!!!"
Mr. Robot had some of the same vibe, but stretched out a bit at times. It'd be amazing if they could condense some of that into one movie very much like Sneakers but with more modern hacks.
The screenwriters Lawrence Laskar and Walker Parkes talk about the research for Sneakers and War Games on a recent episode of Star Talk with Neal DeGrasse Tyson:
https://startalkmedia.com/show/how-storytelling-prevented-nuclear-war/
And just today there is a post about the Sneakers Movie Promotional Floppy!
Now, from memory I’m pretty sure there is a scene where the visually impaired / blind Hacker can work out the password by listening to the audio on the surveillance tape!
I’m probably mangling my memory of the scene, so please correct me! :-)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38585213
Are there any more modern film analogs of Sneakers with similar quality? Such a hard hitting cast... I still watch this movie at least once a year.
One of the best hacker movies ever. The involvement of Leonard Adleman (the A in RSA) in the movie [1].
He said: "I would do the scene if my wife Lori could meet [Robert] Redford"
[1] https://molecularscience.usc.edu/sneakers/
I love corporate/financial/technology/mathematics thriller film genres but they seems to be a very small niche. Good ones are especially rare. My favourite is "Michael Clayton" (2007), and "Margin Call" (2011) is my second favourite. "Sneakers" (1992) is old but pretty good. "Disclosure" (1994) is also old but quite watchable. Dare I mention "Pi" (1998)?
Someone here mentioned the TV series "Billions" which is my guilty pleasure. The stories are so absurd but the great cast manages to carry it off successfully. The only criticism I would make is that, although the show is ostensibly about a hedge fund manager, it seems to contain almost zero actual finance or game theory stuff. The only occasion, that I can recall, when finance enters the plot in a semi-serious way is the episode "Short Squeeze", which was one of my favourite episodes.
This reminds me of a line from the movie Sneakers, by one of the bad-guy-company stooges.
It was something like, "Remember when computers used to be fun?"
It might be the reference to the movie Sneakers. The quote from Sneakers is: "My voice is my passport. Verify me."
>They show that assuming some adversary can read Threema messages would entail that the Gap-Diffie-Hellman problem can be solved in polynomial time. Since this is something no efficient adversary is believed to be able to do, no adversary can read Threema messages. Hence, Ibex provides provable security, and confidentiality is guaranteed.
The whole point of the movie Sneakers was to remind the world that if someone does solve P = NP Hard problem they wouldn't tell anyone about it for the exact reason Threema is promoting it's secure methods. Not that anyone has solved the problem, but who really knows.
At first I thought this was a reference to the movie Sneakers (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zVgWpVXb64), but after searching it seems Wells Fargo also does this, https://www.wellsfargo.com/privacy-security/voice-verification/.
I almost went crazy a few months ago trying to find the director’s commentary audio track for the movie Sneakers in my iTunes library. Eventually I realized my memory of it was from the DVD like 15 years ago. Huge bummer, it was was an awesome addition to a movie I love.
I have been fascinated by blind computer usage since “Whistler” from the movie “Sneakers”.
The 90’s movie Sneakers with Robert Redford comes to mind. It’s a heist movie set in the California Bay Area and without revealing spoilers there’s a fantastic whodunnit involving the decoding of audio signals.
This would have made Sneakers a much more boring movie.
Sneakers is the thriller movie you’re looking for
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
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..."
Same. My favorite geezer hacker/heist movie, Sneakers, drops a realistic San Francisco phone number (415 area code) near the end. I always wondered who would pick up if dialed...
Sneakers was the movie that got me to download FreeBSD and start “learning Komputerz”
What a beloved classic
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...
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/
Sneakers was the better movie. More accurate, better actors, better plot.
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.
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.
Hackers and Sneakers are maybe the only decent movies about so-called hackers.
Sneakers is in a league of its own.
We've been desperate for more films of this type and quality ever since. Mr Robot was the only thing that came close in the first season.
There must be a bunch of obscure B movies containing authentic tech/hacking/social engineering methods that just fly under the radar. Anyone know of a list?
Huh:
https://archive.org/details/Sneakers_Film_Promotional_Floppy (with inline emulator)
Released in conjuction with the computer hacking movie "Sneakers" (1992), this floppy-based "computer press kit" contained many of the aspects of regular movie press kits, including cast bios, plots, and information on all aspects of production. It was intended for press, and as such is both "locked up" (via passwords) but also endeavored to help the same press get through the barriers as quickly as possible.
The balancing act between technical complexity and simplicity to ensure promotion is quite notable.
The program in question is DOS-based, and was released in 1992 as part of a package of both written and computer-based information.
Related:
Cracking the Code: Sneakers at 30 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31378418 - May 2022 (76 comments)
Memories of the “Sneakers” Shoot (2012) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29840802 - Jan 2022 (198 comments)
Sneakers: Robert Redford, River Phoenix nerd out in 1992’s prescient caper - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29620095 - Dec 2021 (7 comments)
Sneakers (1992), the Film - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26111977 - Feb 2021 (2 comments)
Tool Recreating the “Decrypting Text” Effect Seen in the Movie “Sneakers” - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11643270 - May 2016 (54 comments)
Sneakers - movie about pen testing, crypto/nsa, espionage, and deception (1992) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6196379 - Aug 2013 (5 comments)
What it was like shooting the movie Sneakers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4498985 - Sept 2012 (46 comments)
Sneakers (Film, 1992) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1499298 - July 2010 (1 comment)
Joybubbles: the blind phreaker whom Whistler was based off of in Sneakers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1443241 - June 2010 (1 comment)
Watching Mr Robot encouraged me (a skilled tradesmen) to install Kali Linux, about a year ago. I am currently attempting to pivot into a more-technical lifestyle that is easier on my poor, yet-forty body.
Sneakers was recommended to me by a client, whom suggested my talkativeness (both depth and range) were similar to one of the movie's character behaviors. I deleted the movie afterwards, and ... I have plenty of available capacity.
Re: SciFi dating concepts: I just read BJ Novak's "One More Thing", which is a collection of short stories. My favorite is that of a man whose sex robot falls in love with him... so he attempts to return her (I haven't spoiled anything with this teaser).
+1. Sneakers is the best hacker movie we've made yet.
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.
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.
Well it funded the North Korean nuclear program. They got smart and put in miners that only use like 5% of CPU to avoid alerting consumers spread far and wide paired with exploiting blackmail material against folks who thought they could treat life like it was the hit 1992 film sneakers.
(Did anyone else have to threaten to put an agent of a foreign power through a Starbucks window, or is that a very "this city has no embassies and COVID has made people particularly antisocial in October 2020" situation? Can't wait to talk about that one on a stage not dedicated purely to comedy someday soon!!)
Edit: grammar stuff.
I watched both sneakers and three days of the condor recently. Sneakers is an OK Hollywood movie but I fail to see the reverence it has. The technical details of the physical security systems are nonsense.
Condor is a better movie. It still suffers a bit around the Condor Cathy relationship.
