Sorry to be pedantic about this (actually I'm not) but it wasn't iCloud, it was a sync program called Bride of Frankensync... Every sync program should be called something like this just so non-geeks realise what they're doing when they upload files to the cloud.
Hollywood vs hackers: Vulture cracks Tinseltown keyboard cornballs
A lot of exciting things are happening online right now. Eye-boggling blocks of code are presently being distilled into art, pornography and weapons of war, and making that distillation look exciting on film would be a challenge for film-makers who thoroughly understood the world of IT. And, if we’ve learned anything from the …
COMMENTS
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Thursday 15th January 2015 11:19 GMT Raumkraut
Re: Boris?
I think you'll find that Arnold J Rimmer (technician, second class) got there first; during the test to join the crew of the Enlightenment.
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Thursday 15th January 2015 10:21 GMT Anonymous Coward
Awwww... come on....
Movies about hacking and you completely forgot about this piece of crap :
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Thursday 15th January 2015 11:54 GMT silent_count
Re: Awwww... come on....
Not so much forgotten as supressing the memory to avoid the possibility of further crap movie induced trauma.
Introducing Timothy Olyphant as the evil hacker mastermind you'd kick in the backside, en passant, on the way to the pub. You'd barely even break stride while thwarting his plan to... meh, whatever.
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Thursday 15th January 2015 10:28 GMT Major Ebaneezer Wanktrollop
Magic USB sticks
How about the USB sticks that the good guys insert into any random bad guy machine and without a tap on the keyboard up pops a huge 'Downloading Data' message on the screen. That, instead of triggering the Microsoft Transfer Fibbing Protocol (the everlasting 2 minutes to go until completion) actually fills the building with bad guys who can't reach said machine until the transfer is complete.
Pure movie magic
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Thursday 15th January 2015 15:43 GMT Frumious Bandersnatch
Re: Magic USB sticks
Actually, the "magic USB stick" might be (unintentionally) more plausible than you give it credit for.
ISTR that there was a bug in the PlayStation 3's USB device driver that allowed a "malicious" USB device to overflow a buffer and execute arbitrary code, thus owning the machine. Lately, there's also been a similar hack for OS X, though it requires rebooting the machine with the hacked device plugged in. It's pretty easy these days to find small machines with a USB OTG port that can be programmed to act as any USB device to test for bugs on the target machine's USB device handling and if you find an exploit, you can probably find an even smaller (ie, thumb-drive sized) machine to deploy the hack on.
Of course, I did say that films including this plot device were only "unintentionally" plausible. Then they go and ruin it by "downloading" many terabytes of data onto a device that can't possibly hold that much data. Or any time that a sysadmin plugs an unknown device into their PC/laptop, when really they should know better (didn't the top boffin do that in Skyfall, too? Facepalm!).
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Thursday 15th January 2015 10:43 GMT AndrueC
Ah, Hollywood and IT. So much unintended humour.
Like IPv4 addresses where one or more octects is often greater than 255.
Or locating someone using the IP address of an email.
Or referring to a GPS device as a 'tracker'. In one example they chose a GPS device because the vehicle was going where there would be no cell phone coverage.
To say nothing of the infinitely zoomable digital image.
NCIS had in intriguing one last week. A laptop that they plugged a USB stick into which managed to infect their network through the power cable. My first reaction was to laugh.
Why would the technician allow the USB device to infect the laptop in the first place? But it's possible to imagine that as the only way to see what it did (a VM might be a better idea but it depends how good the sandboxing is). And she did put the laptop into a Farraday cage to prevent the infection spreading over the wifi network (and a clever virus could switch the wifi on so that was sensible). So that just left the question of an infection spreading through a power cable. Stupid? Maybe not. Perhaps all their laptops come with power-line networking support. Not completely impossible for a covert agency. But frankly I just ended up laughing..which annoyed the other person who was avidly watching it.
But for me the big annoyance is the way Hollywood still insists on having people stay on the line for at least half a minute so that the call can be traced. I don't think that's been needed in the Western world since before the turn of the century.
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Thursday 15th January 2015 12:04 GMT Colin Brett
"Like IPv4 addresses where one or more octects is often greater than 255."
I thought this was to prevent suggestible loonies actually trying to connect to that fictional IP address. If it's in a movie it must be real, right? Similar to the non-existent 555 exchange or area code used in telephone numbers.
