I think its a bit more than that. The hacking is realistic, because its more than just Mad-Libbed in.

When writing shows like Star Trek, writers often put things like Insert Technobabble Here into the first draft of the script, and it gets filled in with Reverse Tachyon Inductors later. This works for SciFi, since any explanation can be RetConned. But its glaringly obvious when done with real tech. The tech terms and snippets are more than just buzzwords dropped into a middle of the sentence. They are clearly defined plot devices with real world meaning.

It's a unix system. I know this.

Saw that movie with a large group of ThinkingMachines employees. We'd rented out the theater for one of the first showings, since they'd used a ThinkingMachine CM-5 supercomputer instead of a Cray because Cray wouldn't loan them one of theirs.

Anyway that line got a huge reaction of cheering and applause, bigger than any other during the movie.

That particular example seems so strange. The first half of the movie seems believable: long debug/compile times, never shut down the mainframe, disgruntled employee ineptly tries corporate espionage. Then we get that atrocity of a file explorer.

That scene did seem out of place, and I'm not sure how useful a 3D file explorer is, but fsn was a real (experimental) product for IRIX systems.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fsn

edit: fsn is lowercase

Never forget the 90's love for 3d actually went this far beyond the practical.

Perhaps culminating with psDoom, which allowed you to kill processes by shooting them in an FPS.

It could be they were intentionally trying to make the IT look bad.

From what I remember about the book, the dinosaur motion-tracking system was programmed to only find N dinosaurs each day because there was no reason for there to be more dinosaurs. It's why the dinos were able to breed undetected, because even though they were being picked up, the system only looked for N dinosaurs.

> It could be they were intentionally trying to make the IT look bad.

Or... Film is a visual medium, and so things have to look gee-wizy, because light grey text on a little black window looks incredibly boring. Have you you not seen a movie featuring computers in the last 35 years? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pe6gGUR3Ga4

Filmmakers can probably get away with light grey text on a black window much easier now, because it's now so far from most filmgoers' everyday experience of computing. Whereas in the time of Jurassic Park, the DOS command line was not at all exotic.

In Star Trek I don't know why they don't use fuses and circuit breakers so nobody dies if a panel explodes, if it overloaded it would just break the fuse or circuit breaker if the enemy fired at them causing a surge or whatever.

Well, the real answer is because it's a cheap way to make "people sitting looking at computers" seem exciting and dangerous.

I think the in universe answer is that everything uses plasma or something.

In the future with Star Trek, they should have quantum computers using fiber optic wires that are harder to hack because intercepting data changes it and the receiver will know it was tampered with.

Kirk and company basically had a Siri they could talk to and it would do things. "Computer show me yesterday's video log on the bridge at 3:32 PM" or whatever.

Mr. Robot has good tech because, like HBO's Silicon Valley, they consulted with people in the industry.

USA has posted an interesting making-of of sorts on the show: https://youtu.be/1BbTUASfrAI

The point is why they consulted with people in the industry. Often when media shows hacking it's as an action scene, and you can have some very exciting realistic hacking scenes, but only if you can rely on the audience understanding a lot of the context, which you can't, so instead they present a charicature of hacking that is exciting to a wide audience. The same can be said of many other domains of knowledge. You can make realistic historical settings extremely interesting, but that's very hard if the audience doesn't know the historical background so that they can connect what is happening on the screen with what happened in history.

Mr. Robot consulted with people industry because their hacking scenes more closely resemble Sherlock Holmes detective work than action sequences, so they don't have to make things happen fast to get viewers' adrenaline flowing and can have time to give lay-people more room to understand the context. Without this story structure any expert consultations would be wasted.

I appreciate your comment, I think is insightful, but I have to say it: about the 'get viewers adrenaline flowing', they could, at least, make a little effort in avoiding the totally ridiculous.

If they are not aiming for realism, they could, at least, try to be coherent in their own 'universe'. Sometimes, the things that come from Hollywood feel like they don't respect their public.

We leave for another day the discussion about if their public deserve the respect.

Matrix wasnt action oriented?

Don't watch the new Person of Interest tv show then, it's a lot like CSI but they name-drop technical jargon in only semi-relevant context, which makes it even worse for some reason.

I think that's rather over-criticizing it. Person of Interest may not be able to match Mr. Robot in technical realism, but it is set in a fantastical universe with a fully functional AI. I wish they were as committed to realistic hacking as Mr. Robot, but it cannot be said that they didn't try. Its hacks were explained enough for a layman, and shown enough for a technical person.

And its story was good, too. I'd recommend it to people just for that.

But that's what makes it worse than CSI, because it's so heavily grounded in technology that suspense of disbelief is disrupted when technical terms are misused.

Can you give some examples? I'm sincerely asking, since I never felt that technical terms were misused. I want to know where I missed that.

Person of Interest has some of the most realistic uses of tech on TV. It could match Mr. Robot... the only reason it doesn't is... it's a scifi show.

Yes, you have to make believe some things about bandwidth and just how smart one person can be. But classifying POI, an incredibly high quality and well researched show, as "worse than Cyber" is doing nothing but hurting the cause you claim to support. And the reason I'm pissed off about that is that I support it too.

Sorry that science fiction show is not a documentary about the NSA. May I recommend Citizenfour instead?

I love that show, it definitely cheats some on the tech, but based on reality.

It was really entertaining that it started right before Snowden released.