5 Things Hollywood Thinks Computers Can Do
#1.
Computers Can Talk to Goddamned UFOs
Worst Offender: Independence Day
What Happened:
The Earth is under attack by a race of vastly advanced aliens, so Jeff Goldblum creates a virus from his PowerBook that disables the entire apparently Macintosh-compatible fleet of ships.
Why It's Ridiculous:
This is difficult to wrap our minds around. The aliens in Independence Day were not only thousands of years ahead of us technologically, but also were an entirely different species. Therefore, Goldblum's feat was the equivalent of colony of baboons in the Congo hacking into CitiBank using tree bark and clumps of their own feces.
Yes, we know it's just a big, fun sci-fi rollercoaster ride. Yes, we're willing to turn our brains off-they're in that state through most of our workweek anyway. But meet us half way, Hollywood. Write it so that, say, the guys at Area 51 had taken one of the alien's computers off the Roswell ship and reverse-engineered it over the decades. Or, something. Work with us, here.
But of course, there is exactly one reason why the aliens were defeated by a PowerBook in Independence Day: because Apple paid for it as part of the product placement. Yes, my friends, the entire plot culminated in an advertisement, and one you paid to see.
In real life�
That new Mac operating system that's coming out? Goldblum' PowerBook 5300 had about one-tenth the memory needed to run it. So, forget uplinking to an alien freaking starship; if he simply tried to run a piece of software from the same damned manufacturer from just 10 years in the future, the result would look something like this:
Re independence day, I must submit that any electronic device made from carbon based materials anywhere in the universe would still be bound by the logic of our own solar system. The physics driving them would be the same. If they weren't, the alien space craft would stop working somewhere in the galaxy after the particular radioactive particle they farm from dead space became out of season. So presumably, their electronics would work in a similar fashion. If that is true, then Binary code would be the most likely result of their computer scientists as well. Binary was developed because electronics work in "on" "off" parameters. Every single computation boils down to "true" or "false" which is what boolean means. If goldbloom was able to de-construct their machine code into binary, it's possible even if unlikely, that he may be able to write a simple piece of code that could theoretically disable the alien ships for a time. Doing it after a little sit down is impossible, yes, but your argument that his mac would be incapable of writing code for the alien computers is a bit flawed. A virus does not have to be much. A self executing file simply has to issue one single malicious command to be effective. For good measure, it can copy itself to what ever drives or media it has access to. These are simple functions on earth computers, and as computer science is derived from basic physics of matter, this isn't impossible based on your logic. A command like "shut down the shields" obviously wouldn't be that simple to execute. However, consider another aspect of this. The aliens were using OUR broadcasting system to communicate their launch coordination. That tells us right there that their technology is similar enough that they can broadcast signals on our own frequencies, and also unsophisticated to the point that they need to use our systems to coordinate. Seems to me rather than nuking houston, Pulman should have pulled the plug on major broadcasting systems. And you all say sopa is evil...
Replythere have been a few computers made that operated on trinary logic, so the binary system is far from the only option for computer design... an alien species that is way more advanced than us? there's no way to know if they'd use binary or not.
let's put it this way - do you think you could hack my computer by connecting a commodore 64 or, say, the original gameboy to it? i doubt it.
Oh my god. The Nikita reboot abuses computer magic so badly it's not even funny.
ReplyI gotta disagree with the Mac hacking the aliens computer systems doubts. Some time ago, (I had just dropped about 3 hits of acid) I was walking around, and suddenly realized how easy it would be to use Backtrack 5 to hack into the computer systems of the humanoid species on Planet [insert intersting name here]. It could be done! But not with a Mac. :P
Replyactually backtrack is programmed for UNIX based operating systems which is exactly what a mac is....so it is more plausible on a mac
You had me at "3 hits of acid".
A hacker can actually make a macs battery explode by over heating it
ReplyThat's because it's an Apple product though; they just need to coax the 20 or so souls of third world orphans they bind to each one via a necromantic ritual into breaking free to seek their revenge.
The things in Die Hard were fantastical but few things are outside the reach of hacking, they didn't blow the power plant up through a broadband modem, they went to the station, killed some government agents and took over the station and opened remote access up to it. Rerouting all the gas to that one conduit would have caused an explosion. And they didn't hack the mind of the pilot, and it isn't to far-fetched that in a world of chaos, a pilot, who knows there is a terrorist about, would fire upon a truck with the suspected terrorist, especially if someone with the correct credentials, GO codes, tells him to do so. It also isn't too far-fetched that Gabriel would have access to some of this more than other hackers and could hack the government faster, because he was the CIO of the government...So...yea it is possible, far-fetched, yes, but very possible.
Replyactually in a deleted escene of the independence day they do exactly what you said whit the reverse-enginereed computer from roswell
ReplyWasn't there a cracked article on movie plotholes that would have been explained by deleted scenes?
In #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.
ReplyActually you forgot to read. This article came out in 2007. Eagle Eye came out in 2008. nice try though
Lets 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.
The problem was not the fact the kid could control WOPR. The problem was WOPR decided to call off a nuclear war because it was unwinable, even though it was originally programed to retaliate regardless. That would have required some kind of sentience.
Still a fantastic movie, though.
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 would further like to add to your comment; the crack about the poor IMSI 8080, a computer I owned is incorrect. In its basic configuration it indeed had no more than 64 kb and often only 8 to 16 kb. First though It was possible with page swapping in memory to take memory to as much as 256kb. I managed 128kb on my system. Second point is that again with magnetic media such as 8 inch floppy disks or even tape and page swapping the Cracked article can easily be read on the IMSI system. Third point in this movie the IMSI was more of a dumb terminal with some basic graphic support, some basic voice synthesis (questionable but not unlikely) and modem support. Finally YES Government minions are often not as smart as the job they need to do, hence the game simulations still being available on the WOPR and the open lines into a supposedly secure system, in fact any lines into a supposedly secure system.
I'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.
The difference is the Rosetta stone doesn't interact back with you. With an alien computer, especially if some of the interface where in tact, they could keep trying different things and note the output. It would be like having an ancient Egyptian who traveled forward in time, and learning to communicate via trial and error.
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'.
Reply Hide All See All 3 RepliesOn 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.
It's all computers' fault!
Scroll to any page besides the last one and you'll have a white background.
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!