I have to say I was pretty disapointed with this episode of my favorite podcast. This was one of the most anticipated ones for me and I feel like you guys maybe left this on in the background while you were doing something else instead of giving it the attention it deserves. Not one of you remembered that the company was called Elligson Mineral and the computer was The Gibson, even though they repeat it so many times it starts to lose all meaning. Paul didn't pick up on the fact that the other kids on the roof who fell for the prank were all obviously younger than Dade, because it was the first day of school and they were freshmen. The only child ass showing in the film was that of Joey, I think Jason imagined a whole scene where a naked 11 year old Dade was arrested, when in fact we never see him get taken down by the non-uniformed cops who never identify themselves. For some reason Paul remembers Burn's sweet new P6 laptop as a modem.
I was really hoping to hear mention of Marc Anthony as a sympathetic FBI agent and undercover perv at the high school party, there has got to be some interesting background information there. Or how about the way Agent Dick Gill is incapable of traveling in a poice car without hanging his head out the window like a basset hound. And how the hell did the agents know where to go in Grand Central Station after they came opon the coupled phones. (and why did the "hackers" even do the hack from the same station as the hacked phones) Why does 19 year old Angelina Jolie look like she's a different species than 25 year old Angelina Jolie? In 1995 when we didn't know her name, we all refered to her as "The elf girl" from Hackers.
These are points my friends and I rip on when we watch this movie.
And how about that soundtrack? This movie introduced me to The Prodigy and Orbital in high school.
You guys leaned pretty hard on the costume design, and while it was out there I knew people who had the same outfit as Dade, and plenty of people in my high school looked like every other character besides Kate (who I think was trying to look like a fashion model and it was probably Jolie's idea).
This movie is highly stylized, in the same way that CSI or NCIS is stylized. Hacking is sitting in front of a computer, figuring shit out, peeling back the layers. It looks boring as shit to someone observing, you can't make a movie out of that. The whole movie would have been that scene where Joey is downloading the garbage file.
When we were screwing around with this stuff in the 90s, it was an adenaline rush, your hands are shaking, you're trying to find something useful and get out of there before you get caught or maybe you're already caught and the cops are going to be knocking on your door in the morning. I've had nights where I was tearing up printouts and throwing out disks just like Phreak. Kids were getting busted all the time, but there weren't really laws in place to charge them with, so you got a stern talking to from someone who didn't even understand what it is you did. They got a lot of things right in this movie. Dumperster diving for user accounts, social engineering to get modem numbers, piggy backing phone lines. They obviously had to dress it up with something a little more visually exciting for the uninitiated.
Hacking in the 90s was really easy, companies were just getting connected and they were relying on security through obscurity. I had free internet for 3 years from my local university, and all I had to do was know the phone number of their modem bank and notice that they set their default password to be the same as the faculty member's username. The only thing unbelivable about the hacking in this movie is that a high school in 1995 would have a Macinosh controlled sprinkler system.
I think most people who were in high school in the 90s and played with computers love to hate this movie, I know I do.
P.S. "What is it's mission?" kind of saved the episode.
