16 ms·
No-more-secrets: recreate the decryption effect seen in the 1992 movie Sneakers
- javajosh 3y agoI wonder if there is an encryption scheme that could be visualized to look like that.
- nojvek 3y agoLove it! I'm the author of https://github.com/nojvek/matrix-rain https://github.com/nojvek/matrix-rain I should cook up a piped command mode. This is v neat.
- mydriasis 3y agoDUDE that is so cool. I love the "line feed" and "scrambling" effect. Wow!
- jb1991 3y agoIt actually works, too. We've been using this in production for two months and it requires little downtime or ongoing maintenance.
- kenrose 3y agoI have to ask: how are you using this in prod?
- Angostura 3y agoHe could tell you, but then he would have to kill you.
- jb1991 3y agoYou said it, not me.
- archgoon 3y agoHe works for Setec Astronomy.
- sneak 3y agoI actually have a shell identity/company that I use for special projects that is a different anagram of Setec Astronomy.
- iancmceachern 3y agoCootys Rat Semen?
- staplung 3y agoMy Socrates Note? Montereys coast?
- oxygen_crisis 3y agoAcme Stoner Toys? Steamer Tycoons? Ace Monster Toys? Comatose Sentry? Amnesty Scooter? Economy Tasters? Ceremony Toasts? A Torn Ecosystem? Necessary Motto?
- playingalong 3y agoMaybe they meant movie production.
- stavros 3y agoClearly, they lost their encryption keys.
- hnlmorg 3y agoNot the OP but it’s a good way of encrypting your shell.
- ClassyJacket 3y agoTo decrypt stuff. Duh.
- francisofascii 3y agoHOLY COW! What the hell is this? - Whistler.
- nobleach 3y agoSo crazy that at the news of Kevin Mitnick's passing, I immediately started thinking of this movie. Probably a lot of folks did. Thanks for sharing this.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- wasabinator 3y agoThis is really great. Love the movie.
- tracker1 3y agoSame, neat little effect. Thinking it could be fun to use this in conjunction with like a BBS ascii based door or something.
- sandyarmstrong 3y agoThis is one of my favorite movies of all time. The decryption scene is so iconic in my memory. You absolutely NAILED it! Thank you for this lovely surprise.
- henriquez 3y agoSo neat. I just hacked into the FBI!
- Pixie_Dust 3y ago[dead]
- parpfish 3y agothat show deserves a spot in the pantheon of hacker tv-shows along with silicon valley and halt & catch fire.
- xeromal 3y agoI never could finish the final episode of halt & catch fire. Hurt my heart too much. :( Rough way to go.
- VikingCoder 3y agoAnd read Daemon and Freedom by Daniel Suarez...
- dylan604 3y agoI missed Mr Robot's first season when it originally aired. I watched the first 2 seasons, and then somehow life got in the way. I recently went back to this earlier this year, and holy cow was that a mind bender of a show. I also just happened to have had a recent friend go through a hard drug enhanced psychotic episode a few months prior, so the timing of watching the complete series and seeing Elliot's journey was much more affecting than I would ever expect. The whole time, I was wondering if this was anything like what my friend's experience was like (minus all of the hacking). Reading about the show online, there is a lot of commentary on just how realistic people thought the portrayal was.
- antihero 3y agoDo you think watching it could be quite triggering for someone who has experienced this sort of episode?
- dylan604 3y agoI have no earthly idea about anything like that. I have nothing resembling training/learning/experience of what goes on in someone's head. I can't even fully grasp what's in my own noggin let alone to assume I could for someone else.
- lvncelot 3y agoThis together with cool-retro-term[1] is an absolute must on my machines for real hacker hours. [1] https://github.com/Swordfish90/cool-retro-term https://github.com/Swordfish90/cool-retro-term
- VikingCoder 3y agoClassic!
- azubinski 3y ago:) This is for the lonely boring nights...
