Ripe fromage. If I were writing the sequel, it would be a series, and it would be about how they grew up and now they all work leading security at platform companies and government agencies. While reversing a worm that was unleashed by trolls to sabotage a social-credit/Nosedive-like app, Kate/acidburn finds the encoded string "that place where I put that thing that time," which has to be a reference to their old crew, but she can't let anyone know because the scandal against the social platform company would swing an election. Story unfolds as a mix of tracking down Dade/zerocool, who apparently made money in crypto and disappeared to live on boats and vanlife away from technology, and who may be the one behind the worm. Busting him busts her, so she has to find her old ex and talk him down somehow. He may also be the father of her first kid and she still has unreconciled feelings, and he doesn't know. Homages to the Before Midnight sequels about finding each other again, and the Thurman/Carradine Kill Bill finale.
Working title is, "Defcon 30" Who wants to fund it?
The most realistic character would be the one that is bitter having watched all his hacker friends make boat loads of money, but works some random software engineering job for an unimpressive salary while slowly drinking/eating themselves to death. Maybe it's Joey?
> Ripe fromage. If I were writing the sequel, it would be a series, and it would be about how they grew up and now they all work leading security at platform companies and government agencies.
I used to hang out with a guy who did security freelance work and had a passing resemblance to Matthew Lillard. He like, never slept. He just like, biked around town all night, occasionally pausing at the local co-working space to do some work or play chess with this old Russian dude. There was some shit in his past, I don't know what he did or what was done to him because he never said and I never asked, he only hinted at it. But I kept thinking, man, this guy could totally be a cleaned-up Cereal Killer.
It would be interesting if a social media post/idea led to a movie.
I know social media led to the phrase "Get these MFing snakes of my MFing plane!" getting included in the Snakes on a Plane movie.
I think there was a reddit post turned into a movie deal about what if modern U.S. Marines were transported back in time to the Roman era, but I don't think anything has come from it.
Does anyone know of any other social media posts affecting or turning into movies?
> grew up and now they all work leading security at platform companies and government agencies
The exact opposite of a hacker. If they instead run their own company, built their own products, or open sourced an amazing tool the yeah. Otherwise do we really want a series or movie about their daily stand-ups?
Between Hackers, Masters of Doom, and other rad 90s hacker-coder media, software development really seemed like a much more awesome career than it turned out to be. If I had a time machine I would warn young me that it's really more like a combination of Office Space and Wolf of Wall Street.
It would be awesome to listen to Prodigy or Megadeth while hackin' with the gang though. I'm still down for that if it exists somewhere in the now-corporatized tech industry.
Hackers shows the career guys as lame and high strung, but the hobbyists (or as Razor and Blade put it, those hacking as a survival trait) as cool and having fun. It's easy for something fun to have the fun sucked out of it when it becomes a career.
I think a part of the hacker sub-culture that Hackers touches on lightly is that you have to make your own space. It's not going to exist for you in some prepackaged easy to consume way and certainly not in a corporation. Cyberdelia was for & by hackers, not a club run by some guy who has a bunch of cookie cutter clubs all over downtown. I don't think this is unique to the hacker sub culture, either.
> I think that if I had written the book in the past decade, perhaps Bateman would have been working in Silicon Valley, living in Cupertino with excursions into San Francisco or down to Big Sur to the Post Ranch Inn and palling around with Zuckerberg and dining at the French Laundry, or lunching with Reed Hastings at Manresa in Los Gatos, wearing a Yeezy hoodie and teasing girls on Tinder.
>Between Hackers, Masters of Doom, and other rad 90s hacker-coder media, software development really seemed like a much more awesome career than it turned out to be.
I think it comes down to the fact that our industry has become rigid and beholden to the university education system. John Carmack and John Romero were both college dropouts. Their stories would probably be impossible today. What we have now is a world of people coloring between the lines and going straight from one set of rules to another. There truly is no more punk rock left in tech.
It very much does exist. Just look for places trying to change the very basics of how the world works by hacking on new technology. You know, the places that naturally attract cypherpunks, people distrustful of 'the system' and the like.
