Movie RX
Dr. Benjamin prescribes movies that help and heal through his own experiences or the experiences of others.
Movie RX
Hackers (1995) ft. Derrick
HACK THE PLANET! If you're old enough to remember, you were scared of them. Hackers came out of the woodwork in the 1990s and were represented in just one movie; Hackers! Join Dr. Benjamin and Derrick as they reminisce about their knowledge of the early hacker culture and how it was survival for some while talking about some seriously fun characters in this episode of Movie RX!
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Hello and welcome to MovieRx, where I prescribe entertainment, one movie at a time. I am your host, Dr Benjamin PhD.
Speaker 2:What does the PhD stand for? Hello and welcome to MovieRx, where I prescribe entertainment one movie at a time. I am your host, dr Benjamin PhD. What does the PhD stand for? Praising hackers? Dudes, ha ha, ha ha. Oh man, I love doing 90s movies. It's so much fun. Gotta go back to saying dudes all the time. So today, joining me from the left or midwest, not politically, but very literally the left or midwest, I have again today, derrick.
Speaker 3:Welcome derrick it's it's allowed to be both is.
Speaker 2:Is it allowed to be both? Okay, I'll take it. Oh yeah, totally yeah yeah, the left or midwest, in every way possible.
Speaker 3:We have the left or Midwest. Yes, exactly, that's why it's better out here.
Speaker 2:See, that's what I'm talking about. Okay, so it's been a minute since I saw this movie. If I'm being totally honest, I don't know if I have watched it since the first time. I rented it on VHS. When it first released, I completely forgot Angelina Jolie was in it. It came out when I was in the thick of learning how to build computers. Today we're talking about hackers. So now this is something that has a lot to do with you and your in in your work. Uh, so a little bit. So I'm tell me if I'm jumping the gun a little bit here, but this movie have anything to do with, uh, kind of the, the realm of work that you ended up working in um, I mean you know the, like the movie itself?
Speaker 3:no, I mean sort of, but you know it. So I, I work in cybersecurity. I've been in cybersecurity for the last 10 years in a number of different capacities. I started as a penetration tester. I was the guy that like broke into places that, like you, paid to break into places before, like the, the actual bad guys did it. So, um, I mean the association with hackers and hacker culture and cyberpunk culture, uh, it definitely did kind of go hand in hand. But I mean, am I, am I showing up looking like serial killer every day for, uh, for my job? I mean, uh, well, maybe post-covid, but I mean not before that's awesome.
Speaker 2:I love it. So basic movie info on this one united arts put this movie out in 1995. Uh, it's directed by lane softly, also known for backbeat and k-packs. Uh, stars johnny lee miller, which has done surprisingly little other than this movie, angelina jolie, which has done surprisingly larger amounts since this movie, and, uh, it's also got jesse bradford. But I really feel like that there is so much that needs to be said about so many other people that are in this movie. Like there's so many names that aren't mentioned, like Matthew Willard and, uh, I mean the, the guy who, oh, what, who was he? Uh, the the, the guy he played. He played, uh, uh, in short circuit.
Speaker 3:He was Ben oh her pants are blazing for you.
Speaker 2:Newton C. Yeah, we played ben in short circuit and he ends up as the fisher stevens. Yeah, yeah, that's right, I couldn't ever remember his name. And then, uh, um tin tin from the crow got another one from laurence mason yep, yeah, and then uh, oh god, there's just. This movie is just stacked with people um yeah, and like surprising people in here.
Speaker 3:I mean you've, you've even got Penn Jillette in. This is like the security guard guy Mark Anthony in my rewatching Cause when I watched it the first time.
Speaker 2:I didn't give a shit but the one that caught me the most off guard was Penn Penn Gillette being in it. You know his. His daughter's name is Moxie crime fighter.
Speaker 3:Of course it is.
Speaker 2:Do you know what my dog's name is? Moxie crime fighter. I named. I named my dog after his daughter because that's just a badass name. I'm just saying yeah, but yeah, penn Jillette's in here. I mean Mark Anthony, holy shit, man, there's just tons of people in this movie. I mean, granted, we're probably not going to talk about all of them, but yeah, really good, really really good cast, especially at the time, the IMDB description on this one. I'm not going to give any indication what I think about this one, I'm just going to get your thoughts on it. Teenage hackers discover a criminal conspiracy with plans to use a computer virus that will capsize five oil tankers.
Speaker 3:I mean sure they're not wrong. I mean, yeah, like surface level, I'd say that that is probably an appropriate TLDR. There's a whole lot more to unpack there, but okay.
Speaker 2:But it works. I mean, they're not wrong. They are correct in their synapses.
Speaker 3:I suppose they have so many characters that you could put on the front of a movie box. So I mean, I guess I guess.
Speaker 2:Visually it's laughable, as any technologically intelligent person will tell you. Honestly, though, but how can you actually show hacking on screen and make it interesting or exciting to watch?
Speaker 3:Hacking is not a spectator sport Like this is, you know, like somebody is like working in the field. This is a thing that I've talked about countless times over multiple drinks with people at like Def Con's where, like, hacking is not a spectator sport, it is boring as whale shit.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 3:I mean because it's just code, so you have to do something.
Speaker 2:You have to do something to make know entertaining for a non-technical audience, which is, which is why you get all of the like, the, the generic shapes, uh, in in their os's where they're flying through towers of information. That's an air quotes. I hate doing air quotes but I have to say that I'm doing air quotes. You. You know the, the like, all of those stupid like they make. They make hacking. Look like it's an OS, it's so weird.
Speaker 3:It very like. Yeah, it's very matrix ask, but I mean so many, so many tech movies of the nineties got stuck in this trap. You know like Johnny mnemonic dealt with it, lawnmower man dealt with it.
Speaker 2:You know, uh, you know, like the matrix totally dealt with it. Uh, you know, like it, it was definitely a thing. Even, uh, the little girl in jurassic park when she was doing her hacking thing, like it's a unix system, it's so great, you know. And then there's the uh, well, in the net, the net was I would say actually then it was, it was probably the closest I would say to to the actual thing.
