The Worst Hacking Scenes from Hollywood

will know exactly how to hack excellent. I'm glad that. I'm glad now because I've been wondering for years. Guys. We've had Shannon on the show a few times, and today it's a real treat, really because we're gonna talk about some examples of hacking in pop culture and some of the ones that are incredibly awful, just terrible inaccurate ways of showing how hacking works, as well as talk about something to get it more right than not right,

which is kind of awesome. And I mean the start off, we have to admit the real world of hacking, while the results can be quite dramatic and have a huge effect. The process itself is not always cinematic. Nope, it is not. It's actually pretty boring. There's just a bunch of text on the screen and that's about it, right, Yeah, I mean it's it's it's coding, right, yeah, exactly. There's a lot of coding involved, a lot of Python and BASS scripts and things of that nature, and a lot of

terminal work. So you don't see very much gooey or graphical user interface usage whenever you're running some kind of

hack implementation. A lot of times it's just terminal, right, And you know, I understand the need to stretch the truth when you're trying to create a really thrilling movie or TV show and you want to have something interesting to look at, having your characters look at lines of code and going through a process of trying to uh to to create some sort of exploit for a vulnerability that doesn't really hold a lot of people like on the edge of their seat. So I get it, but

it is kind of a problem. And I should also mention we're using the word hacker today a lot. But of course, as I try to mention every time I talk about hacking, hacking is a very broad term, and it doesn't necessarily mean that you are doing anything illegal, and it certainly doesn't even mean that you're necessarily working on a computer. You could be doing some hardware hacks that aren't related to software. Uh, that's important to remember.

But but as far as Hollywood has can certain there's really only one kind of hacking, and that involves trying to break into a place that you're not supposed to be in. Of course, because those are the most interesting people, they're the scary ones, and people are afraid of what they don't understand, right, And I imagine that a lot of screenwriters are particularly scared of hackers because it's one it's clear that they have no understanding whatsoever about it.

And two, I mean we've seen, especially recently, we've seen some very big stories about uh, the entertainment industry running running away from hackers attacking. And whether it's a hacker who's actually gaining access to a system, or it was someone who was on the inside who just managed to exploit their access in the first place, which I would argue really isn't a hack, it's just kind of industrial sabotage at that point. But the Sony story would be

the big example, right. Yeah, the Sony story, I think put a lot of fear in the entertainment industry. And I feel like the entertainment industry as a whole, with very few exceptions, are one of the genres that is the farthest behind when it comes to their own security and privacy. Uh, They're they're the farthest behind when it comes to a lot of things, including how they treat

their women. But I think that it's something that they really need to start focusing on and start understanding, not only for their own security, like with for their employees, for the actors and actresses that work there for these different companies, but also because they need to understand how to actually portray it so that more people understand it

as a whole and aren't so afraid. Right, And so we're going to dive into a discussion of some of the more entertaining and often wildly inaccurate versions of hacking in film and TV. I should also give a shout out. A lot of people on my Twitter feed suggested that I check out a subreddit. The subreddit is it's a Unix system, which is a reference to Jurassic Park. Uh, if you remember the young lady runs up to a computer, she takes one look at it. She says, it's a

unique system. I know this, And then she's immediately looking at a graphic user interface and identifying one block out of like fifty blocks that are on the screen and immediately makes the conclusion that all the files for the entire island are accessible from that one terminal. I don't know how she knows that. Um, that's amazing. It's amazing that you can you you automatically know that everything available

on the island is on that one drive. Somehow, I feel like the only way you would know that it is if you were the information security professional that is working for that company. Was not, you know, she she didn't, just something like she was a little too young to be in a full time employee at that point. So Jurassic Park, while it lends the the the quote it's a unique system to the sub credit, I didn't really

included on this list. There is one other incredibly famous example that I've talked about on a previous episode Tech Stuff, that we will hit. But first I'm gonna talk about a movie. I haven't actually seen this movie, but I

have seen the sequences that involve hacking. That movie is the Core And in the first sequence I wanted to talk about, there's a character whose handle is RAT, which could be you know, like remote access trojan or remote access terminal, depending upon what acronym you want to look at. Often one that is associated with hacking, and RAT is caught by the FBI. The sequence in which he's caught, he's trying desperately to erase all traces of his activities.

