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:
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6 Ways Mr. Robot Is Putting Linux in the Public Eye
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 09 2016, @03:12AM
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.)
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Friday December 09 2016, @06:04AM
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.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by tibman on Friday December 09 2016, @07:13PM
I've tried to get the CD out of the drive before bios boots it. Does that count?
SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Friday December 09 2016, @03:13AM
and they use linux!
Something like:
"Hey, you use linux! Gnome desktop! I use KDE.... hold over from old times"
But then, it seems to have gone into "The hacker is just plain nuts" now (or last i saw).
They need to hold the line against the man and keep kicking him!
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. I have always been here. ---Gaaark 2.0 --
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 09 2016, @07:20AM
Elliot's tenuous grasp on reality makes it slightly difficult to believe that he could remain lucid enough to do the research to accomplish his hacking feats, cover his tracks after the fact, or ever succeed at social engineering. I suppose it's possible that he crammed the necessary knowledge before he went completely off the rails, and he would also have been drawing from his netsec experience at Allsafe. We've actually seen from an objective perspective how horribly bad his social engineering skills really are, when he bumbled his way into Steel Mountain. As for covering his tracks, Agent DiPierro has pretty much unraveled his entire operation already.
Oh. Yeah. He uses Linux! He codes malware in Python! WOW!
(Score: 2) by Webweasel on Friday December 09 2016, @08:58AM
I think you missed the point that sometimes he's Elliot and sometimes he is Mr Robot.
If you watch back both series (Especially the first) Look for the scenes where Mr Robot is with Elliot and the crew. Notice who people are looking at when Mr Robot is talking: Elliot.
Its like fight club. Brad Pitt's character is not real, its always Edward Norton. Same here, when Mr Robot is speaking (Eloquently compared to Elliot), its actually Elliot speaking. This leads to some interesting scenes to rewatch. There's one where the dark army have let them down and Darlene wants to go ahead with the hack. Mr Robot talks her down... only he doesn't, it is of course Elliot speaking as Mr Robot does not exist.
Though referencing the scene you mentioned... Mr Robot is in the car, shouting at Elliot over the radio. Notice the other two hackers don't react to Mr Robot? He's not there.... Again they show the scene in season 2 with Elliot and Tyrell in the car.
Mr Robot is the main character, Elliot is just along for the ride.
Priyom.org Number stations, Russian Military radio. "You are a bad, bad man. Do you have any other virtues?"-Runaway1956
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 09 2016, @10:57AM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schizophrenia [wikipedia.org] and acute psychosis are actually depicted fairly realistically in the show. At least as close as you can get with a dramatic representation. Males typically have their first episode sometime along the way into young adulthood. It's entirely likely Elliot was just "weird" during his junior years without flying totally off the handle. Also, an acute episode works as per the name: it's not like he is always completely out of touch. The times he is are depicted with lots of strobe cuts and accompanying audio.
(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.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 09 2016, @04:32AM
Max Headroom. Still waiting for someone to create a Max computer virus.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 09 2016, @08:09AM
Max Headroom was brain uploading. Not a virus. Max was a full-brain clone of Edison Carter. It was mentioned often enough, Network 23 owned one of the few computers with enough processing power to run an entire brain upload.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 09 2016, @04:48AM
In the first scene of the first episode he's apparently hacking an implied TOR setup by sniffing a local network.
Yeah... why didn't anybody think of that...
For those not in the know all he would see in that case would be an encrypted connection between a computer on that network and a TOR entry node, which reveals absolutely nothing and also has no value.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 09 2016, @06:56AM
Why don't you watch that scene again, because you obviously didn't understand it.
I know you run a website called Plato's Boys.
You're using Tor networking to keep the servers anonymous.
You made it really hard for anyone to see it.
But I saw it.
The onion routing protocol, it's not as anonymous as you think it is.
Whoever's in control of the exit nodes is also in control of the traffic, which makes me the one in control.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 09 2016, @06:17PM
Again, that is completely nonsensical.
The exit node in Tor is nothing unique. It can observe traffic and manipulate it, but it has no idea where it's coming from. In Tor each node, whether a regular relay node or the exit node knows only the previous node and the next node. Again, all you would see sniffing the traffic is an encrypted connection to an entry node. Even controlling that entry node would not provide much since it doesn't have access to the payload - it simply slices a layer off the 'onion' and passes it along.
Fundamentally, closer to the original user = far from information about payload.
Close to payload = far from information about user.
And all these nodes are randomly chosen by the user. The way the FBI 'hacked' TOR was almost certainly simply hosting illicit sites and then hosting malware on the sites that, through browser exploits, sent identifiying information in the payload. They're not actually hacking TOR but hosting malware that could just as well run exploit users on the regular internet.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 10 2016, @03:39AM
No, you're still not getting it. Elliot compromised the local network at Ron's Coffee, then set up his own honeypot exit node, then waited for Ron's Coffee to use Elliot's exit node. Since he was watching both ends, Elliot could correlate traffic between the two nodes, then he could determine Ron was running the Plato's Boys site. Onion routing in the middle doesn't hide anything from someone who can control both entry node and exit node. Google tor correlation attack.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 10 2016, @01:59PM
Compromising a local network has nothing to do with taking over an entry node. The encryption between the entry node and the client is handled not by the network, but by the client. You'd see nothing but an encrypted packet whose size would not even cleanly correlate against the packet size from the exit node! And exit nodes are not chosen based on geographic locationing or anything of the like (and even if they were it would be relative to the final relay, not the original sender!). There are also some safe guards to ensure against dubious exit nodes since they can do things like send back fake traffic or manipulate what's being sent. So magically setting up a exit node that he somehow chooses is just ridiculously unlikely. And correlation attacks are subject to false positives. Also the final connection to the site would also likely be encrypted meaning even if you have control of the exit node you're unaware of what's being sent and so identifying him as anything so specific as the owner, even if we ignore all the other absurdities, ain't happening.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 11 2016, @02:52AM
Don't think you understand how correlation works. It's mostly time correlation. And it is *extremely* reliable if you can *control* the network; statistical proof only requires more data, if that's not the case.
> magically setting up a exit node that he somehow chooses is just ridiculously unlikel
If you control the network, you can kill tor-net links that don't go to your evil exit nodes, until one does.
This shit isn't complex.
You're a TLA troll trying to spread misinformation? Or a mansplainer?
(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.
(Score: 2) by Geezer on Friday December 09 2016, @11:00AM
Remember, the same entertainment machine brings us Doctor Who and MST3K.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 09 2016, @10:29PM
Next time it would have been a lot faster than writing all that in the article, you could have just called up the other six people who watch the show and just tell it to them.