A movie about a white hacker club 'Better World' and a genius hacker 'HEX' having an inevitable showdown with the black hackers as the Songdo International Exchange was hacked in the fourth industrial revolution.(Source: Naver) Edit Translation
The most striking part of the film is its firm embrace of direct action and resistance from the public. After all, when you boil down the plot, the story of Hackers is of a diverse group of young, politically engaged activists preventing Wall Street executives from staging an environmental disaster as cover for white collar crime, all while evading the abusive force of law enforcement happily helping Wall Street. That's downright radical these days.
Download Film Twenty Hacker
Download Zip 🔥 https://urlin.us/2y2FGJ 🔥
Maybe that's more of an indictment of the playing-it-safe, focus group-tested Hollywood of the 21st century, but it also speaks to something Moreu and Softley saw as issues that would grow over the years. The film's climax, where the hackers rush to locate and leak a file exposing white collar crime and embezzlement, now brings to mind the kind of digital whistleblowing we're seeing these days. Not just the exposure of since-ruled-unconstitutional surveillance programs by Edward Snowden, but more recent revelations in things such as the Panama Papers and Paradise Papers, where digital leaks brought to light massive money laundering and fraud schemes done by wealthy politicians and executives.
Hackers came out at a time when the digital realm was still relatively new and the world was shifting from a Cold War polarity to a finance-run system. So much of the world has changed, but the underlying currents of the mid-1990s have become some of the dominant threads of our time today, and Softley's movie saw not only what would be the malicious forces of the near-future but the tactics and mindset that would be needed to resist them. Hackers is a fun and thrilling film that holds up far better than it has any right to, particularly in its politics. On it's 25th anniversary, it really is a movie worth revisiting and thinking on.
Usually I try to fill this part of the newsletter with the informative but anxiety-inducing articles I'm reading, but since we're talking about Hackers, I have to include one fun bit. In 2018, Motherboard talked to actual hackers and cybersecurity experts about the film and why it is so beloved.
Twenty-five years ago today, Hackers was released. Audiences got to see a big-screen Hollywood look at cyberactivism, watch Crash and Burn go from rival hackers to a couple, hear a collection of fantastic electronic songs, and were introduced to the iconic words: \u201CHack the planet!\u201D If you know me at all you know that I love Iain Softely's 1995 film. I missed it in theaters and only saw it for the first time a few years ago but it quickly became one of my favorites. It's fun, stylish, the ensemble has amazing chemistry and it's also one of the single most relevant films for our times.
\\tIn 2015, for the 20th anniversary of the movie, I wrote on Medium about the film's progressive elements, from deep politics about activism and the corporate-security complex to its diverse casting. Five years since I wrote that, the film has been worming its way through my mind (\u201CA worm and a virus? The plot thickens.\u201D) as more and more parts of it echo through the present. I was lucky enough to see the film again in theaters in January, before everything shut down, and the movie holds up very well. Yes, some of the tech specs are woefully outdated in our digital cloud, smartphone-filled world. Yes, the fashion choices are a bit extreme. But the movie is thrilling, the cast is fantastic, Simon Boswell's score is thrilling and the plot works, especially because of its politics. Softley and co. were not predicting the future, but they did tap into emerging trends that would metastasize in the years since Hackers' release.
\\tBy all accounts, Hackers should have been vapid mid-1990s cinema, something cashing in on what was seen as a fad or subculture, the way we got so many rollerblading and extreme sports films at the time. The Internet was already getting that treatment; the same year as Hackers came out, the far more pulpy The Net came out. In a way, Hackers operates like Kathryn Bigelow's Point Break. This is not a movie made to be campy or a so-bad-it's-good film. Yes, the premise is a bit silly, and yes there is humor within the film, but the actual stakes and tension in the film are played straight. Characters like Dade Murphy, AKA Zero Cool AKA Crash Override (Jonny Lee Miller), Kate \u201CAcid Burn\u201D Libby (Angelina Jolie) and Lord Nikon (Laurence Mason) are dynamic, interesting and are not played as stereotypes or overly cool. In Hackers' case, that internal seriousness about its plot and characters allows it to go beyond just being about an emerging subculture and into some strong social commentary on power and activism. Screenwriter Rafael Moreu had become fascinated by computer hacks and early digital culture and he did his research when crafting the script. The Hacker Manifesto is name-dropped and quoted in the movie.