While Sneakers is make believe, condor resonates today. The speech about oil is pretty spot on. The whole idea of releasing to the papers is a movie trope, but the antagonist casts doubt, “will they publish the story” We know today that the press is a propaganda arm of the government and the answer is probably no. They will not publish the story.
That's really cool. Turner's phone company background was a very interesting facet of his characterization. I'm sure it was to many a Sneakers-like experience.
Personally I liked this factor, and the Higgins character, enough that I outlined some fanfic in which Higgins quits the agency and convinces Turner to help him out on various freelance jobs. I thought they made a very rationally-sympathetic pair in the film.
As a random aside, Day of the Condor is Kevin Mitnick’s favorite movie. Mitnick was probably the most famous hacker in the world at the time Sneakers was being cast.
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".
The film score is a James Horner masterpiece: https://web.archive.org/web/20130128143052/http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2012/09/sneakers_score_the_underappreciated_beauty_of_james_horner_s_soundtrack_for_the_1992_film_sneakers_.single.html
It's very interesting because it predates the modern consensus that hacker movie music should be electronic. If it were made today it would be full of synths, but back then nobody knew what a hacker movie was supposed to sound like. So you get lots of choir vocals, strings, and piano. It's beautiful!
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).
Related:
Memories of the “Sneakers” Shoot (2012) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29840802 - Jan 2022 (198 comments)
Sneakers: Robert Redford, River Phoenix nerd out in 1992’s prescient caper - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29620095 - Dec 2021 (7 comments)
Sneakers (1992), the Film - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26111977 - Feb 2021 (2 comments)
Tool Recreating the “Decrypting Text” Effect Seen in the Movie “Sneakers” - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11643270 - May 2016 (54 comments)
Sneakers - movie about pen testing, crypto/nsa, espionage, and deception (1992) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6196379 - Aug 2013 (5 comments)
What it was like shooting the movie Sneakers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4498985 - Sept 2012 (46 comments)
Sneakers (Film, 1992) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1499298 - July 2010 (1 comment)
Joybubbles: the blind phreaker whom Whistler was based off of in Sneakers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1443241 - June 2010 (1 comment)
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.
The Unclear and Present Danger podcast covered this movie in their latest episode.
https://jamellebouie.net/unclear-and-present-danger/2022/5/13/sneakers-feat-mike-duncan
I distinctly remember Sneakers DVD having a fabulous director’s commentary track, where they talk about writing and filming the movie shot-by-shot, however it doesn’t seem to be available in my Apple TV purchase. Does anyone know if it’s possible to hear the commentary track with any streaming service?
Sneakers is just a training movie on how a red team should do a pentest.
Anyone have a really old copy of Sneakers (like on laserdisc)? I noticed in the background of the bluray transfer https://files.catbox.moe/nnywzq.jpg there is this asiacrypt poster and I wondered if it was composited in later transfers over something else, as I think the conference would have been too late for the movie production.
I think sneakers still holds the record for the best number theory jargon in movie history:
"While the number-field sieve is the best method currently known, there exists an intriguing possibility for a far more elegant approach. Here we would find a composition of extensions, each Abelian over the rationals, and hence contained in a single cyclotomic field. Using the Artin map, we might induce homomorphisms from the principal orders in each of these fields that z by f z. These maps could then be used to combine splitting information from all the fields... this in turn would require the standard Kummer extensions that nontorsion form of the Jacobians of the Fermat curves gives rise to. It would be a breakthrough of Gaussian proportions and allow us to acquire the solution in a dramatically more efficient manner. Now, I should emphasize that such an approach is purely theoretical. So far, no one has been able to accomplish such constructions, yet."
Sneakers is still one of my all time favorite movies.
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.
Such a great film. I wonder if the recent TV adaptation was any good. Other fun films that feel like they're in the same vein (or the same universe!):
"Sneakers"
"The Conversation"
"Enemy of the State"
I don't really avoid that kind of movie if it has any depth. It's generally the element of the film that's the sound of tinkling brass though, less substantial and more easily ignored than paid attention. For example I find there is a line-of-no-return where computer tech movies cross into corporate culture concerns, and I find those movies much less interesting in terms of the tech aspect.
Good examples are movies like Sneakers or WarGames or even The Net, where some computer culture aspects are either clearly fleshed out or given attention as their own unique world that may supercede what corporate is doing or aware of. If corporate endorses it, yeah no, that's often more of a morality play.
> It was unapologetically nerdy; it doesn't try to "be cooler than it is".
Who didn't have a screensaver of the Matrix glyph waterfall? What action movie/cartoon/video game hasn't copied or given an homage to Gaeta's take on bullet time? Who here on HN can't pull up a mental image of Trinity's acrobatic kick or the sound of Smith's voice?
To top it off, all of those things I just mention happen in the first six minutes of movie. If you're seriously going to claim you weren't all in the moment Trinity inexplicably races toward a dumptruck toward a ringing phone in a phonebooth, I won't believe you without reading your galvanic response in realtime.
I also enjoyed Sneakers.
> I haven’t heard “Sneakers” used to describe anything computer / security related when it came out or today. Sneakers are shoes.
How about "sneakernet"? I believe it predates the movie though, and that shoes are optional.
If you aged the cast of Mr. Robot by a couple decades so that they're middle aged, and transported them and their memories back in time to the early 1990s, and the whole crew was focused on just one hack, that's pretty much the movie Sneakers.
Not seen Sneakers but i will watch it now based on your recommendation.
For me, one of the biggest underrated hacking movie is Antitrust. Nobody ever seem to talk about it.
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.
The social engineering in the movie is pretty much the same stuff everyone talked about in DEFCON conferences even a decade or two later...and really, still topical today (phishing.)
I think The Box was pretty realistic. It absolutely looks and acts the part of an FPGA type device.
Finding a "shortcut" through computationally expensive encryption is plenty realistic (look at all the wifi attacks, for example), and while they keep saying "any encryption", it's pretty clear they're talking about DES, which the NSA was pushing everyone to adopt.
Remember how in the film the crew realizes that the NSA wants The Box to be able to snoop on the FBI et al? What did the NSA almost mandate be used for encrypting everything government related?
Everyone strongly suspected right from the get-go that the key size for DES was far too short...to allow the NSA to brute-force it. We now know they turned out to be right.
DES was published in '77 and almost immediately strongly criticized.
According to Wikipedia:
> Lawrence Lasker and Walter F. Parkes first conceived the idea for Sneakers in 1981, while doing research for WarGames.
Doesn't seem like much of a coincidence that work on the Sneakers script started not long after DES was published and almost immediately viewed as a joke by the crypto community.
I think Sneakers was a lot more realistic and well-researched than people give it credit.
> Both films have nonsensical MacGuffins as their central element
Sneakers automatically decrypting something is a conceit of the movie to show what the device can do (find primes to break encryption), even if the way they go about showing it is silly. If you had more time and an understanding audience, you could replace that with a scene where they try out the encryption breaking on files, etc, and the movie works the same for the most part if you explain why it's important. It's all understood technology, explained with the limitations of the time.
