Hacker Cinema
The Net
1995 · Film · 114 min
Directed by Irwin Winkler
CrimeDramaMysteryThrillerAction
Angela Bennett is a freelance computer systems analyst who tracks down software viruses. At night, she hooks up to the internet and chats to others 'surfing the net'. While de-bugging a new high-tech game for a cyber friend, she comes across a top secret program and becomes the target of a mysterious organization, who will stop at nothing to erase her identity and her existence in order to protect the project.
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51 comments on Hacker News
The net?
I've not seen that since the 90s so it might not be a classic but if you've ever seen an unexpected pi symbol (look on the bottom right of old.reddit.com) in software then they're probably referencing that movie.
As far as 90's cyber films go it was probably The Net that had the most realistic vision of the future. Workin from home, ordering pizza.
If you’ve ever seen the movie Net with Sandra bullock you might enjoy mine
https://wifipunk.com
I remember quite the opposite, but could be wrong.
At least there was a lot of hope that digitizing a lot of things would be faster and more convenient.
Perhaps secretaries, postal workers, and travel agents should have been worried but I think most industries did not see the Internet as a threat.
Waiting weeks for mail order items or using a paper card catalog in a library weren’t fun.
At the same time, I don’t think people were expecting shopping malls to decline as they have. Buying shoes and clothes online would have seemed absurd.
In the movie “the Net”, the idea of ordering food delivery over the Internet seemed a bit far fetched at the time — it was very early days for online commerce.
So it begins...
Where there is smoke, there is a fire. Wait for more and wait for people to learn how identity theft is the worst problem you can have.
Imagine you trying to prove that you are you, while somebody else with your passport details, driver license, address, DOB, phone SIM swap, etc, is acting like you causing all sort of financial disaster???
1995 The Net movie, people in 2025 will learn the hard way that was not just a movie.
I really disliked hackers when it came out, except for the sound track. Never saw it again until some twentieth anniversary watch party, and from that distance saw it for what it was and found it amusing. ... I still wouldn't call it a great movie, but enjoyable enough or at least I now get why people like it.
Certainly far better than The Net, as low of a bar as that is.
You would have had to have this thought prior to the release of the movie “The Net” in 1995
> When I first joined the Internet (1995!), there was more of an expectation of civility (IRC being a notable exception), and that is the behavior pattern I picked up upon.
Also netiquette, learning to lurk before posting, meeting people outside your normal groups and getting along with them and other behaviors I'm sure I'm forgetting. Being a tech person on the early internet, despite the flame wars, was a positive experience for me. People wanted to make this work, and that early internet full of tech-minded people and engineers did work to some degree. The idea that this could become a place where people could be what they wanted to be but were still accepted was the idea going at that time, at least according to my experiences. Niches mostly kept to themselves, you could find the groups you wanted to be a part of, and you could avoid those you didn't. When everything we had started to go mainstream, it started to crack and fray. When everything went commercial, it all came crashing down.
I'm thinking mostly of pre-web, and early web. I remember thinking when I came across the first URL in a movie that it was likely the start of the end of the internet as I knew it. I think it was "The Net" which was probably mid-90s.
The Net is a guilty pleasure of a movie
> But we don't talk enough about how improbable it would be that this elite hacker circa 1994/1995 would be using a Mac in those cursed Michael Spindler times.
Fast forward to 2011 where The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo also uses a Mac for hacking, a bit cringe but not as impossible like Mission Impossible, then in the same movie she uses Nokia 770 and that thing had some genuine superpowers compared to Nokia 9210
You know what we don't talk enough about about this movie? Angela was a Mac user -- and not a Mac user when it was cool to be a Mac user, a Mac user when it was extremely not cool to be a Mac user and a Mac would be the worst machine you could use circa 1994/1995 to hack into anything. (Mission: Impossible used a Mac too, but they didn't use the Mac OS 7 UI, meaning Ethan used a command line, which was wrong but "felt" more hackery.) They even shot the final sequence at a Macworld or something if my Mac-trivia-adled brain is remembering correctly.
Anyway, in 5th grade or whatever, we totally used to use the same names and icons that they had in "The Net" when chatting with one another using AppleTalk or whatever the networked chat system was that you could use in the Mac lab.
But we don't talk enough about how improbable it would be that this elite hacker circa 1994/1995 would be using a Mac in those cursed Michael Spindler times.
The sidebar is an index of several additional option pages, shown to the right of it. The first one is "Common" and it is shown by default.
This design didn't actually make it into the production release, it was replaced with https://bvckup2.com/wip/r82-rabbit-hole-x.gif.
