-
Notifications
You must be signed in to change notification settings - Fork 8
/
Copy pathdear-hollywood.html
173 lines (161 loc) · 9.26 KB
/
dear-hollywood.html
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
122
123
124
125
126
127
128
129
130
131
132
133
134
135
136
137
138
139
140
141
142
143
144
145
146
147
148
149
150
151
152
153
154
155
156
157
158
159
160
161
162
163
164
165
166
167
168
169
170
171
172
173
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<link rel="canonical" href="https://hardmath123.github.io/dear-hollywood.html"/>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/static/base.css"/>
<title>Dear Hollywood - Comfortably Numbered</title>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8"/>
<meta charset="utf-8"/>
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0, maximum-scale=1.0, user-scalable=no" />
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Comfortably Numbered" href="/feed.xml" />
<!--
<script src="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/mathjax/2.7.1/MathJax.js?config=TeX-AMS-MML_HTMLorMML"></script>
<script>
MathJax.Hub.Config({
tex2jax: {inlineMath: [['$','$']]}
});
</script>
-->
<link rel="stylesheet" href="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/[email protected]/dist/katex.min.css" integrity="sha384-Um5gpz1odJg5Z4HAmzPtgZKdTBHZdw8S29IecapCSB31ligYPhHQZMIlWLYQGVoc" crossorigin="anonymous">
<script defer src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/[email protected]/dist/katex.min.js" integrity="sha384-YNHdsYkH6gMx9y3mRkmcJ2mFUjTd0qNQQvY9VYZgQd7DcN7env35GzlmFaZ23JGp" crossorigin="anonymous"></script>
<script defer src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/[email protected]/dist/contrib/auto-render.min.js" integrity="sha384-vZTG03m+2yp6N6BNi5iM4rW4oIwk5DfcNdFfxkk9ZWpDriOkXX8voJBFrAO7MpVl" crossorigin="anonymous"></script>
<script>
document.addEventListener("DOMContentLoaded", function() {
renderMathInElement(document.body, {
// customised options
// • auto-render specific keys, e.g.:
delimiters: [
{left: '$$', right: '$$', display: true},
{left: '$', right: '$', display: false},
{left: '\\begin{align}', right: '\\end{align}', display: true},
{left: '\\(', right: '\\)', display: false},
{left: '\\[', right: '\\]', display: true}
],
// • rendering keys, e.g.:
throwOnError : false
});
});
</script>
</head>
<body>
<header id="header">
<script src="static/main.js"></script>
<div>
<a href="/"><span class="left-word">Comfortably</span> <span class="right-word">Numbered</span></a>
</div>
</header>
<article id="postcontent" class="centered">
<section>
<h1>Dear Hollywood</h1>
<center><em><p>A rant about technobabble.</p>
</em></center>
<h4>Friday, December 12, 2014 · 3 min read</h4>
<p>Dear famous producers, scriptwriters, authors, and publishers:</p>
<p>On behalf of the programming community, I would like to bring up a rather sore
point among us. Whenever you have a scene involving “hacking”, you seem to make
it a point to write scripts by mashing complex-sounding buzzwords. We all
cringed when someone <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkDD03yeLnU">declared</a>
“I’ll create a GUI interface using Visual Basic. See if I can track an IP
address” in CSI. We facepalmed when Randy used <code>telnet</code> to make a secure
connection in <em>Cryptonomicon</em>. We spawned a subreddit when Lex <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFUlAQZB9Ng">used a UNIX
system</a>. And some of us broke out
in hives at <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2rGTXHvPCQ">N3mbers’ description of
IRC</a>.</p>
<p>But we cheered when <a href="http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/05/16/matrix_sequel_has_hacker_cred/">Trinity used
<code>nmap</code></a>
in <em>The Matrix Reloaded</em>.</p>
<p>When you depict ‘hacking’ as an esoteric dark art, you tell the public that
‘hackers’ are a breed of sorcerers who know the right incantations to make the
Internet bow to their will.</p>
<p>This is a lot like claiming pharmacists are brilliant potion-makers who pass
down the secrets to make mystic brews that control the human body.</p>
<p>But I don’t see any whizz kids saying “Hang on, I bet I can cook up a quick
truth serum by distilling the monorubidium dibenzene crystal. Could you hand me
the Bunsen burner?” (Followed by one of the most annoying line in all of
cinema: “In <em>English</em>, Doc?”)</p>
<p>This strange caricature that popular culture has drawn is what makes people
regard ‘hackers’ with a blend of suspicion and fear. It leads to a vast
