"The Net"

I saw "The Net" yesterday and was moderately entertained. Lots of leaps of
logic, especially the notion that one can be "vanished" by having computer
records changed--I can believe that such changes would screw things up, but
surely even the character played by Sandra Bullock (nicely) would have
human friends and associates to vouch for her.

The portrayal of her job as a "beta tester," with a couple of Mac screens
running and lots of MacTCP connections, was well done. In fact, maybe the
most interesting look at computer screens I've seen. (But maybe I'm
biased...)

The cheesy climax, involving a computer virus, was especially egregious.
But tension has to be gotten somehow, I suppose, and most moviegoers will
not be terribly excited by the "real stuff." All in all, some good tension.

If this was the film I advised a woman screenwriter/researcher about (the
"vanishing" part she was asking me for tips on, 18 months ago), I sure
couldn't seen any influence of my ideas, or those of Cypherpunks. (I have
her name written down somewhere, but the two official screenwriters were
both male...still, I have a hunch she was doing background research for
them.)

Ironically, I saw a second movie the same day..."Under Siege II." It had a
lot of crypto, as well. Things like "Going secure" on cellphone
conversations with the Arabs purchasing the terrorist actions.


--The Praetorian
                                                           ----
                                                          | PI |
                                                           ----

..........................................................................
Timothy C. May         | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,
tcmay@sensemedia.net   | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero
408-728-0152           | knowledge, reputations, information markets,
Corralitos, CA         | black markets, collapse of governments.
Higher Power: 2^756839 | Public Key: PGP and MailSafe available.
"National borders are just speed bumps on the information superhighway."

On Wed, 2 Aug 1995, Timothy C. May wrote:

> The portrayal of her job as a "beta tester," with a couple of Mac screens
> running and lots of MacTCP connections, was well done. In fact, maybe the
> most interesting look at computer screens I've seen. (But maybe I'm
> biased...)

Don't forget the Wolf 3D "beta" she removed the virus out of. :-)  She 
was actually using ResEdit in one of the scenezez, but don't know why 
they kept on flashing all those hex dump black screenz.  After all, all 
they had to do was install MacsBug on the machine and hit the 
programmer's switch...  instant way to show code, and would have been 
even more realistic... (though some would use McNosey or The Debugger 
instead.)

> The cheesy climax, involving a computer virus, was especially egregious.
> But tension has to be gotten somehow, I suppose, and most moviegoers will
> not be terribly excited by the "real stuff." All in all, some good tension.

Except for having the "ESC key" virus travel to the Dept. Of Justice 
mainframe from a Mac (I'd like to see a virus do pull that one off!)  The 
rest was fairly believable to some extent.  The moral of 'The Net' was of 
course that you shouldn't trust your machine's security to some off the 
shelf package 'Gatekeeper.'  Trust only 'Cypherpunk' Brand Software ;-)

She made some very big mistakes in her actions.  First, there are such 
things as backups, she could have convinced her lawyer to go to the DMV 
and force them to restore her records from tape.   Her fingerprints and 
photograph would appear... or more than likely look her up in the paper 
files.  I'm sure she got her first license waay back before they stored 
graphics on machines from the timeframe of the movie, her age, etc.

Shouldn't have been too hard to pull that off.  It may be easy to modify 
a series of computers and alter all records with a full set of back 
doors, but you can't change backups that are in the vaults of a 
government agency that easily. :-)

> Ironically, I saw a second movie the same day..."Under Siege II." It had a
> lot of crypto, as well. Things like "Going secure" on cellphone
> conversations with the Arabs purchasing the terrorist actions.

Things are starting to look up for us if Joe Bloe sees these movies and 
learns about security and crypto -- even if it's by watching movies.

don't forget in the Net, Angela used several cell phones which led 
straight to her even though they were stolen... and of course the bad guy 
was listening in on all her conversations. :-)

Also how did she get into the Moscone Convention Center without a badge; 
I didn't see her swipe one from someone... just snuck right in..

The thing that I liked most about this is the parralel between James 
Gregg and Bill Gates.  :-)  Not quite as obvious and forward as it should 
have been.  All Mac's and no Windoze 95 screens anywhere!!!!  I think 
Bill is well pissed about that.





                                                                   =====
                                                                    ! !
                                                                    ! !


