Ripe fromage. If I were writing the sequel, it would be a series, and it would be about how they grew up and now they all work leading security at platform companies and government agencies. While reversing a worm that was unleashed by trolls to sabotage a social-credit/Nosedive-like app, Kate/acidburn finds the encoded string "that place where I put that thing that time," which has to be a reference to their old crew, but she can't let anyone know because the scandal against the social platform company would swing an election. Story unfolds as a mix of tracking down Dade/zerocool, who apparently made money in crypto and disappeared to live on boats and vanlife away from technology, and who may be the one behind the worm. Busting him busts her, so she has to find her old ex and talk him down somehow. He may also be the father of her first kid and she still has unreconciled feelings, and he doesn't know. Homages to the Before Midnight sequels about finding each other again, and the Thurman/Carradine Kill Bill finale.
Working title is, "Defcon 30" Who wants to fund it?
The most realistic character would be the one that is bitter having watched all his hacker friends make boat loads of money, but works some random software engineering job for an unimpressive salary while slowly drinking/eating themselves to death. Maybe it's Joey?
Would recruit Richard D. James and Max Richter (former FSOL) and maybe Nils Frahm to score it. Floria Sigismondi to direct or at least DP, or Jolie to self direct. Writing team members from For All Mankind and Mr. Robot. Cameos by everyone. Easter eggs by Parker Warner Wright. It's so close to reality already it becomes an ARG pretty fast.
> Ripe fromage. If I were writing the sequel, it would be a series, and it would be about how they grew up and now they all work leading security at platform companies and government agencies.
I used to hang out with a guy who did security freelance work and had a passing resemblance to Matthew Lillard. He like, never slept. He just like, biked around town all night, occasionally pausing at the local co-working space to do some work or play chess with this old Russian dude. There was some shit in his past, I don't know what he did or what was done to him because he never said and I never asked, he only hinted at it. But I kept thinking, man, this guy could totally be a cleaned-up Cereal Killer.
It would be interesting if a social media post/idea led to a movie.
I know social media led to the phrase "Get these MFing snakes of my MFing plane!" getting included in the Snakes on a Plane movie.
I think there was a reddit post turned into a movie deal about what if modern U.S. Marines were transported back in time to the Roman era, but I don't think anything has come from it.
Does anyone know of any other social media posts affecting or turning into movies?
> grew up and now they all work leading security at platform companies and government agencies
The exact opposite of a hacker. If they instead run their own company, built their own products, or open sourced an amazing tool the yeah. Otherwise do we really want a series or movie about their daily stand-ups?
Between Hackers, Masters of Doom, and other rad 90s hacker-coder media, software development really seemed like a much more awesome career than it turned out to be. If I had a time machine I would warn young me that it's really more like a combination of Office Space and Wolf of Wall Street.
It would be awesome to listen to Prodigy or Megadeth while hackin' with the gang though. I'm still down for that if it exists somewhere in the now-corporatized tech industry.
Hackers shows the career guys as lame and high strung, but the hobbyists (or as Razor and Blade put it, those hacking as a survival trait) as cool and having fun. It's easy for something fun to have the fun sucked out of it when it becomes a career.
I think a part of the hacker sub-culture that Hackers touches on lightly is that you have to make your own space. It's not going to exist for you in some prepackaged easy to consume way and certainly not in a corporation. Cyberdelia was for & by hackers, not a club run by some guy who has a bunch of cookie cutter clubs all over downtown. I don't think this is unique to the hacker sub culture, either.
> Hackers shows the career guys as lame and high strung, but the hobbyists (or as Razor and Blade put it, those hacking as a survival trait) as cool and having fun.
the fastest way to make something UNfun, is to get paid for it. Do this excercise. think of any fun activity. then imagine getting paid for it. If you're honest and you know what those jobs are like then you'll quickly find that getting paid for something sucks nearly ALL the fun out it.
