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Re:'Hackers' at 20 by JoshTriplett on Tuesday September 15, 2015 @11:29PM (#10224515)
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.

Re:'Hackers' at 20 by cxseven on Wednesday September 16, 2015 @12:32AM (#10224697)
There's a retrospective on WarGames that's even better than the CS Monitor Hackers article at http://archive.wired.com/entertainment/hollywood/magazine/16...

WarGames was another case of life imitating art imitating life, when the over-the-top NORAD command center set (the director called it "NORAD's wet dream of itself") became the blueprint for command centers everywhere going nuts with monitors.

A NORAD commander is quoted there: "A few years later, I was an executive officer with the Air Force Space Command stationed at Norad near Cheyenne Mountain. And I'm wondering, 'Gee, where can we get such cool-looking displays?' It was a good forcing function. It required us to all of a sudden say, 'If it really can look like this, why doesn't it?'"

Re:'Hackers' at 20 by aaronbrethorst on Wednesday September 16, 2015 @04:22AM (#10225330)

    Hackers is dripping in 80s cheese
2015 - 20 = 1995
Re:'Hackers' at 20 by eru on Wednesday September 16, 2015 @10:42PM (#10231294)
80s cheese was still available in the 90s.
Re:'Hackers' at 20 by JoshTriplett on Wednesday September 16, 2015 @02:56PM (#10228895)
I stand by my statement. :)
Re:'Hackers' at 20 by aaronbrethorst on Friday September 18, 2015 @03:21AM (#10237896)
hah, ok, respect :)
Re:'Hackers' at 20 by nailer on Wednesday September 16, 2015 @04:18AM (#10225313)
> it's far better and more realistic than the majority of movie-style "hacking" scenes.

In Ex Machina the main character appears writes a field sieve in Python to break some crypto. The code doesn't actually do that but it's still decent.

A bunch of older movies featured nmap.

Re:'Hackers' at 20 by CPLX on Wednesday September 16, 2015 @05:18AM (#10225492)
And newer ones too. This is a fun link if you haven't seen it: https://nmap.org/movies/