You can also find people with that ethos in corporate places, but they get swarmed out by suits and people who went to coding school because it pays well.
I've always felt that an industry or research field goes through multiple stages:
Discovery that it exists -> Fumbling -> Golden Age -> Mechanization
Mechanization is where the bean counters and optimizers get into it and make it into something boring. I'm not a software engineer but I feel like my own field is in the "Mechanization" stage. My solution is I'm just about to leave and never look back because I stopped caring. I still like the original stuff I learned but I don't care about what's become of it.
Honestly, I think who you are as a person is often going to be misaligned with what capitalism and industry does with what looks like your passions, and it's healthy to recognize that and leave while you can. You may be doing software engineering but you're not a software engineer; you're a person and you can reinvent yourself any time you want.
I think many of us believed that for sure we are going to be the cool ones but we actually turned out more like Office Space people. Not everyone is Crash Override.
I wish I could code in the time when there were no deadlines and you could gradually plod away at incredibly complex assembly code while hanging out with some like minded folk. That probably stopped being a thing in the 70s though.
Part of what made this movie so startling when it came out is it was the first (and really only) film that was plainly aware of hacker subculture at the time and is loaded with easter eggs demonstrating that. It was at once a ridiculous parody of it and an homage to it. It’s like a love letter to small-h hackers.
During Chaos Communication Camp in 2019 we held a veryvery improvised screening of Hackers. The people at the Norwegian hackerspace I was with had never seen the movie, clearly this was a mistake we needed to fix!
We managed to steal^Wborrow the projector screen from an empty workshop tent. Hauled it across a veryvery busy whiskytasting event (called Whiskeyleaks). Got a small projector and then we rigged the sound.
A single concert speaker was our sound source, but we had no AUX cable long enough. So we found a headset with an AUX output on it and chained it together with the AUX cable :)
Also had a screening at May Contain Hackers this year, and it was great having 30 people scream "Hack the Planet" during the movie and loudely complain when the RISC line came :)
Hackers was released September 15, 1995. The newest version of Netscape you could have been using the day it came out was 1.22.
Netscape 2.0 came out three days later (September 18, 1995) and included first support for javascript, java, and plugins.
The Dot-Com craze was just getting started but nobody knew how big it would become. Few worked for Internet startups and nobody had been to a launch party yet. I had registered my first domain name just two months earlier.
What an amazing time (1994-2000) to be alive and just out of school. It was our "Roaring 20's"
Iirc, the movie's official website got hacked, saying it was a terrible movie and to go see "The Net" instead. Also, the movie's website got in to some hot water for hosting some kind of hacking information on it.
They set it up to look like Cyberdelia. After the movie they ran a costume contest. The showing was just weeks before the pandemic truly hit America, and we felt pretty lucky that we made it home with out anything.
Hah. Just yesterday I was contemplating how awful Angelina Jolie's character's handle "Acid Burn" was. Like - who the fuck would choose such nickname for themselves?
Other than that - cult movie. Love it. Awesome soundtrack, not that bad acting and not that bad script for back when computers and internet were hip, not just the usual thing.
"Hackers" caricaturally but still somewhat properly presents the phreaking culture which was and is rather uncommon for non-niche movies, especially from that era.
Both Acid Burn and Zero Cool had handles that came off as self-deprecating. I kind of liked that, as counterpoint to the competitive ego dynamic between them.
He's also the owner of the all-time worst American accent, in the not very good movie Mindhunters. Here's a clip from the middle of the movie showing it. There are spoilers for the movie in the clip, but you should probably never see it, so spoiling things isn't such a terrible thing.
That's awesome! I've used "the pool on the roof must have a leak" a few times as well. That movies has so many one-liner quotes that still live on to this day.
I hated it when it came out for its inaccuracy, but man it's just so much fun I'm developing a video game inspired by it!
Actually, I take that back. In terms of culture it was not that far off the mark. I went to college near New York City, and it turned out to be a local hotbed for activity in the MOD/tracker scene. I used to pal around with one guy who was a big deal in the KFMF, and he looked like he could have come right off the set of Hackers. Even used the handle "Phreak" for a bit and had Hackers soundtrack posters on the wall. Because you know, awesomest soundtrack(s) of all time and that.
