Hackers and the Evolving Representation of Hacking in Media

In this episode, Adam and David examine the transforming portrayal of hacking through film, television and video games. They watch the movie Hackers (1995) and discuss how 1995 became a benchmark year for cyber awareness. They talk about the evolution of the representation of hacking through video games like Bioshock (2007), Fallout 3 (2008) to more recent games like Hacknet (2015). We discuss early films like WarGames (1983), Johnny Mnemonic (1995) and The Net (1995) to more contemporary films like Skyfall (2012). And we do it all while cracking jokes and talking in funny voices.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Hello. I'm David. And I'm Adam. And this is Geek Motif.

SPEAKER_02 0:04

Yeah, this is uh a new show where we're going to take large concepts, like for instance, this time we're doing hacking, and we're gonna trace it through the history of pop culture.

SPEAKER_01 0:14

Be it movies, TV shows, video games, some books.

SPEAKER_02 0:18

Right. Then we're going to take a movie or two and use them as a case study. This time we're doing hackers. The funny thing is that David has never seen almost any movie. You can name a movie.

SPEAKER_01 0:31

Most movies I have not seen. So we're gonna fix that by watching them and then talking about them.

SPEAKER_02 0:35

If you would like to hear about hackers and see David see it for the very first time, stay tuned.

SPEAKER_00 0:52

Is that Matthew Lillard? Yes. Oh my god. He's amazing in this.

SPEAKER_03 1:02

Can't get this in stores, man.

SPEAKER_01 1:07

Well, should we talk about hackers?

SPEAKER_02 1:09

Yeah, I think we should, Dave. Hackers. Matthew Lillard's movie. I mean, he kind of, even though he isn't the main character, kind of owns this movie.

SPEAKER_01 1:17

Everything that Matthew Lillard is is in just brings me such joy. Yeah. So much joy.

SPEAKER_02 1:22

I mean, his character, whenever he's on screen, just kind of eats up everybody else.

SPEAKER_01 1:27

He absolutely commands every every square inch of the screen. And with his moniker, serial kill series. Like the like the like the cereal. Like like the food. Actual cereal. Yeah, like cereal. Yeah. I did not know that until I looked up his credits for this.

SPEAKER_02 1:43

So hackers, 1995. Not the first instance of hacking in a film. War Games is a very early example of that, 1983. So we're talking 12 years before this film.

SPEAKER_01 1:56

It's kind of crazy to see how it's evolved in a relatively short amount of time. And then how it's still today in newer films and TV shows and video games, you always see the falling characters, you know, via the Matrix. That just became a thing.

SPEAKER_02 2:11

Well, yeah, that's a trope. That just kind of automatically signifies that you're hacking now. Hackers is really early on. Uh I looked it up. At this point in our history, only 14% of homes actually had connection to the internet. 14%. Which is crazy to think about. So I mean, the concept of computers and especially computers that are attached to the internet, they can talk to each other, was almost magic at this point.

SPEAKER_01 2:35

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 2:36

In war games, it was real magic then because nobody had them. It was massively expensive. They were incredibly slow.

SPEAKER_01 2:43

And trying to like give people a visual representation of what was going on in like a computer space at the time when nobody really had access to it must have been such a task.

SPEAKER_02 2:53

Yeah, because they don't have any point of reference.

SPEAKER_01 2:55

No, there's nothing to go go off of.

SPEAKER_02 2:58

Well, I mean, I think that's what this movie does really well, too. Hackers doesn't try to show you what hacking actually looks like. It's trying to capture a vibe, right? Right. Crazy montage of time passing and you know, algorithmic equations flashing and I love it. The actual representation of the internet, which I love in this film because it it's real. Like they shot an actual miniature and then did like all kinds of projection and animation on that miniature.

SPEAKER_01 3:28

It's always been portrayed as like a cityscape. You see it like in this, you see it in Tron, Johnny Mnemonic. They they have a like a cityscape, you know, net tech.

SPEAKER_02 3:36

Almost like the same shot as the opening shot of this, where they're passing over New York and it's like an overhead shot that turns into a terminal. Except for in Johnny Mnemonic, it's uh crappy 90s CGI.

SPEAKER_01 3:46

I mean, they did the best they could.

SPEAKER_02 3:49

But yeah, it's I mean, I got serious love for crappy 90 CGI.

SPEAKER_01 3:54

There's definitely something to be said about the practical effects in hackers for this like representation. It played so well. Right, it doesn't age, right?

