Why can't films and TV accurately portray hackers?

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20170802-why-cant-films-and-tv-accurately-portray-hackers

by ohjeez • 9 years ago

21 44 9 years ago

tmzt• 9 years ago

Shouldn't the illustrious Beeb be asking themselves why the news media is incapable of the same thing? Maybe the reason is the same as why they and practically every other news organization fail to accurately portray technology in general, including encryption. These inaccuracies tend to bubble up to policy discussions where the media’s misrepresentations are turned into (bad) policy.

fenwick67• 9 years ago

Cue the "man in balaclava using a macbook to edit HTML" stock photo

EDIT: wow they even use "man in black hoodie with hood concealing face with green characters flying around like The Matrix" as the story hero image

gozur88• 9 years ago

Sounds like an upgrade to the balaclava.

LordKano• 9 years ago

Because they're in the business of providing entertainment and most of "hacking" is mindnumbingly boring.

neaden• 9 years ago

I'm not even sure if films/tv portray hacking more innacurately than they do the average job they portray such as police, lawyers, doctors, etc.

vanderZwan2• 9 years ago

At least programming doesn't try to copy the practices from the movie. If you're in IxD there's always a few idiots who think movie interfaces are a good example of usability. No, they're a good example of what looks sleek and amazing on screen, and what is compatible with the narrative need for exposure. That rarely works out well for usability .

lostmsu• 9 years ago

For the same reason they can't accurately portray anyone else - most of the time activity in nearly any profession is boring.

krapp2• 9 years ago

I can't even imagine the rage that lab technicians and forensic pathologists must have felt when shows like CSI, NCIS and Bones were popular, and their job was portrayed as all sexy quirky people using lasers and holograms.

And lawyers - the "CSI Effect[0]" has apparently made proving cases with real science more difficult.

[0]https://www.thebalance.com/csi-effect-1669447

occultist_throw2• 9 years ago

From the article you linked...

"Professionals worry that jurors may acquit guilty defendants because forensic evidence is not presented by the prosecution at trial."

How is that bad?

eriksssss• 9 years ago

"Enhance!"

bonzini2• 9 years ago

There was a famous clip of a Bollywood movie where the hacking scene includes the Windows Media Player user interface: https://youtube.com/watch?v=HyDXEik3mH8

gr3yh47• 9 years ago

do you know the name of the movie?

bonzini2• 9 years ago

No, but it was on Reddit a few years ago so it should be possible to Google it.

mercer2• 9 years ago

It's nice to see that Indian Ron Swanson doesn't hate computers as much as his US counterpart.

vanderZwan2• 9 years ago

Jurassic Park – In the midst of a velociraptor attack, Ariana Richards sits down at a computer and says, “It’s a Unix system. I know this.” Then she somehow hacks the entire Jurassic Park security system in a matter of seconds and takes control of the automatic doors. This scene is filled with tension, but what she does is analogous to someone loading a browser on a Macbook and then saying, “It’s Safari. I know this,” and then going on to compromise someone’s Gmail account in a couple seconds.

Well if you put it like that it actually sounds somewhat plausible, since she was on that someone's computer. Most people I know leave their Gmail logged in.

bitwize• 9 years ago

I interpreted it as, she could probably recognize the directory structure in the visual tool as belonging to a Unix system, and from there guess that it responds to standard Unix commands. It would take a bit longer than is depicted, but she could probably cd into some interesting-looking directories from there and find the programs used to control the park's facilities.

mcguire• 9 years ago

"... While most people troll this scene for its usage of 3D graphics on screen, she’s actually using a real 3D filesystem called FSN."

That's not a filesystem.

TrevorJ• 9 years ago

It is a file manager though.

unsignedint• 9 years ago

I don't think that scene was about hacking. They have already rebooted the system to wipe what Nedry has done (which, on its own, is a notion that is unrealistic) then it was just waiting to be reactivated by navigating to the right subsystems.

sircastor• 9 years ago

While most of these examples are spot on, I will argue the point of the Jurassic Park Hacking scene:

The 1992 world of computers and networks was much different than our world today. The author uses the analogy of familiarity with a browser and gaining access to a gmail account. I remember 1992. I remember the systems that didn't have lock screens, and didn't have log in passwords. Couple that with a theme park's computer system that's still being built and debugged.

I think it's totally rational that a kid who's familiar with a unix filesystem and a navigator could poke around a system until she found some security scripts.

I take much more issue with the "video feed" of the Dock with the worker Nedry was talking to - and the video playback bar on the bottom of the window.

JdeBP• 9 years ago

But "It's a Unix system" ... and Unix did have log-on passwords. That said, what's on screen in that movie actually was a Unix system.

* https://movies.stackexchange.com/questions/9745/

smitherfield• 9 years ago

* Because almost all “hacking” is boring, and/or conceptually dense and/or non-cinematic.

* Rule of Cool.

* Because screenwriters typically have little knowledge of the subject.

* For the same reasons (the ones above) films and TV can’t portray lawyers or doctors or teenagers or police officers or drug dealers or scientists or bartenders or art thieves or Wall Street or soldiers or college students or anything else accurately.

msla• 9 years ago

Because almost all “hacking” is boring, and/or conceptually dense and/or non-cinematic.

Similarly, has any show ever portrayed writing accurately?

Any kind of writing. Screenwriting. Doesn't matter. It's the same problems as you list there: The actual act of putting words in order is determinedly, obstinately non-cinematic.

It can't be unfamiliarity, given that writers are writing those scenes, so it has to be the simple fact training a camera at someone staring into space and/or working quietly is a dumb idea in a visual medium.

