
My Code made it to a Hollywood Movie - infoseckid
http://hackoftheday.securitytube.net/2013/04/my-code-made-it-to-hollywood-movie.html
======
ErrantX
This is slightly meta, but it's nice to see the attitude of the OP here. It
quite matches my own.

It's always disappointing to see my work appear somewhere else without credit,
but usually it is not worth moaning about. At the end of the day, he put that
material up to be helpful to someone - and even if it wasn't used in the way
it was intended, or with appropriate credit, at least it was still helpful.

It's a good attitude to have, I feel.

Especially as it means he gets to feel "cool, my work is in a hollywood movie"
rather than "they stole my work". A much more positive feeling :)

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TazeTSchnitzel
Somewhat related, I've had an ambition for a while to contribute to a widely
used library like zlib or OpenSSL, purely so that I could claim I had written
code used in Windows or on my friend's mobile phone.

I am yet to contribute to either project, but I did successfully get in a
patch to PHP which removed logo GUIDs for good, which means once PHP 5.5 is
out, I can claim that a lot of internet websites use my code :D

~~~
yahelc
For others who were curious, I tracked down that PHP pull request:
<https://github.com/php/php-src/pull/132>

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
That's the one!

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WA
The most interesting part is that they even bothered to take source code that
is loosely related to security stuff and not just took any source code that
came across their way.

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diadara
I used to pause Person of Interest <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1839578/> to
look at the code which made no sense at all and stopped following the stupid
series.I am sure I am not the only one .It's not a bad thing to pay attention
to detail.

~~~
krapp
You're an outlier though. Making the code look authentic means burning through
valuable time and money on a special effect their viewers almost certainly
won't know enough to care anything about. It's just not worth the effort for
anything more than "something that looks like code."

~~~
diadara
You are right, if there is no reward for authentic looking fake stuff ,why
bother.. I should stop trying to make sense out of television hackers code.

~~~
krapp
Repeat to yourself: "it's just a show, I should really just relax."

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ChuckMcM
I'm not sure which to be more amazed by, that someone recognized their code in
a small snippet in a movie, or that a movie maker actually used _networking_
code when the plot called for it.[1]

[1] As opposed to "The Terminator" who came from the future running a bootleg
copy of the Apple II boot roms :-)

~~~
protomyth
Well, they still make 6502 derivatives[1] and it may be cost effective to
embed for part of a terminators[2] control. Think of it as embedded device
controllers. :)

1) <http://www.westerndesigncenter.com/wdc/>

2) side theory I read somewhere: Pixar's Cars is a sequel to Terminator about
1,000 years later.

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friendly_chap
This is really cool. It's amazing that even at big budget movie studios, the
general workflow is the same as everywhere else: copypaste an as fast as
possible solution from the internet... I guess no matter where they work,
people remain people, and budgets are tight.

~~~
Someone
I doubt google-copy-paste is the norm in movie studios. Movie studios must be
very conscious of copyright infringement. Certainly for audio tracks and works
of art showing up in movies, they make sure they will not be sued if the movie
is successful.

For source code, I don't know how far copyright stretches. Does it apply to
the textual form at all? For example, if this this code is GPL-ed, and you buy
a copy on DVD, would ey be required to give you the source on demand?

~~~
rayiner
Not legal advice: I'm too lazy to apply the fair use factors here but it might
actually be copyright infringement. On one hand it's a small snippet of code.
On the other hand it's a for-profit product. You wouldn't get sanctioned for
suing them over it I don't think.

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commanda
I find it amazing that somebody actually knew OP's code well enough to
recognize it in the trailer. Or maybe someone searched github for the strings
they saw instead? Either way, pretty cool - I'd love to have some code in a
movie too!

~~~
protomyth
VFX guys are pretty knowledgeable about computers, so maybe one of them knew
about the code.

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reeses
Český Wikipedia has the code as well.
<http://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raw_socket>

I'm not sure whence the code was lifted, but it would not surprise me if they
just grabbed some code from Wikipedia and assumed it was freely usable.

~~~
dopamean
The code on Wiki doesnt seem to have the same comments.

~~~
reeses
No, but the key one is "/* A simple write on the socket ..thats all it takes !
*/" which the author said was rather distinctive, and I would have to agree.
(In fact, it was the search I used to find this example.)

How it got onto Wikipedie is another question (might have been on en, ru, or
other wiki and translated).

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Snowda
If I was the OP I would just ask them to stick my name somewhere in the
credits and call it a day.

~~~
megablast
If I was the OP, I would do exactly what he is doing. This in no way deserves
a credit in a movie.

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to3m
Why not? If they used 3 seconds of somebody's music, you can be sure they'd
have to give some credit for that - at the very least!

Look at the average credits for the average film. They go on forever, and
there are tons of people in them. It's not like crediting somebody is a big
deal, in terms of the cost of giving it out. There are plenty of people whose
contribution to the film was small, just like the author of this code, but
they get credited anyway, and that's just as it should be - the credit is for
the contribution, not for the extent to which it makes the film a success.