SPEAKER_02 4:04

Like the crappy 90 CGI. The only reason that I call it crappy now is because it's aged so badly, right? But that's all CGI. I mean, even CGI from like the you know early 2000s or bad. Like, you know, what's crazy is that hackers, when it came out, it was a $20 million budget, it only made $7.6 million. Oof. It was a massive bomb, but has gone on to become a massive cult hit.

SPEAKER_01 4:28

Through the small amount of research I've done on the video game side of things for hacking, hackers obviously came up a fair amount of times.

SPEAKER_02 4:36

Like well, I know that a lot of hackers cite it as the reason that they got into hacking. Yeah. Like they saw this movie, they said, Oh, these people are cool. Like, they are super cool. Yeah. I mean, we gotta talk about the style. Incredibly overstyled, these these kids, these high school kids wearing high fashion all the time. They got they got Beverly Hills budget for everyday life. It's crazy. It was awesome. Why do you think that this movie became the cult phenomenon that it actually has?

SPEAKER_01 5:03

The fact that it inspired people to actually pursue careers in cyberspace of varying degrees. People learned hacking, people learned cybersecurity, people learned you know coding, right? Just more access to computers. It was so influential at the time that most people didn't have computers at their homes, or if they did, they didn't have, you know, they weren't on the internet or whatever. So as people started learning these things, there's a whole set of people who, you know, see a movie like this and then they just get curious. And that curiosity sparks, you know, chasing down all kinds of questions that they never would have asked before.

SPEAKER_02 5:42

Right. And that's I mean, that is part of the actual hacker manifesto. Remember, they read it in the movie and they say this is our world now, the world of the electron and the switch. We exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias, and you call us criminals. Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is curiosity. They portray this counterculture, which I think is a major part of this, right? Like the idea of this is not only a group of people, but it it's a a culture that they're creating, right? A cyber culture that um didn't exist before. It's like the new rock and roll or the new punk rock, right? It's it's not only a shared interest, but it's also an aesthetic, right? Right. They dress a certain way, they hang out in certain bars, they have certain secret knowledge that other people don't have, and you know, only people in the know. It's a it's a gang.

SPEAKER_01 6:37

It's a secret club that only the people that are in it know about. Exactly. Exactly. It's it's a form of anonymity that allows them to be accepted without, you know, face value. It's just they are they're behind the screen. They're you don't know who they are. They all have monikers in this movie.

SPEAKER_02 6:55

The idea of cyber culture really exploded in 1995. Johnny Numonic came out in 1995. Which is crazy that all of these came out in 1995. The net came out in 1995, Hackers came out in 1995, and so did Virtuosity. Part of the reason that this movie is still around and still considered a classic is the music. I think it captures a certain time in music that was uh, you know, that early, early wave of electronic music. I mean, it this this has prodigy, orbital, left field, kruder and dorfweister, underworld. It really captures that vibe of that time. And if you were into that kind of counterculture, that was the music you were listening to. Usually uh at this point, uh, when a movie would come out, they would release a soundtrack beforehand to get people excited about it. In this case, they didn't think anybody was going to be interested in this music because most people had never heard of these bands. So they didn't release the soundtrack, and then after the movie came out, the few people that actually went to the theater to see it like started screaming that they wanted a soundtrack. Then they had to scramble and put together a soundtrack. And it was so popular that they released two other soundtracks that were not music from the movie but inspired by the movie.

SPEAKER_01 8:11

So they just had like essentially a whole genre kickoff because of this kind of movie, too.

SPEAKER_02 8:15

Yeah. He's kind of dressed like Dracula. You're right. Isn't he? Like we should hack the world together. Well, we can spin out and talk about a uh little bit about video games. I always spin out. Um, yeah, video games, you know, uh have always kind of had hacking like mini games involved in them, right?

SPEAKER_01 8:39

Yes. There's it's always been like a system. Almost from the very beginning, like System Shock. Yeah. Uh I had Alpha Protocol was uh one where they they did the whole like moving numbers thing. Video games always stylized hacking, they you know, because it has to be fun. Real hacking. Well, just like movies, right?

SPEAKER_02 8:55

Um, you know, you don't see people sitting down there typing in terminal commands that often. I mean, you do kind of now, but yeah, newer games newer movies as well try to you know make it more. I mean, even you know, if you look at Mission Impossible or even the latest Bond film, anytime someone's hacking, there's still this three-dimensional graphic, and it's like, oh, we're breaching the shell right now. The kernel is open, you know. Done a mnemonic thing. Yeah, but it's like three doing the 3D space thing. That isn't part of hacking, really. Like there's no graphical interface like that. It's all just words. It's all terminal commands and yeah, that kind of stuff. So, you know, they're try they're always trying to find some sort of unique in to make it interesting to the viewer, right? And I think that is the same with video games.

