Sneakers 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.
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.
I think we shouldn't forget the real stars of that movie, Maury Chaykin and Eddie Deezen, both playing epic nerds. Jim and Alvin were my heroes. Not so much now.
While 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
Having been actually hacking in the time when WarGames came out, it portrayed exactly how it was for me and my sphere of young hackers (sans the NORAD visits, of course).
I found Sneakers great, too. Great story, and the TTPs (techniques and tradecraft) were mostly spot-on. Has anybody else been to NewHackCity West (in the bay area, now defunct, AFAIK) and remember the sign out front? :)
Maybe I'm not giving it a fair shake, but Hackers looks awful. I never saw Hackers completely, only scenes and such, but it never interested me and seemed silly and outlandish, as if it were written by some Hollywood outsider who was trying to be as imaginative against stereotypes at the time as possible. It doesn't resonate with me at all (from the scenes I've watched).
I think you should give Hackers a chance... it is silly and full of hollywood tropes, but it definitely captures the hacker culture of city hacker kids in the 90's. I also think the film pays homage to well known hackers from the 80's and 90's, all the handles of the characters in the movie are named after real people and there are even references to the types of textfiles/books we all shared at the time. If you can suspend your disbelief it's great.
But I do have a soft spot for the movie. It was filmed in the HS I went to (thought I attended a few years later) - there's a scene where one of the characters was redboxing on one of the school payphones, and I got to do that from the same phone as a student in that school - how cool is that?
I never really got why Hackers was always lumped in with Wargames and Sneakers. The vibe of Hackers always seemed way different, with all the "cool dudes wearing sunglasses" and skateboards and flamboyant outfits and EDM music. I mean I like the movie, but it was less of a realistic "computer hacking" movie and more of a "too-cool people partying" movie, much more like Swordfish.
Although the vast majority of our crews were skaters/BMXers, we were much more low key and much less flamboyant.
It was at a time when the feds were just starting to take some hacking incidents seriously. At that point in time, if you got caught, you'd usually just get a stern talking to by some authority figure, be it a local cop and/or one of the heads of the org you infiltrated.
I may give Hackers a watch this weekend and try to appreciate it for what it is. I was already adulting by the 90s, so while I was still on the field, I didn't pay much attention to 90s hacker culture, except for who was getting arrested or informing.
By buddy and I were teens doing BBS stuff at the time and walked out of Hackers when they were talking about their FOUR TEEN POINT FOR BEE PEE ESS modems. Snuck in to Braveheart. Don't regret that decision.
Only when it sprung a leak. Funny enough, there were a few of us that would go hang out on the roof. The stairs were gated, but it was the kind of gate you could reach your arm through and open on the other side. It's a big school though, and in reality there was a pool on the ground floor... so the pool on the narrative would fall apart in real life :D
I did give it a watch tonight. It wasn't nearly as bad as I thought -- 90s fashion and the outlandish hacking scenes aside. It had a decidedly east coast feel and the club reminded me of nHc-west.
I can't speak for everyone, but for me Hackers was the first time I was told that being a teenaged computer nerd (I was 15 when it came out), was not freakish. The only options in my experience until then were: Freak (in the should be outcast sense) or Freak (in the look at this genius no one can understand sense). In fact, it can be actually cool!
Sure the movie is cheesy (in all aspects except music really - a lot of that music was independently loved), but the part where it somehow validated my existence made it super important personally. I suspect this is true for plenty of others too - to this day you can go to Defcon (etc) and hear "Hack the Planet!" and more obscure quotes ("its in that place i put that thing that time" or "ugh hardcopy" for example). Even from people who aren't in their late-30s/early-40s.
Hackers is just really fun and light-hearted. There’s something wholesome about the affection which the young hackers have for one another. Also, first Angelina Jolie movie, to my knowledge. The technical aspects are laughably absurd, to the point of being enjoyable (for me).
How so? In terms of technical accuracy, Wargames is vastly more accurate (everything down to the old paperclip trick to get free phone calls, a very old school fone phreaking trick) than Sneakers, or Hackers for that matter.
Speaking of phreaking, I always loved how Sneakers wasn't afraid to be understated. The David Strathairn character mentions that he got in trouble for helping some people make free phone calls, and has perfect pitch and the nickname "Whistler", and... no more is said. People who get it, get it.
Probably based off the real-life phreak Joybubbles, who was also blind, had perfect pitch, was nicknamed "Whistler", and got into trouble for helping people make cheap phone calls.
Probably because Sneakers features more social engineering. That would be my guess. Wargames features realistic war dialers and such, but it also features WOPR, a 1980's computer that can speak and learn and reason like a human.
> but it also features WOPR, a 1980's computer that can speak and learn and reason like a human.
