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The girl with the ANSI tattoo
- klez 14y agoMaybe I'm missing something, but why should it have been oracle SQL?
- flyosity 14y agoIt's an Oracle-focused database blog so it was probably a reference to what his articles are usually about. (Just a guess.)
- klez 14y agoI'm happy that, finally, people are not shoving 'movie-os' in computer scenes anymore. The first time I saw real stuff in movies was in Antitrust, then in Tron: Legacy and finally here.
- jeffool 14y agoThe Social Network was good about it. Someone online actually reedited the scene where he was grabbing images from frat sites and edited in scenes from other films, like Hacker's "virtual skyscrapers", and suddenly it was like a real Hollywood film again!
- ralfd 14y agoWe recognize when movies dumb computer stuff down, but the truth is they do it always! Imagine sitting beside a big horse nerd and every time a horse is on the screen and makes this typical horse noise they would comment "the horse didn't make the sound" or white walkers are killing the night watch behind the wall and "this horse is not really frightened but relaxed and listens curiously" or every time there is a mighty black Frisian horse in a movie, which believe me hey are a lot!, they would comment how wrong and stupid it is that Zorro/Prince of Persia/the Spartans are riding Frisians.
- waterlesscloud 14y agoI have a friend who is a competitive target shooter, and he's always complaining that the shell casings are the wrong size during shootouts. Of course now he's got me doing it too...
- scott_s 14y agoMovies always abuse the gun-cocking sound, and/or have characters cock (or pump, for shotguns) the guns at inappropriate times because it looks cool.
- drblast 14y agoOr the "click, click" empty revolver sound on a semi-automatic pistol. This pretty much only happens if you're evil though. The slide just never seems to lock back like it should unless the hero has two guns that need to be thrown on the ground before he/she walks forward defiantly and grabs two MORE guns.
- nicholassmith 14y agoIf you think that's bad count how many gear changes happen in a car chase/street race in most big films that have manual cars. Obligatory 9gag http://9gag.com/gag/4026146 http://9gag.com/gag/4026146
- pyre 14y agoYou must have only read the comic, but not the comments about down-shifting for turns. :P
- nicholassmith 14y agoDid read the comments, but they still always find an extra gear to shift up into ;)
- antidoh 14y agoI don't think they dumb down on purpose, I think more often they just don't bother to talk to anyone knowledgeable.
- scott_s 14y agoI paused the movie on all computer shots, and they're all legit. He's using emacs to hack Perl code in the beginning, all of the computers have Linux desktops, and most importantly, when they say things like "I need a dedicated Linux box running Apache with a MySQL back end", it sounds like something the character says all the time. Typically in movies, you can tell actors aren't familiar with the terms they're using because they emphasize them, as if they're trying them out.
- KC8ZKF 14y agoThe audio version of Neal Stephenson's "REAMDE" has our hero saving data in a "ee em ay see ess file." But really, nobody ever says things like "I need a dedicated Linux box running Apache with a MySQL back end" outside of an Aaron Sorkin script.
- bitwize 14y agoNo, they say things like "I need a SinoLogic 16, Sogo-7 Datagloves, a GPL stealth module, one Burdine Intelligent Translator, and Thompson eyephones." When all else fails, make shit up.
- KC8ZKF 14y agoSorkin has a tendency write over-specific dialog, with lots of jargon. For this he is lauded for being accurate, but it sounds stilted. Throw in three or four overwrought soliloquies, and the man wins an Academy Award. I just don't understand his appeal.
- adavies42 14y agoaudiobook narrators are really hit-or-miss on technical material, at least the kind that's sparsely distributed through some types of novels--i've heard them really butcher computer and military jargon quite frequently. (can't remember anything specific off the top of my head right now, but i think there was something fairly egregious in one of the Kris Longknife books.)
- arethuza 14y agobin/iostat in Tron Legacy returns: SolarOS 4.0.1 http://tron.wikia.com/wiki/SolarOS http://tron.wikia.com/wiki/SolarOS [NB I have the relevant screenshot as a desktop background]
- cantankerous 14y agoDid I just now get that SolarOS was just a pun on Solaris?
- arethuza 14y agoI think the capitalisation and the "4.0.1" was a hint that it's really a pun on SunOS. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SunOS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SunOS
- cantankerous 14y agoI feel like a complete putz for not getting the Sun-Solaris relation until RIGHT NOW.
