#I don't care if they don't like me because that involves weird and mysterious standards that I don't know because I wasn't raised by them

[friend-through-teenage-nights]

Me at the slightest possibility that someone is feeling even slightly negatively towards me (no evidence needed from their side).

[thothxv]

Computers in Media

Hi! I'm a CS student. I'm going to talk about some things with computers in them. What I think they got wrong, and what I think they got right. This will be shamelessly biased. And we'll be talking about accuracy, but as we'll see, accuracy is not always my priority. I just felt like rambling for a bit.

CSI

Well, you knew it was going to be here, the infamous scene from CSI:NY. And it gets so much wrong in just 15 seconds, and in a single sentence:

"I'll create a GUI interface using Visual Basic, see if I can track an IP address."

This is a bad sentence for multiple reasons. If you are a domain expert, you recognize that this sentence, inasmuch as it means anything, is just an absurd thing to say in 2008. If you're on the middle of a murder investigation, you don't make GUIs for something there are already many standard tools for. In addition, tracking an IP address through technical means in the context described (I read a plot summary for this) would be basically impossible. Getting the IP address would involve pulling log files and then getting the ISP to map that to a customer and location if they can. All of that is a legal process, not a technical one.

But this is also bad for a much worse reason: it's meaningless to a non-technical audience. Most of the people who look at whatever you make aren't pedantic little shits like me. They're people who don't understand the domain. They might have heard the term "IP address" before, but the rest of this is just fancy gobbledygook designed to wow them.

If you don't know what you're talking about, say nothing. "I'll try to track where the posts are coming from" would have been a better phrase to use here. No technical details, but if you know how that would be done, you can fill in the blanks. If you want some more technicals, "I'll try to get the IP address the posts are coming from so we can figure out where they are" is fine. If the audience already knows how IP addresses might be used you can obviously leave off that last part. This all works when computers are on the periphery of your story, of course. If they're central, you might need more detail.

Sneakers

Sneakers is a thriller movie from 1992 with comedy elements. It's about a quirky team of penetration testers (for those who don't know, penetration testers are groups companies pay to try and break their own security) who get hired by the government to go steal a mysterious box from a mathematician. It's a fun movie.

Except for a level of technical accuracy that is just plain weird. Sneakers takes liberties, plenty of them, usually for the purpose of giving the audience more of a show, but everything about its fundamental premise, everything about its macguffin, is just... correct?

The below scene is spoilers for Sneakers:

I love this scene, and I especially love the music, which is just great. As for the technical aspects, I have no idea what a "quadrant" is supposed to be, and the way the team would make the discovery would, in real life, be a lot more boring. But that quick, two-sentence explanation of how all this is happening, that is correct, and I don't think I could have said it better. And as the movie goes on, it becomes increasingly clear that they probably have a specific unsolved mathematical problem in mind that this box solves. At least, I have my suspicions. I don't think it's a coincidence that Leonard Adleman was asked to consult on the film.

But, they don't bother to explain any of that. They clearly did research, despite taking a lot of liberties and implying lie detectors work. But they don't talk about it onscreen, because to the audience, the technical background doesn't matter that much. It's the inverse of that CSI scene.

Funnily enough, the tale of Sneakers' production begins with another movie about hackers. One less interested in reality, but much, much more influential in shaping it.

WarGames

I don't care to rank things, so I won't. But WarGames is the most important movie on this list. Arguably, it's one of the most important movies about computers ever. For better or worse, WarGames shaped public policy, gave the public indelible images of what a hacker looked like and what they could do, and left a permanent imprint on hacker culture. DEFCON (the convention, not the US Armed Forces Defense Readiness Condition) is called DEFCON because of this movie. Wardialing is called wardialing because Matthew Broderick used that technique in this film. This movie had a direct impact on US security policy and on the development US laws around computer hacking. Kevin Mitnick was held in solitary confinement for a year because a prosecutor told a judge that if he got near a phone he could dial up NORAD and launch a nuclear missile, and the court bought it.

