
'Hackers' at 20 - caio1982
http://passcode.csmonitor.com/hackers
======
bane
There's three really great hacking movies: WarGames, Hackers and Sneakers.

WarGames really nails the solo bedroom hacker of the 80s but then mixes in the
DoD and general purpose AI to turn it into a coldwar thriller.

Sneakers is a clever, quirky, thoughtful adult hacking film.

Hackers though, teenage me ate up the feeling of the hacking culture that it
espoused. When I read cyperpunk books, I pictured the environment and
characters as places and people who could have come from this world. The sort
of irreverent, authority denouncing, cybervandalism spoke to me. The Warez,
Demoscen, ANSI art scenes all seemed to sort of be a kind of foundation that
created a universe that this movie made manifest.

When this movie came out, I was still telneting, BBSing and gophering around
"cyberspace". As soon as I found a writeable folder on an ftp server I'd make
hidden folders and upload crap and tell all my friends. We'd stay up late
wardialing and playing this soundtrack. We'd telnet to random IP addresses and
then get excited when we'd hit a VAX system, just like in the movie.

It formed a kind of social scaffolding my nerd friends and I hung our digital
world off of.

It's kind of laughable in many ways now, like many teen counter culture
movement. But it still holds a special place in my heart.

~~~
fein
Antitrust wasn't bad either, but I'm not sure if it goes too far into drama.

~~~
txrit
Antitrust was great, a longtime favourite of mine. They at least had some
focus on coding etc. rather than just mindless bashing on a keyboard to "hack"
random systems.

------
gozo
I was never that upset about Hackers, but I've had my fair share of laughs at
it over the years. I've had some revelations since then though.

If you don't document things yourself, you don't get to write history. There
just isn't that much material out there of how things were. In hind-sight I
also think it was more accurate than given credit for. Partly because a lot of
the things it described, like phreaking, isn't a thing anymore. So technical
accuracy is no longer that important.

The people who made the movie to some extent understood hacker culture better
than the hackers themselves. They realized that it wasn't the technical
details that was important, but describing the sentiment among hackers.
Otherwise they could have made a movie about security researchers at
Microsoft.

PS. Regarding hacking traffic lights, back in the day you could supposedly
flash a light at the same frequency as emergency vehicles to turn the lights
green, or at least that's what the textfiles said.

~~~
Gracana
The traffic light exploit still works, sort of. They didn't upgrade the
sensors or the communication protocol, they just changed it so that it turns
all of the lights red. Emergency vehicles can run reds, so it works for them
and not you.

~~~
ChuckMcM
This is true, and an Arduino and a switchable strobe will let you figure out
the frequency. The important thing is to know which direction it lets go first
after the light goes away :-)

I read an advertisement for a red light camera system that offered this as a
feature (traffic management for emergency vehicle (EV) ingress and egress) it
had the feature that you had to have red and blue lights, so it wasn't fooled
easily by civilians.

~~~
Gracana
Oh, using the same system but taking advantage of the additional signals
already present on emergency vehicles... that's pretty clever thinking.

------
nfoz
One of the things I love about this movie is how much it got _right_. The
general attitude of the time, the _feeling_ that we had in that era. This film
shows what it feels like to spend all night reading through hexdumps trying to
solve a complex riddle. I don't know anything else that captures that.

Of course it had to be "inaccurate" to show visually what that feels like
without it being super boring. It glorifies a particular set of attitudes and
styles that many of us were a part of in that era.

Love it.

~~~
Zelphyr
I agree and tend to think of it in terms of how the movie _300_ depicted the
Persians as monsters. They were nowhere near as monstrous in real life but the
Greek saw them that way. And the only way to convey the sense of how the
ancient Greek viewed them to our modern eye was to make them hulking giants.

In much the same way, _Hackers_ had to do something to depict how we felt
about computers at the time. I remember thinking how silly it looked at the
time but I also remember it resonating.

Though, I have to say, I was much more inspired by _Sneakers_ a few years
earlier which was much more accurate from a visual and technical standpoint.

~~~
tracker1
I liked Sneakers a lot... loved that movie... never saw Hackers at the time of
release (only first saw it all the way through about a month ago).

I don't know that it was particularly more accurate (at least the device in
question), but I think it was certainly closer.