SPEAKER_01 9:42

It was yeah, one of the weirdest hacking things in games is how Bioshock did it in their first game. Oh yeah.

SPEAKER_02 9:49

That was that weird uh pipe thing, right?

SPEAKER_01 9:51

Yeah, you had to like uncover tiles that had you know pipe shapes behind it, and then you had to have the water go from one side of the map to the other.

SPEAKER_02 10:00

Well, it was glowing green goo.

SPEAKER_01 10:01

It wasn't really water, but whatever it was.

SPEAKER_02 10:04

But I mean that that that isn't actually hacking, that's plumbing.

SPEAKER_01 10:07

Yeah, it was it was just it was essentially making you be Mario, right?

SPEAKER_02 10:11

Like you should have been freaking Mario. Exactly. It's me, Mario. Like there's more plumbing in that game than there is in all of the Mario games combined. Oh yeah. Mario games combined, you're I mean Do you ever actually plumb? Other than having like pipes as a like a motif in the film.

SPEAKER_01 10:27

I mean, in Mario Sunshine, you have a watered backpack that you shoot people with water, so close thing. No. Yeah, not plumbing though. Definitely not plumbing. Deus Ex Mankind Divided.

SPEAKER_02 10:39

Interesting that you brought up Deus Ex though, because they've always had hacking in that game. And I think it's probably one of the more realistic hacking metaphors, though. For for a like especially in the new in the new ones where you're like attacking nodes and trying to get uh before the system recognizes that you're in. That's the the way it branches out, the way that you can backdoor fortify too in that, so that you know it takes the the system longer to get through to you.

SPEAKER_01 11:04

Following paths to different systems, different, you know, files or data centers or whatever.

SPEAKER_02 11:09

I remember the first time I played that, I was just completely lost. I was like, I don't know what's going on here. Like, oh, this is weird, but after a while you get it, and I and I actually really kind of came to respect that as one of the better versions of a hacking mini-game.

SPEAKER_01 11:24

Yeah, for sure. It's good too because it also utilizes using different tools to fortify your the back door to your system so that the system security can't, you know, shut you down faster, or you can just immediately breach into you know certain paths like gamified, but it's it's it's a little more realistic than plumbing.

SPEAKER_02 11:41

Yes, exactly. One of my favorite games is Fallout.

SPEAKER_01 11:44

Fallout. Love the word find game.

SPEAKER_02 11:47

Also, like one of the worst representations of hacking, because you're not really hacking. I I like actually I don't mind playing that game because it's a word game. Right. You have to find the correct word within like the terminal. They give you the number of characters you get right, and so you can determine it.

SPEAKER_01 12:05

Well, honestly, it's it's funny you bring that up. I feel like there is here go with me on this. Yeah, I feel like there's kind of a roundabout way that it is kind of realistic because real hacking involves phishing emails. Okay, so like there's a tool in in actual hackerspace called the Harvester, and essentially what it does is it collects data from public sources like Google, you know, uh social media accounts, whatnot. It basically just combs through those to find the email addresses, IP addresses, open ports in people's systems. That way they can, you know, explore exploit getting in. But one of the major things for actual hacking is the easiest way to hack somebody's account for anything is just to have their password, which is why phishing emails are. Which is 90% of actual hacking now, which is why phishing emails and whatnot. Phishing works.

SPEAKER_02 12:52

I I hear that also they uh they'll go to data dumps on the darknet and look for your name. If they if they have access to you and they find out something about you personally, then they will go and search in the darknet because uh there's all these data breaches that are just available. Our data's everywhere at this point, so it's like impossible to avoid. So just don't get targeted, is really the point.

SPEAKER_01 13:13

But like in a way, the Fallout mini game where you're just trying to find the password, it's kind of like combing through existing data just to find the right set of number or the right set of letters that make up the key to get into whatever system you're hacking in the game.

SPEAKER_02 13:28

So there is a level of and sometimes you'll find a note or something within the system that has the new password. I mean, it's realistic in that way.

SPEAKER_01 13:35

Obviously, it doesn't look like that when you're actually hacking, but like finding finding the password is essentially what hacking is.

SPEAKER_02 13:42

That's what Matthew Broderick does in war games to get into school. He finds he knows where they write down the new password every week, and so he goes and he looks, and then he goes home and he types in the password and gets right into the system. And then he causes World War III.

