Sorry to be pedantic about this (actually I'm not) but it wasn't iCloud, it was a sync program called Bride of Frankensync... Every sync program should be called something like this just so non-geeks realise what they're doing when they upload files to the cloud.
Hollywood vs hackers: Vulture cracks Tinseltown keyboard cornballs
A lot of exciting things are happening online right now. Eye-boggling blocks of code are presently being distilled into art, pornography and weapons of war, and making that distillation look exciting on film would be a challenge for film-makers who thoroughly understood the world of IT. And, if we’ve learned anything from the …
COMMENTS
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Thursday 15th January 2015 11:19 GMT Raumkraut
Re: Boris?
I think you'll find that Arnold J Rimmer (technician, second class) got there first; during the test to join the crew of the Enlightenment.
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Thursday 15th January 2015 10:21 GMT Anonymous Coward
Awwww... come on....
Movies about hacking and you completely forgot about this piece of crap :
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Thursday 15th January 2015 11:54 GMT silent_count
Re: Awwww... come on....
Not so much forgotten as supressing the memory to avoid the possibility of further crap movie induced trauma.
Introducing Timothy Olyphant as the evil hacker mastermind you'd kick in the backside, en passant, on the way to the pub. You'd barely even break stride while thwarting his plan to... meh, whatever.
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Thursday 15th January 2015 10:28 GMT Major Ebaneezer Wanktrollop
Magic USB sticks
How about the USB sticks that the good guys insert into any random bad guy machine and without a tap on the keyboard up pops a huge 'Downloading Data' message on the screen. That, instead of triggering the Microsoft Transfer Fibbing Protocol (the everlasting 2 minutes to go until completion) actually fills the building with bad guys who can't reach said machine until the transfer is complete.
Pure movie magic
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Thursday 15th January 2015 15:43 GMT Frumious Bandersnatch
Re: Magic USB sticks
Actually, the "magic USB stick" might be (unintentionally) more plausible than you give it credit for.
ISTR that there was a bug in the PlayStation 3's USB device driver that allowed a "malicious" USB device to overflow a buffer and execute arbitrary code, thus owning the machine. Lately, there's also been a similar hack for OS X, though it requires rebooting the machine with the hacked device plugged in. It's pretty easy these days to find small machines with a USB OTG port that can be programmed to act as any USB device to test for bugs on the target machine's USB device handling and if you find an exploit, you can probably find an even smaller (ie, thumb-drive sized) machine to deploy the hack on.
Of course, I did say that films including this plot device were only "unintentionally" plausible. Then they go and ruin it by "downloading" many terabytes of data onto a device that can't possibly hold that much data. Or any time that a sysadmin plugs an unknown device into their PC/laptop, when really they should know better (didn't the top boffin do that in Skyfall, too? Facepalm!).
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Thursday 15th January 2015 10:43 GMT AndrueC
Ah, Hollywood and IT. So much unintended humour.
Like IPv4 addresses where one or more octects is often greater than 255.
Or locating someone using the IP address of an email.
Or referring to a GPS device as a 'tracker'. In one example they chose a GPS device because the vehicle was going where there would be no cell phone coverage.
To say nothing of the infinitely zoomable digital image.
NCIS had in intriguing one last week. A laptop that they plugged a USB stick into which managed to infect their network through the power cable. My first reaction was to laugh.
Why would the technician allow the USB device to infect the laptop in the first place? But it's possible to imagine that as the only way to see what it did (a VM might be a better idea but it depends how good the sandboxing is). And she did put the laptop into a Farraday cage to prevent the infection spreading over the wifi network (and a clever virus could switch the wifi on so that was sensible). So that just left the question of an infection spreading through a power cable. Stupid? Maybe not. Perhaps all their laptops come with power-line networking support. Not completely impossible for a covert agency. But frankly I just ended up laughing..which annoyed the other person who was avidly watching it.
But for me the big annoyance is the way Hollywood still insists on having people stay on the line for at least half a minute so that the call can be traced. I don't think that's been needed in the Western world since before the turn of the century.
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Thursday 15th January 2015 12:04 GMT Colin Brett
"Like IPv4 addresses where one or more octects is often greater than 255."
I thought this was to prevent suggestible loonies actually trying to connect to that fictional IP address. If it's in a movie it must be real, right? Similar to the non-existent 555 exchange or area code used in telephone numbers.
Colin
Terminator Icon because we know it's IP address is in the 300+ range :-)
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Thursday 15th January 2015 13:16 GMT AndrueC
I thought this was to prevent suggestible loonies actually trying to connect to that fictional IP address. If it's in a movie it must be real, right?
I suppose it could be,actually, although using one of the private ranges would be pretty good.