He's got tons and tons of computers, and he's using massive magnets to try and wipe drives, and he's throwing CD ROM disks into a microwave and turn to get on high you know, the typical stuff we do when the Feds come knocking. Uh. But but my favorite bit about this little sequence is he then has taken to an interrogation and as he's being interrogated, he just casually reaches over and grabs a guy's cell phone out of his little holster or his pocket or whatever. But the

guy's it's just a cell phone. What can he do with that? Well, Shannon, you know what people can do with so I mean, if you have physical access to a cell phone, it's game over. But but but what what this guy does. He doesn't do something to get hold of the guy's contacts. He doesn't. And this is also pre smartphone. It's really a cell phone. He doesn't

do anything like that. What he does is he takes a little um, a little chewing gum rapper, He dials a couple of numbers on the phone, and then he uses the chewing gum rapper to make a weird little whistling, humming noise, and then casually this is the phone, tosses it back to the guy and says that phone's got free long distance on it forever. I love to real life, that's exactly how it works. Yeah, totally. So I'm pretty sure that this is kind of a comparison to what

people would actually do, which was called phone freaking. And this was like before hacking became a really big popular norm that you would see in like online media that

you see in this day. So back in the day, this guy named Captain Crunch he got his online screen name from opening up a Captain Crunch cereal box and getting out a little I believe it was a kazoo or something similar to that, and he was able to recreate or reproduce the kind of tone that you could put into a pay phone to allow you to make free long distance calls. So they're using that real life scenario to their advantage in this this movie the Core and making it seem like you can do the same

thing with a gum wrapper. Now, personally, I don't believe that you can do the same thing with a gum wrapper. That seems a little bit odd. I know that you can make noises with things like that. You can also do the same thing with a piece of grass if you want to. Yeah, you can. You can entertain yourself in like a third grade kind of way for hours at a time. But yeah, phone freaking really worked on landlines. They worked when the phone system wasn't fully digital yet.

It was a much different system. I mean there and there's some very famous people who got their start as phone freaks. I mean, Steve Wozniak was in that world. The great was was one of the freakers of back in the seventies and uh, but it was it was sort of the same thing that you would talk about hackers today. They weren't necessarily trying to gain the system. They were trying to figure out, how does this work, right,

They were just messing with things. They were trying to reverse engineer them and figure out how they work and put them back together and let them let these different pieces of technology do things that they weren't necessarily supposed to do. And that's what I love so much about hacking. But then you bring it to Hollywood and they're like, oh, these are scary people. They're all going to end up

in the FBI's hands. And that's not necessarily true, right, And and to to take something that worked on landlines on a pay phone basis using a whistle that had I think he even modified it slightly so it would make exactly the tone he needed to replicate the tones that the phone company was using in order to allow for this kind of thing to happen. Yeah, it would

never work on the cell phone range at all. So and and also just just what a weird line like this phone's got free long distance on it forever, and you think there's gotta be multiple ways a phone company would say, Hey, something weird is going on with this

one line. But but the Core, the Core also has another great scene in it with that same hacker, same guy rat Uh And when I see him I always think, uh, he's he's the he's a character who also or he's an actor who also shows up as a character on the show UM Supernatural as a weird, reedy looking uh demon killer guy that you would just expect to get completely obliterated the first time he shows up, but he turns out to be more capable than you would consider

based upon his appearance. Anyway, he walks into a cyber cafe. He's got a CD rom Uh, I think it even says Kung Fu on it, if I'm not mistaken, and he puts it, puts it into a cyber cafe computer, and after like leaning back and putting his hand up to his face for about five seconds, it ends up completely taking over not just his computer, but the entire local network, and all of the screens in the cyber cafe pop up with this image of his rat network

where he has taken over all the computers. I don't even know exactly why he's trying to take over all the computers, apart from just seeing lots and lots of uh, what appears to be news footage which spoiler alert, there's a thing we can use to get that news footage. It's called a TV. You can use that without having to hack any systems. But uh, it's it's just a weird little moment where he's taken over all the computers in the cyber cafe. Now, let's let's go ahead and

make some things clear, Shannon. I know that you've addressed this on on multiple episodes and and other ways of reaching out to your audience. There are certain things you should be concerned about when you go and log into any kind of local area network, UM, any kind of open WiFi. If you're going to a coffee shop and you're using that kind of WiFi, you need to be