> I think that if I had written the book in the past decade, perhaps Bateman would have been working in Silicon Valley, living in Cupertino with excursions into San Francisco or down to Big Sur to the Post Ranch Inn and palling around with Zuckerberg and dining at the French Laundry, or lunching with Reed Hastings at Manresa in Los Gatos, wearing a Yeezy hoodie and teasing girls on Tinder.
>Between Hackers, Masters of Doom, and other rad 90s hacker-coder media, software development really seemed like a much more awesome career than it turned out to be.
I think it comes down to the fact that our industry has become rigid and beholden to the university education system. John Carmack and John Romero were both college dropouts. Their stories would probably be impossible today. What we have now is a world of people coloring between the lines and going straight from one set of rules to another. There truly is no more punk rock left in tech.
I think it's because most tech jobs are not in tech. If you work for a bank, you work for bank. If you work for a fashion retailer, you work for a fashion retailer.
I've worked for a big pension fund and it was exactly like one imagines. Many meetings, a quiet office, slow and boring. I've also worked for small tech-focussed companies with technical nerds as founders; they were rather different, with music, dogs, vodka and late nights.
Oh and age matters too: after I had a kid, the late nights and vodka were not something I had the energy for.
What part of their story are you referring to? There are lots of indie devs that appear to be having great fun making games and doing well to boot. Valheim, Black Rock Galactic, Celeste, Dead Cells, Papers Please, Stardew Valley, Enter the Gungeon, Don't Starve, Undertale, etc. were all pretty bit hits, certainly made their developers millions of dollars, and AFAIK the developers were having fun making them.
John Carmack was also constantly working on the cutting edge. I think that makes a big difference. IIRC from reading MoD, he was the first person to get true side-scrolling working on an x86 chip, before it was thought to not be powerful enough vs the chips used in consoles at the time. Problem is that most of us just don't get to work on the cutting edge usually. A lot of the software that needs building often doesn't need much in the way of creativity.
There are all kinds of people in tech who are self taught without CS degrees though. I don't think it's that beholden to the universities...at least not like other professions. I think it's simply that people took notice that all the money was being funneled into tech. The MBAs all followed.
Industry, for the most part, needs predictability and scale for it to function well. It's very difficult to accomplish that without at least some rigidity.
Punk rock is small by definition. Once it becomes large it changes to mainstream.
It very much does exist. Just look for places trying to change the very basics of how the world works by hacking on new technology. You know, the places that naturally attract cypherpunks, people distrustful of 'the system' and the like.
You can also find people with that ethos in corporate places, but they get swarmed out by suits and people who went to coding school because it pays well.
I've always felt that an industry or research field goes through multiple stages:
Discovery that it exists -> Fumbling -> Golden Age -> Mechanization
Mechanization is where the bean counters and optimizers get into it and make it into something boring. I'm not a software engineer but I feel like my own field is in the "Mechanization" stage. My solution is I'm just about to leave and never look back because I stopped caring. I still like the original stuff I learned but I don't care about what's become of it.
Honestly, I think who you are as a person is often going to be misaligned with what capitalism and industry does with what looks like your passions, and it's healthy to recognize that and leave while you can. You may be doing software engineering but you're not a software engineer; you're a person and you can reinvent yourself any time you want.
I think many of us believed that for sure we are going to be the cool ones but we actually turned out more like Office Space people. Not everyone is Crash Override.
I wish I could code in the time when there were no deadlines and you could gradually plod away at incredibly complex assembly code while hanging out with some like minded folk. That probably stopped being a thing in the 70s though.
Part of what made this movie so startling when it came out is it was the first (and really only) film that was plainly aware of hacker subculture at the time and is loaded with easter eggs demonstrating that. It was at once a ridiculous parody of it and an homage to it. It’s like a love letter to small-h hackers.