SPEAKER_01 13:57

Outlaws was an interesting one, the Star Wars game. See, that was one that I never actually picked up and I haven't seen it yet.

SPEAKER_02 14:03

What you have is a a grid of shapes, you know. Okay. And what you have to do is determine the sequence of the shapes. Again, it's it's basically the same as the word game, but with shapes instead of words.

SPEAKER_01 14:16

It's funny, like just how many different mini-games that people have come up with. There's word finds, there's plumbing. Plumbing, yeah. Very important one. And Black Flag, they have a minigame for hacking where you're literally just playing Froger. You have to get a node from one side to the other, right? And they just have lines of the movement.

SPEAKER_02 14:36

It's like green lines that have little gaps in it, right?

SPEAKER_01 14:38

And you have to get your little guy through the Yeah, and it's literally just like a dot that you get from one side to the other. They just it they took Frogger and they just got rid of like all the things that make Frogger, you know, fun. That game Prey. Prey was stupid.

SPEAKER_02 14:51

The stupidest game, right? Like you have a dot, you have to slide the dot around this little pinball type of thing, and if you hit the sides, then it would ricochet off. And yeah, and if you hit the electrified ones, you lose you lose. Yeah, I mean, I think it's universally thought of as one of the worst hacking games ever.

SPEAKER_01 15:09

Must be really hard to hack the system using spinning phone boots, right?

SPEAKER_02 15:15

I feel like you'd get a little nauseous after. So, can we get back to hackers? We can talk about let's talk about hackers. We've talked a little bit about counterculture, but I think counterculture is one of the main reasons that it's still relevant today, right? Right. It's like the classic youth versus older people, right? Honestly, like the whole metaphor for the movie is basically a youth versus boomers type of situation. The boomers are creating an actual ecological event to cover up a robbery, and then they're leaving the kids to clean it up. Like they wanted to blame the kids for that ecological event.

SPEAKER_01 15:57

These darn kids just don't want to work these days.

SPEAKER_02 15:59

Yeah. So, I mean, honestly, it's the the whole movie is kind of just like a metaphor of you know, like youth versus boomer culture.

SPEAKER_01 16:07

Which is a trope that has been done so many times, and it's always interesting.

SPEAKER_02 16:10

Yeah, well, when you boil it down, like uh you it it's who you identify with. Do you want to be the cool kids, right? Fighting the power, fighting that power, going against the norm. Yeah. I have a quote here from Ian Sofley. This was uh from a nerdist interview. He said, We were in a casual moment in culture where the tectonic plates were about to shift. I wondered what the next one was going to be. That's when I read the script and thought this culture could break through. I saw it as a new rock and roll, which we made explicit in the clothes and the music. It was a new wave of representing yourself, the way you spend time with your mates, and the way you'd adventure into this digital landscape. It was definitely rock and roll. Everything about like I mean, let's talk about the clothes. We talked about them a little bit earlier, right? This, I mean, I wouldn't really call it cyberpunk. It was like punk that was cyber five. Well, yeah, I mean, I think the cool thing about this is like each of the characters had their kind of own unique look. And all of them were kind of mashing all of the things from the past together, all these different movements. Serial killer was obviously punk rock, right? But all of that stuff was modified, like he chopped it up and and wore like all these weird military things with it, and they took the past and then made it present.

SPEAKER_01 17:31

Yeah. Military fatigues were definitely a big part of this movie because I feel like multiples of the characters like at some point or another had some form of military thing going on.

SPEAKER_02 17:42

Oh, Crash Override, like was wearing like fatigues, like and remember he spray painted his keyboard with essentially they were at war.

SPEAKER_01 17:48

Yes, like the whole thing. A battle between, you know, the haves and the have nots.

SPEAKER_02 17:56

You had Angelina Jolie, and she was uh, you know, very Japanese influenced. A lot of she wore like kimonos, but she also wore like surf culture stuff because she would wear like a wetsuit as a as a shirt and then put pants over it.

SPEAKER_01 18:10

It's funny because it feels like in in a movie about hacking, you would want to stand out as little as possible, but everybody in this movie was trying to be the center of attention at the same time. Yeah. And then Matthew Lillard just took the stuff the spotlight no matter what.

SPEAKER_02 18:22

Yeah, I mean he just overacted in every scene in the most brilliant way possible.

SPEAKER_03 18:29

All right, there's a little tensor breaker that had to be done, all right?