more um aware of potential security problems. Yes, absolutely, it's it's very easy if you're on your local coffee shops network or your locals hotels network for anybody to snoop on what you're doing. Uh, you may be using HTTPS, but that's not going to keep somebody for understanding what sites you are visiting. But even though that data may

be encrypted, however, they're still collecting that encrypted information. And it really just depends on how a website that you're visiting is encrypting that information, whether or not they would be able to decrypt it. After a specific amount of time. So I always tell people if they're going to use a you know, hotel WiFi or a coffee shop WiFi, to use a VPN, use some way to tunnel your traffic from point A to point B so that nobody else on that network will be able to see what

you're doing. They may see that your dogged on, they may see your IP address, but they won't know exactly

what's going on with your traffic while you're connected. So, and I'm pretty sure that everybody who generally uses these WiFi networks that are available for free aren't necessarily using VPNs, But it's it's a huge security risk for pretty much every consumer out there that's using these WiFi networks, right and whereas in the core, you know we were talking, it's it's really hardwired computers that are part of the

cyber cafe. You just sit down at a terminal and log in so that you have access to everything on that machine. That's scary too. I mean it's it's kind of like using a computer at the library. You want to be very careful about the kinds of activities you do on that machine, um, because it's not really yours and you don't really you know, and you don't want to go so far to cover your tracks that you're

actually causing problems for the real purpose of that machine. Uh. It's still not quite sure what he was trying to do. It was like he was setting up his own a botan net. Also, if you are sitting of a buttonet, probably a bad idea to have a graphic pop up on everyone's screen saying, hey, your computer's mind now. Yeah. So it's in today's age, it is very popular for people to use ransomware, which will basically announce it's it's

availability on your computer. Yeah, it'll announce its presence on your machine to let the user know, Hey, I've just encrypted all the information, all the photos, all the documents that is on your computer. Now you have to pay me like one bitcoin to get your data back. And then you pay that bitcoin and you may or may not get your data back. So, you know, ransomware it's

a big thing. But in the case of this one, in the case of rat yes, you can install like malware or something like that on a c D. That's entirely possible. You can put pretty much anything on a CD. Uh, And then it looks like he's he's running this CD through the entire network, which you can install malware through pivot and a networks open ports or open eyedps so that you can put the same hour on several different computers.

But it's it's never a good idea to let everybody know what the heck you're doing, if you're doing something that you shouldn't necessarily be doing in the first place. Yeah, I mean again, it's it's there for dramatic effect. But if you're the one person in the cyber cafe who isn't visibly freaking out when all the computers switch over, here's a here's a little hint, they're going to figure out it was you, right, I mean that, that's kind of like, if you're the one guy not surprised that

everything's on fire, you probably set the fire. I'm just saying. Our next example comes from one of my favorite movies of all time. Oh my gosh, me too. I love this movie. Yes, Oh, it's so great. It's so cheesy and wonderful. The Net Also is a is a movie in which a character actually has her identity stolen, and very prescient for its time. It's not like it got everything wrong. Some of the stuff and actually predicted quite well. For example, best prediction of any movie ever it predicted

being able to order pizza online. This was before the dot com bubble even began. This The movie came out in the mid nineties, so this was actually pretty advanced. They they the people behind the film, said, we wanted to be able to let our character make an activity online that would stress how she was uh distancing herself from other people. She was trying her best to limit the amount of interaction she had with other human beings.

It stresses her loneliness, also her paranoia, uh to some extent, and and it was a neat way of doing it, and it also ended up being accurate. However, that being said, there's a bit in the very beginning. It's right when she's going to order pizza. When she's on the phone with a client she does essentially text support and really helps people who have been attacked by a virus recover

their systems. Uh. And it takes her like no time at all to identify what the virus is on this customer's computer, which which she does not have access to. She's she's she's accessing it remotely. She identifies the virus, She sequesters the virus, she removes the virus, plus apparently does repairs to the system, so it goes so it starts working again, and that takes her less time than it would take for her to order the pizza. That's incredible.