- adavies42 14y agonext up: SUN stands for "Stanford University Networks" (which also explains why their original ticker symbol was SUNW) solaris is still internally called sunos (and the versioning is the same as the stupid java one, solaris 11 is really sunos 5.11)
- cleverjake 14y agoMatrix 2 rather famously involved an actual ssh escalation using nmap. Takedown (aka Track Down) was another fairly accurate example of hacking (though highly inaccurate historically). One of the more famous examples of "Movie OSes", Jurassic Park (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFUlAQZB9Ng http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFUlAQZB9Ng), actually was a real unix system running FSN
- lloeki 14y agoI have noticed across the years since 2000: - a bunch of nmap appearances (notably Die Hard 4 and the Bourne Ultimatum, also one of the Matrix movies) - some default OpenBox with XTerms in a few series - KDE quite a number of times too - SSH, bash and Unix FS exploration (cd, ls -l and its output, find, grep) at times In fact it's sad that so much of the computer scenes are bad, but I've seen enough actually good attempts at being realistic that I can't remember where I saw them. What's sure is that the trend is upwards.
- drbawb 14y agoY'know the 3D filesystem in Jurassic Park was a real program too, and it was based on a UNIX system. (I think it's a file explorer for an old SGI box; which makes sense as SGI was commonly used in the production of movies.)
- masklinn 14y ago> I think it's a file explorer for an SGI box Aye it's FSN/Fusion: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fsn http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fsn There's even a screening of fsn in action on youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zaRHU1XxMJQ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zaRHU1XxMJQ
- benihana 14y agoI noticed this in Jurassic Park - it had a sort of movie OS, sort of actual code thing in it: https://twitter.com/hoorayimhelping/status/198887963399176192/photo/1/large https://twitter.com/hoorayimhelping/status/19888796339917619...
- Create 14y agoyou never read the book, which has named the apple notebooks and some shareware software (product placements which are almost gone by now). The main character(s) explicitly saved up for the given machine (although the movie isn't accurate down to the model)
- jlgreco 14y agoThe book explicitly mentions PGP which I thought was particularly cool.
- adavies42 14y agothe books all had this odd habit of being very specific about brands--Lisbeth's favorite microwave pizza, her computers, i think even the names of the ikea furniture. idk if that's normal in swedish writing or if it was just larsson....
- shrikant 14y agoThe overall premise was a little over the top, but WarGames (the older one) got some of the detail correct. In 1983, no less, so it's replete with dial-up sounds and everything!
- bitwize 14y agoWarGames was a marvelous movie! With the exception of WOPR, all of the computer usage was fairly accurate, with a few fudges such as that speech module being audible everywhere, when it clearly says that he bought it for his home computer to read terminal output. Everywhere else a computer is shown being used, it's fairly mundane, e.g., a librarian doing searches for books on Falken. There's no "computers are magic" crap-ola that goes on in later hacker-themed films. As for WOPR, he is based on a real cold-war program called SIOP (Single Integrated Operational Plan), under which the President could tentatively select nuke targets and run computer simulations of what might happen. WOPR, unlike a lot of movie AIs, is not even particularly malicious; he is just running what he thinks is a simulation, blissfully unaware of the stakes, as any computer program without sufficient "common sense" would be. Probably the biggest exaggeration in that movie was the shots of the NORAD command center, which NORAD officials at the time stated was what they wished they had rather than what they actually had. The filmmakers were not permitted access to the insides of NORAD so again, they had to make shit up.
- masklinn 14y agoYou never watched jurassic park?
- Morg 14y agoFor people using mysql, that kind of query really isn't such bad SQL at all.
- sp332 14y agoShocked moviegoers will have been left wondering why a genius-level hacker would outer-join to the Victims and Keywords tables only to use literal-text filter predicates that defeat the outer joins Any excuse for this? :)
- huggyface 14y agoRealistically that they started the query with keywords optional, then moved to them being required (which, it should be noted, a good query planner would effective make an inner join). On the scale of evils of SQL, it lies somewhere around "friendly benign".
- HarrisonFisk 14y agoThe MySQL optimizer will actually notice and remove the outer join aspect automatically. So I have often done this out of pure laziness if I start with an outer join, but really end up needing an inner join.
- nthitz 14y agoIn the original Swedish version she did it with MongoDB!
- Create 14y agoI thought mnesia...
- raverbashing 14y agoWell thank the FSM it's not DB2
- rubyrescue 14y agothe original swedish version would have been Erlang/OTP running mnesia.
- strictfp 14y agoMySql also has swedish roots!
- zacharydanger 14y agoWeirder still how the prompt clearly reads "mysql>" for Oracle.
- zemo 14y ago...did you read the article? They clearly state that it's MySQL. The blog itself is called Oracle WTF.
- zacharydanger 14y agoMy mistake.