Pi is a reference to a (really corny) "hacker" movie from the 90s called The Net. Same thing as the Pi at the bottom right of every page on Reddit.
These are all generally highly reviewed can lead to interesting discussions:
Gattaca - interesting take on genetics/DNA discrimination
Europa - hard science fiction, maybe a bit slow for a 12 year old
The Net - older movie but the concept of digital exile resonates today
City of Ember - post apocalyptic civilization that lives deep underground
First Man - dramatization of Neil Armstrong and the first moon landing (not realy "fiction")
Arrival - first contact situation, tastefully done
Contact - another first contact situation that explores how politics, skepticism, and fanaticism react
The Martian - easily as fun as the book
The Prestige - competing magicians in an industrial age setting
The Hunger Games - extreme class divide in a future setting
Jurassic Park - the original not the sequels
Stargate - wormhole travel to another planet (be careful with the TV shows though, SG1 on streaming has full frontal nudity and "not ok" scenes which were obviously not on the broadcast version and a total shock when we watched it as a family)
District 9 - has some graphic gore and language, so it might be 14+, but is an interesting look at aliens as refugees
Contagion - a look at how a pandemic could play out. Premiered before COVID.
The Maze Runner - interesting setting and look at group dynamics
Honey, I Shrunk the Kids - fun setting
The Village - scary movie with a sci fi twist
Galaxy Quest - comedy
Short Circuit - old movie that deals with AI sentience
Innerspace - another old one, but has some fun concepts
It's amazing how much The Net got right—it even came out the same year as the first phishing scam.
For a deeper look into the movie and its echoes today, check out this week's blog post.
That is a fun article, but they left out my favorite: the dial tone when someone hangs up.
Speaking of phones, it's interesting to see movies' choices about the UI on mobile phones. Do they try to show something like a real phone, or do they give a simplified UI that the audience can read at a glance?
I remember seeing the Net as a teen, and in the climactic scene when the bad guys were trying to break into the room, and Sandra Bullock was hacking their computer and waiting tensely for a progress bar to finish, while it slowly crept towards completion and the bangs on the door got louder, the audience could see it and read . . . "resolving IP address."
Yes, an instance was documented in the documentary The Net from 1995.
Iirc, the movie's official website got hacked, saying it was a terrible movie and to go see "The Net" instead. Also, the movie's website got in to some hot water for hosting some kind of hacking information on it.
Some Hacker Movies that are not mentioned yet that (kind of) match your description:
The Net, Matrix, Code Rush (a documentary)
Was that scene in "The Net" a reference to this?
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/ordering-pizza-online-in-the-retrofuture-5871048/
The dates kinda check out. The movie came out in 95, but seems like Pizza Hut launched this in 94. As I recall their sci-fi writing wasn't as insulting as most sci-fi, so it wouldn't surprise me that this was inspired by the real PizzaNet. Not sure what film schedules actually look like though.
There is an element of this idea in The Net (1995)[0]. A computer programmer finds her life has been turned upside down by a hacker after she accidentally uncovers a conspiracy.
[0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113957/
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.
Not as popular or liked, I also like The Net (Sandra Bullock) as a cheesy, guilty pleasure hacking movie. Didn't see it mentioned here.
In the 80s we had cyberpunk dripping from everywhere, in the 90s we had movies like The Net from 1995: ( https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113957/ ), and just recently(ish) we had Black Mirror.
People don't realize how deep the shit is becoming despite all these. We have successfully amused ourselves to death. (as per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death )
Back in 1995, a movie called The Net was released. One scene near the beginning showed the main character ordering pizza online. I don't think any pizza chain had online ordering until later in the '90s.
It seems like every movie I found entertaining but a stretch in the 90s is becoming reality:
* Demolition Man https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demolition_Man_(film)
* Enemy of the State https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enemy_of_the_State_(film)
* Gattaca https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gattaca
* The Net https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Net_(1995_film)
You never get the “as it was” though - you change. You get older, the characters you identify with change, the feelings change.
The one thing I remember from watching “The Net” in the 90s was Sandra Bullock on the beach, as I was a hormonal teenager. I have no doubt there were other parts of the film. The emphasis will be different to my memory.
I love this about older hacker movies. Watching The Net, Hackers, and Enemy of the State back when they came out resulted in many laughs about how unrealistic their portrayal of tech was. Ordering food online? A remotely hackable sprinkler system? Real time video monitoring from the sky? Ridiculous! Now these things are normal.
> Back in the 80s and 90s people barely understood the internet let alone the idea of selling things on it.