Colin
Terminator Icon because we know it's IP address is in the 300+ range :-)
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Thursday 15th January 2015 13:16 GMT AndrueC
I thought this was to prevent suggestible loonies actually trying to connect to that fictional IP address. If it's in a movie it must be real, right?
I suppose it could be,actually, although using one of the private ranges would be pretty good.
Similar to the non-existent 555 exchange or area code used in telephone numbers.
Yeah. I think the UK system is better. It makes it harder to spot a fictitious number. Oh and I always rewind to take a quick look at the source code. It seems to nearly always be C.
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Thursday 15th January 2015 14:47 GMT Ralara
"although using one of the private ranges would be pretty good."
Why?
Anyone who knows that above 255 is not possible, knows 10, 172 and 192 (et al) are private. You'd still have the voice in your head pointing out how silly it is. And someone might try to do something stupid on a 10, 172 or 192 range (i.e. at work) and get fired.
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Thursday 15th January 2015 22:56 GMT Tom 13
@AndrueC
Never use anything real for a fictional depiction. I don't know if you recall Tommy Tutone and his hit Jenny. I lived near a town that used the prefix when the song was released. The family with the number was not amused, especially as they had a teenage daughter, even if she wasn't named Jenny.
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Wednesday 11th February 2015 18:02 GMT Michael Hawkes
Re: @AndrueC
That pretty much happened in all area codes - 867-5309/Jenny
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Thursday 22nd January 2015 22:23 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: "Like IPv4 addresses where one or more octects is often greater than 255."
There is no hidden IPv4 net. So do not attempt to route to, via or connect to any device with a negative IP address. The Undernet is better protected than 24's 'Cisco Self Defending Network'.
Admittedly if I see a proper IP address in a movie, I will give it a poke sometimes to see if there's an easter egg on the end. As for hacking movies, my favorite is probably Cypher.
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Friday 16th January 2015 01:18 GMT Sandtitz
"NCIS had in intriguing one last week."
What a terrible show NCIS is - but it's the only show where two people can use the same keyboard simultaneously.
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Monday 19th January 2015 11:16 GMT AndrueC
What a terrible show NCIS is
It was okay for the first couple of seasons when it was just a variant of the old cop show format. I mean it was nothing stellar but it entertained. But then they began to develop weird, long running story arcs where they take on the world's most evil people and save western civilisation as we know it all the while trampling over the rights of the general public.
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Monday 19th January 2015 06:59 GMT Kiwi
@AndrueC
But for me the big annoyance is the way Hollywood still insists on having people stay on the line for at least half a minute so that the call can be traced. I don't think that's been needed in the Western world since before the turn of the century.
It probably goes way back before that. Telco's have been able to bill up-to-the-second for decades (even if the billed in 6-minute blocks!), and you can bet that the moment 2 phones were connected, they knew exactly who and where (unless someone had been watching Hackers (or H2) and connected 2 phones together... :) ), so I've always been pretty sure that they've been able to know pretty much instantly where a connection was. I'm also sure in cases like kidnapping, they'd be quite willing to co-operate with the cops.
I've though for years that probably, it's a ploy to keep the un-enlightened on the phone for a critical 59-seconds in the hopes that they can get a local patrol car to the location. But then I probably watch far to many movies :)
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Monday 19th January 2015 11:20 GMT AndrueC
Re: @AndrueC
it's a ploy to keep the un-enlightened on the phone for a critical 59-seconds in the hopes that they can get a local patrol car to the location
That's a pet hate of mine with a lot of cop shows. In the closing scenes when they've worked out where the bad guys are it's usually the main characters who have to get up from their desks, jump into their cars then drive out and storm the premises to make the arrest. In most cases it's going to be quicker to just alert nearby patrols who are probably far closer.
And even worse (Criminal Minds is a big culprit here, along with later CSI seasons) who the hell decides to send expensively trained and educated investigative officers into a probable firefight? You send in the relatively cheap and expendable grunts first not the poindexters!
Bah. I'm definitely sounding like I watch too much TV now.
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Thursday 15th January 2015 12:21 GMT Paul Naylor
CSI?
My favourite is still the classic CSI (or NCIS, MOT, ROFL, or whatever these shows are called) for the immortal line: "I'll write a GUI in Visual Basic to track his IP!". Erm, okay then, you do that.
