[HN Gopher] Cracking the Code: Sneakers at 30
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Cracking the Code: Sneakers at 30
Author : DerekBickerton
Score : 189 points
Date : 2022-05-14 14:43 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (letterboxd.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (letterboxd.com)
| crmd wrote:
| I distinctly remember Sneakers DVD having a fabulous director's
| commentary track, where they talk about writing and filming the
| movie shot-by-shot, however it doesn't seem to be available in my
| Apple TV purchase. Does anyone know if it's possible to hear the
| commentary track with any streaming service?
| predictsoft wrote:
| It's on the Canadian region 1 DVD not anywhere else.
| holly76 wrote:
| breckinloggins wrote:
| I'm fairly certain my life would have gone in an entirely
| different direction had my mom and I not decided - rather
| randomly - to go see this movie in theaters one weekend when I
| was 11.
| kappuchino wrote:
| True for me, too. I was 20 then and undecided between lawyer
| and computer science. Easier choice after seeing the movie.
| nocoiner wrote:
| Heh. I saw it at a younger though still impressionable age,
| and just absolutely loved (and continue to love) that movie,
| and somehow wound up going down that other route.
|
| No regrets, though. Plus at least I can do a pitch-perfect
| recitation of the spliced together voice authorization
| prompt.
| sneak wrote:
| You're not the only one.
| [deleted]
| Terry_Roll wrote:
| An excellent film, should be part of any computer science
| curriculum or at least some homework. Never noticed or knew that
| Hollywood went into such details with the "Easter eggs" back then
| so next time watching it will look out for them.
|
| As also mentioned here, its up there with War Games, Tron and The
| Lawn Mower Man when considering the biological & chemical
| knowledge we have at our fingertips today.
| Stratoscope wrote:
| Here is a fun article by David July, who tracked down some of the
| filming locations. It has some nice photos of the iconic
| PlayTronics building at 400 National Way in Simi Valley:
|
| https://mountsutro.org/2014/03/19/1089/
|
| He did misidentify the bridge the white van drove over. It's the
| Dumbarton, not the San Mateo, and they are driving in the correct
| direction. (From SF you would take 101 to Marsh or Willow and get
| on the Dumbarton from there.)
|
| A sad note: The PlayTronics building was converted to an Amazon
| distribution center a few years ago, and the entire front of the
| building was torn down and made into loading docks.
|
| I suppose it is ironic that I watched Sneakers on Amazon Prime!
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| IMDB has a list of filming locations, as it does for most
| movies. Including the correct bridge.
|
| https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105435/locations
| Stratoscope wrote:
| Nice! It's funny, of all the times I've visited IMDB I
| somehow never noticed this feature. Thank you for pointing it
| out.
| aspenmayer wrote:
| IMDb is owned by Amazon.
| nullc wrote:
| Anyone have a really old copy of Sneakers (like on laserdisc)? I
| noticed in the background of the bluray transfer
| https://files.catbox.moe/nnywzq.jpg there is this asiacrypt
| poster and I wondered if it was composited in later transfers
| over something else, as I think the conference would have been
| too late for the movie production.
|
| I think sneakers still holds the record for the best number
| theory jargon in movie history:
|
| "While the number-field sieve is the best method currently known,
| there exists an intriguing possibility for a far more elegant
| approach. Here we would find a composition of extensions, each
| Abelian over the rationals, and hence contained in a single
| cyclotomic field. Using the Artin map, we might induce
| homomorphisms from the principal orders in each of these fields
| that z by f z. These maps could then be used to combine splitting
| information from all the fields... this in turn would require the
| standard Kummer extensions that nontorsion form of the Jacobians
| of the Fermat curves gives rise to. It would be a breakthrough of
| Gaussian proportions and allow us to acquire the solution in a
| dramatically more efficient manner. Now, I should emphasize that
| such an approach is purely theoretical. So far, no one has been
| able to accomplish such constructions, yet."
| codepoet80 wrote:
| I have it on Laserdisc and will definitely look for this next
| time I watch!
|
| Edit: had to check. Yup, its there on LaserDisc...
| https://files.catbox.moe/l031en.jpg
| nullc wrote:
| AWESOME! Thank you!
