5 Things Hollywood Thinks Computers Can Do
Has your mom ever called in a panic, saying the computer was displaying a weird error message and that she hurried and unplugged it just to be safe--and then dunked it in the bathtub so it wouldn't burn the house down?
It makes you realize that, to some people, a computer is still a terrifying box of mysteries. Well, we think Hollywood writers have those people in mind when they portray laptop computers doing everything short of blowing up the moon.
After all, according to the movies...
#5.
You Can Blow Up Shit At Will With Hacking
Worst Offender: Live Free or Die Hard
What Happened:
The movie' villain, Thomas Gabriel, and his band of hackers are so good at hacking that they've gained the powers of an all-seeing and all-knowing God:
"OK, I want you to hack into that traffic light and make it red. Good. Now, I want you to hack into Kevin Smith' basement and physically move his webcam around the room. Now, hack into the brain of that fighter pilot and get him to shoot missiles into the middle of a busy freeway."
Hacking is to this movie what magic is in the Harry Potter stories: plot-hole spackle. All the gaping cracks in logic between scene A to scene C can be neatly smoothed over with the mystical power of hack. The improbability reaches critical mass, though, when the bad guys hack into the natural-gas lines near a power plant and make them spontaneously explode under the streets.
Why It's Ridiculous:
Look, we acknowledge that Bruce Willis movies take place in a universe where every object is teetering on the brink of spontaneous detonation (see Armageddon, wherein the bolt on a valve handle breaks, causing an entire space station to erupt in an enormous fireball). Still, if natural-gas safety precautions were so poor that entire city blocks could explode via broadband modem, we're certain the guys at 4chan would have done it by now.
In Real Life
Gabriel would make his insane demands to his hackers who, in turn, would snort derisively and call him a n00b. An hour later, 30 unwanted pizzas would turn up, mysteriously ordered under his name from Pizza Hut' online order form, while the hackers giggle and high-five each time the doorbell rings.
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actually in a deleted escene of the independence day they do exactly what you said whit the reverse-enginereed computer from roswell
ReplyIn #5, to be fair, whilst the speed of getting the information required to do so (and granted the ability to do it at all) is questionable, Die Hard 4 did give an explanation to each. Apart from the webcam being moved, but apparently it is possible for one to hack a computer and operate its disk drive.
ReplyBut still, to make the gas explode, all they do is reroute basically all the US gas reserves to that one pumping station - the sheer volume of gas would pressurise it to ridiculous levels and probably ignite just off of that. And in all fairness to them with the fighter pilot, all they did there was hack the US military (OK, they did go too far there) to gain the flight's callsign and then just fed him orders - how all fighter pilots actually fight things on the ground.
They forgot Eagle Eye. Loved that film, though.
ReplyLets consider the two plot hole errors in this article:
Reply1. War Games, The plot was solid, well, to anyone who knows anything about networking, WOPR thought it's inventor was accessing via remote access, it did all the computing and transmitted text for the user to reply to, that's less power than a calculator needs.
2. Independence Day, A ship crashes, Scientists investigate it, years later an invasion fleet arrives mysteriously we can communicate with their computers....OR a ship crashes, we investigate it, and mysteriously our computers start to get better and better, we reverse engineered it, sold it to corporation and ergo our computers use the same basic logics.
Authors of articles should probably watch the films they're exploting the plot holes of, it's basic manners.
Consider ending your sentences properly with a period.
I don't think that the writers of this article actually watched WarGames. If they had, they wouldn't have been ranting about the computer so much as the stupid idiots in the government who left the computer hooked up to a modem with a game called "Global Thermonuclear War" still on the hard disk. Seriously? You don't think that would have caused problems? I mean, even erasing the games would have worked. The problem was that Matt Broderick's character played Russia, so WOPR thought that (being the US) Russia's attacks were imminent. I think that a more appropriate rant would have been: would an AI understand that Global Thermonuclear War was bad by playing Tic-Tac-Toe and always getting "cat's game?" I think that the writers should have done more research before putting this rant. I agree with some parts, but you have to understand that many people don't want to sit through MOUNDS of information in a movie that could be explained by "goverment stupidity" and "some computers." We just accept it as an audience, because it seems mildly plausible. Leave it at that.
ReplyI've seen the deleted scene in ID4, still doesn't explain how an earth computer could have hacked into an alien computer.
ReplyFirst, even if the alien computers were binary, you'd still need to know what their protocols were. The possibility of aliens on another world developing a set of protocols identical to ours would be infinitesimal. s**t, it could take years to figure out what was a 1 and what was a 0. That's just to communicate with the alien computer. Then, you would need to figure out the instruction sets of the processors in the alien computer before you could even write a "hello world" program to say nothing about writing a virus. While at the same time, you would need to learn the alien language, without any help from the aliens.