I mean, she should Every security firm should hire her. She's a genius apparently. So so I like making the comparison between Sandra Bullock's character in the Net to an actual penetration tester that we have in the two thousands or in the tens, in the twenty tens. Penetration testers go through contracts. They go through a company. They're usually hired on by a large firm to go through their

security and make sure everything's okay. They have to write reports, everything has to go through a financial financialist before they're actually paid for any of their work. They don't actually discuss how much they're getting paid with the client. They discuss how much they're getting paid with the company that

they are salaried through. So in the case of Sandra Bullocks character here she's talking about you know, oh yeah, he's like, yeah, I'm gonna you know, pay X amount of money, and he's like, I don't care how much it costs. It's worth it. And that's not necessarily something that you would talk to the penetration tester about, because when you do, they're going to make their they're going to make their time with you as a client much

longer to make it seem like a much more important case. Yeah, so if you if you do, uh, you know, it's kind of like what Scotty would say is that he'd say he'd figure out how long it was going to take him to do a task, and then he would then he would give the captain a time that was longer than what it would take him to do. In that case, it wasn't so that he could get over time. It was so that he could impress the captain by

finishing early. Right. It was like, I told you it was gonna take me three days, but I really put my nose to the grindstone and got it done in a day and a half and the captain's impressed, like, Wow, you're amazing. In this case, it would be yeah, that's

probably gonna take me. You know, I don't know a week's worth of work and you're done in you know, five hours, then you're just billing the time, right, So, so during this conversation that these too have, it sounds like she's a like she's a red teamer, Like she's a penetration tester that works for a big security firm, and she's she's talking to her client though. Uh, but but her actions make me think that she's a freelancer. So I'm not sure what's going on here. I think

that the that it was produced a little bit confusingly. Um, but now that I understand how penetration testing works, even though I am not one myself, I was quite confused by this scene. Yeah, I I I think it was. Out of all the errors that we're talking about today, it's one of the less egregious because, again, unless you were to show like that time had obviously passed a significant amount so that she had had time to really

identify what was happening and then respond to it. Uh, it's not that big a deal compared to some of the other versions that we've got in this episode. So I'm I'm gonna I'm gonna give this one a pass. It's not as bad as it could have been. It's

certainly not as bad as the next one. Oh my gosh, can you just talk about n C I S. Yeah, let's talk about n C I S for a bit, because, uh, you know n C I S. First of all, it has one of the most infamous awful hacking scenes in Hollywood, and so much so that that there are multiple versions of the clip we're gonna talk about on YouTube, my favorite titled to Idiots One Keyboard. But yeah, let's talk

about n C I S for a second here. So we've got we've got a character in n C I S who is sort of she's the the young hip hacker character who uh is the one responding in this particular scene to an attack that's coming in that attack is being represented by lots and lots of pop ups of just strings of characters meaninglessly appearing all over her her computer monitor, and her response is that each one of these is absolutely meaningful, and she knows exactly what's happening,

that the hacker is attacking their systems and trying to get at very uh very secure data and is quickly winnowing through all the different security and so she's just furiously typing on her keyboard in response, and her co worker who's standing next to her and asking her questions and giving her suggestions that don't necessarily mean very much, ends up deciding to help her out by simultaneously typing

on the same keyboard. Chese typing on So you have four hands typing on the same keyboard at the same time. Dear Hollywood, that is not how keyboards work. A computer can't tell which person is typing which thing. It would just come out as a super garbled mess. Not to mention the frustration, like have you ever had somebody come up and just like start pressing keys on your keyboard, because it's very irritating. It is. There's no way that these two characters would be able to type on the

same keyboard at the same time. That's ridiculous. It feels like a violation when someone does that to me, Like like if they if they're like move, even if it if it, if it's preceded by move, I'll show you. I'm like, no, no, you'll tell me and then I'll do it. This is my computer and I don't let

you touch it. Yeah. This was one of those sequences where really the whole purpose of the scene was to show how a non tech savvy, pragmatic guy has a solution to a problem that the two tech wizards completely overlook. So in a way, it's it's about taking down the tech wizard folks a peg or two because they're not thinking practically, they're too filled with panic. So you've got these two characters who are responding in real time to a security threat as if they're doing battle with the hacker.