- sophacles 14y agoI really don't understand why people need to nitpick stuff like this. I mean, it's a movie -- the point is to tell a story not impart technical knowledge. Yeah, the query someone came up with on the fly isn't perfect, we get it, but in reality, this happens at the sql command line all the freaking time, it's a one-off, who cares? And yeah, the returned results are a bit incorrect for the query, but given that a bunch of freeze frame work had to be done to determine this, it seems like a pointless nitpick. Why not instead applaud the film-makers for actually using shockingly (for hollywood) real stuff. Like I said, the point of movies is to tell a story. Sometimes this means glossing over bits, getting details wrong, or even presenting things out of order, because the important part is he plot. We all do this when we tell stories, it's human nature. We want to convey how awesome/important/sad/happy/whatever a moment was, and to do that we need to properly contextualize the emotion and key bits, not every detail. When the makers of a fictional story try to get largely unimportant details right, they are showing dedication to craft, not asking for technical advice. Maybe it's because I'm ramping my team up for demo season, where I have to remind them and the researchers they work with that the grant reviewers haven't spend the last 6 months thinking real hard about the problem, and aren't as expert in the sub-field/topics as we are (they are pretty smart competent people, but they gave us money to do the work because presumably we know more about it than they do...). To do a demo and to make a movie are very similar. You need to convey the importance of the work, without making bogus claims (in demos about research, in movies its about plot breaking), and convey the context in which it can be understood. Sometimes this means leaving out or glossing over really cool technical stuff, because it doesn't actually matter to the bigger picture. Sometimes it means saying "this part is simulated with these assumptions because we don't know yet, or it still needs more reseach, but if true, it shows our point nicely". Sometimes it means showing things happen at 10x or .1x real time, because that is how you tell the story. It isn't lying or being stupid, it is getting points across. Well anyway, that turned into a rant. TL;DR - Detail are not the point of movies, they are just a vehicle to help the point, we should applaud careful attention to them, not nitpick.
- mibbitier 14y agoThing is, if you're "good" at something, and a movie gets it wrong, it can ruin the movie for you. My pet hate is people playing the piano, but playing the wrong notes (While the soundtrack is playing something different).
- wpietri 14y agoPlease nobody let Hollywood see this blog. Somebody's going to say, "Man, we went to all that trouble to make it look realistic. But it doesn't work. Fuck it. Bring back the guy who did the interfaces for Jurassic Park. And the guy who writes Wesley Crusher's dialog." --- Update: I love that my comment mocking excess nitpicking now has triggered triple-redundant nitpicking.
- oliciv 14y agoThis one? http://www.siliconbunny.com/fsn-the-irix-3d-file-system-tool-from-jurassic-park/ http://www.siliconbunny.com/fsn-the-irix-3d-file-system-tool...
- DanBC 14y agoThere are a few 3d user interfaces. (http://nooface.net/3dui.shtml http://nooface.net/3dui.shtml) It's kind of a shame that VRML and these interfaces were being developed when hardware wasn't powerful enough and when networking wasn't fast enough. With good displays, and smart people working on them, and much nicer hardware, I think these techs could provide interesting results.
- sp332 14y agoAs mentioned before, the filesystem browser in Jurassic Park was a real program, called fsn. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fsn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fsn
- pyre 14y ago> interfaces for Jurassic Park Replace Jurassic Park with "Operation Swordfish" or "Hackers," and you might be on to something. Especially since the Jurassic Park interface was a real program that actually existed.
- sp332 14y agoSwordfish was really funny to me because Hugh Jackman had the "kinetics" of a hard night of hacking exactly right, while he's typing at that ridiculous interface.
- shiven 14y agoWow! Only on HN could one expect people picking apart SQL from movie screenshots and then discussing the minutiae of that code! Not that I have any problem with it. However, it surprises me no end how inward-looking, tech-navel-gazing, nerd-o-maniac this can appear to an outsider looking this way :-)
- idleloops 14y agoOh surely that's what they'd expect.
- JamisonM 14y ago> Shocked moviegoers will have been left wondering > why a genius-level hacker would outer-join to the > Victims and Keywords tables only to use literal-text > filter predicates that defeat the outer joins, > whether MySQL has a LIKE operator, and why none > of the victims' initials are 'R L'. For the record since you never see the entire query so it is likely that the SQL is not as wrong as the author suggests. There is an extensive use of ORs in the query so the conditions that are said to defeat the outer joins are not mandatory and the 'R' and 'L' checks are clearly not required to pass. I think it is pretty good representation of how you might build up query from scratch, piling up conditions in OR clauses to finally get what you want. Yes, provided the table that starts with V is aliased as v the v.SEX condition does defeat the outer join, but that might be exactly the sort of thing you would stick in after you had already established a working FROM clause and not bother changing the outer to an inner. Solving the case was after all by definition a one-off. I enjoyed this article because it points out an occasion where a movie really did try to get it right. Someone who knows something about databases had to have made those screens up.
- Akram 14y agoThe author could have done something useful instead of this.
- koide 14y agoLikewise. At least I cracked a huge grin reading it, especially at this golden paragraph: "Immediately moviegoers will notice that this can't be Oracle SQL - obviously the AS keyword is not valid for table aliases. In fact as we pull back for a thrilling query results listing we see the mysql prompt and giveaway use [dbname] connect syntax and over-elaborate box drawing."
