Hacker Cinema
The Jackal
1997 · Film · 124 min
Directed by Michael Caton-Jones
Hired by a powerful member of the Russian mafia to avenge an FBI sting that left his brother dead, a psychopathic hitman known only as The Jackal proves an elusive target for the people charged with the task of bringing him down: a deputy FBI director, a Russian MVK Major, and a jailed IRA terrorist who can recognize him.
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8 comments on Hacker News
I hope you're talking about the original The Jackal. That's a great movie that has fascinated me essentially because of the theme you've identified. A truly motivated, highly-intelligent person could commit horrendous acts without detection. So far, whoever committed this assassination has succeeded; but I suspect, there is simply too much surveillance in 2025 to get away with it.
edit: regarding the surveillance issue, wonder what the retention on google earth/maps logs is for the location of the shooting?
He was a favourite author of mine when I was young, many great novels.
> The Day Of The Jackal was turned into a 1973 film starring Edward Fox as the Jackal, and then became a TV drama starring Eddie Redmayne last year.
It was also the 1997 Bruce Willis movie "The Jackal": https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119395/
The Dogs of War was also a 1980 movie as well: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080641/
> Also when did “techno” become an umbrella term again?
I would guess in the '90s, when there was a lot more crossover between electronic music and other genres. Rock and hiphop oriented stuff like the Prodigy and Chemical Brothers were topping the dance charts, and other more conventional techno like Aphex Twin and Underworld were getting decent media coverage as well.
Plus movie soundtracks at the time tended to include a lot of techno. Trainspotting, Pi, Hackers, The Jackal, The Saint....discovered a lot of artists thanks to these.
Sounds like someone just got a copy of the movie, 'The Jackal.' (1997) Fiction or not, I'm surprised it took this long to be utilized. Is there a blanket-frequency jammer in existence that would have worked at a 150m radius? seems like a tall order
Sounds like someone watched the 1997 film “The Jackal”:
https://youtu.be/TJ4j7OArO8Q
The scenario as described has many similarities with the movie 'The Jackal'. Also it says that the victim got out of the car after a distraction, even though he was traveling in a bulletproof car with an armed escort.
This is a very rookie mistake for a senior official who was in enough of a threat to travel around with an escort of armed guards!
I 'd be very hesitant to believe that story without independent confirmation from other sources.
P.S. Some twitter replies, on the original twitter thread [0] even questioned the validity of the source but I don't know enough about it (Fars news) to evaluate those claims. Putting this out here for the HN crowd to weigh in.
[0]: https://twitter.com/BarakRavid/status/1333080696282288128
This discussion reminded me of a scene from the movie The Jackal in which an assassin basically mounts a rifle on a three-axis motorized mount, connects a calibrated camera to a mounted scope, and then mounts the thing in a truck/van and parks it near the target and uses it over a laptop w/ wireless connection. I think this was in the 90s and I remember thinking, at the time, video bandwidth and latency would be the biggest obsticle but now days it seems like this setup would be near trivial.
When I just tried to google the scene I saw an ISIS setup of virtually the same thing :/
Reminds me of the movie 'The Jackal'
I really hope we don't over correct out of fear because drones will be a net positive for society.