Speaker 2:But it was it was only because of the physicality in it, like because she was physically going from place to place and and you know things like that. But I mean, we'll get in.
Speaker 2:We'll get into that more a little bit later, but the music in this movie was holy shit, awesome great yeah, the whole soundtrack would have would have been broken without stereo mcs connected, though I'm just saying like that that that blase mid-90s. I mean you have to have that, that I don't care sound coming from the music, otherwise it's just not going to work Right.
Speaker 3:Oh yeah, no, like club kids from the mid nineties absolutely loved this fucking soundtrack.
Speaker 2:Oh shit, yeah, and well I mean, and it's just, it's banging Like there's no way that you can listen to the soundtrack without without just at least swaying a little bit with a little Bob in your head. You know, like the typical the. I don't know if you realize this, I'm gonna get up on my microphone already. I'm gonna kind of get up on this for everybody who danced in the 90s, danced like nervous seventh graders at a high school dance. I'm just saying yeah, the only.
Speaker 3:Thing swaying and bobbing, yeah, but the difference is, though, is that the club kids that were doing that, they were also like chomping on a shitload of mdma and they were high as shit.
Speaker 2:Yes, yes, yes, yes, the seventh graders.
Speaker 3:At that time they weren't high as shit.
Speaker 2:Not yet, no, not yet now, the story in this movie was the compelling thing and in a way, I think it's because they had kind of humanized hackers a little bit during a hacker scare, because the mid-90s really was when that started to become a thing, when people started becoming more aware of people finding control of things through computers. And I don't even mean like you know, I don't even mean like big important things, like just simple things where people were like, oh my God, they're going to learn my email password and they're going to send my boss a nasty email. You know, like that, like that shit. I mean, you can like, in this day and age, you can totally send your boss a nasty email and just say my email got hacked and then you're fine. But uh, but I mean, during the hacker scare, hackers were this mysterious, like almost like phantoms that were out there yes and yeah they were nobody ever knew where they were yeah, they, they just.
Speaker 2:They just appeared out of nowhere at a computer terminal and then just messed with you and then they disappeared, all like it was so weird.
Speaker 3:Some of that I mean so much of that got so fucking sensationalized because people are scared of shit that they don't understand. And you know what they sure as hell don't understand. Technology, and you know what they sure as hell don't understand. Technology, common people, especially back in the minute, uh, but they, they got scared. Right, you have the the whole, like there be dragons. They didn't understand what the fuck was going on and so they were like terrified of oh my god, a hacker's gonna fuck with my shit.
Speaker 3:Uh, not realizing that, like back in the 90s, it was fucking hard man uh like you know like scenes that they have from like in the, in the movie where they're talking about like the manuals that you had to have of, like you know, dod code books or, uh, you know like networks and stuff that they came up with and shit like that. I mean, yeah, you had to have like big ass phone books that like told you how to do things or like remembered phone numbers. Uh, you actually had to work at this shit.
Speaker 2:They didn't have like automated programs where you could just point, click, pwn, like you can do now yeah, that's really what most people's imaginations of hacking was was like, yeah, like nuke 95 kind of shit. You know right, exactly the wind nukers and and and all of that kind of stuff, packet, uh, packet sending programs and whatever um well and know, like movies, like war games, didn't do us a whole lot of favors.
Speaker 3:Like war games was fairly accurate, but it was also like you know, oh shit, here's this dumb high school kid that, like butt, fucked his way into nuclear war.
Speaker 2:You're right. In the mid nineties, they almost had to romanticize what hacking was in order in order to address it at all. Yes, in order to address it at all yes, and also to make compelling movies because I'm sorry like watching Crash and Burn go through a hacking competition in the context of the real would have been boring as fuck. Definitely not as cool.
Speaker 3:As somebody that has sat through plenty of capture the flag competitions, I, you know, like I've I've participated in plenty of like CTFs and all it is is a lot of big sweaty nerds with jolt colas next to them doing a shitload of typing. Um, and I, I know I'm generalizing and I know that if there are other people in my field listening to this they are probably going to come at me, but I, I know they're going to agree with you.
Speaker 2:I promise you they're all good. Half of them are going to be like yeah, I'm one of those fat, sweaty nerds, and the other half is going to be like yeah, there's dude, there's a lot of fat, sweaty nerds. So I mean, no, I think, I think that you're probably pretty safe, but yeah, no, the the. A lot of this movie, a lot of this movie's character, comes from the characters.
Speaker 3:Oh, absolutely, yeah, Totally. It's an ensemble movie.
Speaker 2:We're going to start off with the first one, dade. Now I do have a soundbite for Dade, so we'll start off with that here.
Speaker 1:The defendant, dade Murphy, who calls himself Zero Cool, has repeatedly committed criminal acts of a malicious nature. This defendant possesses a superior intelligence which he uses to a destructive and antisocial end.
Speaker 2:Now, in that little bit, the way that they're talking about this guy, it's a 10-year-old kid, right the kind of language that she's using.
Speaker 3:Destructive and antisocial behavior.
Speaker 2:He's 10.
Speaker 3:What the fuck.
Speaker 2:What the fuck are you talking about? Destructive and antisocial. He was having fun, like come on, and that was in 1988. So yeah, I don't even know where to begin with that. First off, with the way that we talk about people in in the court system, like uh it well, in any kind of system really, the way that we talk about people, the kind of language that we use, is important in the way that we paint people and, uh, they were. They were using the kind of the kind of language that you would use to describe a heinous criminal. Correct For a 10 year old that made a computer virus and fucked up like fifteen hundred and seven computer systems. But I mean, but what did he do? He hurt computer systems at a time where people didn't know how to fuck up computer systems hurt computer systems at a time where people didn't know how to fuck up computer systems.
Speaker 3:Well, it, yeah, he, he fucked up computer systems that uh, controlled, uh, you know, things like the other, the stock market as an example, uh. So like, yeah, you know, he, he, you know. You could say, yeah, all he did was crash some computers. Yeah, but he crashed some computers that cost a lot of people some fucking money right.