Wargames rests on an AI which we still can't make and aren't sure how to make or if it's necessarily possible to make. The movie falls apart entirely if it's not a learning computer. The conversing audibly is a conceit to make it more approachable as a film like in Sneakers, but that's not the largely problematic part.
One of the best things about Sneakers is that it doesn't play down to its audience. There's little to no expository dialog. There are flashbacks that drive the plot, but no flashbacks or other artificial constructs that explain technology or terms. Everything is presented smartly, and the writers and director trust the audience to understand what's going on.
It manages to be specific about technical things without feeling aged, even now.
I might be biased since I'm an old 80s phone phreak/cracker/hacker, but I can think of few other examples that capture what things were really like, with social engineering proving as (or more) valuable than hacking, dumpster diving, and a group of people driven more by geeky interest than profit motive (although not entirely, of course). The only other hacking film that comes close is War Games, but only the first half.
I think the exposure is low in comparison to those other films. I’d attribute it to branding and the understated style.
I haven’t heard “Sneakers” used to describe anything computer / security related when it came out or today. Sneakers are shoes.
It also lacks whiz bang effects and violence delivered in The Matrix. (It’s good for other reasons too)
That said these are great reasons to like the film then and today.
(Unless you were in charge of the studio at the time it was released.)
> While Sneakers features a box which can decrypt anything, at the touch of a power probe.
> Both films have nonsensical MacGuffins
Sneakers came out in 1992 and in 1999, EFF and distributed.net brute-forced a DES key in under 24 hours. If that's what a bunch of randoms could do in 1999 with commodity hardware, the NSA almost certainly had ASIC, FPGA, or supercomputer based tools to provide nearly the same functionality much, much earlier.
If you pay attention to the talk around The Box - the concept is that the mathematician found a "shortcut" through western encryption algorithms. That's a very accurate representation of plenty of crypto attacks. For example, a bunch of WiFi attacks are nearly as magical as The Box.
The film eventually reveals that it's the NSA that wants the box...to spy on other government agencies. Also rooted in truth; the NSA created DES with intentional weaknesses, mandated its use for the government and pushed its use in private sector.
I have an extreme nostalgic attachment to Sneakers.
I went to a summer camp for kids interested in computers (was it called Cybercamp? who knows, this was in like 1999, Google was barely even a thing yet) at Illinois State University for several years in a row when I was in junior high and high school. And every year, to cap it off, they’d gather us in an auditorium to watch Sneakers.
So this movie is now inextricably linked up with, well, adulthood for me. We were staying in college dorms, and working in real computer labs, and going to head shops with the computer science kids who were the camp counselors…such good times for a nerdy kid from the boonies. The movie just felt sophisticated to a hillbilly like me—I mean, Sidney Poitier and and Robert Redford having a cocktail party after pulling off a heist, all set to a minimalist jazz soundtrack? So urbane.
Leonard Adleman (the "A" in RSA) was a technical consultant for the film.
https://molecularscience.usc.edu/sneakers/
> but it also features WOPR, a 1980's computer that can speak and learn and reason like a human.
While Sneakers features a box which can decrypt anything, at the touch of a power probe.
Both films have nonsensical MacGuffins as their central element, but Wargames has vastly more technically-accurate methodology sprinkled throughout the film.
Yes, exactly. And them knowing which relay points the NSA had tracked. Don't get me wrong, I think it's a great film, but I feel like because it's a great film overall, technical-minded folks sweep all the technical bullshit in it under the rug. Whereas a film that everyone can agree is hot garbage, like Swordfish, gets ridiculed for having ridiculous crap in it, while Sneakers is (rightly so, I think) given a pass.
I love Sneakers, but you have to admit that the central MacGuffin is nonsense. A magic literal black box that decrypts literally anything when you touch a solder plate...um ok. If the film itself were poorly done, this would be ridiculed to no end.
Some discussion already here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29840294
Discussion of the film "Sneakers" here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29840802
Some discussion already here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29840294
Discussion of the film "Sneakers" here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29840802
Robert Redford. Sidney Poitier. David Strathairn. River Phoenix. Mary McDonnell. Timothy Busfield. Dan Ackroyd. Donal Logue. Ben Kingsley. James Earl Jones. Stephen Tobolowsky.
There may exist movies with better casts than Sneakers, but there don't exist many.
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.
Loved Sneakers when it came out, it was one of the few computer/technology movies that seemed to make an effort to get things right. Or, at least as close to right as you can in a movie.
Side story, the article mentions the Universal backlot and the tour buses that come through. Years ago I was working with Universal on a security project. I'm being driven around with my sales guy on a golfcart. We're in the back seat, facing backwards, with a guy from Universal, and my sales engineer in the front seats. The driver and my SE are dressed super casual, the sales guy and I both have sport coats and are dressed just well enough to look "important". Tour bus comes by with the driver doing their spiel and I see a few people looking at us trying to figure out who we are. I wave to the bus and smile, a couple of people point, and then about 30 people all point their cameras at us and start snapping pics. It's worth mentioning that the overall makeup of the group looks like a lot of people here on vacation from other countries. I can only imagine those people going back and looking at their pics and trying to figure out who they took pictures of.
I grew up about a mile away from the federal reserve they hacked in this movie, and other than the X-Files, Sneakers is the only media I've ever heard my small hometown of Culpeper, Virginia mentioned in. So Sneakers has always held a place in my heart. But it's also the best hacking movie ever made, in my opinion.
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.
I absolutely love Sneakers. Whenever folks talk about Hackers or the Matrix or any movies or shows that feature tech I argue that Sneakers is the best movie about hacking. I feel like a crazy old man ranting about it to some of my younger coworkers. It makes me sad that my handle (mother) on a lot of gaming services is much more likely to elicit a comparison to Danzig than Dan Aykroyd's character.
>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?
The difference is mostly in plausibility of tools and techniques. Other hacker movies let themselves get wildly ungrounded and metaphorical. Sneakers feels authentic, which I suppose also positions it as more of a spy thriller.
I'd also nominate Cloak & Dagger for the "hacker spy thriller" category, albeit it's driven by a child protagonist, which is both unique and highly implausible.
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.
Yes. Just like in that movie Sneakers
Very pleased to see that Sneakers, one of my favourites, is on this list.
It has a ridiculously talented cast, an amusing script, and a terrifically well constructed caper plot.
The McGuffin is (if you'll allow for the demands of a visual medium) not too badly conceived.
Here's reminiscences from Len Adleman who consulted on the math discourse in the film: https://molecularscience.usc.edu/sneakers/
And here's some minor reminiscences from the professionally nerdy actor Steven Tobolowsky (Werne Brandes ... my voice is my passport...): https://slate.com/culture/2012/09/robert-redford-sidney-poitier-ben-kingsley-dan-aykroyd-what-it-was-like-shooting-the-movie-sneakers.html
Sneakers is a great movie. Social engineering vs outright hacking. A lot of what it's about is still relevant today.