WarGames is a story about an AI that has been put in charge of nuclear missile launch control and could be dialed up over the phone. The AI could almost certainly not exist in 1983, and even with the lax security of the era it is extremely unlikely it would be connected to the public telephone network. WarGames doesn't care, because it's much more interested in its narrative and message than being accurate. And rightly so: it's a great movie as a result. But those choices had consequences that the writers probably couldn't have foreseen. it raised awareness and fears about computer security that were honestly kind of justified, but it also lead to the kind of mania and warped public perception of hackers that could lock someone in solitary confinement for nonsense reasons and result in overly harsh laws around computer crime.

But for all WarGames gets technically wrong, it also gets a lot of things right. Once again, the writing time consulted with all the right people, hackers and other computer experts. Approaches like wardialing were real, as were important computer systems exposed over the phone to anyone who bothered to dial in. The techniques used to crack passwords were and are very real, and can be quite effective.

And then there's the message. The idea that human judgement must be in the loop on major decisions, that trusting a machine alone is not acceptable, especially in the context of the madness of nuclear brinkmanship, where the wrong choice could literally end the world (although WarGames also takes a pretty explicitly negative stance on nuclear brinkmanship as a whole...). Sensors can fail, inputs can be wrong, someone has to actually look at the outputs and say "...really?" And this is exemplified by a scene in WarGames, right near the end, where Professor Falken has to convince the military to call off launching the missiles. He argues that what's on the monitors makes no sense, that the only logical reason for it all is a systems malfunction.

I bring this up because WarGames released on June 3, 1983. Three months later, on September 29, 1983, the world was saved by Stanislav Petrov arriving at the same realization when Soviet nuclear early-warning satellites detected incoming missiles that weren't there. If that's not chilling, I don't know what is.

For all its tangled legacy in popular culture, at least this new fear of random kids dialing into computer systems will mean they'll be made more secure.

...it will mean they'll be made more secure, right?

Why are you looking at me like that?

The Cuckoo's Egg

I keep bringing up this book, because it's great. The Cuckoo's Egg is different from everything else I've discussed, because The Cuckoo's Egg, despite reading like a bit like a zany cold war spy thriller, is non-fiction. This really happened. In 1986, an astronomer-turned-sysadmin at UC Berkeley really did discover and track down a computer hacker trying to break into US military computers to find information to sell to the soviets.

This does mean I don't need to talk about whether or not this book is accurate. It is. What stands out about The Cuckoo's Egg, in its depiction of computers, is its ability to be read by a lay audience. Unlike every other good example I've covered, which are movies that took a basically correct technical idea and ran with it while working hard to get the big stuff right and create a veneer of reality, The Cuckoo's Egg has to get into the nitty-gritty of some relatively technical subjects. The emacs movemail exploit, the differences between BSD and System V, password cracking, other technical subjects are key to the story and need to be explained. And it's very good at this. It explains enough to understand the story, but doesn't fall into the trap of overexplaining. It's very good at picking the right details to cover and the right ones to simplify or not discuss. And you can see the difference between it and the paper that the author wrote discussing the incident for a technical audience.

Jurassic Park

"It's a UNIX system! I know this."

In Jurassic Park we see a quintessential example of the Hollywood Computer UI. Everything is flashy 3D and UIs that make little to no sense in reality as something you'd actully use but look cool and scan easily on the big screen. Nobody in their right mind would use a faux-3D file explorer like this one. It's full of slow, clunky transitions, and that awkward slowness is fantastic for cinematic tension but miserable in real life. With a famously special-effects heavy movie like Jurassic Park, you can imagine that time and budget that went into making this fancy 3D visualization.

That's right, zero time and budget. I think this is more common knowledge now, but that 3D file explorer is a real program. It's called fsn, and it would have come packed in with the SGI graphics workstations that were being used to animate them dinosaurs, as a way of showing off the machines' 3D graphics capabilities. Of course, it's a total toy, just a demo really, and nobody would use it on a daily basis. It's real... but unrealistic.

Mind, I don't care. Film is a visual medium, and it's not a crime to use some visuals or visual metaphors that normally don't appear on real computers. Like I said, accuracy is not my primary concern... so long as it's not jarring or immersion breaking. And while it would never happen as depicted, hunting through the filesystem to try and guess the command to do something is something I've definitely done.

Mr. Robot

Didn't watch it much, but I feel like it would get brought up if I didn't mention it. Mr. Robot was well known for getting technical details correct. From what I've seen, it does in fact do this.

