movie computers (The List! )

On Tue, 6 May 1997, Tim Shoppa wrote: Look at it relative to the other hacker drivel that's made its way to the theaters since War Games. Okay, yeah, aside from the speech-recognition (forgot about that) and a couple other things, there were many instances of realism in the movie, eg. when what's-his-face (Borderick's character) shorts out the microphone on the old payphone to get a dialtone (factual, back then one had to insert a coin which shorted the tip to ground and signalled the CO to provide dialtone). Now switch to something like Sneakers. The most appalling thing about Sneakers was that they supposedly had actual computer security consultants providing the computer tech. So yeah, its real fucken believable that some guy creates a chip that breaks every conceivable encryption scheme...and oh yeah, when it decodes the info, it happens to come out as a hi-res graphic showing detailed plans/schematics/maps/etc on your screen. Sure, ok. Anyway, I don't know why I'm getting so worked up about this. Who cares. Movies with computer plots are invariably lame and an insult to techie intelligence. Probably the most realistic hacking/phreaking scenes overall was in Three Days of the Condor (or was it five days?) Anyway, never saw the whole movie but of the parts I did see I was impressed, especially when Redford was using a butt-set to tap into phone calls and all that stuff. Very real. Of course, I digress (again). Sam ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Computer Historian, Programmer, Musician, Philosopher, Athlete, Writer, Jackass