TE
TechEcho
Home24h TopNewestBestAskShowJobs
GitHubTwitter
Home

TechEcho

A tech news platform built with Next.js, providing global tech news and discussions.

GitHubTwitter

Home

HomeNewestBestAskShowJobs

Resources

HackerNews APIOriginal HackerNewsNext.js

© 2025 TechEcho. All rights reserved.

The girl with the ANSI tattoo

367 pointsby ocirionabout 13 years ago

27 comments

wpietriabout 13 years ago
Please nobody let Hollywood see this blog.<p>Somebody's going to say, "Man, we went to all that trouble to make it look realistic. But it doesn't work. Fuck it. Bring back the guy who did the interfaces for Jurassic Park. And the guy who writes Wesley Crusher's dialog."<p>---<p>Update: I love that my comment mocking excess nitpicking now has triggered triple-redundant nitpicking.
评论 #4048684 未加载
评论 #4048151 未加载
评论 #4048184 未加载
评论 #4048144 未加载
评论 #4048650 未加载
sophaclesabout 13 years ago
I really don't understand why people need to nitpick stuff like this. I mean, it's a movie -- the point is to tell a story not impart technical knowledge. Yeah, the query someone came up with on the fly isn't perfect, we get it, but in reality, this happens at the sql command line all the freaking time, it's a one-off, who cares? And yeah, the returned results are a bit incorrect for the query, but given that a bunch of freeze frame work had to be done to determine this, it seems like a pointless nitpick. Why not instead applaud the film-makers for actually using shockingly (for hollywood) real stuff.<p>Like I said, the point of movies is to tell a story. Sometimes this means glossing over bits, getting details wrong, or even presenting things out of order, because the important part is he plot. We all do this when we tell stories, it's human nature. We want to convey how awesome/important/sad/happy/whatever a moment was, and to do that we need to properly contextualize the emotion and key bits, not every detail. When the makers of a fictional story try to get largely unimportant details right, they are showing dedication to craft, not asking for technical advice.<p>Maybe it's because I'm ramping my team up for demo season, where I have to remind them and the researchers they work with that the grant reviewers haven't spend the last 6 months thinking real hard about the problem, and aren't as expert in the sub-field/topics as we are (they are pretty smart competent people, but they gave us money to do the work because presumably we know more about it than they do...). To do a demo and to make a movie are very similar. You need to convey the importance of the work, without making bogus claims (in demos about research, in movies its about plot breaking), and convey the context in which it can be understood. Sometimes this means leaving out or glossing over really cool technical stuff, because it doesn't actually matter to the bigger picture. Sometimes it means saying "this part is simulated with these assumptions because we don't know yet, or it still needs more reseach, but if true, it shows our point nicely". Sometimes it means showing things happen at 10x or .1x real time, because that is how you tell the story. It isn't lying or being stupid, it is getting points across.<p>Well anyway, that turned into a rant. TL;DR - Detail are not the point of movies, they are just a vehicle to help the point, we should applaud careful attention to them, not nitpick.
评论 #4048253 未加载
评论 #4048187 未加载
评论 #4048314 未加载
评论 #4048285 未加载
评论 #4048156 未加载
评论 #4048234 未加载
评论 #4048146 未加载
评论 #4048333 未加载
JamisonMabout 13 years ago
&#62; Shocked moviegoers will have been left wondering &#62; why a genius-level hacker would outer-join to the &#62; Victims and Keywords tables only to use literal-text &#62; filter predicates that defeat the outer joins, &#62; whether MySQL has a LIKE operator, and why none &#62; of the victims' initials are 'R L'.<p>For the record since you never see the entire query so it is likely that the SQL is not as wrong as the author suggests. There is an extensive use of ORs in the query so the conditions that are said to defeat the outer joins are not mandatory and the 'R' and 'L' checks are clearly not required to pass. I think it is pretty good representation of how you might build up query from scratch, piling up conditions in OR clauses to finally get what you want. Yes, provided the table that starts with V is aliased as v the v.SEX condition does defeat the outer join, but that might be exactly the sort of thing you would stick in after you had already established a working FROM clause and not bother changing the outer to an inner. Solving the case was after all by definition a one-off.<p>I enjoyed this article because it points out an occasion where a movie really did try to get it right. Someone who knows something about databases had to have made those screens up.
nthitzabout 13 years ago
In the original Swedish version she did it with MongoDB!
评论 #4048401 未加载
评论 #4048164 未加载
评论 #4048235 未加载
klezabout 13 years ago
I'm happy that, finally, people are not shoving 'movie-os' in computer scenes anymore.<p>The first time I saw real stuff in movies was in Antitrust, then in Tron: Legacy and finally here.
评论 #4048081 未加载
评论 #4048027 未加载
