I saw "The Net" yesterday and was moderately entertained. Lots of leaps of logic, especially the notion that one can be "vanished" by having computer records changed--I can believe that such changes would screw things up, but surely even the character played by Sandra Bullock (nicely) would have human friends and associates to vouch for her. The portrayal of her job as a "beta tester," with a couple of Mac screens running and lots of MacTCP connections, was well done. In fact, maybe the most interesting look at computer screens I've seen. (But maybe I'm biased...) The cheesy climax, involving a computer virus, was especially egregious. But tension has to be gotten somehow, I suppose, and most moviegoers will not be terribly excited by the "real stuff." All in all, some good tension. If this was the film I advised a woman screenwriter/researcher about (the "vanishing" part she was asking me for tips on, 18 months ago), I sure couldn't seen any influence of my ideas, or those of Cypherpunks. (I have her name written down somewhere, but the two official screenwriters were both male...still, I have a hunch she was doing background research for them.) Ironically, I saw a second movie the same day..."Under Siege II." It had a lot of crypto, as well. Things like "Going secure" on cellphone conversations with the Arabs purchasing the terrorist actions. --The Praetorian ---- | PI | ---- .......................................................................... Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay@sensemedia.net | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero 408-728-0152 | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Corralitos, CA | black markets, collapse of governments. Higher Power: 2^756839 | Public Key: PGP and MailSafe available. "National borders are just speed bumps on the information superhighway."
tcmay@sensemedia.net (Timothy C. May) writes:
I saw "The Net" yesterday and was moderately entertained. Lots of leaps of
I saw it about 1/2 hour ago. I make a point of seeing every computer-related movie. I don't think real movie-goers would enjoy it much. It's cheap and unprofessional. Lots of running around, but no real car crashes. The acting is terrible. The star should NOT have appeared in a bikini. Yech.
logic, especially the notion that one can be "vanished" by having computer records changed--I can believe that such changes would screw things up, but surely even the character played by Sandra Bullock (nicely) would have human friends and associates to vouch for her.
They try to "explain this away" by saying that 1) she lived in the neighborhood for 4 years and never got to know any neighbors (as one of the neighbors tells the police), 2) her mother's got Alzheimers and doesn't recognize her anymore, 3) she telecommutes for a company in another city and only knows 2 people there in real life. One gets killed at the beginning; the other gets fired and she makes no attempt to find him (one of the many loose ends). The computer-related plot is just slightly more plausible. (Movies about financial services, like _Wall St_ usually distort reality much worse than movies about computers. Can you say "creative licence"?)
The portrayal of her job as a "beta tester," with a couple of Mac screens running and lots of MacTCP connections, was well done. In fact, maybe the most interesting look at computer screens I've seen.
Yes, everything is done on various PowerMacs, including playing Wolfenstein. Could be X terminals. Except for a little Duo she gave her shrink/boyfriend, and a powerbook she used at the beach. IMO, it's better than most such scenes... It's way better than the scene in Wargames where the computer tries to pick 10 digits of a password one by one... Not as good as Sneakers... In a typical suspenseful scene (not a spoiler), the heroine sneaks into an office and sets off a fire alarm. Everyone leaves, including a villaine, who doesn't log off. The heroine receives a new e-mail addressed to the villaine, with the orders to kill the heroine (clearext), signed 'pretorian'. The heroine types 'whois pretorian' and gets an IP address, but no name. The heroine goes through what looks like traceroute and obtains the pretorian's name and picture (but the viewers know his identity from the start, of course). She finishes saving it to a floppy disk moments before the villaine returns to the cubicle. (One of the IP bytes was 344, by the way.) Another time she types "telnet someone@somewhere.mil". Another time she "hot chats" on an her Mac, and hooks up the text to a voice synthesizer. (If they all exchange so much e-mail, why do they bother FedExing diskettes?)