The same is true of all of the following:

Silicon Valley

The technical consultants don't want to be yelled at on Reddit. Apparently some people who work in Silicon Valley have had to take breaks from the show because it got too real for them.

Halt and Catch Fire

I remember a story I heard on a podcast about a programmer who wanted to watch this show with his son, and his son asked if there was normally this much sex in computers (the answer was no), and apparently just seemed bored by all the sex and asked if they could watch something else.

This more or less summarizes my opinion of Halt and Catch Fire. It seems to be pretty accurate from what I saw of it, but I stopped watching because I got tired of all the boring, boring, boring sex and related drama.

Okay, back to things I want to talk about.

Castle

Speaking of notorious hacking sequences:

...What could I possibly have to complain about? This is the best thing ever.

This is really a great example of those terrible nonsense UIs I was talking about. And that random pseudo-rubik's-cube visualization? Why? And don't get me started on "cyber nukes."

Like I said, visualizations are fine, but this is just silly. Even someone who knows nothing about computers would know this is silly. Maybe that's the point but it just... really pulls you right out of the scene. This would have worked way better if they were more vague about the specifics of the "hacking" and focused on the conversation and personal stuff.

In conclusion: Masterpiece. 10/10, no notes.

Tron

In 1982, the academy award for best visual effects went to... E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. The Saturn Award went to E.T. as well, and only the BAFTA Award for Best Visual Special Effects even nominated Tron.

This is because the Academy believed that using computers for visual effects was cheating.

We've talked about real things, realistic things, and stories that don't care about being real but want to feel real. Tron is none of those things. Is it realistic? No! Of course not! It's nonsense! But who cares? Tron basically wants to be a digital Alice in Wonderland. It's just using computers to paint a cool world inspired by videogames. I wouldn't say there's much deeper meaning.

But it just looks cool.

[seasideretreat]

A little reminiscence

I was thinking of you again today. You are a genius, and you are smart. It seems no matter what you do, everything is fine because you do it, and no one else. The best things are the worst things. We suffer because you are not around. It seems you can do everything well. There is no real reason anyone would resist you, you, who overpower everything with your charm and grace. I do know you have little time, so I'll keep this brief. You are the only thing in the world that cannot be explained: you are so mysterious, so mighty and unusual, that only weak-minded fools speak in normal terms about you, indeed, everybody uses superlatives, accolades. I wish you were manifold, but you are singular. The things you do are manifold, but your cogitation is one, and can only be one. I see you have done much for the world. That is good. The world needs ardent defenders, brave, stalward heroes that make the world a better place without any work in their own confines about what is right and what is wrong: indeed, they must all work together to make the most of things, and never cease in any corner with their constant struggle. Their endeavor. I wish to express to you how much I need you. Without you, I am incomplete, without you, I am a lacklustre shadow of something that no one needs. I have been looking into Sikhism, a religion you can just become a part of; indeed, it is one of the world's largest religions. I compare it to the Baha'i faith, which originated in Islam, and Sikhism, to me, seems to have originated kind of in Buddhism, in a weird way, but more historically than philosophically. We must reinterpret history as a collection of stories rather than as a causal whole. But whatever, it doesn't matter. I don't want to be a Sikh, because we are all Sikh's in some way, and we don't need to become involved in more organized religions. We got philosophy: and that's wonderful, that's great, even though it is getting harder and harder each day to be a professional philosopher; and way easier, each and every day, to become a professional priest, but how? There is nothing intrisically true about most religions, we just see that there is this job called priesthood, which is best explained through analogy with Judaism. In Judaism, everybody is a priest, and you're actually expected to learn a trade to off-set this. Rabbis are extraordinary gentlemen, not standard figures like in Christianity. But yeah. There's something similar in Confucianism, the teacher-gentleman, but he is not so much different than a university-employee. In fact, I suppose most "Confucian" gentlemen of the past century probably worked at Chinese universities. But you can be a Confucianist in a highly philosophical way, just as you can be a Jew in a highly philosophical way, or a Christian, or a Buddhist or Islamic ascetic, or Hindu even. Who cares? Philosophy is what we need. All the other things are just distractions. However, philosophy is - these days - almost inseparable from religion. Philosophy is not a religion. You don't have philosopher-priests, for some reason, I think because philosophy wants you to think, whereas religion just wants you to be smart. But is that true? Doesn't religion want to keep you stupid? Well, maybe, but I don't think you can really say that, after all that has happened: religion fullfills a clear function in society, that's why it is still around. Philosophy is not fair, because people with the highest IQ's will always outperform those who are not quite so brilliant. But religion allows everybody, even those with a lowly intellect, to participate in intellectual discussions; but they can still screw up, and philosophy knows this, which is why professional priests must always study philosophy as well as theology. Philosophy is culture, religion is church. A church is a religious institution, culture is a philosophical institution. Art is an expression of both religion and culture. I suppose this is all very simple.