~~~
throwaway7767
I always assumed the "device in question" was a hardware DES cracker. Assuming
that, the story makes a lot of sense for the time.

------
buffoon
Memories...

Good soundtrack, even if the film did make me cringe. When it came out I was
knee deep in oodles of Perl on a shit-hot upgraded SPARCstation 10 machine
(not camo painted I will add). Whacked the soundtrack in my external caddied
CD drive and plugged my headphones in, then spent 2 hours of frigging #defines
trying to get the fucking thing to compile a CD player that worked on SunOS 4
OpenView that I'd downloaded off Usenet via a 14.4k Hayes SmartModem (which I
still own)

And that piece of crap cost more than my car at the time...

Edit: I just realised one piece of tech I still use daily survived from back
then; a lowly TI-85 calculator.

~~~
rjsw
I'm guessing your CD player was workman.

~~~
carey
Oh wow, I remember workman now. At least I had university Internet, even if
the whole country's net was taken down once when someone tried a video chat.

It must have been a year or two later that I wired a doorbell between DTR (I
think) and CTS on a Sparc workstation, with a program that broadcast a UDP
packet to a Tcl/Tk program running on multiple lab machines whenever tcdrain()
unblocked.

------
Amorymeltzer
The (few) scenes that took place at school were filmed in Stuyvesant High
School
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuyvesant_High_School](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuyvesant_High_School))
which I attended. It always felt very appropriate - Stuy is a specialized math
and science school.

At any rate, I can confirm that the "pool on the roof" myth is indeed alive
and well. Upperclassmen used to try and sell "pool keys" to incoming students
for $10 each. Absurd as that was, there was a thriving market for escalator
keys - to turn on or off the many escalators in the 10-story building - so it
wasn't that far-fetched.

~~~
hobbsy
I was an extra in this movie - some of the school scenes (eg. the hallways
during the sprinkler scene, which was great fun to film!) plus some interior
classrooms too - were filmed on a sound stage at Pinewood Studios in London
[1].

[1]
[http://www.pinewoodgroup.com/production/hackers](http://www.pinewoodgroup.com/production/hackers)

------
TillE
It's been a very long time since I've seen the movie, but I was going to make
the same point that the director does: it was never intended to be realistic,
just a fantasy which captured the right feelings. It's probably not a good
movie for other reasons, but I think it was successful at doing that.

I've heard similar criticism of William Gibson's work, that his 1980s-flavored
cyberpunk makes no sense scientifically now. And that's true. But it still
completely works as a fantasy world.

~~~
pakled_engineer
Some of Gibson's 80s writing is almost prophecy, like New Rose Hotel

>Set in the near future, huge megacorporations control and dominate entire
economies. Their wealth and competitive advantage reside in the human capital
of their employees and the intellectual property they produce. Corporations
jealously guard their most valuable employees and go to great expense to keep
them safe and happily productive. There is little point in traditional
corporate espionage as new products are developed at a lightning pace; there
is no time to capitalize on the intelligence acquired from a rival firm, it
will be obsolete before it can be used. Companies now hire extraction agents
to steal each other's top productive employees.

------
rarepostinlurkr
Kind of feel weird posting this but a recent show, Mr. Robot feels like the
next attempt at something kind of like "Hackers".

One of the early on episodes actually has a character musing aloud if some
screen writer is making the next Hackers to incorrectly portray this
generations technologist. As they watch Hackers on TV in a hotel. A bit tongue
in check, because the show itself is doing exactly that.

It's actually quite good and surprisingly "accurate" on the technology bits
and even some of the personalities.

\--
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Robot_(TV_series)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Robot_\(TV_series\))

~~~
disbelief
I love Mr. Robot (even though it borrows rather heavily from Palahniuk, among
others) and strongly recommend it to anyone who liked the movie Hackers. I
particularly enjoyed the Hackers reference in that episode you mention. The
character's contempt at the technical infeasibility of the data visualizations
is well captured as I've probably heard that same criticism a million times by
my "real hacker" friends who may have snorted derisively but _still watched_
the film to its end multiple times.

------
thephyber
Sneakers[1] > Track Down/Takedown[2] > Hackers[3] > Sword Fish[4]

[1]
[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105435/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105435/)

[2]
[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0159784/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0159784/)

[3]
[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113243/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113243/)

[4]
[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0244244/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0244244/)

~~~
bch
I feel like having Swordfish in there at all skews your "weak side" of that
list to the gutter. Not fair to Hackers to be so closely associated with
Swordfish.