Not really the same vibe as what you're describing but I need to go back and watch Enemy Of The State.
Another one that seems similar to the vibe you describe is Sneakers. Hell, even Wayne's World is kinda the same vibe (in terms of their TV show).
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.
Since my divorce, I've found that I get a lot of help out of media like this for recharging my spirit to work on things. Sometimes kids' movies are the best, because they aren't at all about the 'how', but they are about the 'why'. Here's a list of a few that I find helpful:
Tomorrowland
Big Hero 6
Robots (2005)
The Martian
Sneakers
Real Genius
Wargames
Macguyver (80s show)
Cosmos
October Sky
Iron Man
The Astronaut Farmer
Flight of the Phoenix
Something Ventured
Now if I can only figure out how to get a team behind me like in those movies... :)
Apollo 13 (1995) - there are various scenes showing the engineers working through various technical problems (much like gravity and the martian)
Antitrust (2001) - The technical portion is goofy, but discusses the open source software movement, VCs, working for a major tech company (an evil bill gates character played by tim robbins)
Sneakers (1992) - Personally, one of my favorite movies of all-time. Code breaking, old school hacking (think wargames). I think the best description i've heard of it is an 1970s caper movie. You will never see a better cast in a movie. Robert Redford, Sidney Poitier, Ben Kingsley, James Earl Jones, Dan Ackroyd, River Phoenix, David Strathairn, Mary McDonnell all play major roles
Mythic Quest (2020) - Apple tv show about creating video games and running a tech company
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.
> Counterpoint: _Sneakers_: the thinking person's hacking movie.
Lacks the soundtrack. I always work to music to help focus.
> 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.
Oh man happy to help! I hope you enjoy it, your comment made me list Wargames and Sneakers on my watchlist, haven't seen those in a while.
Condor and Blackhat are actually new to me so watching that first!
Mr Roboto was good to me, I love BD Wong so hard- I don't know if anyone out there has seen Focus (Will Smith movie) but he is Fantastic and steals the movie though he's only in it for 10 minutes.
> Man the good ol days. I remember when the movie Hackers came out
I had to look it up; I can't believe I have never heard of this movie, I should have been interested back then. Wargames (1983) was the film that my computer friends and I associated with our activities, and I was disappointed for years after that nothing came close to it, maybe Sneakers (1992), and 3 Days of the Condor (1975), though that is more of a spy intrigue genre, but it included a fascinating introduction to phreaking. More recently, I enjoyed Blackhat (2015) and Mr. Robot also scratched that itch. I'm going to look for Hackers (1985). Thanks for mentioning.
It's never said explicitly, but I believe the McGuffin in the movie Sneakers implies its inventor has either found a proof of P=NP or has implemented an algorithm that would imply a proof of P=NP.
This idea has been around for decades. Surprised that nobody has mentioned this film.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneakers_(1992_film)
Whistler, Mother, and Carl investigate the box, finding it capable of breaking the encryption of nearly every computer system.
Sneakers is about perfect for those kinds of movies. The major hacking facets are all represented by various specialists and it is all just barely plausible.
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.
Well, the most obvious problem for the average lay person is that the movie "Sneakers" would suddenly gain relevance again, and most of the cast are too old (or too dead) to make a sequel.
Also, that whole thing about lots of computer encryption tech suddenly being effectively insecure.
A look at the film for the 25th anniversary a few years back
https://www.metafilter.com/119793/Slate-celebrates-the-20th-anniversary-of-Sneakers
The technology was not very fanciful if at all. If you think that movie was ahead of its time in terms of exhibiting what was possible, then might I suggest Three Days of the Condor (1975), and of course the ever popular Sneakers (1992). The former is far more fascinating given its age, although I suspect less so for someone who was in the middle of their computer science/computer engineering/signals intelligence/cryptanalysis career during that era.
The things that governments are capable of doing are rarely secret. They leak out over time, and you'll see them portrayed in niche culture long before they become undeniable public knowledge. For example, off the top of my head, the satellite photos published amidst the 1998 missile strike of the Al Shifa pharmaceutical factory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Shifa_pharmaceutical_factory) are the types of evidence that inform the private sector, including authors and screenwriters. I'm sure similar photos and descriptions were publicly available much earlier than that, so the generic ability to track people on rooftops via satellite (notwithstanding all the little gotchas that aren't fit for storytelling) was more than plausible at that point, especially considering that then as now the military doesn't typically release material that discloses their best capabilities.
I used to have a link to a pre-9/11, accidental admission in a magazine interview by a general about the Navy's ability to tap undersea fiber optic cables. Though at that point I think it was already assumed the U.S. performed such missions--certainly by Russia and China, but even among intelligence geeks--which is probably why he didn't think much of the comment. (IIRC, the topic was a submarine designed for tapping undersea cable, though at that time it was only "public knowledge" that it could tap traditional copper cables, not fiber optic. He impliedly--only barely shy of explicitly--admitted that it also tapped fiber optic cables.)
What's fanciful is the degree and extent of corruption assumed in these narratives. People seem to think it's more plausible simply because of the true-to-life character of the technological portrayals. But NEVER forget that the principal aim of movies is to elicit strong emotions by leveraging common fears[1] and desires, suspending disbelief by deftly mixing fiction with non-fiction. And I don't mean to preach; it's definitely a life-long struggle for everyone to differentiate culturally constructed narratives from reality.
[1] E.g. Big Brother, the particularized fear of powerlessness that comes when mixing it with political cynicism.
Have you seen the movie Sneakers? That one gets it so right.
Setec Astronomy: https://slate.com/culture/2012/09/sneakers-trevor-paglen-on-how-the-movie-might-have-influenced-a-real-life-u-s-intelligence-agency.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.
My favorite “hacker” movie is “Sneakers”.
I share your sentiment. Back in the 1970s (when I was a kid) through the 1990s, getting a new piece of hi-tech gear was just plain fun.
Modern hardware is even more awesome, but it seems like almost every product that interests me is tarnished by manufacturers hell-bent on recurring revenue streams, or gathering as much of my personal information as possible to increase their profits.
I make a living as a software developer, but I'm coming to hate so much about modern technology. It reminds me of a line from the movie Sneakers [0], where some anonymous corporate programmer says to another, "Remember when computers used to be fun?" (Or something like that. I saw the movie 25 years ago.)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneakers_(1992_film)
Also a good film, Sneakers from the early 90s.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105435/
>But criminals are usually just dumb in regards to this
I'm reminded of the film Sneakers:
Marty: Organised Crime?
Cosmo: Don't kid yourself, its not that organised.
Reminds me of my favorite 'hacking' movie Sneakers: "Hi, my name is Werner Brandes. My voice is my passport. Verify Me."