~~~
ry0ohki
I think a better example would be a scene where someone is reading a book. I
kind of doubt they would give credit to Earnest Hemingway in the credits, but
maybe I'm wrong.

~~~
ANH
The difference here is that it appears we are meant to believe a character in
the movie wrote the code. I may be wrong since it's hard to tell from a promo
what is happening, except for LOTS OF EXPLOSIONS.

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D9u
Considering the way Hollywood bristles at "piracy" of their own products, I
suggest raising holy-high-hell over this example of Hollywood "piracy" of the
code in question.

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anonymouz
NMAP has often appeared in movies too: <http://nmap.org/movies/> .

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ot
I wonder if this is enough to make his Bacon number finite.

~~~
throwaway1979
Why do you say finite? The point of the Bacon and Erdos quip is that most
people would have a low number (8-10).

~~~
DavidWoof
The point of Bacon and Erdos numbers is that most actors and mathematicians
have low numbers, not most people. I, for example, have never published an
academic paper, which makes my Erdos number infinite. OTOH, if you count
working as an paid extra, my Bacon number is 2 (what do you mean that doesn't
count?).

BTW, a Bacon number of 10 is extremely high. IIRC, the highest finite Bacon
number of anyone in the IMDB is 8.

~~~
throwaway1979
Thanks. That clarifies it. I got this confused with the seven degrees of
separation from Kevin Bacon, wherein you count the number of people who know
each other between you and the actor.

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vidarh
The fun part is that the Oracle of Bacon etc. has given us a great way to
drive home the degrees of separation stuff not just for movie stars, but by
making it fairly easy to find your own degrees of separation from Bacon.

E.g., I'm Norwegian, with no direct connections to the movie industry at all.

But if you include documentaries, Gro Harlem Brundtland, a former Norwegian
prime minister and WHO director, has a Bacon-number of 3 (she was in some
documentary that included Morgan Freeman)

As a child, I pretty much ran into her while on vacation. In high school, I
interviewed a member of parliament that had regular dealings with her at
various points in his career, and later I was politically involved and did
debates against a later minister in a Labour party government, etc. I can find
a number of other things connecting me to her.

Depending on how strict you want to be, I can "trace" back to Kevin Bacon
either directly (tenuous) or about half a dozen people that both she and I had
dealings with, in the latter case with 4 people separating me and Kevin Bacon.

Alternatively, I can find a link to Kevin Bacon via Mao Zedong: I used to know
a guy that met Mao on a trade union trip to China in the 50's. Mao obviously
met Nixon, and Nixon and the Clintons know each other, and Hillary Clinton was
on Entertainment Tonight with Kevin Bacon at one point. Alternatively Nixon
mas in a TV special with Robert Wagner, who was in Wild Things...

I could probably find dozens more paths to someone in the IMDB data.

 _Most_ people can probably "connect the dots" via people they can name in
their social circuit to _someone_ in the IMDB dataset in at most 2-3 steps,
and actually find a specific path to Bacon...

Quite likely you can find several weird paths. Find anyone who has ever served
as a member of congress or parliament in your respective country, for example,
and you have at least an indirect path to a head of state, which gives you a
path to any of a large number of high profile heads of state that have IMDB
credits...

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akandiah
If it weren't for the code comments, it would've been hard to notice that it
was the OP's code. It's sometimes very hard to find the differences between
C-based POSIX/BSD socket code written by multiple parties - especially when it
comes to the set-up routines. Kudos to the OP!

~~~
infoseckid
A _new_ reason why to comment your code well :)

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jfaucett
that's awesome. I love the OP's attitude : "How do I feel about this? Great :)
If not me, at least my code made it to a 3 second clip in a Hollywood Movie :)
". It kind of makes me angry for him though that they didn't even bother to
give him a credit or ask him if they could use it in anyway. The least anybody
can do is give credit where credits due when using open source libs.

~~~
mseebach
If they should credit everyone that did something that's used as a backdrop
for a few seconds in a movie, they'd have time for little else. The guy who
did a mural the main character walks by also doesn't get a credit.

~~~
uptown
Actually - that depends. Artists have sued (and successfully settled in some
cases) for their artwork appearing as the background of other productions.

[http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr-esq/Maya-hayuk-
lawsuit-...](http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr-esq/Maya-hayuk-lawsuit-
sony-295409)

I'm not saying I think he should pursue it in this case, just that the
scenario you laid out isn't unprecedented.

~~~
pfedor
Yeah artists seem to do it all the time. They also often get indignant at the
merest suggestion that they might want to agree for someone to use their work
for free.

The difference is, of course, that writing code is joy so no wonder people
will gladly do it and give the results away, whereas creating art is
unpleasant, tiresome work, so it's an insult to suggest anyone would do it for
reasons other than money.

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markolschesky
I remember when I worked for a company that made hospital computer software.
They were on top of the industry and growing, yet at one point totally geeked
out about the fact that their software was going to appear on a show like
Gray's Anatomy. Hollywood is the greatest.

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joshka
Great, but what's the license on the code? Isn't this a breach of copyright?

~~~
jpadkins
Most likely falls into Fair Use. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use>

~~~
hkmurakami
Ironic, since doing something analogous with scenes from this White House Down
movie in a few years will probably get us a DMCA takedown.

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hackshare
I found this to be interesting. Good to see Hollywood using real code. You can
use this on resume :)

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samwillis
You could probably get a credit for that, maybe...

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pressurefree
dont get stuck in command mode on us...