If this was the film I advised a woman screenwriter/researcher about (the "vanishing" part she was asking me for tips on, 18 months ago), I sure
They may have been reading the Risks digest too much. :) One guy is apparently flying his Cessna "by wire", thinks he's approaching the airport, actually hits a smokestack. Another guy gets wrong medications, twice, and dies. All as the result of the vilaines changing computer records, of course. Interestingly, there's NO mention of crypto. Once you know someone's password, or have physical access to the media, you can read and write everything. Once you change some data, it's changed. No digital signatures. However, once the virus melts the villaines' mainframe, their data is gone. No backups. And all the changes they made in other systems are reversed. Reminded me of _The Wizard of Oz_ a bit. In fact, the bad guys were selling everyone a computer security system called "the Gatekeeper" (a Trojan horse, really), but it's not identified as crypto. It sounded like access rights are checked by their server. It involves a Web page with a 'pi' symbol (pi stands for pretorian, of course). Clicking on the pi while pressing control-shift will display much hexadecimal stuff and then let the user in through a backdoor. Hmm. Gatekeeper = Bill Gates = Windows 95? Is that why Apple lent those Macs? :) There's a character named "CyberBob" who's never seen. He only hot-chats and eventually gets killed. His icon looks like MS Bob. I heard only one mention the "the Internet". At the end of the movie, a TV announcer says that the case was cracked because the "programmer analyst Angela Bennett e-mailed the evidence to the FBI from the Internet". (E-mailed from an open-access computer at a computer show, I might add) We were treated to 5 or 6 previews. One was for another movie called "The Hackers", on the same topic, coming this summer. Some kids like to break into systems. The bad guy blackmails someone, frames the kids. --- Dr. Dimitri Vulis Brighton Beach Boardwalk BBS, Forest Hills, N.Y.: +1-718-261-2013, 14.4Kbps
On Wed, 2 Aug 1995, Dr. Dimitri Vulis wrote:
I saw it about 1/2 hour ago. I make a point of seeing every computer-related movie. I don't think real movie-goers would enjoy it much. It's cheap and unprofessional. Lots of running around, but no real car crashes. The acting is terrible. The star should NOT have appeared in a bikini. Yech.
Why not, she had the right 'assets' for that scene, no? 8-D
They try to "explain this away" by saying that 1) she lived in the neighborhood for 4 years and never got to know any neighbors (as one of the neighbors tells the police), 2) her mother's got Alzheimers and doesn't recognize her anymore, 3) she telecommutes for a company in another city and only knows 2 people there in real life. One gets killed at the beginning; the other gets fired and she makes no attempt to find him (one of the many loose ends). The computer-related plot is just slightly more plausible.
Makes sense, too many geeks without a real-world-life out there.
In a typical suspenseful scene (not a spoiler), the heroine sneaks into an office and sets off a fire alarm. Everyone leaves, including a villaine, who doesn't log off. The heroine receives a new e-mail addressed to the villaine, with the orders to kill the heroine (clearext), signed 'pretorian'. The heroine types 'whois pretorian' and gets an IP address, but no name. The heroine goes through what looks like traceroute and obtains the pretorian's name and picture (but the viewers know his identity from the start, of course). She finishes saving it to a floppy disk moments before the villaine returns to the cubicle.
(One of the IP bytes was 344, by the way.)
The security was laughable. But consider that most of corporate Amerika is this way. Very few care about security. Here at work I have to fight extra hard with idiots who log in and leave their machines -- users with Supervisory access! All sorts of shit like that... Re: ip #'s: Yeah, it's like all the phone numbers in every movie are 555-xxxx. Probably they didn't want to get sued by posting a real net address and get sued.
Another time she types "telnet someone@somewhere.mil". Another time she "hot chats" on an her Mac, and hooks up the text to a voice synthesizer.
That was after she got the milnet address though nice email address that can be telnetted into. But the voice synths are possible. Apple does provide that capability. You'd have to get the irc client to use it. Don't know of any that do off the top of my head but I haven't looked for it either. It wasn't much of a "hot" chat. It could have been much steamier. The sex content of this movie was pretty lame though...
(If they all exchange so much e-mail, why do they bother FedExing diskettes?)
More secure to fedex a disk. Nobody on the net can read what's not on the net. ;-) Now if the author of this movie knew about pgp... totally different story.
Interestingly, there's NO mention of crypto. Once you know someone's password, or have physical access to the media, you can read and write everything. Once you change some data, it's changed. No digital signatures.
Yeah, that was quite bad.
In fact, the bad guys were selling everyone a computer security system called "the Gatekeeper" (a Trojan horse, really), but it's not identified as crypto. It sounded like access rights are checked by their server. It involves a Web page with a 'pi' symbol (pi stands for pretorian, of course). Clicking on the pi while pressing control-shift will display much hexadecimal stuff and then let the user in through a backdoor. Hmm. Gatekeeper = Bill Gates = Windows 95? Is that why Apple lent those Macs? :)
That was my impression too.
There's a character named "CyberBob" who's never seen. He only hot-chats and eventually gets killed. His icon looks like MS Bob.
