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Memories of the “Sneakers” Shoot (2012)
- BTCOG 5y agoNot as popular or liked, I also like The Net (Sandra Bullock) as a cheesy, guilty pleasure hacking movie. Didn't see it mentioned here.
- jmuguy 5y agoLoved some of the quirky application props they had, like "Mozart's Ghost". I definitely remember making some Visual Basic programs that had a little pi symbol in the bottom corner of the screen. I don't think I even knew how to program, was just making UIs that did nothing.
- dwighttk 5y agoStephen Tobolowsky’s podcast is a great listen if you liked that short article https://tobolowskyfiles.com/ https://tobolowskyfiles.com/
- awestley 5y agoRIP Sidney Poitier
- myself248 5y agoRIP Sir Sidney Poitier KBE, 1927-2022.
- jmuguy 5y agoI absolutely love Sneakers. Whenever folks talk about Hackers or the Matrix or any movies or shows that feature tech I argue that Sneakers is the best movie about hacking. I feel like a crazy old man ranting about it to some of my younger coworkers. It makes me sad that my handle (mother) on a lot of gaming services is much more likely to elicit a comparison to Danzig than Dan Aykroyd's character.
- pcarolan 5y agoSame. I was 14 at the time it came out and I can still remember how I felt walking out of the theater. Everything I love about the movies was there and it inspired me to want to lean more about computers.
- willcipriano 5y agoSneakers was the best technically, but Hackers captured the spirit of hacking during the time the best. Wargames is inbetween those. I'd argue Weird Science and Ferris Bueller are at the same level as the Matrix as far as the hacking content goes.
- jmuguy 5y agoYeah its probably not fair to compare them really, because I think Hackers (and Wargames) are great too. Just in terms of the movie itself (and cast... I mean my god) its great.
- jkingsman 5y agoWhile I completely agree with you, as a very minor point, The Matrix Reloaded features Trinity correctly using nmap to find an exposed SSH server, and then correctly using SSHNuke to exploit an era-appropriate CRC vuln -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PxTAn4g20U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PxTAn4g20U
- wcarss 5y agoI feel Wargames is often underrated. It was one of the very first movies about the topic (1983), and yet it balances being an entertaining blockbuster with very realistic depictions of many kinds of hacking, from waiting around for a port-scanner, to patiently shoulder surfing an administrator, to dumpster diving and just doing research on your opponents, plus many others. It even bases the overall plot on AI-training-set-poisoning! To this day that topic remains pretty far out of the public consciousness as a concern, but it's probably gonna be a pretty big deal. It also captures a core hacker cultural feeling of "curious grey-hat teenagers having fun exploring" versus "large powerful entities getting very mad at the wrong people over their own failures to implement basic security safeguards." It even manages to stuff a nuclear deproliferation + broad antiwar morality play in there, and through all of this, there's not a single crazy imaginary hacking visualization! It's a great hacker movie.
- jzellis 5y agoI still wanna get some old Cray XMPs and use em as office benches. RIP Sidney as well. A great actor and, by all accounts, a great man.
- thakoppno 5y agoI hope he finally gets those two round-trip, first-class tickets to Athens, Lisbon, Madrid and Scotland and Tahiti.
- qzw 5y agoBut Tahiti is not in Europe.
- rjsw 5y agoIt is part of a European country.
- acheron 5y agoI want peace on earth and goodwill towards men.
- cobrabyte 5y agoYou're not even faced the right way!
- cwillu 5y ago‹mutters something about a phone number›
- computershit 5y agoWe are the United States government. We don’t do that sort of thing.
- rotexo 5y agoThis is not a car dealership, pal!
- sv123 5y agoOne of my all time faves, was thinking about this moving this morning when I saw the news abut Sidney Poitier. Setec Astronomy.
- twic 5y agoHmm: https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/12819191 https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/c...
- pier25 5y agoOne of my favorites movies. It has this brilliant blend of thriller with humor and the music by James Horner is fantastic. Although I generally hate comedies, it's probably one of the few movie that makes laugh, even though I know it by heart.
- Overtonwindow 5y agoWhat a great read. I wished more actors took pen to paper to talk about their times behind the cameras.
- ISL 5y agoParticularly poignant for today: > I sat listening, but my predominant thought was "Damn, Sidney Poitier is a handsome man."
- VonGuard 5y agoTheir headquarters is the Fox Theater, now fully renovated and open, in Oakland.