Ironic was the movie "The Net" in 1995 with Sandra Bullock. The opening scene of her ordering pizza online was such a leap of faith for people at the time. The other interesting thing is how the movie basically predicted where we are now with all of our personal information online.
The very first time I saw the idea of ordering something online, was when Sandra Bullock ordered pizza online in the 1995 movie The Net. I was just floored, like I couldn't grasp exactly how such a thing would work and how it could really be possible.
The German director Lutz Dammbeck made an interesting documentary "Das Netz" (the net) about strange parallels in the development of the internet, the counterculture and the terrorist attacks of the Unabomber:
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Das_Netz
There is an interesting documentary about Kaczynski and the philosophy behind him by Lutz Dammbeck called "The Net": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLqrVCi3l6E Featuring a pretty pissed David among others.
I saw him interviewed in a documentary on Fandor called, 'The Net.' The interview took place in his home about 15 years ago. There were a number of topics, but I particularly remember how he spoke of how fear is borne out of ignorance. Well worth checking it.
What movies/tv shows are you watching? Try Supernatural. Try the old movies from the 90's like Hackers and The Net. Even the Matrix. All of them featured women hackers as well as men.
I was not given "the focus" by default. My Jr. High and High School did not have a CS program at all. I taught myself how to program (Pascal and Assembly) by READING BOOKS, because we lived in a rural area and dial-up internet is slow!
Is it so wrong to believe that if I can do it, so can others, regardless of their gender? Maybe I have a higher confidence in women than they do!
Tron is one of the great movies of all time IMHO. It was one of the first to do a fantastic job of the "world within a world" idea on film, had an incredible aesthetic and a reasonably fun film. But it's not really a hacker movie.
The Net always came across to me as a movie made by people who had never touched a computer. Without knowing what to write about (and after exhausting as many technical inaccuracies as possible) it just turns into a run of the mill thriller. It's kind of painful to watch. Hackers tosses out some jargon, but lots of the actual computer interaction stuff is completely obfuscated and contained in the fantasy of the world itself.
Can't say I've seen the rest, but I've added them to my list!
What about
Tron http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084827/
The Net http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113957/
Firewall http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0408345/
Blackhat http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2717822/
Who Am I http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3042408/
Yes, people forget that Emmanuel Goldstein of 2600 fame was a consultant on Hackers. If you thought that was unrealistic (and OK, it was), revisit the other '95 hacker movie: The Net.
"The Net" (1995) movie thriller with Sandra Bullock about the early internet and cyberterror featured it (named pizza.net) too: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113957/ , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Net_(1995_film)
Photos of all websites featured in the movie: http://gizmodo.com/every-webpage-from-the-1995-movie-the-net-1592821504
Also The Net, Antitrust and David Fincher's Social Network and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo have very realistic computer sequences.
Antitrust and Social Network also show real source code that compiles (C, Java, Perl, Bash, HTML), Antitrust even explains "Open Source" to the audience. The camera work (especially showing relevant parts of the computer monitors and pan around to keep it engaging for a longer time) on all four movies is really fantastic.
* The Net (1995) - filmed one year before the World Wide Web got traction with the first fully graphical Mosaic web browser: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113957/
* Antitrust (2001) - famous for highlighting the open source movement, features a "CEO" that resembles a mixture of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs in one person as evil character, shows Linux desktop and command shell, and shows real Linux developer: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0218817/
* Social Network (2010) - very realistic, based on real detailed technical blog posts from 2004 on LiveJournal from Mark Zuckerberg and Eduardo Saverin's memory: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1285016/
* The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011) - nmap tool, etc.: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1568346/
---
* Jurassic Park (1993) - real 3D file manager application on Unix desktop, first use of OpenGL: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0107290/ , see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zaRHU1XxMJQ and http://fsv.sourceforge.net/
* movies (like The Matrix reloaded) that use the nmap tool: http://nmap.org/movies/
I saw the movie today, had to chaperon my son and his girlfriend to the movie.
I noticed some flaws, but for a Hollywood movie they were using "comic book physics" which most scifi movies and TV shows use.
I assume that it takes place in an alternative universe where NASA didn't scrub the Space Shuttle program, and space stations are placed close to each other as some form of disaster planning, and of course commercial companies like Space-X and Virgin Galactic didn't exist.
I kind of thought it was like "The Net" but instead of running from the police and computer hackers, she was trying to escape from space and get back to Earth. :)
Anyway my son and his girlfriend saw it and loved it, and both decided to take astronomy because of it. They are both freshmen in high school taking physical science. I think the movie was meant for them. I had to explain after the movie how in space there is no air, and the space capsule parachute was tangled on the ISS and she had to cut it free. That it wasn't because it would slow down the capsule but that it had tethered it to the ISS. That if the chute was free there'd be no air to slow it down. They thought there was something in space the chute would slow it down on, but I told them it was a vacuum. Chutes only work in the atmosphere. That the friction of reentering the atmosphere is what had caused the heat that was burning up the other capsule she had to get on the Chinese station.