I wonder what the highest bandwidth you could get with smoke signals is. Have 288 fires and a bunch of people opening and closing lids on them in 10-second intervals. Awful latency though
e: actually that's probably around the speed of morse code or human speech
yeah, he definitely misread the line and the editor probably didn't catch it. i mean, checking wikipedia, seems like even the very first router/modem had 300 bit/s and that was in the 60s. probably should have been 28KBps
During Chaos Communication Camp in 2019 we held a veryvery improvised screening of Hackers. The people at the Norwegian hackerspace I was with had never seen the movie, clearly this was a mistake we needed to fix!
We managed to steal^Wborrow the projector screen from an empty workshop tent. Hauled it across a veryvery busy whiskytasting event (called Whiskeyleaks). Got a small projector and then we rigged the sound.
A single concert speaker was our sound source, but we had no AUX cable long enough. So we found a headset with an AUX output on it and chained it together with the AUX cable :)
Also had a screening at May Contain Hackers this year, and it was great having 30 people scream "Hack the Planet" during the movie and loudely complain when the RISC line came :)
Hackers was released September 15, 1995. The newest version of Netscape you could have been using the day it came out was 1.22.
Netscape 2.0 came out three days later (September 18, 1995) and included first support for javascript, java, and plugins.
The Dot-Com craze was just getting started but nobody knew how big it would become. Few worked for Internet startups and nobody had been to a launch party yet. I had registered my first domain name just two months earlier.
What an amazing time (1994-2000) to be alive and just out of school. It was our "Roaring 20's"
Iirc, the movie's official website got hacked, saying it was a terrible movie and to go see "The Net" instead. Also, the movie's website got in to some hot water for hosting some kind of hacking information on it.
They set it up to look like Cyberdelia. After the movie they ran a costume contest. The showing was just weeks before the pandemic truly hit America, and we felt pretty lucky that we made it home with out anything.
Hah. Just yesterday I was contemplating how awful Angelina Jolie's character's handle "Acid Burn" was. Like - who the fuck would choose such nickname for themselves?
Other than that - cult movie. Love it. Awesome soundtrack, not that bad acting and not that bad script for back when computers and internet were hip, not just the usual thing.
"Hackers" caricaturally but still somewhat properly presents the phreaking culture which was and is rather uncommon for non-niche movies, especially from that era.
Both Acid Burn and Zero Cool had handles that came off as self-deprecating. I kind of liked that, as counterpoint to the competitive ego dynamic between them.
Back when I was sixteen, I hung out with this kind of crowd and most of the usernames were about how dangerous/scary/bad the person was. I thought it would be funny to deliberately choose a username that was the exact opposite of all of that.
Readit News
Working title is, "Defcon 30" Who wants to fund it?
I used to hang out with a guy who did security freelance work and had a passing resemblance to Matthew Lillard. He like, never slept. He just like, biked around town all night, occasionally pausing at the local co-working space to do some work or play chess with this old Russian dude. There was some shit in his past, I don't know what he did or what was done to him because he never said and I never asked, he only hinted at it. But I kept thinking, man, this guy could totally be a cleaned-up Cereal Killer.
I know social media led to the phrase "Get these MFing snakes of my MFing plane!" getting included in the Snakes on a Plane movie.
I think there was a reddit post turned into a movie deal about what if modern U.S. Marines were transported back in time to the Roman era, but I don't think anything has come from it.
Does anyone know of any other social media posts affecting or turning into movies?
The exact opposite of a hacker. If they instead run their own company, built their own products, or open sourced an amazing tool the yeah. Otherwise do we really want a series or movie about their daily stand-ups?
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4158110/plotsummary
So, it's not an emergency at all. Just for funzies.
It would be awesome to listen to Prodigy or Megadeth while hackin' with the gang though. I'm still down for that if it exists somewhere in the now-corporatized tech industry.
I think a part of the hacker sub-culture that Hackers touches on lightly is that you have to make your own space. It's not going to exist for you in some prepackaged easy to consume way and certainly not in a corporation. Cyberdelia was for & by hackers, not a club run by some guy who has a bunch of cookie cutter clubs all over downtown. I don't think this is unique to the hacker sub culture, either.
I think The Plague was having fun.