misperception of what ‘hacking’ really is. As a more tangible effect, it also,
indirectly leads to the government not knowing how to handle computer security
cases as well as other cases.</p>
<p>You’re stereotyping an entire community: a community with history and values.</p>
<p>Of course, there are the bad guys who steal bitcoin and leak Sony employee’s
personal emails. The least pop culture could do about them is to stop
glorifying them as tech savants and pointing out that almost all such
‘victories’ are simply cases of a big company not installing the latest updates
to their software (this is not a joke).</p>
<p>On the other hand, there are the heroes of computer security: people who
dedicate their time and resources to finding and fixing critical issues in open
source software to keep us safe. These are the real geniuses; they are
brilliant folks with an immense knowledge of how <em>everything</em> works. It’s
unfair to represent them as the same people as above.</p>
<p>Public opinion is really important in things like this, and movies and books
are huge influences on it.</p>
<p>So here’s a request. Next time you have a scene with hacking, consult with an
expert. Or even a geeky high school student (myself included). Ask them to tell
you about a plausible real-world attack, and take the time to understand it at
a conceptual level.</p>
<p>Learn about its history: when was it discovered? Did anyone get in trouble by
using it? Was it embargoed, allowing big companies to patch their systems
before the general public was told about it? Or was it leaked? What might show
up on a computer screen when you’re carrying out the attack?</p>
<p>I <em>promise</em> it’s going to be much cooler than anything fictional. We regularly
talk about things like the BEAST attack, the Heartbleed exploit and the
Shellshock vulnerability. We have tools called Metasploit. We even use the
phrase ‘poisoned cookies’ in research papers.</p>
<p>In the world of ‘hackers’, truth is way cooler than fiction.</p>
<hr>
<p>P.S. You might have noticed that I put ‘hackers’ and ‘hacking’ under scare
quotes throughout this article. There is a reason for this. In the CS culture,
a ‘hacker’ is not a criminal. A ‘hack’ is simply an <a href="http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/meaning-of-hack.html">appropriate application of
ingenuity</a>. Eric Steven
Raymond explains this perfectly in his excellent document <a href="http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html">how to be a
hacker</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>There is another group of people who loudly call themselves hackers, but
aren’t. These are people (mainly adolescent males) who get a kick out of
breaking into computers and phreaking the phone system. Real hackers call
these people ‘crackers’ and want nothing to do with them. Real hackers mostly
think crackers are lazy, irresponsible, and not very bright, and object that
being able to break security doesn’t make you a hacker any more than being
able to hotwire cars makes you an automotive engineer. Unfortunately, many
journalists and writers have been fooled into using the word ‘hacker’ to
describe crackers; this irritates real hackers no end.</p>
<p>The basic difference is this: hackers build things, crackers break them.</p>
<p>If you want to be a hacker, keep reading. If you want to be a cracker, go
read the alt.2600 newsgroup and get ready to do five to ten in the slammer
after finding out you aren’t as smart as you think you are. And that’s all
I’m going to say about crackers.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Someday, I’d like to watch a movie where the FBI imprisons a cracker, not a
hacker.</p>
<p>Until then,</p>
<p>Yours Truly.</p>
</section>
<div id="comment-breaker">◊ ◊ ◊</div>
</article>
<footer id="footer">
<div>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://github.com/kach">
Github</a></li>
<li><a href="feed.xml">
Subscribe (RSS feed)</a></li>
<li><a href="https://twitter.com/hardmath123">
Twitter</a></li>
<li><a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/deed.en_US">
CC BY-NC 3.0</a></li>
</ul>
</div>
<script>
(function(i,s,o,g,r,a,m){i['GoogleAnalyticsObject']=r;i[r]=i[r]||function(){
(i[r].q=i[r].q||[]).push(arguments)},i[r].l=1*new Date();a=s.createElement(o),
m=s.getElementsByTagName(o)[0];a.async=1;a.src=g;m.parentNode.insertBefore(a,m)
})(window,document,'script','//www.google-analytics.com/analytics.js','ga');
ga('create', 'UA-46120535-1', 'hardmath123.github.io');
ga('require', 'displayfeatures');
ga('send', 'pageview');
</script>
</footer>
</body>
</html>