
Why can't films and TV accurately portray hackers? - ohjeez
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20170802-why-cant-films-and-tv-accurately-portray-hackers
======
bronzeage
Because we're here in hacker news, we're biased to think that's the only thing
screenwriters get wrong. The truth is, nearly every single profession is
misrepresented by Hollywood. From doctors, to chemists, biologists,
physicists, mathematicitians, psychologists, policemen, detectives, nearly
every single profession looks absurd from the perspective of people who
actually understand it when it's staged in a movie.

There's a reason why films about directors and movie making seem more
realistic than the rest - they are the only movies designed by people who
actually understand the subject.

~~~
adbge
Indeed, this is the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect:

 _" Media carries with it a credibility that is totally undeserved. You have
all experienced this, in what I call the Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. (I
call it by this name because I once discussed it with Murray Gell-Mann, and by
dropping a famous name I imply greater importance to myself, and to the
effect, than it would otherwise have.)_

 _Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect works as follows. You open the
newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case,
physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist
has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the
article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward-reversing cause
and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of
them._

 _In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in
a story-and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read
with renewed interest as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more
accurate about far-off Palestine than it was about the story you just read.
You turn the page, and forget what you know._

 _That is the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. I’d point out it does not operate in
other arenas of life. In ordinary life, if somebody consistently exaggerates
or lies to you, you soon discount everything they say. In court, there is the
legal doctrine of falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus, which means untruthful in
one part, untruthful in all._

 _But when it comes to the media, we believe against evidence that it is
probably worth our time to read other parts of the paper. When, in fact, it
almost certainly isn’t. The only possible explanation for our behavior is
amnesia. "_

~~~
adrianmonk
I actually don't know if it's amnesia. It might be something more like denial.
The idea that we are surrounded by unreliable, incomplete, and misleading
information is too unpleasant to contemplate, so we just push that thought out
of our minds if there isn't anything concrete to suggest it is happening in
the specific case we're looking at.

This sort of thing seems to happen a lot when there aren't any obvious better
alternatives. Which newspaper can I subscribe to instead that actually is
consistently accurate? Not knowing of one, and not wanting to stop reading the
news entirely, I stay with the newspaper I already have and make the best of
the experience. And part of that is letting myself assume it's accurate
whenever I don't have a reason to say otherwise.

~~~
cr0sh
> Which newspaper can I subscribe to instead that actually is consistently
> accurate?

I understand you aren't actually asking this question, so this response isn't
directed at you personally:

I often wonder why it rarely occurs to people that they can subscribe or
consume multiple sources of information in order to arrive at a more accurate
conclusion?

I also wonder if it has anything to do with poor research skills learned in
high school (or maybe even college/university), in which when doing a research
paper or other similar work, they only look up the subject(s) in an
encyclopedia, use that as their bibliographic source, and never go any further
with deeper research using other means...?

Likely, it's just laziness and apathy.

~~~
mercer
> I often wonder why it rarely occurs to people that they can subscribe or
> consume multiple sources of information in order to arrive at a more
> accurate conclusion?

[...]

> Likely, it's just laziness and apathy.

I find that 'laziness' is generally the laziest explanation for a phenomenon.
Also the least charitable, which is an aspect of interpretation that I've been
trying to pay more attention to.

That said, I don't disagree with you. In fact, I'm often baffled by how bad
people are, in a more general sense, at exploration and search.

I feel like half the stuff I teach junior coders is simply how to search for
solutions to a problem, or how to build up a collection of sources that can
help with the particular domain they're working in. Or even just how valuable
it is to take an hour or so to read through some library's documentation
before or while using it. Not to mention how to develop heuristics to decide
which library is the best one to use for a particular task.

In a world where _most_ necessary information is at your fingertips, the skill
to focus on is how to handle and filter all this information. Even just a
cursory look at most people's google search queries makes it clear that
there's a lot that people can learn in this regard. Or the fact that many
people I know are barely aware of their mac's Spotlight feature, and instead
click around through 'untitled folder (2)' to figure out which document named
'copy of <document> (2)' is the relevant one.

(Basically, aside from the more general value of 'learning how to learn' (for
which Coursera offers a wonderful MOOC with the same name), I feel that
'learning how to find information' is something that most people are
shockingly bad at.)