> I think that if I had written the book in the past decade, perhaps Bateman would have been working in Silicon Valley, living in Cupertino with excursions into San Francisco or down to Big Sur to the Post Ranch Inn and palling around with Zuckerberg and dining at the French Laundry, or lunching with Reed Hastings at Manresa in Los Gatos, wearing a Yeezy hoodie and teasing girls on Tinder.
I think it comes down to the fact that our industry has become rigid and beholden to the university education system. John Carmack and John Romero were both college dropouts. Their stories would probably be impossible today. What we have now is a world of people coloring between the lines and going straight from one set of rules to another. There truly is no more punk rock left in tech.
I've worked for a big pension fund and it was exactly like one imagines. Many meetings, a quiet office, slow and boring. I've also worked for small tech-focussed companies with technical nerds as founders; they were rather different, with music, dogs, vodka and late nights.
Oh and age matters too: after I had a kid, the late nights and vodka were not something I had the energy for.
Punk rock is small by definition. Once it becomes large it changes to mainstream.
You can also find people with that ethos in corporate places, but they get swarmed out by suits and people who went to coding school because it pays well.
Discovery that it exists -> Fumbling -> Golden Age -> Mechanization
Mechanization is where the bean counters and optimizers get into it and make it into something boring. I'm not a software engineer but I feel like my own field is in the "Mechanization" stage. My solution is I'm just about to leave and never look back because I stopped caring. I still like the original stuff I learned but I don't care about what's become of it.
Honestly, I think who you are as a person is often going to be misaligned with what capitalism and industry does with what looks like your passions, and it's healthy to recognize that and leave while you can. You may be doing software engineering but you're not a software engineer; you're a person and you can reinvent yourself any time you want.
https://www.amazon.com/Peter-Norton-Programmers-Guide-IBM/dp...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NYNEX
It might not be your exact thing, but you're likely to meet people who know about everything going on in the area.
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Like a 28.8 Bps modem.
Bps. Not kBps. Just Bps. Perhaps the actor just misread the line and the editors kept it. Still makes me itch to this day.
e: actually that's probably around the speed of morse code or human speech
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modem
For those unaware of CCCamp here are some pictures; http://smtw.de/cccamp19/
We managed to steal^Wborrow the projector screen from an empty workshop tent. Hauled it across a veryvery busy whiskytasting event (called Whiskeyleaks). Got a small projector and then we rigged the sound.
A single concert speaker was our sound source, but we had no AUX cable long enough. So we found a headset with an AUX output on it and chained it together with the AUX cable :)
The end result https://twitter.com/MortenLinderud/status/116502963964076032...
Also had a screening at May Contain Hackers this year, and it was great having 30 people scream "Hack the Planet" during the movie and loudely complain when the RISC line came :)
It all started with Orbital, Underworld, Kruder & Dorfmeister, Leftfield…
Shame about the film!
Netscape 2.0 came out three days later (September 18, 1995) and included first support for javascript, java, and plugins.
The Dot-Com craze was just getting started but nobody knew how big it would become. Few worked for Internet startups and nobody had been to a launch party yet. I had registered my first domain name just two months earlier.
What an amazing time (1994-2000) to be alive and just out of school. It was our "Roaring 20's"
- Hackers (1995)
- Mortal Kombat the Movie (1995) (both of these movies used Orbital's Halcyon +On +On) song and a bunch of other electronic music
- And I remember the Windows 1995 release. That was a HUUUUUGE software release.
They set it up to look like Cyberdelia. After the movie they ran a costume contest. The showing was just weeks before the pandemic truly hit America, and we felt pretty lucky that we made it home with out anything.
Other than that - cult movie. Love it. Awesome soundtrack, not that bad acting and not that bad script for back when computers and internet were hip, not just the usual thing.
"Hackers" caricaturally but still somewhat properly presents the phreaking culture which was and is rather uncommon for non-niche movies, especially from that era.
This movie aged well.
Thirty years later, I'm still using it.
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Hackers is my go-to movie as an initial test for a home theater system.