| W-Stool wrote:
| This word salad from Janek and Harry Dean Stanton's recitation
| of "The Repo Code" in Repo Man are some of the two best rifs on
| word play I've heard in my lifetime. I've never seen the full
| text of Janek's speech - thank you!
| tempodox wrote:
| I've got Sneakers on DVD and the asiacrypt '91 poster is there.
| cscheid wrote:
| 1) Then Donald Logue got famous, and I'd be the idiot yelling
| "that's Gunter Janek!" at every episode of Grounded for Life.
|
| 2) I can't look at that screenshot and not hear "I leave
| message here on service but you do not call"
|
| 3) RSA's Adleman was the science advisor for the movie, so I'd
| guess he snuck in the Asiacrypt poster from the beginning
| droidist2 wrote:
| Donal Logue also played Kevin Mitnick's friend in Takedown.
|
| https://i.redd.it/s884e47lejv41.png
|
| (Also in that scene, a cameo by the real Tsutomu Shimomura)
| hamburglar wrote:
| Donal Logue was also Jimmy the Cab driver in a bizarre
| series of MTV commercials.
|
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=d3o_N6r-wZ0
| posharma wrote:
| Cracking the code...I thought this was about cracking coding
| interviews. I need to take a break :-).
| fattire wrote:
| I thought it was about this:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bUHT773gnPU
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneakers_(1981_video_game)
| dang wrote:
| Related:
|
| _Memories of the "Sneakers" Shoot (2012)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29840802 - Jan 2022 (198
| comments)
|
| _Sneakers: Robert Redford, River Phoenix nerd out in 1992's
| prescient caper_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29620095
| - Dec 2021 (7 comments)
|
| _Sneakers (1992), the Film_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26111977 - Feb 2021 (2
| comments)
|
| _Tool Recreating the "Decrypting Text" Effect Seen in the Movie
| "Sneakers"_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11643270 - May
| 2016 (54 comments)
|
| _Sneakers - movie about pen testing, crypto /nsa, espionage, and
| deception (1992)_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6196379
| - Aug 2013 (5 comments)
|
| _What it was like shooting the movie Sneakers_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4498985 - Sept 2012 (46
| comments)
|
| _Sneakers (Film, 1992)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1499298 - July 2010 (1
| comment)
|
| _Joybubbles: the blind phreaker whom Whistler was based off of
| in Sneakers_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1443241 -
| June 2010 (1 comment)
| folli wrote:
| Thanks for the list!
|
| I get the feeling dang has a sweet spot for Sneakers, too ;)
| zitterbewegung wrote:
| Sneakers is just a training movie on how a red team should do a
| pentest.
| [deleted]
| classichasclass wrote:
| It's the social engineering that makes it timeless, but the
| A-list acting makes it watchable. (Plus Stephen Tobolowsky's
| ad-libs.)
| binarymax wrote:
| Indeed! The best of which is Redford trying to get in the
| office cumbersomely holding a cake and balloons while Phoenix
| comes in to frazzle the guard.
| kappuchino wrote:
| The Internet Archive has the original press kit preserved - as a
| virtual floppy disk, including an (easy) password guessing to
| access some content. See here:
| https://archive.org/details/Sneakers_Film_Promotional_Floppy
| kappuchino wrote:
| ... when you accessed the "about", it says (or better said) 30
| years ago: "... Just remember that, in today's complex world,
| having no more secrets can be just as hazardous as having too
| many ...". Yup, ahead of its time. Nice.
| [deleted]
| jordanpg wrote:
| The Unclear and Present Danger podcast covered this movie in
| their latest episode.
|
| https://jamellebouie.net/unclear-and-present-danger/2022/5/1...
| themodelplumber wrote:
| > It's also not difficult to imagine Bishop as an older version
| of the more principled protagonists he played in Three Days of
| the Condor and All the President's Men.
|
| That's a fun idea. If only the movie ran for just a bit longer
| and mega-casual assassin Max Von Sydow and spooky garage
| conversation informant Hal Holbrook could've been in on things
| somehow.
|
| "You've got to follow...the macguffin!"
|
| (Also this clock tower thing...yeah I admit I never noticed,
| loved the van and mustache though)
|
| A fun read, thanks op!