And this is a common thread in a lot of television and movies. It's not terribly accurate in the real world scenarios, but they are. They're acting like the keystrokes they're doing are going to end up either booting the hacker out or securing some of the data away from the hacker, and they're just furiously typing when the pragmatic guy walks behind the computer system and unplugs it, thus saving them from the hack because now there's no connection

and for the hacker to exploit. Except what he did was actually make it worse because now they don't have a computer that they can work through to hopefully, uh find the hack, find the open port that this guy is coming through, this attacker and close it off. So he's unplugging a computer as opposed to going to the server and cutting that off and turning off the server. He's just unplugging one of the open PCs, right, and

that just drives me nuts. This and Okay, I wanted to throw things at my TV when I was watching this scene because I was like, this is so bad. It's so bad. Yeah, this one, this one's probably out of all the ones that we have, this was probably maybe not the worst, but it's way up there, and it's it's it's clearly played for laughs, at least a

little bit for laughs. Maybe not like outright belly laughs, like you know, anyone who knows what a computer is is probably chuckling, but it's obviously played for this little moment where the pragmatic character can kind of be a smug jerk face like huh see I thought of it first, and the other two characters like why didn't we think of that? And as as Shannon points out, because it

doesn't solve the problem, No, it does not. Yeah. I I highly recommend if anyone is unfamiliar with this, go look for in C. I s who it hits one keyboard and watched this scene and really appreciate it. I also liked when I was reading comments about this one of the comments I read in that subreddit was. The part of the scene that completely pulls me out of it is the fact that when the guy takes a bite of a sandwich, it's such a tiny little bite. It lost it lost all credibility with me. There No

one needs a sandwich like that. Oh that's so funny. Creditors are great. Um. Now. Next on our list is Swordfish, which actually has quite a few awful, awful hacking scenes, some of which involved material not appropriate for this podcast, and so I did not include those scenes when I wrote. There's one in particular where a guy is being tested to see if his hacking skills are leite enough to join. It is awful. It is terrible in so many ways. But that one was so bad that I was like, no,

I can't, that's not going on the list. So instead I looked at a different one. And Hugh Jackman's playing the hacker and he's trying to get access to a system, and the way that they decided to depict this was they show a little cube on the screen and he's building onto this cube with other cubes to make what looks like essentially a Rubik's Cube sized digital construct. It's all virtual. There's no actual physical cubes, and this is what represents getting access to a system somehow building a

three dimensional virtual object out of smaller three dimensional virtual objects. Now, Shannon, is that in fact, how that that looks like when you're trying to access a system you are confronted with

a Rubik's cube that you have to construct virtually. Yeah, so I'm gonna say, uh no, So for me, this looks like they are trying to show their viewers a graphical compilation of what coding would look like once you finally finally compile your code and you get the a okay that everything is okay and there are no errors.

So that's what it looks like to me. Um, if you see actual code, if you see somebody building a virus or building a worm, or like in this case, Hugh Jackman's character is building worm, you'll see lines and line hundreds of lines of code, and then at the end they'll probably choose like go into the gooey and choose to compile code, and then the interface that they're using will give them the okay and tell them that

there are no errors. But in this case, he's building a Rubik's cube on is computer and it looks nothing like what actual compilation looks like. Yeah, yeah, compiling code is uh. So to give to give you guys a little bit of an insight into how computers quote unquote think. We use computer languages in order to construct programs, and the computer languages are written in such a way that a computer understands what operation it needs to perform in

order to progress through the program. Ultimately, that stuff gets compiled and you have like high level computer languages and low level computer languages, uh and then you eventually get down to the point where you get to machine code, and that's where you're getting into the binary codes zeros and ones, where most humans, the vast majority of humans, nearly all humans, are not capable of reading that, at least at least not with a whole lot of time

on their hands. So that's why we have these programming languages to kind of bridge the gap between the language that computers eek and the languages that we speak. So, if you're completely unfamiliar with coding languages or programming languages and you take a look at it, it looks like nonsense, right, and it for someone who is completely unschooled, it looks like you would have to be a genius in order to use it. But in fact, it follows very specific rules.

So once you learn those rules, you know, it does take there is a learning curve, but you do get to a point where you start feeling a little confident with that stuff exactly. And there's plenty of programmers that I know who never learn every single rule in a specific language that they know, but they they have books and books, they have you know, definitions and posters and things of this nature so that they always have a reminder,

so they're able to write different kinds of programs. But as long as you know a few general rules for any language that you're working with, you can write a program. It's it's very hard, it is very complicated, but it's possible. Yeah. Yeah. So it's not like you're building a cube, unless, of course, your program, once executed, is a cube building program, in which case, if it looks like you're building a cube, congratulations you coded it correctly, um. But other otherwise that's

not gonna happen. Our next one is one of my favorite examples of bad hacking because it takes me back to my childhood. I had a discussion with some of my my co workers here about this particular movie, and some of them couldn't remember ever seeing it. Some of them remembered seeing it as a kid on video. I remember seeing this in the theater because I'm old. Superman three.

