After going through the original quick list we tossed together, people were chiming in like crazy. We felt another 10 might help satiate the desire to smirk at the silliness of tech portrayed in movies and TV. Gathering examples from your comments, we have compiled part 2. While I would have loved to narrow this down to a specific item like incorrect lingo or screen grabs, I didn’t quite have enough specific scenes to do it yet. Be sure to keep the comments coming and be specific, I haven’t seen many of these till someone points it out.
10. La Femme Nikita
In this screenshot, you can clearly see an IP, DNS server, and subnet mask. All are formatted incorrectly. While I understand using a fake or non-existent IP, surely the person who knew the terms also knew the format.
9. The Net
[Sandra Bullock] and her maw-dawm get to fight against super powerful hackers. The viruses have fancy data melting effects too.
yep, that is a spreadsheet with gibberish in it. They aren’t even trying. It is like some one just said “i dunno, just go do something computery”.
This overly complex and drawn out scene explaining chat programs will surely make you laugh. It is ok that the hackers are plotting on a public server, they’re speaking l337 so no one can understand them.
“someone, get me a list of computer words STAT!”. Here’s your line.
Security is never a video game. Never. Ever.
4. The Core
The Character named [Rat] in this movie delivers a wonderfully cheesy speech about how he “speaks in ones and zeroes”, then he goes on to make a quick whistle to phreak someones cell phone to have long distance forever. While it was a pretty sweet nod to [Captain Crunch], the method of phreaking shown doesn’t change your cell phone plan.
3. Independence Day
I wanted to avoid this one because so many people have pointed it out, but when [Jeff Goldblum] hacks the mothership, well, it is funny. Apparently there’s some deleted scene that explains this all away with some line about how our current tech is derived from the alien ship that landed 50 years ago. So the aliens haven’t changed anything since then? Wait, are printers and print spooling an alien plot to drive us insane?
In the scene where a TV station is being hacked, we have the usual goofy graphical hacking, but on top of that, we have a physical comedy to go along with it. The robotic arms in the TV station battle it out, grasping tapes from each other.
When you remove a shotgun shell from the gun, and pull out the “shot” and batting, you end up with basically just a pile of gunpowder. When you apply fire to this, you get a poof of fire, not a massive explosion. You need compression to have an explosion. These bombs won’t work. They will burn your house down though, so the makers of the movie can’t even say they were avoiding getting any copy cats hurt.