The activities surrounding writing can be portrayed, the brainstorming and planning sessions and maybe even some of the research, but the act itself is way too internal.

jorvi• 9 years ago

Counterpoint: the movie 'Locke' literally consists of Tom Hardy sitting in a car doing phone calls, and... it works. Beautifully so.

wepple• 9 years ago

The plane hacking on Scorpian still wins for absolute worst scene: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=buHaKYL9Jhg

bronzeage• 9 years ago

Because we're here in hacker news, we're biased to think that's the only thing screenwriters get wrong. The truth is, nearly every single profession is misrepresented by Hollywood. From doctors, to chemists, biologists, physicists, mathematicitians, psychologists, policemen, detectives, nearly every single profession looks absurd from the perspective of people who actually understand it when it's staged in a movie.

There's a reason why films about directors and movie making seem more realistic than the rest - they are the only movies designed by people who actually understand the subject.

adbge• 9 years ago

Indeed, this is the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect:

"Media carries with it a credibility that is totally undeserved. You have all experienced this, in what I call the Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. (I call it by this name because I once discussed it with Murray Gell-Mann, and by dropping a famous name I imply greater importance to myself, and to the effect, than it would otherwise have.)

Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect works as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward-reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.

In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story-and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read with renewed interest as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about far-off Palestine than it was about the story you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

That is the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. I’d point out it does not operate in other arenas of life. In ordinary life, if somebody consistently exaggerates or lies to you, you soon discount everything they say. In court, there is the legal doctrine of falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus, which means untruthful in one part, untruthful in all.

But when it comes to the media, we believe against evidence that it is probably worth our time to read other parts of the paper. When, in fact, it almost certainly isn’t. The only possible explanation for our behavior is amnesia."

adrianmonk• 9 years ago

I actually don't know if it's amnesia. It might be something more like denial. The idea that we are surrounded by unreliable, incomplete, and misleading information is too unpleasant to contemplate, so we just push that thought out of our minds if there isn't anything concrete to suggest it is happening in the specific case we're looking at.

This sort of thing seems to happen a lot when there aren't any obvious better alternatives. Which newspaper can I subscribe to instead that actually is consistently accurate? Not knowing of one, and not wanting to stop reading the news entirely, I stay with the newspaper I already have and make the best of the experience. And part of that is letting myself assume it's accurate whenever I don't have a reason to say otherwise.

cJ0th• 9 years ago

The truth is, nearly every single profession is misrepresented by Hollywood.

True and it doesn't stop there. They don't even get love right.

konceptz• 9 years ago

I'm surprised they didn't have "sneakers" on this list. But then that is a bit of a counter example.

paulcole• 9 years ago

What makes you think TV accurately portrays anyone?

tlogan• 9 years ago

Why can't films and TV accurately portray doctors? Or any other profession ...

d--b• 9 years ago

Let's just put it this way: as far as Hollywood is concerned computer systems are the new quicksand, and hackers are the rope that's needed to get out of it.

pault• 9 years ago

I hate this because it suspends my suspension of disbelief. I can only think of three instances of tv shows and films that get it right: the US version of Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (at least she uses a terminal emulator and ssh); The Social Network; and Mr. Robot. It's so commonly botched that I get really excited when someone gets it right. It doesn't even have to be perfect; just not laughably ridiculous.

occultist_throw2• 9 years ago

The same reason they fail at representing the Occult. 95% of it is not flashy.

I spend a great deal of my time reading, be it new tech documents, papers, or other findings that interest me. Or I read musty old tomes, scans from Oxford library and wherever on mysticism and occultism.

Do you know how exciting it is to show someone reading for hours? Not very. No, people have very low attention spans, and can barely read a facebook post or moderately sized comment. Discussing intricacies of anything on TV is verboten. Small bites are acceptable, and even better if they have flashy and pretty graphics or effects.

So instead, dramatic "interpretations" are used, to ill effect. Insert CSI "zoom - zoom - zoom - caught them", "uber hackers" that can make blenders turn on remotely, to "evil warlocks" that kill at a glance. It's all theater, and badly done at that.

rkuykendall-com• 9 years ago

Unbeatable Squirrel Girl by Ryan North (Dinosaur Comics) has a few panels about this recently:

https://twitter.com/thesizeoffun/status/893479366235230208

Isamu• 9 years ago

When I first saw the "This is Unix ... I know this" scene in Jurassic Park, I had to restrain myself from leaping up in the theater shouting "YES!!"

All those lost hours typing at a green-screen terminal qualify me to be the hero in a Hollywood movie too!

jshaqaw• 9 years ago

Because watching someone mess around with VIM for 17 hours of realtime while eating junk food only to scream "aha the semicolon is four spaces off" is not must see TV

shabble• 9 years ago

Nmap even has a page dedicated to movies showing it's use: https://nmap.org/movies/

Many of them still aren't exactly what you'd call realistic though.

poke111• 9 years ago

I found Black Hat to be unusually realistic https://www.wired.com/2015/01/blackhat-the-best-cyber-movie/

msl• 9 years ago

I feel the article is not quite fair in its coverage of Hackers. Sure, the movie gets many things absurdly wrong, but it also depicts social engineering (calling a security guard and tricking him into telling the hacker a modem's phone number), dumpster diving in hopes of finding interesting documents and guessing passwords. These could be straight from Kevin Mitnick's memoirs, Ghost in the Wires (which came out years later). I think the movie might actually get more things right than it gets wrong.

Why can't films and TV accurately portray hackers?

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