According to experts at the World Economic Forum, the threat of cyber crime is increasing every day.
Which is a shock to us movie geeks. After all, going by the flicks we’ve seen, computer hacking is about as realistic as Harry Potter.
Don’t believe us? Scroll down to see what happens when you apply actual logic to the sort of computer wiz-kids that inhabit the minds of movie-makers.
Kevin Flynn - Tron
What he can do: Flynn (Jeff Bridges) is a computer expert who hacks his way into a computer, physically. That’s right, he manages to put his body inside a computer. Which is a trick we wish was possible, especially when we’re looking at pictures of Megan Fox on our Mac.
Why he’d find real computers confusing: Sadly, it’s not possible to get your real-life body into a computer. The closest you can get is designing a fake body in World Of Warcraft and spending your whole life playing it.
Unfortunately, this can have negative effects on your real-world body, including BO, chubbiness and finger-cramp. Which is a lot less cool than riding a light-bike.
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Comments
randomnoise
Feb 4th 2009, 20:41
"Well, for one thing, the ministry of defence makes it pretty hard to hack into its systems" Does it really? Then why are the US so keen to have Gary McKinnon extradited? He 'hacked' into US military systems by scanning for blank passwords It might seem like the implausible plot of a film, but in fact some US military systems really actually are that easy to hack into. in Wargames David has to do some research into thr programmer before he managed to get the password.
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Grasshopper
Feb 5th 2009, 11:49
Ah, but in Independence Day he can use USB to connect to the aliens - Universal serial bus - key's in the name, see? It's supected that the "Virus" he planted on their computers was actually Windows ME...
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Mart15
Feb 14th 2009, 18:55
What about Kevin Smith in Die Hard 4? Come to think about it, everyone except Bruce Willis in Die Hard 4? They do some crazy stuff by just tapping a few buttons. Regarding Independence Day - there's a deleted scene included in the extended edition where Jeff Golblum is left alone in the alien spaceship with his laptop. He was told not to touch anything and we never saw him do anything on-screen but there was the opportunity there to interface with the alien technology. In the theatrical version it did smack of deus ex machina, but if they'd given it time rather than jumping to the next part where stuff blows up, it could've been a bit more believable.
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somewhatfrail
Feb 16th 2009, 21:02
In Independence Day don't they say that all of today's technology was reverse engineered from the alien tech on the ship? Human computers, therefore, are descendants of what was once alien. (Wow, did I just actually excuse Roland Emmerich?)
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Wrighty1985V
Apr 1st 2009, 6:17
I would like to correct you totalfilm!!! 'Despite the fact he’s able to get Witwicky’s address – and a picture of his face - from the auction site, Prime stills thinks his target’s name is Ladiesman217. ' It is Baricade refers to Sam as Ladiesman...''Are you username Ladiesman217??'' Prime..if you watch the film again you'll realise..asks him ''are you Sam Whitwicky?'' It is Prime that EXPLAINS to Sam that they got his details from Ebay.He does NOT think his name is ladiesman...how could you possibly get that wrong?
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pahakeisari
Apr 9th 2009, 14:04
This is a topic I've long been interested in, of course movies make reality blunders often out of ignorance, they don't see it'd matter to artistic vision or box office profits. It's to be expected, movies have never had anything close to believable fiction compared to books. (Case in point: sci-fi, star trek tng was the only one that made an effort.) Sometimes technical audience also raise useless points, like "this is unix" line in jurassic park, I had that very similar 3rd filemanager on irix at the time and didn't see any problem with the plot. Of course it's not what unix-systems generally "look like" but if she was familiar with the application she could very well say it was a unix system. And it was much more believable than "Hollywood OS"s usually are. Best movie rendition of a hacker I've seen so far is probably in movie Takedown (aka Hackers 2). While not the greatest movie in traditional measures I'd still recommend anyone to see it. I just hope in future we'd see more movies written for the technical audience, with realistic depiction of gradual progress over time, instead of childish action sequences and "hack the pentagon while receiving a b*****b" like in Swordfish.
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Ladiesman217
Apr 18th 2011, 4:41
huh.... about Transformer... did you watch the movie ?? it was not Prime nor an Autobot who asked him, it was one the Decepticon... it's was even more funny to read that one a "film website" hmm...
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