- kraquepype 3y agoWow that amber screen brings back memories, thank you for sharing. My first helpdesk job included mainframe support, and I got to use one of the old IBM quad screen plasma terminals they still had there. Our ticketing system was still on the mainframe so it was actually useful in my helpdesk duties. (Pretty sure it was this one, or very similar: https://www.argecy.com/ibm-3290-plasma-terminal https://www.argecy.com/ibm-3290-plasma-terminal)
- VikingCoder 3y agoI installed cool-retro-term and no-more-secrets on my Chromebook with Linux, and it does indeed look nice: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gRIG_zK4SQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gRIG_zK4SQ
- koalacola 3y agoIt says I need Qt5 LTS to install that, is that a paid application?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Ziggy_Zaggy 3y agoif you like that one then you'll likely enjoy this[1] one also [1] https://github.com/Rezmason/matrix https://github.com/Rezmason/matrix
- VikingCoder 3y agoAwesome! Are there other movie graphics available too? I've seen plenty of Matrix screen savers. I've seen some things like Global Thermonuclear War from War Games. What other movie effects exist?
- uptown 3y ago“It’s a UNIX system! I know this!”
- cube00 3y agoCootys Rat Semen
- aidenn0 3y agoI'm interested in all kinds of astronomy.
- acheron 3y agoI want peace on earth and goodwill towards men.
- DonHopkins 3y agoThen stop carrying the water for child abusers. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36882634 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36882634
- myself248 3y agoWe're the United States government. We don't do that sort of thing.
- iancmceachern 3y agoYou're just going to have to try
- dylan604 3y agoI love the download and install section's lack of assumptions that someone looking to install this specific package doesn't already have gcc/git/make avaialbe. "Hi, I'm a brand new *nix user on a fresh install of my distro, and I want to install a command to recreate the Sneakers decryption effect" says no one, ever. =) So many packages make these kinds of assumptions. I tend to find that in those situations, the likelihood of some other salient bit of information gets left out as well. Also bonus for not being an npm install type of something.
- ghusto 3y ago> npm install type of something THIS! I was a little disheartened when I saw I had to build it, but the repo is tiny, and the build is a second. This should be the norm, not a pleasant surprise!
- Cthulhu_ 3y agoBut also, on the other hand, I'd like software to be easy to install, so it being included in package distributions is convenient. That said, being able to run from source without dependencies would be cool as well; that's probably why some tools are still built in pure shell code.
- bamfly 3y agoI hate this in documentation. Snippets of code or config that don't work on their own, and it may not even be clear where they're supposed to go or what they're nested in. May use imports the name of which cannot be found on the page. That kind of crap. Please, at the very least, put a full-fat example or a link to it at the bottom of the page. Something.
- phatskat 3y agoThe amount of “put this in your config file” for things they are part of build chains for JS without specifying where that file lives. Oh, the word “config” is a link to the configuration docs page but…that just lists the possible config options and not where they live.
- 3y ago
- joshstrange 3y agoI cannot hear the word "Passport" without saying (at least in my mind) "My voice is my passport".
- Winse 3y ago"...verify me" that wasn't easy, what I just did.
- sumtechguy 3y agoFor me it is 'cattle'... 'cattle mutilations are up'
- pengaru 3y agoHave you ever seen an Akroyd interview. like in a podcast format? He wasn't even acting in that role.
- iancmceachern 3y agoTotally, Ghostbusters too
- myself248 3y ago"Give him he-- Give him help."
- bentobean 3y agoBe a beacon.
- dylan604 3y agoI just love to hear someone say the word passport
- joshstrange 3y agoEvery few times I hear passport I also have to go watch that clip because I find it so funny.
- diyftw 3y agoThis takes me back to my BBS days. ANSI animations were all the rage. I can't for the life of me remember the name of the software I used, but in the mid 90s I created numerous ANSI animations that looked very much like the movie.
- myself248 3y agoLikely TheDraw!
- Anthony-G 3y agoVery cool. It’s easy to build the project from source and I appreciate the uninstall target in the Makefile (not all projects include this).