Edit: typo

~~~
chisleu
Having swordfish in there at all, and not War Games, invalidates the list.

Ferris Bueller's Day Off deserves more credit than swordfish on social
engineering alone!

~~~
tempVariable
Not to band-wagon it up, but I agree that Swordfish felt like an overly
produced Mad TV sketch of a techno-action movie. Expensive cast - cringe
worthy though.

------
klt0825
Seeing this at 11 is honestly what made me interested in computers and pushed
me towards my current career, so seeing that it is 20 years old is sort of a
shock.

I can also certainly can relate to the portion of the audience that found
phreaking much more interesting than hacking and the fact that the phreaking
scene is all but dead is pretty sad.

~~~
endgame
If you missed the phreaking era like I did, do yourself a favour and read
"Exploding the Phone":
[http://explodingthephone.com/](http://explodingthephone.com/) .

------
xhrpost
I once heard a story of a firefighter that used to love to watch the movie
Backdraft just so he could point out all the inaccuracies. This was somewhat
of my interest with Hackers in my younger years. Today, I get caught up in the
90's nostalgia. The article makes an interesting point that the movie is "one
of only a handful of movies in the cybersecurity film canon". On top of that,
I can't think of any cyber-ish movies that come close to matching the era and
attitude of Hackers.

~~~
oso2k
The earlier film, Sneakers [1] had some of the same ethos embedded, especially
in the climax.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneakers_(1992_film)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneakers_\(1992_film\))

------
hashberry
"We emphasized the use of psychedelic colors that the world of hacking was a
mind-expanding experience for the kids."

Awesome quote. Computers/programming/"hacking" were definitely a mind-
expanding experience for me as a teen. While "grown ups" saw a boring beige
box, the machine felt alive with limitless possibilities to me.

------
ChrisArchitect
love the film to pieces, never for the accuracy (tho it did accurately
introduce many to the concepts of phreaking etc, simple stuff, tonedialing
etc.whether technically displayed properly.....oh gosh it's all coming
flooding back now)

There was a quote from Softley in the Art of the Title article about the
opening titles
[http://www.artofthetitle.com/title/hackers/](http://www.artofthetitle.com/title/hackers/)
where he says it was a Bridge. Being of a certain age, this totally was part
of it. It was for the most part the peak of the modem/bbs days... and there
was a transition between the more analog days to the real digital days, the
days of the internet - where alot of the hacker culture, and things like the
demo scene etc...became diluted. Anyways, never took it that seriously, I mean
the characters alone are so out there, but it was inspiring from the whole
computer thing to the _music_ (legendary soundtrack, introducing a lot of
ravey/UK type stuff to ppl, on the cusp of the whole electronica thing) and
just the 90s nostalgia/tech nostalgia - it's great! And come on! Angelina
Jolie and Jonny Lee Miller alone...the former going on to such massive
success....

------
tdicola
It's funny to think in another 20 years kids might see this movie and wonder
what are those weird small rooms with phones that people go into all the time.
And they have to pay money to make a call!?

~~~
jerf
I can already tell you that the idea that a phone number calls a _house_
rather than a _person_ is foreign to a 7-year-old.

~~~
rconti
Which is really as it should be. I also find it amusing when people are
SHOCKED that a kid would have a cell phone. Sure, they don't need an
extravagant $700 smartphone, but who needs a cell phone more? The adult with
multiple credit cards, money, reliable transportation, and sits at a desk 8
hours a day with a telephone sitting right there on it? (and then commutes by
comfortable car to a house that likely has a landline.. or at least used to
when I originally formulated this argument)? Or the kid who rarely has access
to a landline, no credit card, no transportation of their own, relies on
others (school bus, parents, etc) for transportation to a schedule that might
vary each day of the week, and who is much more likely to be "stuck"
somewhere?

~~~
mikekchar
Perhaps they are available everywhere and I haven't noticed, but in Japan they
have cellphones with 4 programmable buttons on them. You can't call anybody
other than those 4 people. They are quite popular as emergency cell phones for
children and the elderly (the latter because the buttons are really easy to
push).

