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posted by Fnord666 on Friday December 09 2016, @03:02AM   Printer-friendly
from the but-can-he-trace-a-connection-with-a-VB-GUI? dept.

Cory Doctorow has written an article on how the USA Network's show "Mr. Robot" breaks typical Hollywood stereotypes on hackers and their culture.

For decades Hollywood has treated computers as magic boxes from which endless plot points could be conjured, in denial of all common sense. TV and movies depicted data centers accessible only through undersea intake valves, cryptography that can be cracked through a universal key, and e-mails whose text arrives one letter at a time, all in caps. "Hollywood hacker bullshit," as a character named Romero says in an early episode of Mr. Robot, now in its second season on the USA Network. "I've been in this game 27 years. Not once have I come across an animated singing virus."

[...] Following a time line of events from about a year before the air date of each episode, Mr. Robot references real-world hacks, leaks, and information security disasters of recent history. When hackers hack in Mr. Robot, they talk about it in ways that actual hackers talk about hacking. This kind of dialogue should never have been hard to produce: hacker presentations from Black Hat and Def Con are a click away on YouTube. But Mr. Robot marks the first time a major media company has bothered to make verisimilitude in hacker-speak a priority.

Related Articles:
Exploring the Hacker Tools of Mr. Robot
6 Ways Mr. Robot Is Putting Linux in the Public Eye


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  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 09 2016, @03:12AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 09 2016, @03:12AM (#438989)

    In the first few episodes Elliot is in the data center trying to clear the virus before the servers reboot. Look at the diagram of the network, as the servers slowly connect to each other giving just enough time for our hero to peck away at the keyboard and save the day!

    (Yeah, as if.)

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  • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Friday December 09 2016, @06:04AM

    by maxwell demon (1608) on Friday December 09 2016, @06:04AM (#439032) Journal

    But that's just the equivalent other movies where the bad guys always are sufficiently bad at shooting that the hero always survives even when essentially unprotected under heavy fire.

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  • (Score: 2) by tibman on Friday December 09 2016, @07:13PM

    by tibman (134) Subscriber Badge on Friday December 09 2016, @07:13PM (#439333)

    I've tried to get the CD out of the drive before bios boots it. Does that count?

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