Yeah, death to MS-Bob... >:-)
I heard only one mention the "the Internet". At the end of the movie, a TV announcer says that the case was cracked because the "programmer analyst Angela Bennett e-mailed the evidence to the FBI from the Internet". (E-mailed from an open-access computer at a computer show, I might add)
Not unlikely. A lot of trade shows do provide machines with net access as demos of the internet. Though it's usually manned by the ISP and not out in the open. =================================================================93======= + ^ + | Ray Arachelian | Amerika: The land of the Freeh. | \-_ _-/ | \|/ |sunder@escape.com| Where day by day, yet another | \ -- / | <--+-->| | Constitutional right vanishes. |6 _\- -/_ 6| /|\ | Just Say | |----\ /---- | + v + | "No" to the NSA!| Jail the censor, not the author!| \/ | =======/---------------------------------------------------------VI------/ / I watched and weeped as the Exon bill passed, knowing that yet / / another freedom vanished before my eyes. How soon before we see/ /a full scale dictatorship in the name of decency? While the rest / /of_the_world_fights_FOR_freedom,_our_gov'ment_fights_our_freedom_/
Ray Arachelian <sunder@escape.com> writes:
On Wed, 2 Aug 1995, Dr. Dimitri Vulis wrote:
terrible. The star should NOT have appeared in a bikini. Yech.
Why not, she had the right 'assets' for that scene, no? 8-D
Tastes vary. If she were my friend, I'd recommend stuffing that bra. :) :) :) (With something steganographic, of course. :)
In a typical suspenseful scene (not a spoiler), the heroine sneaks into an office and sets off a fire alarm. Everyone leaves, including a villaine, wh doesn't log off.
is this way. Very few care about security. Here at work I have to fight extra hard with idiots who log in and leave their machines -- users with Supervisory access!
I once was a consultant at a small financial services firm, and a (young, disturbed) user was going around playing stupid pranks on unattended PCs. I mandated the use of screenblankers that kicked in after 3 minutes of inactivity and required a password to get back. The user would then reboot the PCs; some password was needed to get onto the LAN, but he'd mess with the local config.sys's. He eventually got fired and I do something else.
(One of the IP bytes was 344, by the way.)
Re: ip #'s: Yeah, it's like all the phone numbers in every movie are 555-xxxx. Probably they didn't want to get sued by posting a real net address and get sued.
I see! I remember reading that they discovered in the 30's that if they used a real phone number in a movie, some people would actually dial it to see what it is in real life, so all the phone numbers are in the nonexistent 555 exchange. I guess if a valid IP number were used, some folks would ping it or something. I guess byte values>255 are the IP equivalent of 555. Better than 127.0.0.1 - someone might telnet to 127.0.0.1, then ask mgm/ua whose address this is. :)
"hot chats" on an her Mac, and hooks up the text to a voice synthesizer.
can be telnetted into. But the voice synths are possible. Apple does provide that capability. You'd have to get the irc client to use it.
My 6yr-old's IBM Aptiva comes with a sound board and the software that reads English text and pronounces it in much more lifelike manner than the gizmo in the movie. That gizmo sounded annoyingly computer-like, but had intonations obviously coming from a human actor.
it either. It wasn't much of a "hot" chat. It could have been much steamier. The sex content of this movie was pretty lame though...
Hotter than any I've had in many, many years... So, will they ever show some real X-rated hot chat in a real R-rated movie? :)
(If they all exchange so much e-mail, why do they bother FedExing diskettes
More secure to fedex a disk. Nobody on the net can read what's not on the net. ;-) Now if the author of this movie knew about pgp... totally different story.
Better yet, if they were shown sending each other PGP-encrypted e-mail over the Cypherpunks Anonymous Remailer Network... :) :) Maybe in the next movie.
(E-mailed from an open-access computer at a computer show, I might add)
Not unlikely. A lot of trade shows do provide machines with net access as demos of the internet. Though it's usually manned by the ISP and not out in the open.
The notion is very realistic (but the flashy displays in the movie were not). At the recent PC Expo at the Javitz Center in NYC, there were tens of PCs running various Web browsers to try out. No one was watching over most of them. I entered the URL telnet://uunet.uu.net:119, and sure enough, got connected. It accepted 'IHAVE', but I was too lazy to type in an entire Usenet article. I (and the heroine) could have telnetted to someone's port 25 just as easily. --- Dr. Dimitri Vulis Brighton Beach Boardwalk BBS, Forest Hills, N.Y.: +1-718-261-2013, 14.4Kbps
In message <9o809c19w165w@bwalk.dm.com>, Dr. Dimitri Vulis writes: [...]