~~~
tailgate
I met an one of the entrepreneurs behind the jitterbug(now known as a
different company). Initially they focused it at parents wanting phones for
their children, but now it's mostly for the elderly.

He said they failed at their market research - they tried to make something
that appealed to parents, but neglected to see what kids actually wanted(to
have things like the adults do). American kids knew it wasn't a real phone,
and rejected it. Their parents then got them a flip phone instead of a "kiddie
phone".

------
cxseven
It captures an optimistic spirit of the culture about as well as Hunter S.
Thompson talking about the middle 60s:

DUKE (V/O): Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas.

(he gets up, pours himself a drink.)

DUKE (V/O): Has it been five years? Six? It seems like a lifetime -- the kind
of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very
special time and place to be a part of. But no explanation, no mix of words or
music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and
alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant.

DUKE throws open the curtains. Light streams in. Ext. 1965 Stock Footage: We
are in San Francisco. Images of the time flood in.

DUKE (V/O): There was madness in any direction, at any hour... you could
strike sparks anywhere there was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we
were doing was right, that we were winning. And that, I think, was the handle
-- that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of old and evil. Not in
any mean or military sense; we didn't need that. our energy would simply
prevail.

We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful
wave...

DUKE's face is suffused with a sadness and serenity we have never seen before.

DUKE (V/O): So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill
in Las Vegas and look west, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see
the high water mark -- that place where the wave finally broke and rolled
back.

The memories dissolve into the night skyline of Vegas. DUKE closes the
curtain. The room is in darkness again.

------
jjaredsimpson
Honestly the thing I remember most about Hackers was when the credit rolled
and hearing Halcyon for the first time. That changed my music tastes
permanently.

~~~
nanonoise
The most loved music soundtrack in my collection. These is also a Hackers 2
soundtrack (music inspired by). Both are pretty brilliant.

------
apaprocki
I was recently in Kiev and I happened to see the movie being broadcast on a
small kitchen TV with VHF rabbit ears. So there was tons of static and it was
dubbed with that deadpan style Russian that they typically do in movies
without even trying to replicate the actors' emotions. I don't know exactly
why, but it made me laugh out loud.

------
wainstead
And consider just four years later "The Matrix" was released. It gives you an
idea of how fast things were changing in the 90s.

------
jedberg
This movie came out when I was 18 and I very much related to the characters in
the story. My friends and I definitely stepped up our "hacker" game after
seeing this film. I also bought the soundtrack on CD (that's something you did
then) and it was what got me into techno/house music.

Funny side story: I grew up in LA and one of the things we got to do as
teenagers was see pre-screenings of movies. This was usually before they were
finished and rated, as a way for them to tweak the final product.

Hackers was one of those movies. They didn't change much except that Angelina
Jolie unzips her jacket all the way to show her breasts. They cut the scene
most likely to get their PG-13 rating, but 20 years later that scene is
horribly sexist and a sign of the times.

~~~
simoncion
> ...20 years later that scene is horribly sexist and a sign of the times.

IIRC, (and I may not RC) that scene is Jolie and Miller engaging in sexual
role-play. A few moments later, we cut to what's _actually_ going on: the pair
is making out on a bed, and their friends have _just_ walked in to deliver
good news, but are currently gawping at the spectacle. Jolie notices the
gawpers, gets up, calls them something off-color, and we get to hear the good
news.

Is my memory of the scene dramatically off the mark, or am I missing the
sexism?

~~~
angersock
These days, anything remotely sex-positive for heterosexuality is usually
claimed to be sexist.¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

~~~
gaius
Quite. She's absolutely 100% in control and doing what she wants to do. I
guess some people find that threatening and try to use a trigger word to shut
it down.

------
randcraw
Or we could celebrate another 'Hackers' at 31 -- the 1F-th anniversary of
Steven Levy's "Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution", a fantastic book
on the origins of hacking, which also helped me get my first job as a
programmer. (My employer-to-be had just finished reading the book too and we
talked about it during the interview.)

Thanks Steven. (And Greg.)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackers:_Heroes_of_the_Compute...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackers:_Heroes_of_the_Computer_Revolution)

------
bitwize
_Hackers_ is pretty much _The Craft_ for people in my trade: very silly, very
90s faux-edgy, and very fun. Originally I hated it, but then I was a dormmate
in college with a skinny Russian kid who looked like he could walk straight
off the set of this movie -- and he used the handle "Phreak". (He was into the
MOD/tracker scene.) So eventually I came around to see its validity as an
artifact of the cyberpunk zeitgeist.