I started my career at Bell Labs in the 80's and one engineer there made a huge impact on me. I learned more from him that any other single person I have worked with since. He suffered from progressive myopia so he had a rig with a camera and a big screen and a huge monitor. He coded slower than everyone else, but in a way, that was his secret power because his code almost never failed in testing. Also, he was brilliant and I learned more about hardware and software from him that I did in Masters EE program. Also, he had this insight about the balance between when to use hardware and when to use software that I think is somewhat lacking today (discussion for another day). A lot of people have said that he was the inspiration for the character in the movie Sneakers (Whistler) could be he was really well know but passed away some time ago. I recall a time when we had a big meeting with a lot of executives and he had long hair and a beard and after the meeting one of the big wigs said to me "who is the guys that looks like Jesus, he is a genius". Sorry that I am going on a bit, I cannot even begin to understand what you are going through, but I can tell you that you should not underestimate the impact you can have on others. I wish I had better words here, I wish I knew more about what to suggest to help you technically, but all I know is that someone dealing something with something similar to you meant a great deal to me personally and professionally. Best wishes.
You might want to check out some things like
https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/bh0vm0/emacspeak_how_the_blind_use_emacs/
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/118984/how-can-you-program-if-youre-blind
and also contact some individual programmers with visual impairments.
I don't have particular expertise in this area but I remember meeting a completely blind software developer in 1995 or 1996 (when presumably the tools available were much more limited!). He said that he had successfully pursued this career for a number of years already at that time. However, I think the things he was working with would be things that you'd consider more to be backend engineering.
I also know a computer scientist who is blind and who has continued researching, publishing, and teaching, but as he works in theory, his work might also feel more backend-like.
> - Besides a screen reader, what are some of the best tools for building software with limited vision?
If you decide to learn Braille well, Braille terminals are still a thing:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refreshable_braille_display
(You might have seen one used in the movie Sneakers!)
Some fluent Braille readers can use these terminals at very high speeds (although people who use screen readers also often get used to using their screen readers at extremely high speeds).
> - Are there blind frontend engineers?
I know you might not want to pigeonhole yourself and work specifically on disability-related projects, but a lot of companies are trying to ensure accessibility of their web sites and so are interested in having developers with specific disabilities to help make sure that that works out properly. I believe there are consultancies of people with specific impairments who develop (and test) UI for accessibility to users with similar disabilities.
At least the movie Sneakers was serious about the math: http://world.std.com/~reinhold/math/sneakers.adleman.html
Len Adleman was listed as an advisor in the credits of the movie "Sneakers". Is that a connection from the math world to the Bacon world?
Was this the device that Whistler used in the movie Sneakers? I guess that was more of a keyboard or monitor though...
I'm always reminded of Dan Aykroyd's line in the 1992 movie "Sneakers". His character, Mother, was huge on conspiracy theories.
"Cattle mutilations are up."
Sneakers tops my list. The macguffin (decryption chip) is kind of lame, but the variety of hacking and social engineering tricks in the movie makes it entertaining.
Sneakers is the best hacker film ever made. Hackers was maybe number 2 in my book.
This comment encapsulates the plot, events and a monologue of the movie Sneakers made in the early 90s.
You show it to someone in Hollywood and they then go and make the film 'Sneakers', probably. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105435/
Nobody yet has mentioned a film that was premised on the invention of a black box "capable of breaking the encryption of nearly every computer system".
IIRC the movie plot was somewhat convoluted and confusing and I don't have any desire to see it again. I'm bringing it up because there are a number of "what would you do if" posts here.
In the end, the "sneakers" use the box to cause: the sudden bankruptcy of the Republican National Committee, and the simultaneous receipt of large anonymous donations by Amnesty International, Greenpeace, and the United Negro College Fund.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneakers_(1992_film)
This immediately makes me think of the movie Sneakers https://www.reddit.com/r/MovieDetails/comments/9c0aya/in_sneakers_the_blind_character_whistler_can_be/
Sneakers worked well because it had A-list actors playing up the social engineering aspect, which an A-list actor can do. It had comparatively little meditation on the hardware and technical aspects and from a plot and longevity perspective I think that was a particular strength of the movie.
Coould be the opening bank scene in the movie ‘Sneakers’...
I'm reminded of the bit in Sneakers (1992; the other canonical hacker film) where the hackers have to produce a recording of their target saying "my voice is my passport, identify me" to defeat such a system. They do this by taping his conversation and pasting the words together.
Someone has seen the movie sneakers! The blind guy did this in that movie.
Sneakers is a fun movie based in computer security and pen testing (and classic government conspiracies).
The former user could of potentially enabled the iOS setting to not require attention for faceID.
And from my spy movie expertise:
Turn the heater in the room full blast to achieve the needed thermal level (The Saint, Sneakers)
A Sneakers quote. Worth watching for Hollywood's take on the early 90s version of our current social media/social engineering quagmire.
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.
Here's a good starting point to learn more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-quantum_cryptography
Also, there's some related discussion in the amazing cinematographic masterpiece that is Sneakers: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105435/
It strikes me how prescient the movie "Sneakers" was
I was kind of disturbed that GitHub publishes every user's public key.
https://developer.github.com/v3/users/keys/
This is a different situation and public keys are not directly analogous to password hashes: there isn't a reliable way of cracking public keys in the same sense that there's a semi-reliable way of cracking hashes. But it was still strange and uncomfortable to me that they would reveal this "target" (and if there were specific key generation bugs, like RNG seeding errors, people might actually be able to crack a few of them and know that they had suceeded).
Relatedly, I was thinking about the magic crypto-cracking device in the movie Sneakers. Once they had it, they could immediately use it to log on to random network-connected services, defeating the authentication. So, how is that supposed to work? How do they automatically know what credentials would be accepted for a particular service? Are there common network authentication protocols based on public-key cryptography that have the property that the verifier tells the prover the public keys that it trusts?
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.
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 movie "Sneakers" made this point in 1992:
"Cosmo: There's a war out there, old friend. A world war. And it's not about who's got the most bullets. It's about who controls the information. What we see and hear, how we work, what we think... it's all about the information!
The world isn't run by weapons anymore, or energy, or money. It's run by little ones and zeroes, little bits of data. It's all just electrons."
One of the great underrated films of all time. Sneakers
I assume from your comment you haven't watched the movie 'Sneakers'. You should definitely check it out!
I've never seen Patlabor. Sounds like I should.
And Sneakers, asides from the magic, encryption-breaking MacGuffin, is some of the most realistic hacking in movies. What's the preferred tactic of these tech geniuses? Basic social engineering. Sure, they know a lot of other tricks, but why figure out a clever way through the badge system if a cake and some birthday balloons will work just as well?
Sneakers is such a great movie, particularly the scene using sounds heard to track the route of a vehicle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KuIheGaiFLM
Obviously watch the whole movie, but the clip gives the gist of the high quality of the script.
This doesn't appear to be so much a curated list of much-watch movies so much as a list of all movies about hacking ever.
Here is my curated list of movies ever hacker and cyberpunk enthusiast must watch:
* Sneakers
* Ghost in the Shell
* Tron
Why is Tron there? Because the screenwriter loosely based the character around her husband. Who was her husband? Alan Kay. Tron's protagonist is Alan Kay.