- bcl 5y agoShameless plug for my side project - Sneakers HQ https://movielandmarks.com/#lm-1036 https://movielandmarks.com/#lm-1036
- b3morales 5y ago> It’s a technology movie that still isn’t outdated even though it was released 20 years ago and features cradle modems. This is a great point. I guess it's because they kept it realistic. Except for the box itself (of course) and maybe the voice-activated mantrap, there wasn't really any crazy futuristic spy tech. It was all plausible for the time, so it hasn't been invalidated by the actual future.
- Avshalom 5y agoEven then, the box: "an ASIC implementation of a newly discovered crypto attack" complete with a massive white board full of linear algebra is about as good a muggufin as you can ask for in any computer adjacent movie.
- myself248 5y agoThe only thing I don't love about it is the macguffin-ization itself. An algorithm is an idea and could've been communicated, published, spread around the world in the blink of an eye. Some years ago I wrote down a sketch of a sequel based on this exact idea, but the paper is encrypted and the key is sharded, and much of the plot revolves around trying to convince the trusted people who hold the shards that the researcher is actually dead and they should unseal the document, while the adversary tries to convince otherwise.
- MPSimmons 5y agoI'd read that.
- deanCommie 5y agoIn a traditional definition of "algorithm", maybe. But think about a machine learning model or a neural network. The kind of breakthrough that will break RSA might not be describable in a research paper (sure, the science would be, but the science for neural networks took decades before it was able to be applied practically)
- KennyBlanken 5y ago
- owlbynight 5y agoI grew up about a mile away from the federal reserve they hacked in this movie, and other than the X-Files, Sneakers is the only media I've ever heard my small hometown of Culpeper, Virginia mentioned in. So Sneakers has always held a place in my heart. But it's also the best hacking movie ever made, in my opinion.
- Rebelgecko 5y agoI think Culpeper was also referenced in an episode of Homeland
- aksss 5y agoHa, I made a point to visit Culpeper specifically because of the TV show Turn (and the book it’s based on, Washington’s Spies). I guess the Culpeper spy ring in the Revolutionary War was named for this town that George Washington had surveyed in his younger years. I happened to be road-tripping through VA and NC, saw it on a map and thought, I can’t not go there.
- crmd 5y agoYou might enjoy this brochure which explains how the FedWire Culpepper Switch worked: http://coldwar-c4i.net/Mt_Pony/culpsw01.htm http://coldwar-c4i.net/Mt_Pony/culpsw01.htm
- aksss 5y agoWow, new to me. Fascinating, thanks!
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- owlbynight 5y agoThis is really awesome. I grew up with a lot of interest in phreaking, lived right at the end of Mt. Pony Rd on the opposite end of the road as the federal reserve, and had no clue about any of this.
- bttf 5y agoGreat read. > Years later I ran into Phil at the symphony. I asked him I how he was able to come up with such a great script. He blushed and said he had worked on it for nine years. I know spending a long time writing something doesn’t guarantee success. But not giving up on a good idea almost always does.
- arminiusreturns 5y agoThis is a highly encouraging comment, and just what I needed today.
- brk 5y agoLoved Sneakers when it came out, it was one of the few computer/technology movies that seemed to make an effort to get things right. Or, at least as close to right as you can in a movie. Side story, the article mentions the Universal backlot and the tour buses that come through. Years ago I was working with Universal on a security project. I'm being driven around with my sales guy on a golfcart. We're in the back seat, facing backwards, with a guy from Universal, and my sales engineer in the front seats. The driver and my SE are dressed super casual, the sales guy and I both have sport coats and are dressed just well enough to look "important". Tour bus comes by with the driver doing their spiel and I see a few people looking at us trying to figure out who we are. I wave to the bus and smile, a couple of people point, and then about 30 people all point their cameras at us and start snapping pics. It's worth mentioning that the overall makeup of the group looks like a lot of people here on vacation from other countries. I can only imagine those people going back and looking at their pics and trying to figure out who they took pictures of.
- illwrks 5y agoLove that anecdote :D I used to work at a film marketing agency, which involved going to private screenings of films before general release. On one film we were working on, a colleague and I attended a screening of a close-to-finished film. I was tasked by the agency with taking notes on anything of importance that might be usable from a marketing perspective. There were a crowd of others at the screening also, another agency and random people. Throughout the film I was checking my watch (for timestamps) and taking notes. Afterward when milling about in the lobby it turns out the director was sitting just behind me and he was getting more and more worried and nervous as I continued to check my watch and take notes... It was only his second film, a rehash of an older classic one, and he thought I was one of the journalists who were also at the screening and would slate the film... I often get a smile thinking of the panic and dread that must have went though his head every time I checked my watch. It was a good film though and went on to do well.
