Let's talk for a second about epiphanies. Originally, back in the Latin and Greek roots of the word, they meant any sudden and miraculous manifestation of a god. So like Zeus shows up, and that's an epiphany. That's not really relevant, but I just thought I'd mention that to preface this.
I had an epiphany the other day.
I do feel like this is an incredibly important piece of human knowledge, and if anyone has anything to add, I'd welcome it, because I do not really possess the sum total of human knowledge. But as I sat, pondering the solemnities of life, I realized, suddenly and without precursor, that the most accurate depiction of actual real-life computer hacking in all of Hollywood is near the beginning of TRON.
And not the sequel, either. The original, 1982 TRON starring an enormously chill Jeff Bridges and some of the most ridiculous descriptions of computing ever produced. I hear you laughing (get out of my head, Maurice), but I'm dead serious. Think of hackers in movies and TV. How do they hack? They sit down at a computer, with a password prompt or a terminal, remote or on site (that doesn't seem to matter), and they start typing. Hacking intensifies, and then they... win. Re-write something. Shut down something. Take control. Hacker battles. Or whatever. That's how it always plays out except in blatantly-a-Disney-fantasy-movie TRON.
That movie starts with a hacker (Chill Bridges himself) sitting down at a computer. He has logged on to a remote server, seemingly by using his old employee credentials to do so. He then runs a program he created specifically for the purpose of returning information from that remote server. He watches the program chug for a few minutes, and then it returns a failure. He gets marginally less chill, and then goes to play some arcade games.
Forget the silly tank and recognizer visualizations of what's happening inside the computer, and just look at the dude sitting at the computer. Because that is exactly what real hacking looks like. Someone spends some time writing a piece of software tailored to get them the information they want, then they social-engineer their way onto whatever hardware or network they need access to, and then just let the software run. Either it works or it doesn't, they get what they want or they don't, and then it's over. Back to the drawing board in the event of a failure, try again in a few weeks with some new software.
No on-the-fly "I'm'a reprogram your firewall via Command Prompt" like you see in most movies and TV, because that's not how firewalls work. You can't rewrite a piece of running software on the fly because the processor executing the code is millions of times faster than your fingers. And you can't "intercept" the "commands" of another "hacker" and "counter-hack" them in real time because nothing about that sentence is how software or computers work.
So there you have it. Silly dialogue, hilarious haircuts, and ridiculous plot aside, TRON has possibly the most accurate depiction of hacking ever in Hollywood. The sequel is a pretty close second. And if that doesn't seem ridiculous to anyone else...
Well, whatever.
I had an epiphany the other day.
I do feel like this is an incredibly important piece of human knowledge, and if anyone has anything to add, I'd welcome it, because I do not really possess the sum total of human knowledge. But as I sat, pondering the solemnities of life, I realized, suddenly and without precursor, that the most accurate depiction of actual real-life computer hacking in all of Hollywood is near the beginning of TRON.
And not the sequel, either. The original, 1982 TRON starring an enormously chill Jeff Bridges and some of the most ridiculous descriptions of computing ever produced. I hear you laughing (get out of my head, Maurice), but I'm dead serious. Think of hackers in movies and TV. How do they hack? They sit down at a computer, with a password prompt or a terminal, remote or on site (that doesn't seem to matter), and they start typing. Hacking intensifies, and then they... win. Re-write something. Shut down something. Take control. Hacker battles. Or whatever. That's how it always plays out except in blatantly-a-Disney-fantasy-movie TRON.
That movie starts with a hacker (Chill Bridges himself) sitting down at a computer. He has logged on to a remote server, seemingly by using his old employee credentials to do so. He then runs a program he created specifically for the purpose of returning information from that remote server. He watches the program chug for a few minutes, and then it returns a failure. He gets marginally less chill, and then goes to play some arcade games.
Forget the silly tank and recognizer visualizations of what's happening inside the computer, and just look at the dude sitting at the computer. Because that is exactly what real hacking looks like. Someone spends some time writing a piece of software tailored to get them the information they want, then they social-engineer their way onto whatever hardware or network they need access to, and then just let the software run. Either it works or it doesn't, they get what they want or they don't, and then it's over. Back to the drawing board in the event of a failure, try again in a few weeks with some new software.
No on-the-fly "I'm'a reprogram your firewall via Command Prompt" like you see in most movies and TV, because that's not how firewalls work. You can't rewrite a piece of running software on the fly because the processor executing the code is millions of times faster than your fingers. And you can't "intercept" the "commands" of another "hacker" and "counter-hack" them in real time because nothing about that sentence is how software or computers work.
So there you have it. Silly dialogue, hilarious haircuts, and ridiculous plot aside, TRON has possibly the most accurate depiction of hacking ever in Hollywood. The sequel is a pretty close second. And if that doesn't seem ridiculous to anyone else...
Well, whatever.
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