- VikingCoder 3y agoOoh, I lack the time to play with this, but I think someone could compile the lib to WebAssembly and tie it in to https://xtermjs.org/ https://xtermjs.org/ Then you could have a web page with static DOM elements that do this effect!
- dylan604 3y agobut I think someone could... let's try that again, but I think you should... the beauty of open
- VikingCoder 3y agoShould no one on HN share their ideas? Must they implement them all themselves to satisfy you? Do you think you're improving HN by discouraging people from sharing ideas they don't have the time to implement?
- Cthulhu_ 3y agoIdeas are cheap though, and I can see how people get miffed at people coming up with ideas, if the reader assumes whoever came up with the idea that someone else should put in the work. But seriously, for every 100 startups that post their Show HN on here, there's been 10.000 ideas but only 1 that will eventually translate into a product.
- VikingCoder 3y agoIs anyone under the illusion that this will become a product? No, it's just neat. And I realized there's a way to make it available in more places. If we can convince the mods to post a guideline, "please don't share ideas for others to implement", then that's fine. I'll try to abide. Until then, I think it's stupid to complain about other people sharing their ideas.
- dylan604 3y agoLet's try s/complaining/challenging/ and see how that changes the actual spirit of the comment.
- rezmason 3y agoNot only cool looking, but good code and attention to detail!
- mikae1 3y agoI need a JavaScript version of this!
- bmmayer1 3y agoObligatory two idiots, one keyboard link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8qgehH3kEQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8qgehH3kEQ
- junon 3y agoThe thing about NCIS is that they had these sorts of jokes coming with actual technical background. This wasn't just a thing some writers thought people wouldn't notice, I'm pretty convinced NCIS did this on purpose. The "I looked at the source code and 1 out of every 337 payments went to <name>", or the "The printer is coded using assembly" while HTML is shown (two opposite ends of the spectrum) really convinced me that the tech was supposed to be so obviously fake to tech people that it allowed them to still be entertained by it. Compare this to CSI:Cyber which wasn't taking the piss out of IT and simply made stupid, ridiculous things up ("cyber nuke") or Numb3rs which described IRC as "two boats passing in the ocean communicating through the ripples of the water" or "thankfully I speak leet". NCIS seemed to actually try to either get things right, or make them purposefully outlandish. I respect the writers for that.
- unbalancedevh 3y agoI think they could have improved the effect if they'd had Gibbs start moving the mouse around and clicking when he first stepped up.
- _nub3 3y agoThanks for the title. Went right up into my alltimefaves.
- INTPenis 3y agoI'll forever be piping gpg -d into this tool.
- wood_spirit 3y agoHey, has anyone used an llm to “enhance” the output of terminal programs and make them a little bit more hackerish or Tolkien or something? So we have a shell for mundane work that makes you feel like you’re hacking or exploring or whatever? :)
- nailer 3y agoI really want a modern version of Sneakers where someone works out that a quantum computer has probably been built (maybe years ago) and they have to steal it if it exists. Totally fits in with the original Sneakers "no more secrets" meme.
- xtracto 3y agoYes!! Why dont they do reboots , sequels, prequels , or even shitquels of the films I loved as a kid?
- nocoiner 3y agoI personally could have been on board with a remake with the original cast (though the original was already about aging and maturity, so I don’t think the passage of yet another generation would have been all that compelling of a story), but RIP River Phoenix and Sidney Poitier (had to check and see if Ben Kingsley was still alive, though). I actually think the original holds up shockingly well, for a movie that is at least tangentially about technology. It in part got lucky that it was juuuuust pre-WWW and that critical systems running on mainframes is still a thing in 2023.
- jvanderbot 3y agoWait, you're telling me I can just download these 3-5 source files, type `make`, and it will _just build_? No: * Setting up an isolated build env * Pulling 1600 dependencies and building them from source * installing a filesystem layer with 1600 .so libraries * running docker, npm, etc? _AND_ it compiles in a fraction of a second? Amazing what this new language C can do.
