Dying harder, seven clicks at a time

Last night, we want to see the new action movie, “Live Free or Die Hard,” the fourth movie in the Bruce Willis “Die Hard” series. All of the movies in this series have been well done, but this installment was the most fun, mainly because the plot had to do with rogue hackers. I always enjoy hacker movies.

Fortunately, the producers of this movie avoided one of most egregious clichés, which is having typewriter, teletype or other lame sound effects accompany the slow display of text on a computer screen. However, there were plenty of other elements to make one laugh.

I’m trying not to give away spoilers, but if you haven’t seen the movie, you might want to stop reading.

1. Backup. At one point, there’s an entire secure complex that’s filled with rack after rack of super-high-end servers. It is presented as plausible that the entire facility could be “downloaded” into a portable hard drive. Even with the new terabyte drives, a suitcase full of hard drives shouldn’t be able to back up the entire contents of a major secure data center – even though the facility does have a convenient FireWire port.

2. Downloads. Why, oh why, when data is being “downloaded,” does the contents of the files stream across the screen, complete with still images of all the graphics files?

3. Storage. In that data center, at one point someone opens up a cover – and reveals a row of spinning hard drive platters. Can you say “head crash”? Sure, it looks neat, but exposed drive internals aren’t very practical.

4. Satellites. The good hacker (Justin Long, the “I’m a Mac” guy) takes an off-the-shelf cell phone (well, it was a PDA of some sort), which is offline because the local cellular network has crashed. But with just a few keystrokes, he reprograms it to become a working satellite phone. Yeah, right.

5. I’m In. Hackers in movies and TV shows are universally able to break into a system by grabbing any keyboard (or in this case, by plugging in a folding keyboard) and typing just a few characters. And then they universally exclaim to all and sundry, “I’m in!” Carrying out any random nefarious instruction from “the boss” is just a matter of a few keystrokes after that.

6. Networks. Every system in the world is seemingly connected to every system, so that hackers can, for example, view what’s happening in an elevator’s security camera, open the traffic-control gates on a highway, display the power consumption of a remote data center, steal military access codes, activate a turned-off PC video camera, or take over a local police radio system, all from one workstation, with just a few clicks of a mouse.

7. User interfaces. I don’t know which dev and admin tools are used in movie computers, but not only can hackers create/deliver sophisticated viruses, logic bombs and encryption locks with just a few keystrokes, but those apps also include complex user interfaces, with spinning numbers, animated graphics, sound effects and more. How do they do that? Visual Studio? Eclipse? Xcode? No – they’re usually typing at a command prompt.

Summer popcorn movies. Gotta love ’em.