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| I _loved_ the bit about trying to guess the password from the
| video, and nobody being able to do it, and the blind guy hearing
| the sound over and over and figuring out that it 's in the box on
| the desk. And the audience realizes, "Hey, we were so busy
| looking at stuff that we didn't _listen_. "
| z303 wrote:
| Slate on the 20th
|
| https://www.metafilter.com/119793/Slate-celebrates-the-20th-...
| caseysoftware wrote:
| Sneakers is one of the most fun and often under appreciated geek
| movies out there. Hackers got some points for including the
| Hacker Manifesto but was over the top to the point of comical.
| Sneakers captured the mindset, the vibe, and some of the
| mechanics.. a bunch of slightly odd guys driven by curiosity and
| skepticism.
|
| The fact that they got Redford, Poitier, Aykroyd, and many other
| greats made it shine.
|
| Edit: And from the article, just learned that the screenplay was
| written by Lawrence Lasker and Walter F. Parkes who also wrote
| War Games.
| jorangreef wrote:
| Sneakers and War Games (and also Tron) are great.
|
| We're running a consensus protocol bounty challenge for
| TigerBeetleDB inspired by them [1], with our distributed
| database simulator also being called The VOPR.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Jlikdtm4OA
| zitterbewegung wrote:
| Sneakers and Wargames were in the position when studios had the
| desire to not dumb down the plot or the fact that since
| computers were so new that they could be introduced in such a
| manner and be a compelling part of the narrative. Even when
| Hackers had people from the 2600 magazine consulted for
| production you can see that they weren't really listened to.
| The only really popular shows that stressed realism in hacking
| / software were Person of Interest and Mr Robot.
| jollofricepeas wrote:
| Agreed.
|
| The other fun fact is Sneakers that is beloved by both an
| entire generation of the IT security and intelligence/signals
| community .
|
| For a lot of us it was another nudge into both the blue and red
| sides of the security equation.
| version_five wrote:
| I own it on DVD and just watched the special feature a couple
| weeks ago. It was really interesting to hear them talk about
| the research for the script, including getting Prof Adelman
| (the A in RSA) to consult on the lecture the mathematician was
| giving, and even to draft slides for him to present, which were
| not used in favor of projecting a sea of equations on a white
| background
|
| There are other cool tidbits in there, they got an phreaker
| (sp?, phone hacker) who had done time in prison to consult as
| well. His nickname irl was Captain Crunch, and when they sort
| through the guy's garbage (the guy who's office they need to
| break into, played by the same actor as Action Jack Barker in
| Silicon Valley), they pull out a captain crunch box
| Stratoscope wrote:
| The term you're looking for is "phone phreak". There's
| another reference to John Draper (Captain Crunch) early in
| the movie. When they are playing Scrabble, one of the words
| is SCRUNCHY - and the S and Y are separated from the rest of
| the word at first, so you see CRUNCH.
|
| John was also a technical consultant for the film and appears
| in the documentary on the DVD.
|
| For those who don't have it yet, I definitely recommend
| getting the DVD for the special features.
|
| https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B00008OE4W/
|
| (The cheapest seller is GRUV which happens to be Universal
| Pictures.)
| ceautery wrote:
| I've always seen "phreaker" on 80's era BBSes. This is the
| first time I've seen "phone phreak". Maybe regional
| differences in us old school nerds?
| Stratoscope wrote:
| Yes, perhaps both regional and temporal differences.
|
| Here is the seminal 1971 Esquire article, _Secrets of the
| Little Blue Box_ :
|
| http://www.lospadres.info/thorg/lbb.html
|
| That was the article that inspired me to visit the San
| Francisco State University library to study the Bell
| System Technical Journal and copy down the in-band
| signaling frequencies to make my own blue box:
|
| http://www.lospadres.info/thorg/bstj.html
|
| I was in awe that the phone company had _published_ all
| the information we needed to hack into their system.
|
| It was a fun time. I got to be friends with phreaks like
| Mark Bernay and John Draper (Captain Crunch) - although
| less of a friend after John wanted me to "work out" with
| him...
