Sneakers may be corny - but it's actually based on some serious math. Essentially one of the characters has developed a way to solve a prime factorization in what appears to be constant time (i.e. O(1)). Once you do that - well that's the end of basically all public key cryptography based on the RSA algorithm (pretty much everything in common use). Much more realistic than say, Hackers.
PHREAK
(to Cereal)
D'you bring those Crayola books?
CEREAL
Oh yeah, technicolor rainbow.
Cereal brings a book out of his bag.
CEREAL
Green one.
JOEY
What is that, what is that? Lemmie see. What
are these?
DADE
International Unix Environments.
Cereal pulls out another book.
CEREAL
Luscious orange?
Cereal hands the orange book to Phreak.
DADE
Computer security criteria, DOD standards.
Another book comes out.
DADE
The Pink Shirt Book, Guide to IBM PCs. So
called due to the nasty pink shirt the guy
wears on the cover.
Another one.
CEREAL
What's that?
DADE
Devil book. The Unix Bible.
Another one.
CEREAL
What's that?
DADE
Dragon book. Compiler design.
Cereal brings out a large red book.
CEREAL
Oh yeah? What's that?
DADE
The Red Book. NSA Trusted Networks.
Otherwise known as the Ugly Red Book that
won't fit on a shelf.
By now Phreak has made a pile of the books, and the Red
Book looks wholly out of place on the top of the pile.
Every time I'm watching "Hackers" with someone, I can't help but point out which of those books I own. Inaccurate as hell, but still a fun hacker mindset movie.
When I was young, I thought mechanical engineering would be my ticket to the space race, but after seeing the movie hackers for the 1st time on the engineering floor in college, I thought hacking was COOOOL.
I know it sounds lame, but I have to think that that movie got me fantasizing about it.
So, later on when I was struggling with Statics and Dynamics my teacher recognized that I was really a hacker and not an engineer. He asked how I did all of that stuff on my calculator, I then showed him my serial cable mod for the TI-82, and the other software i had written to make his class easier, because S&D was so hard. He suggested I change majors.
I AM SO HAPPY I DID, and today I have a job where I get paid to design the OpenWeb, and work on side projects. Maybe one will break out.
I still think I owe the campy fantasy of hacking to the movie 'Hackers,' for letting me think i had a better chance of getting a girl via hacking. I guess today i am still hopeful.
In Hackers, I never understood how the bad-guy hacker arranges a drop-off (he comes in on a skateboard no less!) of a floppy disk from Zero Cool that had the "garbage file".
As if Zero Cool didn't have the technical expertise to
make his own copy of the disk's contents first. A drop-off
wouldn't protect the bad guy in any way!
Actually The Plague (the bad guy) was just trying to determine how much of the "garbage file" they had - how much they knew... I have to admit that the movie sort of is a guilty pleasure...
artlogic, I must have missed that detail. Now at least the plot won't be bother me so much then. I'll have to see it again sometime ;) It was overall fun to watch.