- xtracto 3y agoAah this brought me back memories! Waaaaay back in the day (90's) I would implement my own methods I stead of say including stdlib.h or other libraries because I had the (wrong) idea that including it would bloat my C programs (didn't know how a like worked uh?) . 12 year old me would choke seeing NPM, pip, or bundle these days... or Electron! We could do so much with so little!
- dheera 3y agoI've always loved programs that didn't even need "make". The ideal build and install experience should be: $ gcc foo.c; cp a.out ~/bin/foo $ foo Now that is a REALLY good build experience.
- tomcam 3y agoYou probably know that this is routine and even simpler in Go: $ go run main.go
- dheera 3y agoYes, and it boggles my mind why C/C++ hasn't come up with a better built-in build system already. I shouldn't have to specify a ton of flags to g++ something, it should find them within the project directory and pull in dependencies automatically. Header files should be done with. Poof. Gone. There is zero reason for them to exist. I know exactly why they exist, but it's an artifact of a system where preprocessor, compiler, linker are separate. I should be able to do "import<foo/bar>" multiple times and it should pull in all the classes and functions in "./foo/bar.cpp" or "./foo/bar.so" (whichever is available), just like Python, and cache the ".so" files just like Python caches ".pyc" files. Improving C++'s build experience would have absolutely zero impact on execution speed. Yet they're busy adding some stupid spaceship operators and other things people almost never use.
- rcme 3y agoHow come the `ls` output is colorized? I thought that ls normally checked isatty before colorizing output.
- Flatcircle 3y agoOne of my favorite films
- starkparker 3y agoBlog post (2016): https://medium.com/@bartobri/the-movie-based-terminal-effect-not-yet-recreated-by-hackers-46e9ca241bc9 https://medium.com/@bartobri/the-movie-based-terminal-effect... (the comments are more interesting than the post) Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11584535 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11584535
- LinuxBender 3y agoLike the cool retro terminal it appears this is also in VoidLinux. Any other distros also have this? xbps-query -Rs no-more-sec [-] no-more-secrets-1.0.1_1 Recreate the famous decryption scene from Sneakers
- housebear 3y agoOne of my favorite movies of all time.
- geekifier 3y agoIs there any reason this would not work on a Mac and iterm2? I get the initial encryption effect, but sadly, no decryption :). I tried different fonts and iterm2 settings to no avail. I guess I could try the ncurses option, but curious to see this not work natively. Edit: as helpful comments below me explained, you either have to press another key to decrypt, or launch it with the `-a` option.
- adammarples 3y agoYou gotta press enter again lol
- bluedino 3y agoDid you forget the `-a` option on the nms command? Works for me on a Mac with iTerm2
- geekifier 3y agoIndeed I did, thanks!
- ant6n 3y agoMacs are more secure.
- jh00ker 3y agoWho here clicked the YouTube link at the top of the README.md file and DIDN'T watch it all the way through? I admire your resolve!
- i-use-nixos-btw 3y agoThis is it. This is the pinnacle of terminal experience. It’s all downhill from here. Perhaps this is the time to quit and become a farmer, so I don’t have to witness the decline.
- red-iron-pine 3y agogreat way to spook the normies at the coffee shop
- msmith 3y agoThis is great. It reminds me that I tried to recreate this effect with Turbo Pascal back in the 90’s when I first got into programming. Sneakers, Wargames, and BBS culture were pretty influential for me at the time.
- gumby 3y agoI wish programs included stuff like this in their demo modes. Beeps with keypresses, animations, and the like. Back when there were trade shows this would have been great on the show floor (fun to look at and give the salesperson more time to talk). Beeps on keypresses, noises while computing, and of course cool graphics like this. That stuff would be super annoying when actually using the software for real. Perhaps it could be enabled in the free version and suppressed when you bought the license.