SPEAKER_01 18:32

So zero cool. An 11-year-old with access to the internet and the computer crashes like 1,705 systems.

SPEAKER_02 18:41

Yeah, 1705. They mention it like 10 times.

SPEAKER_01 18:44

And then their their family's responsible for like $45,000 of damages or something like that, and he gets banned from all technology, which is you said is a thing that still happens, like, which is not surprising to me, because especially in this day and age where everybody has a supercomputer in their pocket, when you have access to the internet that we have now, it took me two minutes to find actual hacking tools. Right. Like when I was doing research. Because all these tools are open source. Anybody can use them. It's part of the whole process of YouTube can be a hacker. Exactly. Just go to YouTube. Yeah, YouTube can you can learn anything. YouTube will show you how to do it. I mean, I grew up in a time where we had the internet, but it was still pretty darn new in the late 90s and early 2000s.

SPEAKER_02 19:26

Dave, I grew up in a time where no one had the internet.

SPEAKER_01 19:30

Which is crazy. But you had computers.

SPEAKER_02 19:32

Well, I'm one of those crossover guys though. Like it happened while I was young enough that I, you know, learned those tools. But yeah, it's it's very strange. There was everything before the internet, and then there's now everything after the internet.

SPEAKER_01 19:45

Which is just spiraling out of control at all times. Yeah. Like there's no that's the crazy thing, is no matter how much they try to put stops on all this stuff, there's always new tools, new things coming out. That that's why no matter what these companies do, there's always going to be some way to get around security systems.

SPEAKER_02 20:02

Well, I think that's another thing about hackers too, is like, you know, hacking at that point wasn't the negative term that it is now, right? It's it was kind of uh associated with positivity. You know, despite the fact that this deals with worms and viruses, and which everybody was afraid of at that point because it was then just coming into the zeitgeist, people were understanding you know the negativity that could happen if somebody wanted to do it. All of our guys are just curious, they're um excited about this whole access to information, this interconnectivity. Hacking wasn't a necessarily a bad thing at that time, right? And the this movie is filled with like the positivity of actually being in this counterculture, the cyber culture.

SPEAKER_01 20:44

Yeah, because I feel like movies like this and this kind of uh this culture at this time, because it was so new, it generated both sides of the aisle. Like it made people say, Wow, that's so cool. I want to break into government websites and steal information. And it made people say, Wow, that's so cool. I want to stop people from breaking into government websites and stealing information. Like it simultaneously created heroes and villains at the same time.

SPEAKER_02 21:11

Right, right. Like the writer of this film actually hung out with real hackers and and went to hacker meetings like in New York during this time. There was a magazine called the 2600 that was published, and uh in that they would publish places for hackers to meet up and talk. And so that's crazy. Yeah. Um, and so it started out really small, you know, small group of people, but got bigger and bigger as time went on. And we're talking this is through you know the 80s, like early. And so the writer of this actually hung out with a a lot of a lot of these guys asking questions and really getting uh immersed in the culture. I think that's one of the things that makes this movie stand out because a lot of the information that's presented is true information, like the books. Remember when he's like pulling out all those books? What is this? Oh, that's the red book. Oh uh That's the pink book because of his ugly sweater. Like these were real resources that these people were using. The concept of phone freaking, remember when he's on the phone, uh, the freak and he plays the tone off of the tape? Oh, that's right. Yeah, I forgot. Phone freaking was like a big deal um in the early 80s. In fact, in war games, they actually he phone freaks in that too.

SPEAKER_01 22:22

It's crazy. Like, how do you figure these things out? Like how well people just move on.

SPEAKER_02 22:25

So the story of that is crazy. There was a nine-year-old kid who was blind, right? Who, when he would make a phone call, he would hear the tones, and he had perfect pitch and was able to reproduce the perfect tone with his voice. That was the original phone freaker. Where did this take place? That was in the early, early 80s.

SPEAKER_01 22:48

Okay, so not Charlie Booth.