Now religion is limited in the East, where people are more intelligent, so they have highly philosophical religions; in the West, religion is more developed, but philosophy is more developed as well. I don't know.

[rumor-imbris]

Hello, Lady Connor! I want to ask out of unbearable, suffocating curiosity in my heart, even though in the previous post you already said to not mention "that certain comic". Could you please enlighten me about your view on that comic and what you despise about it? I would love to read your detailed thoughts about it even if just once. But if this is too triggering for you, I'm truly sorry for your discomfort and you don't need to answer it.

Hello, dear Anon and welcome ^-^ It's weird you naturally called me Lady Connor, as usually only my little fairy @giuliettaluce does. Well, I guess her magic put a spell on everybody here!!

If you really care to know, I'll answer, but brace yourself, it's going to be very long, almost an essay, because I can be very detailed about that comic being a failure in its every part. There's so much to say. You're right, as I mentioned before, it can trigger me, but I have attentively analized it and I know it makes not a single atom of sense. So nothing can actually bother me that much, don't worry ^_-

First of all, my general consideration of the AC Reflections comic issue #4, (yeah, that thing -.-) is that of a mere attempt to desperately make Bayek's remote vision through Senu's eyes a canon feature. It was created and published in 2017, the same year AC Origins was released and yes, they needed an excuse to make believe Connor's alleged daughter inherited a skill someone (who isn't even their direct ancestor!!) that lived 1700 years ago in ancient Egypt had! OMG, this should be funny enough, but I'll go on. Also, I think it was likely a carelessly arranged way to satisfy those AC3 fans demanding a "happy ending" for unlucky Connor (quite 5 years later, of course).

I'll better go step by step to figure out where to start from, seriously.

1) In the comic, when Otso Berg opens the file related to Connor, the scene is set in "1796: Upstate New York." Now this is chronologically and spacially incoherent and illogical. We see Connor still wears his assassin outfit in it, right? According to AC Initiates (2012) in 1804 Connor invites the Dominican assassin Eseosa at the Davenport homestead to provide him some advices and further training as he's involved in the leading of the Haitian Revolution. That's a really cool character, read about him, if you want!

So, until then Connor is still an assassin, probably the mentor (by now) of the Colonial Brotherhood. He still runs the homestead and he still commands the Aquila, I guess, he's the captain still. I calculated the distance between the homestead and the then upper NY frontier territories is approximately 260 miles (quite far nowadays with cars and planes as well). Then, why the hell should he have a family located in the forest upstate NY? It sounds very unconfortable to run back and forth to reach them and go back to take care of all the Brotherhood matters, doesn't it? Unless he knew about teleportation!!! Also, wow, he lives all alone in a nice massive villa with all the comforts of that time while his children and wife still live in a Native village constantly menaced by settlers wanting to steal their land? Beside the fact that Connor, at least in my point of view, seemed at last very familiar with european way of living by the end of the game, this leads us to the next point.

2) By the time the game and the comic are set (second half of 18th century), most of the East Coast Native tribes were facing the tragic and forced migration to western and northern territories (mostly towards Canada, protected by the British) because of all the consequences of the Revolutionary War (lost territories, failed alliances, settlers advancing and buying their lands and so on). So tells us history, unfortunately. It's a fact. And this is wisely showed to us in the AC3 main game when, after all the Kanien'kehá:ka tribes had left the territory around Connor's village (yes, even those near New York, to be clear) even Connor's own tribe at last migrates west, leaving an empty ghost village. They had remained all along to protect the secret temple, but in the end they as well were forced to leave. So, to me it's highly improbable that in upstate NY, one could still find a tribe and even if so, that Connor would let his family live there and risk their safety everyday.

