
What it was like shooting the movie Sneakers - aarghh
http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2012/09/robert_redford_sidney_poitier_ben_kingsley_dan_aykroyd_what_it_was_like_shooting_the_movie_sneakers_.html
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chris_wot
I'd just like to say that there has never been a hacker/cracker movie like
_Sneakers_ , and I doubt there will ever be one like it again. It was the
first time I ever learned about cryptography, it featured an awesome scene
where they work out where a car is based on the sound of the car going over
speed ridges, it had suspense, fully dimensional characters you could care
about, math, and tiger teams! What is there not to love about this movie?

Oh, and no Hollywood cliches. To this very day, this is the _most_ authentic
hacker movie in existence. Nothing else even comes close. And this movie is
about 20 years old now!

~~~
j-b
My SSID has been 'Setec Astronomy' for a long time. I figure if anyone knows
the password then they are welcome into my network. Definitely my favorite
movie of all-time.

~~~
ksadeghi
TooManySecrets?

~~~
CodeMage
It's certainly better than "CootysRatSemen".

~~~
DoggettCK
I actually had an anonymous secrets site at too-many-secrets.com, which was
originally cootysratsemen.com. Users in beta loved the name, but didn't tell
me until it went live that they didn't want it in their employers' logs.

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k2enemy
There's a war out there, old friend, a world war.

And it's not about who's got the most bullets.

It's about who controls the information: ...what we see and hear, how we work,
what we think.

It's all about the information.

~~~
runjake
k2enemy is quoting the film's main antagonist played by Ben Kingsley.

At the time this line was spoken, it would've been scoffed at by most military
generals [1]. But for us hackers, it was reaffirming to our perceptions and
beliefs about the future.

And now we have Stuxnet, NSA surveillance programs, and god knows what else.

1\. At this time, most of our electronic warfare operations were physically
bombing key water/power stations and reverse engineering enemy hardware with
o-scopes and rs-232 consoles.

~~~
gaius
Most generals ought to have read Sun Tzu...

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wslh
An excellent addition to this article is Leondard Adleman's (the 'A' in "RSA")
story: My involvement with the movie sneakers
<http://www.usc.edu/dept/molecular-science/fm-sneakers.htm>

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kghose
"He blushed and said he had worked on it for nine years."

There you have it folks! Sometimes you just work on something because you have
passion. Life's too short not to do spend time on your passion. And, hey,
sometimes it makes you famous/rich - BONUS!

~~~
npsimons
I don't think it's a coincidence that "Inception" was also ten years in the
making. Something about caring enough about an idea not to give up on it, or
to do right by it.

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ArbitraryLimits
Leonard Adleman's recollection of being the film's "mathematical consultant"
is also interesting:

<http://www.usc.edu/dept/molecular-science/fm-sneakers.htm>

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yanowitz
Any discussion of Sneakers is incomplete without pointing out the anagram: NSA
reeks

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UrLicht
Wow, was it really 20 years ago? As a kid my family lived in the Summit at
Warner Center townhouses in LA. One night my friends and I saw a bunch of
movie trailers pull up and of course we just had to see what was going on. We
watched for hours(!) completely enthralled as Dan Aykroyd stood on top of a
car passing a wallet back and forth through a window. It really gave me an
appreciation of the level of perfection that producers of movies demand.

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lifeisstillgood
For me the killer line was Redford collecting his fee for a coporate white hat
job:

    
    
      Redford (flirting) - Well, its a living !
      Pretty Secretary (Looks at cheque) - Not a very good one.
    

Said everything - and fair put me off the idea of copying what otherwise
seemed a really cool job :-)

~~~
cpenner461
Heh... Every time I watch this I try (unsuccessfully) to see how much the
check is for. I guess part of the timelessness of it, you just substitute
whatever the current value of "not a very good one" would work out to be.

~~~
lifeisstillgood
Yeah. I am glad though. The 20 year old me would have seen any number larger
than his student-limited wallet and swapped careers instantly :-)

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sespindola
Great movie. In 1998 the EFF built a DES cracking machine like the one
depicted in the movie[1].

Though it took 9 days to run through the whole DES cypher space, instead of
doing it in real-time.

1: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EFF_DES_cracker>

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nikcub
Author also has a very good and interesting podcast called 'the tobolowsky
files' that is worth a subscribe/listen:

[http://www.slashfilm.com/category/features/slashfilmcast/the...](http://www.slashfilm.com/category/features/slashfilmcast/the-
tobolowsky-files/)

~~~
waterlesscloud
This is about the only forum I visit where he's better known for Sneakers than
for playing "Needlenose" Ned Ryerson in Groundhog Day.

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drblast
Great article about the best "hacker" movie ever made.

Wish there were more like it.

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ColinWright
I remember that two characters sit on a seat and have a conversation, then
move off again, and never mention that they'd been sitting on a Cray.

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SG-
sneakers really survives the times too, not only is it full of good story and
acting, but technologically it wasn't way out there.

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drhodes
And it has a fantastic soundtrack:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-PCUVlfaVU>, picks up nicely two minutes in
with the staccato brass punctuating key changes.

~~~
npsimons
If you like that, listen to the music for the scene when they are figuring out
what the black box does: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWQtI_Zh38Y>. The
claves in particular (starting around the 2:07 mark) are interesting; as the
characters on screen connect the dots, so too do the two beats of the claves
get closer and closer . . . still gives me shivers.

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rachelbythebay
I remember using Compuserve to get their electronic press kit. It was a pretty
big download, and then you could run their program and browse around through
their presentation. I would love to see that again just to see how well it's
held up to time, even if it means running it in a DOS emulator.

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zandorg
In the DVD commentary, they mention 'some software' which they used to find
the anagrams. I have a feeling this is 'NAMEGRAM' (ie, avaiable around 1992)
which you can still find online.

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teeja
I think the cleverest line in the movie is about what a herd of geese sounds
like.

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iblaine
I remember Sneakers being painful to watch. Great drama, technically painful.

~~~
Zelphyr
I had a different impression. It was the first "computer" movie I'd seen (and
one of the few since) that portrayed computer interfaces as what they really
were at that time.

Antitrust is another but thats because they hired John "Maddog" Hall as a
consultant.

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Arvin2
This article contains TOO MANY WORDS and not enough secrets.

