I have a younger partner who does infosec - she's never seen Hackers and I skimmed it, thinking about showing it to her. It's fun, but it's aged poorly to the point that it'd be too cringe to show her. Sneakers, in contrast, has aged really well. It's the only film I've seen that "gets" the hacker ethos, its culture and history... and has relatively realistic depictions of hacking (a lot of social engineering, research and a bit of computer hacking).

A lot of fantastic actors, and a real treat to see one of the handful of films River Phoenix did (taken far too soon).

Sneakers is an unambiguously fantastic thriller with god tier cast.

But Hackers is a classic too and always meant as over the top fun. I don't think it's aged badly, it was ludicrous at the time too. It's now a period piece that captures the imagination of the moment. If you can't find joy in people hacking while roller blading as The Prodigy blasts man... I don't know, shame. The 90's sure feel like a lot more fun than today. There are a lot of things that work in the film and have stayed with me over the decades. Whether it's Joey at AA for computer addiction, everyone geeking out over a laptop, "ugly red book that won't fit on the shelf" or "It's in that place I put that thing one time".

I absolutely love Sneakers, but I think you're writing Hackers off too easily - my experience is that it's widely loved within the infosec community, not because it's accurate in any way (it is extremely obviously not) but because it captures what people want hacking to be. You should absolutely watch it together, and if she hates it you should just blame me.

No way, definitely watch Hackers! It's actually a really great capture of the kinda wild computing/hacker culture of the 90's, super on-point aesthetically. Plus the plot is pretty fun. It's a super cult classic for a reason, and gets so many things right. The cheesiness is actually not too bad and IMO a key part of the charm. There are some really cool scenes too.

I showed Hackers to my girlfriend a few years ago. I am a software developer who has seen it multiple times. She isn't into computers at all and had never seen it before. But we both really enjoyed it. It's a fun movie that fantastical enough to be fun and engaging while grounded enough to be believable. The less-realistic parts didn't break the immersion for her but were a source of amusement for me that didn't ruin the overall experience

Hackers is ok. If you want to re-calibrate your cringe-o-meter with respect to movies that involve "hacking", see Swordfish (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swordfish_(film)).

I own it on DVD and just watched the special feature a couple weeks ago. It was really interesting to hear them talk about the research for the script, including getting Prof Adelman (the A in RSA) to consult on the lecture the mathematician was giving, and even to draft slides for him to present, which were not used in favor of projecting a sea of equations on a white background

There are other cool tidbits in there, they got an phreaker (sp?, phone hacker) who had done time in prison to consult as well. His nickname irl was Captain Crunch, and when they sort through the guy's garbage (the guy who's office they need to break into, played by the same actor as Action Jack Barker in Silicon Valley), they pull out a captain crunch box

The term you're looking for is "phone phreak". There's another reference to John Draper (Captain Crunch) early in the movie. When they are playing Scrabble, one of the words is SCRUNCHY - and the S and Y are separated from the rest of the word at first, so you see CRUNCH.

John was also a technical consultant for the film and appears in the documentary on the DVD.

For those who don't have it yet, I definitely recommend getting the DVD for the special features.

https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B00008OE4W/

(The cheapest seller is GRUV which happens to be Universal Pictures.)

I’ve always seen “phreaker” on 80’s era BBSes. This is the first time I’ve seen “phone phreak”. Maybe regional differences in us old school nerds?

Phone freak (with an f) was the original term, in the late 1960s. When Ron Rosenbaum wrote "Secrets of the Little Blue Box" he made it into "phone phreak". "Phreaker" came a bit later (1980s is about right). Shameless plug -- I wrote a history book about this whole subject, "Exploding the Phone": https://www.amazon.com/Exploding-Phone-Phil-Lapsley/dp/08021... My website, such as it is, offers additional goodies, including lots of scans of original docs like FBI files: http://explodingthephone.com/ If you want more on Captain Crunch, see http://explodingthephone.com/search.php?q=draper&sort=releva...

Phil (with a ph), it is so nice to run into you here!

I had no idea about the 1960s spelling - thanks for mentioning it.

As it happens, I bought your book in February 2013, only a couple of weeks after it was released. I will have to re-read it now. :-)

I highly recommend the book to anyone interested in this bit of hacking history.

Thank you!