Actually, when things go wonky in our IT department, this is usually the line we use. Or something from IT Crowd...
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Thursday 15th January 2015 17:16 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: CSI?
Well, you are correct, but having actually written commercial fingerprint-matching software, the real processing happens in background, and the fingerprint images displayed every so often are on the GUI thread (pick a random 100 or so), and are just there because people expect to see them (like in CSI, for example). An IAFIS match was claimed to take about 27 minutes.
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Saturday 17th January 2015 10:59 GMT Destroy All Monsters
Re: You just wait for the remake.....
DAT DISCUSSION on Stackexchange: "How does David Lightman in WarGames manage to hack a computer by dialing a number?"
"There was an internet, and you connected to it. You didn't have the World Wide Web."
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Thursday 15th January 2015 13:17 GMT phuzz
Hackers
Ok, Hackers was crap, but the soundtrack was pretty good. Prodigy, Underworld, Orbital, Leftfield, Kruder&Dorfmiester, Massive Attack etc.
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Thursday 15th January 2015 16:04 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Hackers
For the time Hackers wasn't too bad, it was made at a time when the average person didn't have a computer or understand them and was dumbed down in the light of that.
They did their research and most of the attacks shown were current for the time (social engineering, dumpster diving, shoulder surfing etc.) I once saw clips from it used to illustrate an OU course on IT security, and the director said all the attacks depicted had been used in one form or another in real life apart from the battle with the video tape loader, (the capsizing tanker plot was taken from a genuine attack on a marine research institute where someone capsized the tanker models in the simulation tank).
Yes, it was aiming for a teen demographic and was trying hard to be cool but you see way worse in much more recent films.
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Thursday 15th January 2015 13:24 GMT ukgnome
"it's a Unix system, I know this"
Whenever there is a hack segment on a TV or film my wife usually looks at me to see how angry I am becoming. When I am close to exploding she knows that the shows researcher may of maid a few errors.
And I find it odd that you haven't included Jurassic Park.
"it's a Unix system, I know this"
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Thursday 15th January 2015 15:51 GMT Matt Piechota
Re: "it's a Unix system, I know this"
"nd I find it odd that you haven't included Jurassic Park.
"it's a Unix system, I know this""
As a post a couple up from yours pointed out, that line is completely accurate. It's IRIX (which is a UNIX), and that tool (fsn) was actually on IRIX installs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zaRHU1XxMJQ
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Thursday 15th January 2015 18:24 GMT AndrueC
Re: "it's a Unix system, I know this"
And I find it odd that you haven't included Jurassic Park.
Or one of the other novels he wrote, Sphere. There's a couple of classics in that. While investigating the strange signals they are getting they refer to them as being the 'Askey' code. Good ol' Arthur :)
Then later on there's a page of digits (and no letters). One of the characters says it's a hex dump (er..no way to know that given that there's no letters) then makes the comment that it can't be from a 68000 processor because they don't work in hex.
The mind boggles :)
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Friday 16th January 2015 12:36 GMT Why Not?
Re: "it's a Unix system, I know this"
It was "It tells you everything" bit that made me laugh.
Now if she had said it puts everything in code in an obscure log file only mentioned in 1.256 release notes that you then have to search for hours to find the explanation for she might have been believable.
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Thursday 15th January 2015 14:07 GMT midcapwarrior
data center without any kind of cooling
"That and Silva’s “server farm” that is apparently operating on Japan’s Hashima Island without any kind of cooling or visible cabling"
The newest "green" data centers are designed to reduce heat density and use outside air for cooling. Chiller-less adiabatic cooling using outside air cooling (adding humidity to reduce heat - think a spray of water on a hot day).
It's all part of PUE reduction.
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Thursday 22nd January 2015 11:57 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: data center without any kind of cooling
And what about the "Winter Soldier" aereoships datacenter (using blades, but with a strange enclosure which doesn't look designed for security and strength...( put in a very and easily accessible position - but with a sci-fi design, of course? An without any access control?
Usually those kind of equipement are in the most hardened part of a ship....
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Thursday 15th January 2015 19:11 GMT Jeremy Allison
Re: SNEAKERS
Yeah, I was gonna mention this too.