The notion is very realistic (but the flashy displays in the movie were not). At the recent PC Expo at the Javitz Center in NYC, there were tens of PCs running various Web browsers to try out. No one was watching over most of them I entered the URL telnet://uunet.uu.net:119, and sure enough, got connected. It accepted 'IHAVE', but I was too lazy to type in an entire Usenet article. I (and the heroine) could have telnetted to someone's port 25 just as easily.
That's odd. "uunet.uu.net" has had no A records for over a year. Perhapse you mean "news.uu.net"? At a recent the-net-is-hot-and-we-want-in show I appear to have torqued off some sales drones 'cause I managed to get their Kosak-mode web browser to give me a telnet. They had left a "search the net" link on their pages (pointing to Lycos or Info Seek - I don't remember which), and I used it to locate one of my pages which has a "type the URL" field (it issues a redirrect). I guess they didn't realise that if they give you a "global" search box you can get anywhere as long as you remember enough of the text on the page...
On Thu, 3 Aug 1995, Dr. Dimitri Vulis wrote:
I once was a consultant at a small financial services firm, and a (young, disturbed) user was going around playing stupid pranks on unattended PCs. I mandated the use of screenblankers that kicked in after 3 minutes of inactivity and required a password to get back. The user would then reboot the PCs; some password was needed to get onto the LAN, but he'd mess with the local config.sys's. He eventually got fired and I do something else.
Unfortunatly, the lusers here are brain-dead and don't care about anything. They don't even know the first things about DOS. We do have a couple of geniuses who think they know Windoze (or want to learn it) who occasionally play with the icons and groups: one such genious once closed a group window, then claimed someone "erased it." What a dork! The worse is that I have to clean up after them no matter how stupid they are.
I guess byte values>255 are the IP equivalent of 555. Better than 127.0.0.1 - someone might telnet to 127.0.0.1, then ask mgm/ua whose address this is. :)
Well, the loopback is only a single IP address. If they used that, every net.entity would have the same IP. Not too good. :-)
My 6yr-old's IBM Aptiva comes with a sound board and the software that reads English text and pronounces it in much more lifelike manner than the gizmo in the movie. That gizmo sounded annoyingly computer-like, but had intonations obviously coming from a human actor.
Nope, sounded right the like the Apple MacinTalk II Pro voices. They've got some really cool voices, some even human sounding. Check it out if you get a chance. Real intonations: you can hear the voice flex, etc. There are some voices that follow songs or other tones. (i.e. Big Ben, Bells, etc.) They sound like they're singing.
The notion is very realistic (but the flashy displays in the movie were not). At the recent PC Expo at the Javitz Center in NYC, there were tens of PCs running various Web browsers to try out. No one was watching over most of them. I entered the URL telnet://uunet.uu.net:119, and sure enough, got connected. It accepted 'IHAVE', but I was too lazy to type in an entire Usenet article. I (and the heroine) could have telnetted to someone's port 25 just as easily.
Yep. Those be the same machines where I dropped my Cypherpunx PC EXPO V2.0 disks. Just left a few dozen infront of each machine as I used them. Sort of the sleight of hand that theives use to lift stuff; only I didn't take, I put. >;-)
Brighton Beach Boardwalk BBS, Forest Hills, N.Y.: +1-718-261-2013, 14.4Kbps
Say, what's on this BBS anyway... (send me email, enough noise on this list.) =================================================================93======= + ^ + | Ray Arachelian | Amerika: The land of the Freeh. | \-_ _-/ | \|/ |sunder@escape.com| Where day by day, yet another | \ -- / | <--+-->| | Constitutional right vanishes. |6 _\- -/_ 6| /|\ | Just Say | |----\ /---- | + v + | "No" to the NSA!| Jail the censor, not the author!| \/ | =======/---------------------------------------------------------VI------/ / I watched and weeped as the Exon bill passed, knowing that yet / / another freedom vanished before my eyes. How soon before we see/ /a full scale dictatorship in the name of decency? While the rest / /of_the_world_fights_FOR_freedom,_our_gov'ment_fights_our_freedom_/
Ray Arachelian writes
Well, the loopback is only a single IP address. If they used that, every net.entity would have the same IP. Not too good. :-)
Nope. *Any* IP address starting with 127 is a host loopback address and shouldn't appear outside the host. This from the "Assigned Numbers" RFC (STD 2). 127.0.0.1 is only convention. It's the "first" loopback address.