And in a few ways it was accurate: it predicted (perhaps inspired?) the rise
of case-modding.

------
fierycatnet
I don't understand the hate. Hackers was a really great niche film. It wasn't
going for the Oscar but when I saw it for the first time when I was 14 it got
me excited about computers. Movie was fun and soundtrack was great. When I
managed to compile and use my first exploit it felt like I was one of "them".
Made a few friends online that I only knew by their "hacker names" and I even
formed a team. Now that I think about it those were the fun times.

------
oneJob
WarGames (1983)! I don't think this has been mentioned yet (?!).

The modem, hacking the phone companies, motivated by curiosity and paying no
mind to whether or not one is breaking any rules, military misuse of
technology, programs being used to ends not intentioned by its creator,
command line, hacking alone, physical infrastucture comtrolled by software.

I mean, it had it all!

------
vezzy-fnord
For an actually good hacker film, see _23_ (1998), about the story of Karl
Koch.

~~~
e12e
23 (the German original, not the similarily-named holkywood turky!) is great.
Fwiw I love Hackers too, but they are so different, it's hard to compare them.

I also like "Hackers 2"/"Takedown" despite the various controversies (the book
being a rip off of another book, the script being a rip off, both book and
script being factually inaccurate etc).

Still now that Mitnicks own autobiography is out, while the movie might not be
a kind treatment of him, or his friends. I still think it's quite a good
hacker film, with some traces of accurancy (think "inspired by true events"
rather than "based on").

Btw, the name "Hackers 2" was just an attempt at marketing - the two films
have nothing to do with each other.

------
MilnerRoute
When the producer of the movie Hackers appeared on AOL for a promotional chat
room visit, some malicious technology lovers showed up and kept knocking them
offline.

[http://www.aolwatch.org/list/0051.html](http://www.aolwatch.org/list/0051.html)

~~~
MilnerRoute
Here's a more detailed account of the background leading up to that attack.

[http://www.yaleherald.com/archive/xxiv/10.3.97/exclusive/let...](http://www.yaleherald.com/archive/xxiv/10.3.97/exclusive/letter.html)

------
TheGrimDerp1
Sneakers was better.

~~~
McGlockenshire
Sneakers has held up _amazingly well_ to the passage of time. It didn't do
anything impossible, just highly improbable.

If you haven't rewatched it in a while, it's worth watching again.

~~~
superuser2
Eh. Sneakers' central plot point was a magic box that could crack all
encryption. It was otherwise a great movie, and many of the physical "facility
hacking" scenes were quite fun, but the magic box that breaks all ciphers was
more than improbable. Maybe you could say it was a quantum computer :).

~~~
LargeWu
But they got the implications of it right. "There isn't a government in the
world that wouldn't kill us all to get their hands on this." That is
absolutely true. Whether or not such a device exists, or could possibly exist,
is irrelevant.

~~~
DanBC
> Whether or not such a device exists, or could possibly exist, is irrelevant.

It is a little bit relevant in a post that is replying to another post that
says nothing in Sneakers is impossible.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10223284](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10223284)

~~~
gknoy
Putting on my tin foil hat ... one could imagine a box the size of a phonebook
(or just a laptop) that could, when it encounters packets or encrypted data,
send signatures and packets to the NSA data centers, and do the kind of
matching/etc that they are building towards.

Heck, even having it try to decrypt the packet(s) in a distributed manner with
$ALL_THE_KEYS that might have already been collected via nefarious means, and
then return the key + plaintext that is most likely, certainly seems possible
if the box was created by someone with the resources of the NSA.

I would be extremely surprised if someone were not already working on (or had
not already created) something very much like that.

~~~
superuser2
The box in Sneakers is a valuable theft target, implying it is not merely a
frontend, or if the Russians got it the NSA would simply revoke its API keys,
so to speak. It's also the product of a stroke of genius by a single
cryptographer.

It has to be a breakthrough in factoring large numbers very quickly, like what
quantum computers are promised to be. So maybe possible after all, I guess.
It's also very clearly a device, not an algorithm, so probably not a Von
Neumann machine.