If you mentally convert the 'magic' SEATEC ASTRONOMY box to a method be quickly breaking DES, then just about everything else in this movie makes sense :-).
Even down to James Earl Jones saying "We're the US Government, we don't do that kind of thing" to the request for "peace on Earth and goodwill to all men" :-).
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Thursday 15th January 2015 15:21 GMT RainForestGuppy
Cough Cough!! Independence day
Upload a virus from a MAC to Alien Mothership job done!!
Although when I first saw this it did make perfect sense. Of course Apple computers can interface directory to Aliens, because after having to deal with Appletalk protocols for 5 years, I can only conclude that they weren't written by a human hand.
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Thursday 22nd January 2015 12:31 GMT Steven Raith
Re: Cough Cough!! Independence day
As I recall in different cuts of the film, or at least the script, the character had spent lost of offscreen time playing with the alien fighters systems, hence having an idea of how to interface with it cleanly.
Still doesn't explain how he managed to write a virus for it. I mean, what did he do?
guest@Fighter406:~ man self-destruct
Steven R
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Thursday 15th January 2015 15:40 GMT Amorous Cowherder
Oh come on, you missed the best one!!!
Jurassic Park? 11 year old girlie shouts, "This is UNIX! I know this!". She then proceeds to flash up lots of terminal windows an old SGI box and restart the entire park from a single terminal.
Come on, it's a classic hollywood "plot-a-matic"(*) moment!
(* It's a special add-on for Word/Pages that only Hollywood hacks are allowed to download. When they need an IT scene in a movie, this clever little app produces a script to cover the load of old tosh about "OVERRIDE PASSWORD" and hacking for the main script! )
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Thursday 15th January 2015 16:25 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Oh come on, you missed the best one!!!
South Park has on occasion had fun with the Hollywood hacker stereotype along the lines of :
"hacking into the Department of Defence", tap, tap, "through the firewall,... wait it's encrypted", tap tap, "ok we're in"
But to be honest I'm grateful Hollywood takes these liberties, who wants to see someone spend several hours accurately coding a worm or restarting a major island wide IT system?
Probably the most believable mainstream film I've seen was Antitrust (in it's depiction of using IT rather than overall premise and plot!) which did a good job but then again some good IT industry guys were advising them or had bit parts (Linus Torvalds, Tim Lindholm, Miguel de Icaza, Scott McNealey and others, apparently the credits lists a section titled "Geeks" lol), the on screen depictions of code and command line entries were pretty good.
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Thursday 15th January 2015 17:04 GMT SuperNintendoChalmers
It's not a movie but...
The absolute peak of this effect that I've seen was in the Canadian TV series XIII ( http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1713938/ ) where they hunt for a skeleton key to everything although they don't know it until they see it. When they eventually find it they introduce it as:
"The hackers holy grail, a skeleton key that let's you access any system, any program, but it's behind dozens of layers of encryption!"
It's then shown on screen and it turns out to be the HTML view of an Engadget page from 2011.
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Thursday 15th January 2015 19:28 GMT Destroy All Monsters
Re: It's not a movie but...
There is a XIII series?
The original comic didn't feature skeleton keys, just an onion layers of conspiracies, gunplay and dead people. Pretty gud!
Luckily for all concerned the hero of Blackhat is Chris “Thor” Hemsworth, who is as familiar with the gym as the server room.
In the real world, you will meet IT people like this, sadly in the other direction.
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Thursday 15th January 2015 18:43 GMT Anonymous Coward
Ahh, I see what they've done here
Product placement at its best. They are selling two products. Well, three, if you count sex:
1. iPad 128GB model - Apple. Nice.
2. Boinking video in HD - Apple, the iPad and the iCloud. Very nice.
3. Fear, and the Fear Industrial Complex. The Intertubes are very dangerous. We need experts to devise a control policy. For your own safety, of course, and as a service to humanity.
I think it's fair to say I won't be watching this movie. Not even when it goes cable.
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Thursday 15th January 2015 22:40 GMT Hud Dunlap
What about the recruit
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0292506/?ref_=nm_flmg_act_17
Al Pacino gets busted at the end of the movie by the main character hacking the CIA's computer so it can record Al Pacino admitting he is a double agent. In reality it is just a modified screen shot saying the lap top is connected to the CIA computer. Al Pacino thinks he is busted so he gives up.