=================================================================93=======
 + ^ + |  Gate Keeper    | Amerika: The land of the Freeh. | \-_    _-/  |
  \|/  |mozzart@ghost.com| Where day by day, yet another   |  \  --  /   |
<--+-->|                 | Constitutional right vanishes.  |6 _\-  -/_  6|
  /|\  |    Just Say     |                                 |----\  /---- | 
 + v + | "No" to the NSA!| Jail the censor, not the author!|     \/      |
=======/---------------------------------------------------------VI------/
      /  I watched and weeped as the Exon bill passed, knowing that yet /
     / another freedom vanished before my eyes.  How soon before we see/
    /a full scale dictatorship in the name of decency? While the rest /
   /of_the_world_fights_FOR_freedom,_our_gov'ment_fights_our_freedom_/

tcmay@sensemedia.net (Timothy C. May) writes:
> I saw "The Net" yesterday and was moderately entertained. Lots of leaps of

I saw it about 1/2 hour ago. I make a point of seeing every computer-related
movie. I don't think real movie-goers would enjoy it much. It's cheap and
unprofessional. Lots of running around, but no real car crashes. The acting is
terrible. The star should NOT have appeared in a bikini. Yech.

> logic, especially the notion that one can be "vanished" by having computer
> records changed--I can believe that such changes would screw things up, but
> surely even the character played by Sandra Bullock (nicely) would have
> human friends and associates to vouch for her.

They try to "explain this away" by saying that 1) she lived in the neighborhood
for 4 years and never got to know any neighbors (as one of the neighbors tells
the police), 2) her mother's got Alzheimers and doesn't recognize her anymore,
3) she telecommutes for a company in another city and only knows 2 people there
in real life. One gets killed at the beginning; the other gets fired and she
makes no attempt to find him (one of the many loose ends). The computer-related
plot is just slightly more plausible.

(Movies about financial services, like _Wall St_ usually distort reality much
worse than movies about computers. Can you say "creative licence"?)

> The portrayal of her job as a "beta tester," with a couple of Mac screens
> running and lots of MacTCP connections, was well done. In fact, maybe the
> most interesting look at computer screens I've seen.

Yes, everything is done on various PowerMacs, including playing Wolfenstein.
Could be X terminals. Except for a little Duo she gave her shrink/boyfriend,
and a powerbook she used at the beach. IMO, it's better than most such
scenes... It's way better than the scene in Wargames where the computer tries
to pick 10 digits of a password one by one... Not as good as Sneakers...

In a typical suspenseful scene (not a spoiler), the heroine sneaks into an
office and sets off a fire alarm. Everyone leaves, including a villaine, who
doesn't log off. The heroine receives a new e-mail addressed to the villaine,
with the orders to kill the heroine (clearext), signed 'pretorian'. The heroine
types 'whois pretorian' and gets an IP address, but no name. The heroine goes
through what looks like traceroute and obtains the pretorian's name and picture
(but the viewers know his identity from the start, of course). She finishes
saving it to a floppy disk moments before the villaine returns to the cubicle.

(One of the IP bytes was 344, by the way.)

Another time she types "telnet someone@somewhere.mil". Another time she
"hot chats" on an her Mac, and hooks up the text to a voice synthesizer.

(If they all exchange so much e-mail, why do they bother FedExing diskettes?)

> If this was the film I advised a woman screenwriter/researcher about (the
> "vanishing" part she was asking me for tips on, 18 months ago), I sure

They may have been reading the Risks digest too much. :) One guy is apparently
flying his Cessna "by wire", thinks he's approaching the airport, actually hits
a smokestack. Another guy gets wrong medications, twice, and dies. All as
the result of the vilaines changing computer records, of course.

Interestingly, there's NO mention of crypto. Once you know someone's password,
or have physical access to the media, you can read and write everything. Once
you change some data, it's changed. No digital signatures. However, once the
virus melts the villaines' mainframe, their data is gone. No backups. And all
the changes they made in other systems are reversed. Reminded me of _The Wizard
of Oz_ a bit.

In fact, the bad guys were selling everyone a computer security system called
"the Gatekeeper" (a Trojan horse, really), but it's not identified as crypto.
It sounded like access rights are checked by their server. It involves a Web
page with a 'pi' symbol (pi stands for pretorian, of course). Clicking on the
pi while pressing control-shift will display much hexadecimal stuff and then
let the user in through a backdoor. Hmm. Gatekeeper = Bill Gates = Windows 95?
Is that why Apple lent those Macs? :)

There's a character named "CyberBob" who's never seen. He only hot-chats
and eventually gets killed. His icon looks like MS Bob.

I heard only one mention the "the Internet". At the end of the movie, a TV
announcer says that the case was cracked because the "programmer analyst
Angela Bennett e-mailed the evidence to the FBI from the Internet".
(E-mailed from an open-access computer at a computer show, I might add)

We were treated to 5 or 6 previews. One was for another movie called
"The Hackers", on the same topic, coming this summer. Some kids like to
break into systems. The bad guy blackmails someone, frames the kids.

