7 ms·
'WarGames' and Cybersecurity's Debt to a Hollywood Hack
- TheBlight 11y agoIf it weren't for this film I don't think I would've really bothered much with computers.
- dankohn1 11y agoIf you haven't seen it recently, I really can't recommend this movie enough. I showed it to my then 6 and 8 year old boys, and they totally got it and loved it. It just holds up incredibly well.
- duskwuff 11y agoIn a similar vein, the same producers also made Sneakers, which also holds up quite well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneakers_(1992_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneakers_(1992_film)
- qubex 11y agoI rematch it almost yearly and I never tire of it, though of course I know it all off by heart by now. Curiously it also engendered a life-long curiosity with Seattle which I finally satisfied last year by actually going to visit the place. Odd how one's mind can fixate on such fictions and make them points of interest.
- sjclemmy 11y ago"Do you want to play a game?" Me and my friends used to quote that to each other back in the 80s. I loved that movie.
- Esau 11y agoI know how you feel. It was the first movie I ever took a girl to see.
- guiambros 11y agoLikewise. It was the first we rented, when my dad bought a shiny new VHS player. The movie stayed in my head for weeks, and is what hook me with computers.
- metaobject 11y agoI've definitely used that phrase at some point earlier in 2016.
- qubex 11y ago“The only winning move is not to play” has to be an all-time favourite of mine.
- jamespitts 11y agoThe screenwriters meeting with Willis Ware at RAND reminds me of how Steve Jobs would call up various S.V. legends in his youth. It pays off to make that call!
- alanfalcon 11y agoRecently re-watched this movie thanks to Ready Player One: so great to see plausible hacking in a movie (as much as I enjoy Hackers for the entertainment value) - I love this behind the scenes snippet about the movie and its real world impact!
- bitwize 11y agoI love how David researched Stephen Falken in his search for plausible backdoors -- by going to the library, looking through the card catalog, and checking books and magazine and newspaper articles about him.
- TheBlight 11y agoYeah that part wasn't super realistic. A good dictionary file would've cracked that bad boy in less than an hour.
- DanBC 11y agoRate limiting would have killed that dictionary. Just the connection speed: 300 baud means roughly 300 bits per second, or roughly 2250 characters per minute.
- loeg 11y ago1983? He'd get in after his first try, with "password".
- bitwize 11y agoBut what kind of credentials would he have? Would he even gain access to the games he was after? The whole point of hunting for the Falken backdoor was to gain the highest access he could, so he could get his hands on what he thought were games in development to be released soon. Also, 'nother WarGames fun fact: Stephen Falken is, of course, a play on Stephen Hawking. At the time of the movie's creation, Professor Hawking had only recently been diagnosed with ALS and was thought to not be long for the world. The original script/treatment was about a relationship between Falken and a teenager, to whom the terminally ill Falken would pass as much knowledge as he could before he died, so his work could live on. When the PC debuted, the script was reworked to incorporate the role computing had in young people's lives, and the nascent "hacker" phenomenon.
- molecule 11y agoAnother case involving a movie influencing Reagan, US policy and related to nuclear weapons is The Day After: > President Ronald Reagan watched the film several days before its screening, on November 5, 1983. He wrote in his diary that the film was "very effective and left me greatly depressed," and that it changed his mind on the prevailing policy on a "nuclear war". The film was also screened for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. A government advisor who attended the screening, a friend of Meyer's, told him "If you wanted to draw blood, you did it. Those guys sat there like they were turned to stone." Four years later, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty was signed and in Reagan's memoirs he drew a direct line from the film to the signing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_After#Effects_on_policymakers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_After#Effects_on_polic...
- UncleSlacky 11y ago"Threads" and "The War Game" were more realistic, IMO. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threads https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threads https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_Game https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_Game
- secfirstmd 11y agoJust talking to someone about "Threads" yesterday. IMHO the best "after the nuclear holocaust movie" (even more so than The Road), I think of all movies it was the one with the biggest immediate psychological impact on me (a rare thing)...I remember watching it and quite simply not wanting to get out of bed the next morning as I just felt a nuclear war was inevitable, we were all screwed anyway - and humanity sucked.
- PhasmaFelis 11y agoIt is so terrifying that the guy with his finger on the nuclear button had given so little thought to nuclear policy that a movie could change his mind. He should have known everything The Day After had to teach before even taking office.
- PakG1 11y ago
- harel 11y agoThis movie launched my love to computers and I owe my career to it. I was in awe how broderick got to hack all computers, have the adventure and get the girl. Perfect, I'll have some of that please. I still want to thank him one day.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- assocguilt 11y agoAnother jerk it to Jobs comment....
- tekromancr 11y agoWhat value does that comment add?
- assocguilt 11y agoIt might prevent similar comments in the future.
- tekromancr 11y agoComments where someone you don't approve of is mentioned totally neutrally, in passing? I dunno if it's going to have the intended effect, friend. People mention people, it's just kinda how folks work.
- PhasmaFelis 11y agoSteve Jobs was an asshole through and through, but come on, man. If you can't bear to hear his name mentioned in even a neutral context, that's your problem, not ours.
- dang 11y agoPlease stop posting unsubstantive comments to HN. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11146445 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11146445 and marked it off-topic.
- harel 11y agoThis seems quite relevant again now: The story of the IMSAI - the War Games computer: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10033325 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10033325
- NiftyFifty 11y agoet al Sony.
- ChrisArchitect 11y ago"I'm starting to think a major motion picture has lied to me about the capabilities of home computers!" https://twitter.com/chrisarchitect/status/701794179613995008 https://twitter.com/chrisarchitect/status/701794179613995008