SPEAKER_02 22:49

Got it. Not Charlie Booth. People heard about that and they built these things called blue boxes, which would reproduce the tones. And it had like a little um speaker on it, and you could hold it up to, you know, this is back when they actually actually had payphones. Right. And you could play that tone into it, and then you could make a phone call anywhere in the world. So they talk about that in hackers, but they actually do that in uh 1983 in War Games beforehand. While they were making hackers, they brought on real hackers as consultants. So they brought like Emmanuel Goldstein, he's the guy that printed that uh that magazine, the 2600. Oh, okay. Uh, and they brought on Nicholas Jerecki, who was basically the Joey Joey character, and he literally got in trouble and was banned from actually having a computer for like eight years or something like that from for hacking into uh major systems. I think you know they were combing through the dialogue, making sure that all the stuff that they were presenting was actually real, the fact that the manifesto made it into there. Like, I think that is why that film resonates so well with actual hackers because they followed actually even though the movie is kind of silly and fun, the actual information that's presented in it is true and real. Like the situation where they're dumpster diving looking for information and they shoot that flare at the security guard, that was a real story that they just incorporated into movies. So the verisimilitude of what is presented in in the screenplay is something that resonates with people still today. You said something earlier about anonymity, you know, and and they say it in the manifesto, right? They say that uh we exist without skin color, without nationality, and without religious bias, right? Because what you are is a name. Your your character's on a screen. Yeah, and not even like a real name, it's just you know right. It's made up. You can be anybody you want, right? Like you can play against who you are, your very nature, if you want to. But I think that also is represented in this film. Like we we have multi-ethnic group of people that come together under unified ideal, right? Or this this uh concept of freedom. You know, you've got Asian characters, you've got Puerto Rican characters, you've got black characters, white characters, they all interact. There's no bias, there's no clicks, no things separating them. They're all unified under the this constant need to be plugged in and associated with the internet.

SPEAKER_01 25:17

I don't have my actual name on you know any game that I play. I use, you know, my my gamer tag, something that people, you know, embraced immediately. Right. And not even, you know, hacking groups, just people in general. Well shoot. Should we talk about like how they visualize different sequences of hacking in hackers? When they're fighting the plague, like towards the end of the movie, and they have you know cookie monster come up on the screen and he's like deleting files and whatnot, and they're like, you know, he's got a little Pac-Man character going back and forth deleting lines of code, and then the plague is like, just type cookie. Yeah. Like give give cookie monster, yeah, give cookie monsters cookie, and then rabbits start going across the screen, and we have Penn come up on and tell us that you know you gotta give it a vaccine or whatever.

SPEAKER_02 26:00

It's it's funny that they have all these different well, I mean the the graphics are representing viruses that are being introduced into the system, right? But they have to do it in a visually appealing way. Yeah. Because people's understanding of what a virus was at the time was so low. Very limited. Yeah, very limited. So it's like, okay, well, what are we gonna do to represent what a virus does? Yeah. And they went with the most obvious thing, like cookie monsters deleting code.

SPEAKER_01 26:24

Yeah, yeah. And then you have things like in John in Johnny Mnemonic, where he's in like an actual 3D space, and when he's talking to his uh contact in that one organization or whatever, you just see the screen like melting in and like deleting his face over time type thing.

SPEAKER_02 26:38

Yeah, and he's like, Oh, it's a virus! Pac-Man noise. And then there's you know, hacker dolphins in that film. Hacker dolphins. Who's the dolphin?

SPEAKER_00 26:50

What's the dolphin's name again?

SPEAKER_02 26:51

Jones. Jones. Jones. That sounds right.

SPEAKER_00 26:53

Hey, you gotta meet Jones.

SPEAKER_02 26:57

Let's talk about the net. So, like, that's a typical thriller, but like her job is to be a hacker, to analyze data and remove viruses and things like that. Let's let's talk about the actual like most amazing thing that she does in that film is order pizza. Or online in 1995.

SPEAKER_01 27:15

Long before that was a thing that was in 1995.

SPEAKER_02 27:18

She orders pizza online. I was I remember seeing that and going, oh my god, I wish I could do that. That's so cool. And then she waits to the last minute and orders uh plane tickets online too, which you still had like travel agents and stuff like that. Yeah, there's no way that that was that was a system that like, you know, this is like futuristic at this point. You know, there's no way you're actually ordering tickets online. Let's now extrapolate to present day and the way that hacking is represented on screen.

SPEAKER_01 27:48

Yes. So it feels like because people have had access to it for so long at this point, it seems like it's been pushed in a more realistic direction mostly. You still see hacking that's you know, the 3D space, you know, just doing things with your hands, you know, yeah. Jarvis and Iron Man type style. Right. But you see a lot more like actual terminal commands running and people typing into you know just a text box and a screen type thing. And a lot of times they'll have like a bunch of them just start popping up and doing stuff when I feel like for certain tools, when you run a command on a terminal or whatnot, you might have to leave it running, so then you would open a new one up to do something else while that's going type thing. Like if you're scanning for you know email addresses or passwords or whatever.