Exploding the Phone is such a great book. Wish you had more

Yes, perhaps both regional and temporal differences.

Here is the seminal 1971 Esquire article, Secrets of the Little Blue Box:

http://www.lospadres.info/thorg/lbb.html

That was the article that inspired me to visit the San Francisco State University library to study the Bell System Technical Journal and copy down the in-band signaling frequencies to make my own blue box:

http://www.lospadres.info/thorg/bstj.html

I was in awe that the phone company had published all the information we needed to hack into their system.

It was a fun time. I got to be friends with phreaks like Mark Bernay and John Draper (Captain Crunch) - although less of a friend after John wanted me to "work out" with him...

We had two phone lines at home, and one time I made an 800 call from one line, got into the tandem and started routing the call back and forth across the country and up and down through Canada and Mexico, and finally called the other line. I wanted to see how long a delay I could get when I said "hello" into one phone and hear it in the other. It was a full second!

Later a friend was visiting who was studying Russian, and I said "why don't we call the Kremlin!"

My automated dialing tricks only got me as far as Italy. So I rang an Italian operator and explained that I was an American operator trying to place a call to the Kremlin, and could she route the call for me? And she did!

The Kremlin switchboard connected us to an English translator, and we chatted a while. We explained that we were phone phreaks who used a blue box to place the call and how we routed it through Italy.

He asked, "is that like ham radio where you get a license from the government to do this?" We said, "yeah, sort of like that."

Eventually I got busted. I was living with my parents in Pacifica and had my electronics and programming lab in their basement. This was before personal computers, of course, but I was working for Tymshare and had a Teletype at home so I could dial into their machines in the off hours.

When I got home from work one afternoon, a couple of phone company investigators and a police detective were in the living room, sipping tea. My grandmother was visiting and she had served refreshments while they waited for me.

After some small talk, I gave them a tour of the basement lab. They didn't arrest me or anything, just took a circuit board or two and said "we'll be in touch."

I had to go to court and paid $25 restitution to Pacific Bell, a $150 fine, and yikes, $450 in 1972 dollars to my lawyer who pleaded nolo contendere for me.

Afterward, the investigators felt bad about it. They said the last guy they'd caught had been a real jerk but I seemed like a nice kid. So they took me out to lunch at my favorite Chinese restaurant!

I eventually ran into Captain Crunch again at the 2013 Homebrew Computer Club reunion. He didn't recognize me at first, but I mentioned that we used to hang out at his Berkeley apartment and smoke pot and hack on Forth code into the night.

John's eyes lit up: "Did we work out?"

https://www.flickr.com/photos/geary/10861963196/

Great story! :-)

Fantastic! Thanks, man.

I remember mostly just “phreak” in the UK.

Also, “hacker” was always a person that broke into computer networks while “cracker” was always someone who cracked copy protection for warez.

I've bought from GRUV once, it was an obvious bootleg so never again.

*Adleman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_Adleman

Sneakers and Wargames were in the position when studios had the desire to not dumb down the plot or the fact that since computers were so new that they could be introduced in such a manner and be a compelling part of the narrative. Even when Hackers had people from the 2600 magazine consulted for production you can see that they weren't really listened to. The only really popular shows that stressed realism in hacking / software were Person of Interest and Mr Robot.

Well, PoI said some of the right things, but everything was too easy, frankly. So, I'd say just Mr. Robot.

POI and Mr. robot's hacking situations were both too easy but relative to Mr Robot yes POI was extremely more easy. I was more speaking to technical accuracy that was actually in the writing of the script (but for POI it was glossed over how to make the AI work and Mr Robot just made good situations that someone could actually do). But, at least POI and Mr Robot were trying.

Agreed.

The other fun fact is Sneakers that is beloved by both an entire generation of the IT security and intelligence/signals community .

For a lot of us it was another nudge into both the blue and red sides of the security equation.

> The fact that they got Redford, Poitier, Aykroyd, and many other greats made it shine.

Reminder that Poitier died fairly recent: January 6, 2022 (at 94).

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidney_Poitier

Sneakers and War Games (and also Tron) are great.

We're running a consensus protocol bounty challenge for TigerBeetleDB inspired by them [1], with our distributed database simulator also being called The VOPR.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Jlikdtm4OA

I've been looking for the pool on the roof since I was about 8 or 9 years old.