\\tThe most striking part of the film is its firm embrace of direct action and resistance from the public. After all, when you boil down the plot, the story of Hackers is of a diverse group of young, politically engaged activists preventing Wall Street executives from staging an environmental disaster as cover for white collar crime, all while evading the abusive force of law enforcement happily helping Wall Street. That's downright radical these days.
\\tMaybe that's more of an indictment of the playing-it-safe, focus group-tested Hollywood of the 21st century, but it also speaks to something Moreu and Softley saw as issues that would grow over the years. The film's climax, where the hackers rush to locate and leak a file exposing white collar crime and embezzlement, now brings to mind the kind of digital whistleblowing we're seeing these days. Not just the exposure of since-ruled-unconstitutional surveillance programs by Edward Snowden, but more recent revelations in things such as the Panama Papers and Paradise Papers, where digital leaks brought to light massive money laundering and fraud schemes done by wealthy politicians and executives.
\\tAnother unnerving part of the film is its depiction of how violently law enforcement takes down hackers. Most of these raids on screen are full of heavily armed SWAT teams violently busting in on young adults and teenagers with guns drawn. These raids were not some wild fantasy cooked up by the writers \u2014 they in part lead to the rise of digital rights and legal defense groups such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation; and extreme state violence against dissidents is well documented \u2014 but they also show how the state will use overwhelming force to not only go after someone but scare others from acting. At times it can be odd that the Secret Service lets Ellingson Mineral's security officer The Plague (Fisher Stevens), the actual mastermind of the plot, take the lead on investigating suspects, but look around at 2020, does the divide between big tech, Wall Street and the United States' surveillance apparatus look that strong? A former head of the NSA is now sitting on Amazon's board of directors. Digital home security systems like Ring are partnered with police departments. Major tech investors advise the White House and help with expanding the national security world into the digital realm. The Plague's plot to rip off his own employer and cover his tracks with an oil spill blamed on innocent hackers almost works because of how easily he is able to manipulate attention-hungry, short-tempered Secret Service agents such as Richard Gill (Wendell Pierce).
\\tThen there is Hackers' look at digital life itself. Sure, most people are online for apps and social media, not hacking the Gibson while cruising through a cyberspace that looks like Manhattan (a genius design touch by the filmmakers). And much of the hacking is about social engineering and tricking people into giving them access. But Hackers also had a pretty good look at how people would express themselves online, and how that would be commodified. When Cereal Killer (Matthew Lillard, just making the oddball feel real and alive with every twitch and character tic) says in an over the top way that \u201Cwe have no names, we are nameless\u201D when talking about credit cards, it's hard not to laugh at his tone but also think of the way our data, both in the information we enter into websites and the metadata of our phones and photos are secretly gathered and sold by governments and corporations. The various hacker names the characters go by \u2014 Lord Nikon, the Phantom Phreak, Razor and Blade \u2014 would be indistinguishable from the social media handles we use today. Even online virality comes into play, with Dade's past as Zero Cool, and his hack gaining myth in tech-savvy circles (if there's one plot hole in the film it's that Nikon, who has photographic memory, can recall the exact New York Times front pages covering Dade's hack, but didn't know who Dade was, despite cameras at the trial). Even the climax, when a collective of hackers from around the world team up to flood the Gibson with viruses to stop the Plague isn't that far off from the mass online mobilization we see today.
\\tHackers came out at a time when the digital realm was still relatively new and the world was shifting from a Cold War polarity to a finance-run system. So much of the world has changed, but the underlying currents of the mid-1990s have become some of the dominant threads of our time today, and Softley's movie saw not only what would be the malicious forces of the near-future but the tactics and mindset that would be needed to resist them. Hackers is a fun and thrilling film that holds up far better than it has any right to, particularly in its politics. On it's 25th anniversary, it really is a movie worth revisiting and thinking on. ff782bc1db
historical weather data download excel