I transcribed the great number theory jargon from the film-- which your link describes but fails to include in its entirety-- in this post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31379273
In contrast, Hackers had a mix of "that's how it's down, IRL" and wholly created fantasy hacking. Both were entertaining films, imo, albeit with entirely different approaches to hacking.
Thanks for that, it’s interesting. It seems that his involvement was just for the one lecture scene though? The movie itself is chock full of references to nerd, hacker, conspiracy, and security knowledge. Anyone know how they did all the research for this film?
The screenwriters Lawrence Laskar and Walker Parkes talk about the research for Sneakers and War Games on a recent episode of Star Talk with Neal DeGrasse Tyson:
Many writers/studios get a technical consultant. Sometimes your writer friend will ask for help, other times you'll get an introduction from some VFX house you're working for and others it's your wife's-friends-husbands-boss.
lol. I sent that post and didn’t think twice about it, but of course you are right! I’ve started to think of physical media as “legacy”, but it is not of course!
For example, Silicon Valley, had a handful of co-producers who went to niche tech conferences like dweb camp and got attendees on consulting contracts for the upcoming seasons they were writing.
I presume the conference circuit was still where they picked up the contacts in 1992
Coincidentally, staff of the internet archive co-produced and sponsored dweb camp :)
I haven't seen it since it came out. But if my memory serves (and likely it does not) it was a meh film.
No one yet has done anything for hacking like "Real Genius" did for nerdy Physics majors. (And even that film is flawed in a number of ways.) I would love to see a film set in the 80's that gets hacking/phracking right. The "Stranger Things" fans would go nuts for the cultural references.
Something like "Densha Otoko" (Train Man) meets "American Graffiti". (Holler if you're interested in me writing your script, ha ha.)
I'll find and watch the film again though. I may have relaxed a bit on my criticism of films depicting computer users.
You don’t happen to remember the name of an Amiga game where you navigated a little robot around via CCTV while avoiding security guards, in order to break into a safe?
Hmm I don't recall any game where the object was to to break into a safe... There was Quadralien, where you control robots to repair the central solar system reactor "Astra", which has begun to break down. You have to repair circuits and clean up the radiation leaks before the station blows.
The next closest I could think of is Infestation (one of Psygnosis' lesser known games), where you are sent to investigate a space colony that has been wiped out by an alien life form. Even getting into the station itself before running out of oxygen is a challenge.
Mr. Robot had some of the same vibe, but stretched out a bit at times. It'd be amazing if they could condense some of that into one movie very much like Sneakers but with more modern hacks.
Oh, man. It's basically a diskmag. Very much in keeping with the theme of Sneakers, right down to its relative technical and communitarian realism in depicting hackers/hacking.
2017: Open source web browser company silently to users, not even any discussion on bugzilla or anywhere else - installs a plugin made by an advertising company for a media conglomerate's TV show about hackers into everyone's Firefox installations.
The project manager responsible who used to work in the advertising industry tries to damage-control things and locks/hides the ticket. Another mozilla staffer unlocks/unhides it and states it was improperly hidden/locked.
He said: "I would do the scene if my wife Lori could meet [Robert] Redford"
[1] https://molecularscience.usc.edu/sneakers/