SPEAKER_02 28:33

Yeah, or you're scanning hex code or ASCII code or something like that, you know, like that.

SPEAKER_01 28:37

Something that just takes time. So you got that going on one side, pull up another one for the other. Well, I think you've got really realistic representations like Mr. Robot. Yes, Mr.

SPEAKER_02 28:47

Robot's a really good is yeah, like almost everything that they do in that is is truly realistic except for the time that it takes to do it. Yeah, they compress time, you know, he always knows exactly what to do and how to do it immediately because he's a super genius. As viewers, we're we're kind of going along with that concept. We don't want to sit for five episodes while he figures something out.

SPEAKER_01 29:10

Yeah, representing it in media is like it has to be quick just to keep the story moving along because otherwise you'd be sitting there watching a guy just looking at a screen waiting for you know his script to run.

SPEAKER_02 29:23

Yeah, like it has to be visually interesting. Like that's why shows like CSI or Castle, like there's always like some sort of you know hacking thing in those. They're always ridiculous. Yeah, it's always like, what did you say? Oh, I'm in. You know, it's always like, I'm in. It's like I gotta put in my thumb drive.

SPEAKER_01 29:39

Yeah, okay, the keys in. Right. Like it just starts, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 29:42

Yeah. But you know, like then you have like really realistic versions like Snowden, that movie. Never saw it. Yeah. In your like Skyfalls and your Mission Impossibles. The idea of hacking is still, you know, represented through 3D graphics and all this kind of incredible.

SPEAKER_01 30:01

Those movies are always about like the big thing, though. I mean, for right. I mean, mission you got exploding bubblegum and stuff like that. It's ridiculous. You just kind of go along with it, right? Like it's you suspend reality to enjoy the show. And again, like real hacking is just it's boring. So people need something entertaining to you know keep it going. Even like, you know, games that make hacking more realistic. Oh, yeah, let's talk about that. There's a whole wave of games now that there's a lot of them now, but that's the thing, it's still a relatively I mean, it's a niche community. The only people who are gonna play these games are people that are actually interested in like cybersecurity coding, like that kind of thing. Because you're you're typing in terminal commands. Regular people aren't normally gonna do. We have operating systems that yeah, we have graphical interfaces that make things easy for us. Exactly.

SPEAKER_02 30:47

Rarely does anybody need to go into terminal.

SPEAKER_01 30:49

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 30:49

I mean, there was that game Watchdogs that was all about hacking, but it was I I thought that it was a very well, I mean, because it was a console game, it wasn't very deep or or even very realistic. Like he saw like all of these electrical pathways, which was cool. It was a cool visual representation of how everything's connected.

SPEAKER_01 31:11

Yeah, but you know, all you had to do was point at something and it was hacked, like, or you know, they that was another one where like it was is Hollywoodified essential. Absolutely because you just have 100%. Yeah, you just have a bunch of tools on your phone or whatever that allow you to like you know activate instantaneously.

SPEAKER_02 31:28

It's like, okay, hey, uh, there's a car, you know.

SPEAKER_01 31:30

Change the stoplights, start the car, make it drive away. There's a there's a device that is is popular in hackerspace called a flipper. It's it's like a radio transmit and receiver type thing, but it can uh you can map like key fob yeah signals to it.

SPEAKER_02 31:46

They use that a lot for like getting into hotel rooms and and things like that. Hotel keys or credit card.

SPEAKER_01 31:52

Yeah, yeah. Which is a big I mean it's most it's it's frowned upon to use them in that way, obviously. Yeah, but it's still something that like anybody can buy. It's like they're just available online. Other games that are like really good approximations of real hacking, ironically, pretty realistic as far as like tools used and whatnot, is called uh Anonymous Hacker Simulator, where this this is an interesting game because it actually has like a 3D space where like your character, you can get up and walk around and you know customize your apartment, that kind of stuff. But then you sit down at a computer and you have access to these tools that actually exist, like Nmap, where which is uh an application that uh discovers networks and uh is used for like security auditing for companies they have aircracking, which is like to crack Wi-Fi security. It's specifically used to capture packets uh to see to recover security keys. So like when you're you know, when your computer's communicating with other data centers and whatnot, and it's sending and receiving packets, this essentially intercepts that to get security keys so that they have access to it too. There's more realism in these in video games now. It's made to be more interesting, but it's still not the most interesting thing in the world. Like con it's again, the only people who are gonna play games like this are the ones that are actually interested in cybersecurity, in hacking, that kind of thing.

