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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 09 2016, @07:54AM
Not once have I come across an animated singing virus
You need to get out more!
(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 09 2016, @09:14AM
Those moving and singing things you see there are not viruses, they are called birds. And beware, if you continue to call them viruses, they might very soon be angry birds!
(Score: 2) by TheB on Friday December 09 2016, @08:15PM
Back in the Netware days someone did make the Rabbit virus from Hackers.
It spread from computer to computer using msg to synchronize the animation.
The rabbit may have been displayed on only one comp at a time, however without knowing the physical location of each PC it rarely move from screen to screen like in the movie.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 19 2016, @08:52PM
Strip out the animations etc and all the viruses presented had a basis in reality.
Cookie monster existed. It filled your terminal screen much like it did in the movie until you did just as is stated.
The rabbit is another term for a fork bomb.
The SV SWJs simply use the movie as some kind of virtue signal.
Damn it, how they praise a tv series that ham handily shows the protagonist blackmail a guy over a supposed back room pedo site? Its up there with cheerleading witch hunts at this point. Declare someone pedo and you can skip right to burning him (always a man no less) on the stake.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 09 2016, @09:17PM
i have seen a virus that played music in 1994! This company my mom worked at, was infected with http://virus.wikia.com/wiki/Yankeedoodle [wikia.com]
Virus made the currently edited document look like a pile of letters on the bottom of the screen. And then it played that awesome melody on PC speaker...
All the secretariat was in panic, for some important contract document was edited on the infected machine when it happened. A box of floppies in a safe was their backup solution. No there weren't other copies.
Spent the day playing games and observing this leet dude, their "programmist", struggle with removing it. He had a laptop with, get it, COLOR non-crt screen. He was like a God amongst peasants. And, he won. The document was saved, ehehe.
And he let me play pacman on the laptop afterwards, and gave me a copy on a 1.44 disk. I was like 9. Good times.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 19 2016, @08:54PM
While not viruses (i hope), game cracking groups routinely added intro sequences of their own to games they uploaded.
Intro sequences that could involve fairly elaborate animations and music.
Often said groups overlapped with the demo scene that still exist to this day.
That a person like Doctorow fails to acknowledge this is worrying.