On hacking - Why Hollywood hacking is so hilariously horrible

Every now and then someone says that their opponent is hacking the clock, hacking the interface to make their opponent's mouse misbehave, or something. So I thought I'd write something to explain some of what could be theoretically possible and what's reasonably practical.

First, hacking doesn't work in real life the way it does in the movies.

See more in the original article: On hacking - possibilities and practicalities

Real hacking is boring

Good TV should be fun to watch. Movies should be fun to watch. Real-life hacking? Not so fun to watch.

So forgive Hollywood if they try to spice things up with pretty flashing lights and frenzied typing. After all, it's basically impossible to film accurate hacking and have it be visually interesting in the way film demands.

There's a whole host of problems, starting with how screens during real hacking don't necessarily have any motion, and static data display is boring on the big screen for any amount of time longer than a second. The matter is made worse by how most hacking software is function over form, whereas interesting action scenes demand the exact opposite. Add that to tiny text sizes that are unreadable at any reasonable filming distance, and you've got a pretty good argument for replacing it all with some flashing lights and colors.

The same goes for sound. The only way to make footage of an unreadible static screen less interesting would be to score it with subtle typing noises, and maybe contemplative breathing. Which explains why movie hackers are always pounding on the world's loudest keyboards with hammer-fingers, and why each and every program screams with bleeps and bloops whenever you so much as move the mouse. You know, on the rare occasion there is a mouse, because watching cursors move is also pretty boring.

Real hacking is almost never action the way that Hollywood needs it to be. Hacking is more often just arduous research, planning, and then a computer trying a whole bunch of things on its own for hours. Cracking into someone's email account in real life is invariably 10-second victory built up to by hours if not days of painstaking detective work and computers running brute-force crackers. Trying to film hacking as high-tension is like trying to film a stakeout as an action scene. The sum-total of hours of tedium.

See more in the original article: Why Hollywood Hacking Is So Hilariously Horrible

Hollywood hacking scenes don't just throw rules of hacking out the window; often they don't even adhere to the most basic rules of technology that the writers probably have in their very own homes.

They're not that stupid; they are just trolling you. And really, what could be more hacker-savvy than that?

See more in the original article: What Hollywood gets right and wrong about hacking

So while it’s good to have realistic depictions of hacking, it’s sometimes better to just laugh off how terrible they are.