Speaker 2:But I mean, are we really going to talk about this kid like like he's, you know, charles manson? No, he's not. No, he's not a batman villain. No right, he's not a, you know yeah, like he's not a.
Speaker 3:He's not a batman villain. He was a bored 10 year old that did some dumb shit right. You and I grew up in the middle of nowhere. We did some dumb shit at 10.
Speaker 2:We did lots of dumb shit.
Speaker 3:Yes, yeah. So some of that might have been considered destructive and illegal.
Speaker 2:Right and and, but I mean antisocial, I did. As far as I'm concerned, this movie shows that hacking is anything but antisocial, especially because of the way that they have to do things. We'll kind of leave some of that, because all of that stuff ties in later, like in into some talking points that we have later on. But like, right, uh, the next one we got. We got kate acid burned. What. What do you think about kate?
Speaker 3:pissed off rich kid uh so like the, the way that the way that she is portrayed amongst the uh, the group is that she is like the alpha hacker amongst their particular tribe there. But I mean, her mom is this million dollar author, she lives in a really nice fucking house and she decided that she was going to slum it with the, with the hackers, and do some shit. I mean like, yes, pulls off some really interesting stuff, but at the same time she just really strikes me as like bored form of protest instead of actually like a love of technology and wanting to like pick things apart and see how shit works under the under the hood and stuff like that.
Speaker 2:Right, but she still, she still seemed knowledgeable, very yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean she was going to be good at it.
Speaker 2:Like you're going to have to be knowledgeable in what you're doing, right, yeah?
Speaker 3:Yeah, she wasn't a poser. You to have to be knowledgeable in what you're doing Right.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, she wasn't a poser, you know, yeah, definitely not a. You know, definitely not a poser, not a tourist. You know she knew what she was doing. It just it wasn't. I don't know. You know just something about the way that that character was written. I don't know if it was like the writing or I don't know if it was the delivery of it. She's almost like she chose it rather than doing it out of necessity. Correct, yes, and for a lot of uh, for a lot of people that get into uh, you know, get into hacking, uh, you know it's, it's more like a calling than uh, than it is like. You know, something that I just woke up one day and decided I was gonna fucking do because if you have any sort of like normalcy in your head, you won't do it right.
Speaker 2:Well, I mean, that's a perfect example with dade. Uh, I mean, dade was a 10 year old kid that was vastly more intelligent than a, than a typical 10 year old, yes, and? And he just understood it, and so it just seemed natural to him that. Oh well, I'm curious about this because I understand it even though I'm 10, and I'm going to pursue my knowledge of it and whatever happens happens, yeah.
Speaker 3:It becomes. It becomes almost like a compulsion to where they're. You know. They're like, well, I found this vulnerability or I shouldn't be able to do this, so I'm going to fucking do it. Or you know, this is I'm going after particular pieces of information. Information should be free, so I'm going to go ahead and do this, like they. It's almost like a different interpretation of like, right or wrong, or it's that compulsion, you know, kind of a kind of a thing. Like the other, the scene where they've got Joey in the, the Narcotics Anonymous, you know kind of group there right, where he's trying to say you know, I'm, I'm not an addict, I'm not an addict, no-transcript, right addiction for what it is that they're.
Speaker 2:They're doing like they can't stop themselves, they can't help themselves, right when this movie would have been I mean the idea, the idea of technology addiction is. I mean, it's still something that people have a hard time grasping now.
Speaker 3:Uh, right in 2024. We definitely have fucking issues of it now right, whereas in. Like back in the mid 90s, you were like what, why? What are you addicted to?
Speaker 2:yeah, your game boy. Like oh right, you got a game boy color and so you play it twice as much now, like come on exactly but uh, but no, I mean, yeah, I guess it kind of makes sense that as as a compulsion, then yeah, it would be very similar to an addiction Treating. It would be difficult, though.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, and that's an argument that I make all the time with. Uh cause, like you know, I work with families. Mm-hmm, if I'm on a visit and I'm documenting a visit and there's and there's a family that is, you know, using tablets or computers or or whatever, I'm always afraid that that's going to come back on the family. Um, because case managers and and you know, uh, lawyers and judges like to do that. They like to say, well, you're not spending time with your family, you're spending time on technology. Say, well, you're not spending time with your family, you're spending time on technology.
Speaker 2:Um, and it's like a lot of the time, I have a hard time not being trying not to be in in that and be like look, you think this is a problem because you grew up in an age when that wasn't a thing. But it's like this is the world that we're going into. If they don't have the time to spend with technology and they don't have the time to spend with technology and they don't understand it, then they are leaving themselves at risk. They're giving kids laptops and tablets at school now, like it's yeah it's just a thing.
Speaker 2:so, as as much as they as they really are hard on people about technology and how much they're addicted to it and how much they're dependent on it, they're also, there's also this, this compulsion to, uh, to judge it too far and say that something that is just strictly normal you know what is normal use for technology is addiction.
Speaker 3:And I think it's a balancing act, right? Uh, you know it's a, it's a balancing act and I think trying to figure out, uh, you know when you're talking about, you know, addiction to technology, it depends. Uh, you know, you could, you could say any sort of, uh, you know what, what is it that makes addiction a bad thing? Right, it's not the, it's not the addiction, it's not the other, the consuming, the thing that happens to be, whatever it is that you're addicted to all the time. It's the impact that it has on your life, right?
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 3:So they may be spending that time on a phone or a tablet or something along those lines, but if it doesn't have a negative impact on their life, then it's fine. It's not that big of a deal.
Speaker 2:Right or the lives of people around them.
Speaker 3:It's not that big of a deal, or the lives of people around them. Exactly Same could be said on computer hacking. You could say that somebody has an addiction to their computer or a compulsion to their computer to do particular things, but if it doesn't have a negative effect, then it's not that big of a deal. Or if they're, some of us, lucky ones that have been able to turn it into a career, then that addiction is absolutely fine, because now we make money, which in a capitalist society, yay, money you know like. So we just figured out how to make the scam work. But then you've got guys like Kevin Mitnick, where you look at his story and the entire time that he's doing, the various things that he was doing there during his particular reign when he was on the other side of the law. Uh, there are several times where you're like kevin dude, just knock it, the fuck off like stop knock it off.