- duxup 5y agoThe main speech from the film still rings true (SPOILERS) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m0UB3LD2EoA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m0UB3LD2EoA Soundtrack was AMAZING.
- Legion 5y agoRobert Redford. Sidney Poitier. David Strathairn. River Phoenix. Mary McDonnell. Timothy Busfield. Dan Ackroyd. Donal Logue. Ben Kingsley. James Earl Jones. Stephen Tobolowsky. There may exist movies with better casts than Sneakers, but there don't exist many.
- rsync 5y ago"Hurlyburly"[1] Sean Penn Kevin Spacey Robin Wright Penn Chazz Palminteri Garry Shandling Anna Paquin Meg Ryan One of my favorite movies. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurlyburly_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurlyburly_(film)
- dhimes 5y agoRIP Mr. Poitier :,( EDIT: Sir Sidney
- thedevelopnik 5y agoIf you’re gonna call him Mr., then you call him Mr. Tibbs.
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- taylorius 5y agoCattle mutilations are up...
- sumtechguy 5y agoHeh, I used say that line to people. Most do not get it. But when they do... awesome.
- pengaru 5y agoMy perception of Akroyd's character completely changed after hearing some of his recent podcast interviews when he was peddling his vodka brand. Either he's a conspiracy theory nut irl, or he still hasn't broken character since filming Sneakers.
- thedevelopnik 5y agoNah he’s that crazy. Ghostbusters was pretty close to a possible documentary for him.
- aksss 5y ago> The messenger arrived with a big envelope. I opened it. It said Sneakers. My heart sank. It sounded like a bad teen comedy about a hapless junior-high basketball team that is saved when they recruit a girl point guard who’s a great shot. XD
- thatoneguy 5y agoI got immense joy out of working in Google's original SF office that was right above where the "handoff" scene took place and it's funny in the movie how there's a long hill of dirt in the shots that look out towards to the bay as that's where a MUNI line is now. Also, in case anyone is wondering, the acoustic modem in the movie they use to make an "untraceable satellite call" is an Atari 830. Finally acquired one during lockdown last year while I was building an in-home dial-up ISP because I never really understood how they worked...it looks just as cool in person as in the movie.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- endgame 5y agoPlease tell me you're taking notes somewhere, because that sounds like a really fun project.
- Legion 5y agoRiver Phoenix asking for Amy Benedict's phone number will always be one of the smoothest moves in cinema.
- packetslave 5y agoYep, he was smooth enough that he got her weapon totally wrong ("Um, the young lady with the... Uzi?" ... nope, she's holding an MP5) and STILL got her phone number!
- Minor49er 5y agoI recently watch a copy of it on Laserdisc. I love this movie
- Ansil849 5y agoI love Sneakers, but you have to admit that the central MacGuffin is nonsense. A magic literal black box that decrypts literally anything when you touch a solder plate...um ok. If the film itself were poorly done, this would be ridiculed to no end.
- Angostura 5y agoQuantum Blockchain - that's all you need to explain it.
- thakoppno 5y agoThe scene depicting the NSA tracing the phone call also seems very dubious from a technical standpoint.
- Ansil849 5y agoYes, exactly. And them knowing which relay points the NSA had tracked. Don't get me wrong, I think it's a great film, but I feel like because it's a great film overall, technical-minded folks sweep all the technical bullshit in it under the rug. Whereas a film that everyone can agree is hot garbage, like Swordfish, gets ridiculed for having ridiculous crap in it, while Sneakers is (rightly so, I think) given a pass.
- naasking 5y agoI think the the shear volume of technical garbage plays an important role here. Artistic license lets you skip and fudge some technical details that would detract from the story if you covered them properly, but you can only take that so far.
- nullc 5y agoLong distance phone tracing used to require calling from switch operator to operator while the circuit was active, -- the only unrealistic part is their visualization of the trace progress and the era-inappropriateness of that kind of tracing. One could imagine knowing trace progress if one imagined they'd also compromised the transit exchanges well enough to see if someone was accessing the service console.
- pmarreck 5y agoOne of my favorite movies.