Some spoilers Warning
Let me see, Explorer Space Shuttle trying to repair a telescope with a new circuit board. Russians go crazy trying to blow up out of control spy satellite with some super missile that just wipes out all satellites and throws debris everywhere. NASA was not aware of it, and had miscalculated the velocity of the debris so there was no way to abort the mission before they got hit. Some super space suit thruster pack got George Cloney to fly around like Superman and save Sandra Bullock and get to the ISS. But the ISS has problems and the Russian space capsule has a deployed parachute in space. Bullock gets snagged on parachute cord, Cloney has to let go to save her or else she'll get lose. She has to use Russian capsule to get to the Chinese station that has a clone of the Russian capsule with a working parachute to get back to Earth. I won't say how it ends though.
Sure it was mostly animation for 90 minutes, and we saw it in IMAX. But the main point is that it gets teenagers to study more math and science as a result of seeing the movie and asking questions about the physics involved. So I can forgive the mistakes and "comic book physics", if it promotes education.
Encryption is not the silver bullet, I agree with that.
All the points he makes are possible scenarios. After Snowden, almost nothing that can be done seems unlikely to have been done. Heck, even the movie "The Net" looks like prophecy come true now.
It's weird to think that encryption is not as secure as we all believed but it still makes it more difficult for the Big Brother to watch over all of use.
In the end, encryption is only completely useless if each and every provider reports to the government. It's a shame and disgrace for the western world that we even assume that this could become a reality.
Has anyone seen the movie The Net? I can't help but keep being reminded that this is what's going on and it's only a matter of time before it starts becoming obvious to the public.
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
I think the FBI is watching the movie, "The Net" too much.
Well, I saw this movie called "The Net" and there was a virus on a Mac.
Then again, that's hollywood.
The movies "Hackers" and "The Net" were released in 1995. "Hackers" used the term to mean "someone who penetrates computer security". The one use of the term in in "The Net" [1] was ambiguous as to whether it meant this sense, or Paul Graham's sense of the word[2]; but 90% of the movie was about security and counter-security. So I'd say that the [counter]security connotation was common usage by that time.
[1] http://www.script-o-rama.com/movie_scripts/n/net-script-transcript-sandra-bullock.html
[2] http://paulgraham.com/gba.html
While not exactly what you're looking for, I find myself going back to http://nanocrowd.com quite often for movie recommendations.
They don't do TV shows, but their niche categories are usually pretty solid.
It works well if you can give them an example of the type of movie you feel like watching. For instance, I wanted to watch a cheesy, nerdy, thriller earlier tonight, something along the lines of Hackers and it suggested The Net, Antitrust, TRON, Live Free or Die Hard, The Matrix, Swordfish, etc. Exactly what I was in the mood for.
Hilarious. I was just looking at the same thing and thinking of the Praetorian Pi symbol in that epic film, "The Net"
I heard about this before. I think it's cool that Peter Norvig puts it in his CV: "1998 Television writer: Code written by me for my first textbook was shown on the TV show The Net on 10 Oct. 1998. I was uncredited for this work" (http://www.norvig.com/resume.html)
"If you are like most, you kill more time hopping around on Facebook than you do exploring the Net."
Uhhh...not even remotely applicable to me, unless by "the Net" he is referring to a Sandra Bullock movie.
Primer - Ultra low budget film about a couple of engineers who accidentally invent a time machine in their garage while working on a startup.
Blow - Not really a hacker movie, but it's rags-to-riches-to-rags storyline should be interesting to a lot of entrepreneurs.
Day of the Jackal - Not a hacker movie either, but the main character's methodical preparation for an assassination will appeal to a lot of hackers.
The Net - A pretty good thriller about a hacker who has her identity stolen in a big conspiracy.
Fat Man and Little Boy - Slow but well done movie about the Manhattan Project.
I think this article just shows how co-dependent some of us are on the network. Other bloggers leaving comments in this post showing empathy "how horrible" it must have been. I have an addictive personality and it scares me how much you can live your life on the net. Which is why I try to avoid twitter/RSS readers/FB. Remember when Angela in the movie The Net (played by Speed's Sandra Bullock) had her identity erased by the bad guys?
Just had random flashback to that doesn't-seem-so-silly-now movie "The Net" staring Speed's Sandra Bullock where they remove her identity...