Speaker 3:Like you know, this is a bad idea. You know where this leads. Stop fucking around.
Speaker 2:And he did it anyway that is addiction yes, exactly um, so, jumping into the next one, I I kind of took four characters and then just like, like, just put them all into one line, and that serial killer, nikon, phantom freak and joey. Uh, joey forgot a handle, did he?
Speaker 3:I know, no, no, he yeah. He never got an official handle, he's just joey just joey.
Speaker 2:So serial killer, nikon phantom, Phantom Freak and Mr no Name. What do you think of those guys? Me personally. I think that it's all about serial killer.
Speaker 3:Oh, dude, yeah, Like those guys, like they absolutely steal the movie. Those are like the three dudes, especially serial killer Nikon and Phantom Freak. Like those guys are like the, you know the, those, the, the three dudes, especially, uh, you know, serial killer Nikon and, uh, phantom freak, like those. Uh, those guys are like the support, they're the backbone of the whole freaking movie and especially serial Right, I mean just fucking Matthew Lillard, that that dude, holy shit, you know, uh, just the way that he played that role was just fucking great, just the way that he played that role was just fucking great.
Speaker 2:As soon as he appears on screen in any movie that he is in, you are instantly attracted to whatever it is that he's doing.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 3:And that's what I love about Matthew Lillard.
Speaker 2:Yes, like whether it's him as Shaggy, which I hate the Scooby-Doo movies, but him as Shaggy I loved, right. You know him in Scream. I loved Him in I mean everything.
Speaker 3:Everything that that man has done. I'm feeling woozy here.
Speaker 2:That's great.
Speaker 3:But no, it's just, it's his delivery. You know it's the way that he delivers. You know with particular, with the particular characters, and I mean with the way that he played Serial. You know with the particular characters and I mean with the way that he played Serial, you know, also known as Emanuel Goldstein. You know, like the way that he played that particular character was fucking great.
Speaker 2:That's wasn't that Crunch.
Speaker 3:No, you know. So Emanuel Goldstein is a pseudonym for the guy that publishes the 2600, the hacker quarterly Calling him Serial Killer is a reference to the hacker Cap'n.
Speaker 2:Crunch oh, okay, okay, yeah, because I knew that Serial Killer was kind of a nod at Cap'n Crunch.
Speaker 3:Yes, yeah, yeah, calling him Serial was a nod to Cap'n. Having his name be Emanuel Goldstein, that's a nod to 2600.
Speaker 2:Oh, okay, okay.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Nikon, nikon and Phantom Freak. Do those have any pop culture to real world?
Speaker 3:So Nikon, the big thing for him was the photographic memory or the eidetic memory, the, uh, the eidetic memory, uh, that's. That's actually I don't want to say it's a common thing, but it is something that, uh, that you do find quite a bit in. Uh, you know in that, you know in the hacker culture, or people that work in cyber security or people that work with technology, uh, they, you know the, the ability of being able to just fucking polaroid head their way through. You know books or bits of code or anything along those lines. You know they can, they can wink at something and they've just got it stuck in their brain forever. Um, so I mean, that's, that's kind of a reference there. And then freak, you know the, the, the phantom freak, all of his shit was based off of a phone.
Speaker 2:Freaking the phone freaking yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah, uh, you know which. For you know, for normal people that have social lives and shit, uh, phone freaking was a way of being able to hack phone systems back in the day and you know there were several things that he did that are legitimate. You know phone freaking techniques.
Speaker 2:Real things, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3:You know there were things that were actually done. So I mean, that was yeah, that that was kind of like his superpower was uh was being able to do phone freaking.
Speaker 2:That was something that I was always kind of surprised that they allowed to be in movies, that they made a movie and that they allowed him to do as many of those things and show it.
Speaker 3:Some of those things they glossed over. Uh, you know, like they they made them look very simple in the movie they're they're not. As for some of them they're not. As for some of them they're not as easy to actually pull off. Like when he's got the tape recorder with the DTMF tones that he's playing into the payphone For younger kids, Google, what a payphone was, anyway. But when he's playing the tones into the handset and he's getting his five bucks worth of phone calls that he's able to make, he's getting his five bucks worth of phone calls that he's able to make. Yeah, that was a thing.
Speaker 3:But trying to get those tones in the first place was actually kind of a pain in the ass. Trying to get that, especially off of a micro recorder. It wasn't as easy as they made it look like in the movie Now, with him doing the other, when he's in holding and he's to get to the, the little plunger thing till he gets the operator. That was a thing. You know, like that was, that was totally a thing that you were able to do, um, but I mean you were just able to do that. I mean you, you could pick up a pay phone and if an operator picked up as long as she wasn't feeling like, you know, like, as long as she was feeling helpful, uh, she would go ahead and make like a phone call, like that you know like they had the ability of doing that kind of stuff well, because what was it costing?
Speaker 2:it was costing a quarter, you know, right, like I mean, if they helped somebody out that they said, oh, I got disconnected, it was. It was 25 cents that they were costing somebody. Um, which, in the grand scheme of things, one call for 25 cents isn't really a bunch.
Speaker 3:Now, I'm sure after this movie that probably became a bit of a nightmare uh, yeah, yeah, you know once, uh, you know like people did start to abuse that, and I mean I, I know from personal experience like, yeah, it got abused and the uh, the operators, they started to shut that shit down to where we had to find other ways to uh like either scam free phone calls or find other ways to, you know, get messages across.
Speaker 2:Right, if it was a kid and they just simply told them I'm, I need to get ahold of my parents and I don't have any money, then they'd just do it Like I mean, so it's like as a kid, you're like, well shit, all I have to do is just say that I don't have any money and I need to call my parents Like of course. Who's going to say no? Like yeah, yeah, that's not a thing.
Speaker 3:Oh yeah, no, you just you figure that kind of stuff out, or you know, I mean, that would be, that would be an example of like social engineering. Right, you know, you figure out a way to like pull at the heartstrings and you figure out how you can manipulate the operator on the other side. Which a lot of that, a lot of stuff was done with, you know, with with that, that kind of technique.