Hackers is a fun movie. It has a fantastic time capsule soundtrack, fun sets (the arcade, the computer room) and some fun little performances (Matthew Lillard! Fisher Stevens!) It's interesting what the show gets right (little bits of phreaker culture, social engineering) and what it gets wrong (almost everything about how computers actually work). From a realism perspective, Mr. Robot blows this out of the water, but it's still fun.
I'd recommend The Internet's Own Boy, Buckaroo Banzai, Real Genius, Office Space, or Bret Victor's Inventing on Principle ahead of Hackers and Sneakers.
Startup.com is pretty good as a movie about startups (I lived just about every minute of that movie, just at a different company) but it doesn't have any actual hackers in it.
I hear Risk and Citizenfour, both about Wikileaks, and Revolution OS, about Linux and the GNU and open-source movements, are pretty good, but I haven't seen them.
I found it very hard to watch because Aaron was a friend of mine.
The Matrix is nominally about hackers (and even, like Hackers, computer security) but, as with Startup.com, hacking doesn't really enter into the movie much; instead it's all running firefights and magic disguised as computers. Like Hackers and Sneakers, it bears the same relationship to hacking as https://axecop.com/ (a comic scripted by a five-year-old) bears to law enforcement. However, it's enormously more popular than all the movies above, even if its Rotten Tomatoes ranking is lower than The Internet's Own Boy.
I hear Masters of Doom is pretty good but I haven't watched it.
"Sneakers" and "War Games" were my favorites, because they were so realistic and thought-provoking. "Tron" was my favorite from the "magic disguised as computers" category.
Sneakers really doesn't get enough love, probably because I'm not sure people knew what to make of it. Names so big the billboards couldn't hold them all, but doing things with computers that didn't make sense to your average viewer. So punk, even if half of them are in suits. I love Hackers, but it's like a generational sequel to Sneakers.
I still remember watching it as a kid when it came out, it’s one of the reasons I got into programming in the first place. The alure of being a ninja hacker to a 8 year old was hard to escape. Funny enough, it took another 6 years until I got my first computer, and another 2 after that when I got access to the internet.
the hackers soundtrack is fantastic and includes some of the best electronic music from the era. the version of halcyon and on is in my opinion almost as good as the original 11 minute 12" uk promo edit [0], which may not have fit on this soundtrack.
in 2020 varese sarabande released an expanded 2xCD of the hackers soundtrack [1]. the second disk includes full length versions of the instrumental electronic music composed for the film by simon boswell [2] but not included on the 1 disk soundtrack and is absolutley essential listening while rollerblading to the payphones at penn station.
My local cinema recently showed this and it was great to see it on a big screen, I think the older you are the funnier and more ridiculous it gets. When I was a kid and saw it I was totally inspired seeing them hacking from a payphone outside on the street, I thought it was so cool!
I always wanted the epic boot up sequences like they had in that movie... in Windows for a bit you could change your boot image, but I could never get it to be an animation.....
I've got a dorky 'matrixish' oembootlogo on my desktop cause the bios tool asks for an image. Doesn't animate or anything though. It would be difficult to use the windows 95 pallete animation to do a rotation effect, I think.
I am really curious: what do you find interesting about this movie in comparison with Sneakers (advised by Leonard Alemán [1]) and War Games? I don't remember any takeaway from Hackers.
Hackers is still one of those films that are influential and still resonates to this day. If you haven't seen it yet, I would advise to get the Region B (UK) Blu-ray release from 88 Films since not only it has the better surround mix (5.1 compared to 2.0 on the Shout Factory US release) it also has a director commentary track only seen in the UK release.
It's pretty easy to get a region free Blu-ray player these days.
