
Tool Recreating the “Decrypting Text” Effect Seen in the Movie “Sneakers” - rfreytag
https://github.com/bartobri/no-more-secrets
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chris_wot
Seriously, this is the smartest, most interesting, and oddly the most accurate
movie I've ever watched about computer and network security. And it was hugely
entertaining, compelling and exciting!

This movie introduced a lot of people to cryptography, tiger teams and ethical
cracking/hacking. Also, it had Sidney Poitier, Robert Redford, Dan Ackroyd and
River Phoenix.

One of my all time favourite movies.

~~~
VonGuard
If you want to do a road trip, the Sneakers office was in the second floor of
the Fox Theater in Oakland. No idea where Seatec Astronomy was. Maybe Fremont.

~~~
codezero
IMDb has a nice list of filming locations:
[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105435/locations](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105435/locations)

Was Setec one of the locations? Is that where they did the handoff with the
fake FBI folks?

I remember Playtronics was the one large building they broke into.

~~~
unsignedint
Setec Astronomy is just a code name of the project, not an actual place.

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Aelinsaar
Oh, now this I like! Now I just have to 3D print Whistler's custom braille
keyboard...

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davesque
He should have published it under a github organization called Setec
Astronomy.

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ryhanson
For the people who want to try this on OS X run `locate ncurses.h` to see if
you have the ncurses library. If you have Xcode installed, you should have it
in a few places. Then update the Makefile, set `NCURSES_H = {dir}` and it
should make and install just fine.

~~~
cweiss
brew install no-more-secrets

Works.

~~~
ryhanson
Sweet, thanks! I'm not sure why I didn't think to try that. Worked for me!

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zwischenzug
'What did it sound like?'

I loved that film. Loved it.

~~~
fapjacks
I really like this, too... I have this movie (and others including Antitrust
and, yes, Hackers) in my "night time playlist" for when my wife goes back home
to visit family for a few weeks each summer and Christmas. It is a very
comfortable movie for me.

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k2enemy
Very cool! My favorite movie.

See also:
[https://github.com/jtwaleson/decrypt](https://github.com/jtwaleson/decrypt)
although yours much more faithfully recreated the Sneakers scene.

~~~
Aelinsaar
I loved that movie too, and I find it holds up far better than a lot of
technologically-minded fare from the early 90's. It was one of those allstar
casts that really got some mileage from the various personalities and styles,
I think.

~~~
smileysteve
Given the current government war on encryption and the snowden revelations, we
might say it's as timely today as it was in 92' if not more

~~~
Aelinsaar
It certainly proves the thesis of the film, which is that the "good guys" are
not so good as to be trusted with everyone's secrets.

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linker3000
Kinda reminds me of what I did at school in about 1980 while dicking around on
a Commodore PET 3016.

~~~
kazinator
One of my earliest machine language programs was an experiment to see how fast
a 1 MHz Apple II+ could count to a million. The code initialized some
characters in the display buffer to ASCII '0' and then incremented them
directly.

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jason_slack
Sneakers was just as much about social engineering as it was its technical
nature. I love this movie. I think I must listen to is as I work a few times a
month.

One thing I took away from this movie is Whistler able to solve pieces while
listening. It showed me that I should always listen first and interject my
input after :-)

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stuxnet79
Sneakers came out before I was even born but now I feel compelled to watch
this old, and perhaps cringe-worthy hacker movie. Hope it does not disappoint.

~~~
steeef
"Cringe-worthy"? Hardly. You owe it to yourself to watch it. It's easily one
of the best hacker movies.

~~~
beachstartup
it's the best one, by far.

~~~
oatmale
I'm partial to operation takedown which is a pretty solid representation of
Kevin mitnick.

~~~
serf
No way.

In that movie Mitnick was outright violent towards Shimomura (he wasn't in
real life) , along with a few totally ficticious real-life encounters between
the two.

Also, this movie depicted Mitnick destroying files and evidence (didn't
happen).

The script was leaked during his defense. No good.

I understand movie magic and drama, but what a kicker to be trying to defend
yourself legally while a Hollywood production glorifies you as a criminal
while simultaneously injecting fiction into the true story.

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pavel_lishin
Anyone feel like creating an xscreensaver hack using this?

~~~
nickpsecurity
Nah, The Matrix code was the last screensaver we ever needed. Even nostalgia
for Sneakers doesn't make the effect cooler. Probably just that the Matrix
makes better background noise, tricking your mind into spotting patterns.

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zandorg
And of course, the anagram software they used (as mentioned in the commentary)
was most likely NAMEGRAM, an old DOS program.

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0xdeadbeefbabe
Dang I thought it would be the one that changed the characters into a line
drawing of a map.

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stirner
Your C API seems to take a null-terminated string without a specified length.

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tracker1
I feel suddenly motivated to work on my telnet bbs to put this to use... :-)

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fotbr
'Tis very nicely done.

I wish I had the time or talent to turn this into an actual shell.

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annoying_tech
Doesn't work with screenfetch and neofetch :'(

but...
[https://gfycat.com/WanSecretGyrfalcon](https://gfycat.com/WanSecretGyrfalcon)

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PascalsMugger
Why are we adding (2016) to current year submissions now?

~~~
overcast
So time travelers feel more comfortable. You know how offended everyone gets
these days.

~~~
pingswept
Goddam fateless tickers. Why can't they just stay put?

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USANEEDSHELP
I love this. I love the movie. It's geeky and I went on a date to see this
movie with a female friend of mine at the time (we weren't girl/boy friend at
that time). Now she is my wife of almost 20 years (2017). IT was playing at
the Midway Theater in Forest Hills NY.

