Highly recommended, didn't think I'd watch the whole thing but the production quality was great and it explains everything much better than the wired article.
After your reco after the GP's reco, I would have to agree. This is well done. However, coming from a coding/dev background, it was easy to follow and it all makes sense.
However, it goes to show why hacking will never be made interesting in movies without a bunch of fake nonsense like hacking the Gibson's 3D virtual environment.
“Hackers” is interesting because there’s two depictions of hacking in the same movie.
One is flying through the holographic city of files.
The other depiction is quite realistic: they show the protagonist spending all night reading through many pages of assembly to reverse engineer a virus, people do social engineering, etc. “Hackers” made this seem cool too!
Sneakers had them going through the trash, setting up a mark on a fake date, and staking out a building and the security company it used with all sorts of stuff not once looking at a computer screen to "hack" three years earlier.
I like Hackers for the campy side of things, but Sneakers will still take a higher spot on my list.
The best and worst examples were in the same movie, IMO: Nedry's finger-wagging admonishment and all hell breaking loose, then later, "it's a Unix system, I know this!" and some exotic file manager visualization.
Mr Robot has some decent hacking scenes. At least they put up prompt windows with commands that are generic enough to not be hackTheGibson.exe type lame.
I used to work with a couple of the guys who consulted on the technical aspects of Mr Robot. From what I recall, the general idea was to use realistic hacks, but speed through the boring parts to keep the show interesting.
Are you thinking of the one shown in Jurassic park? The scene in hackers was much more CGI, and while I don't doubt it was inspired by fsn, I'd be very surprised if it actually was fsn.