Yeah, that dig is unfair. Sneakers didn't have a universal key that broke all crypto. They had a device that could break a certain kind of crypto that happened to be used by the US (in the movie, the Russians state that it doesn't affect their encryption).
I always assumed the original script called it a DES cracker but the studio people dumbed it down. But sneakers is unique among hacker movies in that it needs very little retconning to make sense from a technical perspective.
Indeed 'Sneakers' is a good hacker movie by all means. It even give us a Perl script at some point AFAIK.
There is another movie called "Travelling Salesman" where a few mathematicians solve P vs NP and explain the possible implications to a federal agent who wants to exploit their breakthroughs.
ps. Awesome script to play hacker while people is looking at your shell https://github.com/bartobri/no-more-secrets
>Sneakers ridiculously featured a universal key that can break all crypto
That's not ridiculous at all: go back and re-watch the film. If the MacGuffin did what the film said it did, it would effectively act as a universal key.
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.
This is literally the plot of Sneakers, the 1992 hacking movie. I would hope voice signature systems are beyond "Hi, my name is Werner Brandes. My voice is my passport. Verify Me."
Sneakers is one of my favorite movies.
I don't believe that the scene you're thinking of happens. Whistler is pretty impressive, but even he can't hear the difference between keystrokes.
The other cool things that Whistler does are figure out where Martin was taken by the sounds that Martin remembers, and figure out what the various rooms in the building are via telescopic microphone ("Emergency exit stairwell." "How can you tell" "I can hear the emergency exit light batteries recharging") :D
That's a lot of detail, which I'm not familiar with as a causal observer, but its irrelevant.
The slides show the capabilities of one layer of the onion, but its surely naive to assume that's everything?
A total mathematical factoring break is a holy grail. I mean, they made a hollywood movie about this! In the 90s!
Sneakers: "There isn't a government on this planet that wouldn't kill us all for that thing." Obviously, that's a movie, not real life, but the sentiment is valid.
Ha, this is amazing. Reminds me of movies using seemingly far-fetched premises at their time.
Sneakers - in the beginning when they're spying on Dr. Janek, the team can't see the entire password he types, but Whistler hears the missing keystroke.
And related to the original post, The Dark Knight has Batman using sonar from everyone's mobile phones to detect where the Joker's henchmen were and here we are with wifi routers (and potentially other 2.4 GHz devices).
I feel you on that. Tron and Sneakers are both more fun, and Sneakers captures computing more accurately.
On the culture side, I don't know of any major films that capture computing culture. Charles Stross's Laundry series does a better job than most (You can still read The Atrocity Archives without a backround in computing, but you'll get this nagging feeling you're missing something), seeing as Stross is up to his eyeballs in computing. It's also the first piece of fiction I know of to reference Symbolics. And of course, the protagonist's name is Bob Oliver Francis Howard. Because that book just couldn't get any more in-jokey. But, you know, in a good way.
"You" and "Daemon" also capture bits of computing fairly well.
I really enjoyed that movie! For reference http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105435/
"I want peace on Earth and good will toward men." -- Whistler
Sneakers was just as much about social engineering as it was its technical nature. I love this movie. I think I must listen to is as I work a few times a month.
One thing I took away from this movie is Whistler able to solve pieces while listening. It showed me that I should always listen first and interject my input after :-)
Sneakers came out before I was even born but now I feel compelled to watch this old, and perhaps cringe-worthy hacker movie. Hope it does not disappoint.
I haven't seen the movie, so I went looking for a movie named Sneakers that was released this year.
It turns out that it was just CGI /so advanced/ that it took humanity 24 years to reproduce in real time.
Very cool! My favorite movie.
See also: https://github.com/jtwaleson/decrypt although yours much more faithfully recreated the Sneakers scene.
It's strange that this is all coming up just now. The NSA has had this technology since at least 1992 when it was revealed in the gripping documentary movie "Sneakers".
This is exactly the kind of thing they would have put in old hacker movies like Sneakers that I'd always laugh at. I live in the future.
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.
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 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.
Sneakers is an all time favorite of mine. If you like heist movies, I think you will find it to be a very satisfying example of the genre.
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 is a better film: better written, better acting, and better expression of the motivations of real people... but it also falls down on technology.
Sneakers is not only the best hacker movie (not that there are a lot to choose from), but its themes are eerily prescient -- secrecy, encryption, mass surveillance, control over information.
I haven't revisited it since Snowden happened, but I really ought to.
Eh. Sneakers' central plot point was a magic box that could crack all encryption. It was otherwise a great movie, and many of the physical "facility hacking" scenes were quite fun, but the magic box that breaks all ciphers was more than improbable. Maybe you could say it was a quantum computer :).
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/
Sneakers has held up amazingly well to the passage of time. It didn't do anything impossible, just highly improbable.
If you haven't rewatched it in a while, it's worth watching again.
The earlier film, Sneakers [1] had some of the same ethos embedded, especially in the climax.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneakers_(1992_film)
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.
Two movies, Sneakers and Hackers led me to my career. They're still two of my favorite movies, each for different reasons.
Sneakers is wildly entertaining on many levels. Plus it was an early hacker movie which was cool. Primer is trippy, one of those rare movies where you will instantly watch it again after the first viewing. Then you'll google the plot and read for an hour and watch it a third time in the same day. It works though.
Sneakers is such a great film and so very underrated.
Does the movie "Sneakers" count?
Sneakers - one of the best computer movies when I was a kid. I used to watch it over and over again. Good times. Must go find it somewhere. That movie probably had an impact on actually getting into the business later on.
Yeah... I was hoping there were going to be some comments about how other people loved the movie Sneakers.[1] Sigh.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_XRqJV2zdk
This could also be said about passwords: I have bad memory I can't remember a long complex password.. Point being that there are issues with all forms of security. Bullet proof glass for example can be taken out by an RPG this reasoning is only detrimental to the advancement, innovation, and implementation of layers of security to protect consumers. I think it's neat and my take a way from the article is that the author felt comforted by the fact that at least someone at the bank appreciated the movie sneakers and was attempting to increase security measures through innovation.
Just watch "Sneakers" instead of that drivel of a movie.
I love the company name in the screenshot "Setec Astronomy" - it's a reference to the movie "Sneakers". It is an anagram for "too many secrets".
Hacker's is mostly like a children's movie. Matrix on the other side is excellent IMHO.
Another good movie on the topic of computers is 'The traveling salesman' and 'Sneakers'.
I disagree. Symantec is one of the few companies on the planet that has had to deal with this exact situation before: Stuxnet.
By late 2010, Synametic had come to the conclusion that Stuxnet was most probably a joint US/Israeli malware project, designed to disrupt Iran's quest for a nuclear bomb. [1]
Just try and imagine that the gravity of that moment. They had stumbled into an international covert action involving weapons of mass destruction. I mean the closest thing I can even compare this with is fiction (the "too many secrets"/"using the magic box" scene in the movie Sneakers). But this wasn't fiction, and Symantec researchers and management had to decide what to do.