评论 #4048070 未加载
评论 #4048395 未加载
评论 #4048029 未加载
评论 #4048196 未加载
评论 #4048408 未加载
评论 #4048124 未加载
g-garronabout 13 years ago
It was totally bad to perform image leeching. The site <a href="http://www.williamrobertson.net/" rel="nofollow">http://www.williamrobertson.net/</a><p>Where the image are hosted, is now off-line, because of this.<p>You can use imgur, minus, or even blogspot itself instead.
评论 #4059711 未加载
klezabout 13 years ago
Maybe I'm missing something, but why should it have been oracle SQL?
评论 #4047991 未加载
wonnageabout 13 years ago
Heh, tried to share this on Facebook and got a "blogspot.co.uk is spam" warning.
shivenabout 13 years ago
Wow! Only on HN could one expect people picking apart SQL from movie screenshots and then discussing the minutiae of that code! Not that I have any problem with it. However, it surprises me no end how inward-looking, tech-navel-gazing, nerd-o-maniac this can appear to an outsider looking this way :-)
评论 #4048342 未加载
dude_abidesabout 13 years ago
I loved how matter-of-factly he says<p><i>Naturally I couldn't help stitching a few screenshots together in Photoshop</i>
waterlesscloudabout 13 years ago
I tried to share this on my Facebook timeline (I have a lot of movie geek friends and computer geek friends), but I was not allowed to since it comes from an "overly spammy site".<p>First time I've seen that...
mikecaneabout 13 years ago
Let me just say that after seeing the original Swedish movie and then reading the book, I was crushed to learn there was no hacker tool called "asphyxia" in the book.
评论 #4048699 未加载
kayooneabout 13 years ago
this guy worked on the TRON command line/vfx stuff <a href="http://jtnimoy.net/?q=178" rel="nofollow">http://jtnimoy.net/?q=178</a><p>Really amazing!
strictfpabout 13 years ago
&#62;Shocked moviegoers will have been left wondering why a genius-level hacker would outer-join to the Victims and Keywords tables<p>Mysql defaults to inner join. See <a href="http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4418776/what-is-the-default-mysql-join-standalone-inner-or" rel="nofollow">http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4418776/what-is-the-defau...</a>
callmeedabout 13 years ago
On a related note, I asked about fake UIs/OSs on quora a while back: <a href="http://www.quora.com/Why-do-movies-and-TV-shows-often-show-fake-operating-systems-and-software-interfaces" rel="nofollow">http://www.quora.com/Why-do-movies-and-TV-shows-often-show-f...</a>
jyapabout 13 years ago
The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo also uses OpenOffice which I thought was cool: <a href="https://twitter.com/jyap/status/181908341675663362/photo/1" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/jyap/status/181908341675663362/photo/1</a>
luminaobscuraabout 13 years ago
they constructed a relevant sql query. that is more than enough for that scene. compare with this: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkDD03yeLnU" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkDD03yeLnU</a>
mbyrneabout 13 years ago
You're all wrong. It's pretty clear they had to obfuscate what she really wrote so no one could use it to "hack into the mainframe," on advice from their lawyers to avoid liability.
Jun8about 13 years ago
I think they've done a <i>pretty</i> good job, compared tp the general level of hacketry and math prtrayals on film. This is up there with Trinity's login using a ssh vulnarabilty.
sodafountanabout 13 years ago
"The Social Network" did hacking scenes quite well too. I'd recommend seeing that movie for anyone who's interested in doing a start up.
评论 #4051472 未加载
zacharydangerabout 13 years ago
Weirder still how the prompt clearly reads "mysql&#62;" for Oracle.
评论 #4048085 未加载
idleloopsabout 13 years ago
Great article.<p>My pet peeves in shows/movies, are normally around the fact that it takes more than a few seconds to do anything useful on a computer. And yet on film even idiots seem to command their gadgetry with aplomb.<p>They should show failed password attempts. Computer lock ups. Anti-virus software blocking any meaningful use of the computer. Frustration of users as they are prevented from booting due to system updates etc.<p>I'm also not a fan of fake search engines - and video streams that appear in flawless hi-def!<p>I wish computers were omitted entirely sometimes - they are pointless props, and just age the movie. Couldn't they just say - 'I searched for blah'?<p>It's not like I'm loosing sleep over it though. I would rather TV wasn't such an insult to the imagination (I can - and enjoy - filling in the gaps myself.)
评论 #4048627 未加载
评论 #4048787 未加载
评论 #4051072 未加载
Morgabout 13 years ago
For people using mysql, that kind of query <i>really</i> isn't such <i>bad</i> SQL at all.
评论 #4048101 未加载
forgabout 13 years ago
The Swedish police use or at least used MySQL as database solution.
tubboabout 13 years ago
Is there a reason why none of the images work?
评论 #4049731 未加载
评论 #4049195 未加载
sodelateabout 13 years ago
i have been always curious about hacking with modern computers,movies just did a little to let more people know that
Akramabout 13 years ago
The author could have done something useful instead of this.
评论 #4048341 未加载