23 Sep
1997
23 Sep
'97
6:51 a.m.
On Tue, 23 Sep 1997, Allison J Parent wrote:
He did a lot of majik that was technically suspect!
Most secure systems
back then would at best give you three tries at the password and drop you
and if you tried the account within 15 minutes you were again dropped and
the timer reset. The was to prevent cracking via successive tries. That
was an example of commercial systems, secure military would not even have
outside access that wasn't encrypted and highly secure.
They explained that away in the movie by blaming it on the phone company
for not disconnecting the line several years before like they were
supposed to.
And I don't know of a login paradigm where you can type "HELP GAMES" and
get a list og games to play. How a staff of government programmers could
overlook a security crater opening like that stretches the imagination.
But anyway, if nerds like us made a computer movie nobody would go to see
it because it would be way too over their heads. Not that a technically
plausible movie that is also easy to understand is impossible to make
though.
Sam Alternate e-mail: dastar(a)siconic.com
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