---

Dr. Dimitri Vulis
Brighton Beach Boardwalk BBS, Forest Hills, N.Y.: +1-718-261-2013, 14.4Kbps

On Wed, 2 Aug 1995, Dr. Dimitri Vulis wrote:

> I saw it about 1/2 hour ago. I make a point of seeing every computer-related
> movie. I don't think real movie-goers would enjoy it much. It's cheap and
> unprofessional. Lots of running around, but no real car crashes. The acting is
> terrible. The star should NOT have appeared in a bikini. Yech.

Why not, she had the right 'assets' for that scene, no? 8-D

> They try to "explain this away" by saying that 1) she lived in the neighborhood
> for 4 years and never got to know any neighbors (as one of the neighbors tells
> the police), 2) her mother's got Alzheimers and doesn't recognize her anymore,
> 3) she telecommutes for a company in another city and only knows 2 people there
> in real life. One gets killed at the beginning; the other gets fired and she
> makes no attempt to find him (one of the many loose ends). The computer-related
> plot is just slightly more plausible.

Makes sense, too many geeks without a real-world-life out there.

> In a typical suspenseful scene (not a spoiler), the heroine sneaks into an
> office and sets off a fire alarm. Everyone leaves, including a villaine, who
> doesn't log off. The heroine receives a new e-mail addressed to the villaine,
> with the orders to kill the heroine (clearext), signed 'pretorian'. The heroine
> types 'whois pretorian' and gets an IP address, but no name. The heroine goes
> through what looks like traceroute and obtains the pretorian's name and picture
> (but the viewers know his identity from the start, of course). She finishes
> saving it to a floppy disk moments before the villaine returns to the cubicle.
> 
> (One of the IP bytes was 344, by the way.)

The security was laughable.  But consider that most of corporate Amerika 
is this way.  Very few care about security.  Here at work I have to fight 
extra hard with idiots who log in and leave their machines -- users with 
Supervisory access!  All sorts of shit like that...

Re: ip #'s: Yeah, it's like all the phone numbers in every movie are 
555-xxxx.  Probably they didn't want to get sued by posting a real net 
address and get sued.

> Another time she types "telnet someone@somewhere.mil". Another time she
> "hot chats" on an her Mac, and hooks up the text to a voice synthesizer.

That was after she got the milnet address though nice email address that 
can be telnetted into.  But the voice synths are possible.  Apple does 
provide that capability.  You'd have to get the irc client to use it.  
Don't know of any that do off the top of my head but I haven't looked for 
it either.  It wasn't much of a "hot" chat.  It could have been much 
steamier.  The sex content of this movie was pretty lame though...

> (If they all exchange so much e-mail, why do they bother FedExing diskettes?)

More secure to fedex a disk.  Nobody on the net can read what's not on 
the net. ;-)  Now if the author of this movie knew about pgp... totally 
different story.

> Interestingly, there's NO mention of crypto. Once you know someone's password,
> or have physical access to the media, you can read and write everything. Once
> you change some data, it's changed. No digital signatures.

Yeah, that was quite bad.  

> In fact, the bad guys were selling everyone a computer security system called
> "the Gatekeeper" (a Trojan horse, really), but it's not identified as crypto.
> It sounded like access rights are checked by their server. It involves a Web
> page with a 'pi' symbol (pi stands for pretorian, of course). Clicking on the
> pi while pressing control-shift will display much hexadecimal stuff and then
> let the user in through a backdoor. Hmm. Gatekeeper = Bill Gates = Windows 95?
> Is that why Apple lent those Macs? :)

That was my impression too.

> There's a character named "CyberBob" who's never seen. He only hot-chats
> and eventually gets killed. His icon looks like MS Bob.

Yeah, death to MS-Bob...  >:-)

> I heard only one mention the "the Internet". At the end of the movie, a TV
> announcer says that the case was cracked because the "programmer analyst
> Angela Bennett e-mailed the evidence to the FBI from the Internet".
> (E-mailed from an open-access computer at a computer show, I might add)

Not unlikely.  A lot of trade shows do provide machines with net access 
as demos of the internet.  Though it's usually manned by the ISP and not 
out in the open.