- tptacek 3y agoTrue fact: there's a subset of real cryptanalysis attacks --- the CBC padding oracle, Bleichenbacher's RSA padding oracle, the ECB byte-at-a-time attack --- that (I think?) Juliano Rizzo coined the term "Hollywood Attack" for, because when you run the exploits for them, they look like decryption in Sneakers. It's a good term, everybody should use it, it's even a little useful for getting the intuition behind the attack (a lot of cryptanalytic attacks work by finding creative ways to isolate a single byte of ciphertext instead of having to work against the entire 128 or 2048 bit message).
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- owlbynight 3y agoCool, thanks for this welcomed break from work today. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KM7CXt1zXDU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KM7CXt1zXDU
- jrflowers 3y agoSeatec Astronomy was an anagram for Too Many Secrets, not No More Secrets.
- wmichelin 3y ago༼ つ ◕_◕ ༽つ homebrew pls
- S33V 3y agolooks like it's there: https://formulae.brew.sh/formula/no-more-secrets#default https://formulae.brew.sh/formula/no-more-secrets#default
- iancmceachern 3y agoI absolutely love this movie. I grew up watching it on VHS and coincidentally bike by the setting of one of its major scenes daily. There is that brick courtyard that currently sits between Google and Wharton. In the movie its a outdoor dining area, and Sidney Poitier says, holding the car phone in Martin's Karman Ghia, "Martin, It's your mother". And then they realize they're not with the NSA. Anyway, they've added a floating firehouse there now, and the road looks a bit different, but I love how similar the view is there now as to when the movie was filmed. I really do love this movie, it's really well done all around.
- janee 3y agoMade me think of cool retro term, which I haven't checked out in I want to say 10 years...lo and behold someone already applied this to the green version haha https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/121322/32070715-163a1c94-ba42-11e7-80bb-41fbf10fc634.gif https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/121322/32070715-16... See https://github.com/Swordfish90/cool-retro-term https://github.com/Swordfish90/cool-retro-term
- jtwaleson 3y agoAlways fun :) Years ago I wrote a similar single file python script “decrypt.py” which does roughly the same thing. Sadly it’s still my most popular GitHub project: https://github.com/jtwaleson/decrypt https://github.com/jtwaleson/decrypt
- azubinski 3y agoBecause the web is getting more and more boring... If you embed this toy in any terminal browser so that every opened page is "decrypted", you get something very very funny :)
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- jonmasters 3y agoThe best movie of all time
- danhon 3y agoFor added verisimilitude, when using sneakers you could also trigger playback of the appropriate track ("Too Many Secrets") from James Horner's soundtrack: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4KOuCe2-fj8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4KOuCe2-fj8
- vorticalbox 3y agoIs there a way I can make zsh just pipe everything into this so every command I run has this effect?
- ubermonkey 3y agoI have a soft spot for that film. Great cast, good script, and a surprisingly reasonable take on encryption -- even for today, let alone for 30+ years ago.
- vunderba 3y agoI love stuff like this. I actually recreated the basic program that Sean Astin's character used to "hack" the exits access code in an episode of Stranger Things a while back using the modern port QB64. https://specular-realms.com/2021/04/21/strangest-things https://specular-realms.com/2021/04/21/strangest-things
- atentaten 3y agoMakes me wonder how the original effect was accomplished in the film.
- saeedugaba 3y ago[flagged]
- iancmceachern 3y ago"The key meeting took place on July the 3rd, 1958, when the Air Force brought the space visitor to the White House for an interview with President Eisenhower. And Ike said, "hey look, give us your technology, we'll give you all the cow lips you want."
- koromak 3y agoI want to have an idea this fun and useless. I'm always so charmed by things like this.
- ezequiel-garzon 3y agoWhy is it necessary to use sudo to install this?
- throwawaymobule 3y agoIt puts the resulting file into /usr/local/bin. You can run it without sudo if you already can write there for some reason. Or, define $DESTDIR if I'm reading the makefile correctly.