@ Rob:

Good point. I didn’t think about that. Still, why can’t they do that for everything? Why can’t they just have someone knowledgeable write them a decent monologue and shoot it like this?

@ road:

I can’t think of one. Also, they get bonus points for not using macbooks in place of all laptops. That’s sort of notorious. Everyone in every movie ever seems to have a macbook which is coincidentally not running OSX but some made up 3D OS you can hack by rapidly pressing keyboard keys and never using the space bar.

@ Simon:

I actually show the screenshot from Matrix in my class to show students what real hacking looks like, and explain port scanning to them.

@ Adrian:

Yep. Most people will watch this and go “oooh, this guy must be a real smart computer guy”. We watch it and go “LOL, he is just scraping these servers for pix. Good job Hardward IT!”

:)

I loved the hacking scene. After it passed, I watched it again and checked whether I could make any sense of it. And I did, I understood what programs he used and what he did with them, in the way that I could use them.

That’s all a technical hacking scene needs. Some real life known programs interspersed with their inherent uses. For any non-technical viewer, he’ll still see it as computer mumbo jumbo.

Double post! Sorry. Can you remove this one? @ Simon:

@Road: There’s the one scene in the matrix that uses a real hack: “Tritnity uses Nmap to find a vulnerable SSH server, and then exploits it using the SSH1 CRC32 exploit from 2001.”

@Luke: Stop doing that! It’s the second time that you posted about a movie at the same time I was watching it.

@Road: There’s the one seen in the matrix that uses a real hack: “Tritnity uses Nmap to find a vulnerable SSH server, and then exploits it using the SSH1 CRC32 exploit from 2001.”

@Luke: Stop doing that! It’s the second time that you posted about a movie at the same time I was watching it.

Probably the first Hollywood movie to ever mention Perl or Emacs. Can anyone think of any others? I’ve simply never seen real computer tools portrayed in a movie, ever.

I think what really helped with the realism of that opening sequence is they lifted a lot directly from Zuckerberg’s LiveJournal. I agree though, I like that they didn’t turn the movie into a modern day Hackers.