My wife who is a doctor rented this for us to watch when it first came out on video since I am a programmer. She couldn't understand why I kept rolling my eyes at many scenes. I think she understood when I got her back by renting some hospital drama movie and watched her roll her eyes at all the improbable medical situations it presented.
motohagiography|3 years ago
Working title is, "Defcon 30" Who wants to fund it?
j0hnyl|3 years ago
theprincess|3 years ago
derwiki|3 years ago
bitwize|3 years ago
I used to hang out with a guy who did security freelance work and had a passing resemblance to Matthew Lillard. He like, never slept. He just like, biked around town all night, occasionally pausing at the local co-working space to do some work or play chess with this old Russian dude. There was some shit in his past, I don't know what he did or what was done to him because he never said and I never asked, he only hinted at it. But I kept thinking, man, this guy could totally be a cleaned-up Cereal Killer.
MerelyMortal|3 years ago
I know social media led to the phrase "Get these MFing snakes of my MFing plane!" getting included in the Snakes on a Plane movie.
I think there was a reddit post turned into a movie deal about what if modern U.S. Marines were transported back in time to the Roman era, but I don't think anything has come from it.
Does anyone know of any other social media posts affecting or turning into movies?
sleepybrett|3 years ago
yrgulation|3 years ago
The exact opposite of a hacker. If they instead run their own company, built their own products, or open sourced an amazing tool the yeah. Otherwise do we really want a series or movie about their daily stand-ups?
metabagel|3 years ago
0x445442|3 years ago
hk1337|3 years ago
So, it's not an emergency at all. Just for funzies.
sleepybrett|3 years ago
slim|3 years ago
bityard|3 years ago
jprd|3 years ago
claudiulodro|3 years ago
It would be awesome to listen to Prodigy or Megadeth while hackin' with the gang though. I'm still down for that if it exists somewhere in the now-corporatized tech industry.
dfxm12|3 years ago
I think a part of the hacker sub-culture that Hackers touches on lightly is that you have to make your own space. It's not going to exist for you in some prepackaged easy to consume way and certainly not in a corporation. Cyberdelia was for & by hackers, not a club run by some guy who has a bunch of cookie cutter clubs all over downtown. I don't think this is unique to the hacker sub culture, either.
dehrmann|3 years ago
> I think that if I had written the book in the past decade, perhaps Bateman would have been working in Silicon Valley, living in Cupertino with excursions into San Francisco or down to Big Sur to the Post Ranch Inn and palling around with Zuckerberg and dining at the French Laundry, or lunching with Reed Hastings at Manresa in Los Gatos, wearing a Yeezy hoodie and teasing girls on Tinder.
ramesh31|3 years ago
I think it comes down to the fact that our industry has become rigid and beholden to the university education system. John Carmack and John Romero were both college dropouts. Their stories would probably be impossible today. What we have now is a world of people coloring between the lines and going straight from one set of rules to another. There truly is no more punk rock left in tech.
jgilias|3 years ago
You can also find people with that ethos in corporate places, but they get swarmed out by suits and people who went to coding school because it pays well.
vouaobrasil|3 years ago
Discovery that it exists -> Fumbling -> Golden Age -> Mechanization
Mechanization is where the bean counters and optimizers get into it and make it into something boring. I'm not a software engineer but I feel like my own field is in the "Mechanization" stage. My solution is I'm just about to leave and never look back because I stopped caring. I still like the original stuff I learned but I don't care about what's become of it.
Honestly, I think who you are as a person is often going to be misaligned with what capitalism and industry does with what looks like your passions, and it's healthy to recognize that and leave while you can. You may be doing software engineering but you're not a software engineer; you're a person and you can reinvent yourself any time you want.
actionfromafar|3 years ago
TheMaskedCoder|3 years ago
bergenty|3 years ago
unknown|3 years ago
[deleted]
0x445442|3 years ago
orblivion|3 years ago
DoneWithAllThat|3 years ago
ulkesh|3 years ago
Like a 28.8 Bps modem.
Bps. Not kBps. Just Bps. Perhaps the actor just misread the line and the editors kept it. Still makes me itch to this day.
Foxboron|3 years ago
For those unaware of CCCamp here are some pictures; http://smtw.de/cccamp19/
We managed to steal^Wborrow the projector screen from an empty workshop tent. Hauled it across a veryvery busy whiskytasting event (called Whiskeyleaks). Got a small projector and then we rigged the sound.