- luminaobscura 14y agothey constructed a relevant sql query. that is more than enough for that scene. compare with this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkDD03yeLnU http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkDD03yeLnU
- idleloops 14y agoGreat article. My pet peeves in shows/movies, are normally around the fact that it takes more than a few seconds to do anything useful on a computer. And yet on film even idiots seem to command their gadgetry with aplomb. They should show failed password attempts. Computer lock ups. Anti-virus software blocking any meaningful use of the computer. Frustration of users as they are prevented from booting due to system updates etc. I'm also not a fan of fake search engines - and video streams that appear in flawless hi-def! I wish computers were omitted entirely sometimes - they are pointless props, and just age the movie. Couldn't they just say - 'I searched for blah'? It's not like I'm loosing sleep over it though. I would rather TV wasn't such an insult to the imagination (I can - and enjoy - filling in the gaps myself.)
- bitwize 14y agoOne movie I saw get this right is Office Space, where Peter's computer has to do 69 different things before finally quitting. True, it exits from a Mac-like GUI to a DOS prompt, but I loved the depiction of office software as finicky, time-consuming, and frustrating.
- bitwize 14y agoI wish computers were omitted entirely sometimes - they are pointless props, and just age the movie. Couldn't they just say - 'I searched for blah'? I hated this movie, but one thing I'm glad of is they actually showed computer use more sparingly than in the book. The book was rife with "Hollywood hacking", and was otherwise a pain in the ass to read.
- atesti 14y ago>Anti-virus software blocking any meaningful use of the computer Don't wish for that! In the Hulk 2008 movie, you can see Norton Antivirus scanning the computer right before he uses it.
- mikecane 14y agoLet me just say that after seeing the original Swedish movie and then reading the book, I was crushed to learn there was no hacker tool called "asphyxia" in the book.
- dude_abides 14y agoI loved how matter-of-factly he says Naturally I couldn't help stitching a few screenshots together in Photoshop
- wonnage 14y agoHeh, tried to share this on Facebook and got a "blogspot.co.uk is spam" warning.
- waterlesscloud 14y agoI tried to share this on my Facebook timeline (I have a lot of movie geek friends and computer geek friends), but I was not allowed to since it comes from an "overly spammy site". First time I've seen that...
- callmeed 14y agoOn a related note, I asked about fake UIs/OSs on quora a while back: http://www.quora.com/Why-do-movies-and-TV-shows-often-show-fake-operating-systems-and-software-interfaces http://www.quora.com/Why-do-movies-and-TV-shows-often-show-f...
- mbyrne 14y agoYou're all wrong. It's pretty clear they had to obfuscate what she really wrote so no one could use it to "hack into the mainframe," on advice from their lawyers to avoid liability.
- kayoone 14y agothis guy worked on the TRON command line/vfx stuff http://jtnimoy.net/?q=178 http://jtnimoy.net/?q=178 Really amazing!
- tubbo 14y agoIs there a reason why none of the images work?
- adeelk 14y ago“Bandwidth Limit Exceeded”
- williamr2019 14y agoUmm, sorry about that, wasn't expecting to be ycombinatored :) Fixed now.
- sp332 14y agoThey hotlinked to a different domain, and the traffic brought the other site over its allotted bandwidth. Very un-neighborly thing to do. You should always host your own images or use a dedicated image host. Edit: never mind the moralizing, it was his own domain that he linked to :)
- Jun8 14y agoI think they've done a pretty good job, compared tp the general level of hacketry and math prtrayals on film. This is up there with Trinity's login using a ssh vulnarabilty.
- g-garron 14y agoIt was totally bad to perform image leeching. The site http://www.williamrobertson.net/ http://www.williamrobertson.net/ Where the image are hosted, is now off-line, because of this. You can use imgur, minus, or even blogspot itself instead.
- socksy 14y agoThat site appears to be the author's own site...
- forg 14y agoThe Swedish police use or at least used MySQL as database solution.
- sodafountan 14y ago"The Social Network" did hacking scenes quite well too. I'd recommend seeing that movie for anyone who's interested in doing a start up.
- maximumsteve 14y agoYes, good hacking tips.
- strictfp 14y ago>Shocked moviegoers will have been left wondering why a genius-level hacker would outer-join to the Victims and Keywords tables Mysql defaults to inner join. See http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4418776/what-is-the-default-mysql-join-standalone-inner-or http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4418776/what-is-the-defau...
- jyap 14y agoThe Girl With The Dragon Tattoo also uses OpenOffice which I thought was cool: https://twitter.com/jyap/status/181908341675663362/photo/1 https://twitter.com/jyap/status/181908341675663362/photo/1
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- sodelate 14y agoi have been always curious about hacking with modern computers,movies just did a little to let more people know that