Speaker 2:Right, and that is something I think that is in our talking points. Yeah, the last character that we have is the plague the lamest villain ever. Yes.
Speaker 3:Oh, her pants are blazing for you, newton crosby.
Speaker 2:Her plants are, her pants are blazing for you. Newton crosby, as said by the plague in 1984. Um now, uh, the plague seeing this guy again. It was weird, uh, I I didn't recognize him as the same guy.
Speaker 3:It takes you a minute, yeah, it takes you a minute to realize who that is.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the whole first time because I watch. I generally watch these movies twice before I get on and do an episode. I do it one just for the sheer pleasure of watching it and then one for analysis, and the first time I watched through it the whole time I'm sitting there going who the fuck is that guy? And and just before sitting down for the second one, I pulled up IMDB, took a look and I was like Jesus Christ, there is no way that I didn't catch that that was him, except that there's no reason to like right. Everything about him is completely different, and it's not just because of the change in years, like his mannerisms, the way he stands, the way he carries himself, the way he talks. I mean, of course, he's not doing a really offensive bastardized Indian accent.
Speaker 2:But aside from that, like just I the the force in his voice as he talks, the confidence and all of that stuff. It's just a completely different character and he pulls it off, oh yeah, and, and he pulls it off in a very believable way. I think this would probably be the first time in television or movies that that it was ever insinuated that somebody who is knowledgeable in computers to the point of being a hacker could be hired to do that job. You know, I think this is the first time that that would have been presented on screen.
Speaker 3:Trying to think Well yeah, well no, because this came out in 95. When did Jurassic Park come out?
Speaker 2:Oh, it would have been.
Speaker 3:I believe Jurassic Park was like 93, I think, because newman, you know the, uh, the, you know the. Well, yeah, he's not newman in the movie, he's newman on seinfeld. But the, the, the, the fat bastard with the, uh, oh, that guy was a hacker, yeah yeah, that's right.
Speaker 2:Oh, and so was uh so was well, I mean, to a much lesser degree, samuel L Jackson. I mean, he wasn't a hacker, he was a programmer.
Speaker 3:Well, yeah, no, he was a developer, he was an IT guy, yeah, but Nedry was a hacker as far as that movie was concerned.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I guess, and it did come out. Yeah, but still like a corporate hacker.
Speaker 3:Yeah, well, yeah, I mean the way that they, the way that a lot of people look at that kind of stuff is know thy enemy Right. So I mean you. You know the culture, you know the attacks, you know how it works. Cool, we're going to have you on our side, like I'd rather have you with me than against me.
Speaker 2:Right, and I think that was, I think that was a really good way to do that. I mean, granted, of course it's going to raise questions about the dangers of doing such a thing. You know a bank, a corporate bank, hiring a hacker to be their cybersecurity? I mean, if he's in the slightest way corrupt, then you're screwed Like you literally let him in.
Speaker 3:So I mentioned earlier that I was going to get on a soapbox at some point about the term hacker and I think that is actually a pretty good opening for where that's going to be. So popular culture puts a negative context on the word hacker. Context on the word hacker. Okay, uh, a hacker is simply just somebody that makes a, a tool or a piece of code or an application or something along those lines, a computer, you know. Whatever it makes, it do something that it's not supposed to do. That's it, that's all they are. Okay, you know, and that that could be.
Speaker 3:You know you could see somebody that did like game mods back in the day, like if you were a pc gamer and uh, and people that did mods to, uh, you know, to their pc games back in the day, that could be considered hacking. It wasn't originally designed to do that. You know, if you were playing wcw and if you figured out a mod to bring in wwe characters, you know, into that particular world, that's hacking. You're making that game do something that it's not originally designed to do. That's that is hacking in and of itself. So it has no like morality to the term, if you will right. There is no, there is no good or bad when it comes to hacking. It's what you do with it. You know then, and that's where that's where you wind up running into just attackers, right? So if you're talking about a bank hiring a hacker, okay, that's not a bad thing outside of the gate.
Speaker 3:It depends on the ethics of that particular individual and what they're going to do with the information that they have. I mean, technically I'm a hacker, right, you know I was. I was hired to break into systems. But I was hired to break into systems legally and with a uh, you know, with a rules of engagement document and like people paid me money, like the people that the bank paid me money to break into the bank, Right, Uh, you know, like that, you know that, like we were allowed to do that. There was consent to do that as part of the vulnerability exercise to show them how they needed to like, shore up their shit and to be able to protect themselves. But now, if I did that without a rule of engagement document, if I did that without the permission of that particular organization, well, now I'm a bad guy. I'm still a hacker, but now I'm operating as a bad guy.
Speaker 2:Right. So intentionality is really kind of the difference between a hacker and just a malicious person.
Speaker 3:Yeah, because that's the main point of the whole thing is that they're all hackers. The Plague is a hacker, the group with Dade and everybody else, the tribe there. They're all hackers. Hackers, they're just doing it in different ways. You know, one one guy is uh, one guy's doing it to try to, uh, you know, fuck money out of the other, these oil guys, and then the other guys they're just doing it for, like, technological exploration and fun right curiosity a lot of the time.
Speaker 2:Yes, joey, the whole reason why this movie has story is because joey was just exploring yeah, he was curious at what was going on in a uh gibson supercomputer right and he and, and he came across something that he shouldn't have had, and you know all this other stuff, and yeah, when they when they have the reference to the uh the hacker manifesto in the uh the movie, and it's.
Speaker 3:You know, my crime is a crime of curiosity, that's, that's it, right there right.
Speaker 2:The thing with the rest of them is that it's really more just their own silly little benefit, like acid, acid burn and well, uh, kate and dade, when they're like, when they first tv station yeah, the tv station thing, yeah, I mean he, he just wanted to watch some outer limits like, and he was, he was taking, he was taking bullshit like hatred, shit off the air to put outer limits on, and I think that that's a service more than anything personally no shit, right, exactly.
Speaker 3:Yeah, you know she's wanting to watch some some sort of like you know women's lib nonsense and he's wanting to watch outer limits.