A single concert speaker was our sound source, but we had no AUX cable long enough. So we found a headset with an AUX output on it and chained it together with the AUX cable :)
The end result https://twitter.com/MortenLinderud/status/116502963964076032...
Also had a screening at May Contain Hackers this year, and it was great having 30 people scream "Hack the Planet" during the movie and loudely complain when the RISC line came :)
fudgy|3 years ago
It all started with Orbital, Underworld, Kruder & Dorfmeister, Leftfield…
pixelpoet|3 years ago
Justin_K|3 years ago
gw99|3 years ago
Shame about the film!
kloch|3 years ago
Netscape 2.0 came out three days later (September 18, 1995) and included first support for javascript, java, and plugins.
The Dot-Com craze was just getting started but nobody knew how big it would become. Few worked for Internet startups and nobody had been to a launch party yet. I had registered my first domain name just two months earlier.
What an amazing time (1994-2000) to be alive and just out of school. It was our "Roaring 20's"
racl101|3 years ago
- Hackers (1995)
- Mortal Kombat the Movie (1995) (both of these movies used Orbital's Halcyon +On +On) song and a bunch of other electronic music
- And I remember the Windows 1995 release. That was a HUUUUUGE software release.
bitshiftfaced|3 years ago
E39M5S62|3 years ago
They set it up to look like Cyberdelia. After the movie they ran a costume contest. The showing was just weeks before the pandemic truly hit America, and we felt pretty lucky that we made it home with out anything.
lallysingh|3 years ago
kstrauser|3 years ago
hericium|3 years ago
Other than that - cult movie. Love it. Awesome soundtrack, not that bad acting and not that bad script for back when computers and internet were hip, not just the usual thing.
"Hackers" caricaturally but still somewhat properly presents the phreaking culture which was and is rather uncommon for non-niche movies, especially from that era.
This movie aged well.
pohl|3 years ago
onychomys|3 years ago
geoffbp|3 years ago
marpstar|3 years ago
Hackers is my go-to movie as an initial test for a home theater system.
baldeagle|3 years ago
christianboyle|3 years ago
For anyone saying it wasn't a realistic depiction - that was on purpose. The hacking scenes are visual metaphors, meant to "spice things up."
An analysis of all hacks in the movie: https://medium.com/h0llyw00d-h4x0rs/hackers-b93e78b95485
stevenhubertron|3 years ago
kloch|3 years ago
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001538/
My favorite character of his was Sherlock Holmes in "Elementary"
racl101|3 years ago
onychomys|3 years ago
https://youtu.be/UACodohFhPs
gwbas1c|3 years ago
Great movie, though. It's one of the few DVDs I've hung onto, even though I haven't watched it in years. Makes me want to skateboard in a datacenter.
jgilias|3 years ago
inanutshellus|3 years ago
toast0|3 years ago
robohoe|3 years ago
shawxe|3 years ago
bitwize|3 years ago
Actually, I take that back. In terms of culture it was not that far off the mark. I went to college near New York City, and it turned out to be a local hotbed for activity in the MOD/tracker scene. I used to pal around with one guy who was a big deal in the KFMF, and he looked like he could have come right off the set of Hackers. Even used the handle "Phreak" for a bit and had Hackers soundtrack posters on the wall. Because you know, awesomest soundtrack(s) of all time and that.
unknown|3 years ago
[deleted]
turdnagel|3 years ago
elymar|3 years ago
eimrine|3 years ago
kragen|3 years ago
Startup.com is pretty good as a movie about startups (I lived just about every minute of that movie, just at a different company) but it doesn't have any actual hackers in it.
I hear Risk and Citizenfour, both about Wikileaks, and Revolution OS, about Linux and the GNU and open-source movements, are pretty good, but I haven't seen them.
The Internet's Own Boy in particular has 8/10 on IMDB, 93% "Fresh" on Rotten Tomatoes, handily beating both Hackers and Sneakers, and is under a Creative Commons license: https://archive.org/details/TheInternetsOwnBoyTheStoryOfAaro... which
I found it very hard to watch because Aaron was a friend of mine.