- Angostura 5y agoOne thing I don't think anyone has mentioned so far. I really like the musical score. James Horner jumping on pianos as is his wont - but really fun music
- parenthesis 5y agoBranford Marsalis, too.
- rotexo 5y agoMe too. The score gave the scene where they comprehend the capabilities of the box such a terrifying edge.
- sneak 5y agoI don't think I have to say many words to emphasize how much this movie has shaped my life. I've had this nick since I was 13 or 14.
- jdofaz 5y agoSneakers is in my Blu-ray collection, when I need to test a microphone or something I often say my voice is my passport, verify me. Not too many get the reference but that's ok
- skibble 5y agoMy memory of this is hazy, but when I was younger Apple had a feature where you could log in with your voice. Really! It would have been either OS 7 or OS 9, probably OS 9. I'm almost positive this is either the phrase you had to say, or at least one of a few options. I don't imagine it was in any way secure, especially compared to the likes of Touch ID or Face ID, but it felt pretty cool at the time.
- dantheman0207 5y agoYou’re right! https://youtu.be/lXzD_oTL4XA https://youtu.be/lXzD_oTL4XA
- r00fus 5y agoClearly someone loved Sneakers at Apple because that's the default voiceprint password.
- parentheses 5y agopoitier!
- cobrabyte 5y agoMy all-time favorite movie. RIP, Mr. Poitier.
- perardi 5y agoI have an extreme nostalgic attachment to Sneakers. I went to a summer camp for kids interested in computers (was it called Cybercamp? who knows, this was in like 1999, Google was barely even a thing yet) at Illinois State University for several years in a row when I was in junior high and high school. And every year, to cap it off, they’d gather us in an auditorium to watch Sneakers. So this movie is now inextricably linked up with, well, adulthood for me. We were staying in college dorms, and working in real computer labs, and going to head shops with the computer science kids who were the camp counselors…such good times for a nerdy kid from the boonies. The movie just felt sophisticated to a hillbilly like me—I mean, Sidney Poitier and and Robert Redford having a cocktail party after pulling off a heist, all set to a minimalist jazz soundtrack? So urbane.
- birriel 5y ago"I leave message here on service, but you do not call." XD This line was referenced in "Halt and Catch Fire." Good stuff.
- anaphor 5y agoThey referenced the movie on Stranger Things as well with a line similar to the one River Phoenix's character says: "It's fascinating what 50 bucks will get you at the county recorder's office"
- crmd 5y agoIt warms my heart that this thread is at the top of HN today. RIP Sir Sidney Poitier and long live SETEC Astronomy!
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- MR4D 5y agoGreat read, and a nice way to honor Sidney Poitier. RIP.
- caymanjim 5y agoOne of the best things about Sneakers is that it doesn't play down to its audience. There's little to no expository dialog. There are flashbacks that drive the plot, but no flashbacks or other artificial constructs that explain technology or terms. Everything is presented smartly, and the writers and director trust the audience to understand what's going on. It manages to be specific about technical things without feeling aged, even now. I might be biased since I'm an old 80s phone phreak/cracker/hacker, but I can think of few other examples that capture what things were really like, with social engineering proving as (or more) valuable than hacking, dumpster diving, and a group of people driven more by geeky interest than profit motive (although not entirely, of course). The only other hacking film that comes close is War Games, but only the first half.
- madrox 5y agoA scene was shot right next to my muni stop at Embarcadero and Folsom. I’d think about this movie every day, if for no other reason thinking about how they made that area look like no traffic existed.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 5y agoWho posted in the PTP thread?
- at_a_remove 5y agoThis is the film that inspired me to learn how to move slowly enough to defeat motion detectors.
- briHass 5y agoHa, yep. As a pre-teen kid in suburbia, creeping past the neighbors' motion detector-activated outdoor flood lights became a fun game.
- MobileVet 5y agoMy home WiFi is and will always be SETEC_Astronomy. What pains me the most is how many people I have to explain it too.
- skygazer 5y agoTry “cootys rat semen” — it stands up on its own, no explanation necessary. If you don’t mind the looks of disgust.
- bryanrasmussen 5y agoSidney Poitier, who played Crease, just died at the age of 94 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29849171 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29849171 obviously he's been in more culturally significant movies, but I always liked his poor no-nonsense guy having to deal with all these darn wackos portrayal in this movie.
- loxias 5y agoThank you so much for this! Such a wonderful story about my favorite movie!