They could have just shut up and said nothing. After all they were a US company, forbidden by law to even to do business in Iran. But they didn't do that. Rightly or wrongly, they published their findings in a whitepaper and told the world about it.
I think Synmantec has earned the benefit of the doubt when dealing with state sponsored malware.
[1] http://www.wired.com/2011/07/how-digital-detectives-deciphered-stuxnet/all/
Matasano Security - Chicago. New York City. Sunnyvale. Job Title: Application Security Consultant
Have you ever seen the 1992 film Sneakers? Near the start, we see Martin Bishop (Robert Redford) close out a bank account, and take the proceeds to the managers. He pretty tersely says something like:
"Gentlemen, your communication lines are vulnerable. Fire exits need to be monitored. Your rent-a-cops are a tad undertrained. Outside of that, everything seems to be fine. You'll get our full report in a few days. But first, who's got my check?""
Cut to a bank secretary, writing Martin a check.
"So, people hire you to break into their places... ...to make sure no one can break into their places?"
Whenever I'm asked to explain what we do at Matasano, this scene comes to mind. Our work is the digital equivalent; breaking applications so they can be made stronger and more resilient to attack, inoculating the world's software like a binary flu shot.
Modern applications are a lot like the bank in the movie. Authentication protects the front door, much like the bank's cameras and guards. Encryption often protects sensitive data, similar to how steel lined walls protect a bank vault. Communication protocols convey information in and out, like armored cars ferrying cash to and fro. Finding the application's 'communication lines', 'fire exits', and 'rent-a-cops' is our goal. As Application Security Consultants we seek the overlooked, the neglected, the unexpected flaws in an application's code. Like Martin, we show how these weaknesses can lead to overall failure of the application, and we do this so it can be improved.
Later in the movie, Cosmo (Ben Kingsley), a villainous ex-con says: "The world isn't run by weapons anymore, or energy, or money. It's run by little ones and zeroes, little bits of data. It's all just electrons." In 1992, that might've been hyperbolic but it's becoming more true every day.
If being part of ensuring the systems we all rely on continue to function safely and reliably, we should talk. If working with smart people on the cutting edge of technology excites you, we should talk. If diving deeply into a wide variety of technologies and facing new challenges daily appeals to you, we should talk. If tearing apart application code and making it do things that its creators didn't intend is fun for you, we should talk.
You can get a taste for the sorts of things we do at www.microcorruption.com and www.cryptopals.com.
Reach out to us at careers@matasano.com or by visiting our web site.
My father is a big fan. I saw some "enhance" sequence once and decided no thanks. I was at his house and this episode came on. cringe It seems like there should be a reasonable middle ground between NCIS and reality. Sneakers was pretty good. :)
The movie "Sneakers" keeps coming to mind.
"Too many secrets" indeed.
Sneakers is a one of my favorite old movies. Have to give props to the above mentioned Pirates of Silicon Valley also.
Yes! The war dialling in this movie was great, as was the hacking (or 'cracking' if you're gonna be precious about it). Also there's a scene where David needs to make a call without change and hacks a payphone using a technique that worked IRL.
Arguably one of the only two truish-to-life hacker movies ever made (the other of course being Sneakers, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105435).
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?
I found Sneakers a little disappointing.
Don't get me wrong, it was a pretty decent 90s thriller. Very charming. But the way it was described made it out to be as if it portrayed complex cryptographic and technical concepts.
All I really saw was an anagram and some idealized substitution cipher. Fun film, misleading summary.
Maybe add the movie Sneakers and maybe Swordfish?
This whole thing has reminded me how prescient the movie "Sneakers" was.
"There's a war out there, old friend. A world war. And it's not about who's got the most bullets. It's about who controls the information. What we see and hear, how we work, what we think... it's all about the information!"
"The world isn't run by weapons anymore, or energy, or money. It's run by little ones and zeroes, little bits of data. It's all just electrons."
I grew up in the Bush v1- Clinton era with Operation Sundevil, the Steve Jackson Games raid, NSA clipper chip, DMCA, Communications Decency Act, PGP legal battles, etc. The movie Sneakers from 1992 was a great example of the NSA paranoia that existed at the time.
The result? Won some, lost some, and the world moved on.
What's different now is that this surveillance is legal at scale because the majority of the populace wants it to be. They're more afraid of terrorists than having privacy. Look at the polls: Hacker News (and techies in general) seem to be in quite a bubble in this regard.
We have more clout than we did in the 90s, but the difference now is that there's a big Terrorism counter argument to anything we say. A majority of the USA prefers to have the electric eye of Sauron to watch over them, because the alternative -- more freedom that might lead to more terror attacks -- is too scary for them to accept. In that sense, the terrorists have won.
There are two viable paths going forward, in my view: (a) Work to convince people they want privacy, and don't want Brin's transparent society - this slows what appears to be the inevitable; (b) Work to ensure accountable oversight of surveillance. No more FISA secret courts, but real public courts and judges and warrants.
What's not likely viable is (a) encouraging people to stop using social networks -- they won't, we broadly LIKE being noticed by others, it gives meaning to our otherwise alienated capitalistic existence; (b) encouraging government to stop tracking people -- they're just getting into the game that Google and Facebook is in.
If a company can track people, so will the government. The key is that government can and must be held accountable to a degree that companies don't have to be. The US public has chosen not to exercise this power to date out of ignorance, laziness, and/or lack of desire.
The likely outcome of all of this is a resurrection and growth in the "darknet", where younger techies go to hide.
I had a feeling that would show up in this discussion! What a classic scene.
"No, that's the CIA."
Talking about movies, I think I'm going to propose a "movie night" sometime soon at Splatspace (the hackerspace in Durham, NC) to watch Sneakers and Nineteen Eighty Four.
Sneakers the movie has my favorite NSA/FBI/CIA jurisdictions quote: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1r6y4vjADwY (0:46)
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.
Made me think of this social engineering scene from the movie Sneakers: http://www.anyclip.com/movies/sneakers/passport/
you should watch the movie "Sneakers".
A good choice, but no movie ever made will ever top Sneakers.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlKDkTbUFhU
4, if an Erdos/Bacon number were a thing:
P. Erdős and C. Pomerance published "On the largest prime factors of n and n +1"
C. Pomerance and L. Adleman published "On Distinguishing Prime Numbers From Composite Numbers"
L Adleman was a mathematical consultant in Sneakers with David Strathairn.
David Strathairn and Kevin Bacon appeared in The River Wild.
//edit, Randy Pausch actually appeared in a movie so I'm sure there's a connection there, too.
Leonard Adleman's recollection of being the film's "mathematical consultant" is also interesting:
http://www.usc.edu/dept/molecular-science/fm-sneakers.htm
An excellent addition to this article is Leondard Adleman's (the 'A' in "RSA") story: My involvement with the movie sneakers http://www.usc.edu/dept/molecular-science/fm-sneakers.htm
I'd just like to say that there has never been a hacker/cracker movie like Sneakers, and I doubt there will ever be one like it again. It was the first time I ever learned about cryptography, it featured an awesome scene where they work out where a car is based on the sound of the car going over speed ridges, it had suspense, fully dimensional characters you could care about, math, and tiger teams! What is there not to love about this movie?