Anyways, I don't think laziness explains it. It's more that people are just
not taught this as a basic skill in school, nor are they taught that this is a
valuable skill. If you don't know how to find things, or how to learn things
for that matter, or why this is something hugely valuable, how can you be
expected to figure that out by yourself?

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smitherfield
* Because almost all “hacking” is boring, and/or conceptually dense and/or non-cinematic.

* Rule of Cool.

* Because screenwriters typically have little knowledge of the subject.

* For the same reasons (the ones above) films and TV can’t portray lawyers or doctors or teenagers or police officers or drug dealers or scientists or bartenders or art thieves or Wall Street or soldiers or college students or anything else accurately.

~~~
msla
> Because almost all “hacking” is boring, and/or conceptually dense and/or
> non-cinematic.

Similarly, has any show ever portrayed writing accurately?

Any kind of writing. Screenwriting. Doesn't matter. It's the same problems as
you list there: The actual act of putting words in order is determinedly,
obstinately non-cinematic.

It can't be unfamiliarity, given that writers are writing those scenes, so it
has to be the simple fact training a camera at someone staring into space
and/or working quietly is a dumb idea in a visual medium.

The activities surrounding writing can be portrayed, the brainstorming and
planning sessions and maybe even some of the research, but the act itself is
way too internal.

~~~
jorvi
Counterpoint: the movie 'Locke' literally consists of Tom Hardy sitting in a
car doing phone calls, and... it works. Beautifully so.

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LordKano
Because they're in the business of providing entertainment and most of
"hacking" is mindnumbingly boring.

~~~
neaden
I'm not even sure if films/tv portray hacking more innacurately than they do
the average job they portray such as police, lawyers, doctors, etc.

------
vanderZwan
> _Jurassic Park – In the midst of a velociraptor attack, Ariana Richards sits
> down at a computer and says, “It’s a Unix system. I know this.” Then she
> somehow hacks the entire Jurassic Park security system in a matter of
> seconds and takes control of the automatic doors. This scene is filled with
> tension, but what she does is analogous to someone loading a browser on a
> Macbook and then saying, “It’s Safari. I know this,” and then going on to
> compromise someone’s Gmail account in a couple seconds._

Well if you put it like that it actually sounds somewhat plausible, since she
was on that someone's computer. Most people I know leave their Gmail logged
in.

~~~
mcguire
" _... While most people troll this scene for its usage of 3D graphics on
screen, she’s actually using a real 3D filesystem called FSN._ "

That's not a filesystem.

~~~
TrevorJ
It is a file _manager_ though.

------
tmzt
Shouldn't the illustrious Beeb be asking themselves why the news media is
incapable of the same thing? Maybe the reason is the same as why they and
practically every other news organization fail to accurately portray
technology in general, including encryption. These inaccuracies tend to bubble
up to policy discussions where the media’s misrepresentations are turned into
(bad) policy.

~~~
fenwick67
Cue the "man in balaclava using a macbook to edit HTML" stock photo

EDIT: wow they even use "man in black hoodie with hood concealing face with
green characters flying around like The Matrix" as the story hero image

~~~
gozur88
Sounds like an upgrade to the balaclava.

------
lostmsu
For the same reason they can't accurately portray anyone else - most of the
time activity in nearly any profession is boring.

~~~
krapp
I can't even imagine the rage that lab technicians and forensic pathologists
must have felt when shows like CSI, NCIS and Bones were popular, and their job
was portrayed as all sexy quirky people using lasers and holograms.

And lawyers - the "CSI Effect[0]" has apparently made proving cases with real
science more difficult.

[0][https://www.thebalance.com/csi-
effect-1669447](https://www.thebalance.com/csi-effect-1669447)

~~~
occultist_throw
From the article you linked...

"Professionals worry that jurors may acquit guilty defendants because forensic
evidence is not presented by the prosecution at trial."

How is that bad?

~~~
krapp
If jurors have unrealistic expectations about the quality, reliability and
nature of forensic science based on tv, then they can't make rational
judgements based on its presence or its absence.