Speaker 2:God damn it right, so I mean not if there's anything wrong with women's lib.
Speaker 3:Don't come after me.
Speaker 2:Yeah, don't, don't come at derrick, we're just creating a narrative here, uh, but I mean seriously, though, like I mean neither one of those. And and it was just, it was uh, uh. Public access tv. You're not hurting anybody. Nobody watches public access, not even in new york. So no, no, like you're, you're messing with maybe 30 people maybe, maybe, 30 people, and even then, who says that you're not making those people happier?
Speaker 3:by making them watch outer limits.
Speaker 2:So, uh, outer limits was a pretty good show. For any of you any of you that are listening that don't know. It was a pretty good show anyway, um, but yeah, so I mean, intentionality is important there. I think that was really the majority of these of the characters in this movie is that they would just do it all for whatever it is that they happen to be interested in. One wanted to watch what he wanted to watch on TV, another one just like. I mean, I don't even know what the freak was into Like when he was doing this thing.
Speaker 3:He was using it for phone calls, you know. I mean, there was a part in there when Dade first shows up to the high school and the first time that he talks to Freak and Freak, looks at him and goes do you mind? I'm on the phone with Venezuela here. Right, yeah, that he talks to freak and freak, looks at him and goes do you mind, I'm on the phone with Venezuela here.
Speaker 2:Right, yeah, like he's, not he's not fucking around, he's.
Speaker 3:he's talking to Venezuela and he's not paying a dime.
Speaker 2:Right. So like I mean there's, there's really not. I guess I just don't. Yes, I know that it's not did that, that you know somebody wouldn't be able to feed their kids, or something. I get it, but but again it's that's. That's not their intention. Their intention is not to hurt people.
Speaker 3:No, most of the time it was about the challenge, it was about the, the being able to do it. It's like the. It's like the Jeff Goldblum quote from Jurassic park. You know, you, you, you, uh, you. You took more time deciding if you could instead of deciding whether or not you should do it. I'm probably paraphrasing and horribly butchering that, but I mean that's actually really close. Yeah, I mean for them, I mean that's, that's what it is. A lot of times it's like you know all right, I'm just curious, curious.
Speaker 2:Let me see if I can pull this off now. Right, something that I did want to make sure to talk about is is, um, that I really, I really appreciated, especially at the time. Nobody has ever really done a good job of showing what hacking is in real life as far as you know visuals and all of that stuff. But one thing that these guys did a really good job on was the physicality and hacking at the time. Um, it was it. It was physically demanding to be a hacker. It was also like getting into systems and things like that.
Speaker 2:It was also at times theatrical, I mean, you'd, you'd have to play a part sometimes, um, you know that kind of stuff it there was more real world work than anybody realized. I mean it's not like somebody would get on a computer in you know a grade school in California and you know, and instantaneously be able to pull everybody's information off from a, from a bank in Wisconsin. You know, I mean there there would have to be some work that would go into that.
Speaker 3:There was? Yeah, there was. There was definitely a lot more work that went into it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, he was putting in lines uh in in on uh the computer on the computers and uh uh in the office when uh cereal cereal was in under her desk.
Speaker 3:Yeah, where he's got the implants.
Speaker 2:Yeah, he had an inline implant. And then he climbs out from under the desk and walks away with his underwear was half off his ass and he's walking away. I mean that kind of stuff, even from the very beginning, when he calls the TV station and he's like, hey man, you know, I mean I'm, I've got this boss. That's really, you know, up my, up my craw for whatever you know, Mr Kawasaki.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I need you to help me out and you know, I got a. I got a, I got disconnected from the system and I got to get back in there to get some information. You know, can you help me out? And, and you know, just give me a phone number. Do you know anything about computers like that? That should have, instantaneously for any any security person, been like uh, I'm not talking to you anymore, like because, yep, you know, do you know anything about computers that would that was? It's always important to establish whether somebody that you're about to just pull one over on knows anything about what it is that you're trying to do.
Speaker 3:Um, yeah, exactly, yeah, it's part of the again there was a lot of acting.
Speaker 2:That was a part of that. Like you said, pull on the heartstrings of those, those uh phone operators and shit like that it was.
Speaker 3:It was more demanding yeah, so much of hacking back in like the the mid 90s. Back in that time period would have been been really dependent on social engineering. I mean, that is totally the way that you would have been able to get it done. Even if you were the smartest coder in the world, you would have still been extremely dependent on social engineering to a certain degree to be able to bullshit your way through operators, bullshit your way through gatekeepers at particular companies, to be able to get certain pieces of data that wasn't on the Internet, because you barely had an Internet back in 1995. And you sure as shit didn't have something like LinkedIn, to where you can scrape all of the information that you want to know about a particular company and get all of the details that you need. No, you had to actually work for this shit.
Speaker 2:And that was the whole point. Like, the whole point was to find the information, I don't know. I just really appreciated how this movie showed that hacking was really. It wasn't as simple as just getting on a computer. No, I mean, granted, there was a very important thing that was said at Dade's 10-year-old thing he wasn't allowed to touch a computer or a touchtone phone until his 18th birthday. Like, and that's there's good reason for that, because a real malicious hacker will know what to do with either of those things that they can fuck something up well, but if if you notice though, in the the, the specifics, they said touchtone phone.
Speaker 3:They didn't say shit about a rotary phone nope, no phone, he could have still social engineered. You know, he could have still done social engineering.
Speaker 2:He just had to get a rotary phone and talk to somebody I also like how you have in here on your on your talking points, the ugly red book that doesn't fit on the shelf. The dod rainbow books yes, those are real.
Speaker 3:Yeah, oh yeah, no, they're. Yeah, they're totally fucking real. Yeah, those are, you know those. There are Easter eggs all through this fucking movie. You know of legitimate things in hacker culture and in cyberpunk culture. There are, there are little Easter eggs, little nods to all sorts of legitimate shit, and, yeah, those rainbow books that he pops out with. I mean there are, there are little Easter eggs, little nods to all sorts of legitimate shit, and, yeah, those rainbow books that he pops out with. I mean those, those are all real things. They were, uh, they were very real and very legitimate in that, uh, that particular time period. Uh, yeah, the, the big red book that doesn't fit on a shelf. Yeah, that was um, uh, dod secure lines, if I remember correctly.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:You guys.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 3:Okay, cool, just you know, it went quiet for a second. I'm paranoid at this point. I'm like oh shit.