Tim wrote :
I saw "The Net" yesterday and was moderately entertained. Lots of leaps of ...
The portrayal of her job as a "beta tester," with a couple of Mac screens running and lots of MacTCP connections, was well done. In fact, maybe the most interesting look at computer screens I've seen. (But maybe I'm biased...) As long as you realize it. :)
[after all, what could beat the scene in Jurassic Park : "This is Unix. I know this..." followed by what looks like a 3-d landing into zany-land. In slow motion. ] -- Serue the SUNite (hmm. so it's entertaining, mindless and devoid of reality? I'm there!)
hallyn@cs.hope.edu (Kenshiro) writes: [after all, what could beat the scene in Jurassic Park : "This is Unix. I know this..." followed by what looks like a 3-d landing into zany-land. In slow motion. ]
Bad example -- it's a real interface to Unix for SGI machines, and you can pick it up from their ftp site. It made perfect sense for the girl (Lex?) to be familiar with it... I'm sure her doting grandfather (or whatever he was) wouldn't have bought her a measly Sparcstation for her home computer. Jim Gillogly Highday, 11 Wedmath S.R. 1995, 05:53
On Wed, 2 Aug 1995, Timothy C. May wrote:
The portrayal of her job as a "beta tester," with a couple of Mac screens running and lots of MacTCP connections, was well done. In fact, maybe the most interesting look at computer screens I've seen. (But maybe I'm biased...)
Don't forget the Wolf 3D "beta" she removed the virus out of. :-) She was actually using ResEdit in one of the scenezez, but don't know why they kept on flashing all those hex dump black screenz. After all, all they had to do was install MacsBug on the machine and hit the programmer's switch... instant way to show code, and would have been even more realistic... (though some would use McNosey or The Debugger instead.)
The cheesy climax, involving a computer virus, was especially egregious. But tension has to be gotten somehow, I suppose, and most moviegoers will not be terribly excited by the "real stuff." All in all, some good tension.
Except for having the "ESC key" virus travel to the Dept. Of Justice mainframe from a Mac (I'd like to see a virus do pull that one off!) The rest was fairly believable to some extent. The moral of 'The Net' was of course that you shouldn't trust your machine's security to some off the shelf package 'Gatekeeper.' Trust only 'Cypherpunk' Brand Software ;-) She made some very big mistakes in her actions. First, there are such things as backups, she could have convinced her lawyer to go to the DMV and force them to restore her records from tape. Her fingerprints and photograph would appear... or more than likely look her up in the paper files. I'm sure she got her first license waay back before they stored graphics on machines from the timeframe of the movie, her age, etc. Shouldn't have been too hard to pull that off. It may be easy to modify a series of computers and alter all records with a full set of back doors, but you can't change backups that are in the vaults of a government agency that easily. :-)
Ironically, I saw a second movie the same day..."Under Siege II." It had a lot of crypto, as well. Things like "Going secure" on cellphone conversations with the Arabs purchasing the terrorist actions.
Things are starting to look up for us if Joe Bloe sees these movies and learns about security and crypto -- even if it's by watching movies. don't forget in the Net, Angela used several cell phones which led straight to her even though they were stolen... and of course the bad guy was listening in on all her conversations. :-) Also how did she get into the Moscone Convention Center without a badge; I didn't see her swipe one from someone... just snuck right in.. The thing that I liked most about this is the parralel between James Gregg and Bill Gates. :-) Not quite as obvious and forward as it should have been. All Mac's and no Windoze 95 screens anywhere!!!! I think Bill is well pissed about that. ===== ! ! ! ! =================================================================93======= + ^ + | Gate Keeper | Amerika: The land of the Freeh. | \-_ _-/ | \|/ |mozzart@ghost.com| Where day by day, yet another | \ -- / | <--+-->| | Constitutional right vanishes. |6 _\- -/_ 6| /|\ | Just Say | |----\ /---- | + v + | "No" to the NSA!| Jail the censor, not the author!| \/ | =======/---------------------------------------------------------VI------/ / I watched and weeped as the Exon bill passed, knowing that yet / / another freedom vanished before my eyes. How soon before we see/ /a full scale dictatorship in the name of decency? While the rest / /of_the_world_fights_FOR_freedom,_our_gov'ment_fights_our_freedom_/
participants (7)
-
dlv＠bwalk.dm.com -
hallyn＠cs.hope.edu -
Jim Gillogly -
Josh M. Osborne -
Ray Arachelian -
Scott Brickner -
tcmay＠sensemedia.net