Oh, and no Hollywood cliches. To this very day, this is the most authentic hacker movie in existence. Nothing else even comes close. And this movie is about 20 years old now!
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
Better yet, has there been any good hacker movies, ever?
My personal favorite is "Sneakers": http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105435/
Sneakers: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105435/
Sneakers. Whistler is blind. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105435/
His job sounds like the movie Sneakers.
_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_.
I mean, any self respecting hacker should have seen Sneakers. Best computer security movie of all time.
Real Genius is first, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089886/ This portrays nearly everyone's ideal undergraduate experience.
Then Sneakers.
Your question reminds me of this quote from the movie Sneakers:
"There's a war out there, old friend. A world war. And it's not about who's got the most bullets. It's about who controls the information. What we see and hear, how we work, what we think... it's all about the information!"
When you boil Google down to its most-basic form, it a company in advertising business. In order to present their users with the most relevent ads (which theoretically will be more likely to be clicked-on) they need to build a profile of their users. In order to build this profile they need to get people to use as many of their services as possible, and the phone is just another component of that. The phone also reinforces people's dependence on their other services. So while you may not see an ad when using GMail on your phone, you're likely to use the desktop version of GMail as well, which means you'll see ads there. Same goes for search, as well as the other services that are linked through Android.
If you think about what information they have about somebody using their services (Search, GMail, Voice, Reader, Blogger, Maps, Shopper, Books, Finance, YouTube, News, Picasa, etc.) adding mobile to that set of data is the obvious next-step to ensure they know as much about their users as possible. It's all about the information, and who controls it.
In the movie "Sneakers", "COOTYS RAT SEMEN" is one of the sillier anagrams encountered when the main characters try to use a Scrabble set to figure out the meaning of "Setec Astronomy". It's a classic hacker movie -- highly recommended if you haven't seen it.
This, needless to say, is what those people who talk about the virtues of "diversity" are trying to say. And the virtues of a diverse team of specialists is, in turn, the theme of most caper films (e.g.: Sneakers).
Especially in emergencies, it can be really great to have three or four people attack a problem from different angles. What you need is someone reading the docs while the system programmer is running strace() and the tuning guru is reallocating processes and memory and the customer liaison is on the phone trying to figure out if they really need to be running this particular enormous task on every page load.
The alternative, if you're by yourself, is to try to multiplex the roles, but it can be extremely difficult to pull yourself out of systems engineering mode while you are in there.
I think you mis-parsed my Sneakers comment. Sneakers is an awesome film. Swordfish, while ok to watch if there's nothing else on can't hold a candle to Sneakers.
Sneakers (http://www.themovietracker.com/movies/8710). The film's aged a little, but it's nice to watch a fairly funny hacking film that doesn't dress up hacking into 3D flying GUIs, Hack the Planet or hacking a TLA with a gun put to your head, while getting head.
Brewster's Millions always cheers me up around Christmas, as does Trading Places (http://www.themovietracker.com/movies/9749), both of which are slightly business related (although not exactly real-world related).
Someone else posted the pursuit of happyness (http://www.themovietracker.com/movies/7605), when I stick that on it comes across as a bit schmaltzy for me but has a good message.
A beautiful mind (http://www.themovietracker.com/movies/1112) is another great film about an incredibly smart but tortured genius who makes a massive contribution to economics.
Catch me if you can (http://www.themovietracker.com/movies/1798) is based on the true story of a fraudster who ripped off banks for tons of money and did all kinds of amazing things with it. It's a great romp and I'd highly recommend a first watch.
Life is beautiful (http://www.themovietracker.com/movies/5583) is hardly an uplifting film but is incredible and if it doesn't make you thankful for what you have, then I'd question whether or not you have a soul.
Sneakers.
the actual "scene" is line feed barf turning into a picture of air traffic, which is basically nonsense. but the logic behind it: a just discovered crypto attack (complete with lots of linear algebra even) hardwired into a device allowing them to read/crack anything based on current gen crypto is about as close as I've ever seen to a correct computer macguffin in film (hell in fiction).
Oh, Sneakers. Sleeper-hold issues aside (Busfield was so miss-cast as a heavy) that is one amazing movie.
Sneakers. :) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneakers_(film) Decent flick.
There's Sneakers (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105435/) but that's just about factoring large numbers, and is pretty light on the CS (though Len Adleman, the "A" in "RSA", was a consultant on that film).
Yours sounds good too.
Interesting, even if the author suggests that Sneakers is a bad movie.
Man, I just lost 2 hours of my life to Sneakers. How did Redford, and company get sucked into that. What a horrible movie.
Good to see Sneakers in the list. Most of the popular hack movies are in there and luckily I have seen almost all of them.
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.
Sneakers is my favourite film. I don't find it particularly corny, but it's very deliberately paced and most of the acting is understated (I guess apart from Dan Ackroyd) which is why I think it never got the recognition it deserved.
Fan of:
The headache inducing blue ribbon winner: Pi - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0138704/
The slightly corny but worthwhile: Sneakers - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105435/
'... burglar, a spy, a fugitive, a delinquent, a hacker, and a piano teacher ...'
CONDOR IN SNEAKERS: Staring & directed by Robert Redford as Bishop. Who leads a team of smart hackers who first work out the what, "make things people want" then ruthlessly executes the how. All the time, incremently adjusting the what. The focus, just work on making "black box" the best in the world and getting as many customers as possible. At the same time, outsmarting those who seek to take a shortcuts in hard road to startup success.
BISHOP: "Well here we have it gang. We know the deal, build the 'black box', release it early, incremental improvements and build up the customers."
MOTHER: "Come on 'Bishop' that theory has been well and truly debunked. Just last week in my latest edition of Conspiracy Theory, you know the Marketing edition. It says in black and white, 'the only way to get recognised' is a quick word to Crunch and your gold!."
WHISTLER: "Did you mean 'Capitan Crunch'? Did you know Crunch did prototype work for Apple ][ telephony hardware, but Jobs got it canned."
BISHOP: "No he means the 'Silicon Alley' of the Noughties. TechCrunch is a waste of time. Look these guys can't even scale their website, they don't listen to their customers. When the advertising falls they are history."
MOTHER: "You mean I've been reading this Marketing edition and it's not true? But they have influence right? Just one email to the editor, then BAMMM. Instant recognition. I simply don't believe you."
CREASE; "It wasn't Jobs, 'Whistler'. It was Gates. Don't worry we settled that one siphoning off his fortune to charity and planting logic bombs in Windows Vista. You don't think he's quiting Microsoft for the love of giving money away do you?"
BISHOP: "Crease enough pranks. Carl hows the new features going? Whistler whats the growth rate this week? Mother come, lets have a quick chat on your sources of information"
Some quick refs ...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneakers_(movie)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000s
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Days_of_the_Condor