|
| We had two phone lines at home, and one time I made an
| 800 call from one line, got into the tandem and started
| routing the call back and forth across the country and up
| and down through Canada and Mexico, and finally called
| the other line. I wanted to see how long a delay I could
| get when I said "hello" into one phone and hear it in the
| other. It was a full second!
|
| Later a friend was visiting who was studying Russian, and
| I said "why don't we call the Kremlin!"
|
| My automated dialing tricks only got me as far as Italy.
| So I rang an Italian operator and explained that I was an
| American operator trying to place a call to the Kremlin,
| and could she route the call for me? And she did!
|
| The Kremlin switchboard connected us to an English
| translator, and we chatted a while. We explained that we
| were phone phreaks who used a blue box to place the call
| and how we routed it through Italy.
|
| He asked, "is that like ham radio where you get a license
| from the government to do this?" We said, "yeah, sort of
| like that."
|
| Eventually I got busted. I was living with my parents in
| Pacifica and had my electronics and programming lab in
| their basement. This was before personal computers, of
| course, but I was working for Tymshare and had a Teletype
| at home so I could dial into their machines in the off
| hours.
|
| When I got home from work one afternoon, a couple of
| phone company investigators and a police detective were
| in the living room, sipping tea. My grandmother was
| visiting and she had served refreshments while they
| waited for me.
|
| After some small talk, I gave them a tour of the basement
| lab. They didn't arrest me or anything, just took a
| circuit board or two and said "we'll be in touch."
|
| I had to go to court and paid $25 restitution to Pacific
| Bell, a $150 fine, and yikes, $450 in 1972 dollars to my
| lawyer who pleaded _nolo contendere_ for me.
|
| Afterward, the investigators felt bad about it. They said
| the last guy they'd caught had been a real jerk but I
| seemed like a nice kid. So they took me out to lunch at
| my favorite Chinese restaurant!
|
| I eventually ran into Captain Crunch again at the 2013
| Homebrew Computer Club reunion. He didn't recognize me at
| first, but I mentioned that we used to hang out at his
| Berkeley apartment and smoke pot and hack on Forth code
| into the night.
|
| John's eyes lit up: "Did we work out?"
|
| https://www.flickr.com/photos/geary/10861963196/
| plapsley wrote:
| Great story! :-)
| plapsley wrote:
| Phone freak (with an f) was the original term, in the
| late 1960s. When Ron Rosenbaum wrote "Secrets of the
| Little Blue Box" he made it into "phone phreak".
| "Phreaker" came a bit later (1980s is about right).
| Shameless plug -- I wrote a history book about this whole
| subject, "Exploding the Phone":
| https://www.amazon.com/Exploding-Phone-Phil-
| Lapsley/dp/08021... My website, such as it is, offers
| additional goodies, including lots of scans of original
| docs like FBI files: http://explodingthephone.com/ If you
| want more on Captain Crunch, see http://explodingthephone
| .com/search.php?q=draper&sort=releva...
| Stratoscope wrote:
| Phil (with a ph), it is so nice to run into you here!
|
| I had no idea about the 1960s spelling - thanks for
| mentioning it.
|
| As it happens, I bought your book in February 2013, only
| a couple of weeks after it was released. I will have to
| re-read it now. :-)
|
| I highly recommend the book to anyone interested in this
| bit of hacking history.
| jmcgough wrote:
| I have a younger partner who does infosec - she's never seen
| Hackers and I skimmed it, thinking about showing it to her.
| It's fun, but it's aged poorly to the point that it'd be too
| cringe to show her. Sneakers, in contrast, has aged really
| well. It's the only film I've seen that "gets" the hacker
| ethos, its culture and history... and has _relatively_
| realistic depictions of hacking (a lot of social engineering,
| research and a bit of computer hacking).
|
| A lot of fantastic actors, and a real treat to see one of the
| handful of films River Phoenix did (taken far too soon).
| mjg59 wrote:
| I absolutely love Sneakers, but I think you're writing
| Hackers off too easily - my experience is that it's widely
| loved within the infosec community, not because it's accurate
| in any way (it is extremely obviously not) but because it
| captures what people _want_ hacking to be. You should
| absolutely watch it together, and if she hates it you should
| just blame me.
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