Before the rosetta stone, it was impossible for scholars to translate the Egyptian language, and even then it took decades to get the language deciphered. Today there are still written languages that haven't been translated yet, and these are human languages FFS! It would be an order of magnitude harder to do the same for a language of an alien being.
Yeah, a lot of this is left over from the 80's, when the average person knew so little about computers that people who did know about them seemed like wizards.
ReplyActually one of the deleted scenes does create something of the explanation you want in Independence day. Why the removed it is beyond me.
ReplyJust wanna say- It'd be impossible to run Mac OS X on that Powerbook anyway. It's a PowerPC machine, and Mac OS X is compiled only for X86 based chips now.
ReplyTotally off-topic but......who in hell decided medium-grey text on maroon was a good combo? I can't read a single comment unless i 'select all'.
ReplyOn topic - i don't know enough about computers to know *exactly* what they can and can't do in the hands of an expert, but i do know one thing - nobody on tv/in the movies uses a mouse. WTH.
No one did, it's an error which occurs in some old articles, the white background is supposed to extend all the way down.
my cousins once hacked into someones webcam and moved the cam around
Replysomeone did that to me and it scared the crap out of me
it depends on the webcam, and recalling that guy's set-up, he would probably have a webcam that could zoom in on a fly 30 ft away...
And in further defense of DH4 - as odd as it sounds to say this in defense of an action movie - there aren't any plot holes. Unfortunately this is the first time I have found this happen on your website but it's just another occurrence of a pseudo-sophisticate self-proclaimed author and thus, inherent expert on writing a story, shitting on what is a blatantly successful and solid movie/book/game/story. Please, explain yourself. Every single thing that happens in DH4 has a very easy to understand connection to the thing before it and none of it is pointless or unexplained, except for the crazy french guy who is apparently from Final Fantasy XIII where you can jump 85 feet straight in the air from a standing position.
ReplyClearly, he's a Dragoon class, if you want to go the FF route...
In defense of DH4, everything that was done in that movie is entirely possible and has and is being done in reality, except for a harrier blowing up a freeway - though it is still possible that they could have hacked into the plane and blindly fired the missile, and jammed the controls. We call that ECM - electronic counter measures. While it is not that easy, it's not impossible.
ReplyAside from the fact simply finding the addresses for half the things they hacked would have taken them at LEAST hours, rather than the seconds. Then there's the fact that nearly every serious hack job (As in more damaging than changing the company website to a penis.) Took days to weeks of surveillance, exploring and social engineering just to figure out the systems and network. (assuming it wasn't an inside job.) The explosion in DH4? The network would have had probably 400 or more systems on it, with another 200 or so support systems all addressed on the network. Of these perhaps 3 MIGHT have the ability to reroute gas lines (which is really unheard of... Most gas lines still use manual valves turned by some guy paid 5.50 an hour to do so) and none of these systems will have convenient names like ExplosionController so that you know which one to get into.
Then there's simply understanding the software itself. I'll give you an hour with some Electronic Dental Record software I've used. I'll give you five bucks if within the course of an hour you can figure out how to freaking prescribe someone, ANYONE freaking Tylenol.
I wonder where the "comedy website" dipshits are to remind Cracked that these are "just movies".
ReplyYeah, I mean, it's not like people who actually know how computors work have any right to express their anger over the fact that movies get everything wrong, or the fact that people actually believe such things are possible. Oh, wait, they do.
To be fair, in Independence Day there WAS a deleted scene where the lead scientist guy at area 51 comes in to find Jeff Goldblum working on the crashed alien ship and reverse engineering the software as you described. Still totally ridiculous, but at least they tried. It just didn't make it to the final cut :(
Replybinary code is a universal languige if you can understand the way a computer works on earth you could understand a computer from outerspace
Randell, there is no such thing as "binary code". Depending on what processes it, a string of the same exact binary numbers can mean radically different things; it depends on what the computer's hardware and software tell it to do. It would have taken years, possibly decades, to reverse engineer alien computers' system architecture, their machine/assembly language, understand their operating system, devise an upper-level programming language, and code up a virus. There is no such thing as "simply" reverse-engineering a computer!
Did anyone else read this and feel like it was basically only two thirds finished?
ReplyThe bit about AI's (#2?) is disappointing. I mean, it makes sense sure but I had my hopes up for finding out how difficult it would be for a computer program to be sentient in the first place. I mean, computers are getting fairly sophisticated but the idea of them spontaenously becoming sentient is laughable considering how complex sentience is (right?). I'd hoped that that would be wittily discussed...too bad...
ReplyI swear more than one fictional character made a big part of their fortune by stealing fractions of pennies from every account in a bank. I think that's plausible enough.
Replyand there are even people who did it in real life.
"We assure you, wherever there is $9.5 billion, there are several people who will f*****g notice if it's gone."
Reply2008 called and it told me to tell 2007 that it's a f*****g retard :/
The kids computer couldn't open this entire article in a word document, but our computers only display one-fifth of it at a time. Although, for different reasons and with other stuff around.
Reply