Speaker 2:No, you're good, DOD Rainbow Books.
Speaker 3:The technical advisors that they got on this movie. I mean, they actually talked to the technical consultants that they have. They're legitimate hackers, actually part of the culture. Uh, you know, that were considered, you know, leet as they, uh, as they say in the movie, uh, you know they. They got a lot of legitimate guys to consult on this movie. You know, guys that were part of, like, legion of doom and, uh, you know, and I think I think kevin mitnick, uh, you know, was talked to, was talked to on this. Uh, I mean, you, you've got guys that actually did some shit where they're like okay, here's what you do to make this a legitimate hacker movie.
Speaker 2:That's awesome.
Speaker 3:Like, some of the technical visuals are terrible, right, and we know this and we beat it to death. But there are also other things of just talking about the culture of cyberpunk and the culture of hacking and some of the legitimate techniques that were done and the little nods to things of the community. Those are absolutely legitimate.
Speaker 2:Like I had said right at the beginning, hacking is boring to watch, so they had to do something visually just to make it a little bit more interesting. Ddos attacks are not interesting to anybody.
Speaker 3:Oh God, no, no, no.
Speaker 2:yeah, ddos is bullshit, but uh, if you do a, uh, if you do it correctly though, you can cripple a fucking nation well, I don't even get me started on freaking on ddos attacks, because I had the day on christmas day I had my family got together and bought me an xbox one when they were new and I went home and I hooked that motherfucker up and I had a fast internet connection and I was ready to play some games. And you know what I couldn't do? I couldn't play any games because fucking lizard squad had ddos the shit out of xbox and I couldn't fucking play. For two days after I got a brand new xbox I was pissed. But uh, oh, and is that the? Is that what you have?
Speaker 3:no, that's not the uh. That's not the uh. The attack on din uh, that was uh, okay, okay different.
Speaker 2:No, so uh yeah it was around the same time. Uh, yeah, it would have been time.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it would have been. It definitely would have been. What I have in the other notes is talking about the Mirai botnet, and Mirai was all of the Internet of Things bullshit that's out there. It was mostly security cameras. They would use default passwords to get into these security cameras. They would infect it with this uh, you know, with their the, the botnet, with the virus, and then they would just keep going from there, you know, and they would infect other you know piece of shit iot cameras and continue to like take them over. And then one day they all just decided, okay, we're gonna send a bunch of fucking pings, which is really just like an acknowledgement. We're going to send a bunch of fucking pings, which is really just like an acknowledgement.
Speaker 3:Right, we're going to send just a bunch of pings and we're going to DDoS the living fuck out of the largest DNS provider in the country and we're just going to overflow their systems and we're going to just wait until this bitch crashes. And when that crashes, that took with them things like netflix, aws, uh, you know, amazon, like in general, um, all sorts of like really big shit that people depend on. Uh, they, they crashed all of it. Uh, there was like 70 different companies that were affected in this, if I remember correctly, and uh it, it knocked out everybody for almost an entire business day, cost a shitload of money. I was in the middle of teaching a firewall, like a firewall instructional class, when this went down and we couldn't access the materials that we needed. So it was me in a room with four other guys where we're just like all right, well, I guess we'll fuck off for the day.
Speaker 3:I can't do anything else, because the Internet doesn't work.
Speaker 2:Right, yeah, that's pretty crazy, uh did. Did they ever figure out who that was?
Speaker 3:no, they, uh, to my knowledge, they they still don't know, like who actually is behind that particular botnet. There are, there are thoughts um starts with R, ends with an N. They're kind of in the middle of another skirmish right now. But, yeah, there are suspicions as to who may be behind it, but as far as I know, they don't have like a smoking gun.
Speaker 2:Okay, yeah. Well, I mean a lot of the time with that kind of shit. A lot of the time, if they don't want you to know, you're not gonna Correct.
Speaker 3:Yeah, you know, for for a number of reasons they can't let you know because of, uh, you know, security reasons, uh, and I mean fuck you gonna do right. You know most of these places. If they're from other countries, they don't. There's no extradition. Come get me. Right ahead sanction me, charge me, come get my ass?
Speaker 2:yep, now I remember that a little bit more. I mean, it's not um yeah, the lizard squad thing.
Speaker 3:That was funny nothing.
Speaker 2:That lizard squad thing was not funny. It was not funny, god damn it. I wanted to play. I wanted to play fucking. What was it? It was destiny was what I wanted to play. I wanted to go through a fucking raid on destiny so bad, and I couldn't on my brand new xbox one, because I want to play because I couldn't even download updates it was so my christmas it was a bad. It was a bad great christmas, okay. It just it really sucked, and all because of a bunch of lizard dicks.
Speaker 3:I hated them guys oh no, I get it, I it. And the thing with like with a DDoS attack there isn't shit you can do. There isn't a goddamn thing you can do. Not at all. That is, it's all upstream to where, like your internet service provider, they're the only ones that can do anything about it, and most of the time they can't do shit.
Speaker 2:They don't know. Yeah, because know yeah they, because they they'd have to know, they'd have to know everything about it in order, in order to do anything, they got to know where it's all coming from, and when you have a, when you have a ddos, specifically distributed denial of service.
Speaker 3:That means it's coming at you from all sides. Man, it's a fucking digital kaki, there ain't shit you can do about it. Oh shit, okay, I warned you.
Speaker 2:I warned you, I love it, good stuff. I mean, I hate it, but I love it. So, um, yeah, don't, don't, as as my uh, my producer is just telling me right now to, to, to tell you all please do not Google Bukake. Uh, that's, and if you do it it's not my fault. I'm just saying.
Speaker 3:Yeah, no, not on us, Not on us.
Speaker 2:I'm now. I'm kind of curious as to whether my producer is telling me not to tell people to do that, because she did. No, oh, okay you did.