Decent movie.
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Friday 16th January 2015 07:22 GMT gizmo23
money
A bit OT but related. Hollywood depiction of money transfers with a progress bar. Like there's some funnel of cash going down a tube. A million is bigger than a thousand so it takes longer, right?
And the dramatic tension idea that if you pull the connection half way through 'cos the bad guys are kicking the door in then you only get half the cash.
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Tuesday 27th January 2015 09:17 GMT Anonymous Coward
More Hollywood Nonsense, Writer of the article is a pseudo intellectual
I'm sorry to say this, but anyone who has written any code at all from html to java knows that all the fast typing in the world will not make a perfect program right off the bat. Even the best coders in the world run tests on their programs to make sure they work. Even that aside, there is still a lot of clicking involved like the opening of a program window, a text editor, a compiler, etc.. Even if by pure luck the code is perfect due to using almost the exact same coding that you have used 1000 times in other programs before this you would still either be caught by errors or the authorities who by now have already gotten enough residuals of your code or viruses to recognize who you are.
Just the same as if you left a finger print at a crime scene codes like finger prints and language patterns are easily unique to each of in the way we express our selves through writing or even coding. Then again in Blackhat he(C.H.) was caught already when they came to him in prison to get his help, so I don't know how great a computer hacker that guy could have been. I would say that the closest Hollywood has ever come to true hacking reality is the 80's movie Wargames and the 70s movie Three Days of The Condor (Robert Redford's character physically hacks the phone system at one of the communication nodes for NYC to make an untraceable call.)
Since then I've yet to see a realistic depiction of all the grueling hours of coding, testing, and retesting of programs that are required in order to get into most secured or encrypted networks. Even if you just downloaded some basic hacking tool (and scanned it, checked it for malicious code within it...after all what could be better than a hacker hacking another hacker?) for getting into a WiFi network; the networks have activity logs that the firewalls create. Even if some how you managed to hack that log to remove your recorded presence there are still more problems when you get on with a data mined password.
A good example of this is that the firewall if it is any good at all it will still try to keep you out as an unrecognized IP address on a secured network. (if the network is not secured then as a hacker there would be no challenge and doubtlessly there is nothing worth risking going to jail over or bragging to your hacker friends about..ie the motive for hacking a system.) There is also the fact that on most secured networks there are both human and automated systems watching for unusual activity such as files being accessed from an outside network source. Even if you had everything prearranged for you and all you had to do was type a few keys to make it work and they made a small blurb about having done that sure I would half believe a few keystrokes.
However we do not see that, instead we see a lot of non-random key typing and its just stupid. If the movie or any tv show was one that I enjoyed then sure I could overlook this, but again its another half assed Hollywood attempted to jump on the money wagon of anything that can sell our shitty movies and steroid/protein powder filled actors.
The only thing worse is the clown who wrote this article that used so many overly pretentious words that sound like the guy was using a thesaurus program in over drive to find big words to make himself sound educated or at least seem intellectual enough to know what the hell he is talking about or at least convince us he does. Have you even read any technology magazines, have you even built your own network/system or even for a second done any kind of coding or programming?? Your article begs and practically screams look at me, look at me I think I know what I'm talking about, when in reality its just more B.S. thrown out their by some dumb monkey that learned how to type and use a thesaurus.
I'm sorry sir, but your not "Biting the hand that feeds IT", your just being a side show act that for a moment caught the attention of someone looking for an article that actually addressed the sad attempts of Hollywood to cash in on something that has revolutionized, changed and molded generations of computer users the world over for the past 30 years. I applaud your writing skills; but your knowledge and understanding of this field are so sadly lacking I would say you need to go back to college/university and take an intro computer/programming course that will give you actual knowledge rather than a copy/paste commentary that has become this sad little article you have written about Hollywood and hacking.
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Thursday 5th February 2015 11:02 GMT RobDog
You've missed one - The Italian Job (1969)
Yes - the scene where they creep into the computer room bridge (note: NOT server room!) and swap out a loaded tape with one containing 'deez new program'. To do it, Benny Hill (Professor Peach, looking after the technical end) is offered a screwdriver??! And when the tape is mounted, it's clearly twisted....and making some sort of bup bup bupbupbupbup noise..now, in all my years as an op, no 3420 made that sound...