Hackers is funny, but I watched it recently and was surprised at the realistic touches. In one scene, a character is showing off his "hacking" books - which included the dragon book, and a Unix book I believe is real.
The best part about Hackers is that they hired Emmanuel Goldstein to serve as a consultant to get the technical details right... and he decided it would be fun to completely troll the movie producers, giving us what we got.
Hackers is an absolutely fantastic and hillarious movie once you're watching it with that in mind. Especially since Cereal Killer is either named after the 2600 editor or else just uses his name in jest when he says "uh, this isn't Woodshop?"
I used to listen to the movie on repeat all day while restoring compromised accounts at Blizzard; it kept me going when my eyes wanted to go cross and my brain wanted to shut down from looking at WoW's "the Matrix" all day tracking stolen virtual goods.
This movie gets so much completely unnecessary hatred. Yeah, it's a joke, but there is plenty of little nods to "real" culture in there. To me it has always been pretty obvious that it was supposed to be silly, but that the people making it knew what they were doing.
I'm pretty sure most of the books from that scene were actually real books.
I'd have to watch it again to be 100% sure, but - going from memory - I believe every single book mentioned in that scene was real. Certainly the "pink shirt book" (IBM Guide to PCs) is real, as is the Dragon book (compiler theory) and the "Rainbow books".
The pink-shirt book is not the IBM Guide to PCs, but "The Peter Norton Programmer's Guide to the IBM PC". Incidentally, the blue-shirt book ("Peter Norton's DOS Guide") was the book that turned me into a computer nerd :)
The pink-shirt book is not the IBM Guide to PCs, but "The Peter Norton Programmer's Guide to the IBM PC".
Right, that's the one I was thinking about. It definitely stands out because of the pink shirt on the cover. So they got the exact title wrong (or I just mis-remembered what they called it in the movie), but still... that scene was fairly accurate for a hollywood movie involving computers. :-)
It's my life's ambition to one day use a file system as pretty and pointless as that one. Barring that, I may just create one for use in my "hacker" puzzle game for iOS that has no actual relation to real hacking (as is the case most "hacker" themed games).
Yeah, the "red box" stuff was legit, it's just that A. few payphones seem to even exist anymore, and B. the ones that do are mostly COCOTs, not Telco operated phones that are (or were) susceptible to red-boxing.
Yeah, but you can op divert COCOTs or just hack them directly (one of my schools' COCOTs had a flaw where you could make the modem think you were still operating for free after dialing toll-free if you hadn't hung up the phone completely, rendering free unlimited calls)
Even better, you can just beige box off them if you can find the demarc point, which is usually on the backside of the building where the phone is. Since all the "magic" that makes it a "pay" phone is in the phone itself, the line it's hanging off of is just a plain old phone line, with full toll call ability and everything.
Back in the mid 90's, when I was a little bit into the phreaking scene, me and my buddies used to always beige box off of a COCOT to dial into the modem for the local phone switch, so we could play around. We found a payphone at a gas-station halfway in the middle of nowhere that closed fairly early, so we'd just pile my laptop in the car, drive out there, park about 40 feet from the phone, run a long ass cable to the demarc box and then sit in the car and hack/phreak. Good times... :-)
