As astounding as this might be, I finally got around to watching the movie Hackers tonight. One would have thought that I would have watched it a long time since given where my interests lie. Yet all these years have passed since the movie was released and I only watched it today.
The roots of this probably lie in the usual portrayal of hackers and technology in general in the movies. For example, in The Net, just about everything was completely wrong. Television shows seem to suffer from the same problem. In fact, popular culture as a whole seems to ascribe mythical powers to a group of people collectively labelled "hackers". Perhaps this was the reason I avoided watching the movie.
It turns out that Hackers gets a lot more things right than I would have expected. While the computer sequences are somewhat hokey and the hackers are made out to be somewhat larger than life, overall, it gives the best picture of hacking I’ve seen in the movies. It was refreshing to see them struggle with breaking in, using social engineering, dumpster diving, and so on. And, in the interest of not boring the audience I can accept the accelerated timing of many of the exploits.
All in all, I have to say that the movie is remarkably good for a mainstream type of film. Not to mention it was entertaining. And, I suppose, the "scenery" was not hard to look at.
As a side note,I am staying completely out of the argument over the definition of hacker vs. cracker and so on since I think it’s completely childish. Thus I reserve the right to publish any flames about terminology with scathing comments. I mean, complaining that people who would ordinarily qualify for the title of hacker should be called cracker because they do something evil is like saying that the term person should not apply to someone who is evil. I now climb off my soap box.