no, really, i used to like this show a lot

[chronovore]

I used to enjoy Chris Carter's Millennium quite a bit. I was a Lance Henriksen fan before he became "Frank Black" on the series, and am still a fan no matter how many cheesy movies he appears in.

There was one episode where Frank and his Millenium Group handler needed to get at some sensitive information on a mainframe, and the 1337 h4xx0r kid they enlist to get them past the mainframe's security says, "Oh, we're going to need some serious computing power to blow past their defenses." So Frank and Millennium Group handler guy bring hacker-kid to the Millennium Group's ultra secret, super powerful IT installation, and the hacker proceeds to randomly attempt a selection of passwords, and he nails it with an easily guessed password on like his 3rd or 4th guess attempt.

It probably wasn't meant to be funny, but it cracked me up. I'm pretty sure that it was just bad writing -- because guessing passwords doesn't require sick hardware -- but in the metafiction my brain constructed, the kid had only wanted to see what kind of hardware the Millennium Group was packing, so he totally scammed them into revealing their setup. Or maybe Chris Carter / Morgan & Wong are Just That Smart. 'Cos it was funny.

Comments

[nattotastic.livejournal.com]

Agreed about Lance Henriksen. I've liked him since Aliens.

I think the reason is less bad writing than just not wanting to spend too much time dealing with an issue and possibly confusing/boring an audience who don't realize the huge amount of time and trouble really involved in breaking military-grade encryption. I know I wouldn't care to watch some kid babysit an algorithm as it ran through all possible combinations over the next 11 years. They just need to convey to the audience that they needed a whiz-kid's help (thereby securing the popular idea that super-genius computer geek types are all Doogie Howser contemporaries).

I often wonder though why TV shows don't show other (slightly more realistic) means of hacking using stuff like distributed computing to speed up the process, or key-loggers, or some social hacking, just as a few examples. Retiring the whiz-kid plot device would be a breath of fresh air from writers. The closest I've ever seen Hollywood coming to doing this is the movie Sneakers, which is an excellent flick IMHO, if you haven't seen it. Still though, Sneakers indulges in the whiz-kid character plot device (River Phoenix). It's forgiven-- Sneakers dates from '92, plus River Phoenix is like a whiz-kid you would actually want to hang out with.

'Course Millenium has an excuse for sticking with the whiz-kid plot device, it's run was from '96-'99. People were still dialing into AOL at the peak of that run.

[chronovore.livejournal.com]

Oddly enough, the recently-canceled Fox show, "Drive" /did/ have something along those lines. The characters are railroaded into pulling a bank job. One of the characters points out that if the safe has a 6 digit passcode, and it changes weekly, the bank manager probably has it stored on his computer, so all they need to do is run an audit search on his computer for a 6 digit variable.

It was marginally more clever than "it's taped under his desk drawer."

I'd like to see the "social hacking" thing happen, as I think it's going to be the next big thing in bank fraud and identity theft. There was an incident recently where people lost their Xbox Live accounts to thieves who convinced MS support staff that they were the legitimate owners who had simply "lost their password"...

Agreed, btw, that "Sneakers" is a good movie. I'd like to catch that one again, and then send it a chaser of several beers and then "Hackers" which I've never seen.

[nattotastic.livejournal.com]

Might wanna chase it with several + 1 beers-- Hackers was awful, IMHO.

[chronovore.livejournal.com]

I'm gonna have a friend edit "HACKERS" (1995) together with all of Angelina Jolie's nude scenes from "Gia" (1998) and see if it makes a more satisfying movie.

[andrewv.livejournal.com]

I <3 Sneakers so much. I still think it's the best movie ever made about the Net. The fact it was made 3 years before the web is irrelevant.

[sdemory.livejournal.com]

Given that Roedeker, the l33t h4XX0r kid, got canned by the group when the Roosters overtook the Owls in Season 2 and, it was implied, offed by the Group in Season 3 (if memory serves me correctly), maybe there's something to the scam angle.

Of course, this was the 1990s, when you could ostensibly get away with showing a geometric screensaver as a sign that Heavy Underground Computing was Going Down.

Ideally, though, the l33t h4XX would've simply typed in "Test" and "sysop," telling the amazed Millennials "Yeah. No one ever changes the factory override."

[captainblack.livejournal.com]

su do apt get-plot-device

[chronovore.livejournal.com]

That would rock even harder than Trinity using that actual *NIX hack in "Matrix: Reloaded."