------
jshaqaw
Because watching someone mess around with VIM for 17 hours of realtime while
eating junk food only to scream "aha the semicolon is four spaces off" is not
must see TV

------
sircastor
While most of these examples are spot on, I will argue the point of the
Jurassic Park Hacking scene:

The 1992 world of computers and networks was _much_ different than our world
today. The author uses the analogy of familiarity with a browser and gaining
access to a gmail account. I remember 1992. I remember the systems that didn't
have lock screens, and didn't have log in passwords. Couple that with a theme
park's computer system that's still being built and debugged.

I think it's totally rational that a kid who's familiar with a unix filesystem
and a navigator could poke around a system until she found some security
scripts.

I take much more issue with the "video feed" of the Dock with the worker Nedry
was talking to - and the video playback bar on the bottom of the window.

~~~
JdeBP
But "It's a Unix system" ... and Unix _did_ have log-on passwords. That said,
what's on screen in that movie _actually was_ a Unix system.

* [https://movies.stackexchange.com/questions/9745/](https://movies.stackexchange.com/questions/9745/)

------
pault
I hate this because it suspends my suspension of disbelief. I can only think
of three instances of tv shows and films that get it right: the US version of
Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (at least she uses a terminal emulator and ssh);
The Social Network; and Mr. Robot. It's so commonly botched that I get really
excited when someone gets it right. It doesn't even have to be perfect; just
not laughably ridiculous.

------
occultist_throw
The same reason they fail at representing the Occult. 95% of it is not flashy.

I spend a great deal of my time reading, be it new tech documents, papers, or
other findings that interest me. Or I read musty old tomes, scans from Oxford
library and wherever on mysticism and occultism.

Do you know how exciting it is to show someone reading for hours? Not very.
No, people have very low attention spans, and can barely read a facebook post
or moderately sized comment. Discussing intricacies of anything on TV is
verboten. Small bites are acceptable, and even better if they have flashy and
pretty graphics or effects.

So instead, dramatic "interpretations" are used, to ill effect. Insert CSI
"zoom - zoom - zoom - caught them", "uber hackers" that can make blenders turn
on remotely, to "evil warlocks" that kill at a glance. It's all theater, and
badly done at that.

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rkuykendall-com
Unbeatable Squirrel Girl by Ryan North (Dinosaur Comics) has a few panels
about this recently:

[https://twitter.com/thesizeoffun/status/893479366235230208](https://twitter.com/thesizeoffun/status/893479366235230208)

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bonzini
There was a famous clip of a Bollywood movie where the hacking scene includes
the Windows Media Player user interface:
[https://youtube.com/watch?v=HyDXEik3mH8](https://youtube.com/watch?v=HyDXEik3mH8)

~~~
gr3yh47
do you know the name of the movie?

~~~
bonzini
No, but it was on Reddit a few years ago so it should be possible to Google
it.

------
shabble
Nmap even has a page dedicated to movies showing it's use:
[https://nmap.org/movies/](https://nmap.org/movies/)

Many of them still aren't exactly what you'd call realistic though.

------
msl
I feel the article is not quite fair in its coverage of _Hackers_. Sure, the
movie gets many things absurdly wrong, but it also depicts social engineering
(calling a security guard and tricking him into telling the hacker a modem's
phone number), dumpster diving in hopes of finding interesting documents and
guessing passwords. These could be straight from Kevin Mitnick's memoirs,
_Ghost in the Wires_ (which came out years later). I think the movie might
actually get more things right than it gets wrong.

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konceptz
I'm surprised they didn't have "sneakers" on this list. But then that is a bit
of a counter example.

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Isamu
When I first saw the "This is Unix ... I know this" scene in Jurassic Park, I
had to restrain myself from leaping up in the theater shouting "YES!!"

All those lost hours typing at a green-screen terminal qualify me to be the
hero in a Hollywood movie too!

------
poke111
I found Black Hat to be unusually realistic
[https://www.wired.com/2015/01/blackhat-the-best-cyber-
movie/](https://www.wired.com/2015/01/blackhat-the-best-cyber-movie/)

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wepple
The plane hacking on Scorpian still wins for absolute worst scene:
[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=buHaKYL9Jhg](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=buHaKYL9Jhg)

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d--b
Let's just put it this way: as far as Hollywood is concerned computer systems
are the new quicksand, and hackers are the rope that's needed to get out of
it.

------
eriksssss
"Enhance!"

------
tlogan
Why can't films and TV accurately portray doctors? Or any other profession ...

------
paulcole
What makes you think TV accurately portrays anyone?