The Matrix is nominally about hackers (and even, like Hackers, computer security) but, as with Startup.com, hacking doesn't really enter into the movie much; instead it's all running firefights and magic disguised as computers. Like Hackers and Sneakers, it bears the same relationship to hacking as https://axecop.com/ (a comic scripted by a five-year-old) bears to law enforcement. However, it's enormously more popular than all the movies above, even if its Rotten Tomatoes ranking is lower than The Internet's Own Boy.
I hear Masters of Doom is pretty good but I haven't watched it.
CodeMage|3 years ago
shadowgovt|3 years ago
... though the all-nighter scene in Hackers where they just "flow" out some code while techno plays over the montage is also pretty accurate.
eddieroger|3 years ago
2000UltraDeluxe|3 years ago
Overtonwindow|3 years ago
colordrops|3 years ago
pfarrell|3 years ago
dehrmann|3 years ago
yamtaddle|3 years ago
mtberatwork|3 years ago
e12e|3 years ago
https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0126765/
nh23423fefe|3 years ago
fodmap|3 years ago
Apocryphon|3 years ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32858840
xenospn|3 years ago
ralusek|3 years ago
jrnichols|3 years ago
bnt|3 years ago
meatsock|3 years ago
in 2020 varese sarabande released an expanded 2xCD of the hackers soundtrack [1]. the second disk includes full length versions of the instrumental electronic music composed for the film by simon boswell [2] but not included on the 1 disk soundtrack and is absolutley essential listening while rollerblading to the payphones at penn station.
[0] https://www.discogs.com/release/42711-Orbital-Halcyon
[1] https://www.discogs.com/release/15991139-Various-Hackers-Ori...
[2] https://www.discogs.com/artist/68855-Simon-Boswell
benj111|3 years ago
MDGeist|3 years ago
baldeagle|3 years ago
toast0|3 years ago
DSingularity|3 years ago
basicallybones|3 years ago
dillutedfixer|3 years ago
I used it on a much younger co-worker of mine when he was having an issue with a website and it turned out to be a problem with cookies.
It was clear to me from his facial response that he had never seen the movie. It didn't go over well.
kiernanmcgowan|3 years ago
archermarks|3 years ago
NGRhodes|3 years ago
All so bad, its agelessly bad, like only a true cult film can be.
But there is one huge redeeming thing for me, and that is I find it a really fun caper.
Findecanor|3 years ago
doublerabbit|3 years ago
One of my favs:
The Plague: We are samurai. The keyboard cowboys. And all those other people who have no idea what's going on are the cattle. Moo.
wernsey|3 years ago
Lord Nikon's Laptop [1] is really what I consider a true _Cyberdeck_.
P.S. Hackaday is running a Cyberdeck competition [2] if you're into that kind of thing.
[1] https://youtu.be/uxY6CUimZ9M
[2] https://hackaday.io/contest/186672-2022-cyberdeck-contest
acidburnNSA|3 years ago
pjmlp|3 years ago
We took it from the local movie rental shop, remember those?
derwiki|3 years ago
ok123456|3 years ago
wslh|3 years ago
[1] https://molecularscience.usc.edu/sneakers/
smmnyc|3 years ago
ch_sm|3 years ago
zamadatix|3 years ago
leotravis10|3 years ago
It's pretty easy to get a region free Blu-ray player these days.
optimalsolver|3 years ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k07cflKCl-Y
imwillofficial|3 years ago
SergeAx|3 years ago
ajaimk|3 years ago
didgetmaster|3 years ago
gw99|3 years ago
beebeepka|3 years ago
Somehow hacking computer things wasn't as appealing as shooting intelligent bugs. Would you like to know more?
badrabbit|3 years ago
par|3 years ago
Asmod4n|3 years ago
_chu1|3 years ago
ridgered4|3 years ago
kgwxd|3 years ago
savrajsingh|3 years ago
ZeroCool2u|3 years ago