Like I said, the point of movies is to tell a story. Sometimes this means glossing over bits, getting details wrong, or even presenting things out of order, because the important part is he plot. We all do this when we tell stories, it's human nature. We want to convey how awesome/important/sad/happy/whatever a moment was, and to do that we need to properly contextualize the emotion and key bits, not every detail. When the makers of a fictional story try to get largely unimportant details right, they are showing dedication to craft, not asking for technical advice.
Maybe it's because I'm ramping my team up for demo season, where I have to remind them and the researchers they work with that the grant reviewers haven't spend the last 6 months thinking real hard about the problem, and aren't as expert in the sub-field/topics as we are (they are pretty smart competent people, but they gave us money to do the work because presumably we know more about it than they do...). To do a demo and to make a movie are very similar. You need to convey the importance of the work, without making bogus claims (in demos about research, in movies its about plot breaking), and convey the context in which it can be understood. Sometimes this means leaving out or glossing over really cool technical stuff, because it doesn't actually matter to the bigger picture. Sometimes it means saying "this part is simulated with these assumptions because we don't know yet, or it still needs more reseach, but if true, it shows our point nicely". Sometimes it means showing things happen at 10x or .1x real time, because that is how you tell the story. It isn't lying or being stupid, it is getting points across.
Well anyway, that turned into a rant. TL;DR - Detail are not the point of movies, they are just a vehicle to help the point, we should applaud careful attention to them, not nitpick.
hackers ⊈ developers
I've watched a few penetration testers at work - they have to have a very broad knowledge base and work at speed. They're not sitting around wondering if their query is going to work in 1s or 0.1s - it just doesn't matter.
Awesome to see 'real' sql in action though.
To be fairly honest, if I noticed something like this I'd crack a big grin and I'd wanna share it, like I just cracked a big grin whilst reading the post.
I think, overall, this a compliment to the detail in the movie. They're using real technology and (kinda) believable commands/code. It's only after deconstructing the scene it's been found they haven't got it 100% right. Most of the time, when someone is 'hacking' at a computer it's a load of nonsense and usually makes me cringe seeing it. I remember one totally shocking clip where a guy was 'hacking' and you could plainly see it was Windows Media Player. Let's not even mention Hackers.
Things like this make me smile and I find them really, really interesting when I either notice them or they are pointed out to me. I could probably waste a whole day reading an archive of these.
This is not made up, folks. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DURk7VQhW-k
Movies want to keep you in the suspension of disbelief (that the storyline is real) and as a programmer it's been hard to do that with most "hacking" scenes in movies.
The only other blockbuster movie I can think of with a reasonably believable hacking scene was when Trinity used an openssl exploit in one of the Matrix sequels.
best of all was the end of _Veronica Mars_ (yes, not a movie) which is the only even vaguely realistic decryption plot i've ever seen.
My pet hate is people playing the piano, but playing the wrong notes (While the soundtrack is playing something different).
The first time I saw real stuff in movies was in Antitrust, then in Tron: Legacy and finally here.
- a bunch of nmap appearances (notably Die Hard 4 and the Bourne Ultimatum, also one of the Matrix movies)
- some default OpenBox with XTerms in a few series
- KDE quite a number of times too
- SSH, bash and Unix FS exploration (cd, ls -l and its output, find, grep) at times
In fact it's sad that so much of the computer scenes are bad, but I've seen enough actually good attempts at being realistic that I can't remember where I saw them. What's sure is that the trend is upwards.
(I think it's a file explorer for an old SGI box; which makes sense as SGI was commonly used in the production of movies.)
Imagine sitting beside a big horse nerd and every time a horse is on the screen and makes this typical horse noise they would comment "the horse didn't make the sound" or white walkers are killing the night watch behind the wall and "this horse is not really frightened but relaxed and listens curiously" or every time there is a mighty black Frisian horse in a movie, which believe me hey are a lot!, they would comment how wrong and stupid it is that Zorro/Prince of Persia/the Spartans are riding Frisians.
As for WOPR, he is based on a real cold-war program called SIOP (Single Integrated Operational Plan), under which the President could tentatively select nuke targets and run computer simulations of what might happen. WOPR, unlike a lot of movie AIs, is not even particularly malicious; he is just running what he thinks is a simulation, blissfully unaware of the stakes, as any computer program without sufficient "common sense" would be.
Probably the biggest exaggeration in that movie was the shots of the NORAD command center, which NORAD officials at the time stated was what they wished they had rather than what they actually had. The filmmakers were not permitted access to the insides of NORAD so again, they had to make shit up.
SolarOS 4.0.1
http://tron.wikia.com/wiki/SolarOS
[NB I have the relevant screenshot as a desktop background]
https://twitter.com/hoorayimhelping/status/19888796339917619...
Somebody's going to say, "Man, we went to all that trouble to make it look realistic. But it doesn't work. Fuck it. Bring back the guy who did the interfaces for Jurassic Park. And the guy who writes Wesley Crusher's dialog."
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Update: I love that my comment mocking excess nitpicking now has triggered triple-redundant nitpicking.
> interfaces for Jurassic Park
My pet peeves in shows/movies, are normally around the fact that it takes more than a few seconds to do anything useful on a computer. And yet on film even idiots seem to command their gadgetry with aplomb.
They should show failed password attempts. Computer lock ups. Anti-virus software blocking any meaningful use of the computer. Frustration of users as they are prevented from booting due to system updates etc.
I'm also not a fan of fake search engines - and video streams that appear in flawless hi-def!
I wish computers were omitted entirely sometimes - they are pointless props, and just age the movie. Couldn't they just say - 'I searched for blah'?
It's not like I'm loosing sleep over it though. I would rather TV wasn't such an insult to the imagination (I can - and enjoy - filling in the gaps myself.)
True, it exits from a Mac-like GUI to a DOS prompt, but I loved the depiction of office software as finicky, time-consuming, and frustrating.
I hated this movie, but one thing I'm glad of is they actually showed computer use more sparingly than in the book. The book was rife with "Hollywood hacking", and was otherwise a pain in the ass to read.
Don't wish for that! In the Hulk 2008 movie, you can see Norton Antivirus scanning the computer right before he uses it.
Any excuse for this? :)
Edit: never mind the moralizing, it was his own domain that he linked to :)
Where the image are hosted, is now off-line, because of this.
You can use imgur, minus, or even blogspot itself instead.
For the record since you never see the entire query so it is likely that the SQL is not as wrong as the author suggests. There is an extensive use of ORs in the query so the conditions that are said to defeat the outer joins are not mandatory and the 'R' and 'L' checks are clearly not required to pass. I think it is pretty good representation of how you might build up query from scratch, piling up conditions in OR clauses to finally get what you want. Yes, provided the table that starts with V is aliased as v the v.SEX condition does defeat the outer join, but that might be exactly the sort of thing you would stick in after you had already established a working FROM clause and not bother changing the outer to an inner. Solving the case was after all by definition a one-off.
I enjoyed this article because it points out an occasion where a movie really did try to get it right. Someone who knows something about databases had to have made those screens up.
Naturally I couldn't help stitching a few screenshots together in Photoshop
First time I've seen that...
Really amazing!
Mysql defaults to inner join. See http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4418776/what-is-the-defau...