Similar to the non-existent 555 exchange or area code used in telephone numbers.
Yeah. I think the UK system is better. It makes it harder to spot a fictitious number. Oh and I always rewind to take a quick look at the source code. It seems to nearly always be C.
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Thursday 15th January 2015 14:47 GMT Ralara
"although using one of the private ranges would be pretty good."
Why?
Anyone who knows that above 255 is not possible, knows 10, 172 and 192 (et al) are private. You'd still have the voice in your head pointing out how silly it is. And someone might try to do something stupid on a 10, 172 or 192 range (i.e. at work) and get fired.
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Thursday 15th January 2015 22:56 GMT Tom 13
@AndrueC
Never use anything real for a fictional depiction. I don't know if you recall Tommy Tutone and his hit Jenny. I lived near a town that used the prefix when the song was released. The family with the number was not amused, especially as they had a teenage daughter, even if she wasn't named Jenny.
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Wednesday 11th February 2015 18:02 GMT Michael Hawkes
Re: @AndrueC
That pretty much happened in all area codes - 867-5309/Jenny
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Thursday 22nd January 2015 22:23 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: "Like IPv4 addresses where one or more octects is often greater than 255."
There is no hidden IPv4 net. So do not attempt to route to, via or connect to any device with a negative IP address. The Undernet is better protected than 24's 'Cisco Self Defending Network'.
Admittedly if I see a proper IP address in a movie, I will give it a poke sometimes to see if there's an easter egg on the end. As for hacking movies, my favorite is probably Cypher.
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Friday 16th January 2015 01:18 GMT Sandtitz
"NCIS had in intriguing one last week."
What a terrible show NCIS is - but it's the only show where two people can use the same keyboard simultaneously.
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Monday 19th January 2015 11:16 GMT AndrueC
What a terrible show NCIS is
It was okay for the first couple of seasons when it was just a variant of the old cop show format. I mean it was nothing stellar but it entertained. But then they began to develop weird, long running story arcs where they take on the world's most evil people and save western civilisation as we know it all the while trampling over the rights of the general public.
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Monday 19th January 2015 06:59 GMT Kiwi
@AndrueC
But for me the big annoyance is the way Hollywood still insists on having people stay on the line for at least half a minute so that the call can be traced. I don't think that's been needed in the Western world since before the turn of the century.
It probably goes way back before that. Telco's have been able to bill up-to-the-second for decades (even if the billed in 6-minute blocks!), and you can bet that the moment 2 phones were connected, they knew exactly who and where (unless someone had been watching Hackers (or H2) and connected 2 phones together... :) ), so I've always been pretty sure that they've been able to know pretty much instantly where a connection was. I'm also sure in cases like kidnapping, they'd be quite willing to co-operate with the cops.
I've though for years that probably, it's a ploy to keep the un-enlightened on the phone for a critical 59-seconds in the hopes that they can get a local patrol car to the location. But then I probably watch far to many movies :)
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Monday 19th January 2015 11:20 GMT AndrueC
Re: @AndrueC
it's a ploy to keep the un-enlightened on the phone for a critical 59-seconds in the hopes that they can get a local patrol car to the location
That's a pet hate of mine with a lot of cop shows. In the closing scenes when they've worked out where the bad guys are it's usually the main characters who have to get up from their desks, jump into their cars then drive out and storm the premises to make the arrest. In most cases it's going to be quicker to just alert nearby patrols who are probably far closer.
And even worse (Criminal Minds is a big culprit here, along with later CSI seasons) who the hell decides to send expensively trained and educated investigative officers into a probable firefight? You send in the relatively cheap and expendable grunts first not the poindexters!
Bah. I'm definitely sounding like I watch too much TV now.
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Thursday 15th January 2015 12:21 GMT Paul Naylor
CSI?
My favourite is still the classic CSI (or NCIS, MOT, ROFL, or whatever these shows are called) for the immortal line: "I'll write a GUI in Visual Basic to track his IP!". Erm, okay then, you do that.
Actually, when things go wonky in our IT department, this is usually the line we use. Or something from IT Crowd...
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Thursday 15th January 2015 17:16 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: CSI?
Well, you are correct, but having actually written commercial fingerprint-matching software, the real processing happens in background, and the fingerprint images displayed every so often are on the GUI thread (pick a random 100 or so), and are just there because people expect to see them (like in CSI, for example). An IAFIS match was claimed to take about 27 minutes.
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Saturday 17th January 2015 10:59 GMT Destroy All Monsters
Re: You just wait for the remake.....
DAT DISCUSSION on Stackexchange: "How does David Lightman in WarGames manage to hack a computer by dialing a number?"
"There was an internet, and you connected to it. You didn't have the World Wide Web."
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