Hacker Cinema
The Box
2009 · Film · 115 min
Directed by Richard Kelly
Norma and Arthur Lewis, a suburban couple with a young child, receive a simple wooden box as a gift, which bears fatal and irrevocable consequences. A mysterious stranger delivers the message that the box promises to bestow upon its owner $1 million with the press of a button. However pressing this button will simultaneously cause the death of another human being somewhere in the world; someone they don't know. With just 24 hours to have the box in their possession, Norma and Arthur find themselves in the cross-hairs of a startling moral dilemma and must face the true nature of their humanity.
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10 comments on Hacker News
It’s also one of the few hacking movies that stands up - assume ‘the box’ is a prototype quantum computer. Better yet assume it has a production process with such a high failure rate they’ve been churning these out for years just to produce a single working instance.
That meme is likely a reference to “Button, Button” a short story by Richard Matheson that was later adapted into a Twilight Zone episode and the 2009 movie “The Box”
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.
Let's assume we're playing the Kevin Bacon game. We've got actors, movies, and roles. Here's some sample data:
INSERT INTO actors (id, name) VALUES (1, 'Kevin Bacon') INSERT INTO actors (id, name) VALUES (2, 'Frank Langella') INSERT INTO actors (id, name) VALUES (3, 'Cameron Diaz') INSERT INTO movies (id, name) VALUES (1, 'The Box') INSERT INTO movies (id, name) VALUES (2, 'Frost/Nixon') INSERT INTO roles (movie_id, actor_id) VALUES (1, 2) INSERT INTO roles (movie_id, actor_id) VALUES (1, 3) INSERT INTO roles (movie_id, actor_id) VALUES (2, 1) INSERT INTO roles (movie_id, actor_id) VALUES (2, 2)
Given the above data model, it's not possible to select all the actors that are within 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon with a SQL statement.
(Data from the incredible Oracle of Bacon, which uses custom graph traversal to serve up results: https://oracleofbacon.org/how.php)
Made me think of this sketch based on a mediocre sci-fi movie[1] from a while back: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y7rzIwrEqpw
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Box_(2009_film)
On a side note, you might like a movie called The Box (2009).
Basically a couple receives a box with a button and pressing it will give them $1 million but a stranger somewhere in the world will die at the same time.
I don't remember if it's any good but your scenario reminded me of it.
So, on the topic of people making horrid decisions when it comes to money, I recommend a movie called "The Box" inspired by a sci-fi short novel by Richard Matheson called "Button! Button!" (Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Button,_Button_(The_Twilight_Zone)#Short_story). Not a spectacular moving, but two hours or so well invested, I believe.
> Suppose I am looking for "that movie with a button". Yup, google get's it, "The Box". Bing thinks I am thinking of Benjamin Button, which was google's second suggestion
Hm. There is no one google. In the google that I see, for that search, it's the other way around: "Benjamin Button" is #1, and "The Box" is #2 (both on IMDB).
Life before search engines was different and it's easy to be blasé. IMHO, getting the one that you are vaguely thinking of anywhere in the top 5 is a great and amazing technical feat. And also good enough to jog your memory, so #1 or #2 makes no difference.
Google almost universally provides the best results if you are actually searching for something.
Compare the results for queries like "that movie where a computer plays tic tac toe" A very reasonable search if you forget what the name of War Games is, but bing fails it utterly and completely; not a single mention of War Games until the second results page, and the wikipedia page for it doesn't appear until the third. Meanwhile on google the first results page barely has anything that isn't about War Games.
Now, if you just search "War Games" both will do fine. For that matter, so does Wikipedia's builtin search...
You can push it even further and get more vague, something like "that car that james may goes fast in" and while at that point google starts to degrade, it still easily beats out bing.
Suppose I am looking for "that movie with a button". Yup, google get's it, "The Box". Bing thinks I am thinking of Benjamin Button, which was google's second suggestion (I wasn't). Fair enough though, suppose I actually had been thinking about "that movie where the guy get's younger". Both google and bing don't do great, though google still definitively does better.
For example, while claiming to remove files that are copies of the movie The Box, Warner removed several files related to the alternative cancer treatment book "Cancer: Out Of The Box," by Ty M. Bollinger. Another title deleted by Warner was "The Box that Saved Britain," a production of the BBC, not Warner.
This is really bizarre. Hotfile might technically be right in suing Warner Bros. for pulling content they don't own the rights to, but it's not as if Hotfile had a legitimate claim to having those files on its servers. Those files are copyrighted by someone, and surely the real rights holders would want their intellectual property removed from Hotfile if they knew about it. And now that Hotfile admits knowledge of these files, aren't they compelled to remove them anyway?
[edit]
Perhaps I should have said ironic instead of bizarre. I don't disagree that there's a legal case here.