SPEAKER_02 33:17

Yeah, I read about one called Hacknet that's really very, very realistic. Yeah. Where you're working almost completely in terminal.

SPEAKER_01 33:25

There's a lot of those.

SPEAKER_02 33:26

Yeah. And then at some point you're counter-attacked by another hacker and they take your whole graphical interface away and you have to like hack into their computer and recover it. There's a point in that game where you have to hack into someone's heart monitor. Uh they have a pacemaker and you stop it and kill them. Like you're making real-world choices. So, in summation, Dave, the representation of hacking has gotten more realistic. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 33:52

More realistic over time, in some ways, more stylized, depending on you know, futuristic aspect.

SPEAKER_02 34:00

Right. And a lot of that has kind of been mixed with the concept of AI now, too. So, you know, I think that's gonna be a whole thing. We I think we should have like a future episode about AI, like and and how the representation of AI has changed over the years, too. Fuck AI.

SPEAKER_01 34:15

But no matter what, it's as much as hacking has changed and uh how it's changed uh stylistically, how it you know, visually, practically, it's always interesting to watch. It's always fun to see people you know breaking the rules.

SPEAKER_02 34:32

Yeah, I think that's part of it. Is like we we get uh a little bit of an adrenaline rush along with them. 100%. You know, a lot of hackers, like I watched a bunch of videos with hackers, and they say the first time you break into a system is like a lot of firsts in your life, like the first time you have sex or the first time your son is born or something like that. It's like one of those seminal moments where straight shot of adrenaline. Yeah, and endorphins just it's like wow, oh my gosh, I I've done it.

SPEAKER_01 34:59

And then it becomes addicting.

SPEAKER_02 35:00

Yeah, and then you get caught by the cops, and then you're in big trouble. Well, and then you have a choice. And then you have a choice to make you either work for the government or you go into private and uh you become a white hat or a gray hat.

SPEAKER_01 35:12

Yeah. It's nice that we live in the age that we live in too, because people who are interested in this kind of thing can, you know, explore cybersecurity. And there's so many websites that teach you about cybersecurity and teach you ethical hacking so that you can learn how to do that and you do it in a controlled space where you're not going to get yourself in trouble, but you still kind of get a hit of adrenaline that like you solved this puzzle, you figured this thing out.

SPEAKER_02 35:36

Let's go back to the hacker manifesto, like the idea that that the internet was going to unite us all.

SPEAKER_01 35:44

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 35:44

Which it did.

SPEAKER_01 35:45

Well, for the better or worse.

SPEAKER_02 35:47

We are now kind of in an international community, right? Like uh you can talk to people in Japan, and you know, it doesn't matter where you're from, you're you're connected, but it's also kind of separated us in a way that no one foresaw, right?

SPEAKER_01 36:01

Like I I think that goes back to the the anonymous factor where people talk to each other online and can be their full selves, but then when they go out in public and they have like a face to the voice, right? It changes dramatically. You get so used to talking to people online, talking through texting, you just you kind of forget how to talk in person. It's I mean honestly, it's something that I struggled with a fair amount just through like high school and whatnot, because I I grew up playing video games, spending all my time, you know, at a computer, at a game console. I would only hang out with, you know, the same three friends ever. Right. And whenever I met somebody new, like I was just super shy. I didn't know how to talk to people. And like it took a lot to get me to start coming out of my shell more.

SPEAKER_02 36:44

Well, now I leave you somewhere, like I go and get popcorn and you're talking to famous people when I come back. It happened one time. It happened one time. I just thought that was the funniest thing. I came back and you had no clue who you were talking to.

SPEAKER_01 36:58

This was a good one, honestly, for the earlier version of hacking, because I've only ever been exposed to like, you know, the later iterations of it. I think up until now, the Matrix was the earliest iteration of hacking I'd ever seen.

SPEAKER_02 37:10

Yeah. Well, and you know, he he captures the vibe as opposed to the actual act. Yeah. I really like that scene when Dade sits down at the computer and like everybody in the background is moving around super fast, like time is passing. That's a good because he's locked in, you know, and then all this all this is happening around him, and he's so unaware of it because he's locked in.

SPEAKER_01 37:31

And that's a good way to like portray what actual hacking is like because it takes a lot of time a lot of the times and the world keeps moving. Right. Exactly. Well, now I've seen hackers. Yes, you have.

SPEAKER_02 37:42

Only 5,000 more things to see. And we'll see you on the next geek motif video.

SPEAKER_01 38:08

This is Adam. And we're fucking nerds.