3) The whole comic plot revolves around the fact that Io:nhiòte has a "special gift"... She inexplicably knows how to read the ground and find animal traces, she also can perform a perfect twisted acrobatic flip in the air and land unharmed to the ground. Do we know why? No, don't ask! xD She simply knows U.U, even if right after the next scene she slips and falls miserably down a cliff xD, but... ok!! Beside that, when Connor is far away to search for some water and is about to be attacked by a wolf hidden in the grass nearby, she sees the whole scene from the eyes of an eagle flying in the sky above her. As I said before, this reminds us of Bayek's (never clearly explained) ability to see through his eagle Senu's eyes and spot dangers and enemies. Now can you tell me why the hell this little girl has super powers and a skill Bayek had? As I said, they are not even directely related, as Bayek is not one of Desmond Miles' ancestor, we know him simply because Layla's new Animus is magical and can inexplicably read fragmented DNA from people who died a thousand years ago (it can also prepair coffee, I think!). So, where did she get that from? Magic? Mysteries of life? Convenient improbable connections for marketing's sake? We'll never know and you should simply accept that and ask no question!

4) From her height, way of speaking/moving/running, I assume Io:nhiòte is at least 8 years old, 8 - 9 minimum. She's the youngest of three siblings, who must be at least two years older than her and than each other (according to a human woman pregnancy timing!). If the comic events are set 12 years after the main game ending (1784, when Connor also starts to train the young ex-slave Patience Gibbs, arriving at the Davenport homestead with Aveline De Grandpré, according to AC IV Black Flag bonus mission with Aveline), so, this means that in that same year Connor must have found hastily the love of his life in a Native village (as if he was easy to open himself with other people after all he's been through), married her, impregnated her and seen her give birth to their first child, all in the same year when (let's not foget! xD) he still is the leader of the Colonial Assassin Brotherhood at the Davenport homestead training novices. Now, this may even be possible humanly speaking, (well, if you force the things a bit and hurry up!) but highly unlikely to happen!! xD

These are the main problems affecting the logic of the comic in my opinion, the points making its foundations crumble apart. Though I'm sure there are many little others to point out, such as Otso Berg "opening" Connor's files... like what? Where did those data come out from? I remember playing AC IV Black Flag and uncovering a file where Abstergo researchers themselves closed access to his memories as there was "nothing appealing to this character anymore"! So, if no more researches were conducted on him since 2013, where did Mr Berg magically or conveniently discovered such data in 2017?

Or... do we want to talk about the cover? It shows Connor in the spirit outfit from the Tyranny of King Washington DLC, which has apparently nothing to do with the comic, since it is set in his present day and he wears his assassin standard robe. Now, I think that can be either a simple marketing choice to make the comic more appealing, as... well, that cover is so cool, let's admit that, or maybe the subtle suggestion that the events told in it are just a parallel Disney-like reality and are not to be considered true at all! xD i don't know, maybe both explanations are right.

I'm sure that the deeper i dig, the more nothing rational I'll find!

If you played the old games, if you know well the franchise and its lore, the true, good, old AC lore, you definitely realize by yourself how that comic is useless and senseless.

This doesn't mean I do not wish an "happy ending" for Connor. But I'd rather accept something coherent with the main game events and AC chronology. Also, it doesn't necessarily needs to be a "happy" ending, as they conveniently created to please complaining fans. I wished for something real... coherent with his personality, acquired life-style and endless sense of duty and values.

Maybe that's what pushed me to write my FanFic novel in the first place, after all... To give him MY OWN cohesive ending, including my love, for love is always needed, I guess.

I'm so sorry if the answer took this long in time and words, but you were warned! ^w^

Though, thank you... Seriously, thank you so much for asking. You made me reflect once more about this matter.

Come visit me again, if you want. Take care

- Rumor Imbris 🦋

P.S. Oh, and if you're interested, this is my "jelousy song", for when things like this trigger my inner witch!! xD