------
howlett
I pretty much owe everything to this film, it's how I started with computers.
I didn't even have one when I watched it but the moment it ended I said
"That's what I want to do!". Never became a "hacker" but at least I'm a
developer and do something I truly love.

As for the accuracy of the film, I don't really have much to say. I don't
expect films to be "too" accurate, if they were they would be called
"documentaries". It's cool to see Gibson they way it was and them turning
traffic lights green etc.

------
orionblastar
"Hackers" wasn't accurate but it did bring about awareness for the need for
computer security and strong passwords.

I think Hollywood should reboot it for the modern times.

~~~
dragonbonheur
Please, not with John Travolta and Hugh Jackman...

~~~
orionblastar
Ugh why them? The main characters in Hackers were teenagers who went out to
explore cyberspace and see what was there and hack into it.

They had a "Hack the Planet" message in that movie.

~~~
crgt
It's a reference to Swordfish..
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfy5dFhw3ik](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfy5dFhw3ik)
Because, you know, that's how hacking works...

~~~
philsnow
Had nearly forgotten how much I hate that movie, and had definitely forgotten
that Travolta has almost a Jean-Baptiste Emanuel Zorg haircut.

------
Apocryphon
Perfect timing for the Art of the Title to release this interview with the
creators of the opening sequence:
[http://www.artofthetitle.com/title/hackers/](http://www.artofthetitle.com/title/hackers/)

------
Amorymeltzer
I submitted a link here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10227078](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10227078)
but in your terminal give the following command a whirl - it should output the
text of Hackers.

nc z.ero.cool 1337

------
BrianEatWorld
If you are in downtown Austin, this is actually playing at Alamo Drafthouse
tonight(9/15).

------
Malic
And here I thought, "Steven Levy's book has been out longer than 20 years..."

------
atmosx
I loved the OST, especially orbital's "Halcyon on and on". It's still on my
'snowboard' playlist. I still remember the intro scene vividly[1].

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pxb5YrDjDZ8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pxb5YrDjDZ8)
"New York - The City that never sleeps"...

------
cweiss
FWIW - The 20th edition Blu Ray release has some great documentary materials
talking about the cast attending computer meetups _in character_ to get
context. Also some bits with the costume designer talking about creating the
the 'look' of the hackers.

------
HugoDaniel
Hackers was a landmark in my youth. I also really enjoyed the movie "23" about
Karl Koch:
[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0126765/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0126765/)

------
PebblesHD
This movie may have had bad visual depictions of computers and laughable tech
references but it was what kicked me in the direction im headed now. Truly, a
life changing moment for me watching this as a young teenager. Mess with the
best...

------
tracker1
I only just recently (about a month ago)... It wasn't horrible, but not having
seen it when it came out it's hard to say what I would have though 20 years
ago (when I was 20), and on BBSes and a few art/dist groups.

------
norea-armozel
I love this film for the cheesiness of it all. But the odd thing, the whole
heist angle was fairly accurate considering what most large scale 'hacks' are
about: money.

------
dec0dedab0de
I watched it on netflix the other day, and it still makes me cringe when
phreak says "twenty eight _point_ eight"

~~~
dragonbonheur
I still do not have a clue what a BLT drive might be... Bacon-Lettuce-Tomato
??? How is that possible?

~~~
dijit
He looks at his sandwich before he says it; he's showing that you don't even
need accurate information to get people to do what you need.

sound potentially important, hurried.. and desperate for a favour- and people
will try to help

~~~
dragonbonheur
Okay... How many times have you watched it to notice that minor detail? Just
curious.

~~~
enneff
It was pretty noticeable on the first viewing IIRC. It's a common movie trope:
[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LineOfSightName](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LineOfSightName)

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kasey_junk
I will pay good money for either a) a modern computer that mimics the clear
laptop or b) Penn jillette to be my assistant.

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rdflterr
bluebeep. toneloc. AOHell. attcard. Miss those days.

Did anyone ever have the "terminator" terminal program which had the hidden
war dialer in it, which you accessed with the password "joshua"?

~~~
rdflterr
p.s. I still watch WarGames. :-)

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dschiptsov
That's mere a narcissistic (hipster's) self-delusion.

I still feel like an idiot at 40.

\-----

A hipster is mere a r _o_ le-governed behavior with corresponding fashion and
hairstyle.