So in Superman three, you've got uh character played by Richard Pryor who is a computer programmer, and he goes to work for a company and he's a he's a data entry guy. For some reason, the data entry folks at this company all have to wear like slippers and stuff. It's almost like it's a clean room, like kind of a clean room, but not really a clean room. And he finds out that everyone in the company is paid their Their payment involves fractions of assent that end up

getting rounded down. So if this sounds like office space, it's very much the same sort of blood. He figures out, Hey, what if I took all the fractions of assent that otherwise go unaccounted. They're just floating around out there, and I pay myself all those fractions of assent so that I make a real huge amount of money, because once you accumulate all of them, it actually amounts to something's significant. But because each individual little appearance of it. It's tiny,

no one takes notice of it. Right Like if I if I took a halfpenny, no one is going to care.

If I take a billion halfpennies, suddenly it matters. But he does this by staying late one day and turning on his computer and he does type some stuff with one hand on a little bitty keyboard that uh, then I'll makes texts start to disappear and appear like one letter at a time, to a point where it's a very common thing in Hollywood, right that the display has some sort of weird effect to it that indicates that, yes, something is happening, like a hacker is attacking or the

system is being compromised. Um. Once he does that, he types in a command that essentially just says, hey, pay all the fractions of a cent to me, and it's written out in more or less natural language, and then he hits enter and it works. A lot of problems with this, the big one being natural language. Like we just said just a second ago, computers do not understand the languages that we communicate with to each other, not not on their own. They have to be taught how

to do that. They're not. They don't automatically speak English. Yeah, if you ever open up a command line on any kind of computer, doesn't matter what operating system pick one, whether it's Linux or DOS or whatever. You get to that command line and you try and type in full English sentences to see if you can make your computer to do stuff, You're gonna be sorely disappointed. It doesn't work that way. It's not like a search bar with Google.

I mean, the Web has really spoiled us, and that anyone who has not had experience with computers before the Web was a thing doesn't really understand that when you get to the command line, it's not like a search field like you're not You're not Gooey has spoiled us. Yes, yeah, I um side note again, I'm old enough where Doss was the way to interface with a computer when I was a kid, or Apple Basic, but I was mostly

using Doss at that point. And then uh, you had the Mac come out in four they took the gooey. They didn't gate the gooey, the graphic user interface. They actually kind of took that from Xerox Park. Xerox Park really kind of pioneered that. Then Microsoft came out with Windows and I resisted switching to Windows for a very long time, and eventually broke down to get Windows when it became clear that all the software coming out only

would be supported through Windows and not through DOSS. And to this day, I'm bitter about that because I taught myself all the Tree commands. Darn it. I grew up with Windows since I was a kid, so it was always I started in the gooey graphical user in a phase. I didn't start with commands. But this is where Shannon makes me feel old. Yeah, I was born in the eighties, so I think that's the difference. That's that's that's fair. That's fair. Go ahead. I I love you too, Shannon.

It's fine. Every every every co host I have makes me feel old because I'm older than everyone but one podcaster at this company. So continue. So I actually liked this Superman three scene because back in the day before I was born, Uh, it was very popular among um people all over the place, no matter what company you were working with, to deal with fractions of a penny, because even a penny as a change in pricing would

be a lot of money. So people would be like, Okay, well it's a penny and a half, and I believe at one point there was even a half cent coin that was distributed in the United States. So this was a thing. You can still see it in this day and age at gas stations. Whenever you go to a gas station, you see on the sign it says like gases to and nine tenths of a of a penny. That's that's a that's from back in the day. One day would use these exact precise measurements for gasoline distribution

at gas stations. So so that really is a thing. Um. But the whole hacking scenario of this scene is very false. You you can't do a specific distribution of money in that nature, and anybody who has access to that kind of information who is working for a company should not have that access in the first pace, especially if they're they're getting paid and they're not like a a chief operating manager of that company. Right. Yeah, it's the the idea that you would have these dumb terminals, like I

am assuming they were dumb terminals. I'm assuming they were all connected to a main system as opposed to each being individual computers. But either in either case you would have limitations on what any of those terminals could access, but because of his leap programming skills, he's able to bypass that and get access to the main frame. I'm pretty sure they use it as a main frame. Mainframe, by the way, is also a great general term that