Speaker 3:No, okay, just making sure. I'm just making you know you'd think, at this point it's almost just become like a regular colloquial, but you know, you would think so, but maybe it's just because I'm a bad person maybe it's because we're horrible people.
Speaker 2:Um so, anyway, now that we're in a wholesome part of our discussion, sure, uh, I mean, do you, do you have a an active ingredient from this movie? Like I know you said that it kind of influenced you a little bit into you know, into your, your interests and everything. But what's your, what's your active ingredient?
Speaker 3:uh, it's community. Uh, you know, actually, with uh, with this one, I mean, uh, you know the, the thing that you run into with so many people that are, you know that with uh, with this one, I mean, uh, you know the, the thing that you run into with so many people that are, you know, that are into this kind of thing. They get into technology like this and especially for, like people like us that are kind of out here in the sticks right um it, you, you have a tendency of being isolated. You know, if you're somebody that knows how this shit works, you're kind of isolated and you're on your own and you don't have a whole lot of people in like, in meat space that even remotely understand what the hell you're talking about, let alone are going to want to like participate with, with what it is that you might be doing. Whereas with the hacker community and the cyberpunk community, you know if you're able to tap into that, you know if you find a chat that you can get into or if you find a message board that, uh, that you could get into and other people that are, you know that are connected in this as well. You now have community. You now have friends all over the fucking world, all over the planet, of people that you can talk to and connect with based off of this particular activity.
Speaker 3:Uh, you know the, uh, the, the defcon hacker conference that happens every year in vegas. Uh, it is 30 000 hackers that descend on the vegas strip and, uh, a good chunk of us, we don't know each other, like none of us. You know, there's a good good portion of us we're like you leave there with new friends every fucking time and, uh, there are people who are like I have no idea what their names are or what their real names are. You know some of these. I only know them by handle, but yet, because we happen to be in like a particular talk, or we're in a workshop together or we're just at a fucking party, and somebody might, you know, give me shit about a particular T-shirt that I'm wearing, or something like that, you might, you know, give me shit about a particular T-shirt that I'm wearing, or something like that.
Speaker 3:And now, now we have a dialogue going and we can start talking about. You know, what's your opinion on this firewall vendor or what are you using to, you know to, to be able to do like initial, initial access for penetration tests or what, what? What's your funniest story that you have about social engineering and phishing? You know things like that. Like now we have things that we can talk about, we have people that we can talk to about this, uh, whereas before you have no one. You know, like your, your possibility of being able to find somebody that to connect to physically. Uh, you know, on that particular subject you didn't have, and now, because of you know movies like hackers. You know movies like hackers. You know you have people that, uh, that you can go with the end of that movie. When they get everybody you know together, right, they get the army of hackers, uh, you know to to go after the bad guys, like that's exactly what I'm talking about.
Speaker 3:Yeah, exactly, hack the planet. You know, uh, where they got everybody to you know everybody around the world to be able to chime in and like help out. That got everybody to you know everybody around the world to be able to chime in and like help out.
Speaker 2:That's, that's the community I'm talking about. That's awesome, I dig that and I and I definitely feel that a little bit um. I mean, granted, when I watched this movie the level of hacking that I had anything to do with was very um, it was very juvenile. Uh, I mean, I I didn't really do hardly any of the the the nifty shit that they kind of did on here. I was more of just the computer, a computer nerd Like I liked building computers and building systems and things like that, and but I I had other friends that were interested in the same things, that were more into that hacker stuff, and so just kind of like it still. It still allowed me to kind of be a part of that with them, because they needed hardware to be able to do their fun shit with exactly I was the guy that knew the hardware.
Speaker 3:You know everybody's got a specialty. You know, like we were talking about freak earlier, his specialty was phones. You know, yeah, exactly, you know everybody's got their their particular thing.
Speaker 2:I mean, for for me it was definitely social engineering yeah, and because of that I think that everybody has their own little thing to contribute to their own little groups. Um, yeah, so I definitely see the community thing in there. For me, though, the active ingredient in this for me was it kind of taught me that you might have a gift that could be used for personal gain, but it doesn't mean that it has to. You can use your gift to help others, even to combat malicious people that have those same gifts. But it kind of brings me back to the RTD thing the right thing to do. So, yeah, I mean, that's really just kind of what it enforced with me was that kind of the thing with Ian Malcolm. You know you were so focused on what you should, what you could do, you didn't stop to think whether you should.
Speaker 3:Right, yeah, Then it becomes you know that, yeah, that becomes an argument of ethics.
Speaker 2:Right. Um, so I got I guess I got an ethical lesson out of this. Uh, really was, was kind of my thing. So, um, derek, thanks again. As always, it's fucking hilarious and fun. Um now, uh, go ahead and go and plug your socials and all your fun shit uh, yeah, so, um, yeah, music nerd.
Speaker 3:So you know, if you want to listen to any sort of like loud, angry nonsense, you can find me on YouTube at Deke the Gnome, the spelled T-H-A, because I was bored, and you know, if you want to listen, you know again, more loud, angry nonsense. You know the. The band that I've been involved with is Mortal Desire D-E-Z-I-R-E.
Speaker 2:Because you know, spelling is hard. Well, I mean, just ask John Davis. I mean, korn is spelled with a K, you know.
Speaker 3:Oh, yeah, yeah, and I mean good, good luck trying to transcribe for that guy. I mean, you know, when he does his. Can you imagine, you know, like the sign language people? You know, can you imagine being a signer at one of his shows when he busts into like his crazy scatting and they're just like I got nothing.
Speaker 2:I don't know what the fuck he's doing at this point. I mean, how exactly do you sign a? I don't know how to sign that.
Speaker 2:Right, that's awesome, that's awesome. Now, if you have a movie that's been medicine for you and you'd like to be on the show, you can email me at contact at movie-rxcom. You can also leave a voicemail or text me at 402-519-5790. If anxiety is keeping you from being on the show. You can write me a couple of paragraphs about a movie and I can read them on air. Remember, this movie is not intended to treat, cure or prevent any disease, and we'll see you at the next appointment. So Thank you.