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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
(Score: 2, Interesting) by pjbgravely on Friday December 09 2016, @03:21AM
People still think that fire sprinklers go off when the fire alarm sounds, when it is in fact very high heat that sets them off. Again Hollywood is to blame.
(Score: 2) by dyingtolive on Friday December 09 2016, @03:53AM
I thought hackers were to blame for the sprinklers going off.
Don't blame me, I voted for moose wang!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 09 2016, @08:38PM
Oh God, not the hacker/cracker pedantic crap from 15 years ago!
Here, let me make it simple. This is where things have settled:
Hackers: People who break into computers to do unsavory things.
Crackers: People who are the main base for Donald Trump's successful candidacy.
(Score: 3, Touché) by el_oscuro on Saturday December 10 2016, @12:44AM
It would be a pretty good way to DOS a datacenter.
SoylentNews is Bacon! [nueskes.com]
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 09 2016, @10:48AM
it's also about the medium.
I watched "chappie" a couple of nights ago.
Extremely naive, but for some reason I liked it.
Anyway. They have a bit of computer stuff in there, and I think it's actually reasonable.
Fundamentally unlike reality, but close enough to make some sense, and it doesn't kill the movie.
I don't think anyone can do better than that.
You can't represent computer hacking accurately in a movie.
You are right that the equating of "hacker" to criminal is wrong and that is something that movies can affect, but there are things that it's unreasonable to blame them for.