Hollywood has misused throughout all the computer films. But uh, it's one of those things that's never explained how he does it. It's just a it's just a thing that happens in the movie. Uh, doesn't you know. They're not drawing attention to it. It's not an important thing other than the fact to illustrate that one. He is smart too. He doesn't see anything ethically wrong with bending the rules because in his mind, these fractions of assent, they're not

doing anything right. They're not they're not in an account, they're not being used by the company. They're just they're just kind of loose somehow. They're they're they're in the company's ownership, but no one's doing anything with it. So therefore, if no one's doing anything with it, no one's gonna miss them when they're gone. So that's kind of how he justifies it, and eventually he becomes one of the he's more of a reluctant villain in the movie. But

he's one of the villains in Superman three. That's a if you have not seen Superman three, good job. Continue on that track. Don't feel tempted to change that. It is not a good movie. It's better than Superman four, although my coworker Joe would probably trounce me for saying so, uh,

super Superman four is awful. Um the next movie. The next example we have is Numbers, which I love just because of the way it mischaracterizes I r C. Which is, there's a scene in which people are trying to figure out what these what these hackers, these two different hackers are trying to do, and they don't know, and they aren't sure how they're going to track down the hackers

and learn what they're trying to do. But then one of the characters says, oh, we gotta go on I r C because that's where all the hackers go to chat. And they use handles. You know, they don't use the real name they use. They use handles on I r C. And that way they can secretly chat to each other.

And then they use this weird meaningless analogy talking about two ships that are sailing across the ocean, and they meet in the middle of the ocean and they exchange illegal goods and then they sail away, and because the wake of a ship fades so quickly, they leave no

trace behind. That's the same thing as I r C. They actually do this whole sequence where that that ship analogy I just talked about is visualized on screen, because folks, I r C is boring, Like showing I r C on screen is incredibly dull, So it's way more exciting to have a visualization of a meaningless ship analogy. Yeah, IRC is super boring to look at, but it's very fun. You can make lots of friends in I r C, so it's it is called Internet relay chat, so that

is a sure thing. People do use LEAs fat Lee speak in I r C, even though leap speak is not that hard to read and her Phinian going into the ships made absolutely no sense to me as an IRC user, because when I pop into I r C and then when I leave, my chats are still there, and they are still there for anybody to see who

was also logged in at the same time. So saying that they disappear after x amount of time is not necessarily true, because anybody with a very very simple script can capture everything that was said in an I R C for X amount of time, for whatever time that they want to save a file four, and then they can upload that file anywhere that they want to. So that this information disappears is completely false. I love that

there's a I'm pretty sure it's the same one. I'm not watching the clips as I'm going through them, so I'm not entirely certain, but I think there's a moment in this where they have a desperate like take a screenshot, take a screen shot, and she does it like at the last second before the connection is broken. And I was laughing so hard that the idea of oh, yeah, you gotta take a screen shutter it's gone forever. Um, Yeah,

it's it's pretty ridiculous. And and there is a funny little exchange where where the lady says like they'll be speaking in lete, but don't worry, I also speak let like like, oh, screenwriter, you're so adorable son. Yeah. Le it's easy to speak, so anybody can do it. Yeah, I mean it's it's really it's really just replacing certain

characters with other characters. That look similar to the ones you were replacing, and then sometimes purposefully misspelling words because someone some at some point misspelled things people thought was funny and they went with it, like pone pone is a great example. P w N. It's supposed to be owned, but someone just in a typo and then that typo became the word yep. That's the lovely thing about it, guys.

Shannon and I had so much to say about how Hollywood portrays hackers that we went on for quite some time. So we're gonna divide up the episodes and we're gonna end part one here. The whole thing has already been recorded, but next week you'll get part two where we talk more about some of the bad examples of hacking in Hollywood as well as some of the good ones. So

make sure you tune in and check that out. Also, if you want to follow Shannon on Twitter, her handle is at snubs that's s n U b s. And if you want to find her other work, it's amazing stuff, you can just go to hack five dot org. That's h a K the number five dot org. And I'll talk to you guys again really soon for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is how stuff works. Dot com