While Sneakers features a box which can decrypt anything, at the touch of a power probe.
Both films have nonsensical MacGuffins as their central element, but Wargames has vastly more technically-accurate methodology sprinkled throughout the film.
> While Sneakers features a box which can decrypt anything, at the touch of a power probe.
> Both films have nonsensical MacGuffins
Sneakers came out in 1992 and in 1999, EFF and distributed.net brute-forced a DES key in under 24 hours. If that's what a bunch of randoms could do in 1999 with commodity hardware, the NSA almost certainly had ASIC, FPGA, or supercomputer based tools to provide nearly the same functionality much, much earlier.
If you pay attention to the talk around The Box - the concept is that the mathematician found a "shortcut" through western encryption algorithms. That's a very accurate representation of plenty of crypto attacks. For example, a bunch of WiFi attacks are nearly as magical as The Box.
The film eventually reveals that it's the NSA that wants the box...to spy on other government agencies. Also rooted in truth; the NSA created DES with intentional weaknesses, mandated its use for the government and pushed its use in private sector.
I think you have a serious misunderstanding of the DES story: the NSA made changes to the S-box without explanation in the 1970's, and everyone was suspicious at the time, but then 15 years later two researchers "discovered" differential cryptanalysis, and realized that the changes the NSA made actually protected it against this form of attack. So instead of weakening it, the changes the NSA made protected it against a then unknown (in UNCLASS) attacks.
The NSA did push to reduce the key size from 64 to 48, which is why the eventual standard was to the always bizarre 56 bits.
> Both films have nonsensical MacGuffins as their central element
Sneakers automatically decrypting something is a conceit of the movie to show what the device can do (find primes to break encryption), even if the way they go about showing it is silly. If you had more time and an understanding audience, you could replace that with a scene where they try out the encryption breaking on files, etc, and the movie works the same for the most part if you explain why it's important. It's all understood technology, explained with the limitations of the time.
Wargames rests on an AI which we still can't make and aren't sure how to make or if it's necessarily possible to make. The movie falls apart entirely if it's not a learning computer. The conversing audibly is a conceit to make it more approachable as a film like in Sneakers, but that's not the largely problematic part.
The computer parts of Wargames were good, but the military parts were hilariously silly. When that movie came out, I was working in the missile business at the time. It was a good popcorn movie, but that's it. The hype of being a serious movie was advertising. The only bit of the military part they did right was the interior of the Launch Control Facility, the room where the two officers turn their keys.
I just watched this on Youtube [1], and was surprised to see the actors in the scene were John Spencer (from The West Wing) and a (very young) Michael Madsen (Mr. Blonde in Reservoir Dogs). According to Wikipedia, this was Madsen's 2nd role ever.
The whole bit with the "farmhouse" cover for it is nonsense. The actual facilities were clearly marked, fenced, and heavily guarded, with the usual "Use of deadly force authorized" signs. Every local knew where they were, as did the Soviets.
Handling your issue .38 that way would get you a reprimand.
And, of course, the military never ran exercises with the real equipment, or without telling the crew.
I wouldn't say Hackers captured the spirit, but more like captured an aspirational desire. Everyone wanted to be a slick William Gibson cyberpunk inspired digital cowboy. Truth is, there were way more Dan Aykroyds than Jonny Lee Millers.
Yeah 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.
Mr. Robot is more about mind hacking (Elliot) and society hacking (Whiterose and other powerful figures), along with Fight Club, Who Am I, and 23 [1998].
Ha! The US story was completely different, there. I was very jealous of the UK music scene for years. Then Deadmau5 and Skrillex showed up and suddenly... a niche interest became a mainstream one circa 2010.
We're talking about a country where Disco Demolition Night was a huge thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disco_Demolition_Night And the backlash persisted for decades. Also, this is so effing American, sigh (everything from media preying on rock-fan fears that "disco is taking over," to using explosives to "blow up" the records, to it starting a riot, to the not-very-hidden homophobia and masculine insecurity, to...)
But me? I've been into this stuff since listening to Kraftwerk in the 80's on one of the first Walkman knockoffs in the high school cafeteria! I never cared how cool (or not) it was, I just loved the beats.
And yet, interest in dance music has been the butt of American media jokes in movies and elsewhere for a long time.
Related: I was once in New Orleans not long ago and asked a bartender where the electronic music venues were and he goes, "you don't LOOK like a f_g..." (sorry about language, but that's literally what he said, sigh) At least in New Orleans, that music is TIGHTLY associated with a certain orientation and NO ONE outside of that orientation listens to it. It's weirdly rigid. But I digress
What’s interesting is that the 90s Ibiza/UK electronic scene had its roots in young brits listening to 80s Detroit and NYC techno . What goes around comes around