=================================================================93=======
 + ^ + |  Ray Arachelian | Amerika: The land of the Freeh. | \-_    _-/  |
  \|/  |sunder@escape.com| Where day by day, yet another   |  \  --  /   |
<--+-->|                 | Constitutional right vanishes.  |6 _\-  -/_  6|
  /|\  |    Just Say     |                                 |----\  /---- | 
 + v + | "No" to the NSA!| Jail the censor, not the author!|     \/      |
=======/---------------------------------------------------------VI------/
      /  I watched and weeped as the Exon bill passed, knowing that yet /
     / another freedom vanished before my eyes.  How soon before we see/
    /a full scale dictatorship in the name of decency? While the rest /
   /of_the_world_fights_FOR_freedom,_our_gov'ment_fights_our_freedom_/

Ray Arachelian <sunder@escape.com> writes:

> On Wed, 2 Aug 1995, Dr. Dimitri Vulis wrote:
> > terrible. The star should NOT have appeared in a bikini. Yech.
>
> Why not, she had the right 'assets' for that scene, no? 8-D

Tastes vary. If she were my friend, I'd recommend stuffing that bra. :) :) :)
(With something steganographic, of course. :)

> > In a typical suspenseful scene (not a spoiler), the heroine sneaks into an
> > office and sets off a fire alarm. Everyone leaves, including a villaine, wh
> > doesn't log off.
>
> is this way.  Very few care about security.  Here at work I have to fight
> extra hard with idiots who log in and leave their machines -- users with
> Supervisory access!

I once was a consultant at a small financial services firm, and a (young,
disturbed) user was going around playing stupid pranks on unattended PCs. I
mandated the use of screenblankers that kicked in after 3 minutes of inactivity
and required a password to get back. The user would then reboot the PCs; some
password was needed to get onto the LAN, but he'd mess with the local
config.sys's. He eventually got fired and I do something else.

> > (One of the IP bytes was 344, by the way.)

> Re: ip #'s: Yeah, it's like all the phone numbers in every movie are
> 555-xxxx.  Probably they didn't want to get sued by posting a real net
> address and get sued.

I see! I remember reading that they discovered in the 30's that if they used a
real phone number in a movie, some people would actually dial it to see what it
is in real life, so all the phone numbers are in the nonexistent 555 exchange.
I guess if a valid IP number were used, some folks would ping it or something.
I guess byte values>255 are the IP equivalent of 555. Better than 127.0.0.1 -
someone might telnet to 127.0.0.1, then ask mgm/ua whose address this is. :)

> > "hot chats" on an her Mac, and hooks up the text to a voice synthesizer.
>
> can be telnetted into.  But the voice synths are possible.  Apple does
> provide that capability.  You'd have to get the irc client to use it.

My 6yr-old's IBM Aptiva comes with a sound board and the software that reads
English text and pronounces it in much more lifelike manner than the gizmo in
the movie. That gizmo sounded annoyingly computer-like, but had intonations
obviously coming from a human actor.

> it either.  It wasn't much of a "hot" chat.  It could have been much
> steamier.  The sex content of this movie was pretty lame though...

Hotter than any I've had in many, many years...
So, will they ever show some real X-rated hot chat in a real R-rated movie? :)

> > (If they all exchange so much e-mail, why do they bother FedExing diskettes
>
> More secure to fedex a disk.  Nobody on the net can read what's not on
> the net. ;-)  Now if the author of this movie knew about pgp... totally
> different story.

Better yet, if they were shown sending each other PGP-encrypted e-mail over the
Cypherpunks Anonymous Remailer Network... :) :) Maybe in the next movie.

> > (E-mailed from an open-access computer at a computer show, I might add)
>
> Not unlikely.  A lot of trade shows do provide machines with net access
> as demos of the internet.  Though it's usually manned by the ISP and not
> out in the open.

The notion is very realistic (but the flashy displays in the movie were not).
At the recent PC Expo at the Javitz Center in NYC, there were tens of PCs
running various Web browsers to try out. No one was watching over most of them.
I entered the URL telnet://uunet.uu.net:119, and sure enough, got connected.
It accepted 'IHAVE', but I was too lazy to type in an entire Usenet article.
I (and the heroine) could have telnetted to someone's port 25 just as easily.

---

Dr. Dimitri Vulis
Brighton Beach Boardwalk BBS, Forest Hills, N.Y.: +1-718-261-2013, 14.4Kbps

On Thu, 3 Aug 1995, Dr. Dimitri Vulis wrote:

> I once was a consultant at a small financial services firm, and a (young,
> disturbed) user was going around playing stupid pranks on unattended PCs. I
> mandated the use of screenblankers that kicked in after 3 minutes of inactivity
> and required a password to get back. The user would then reboot the PCs; some
> password was needed to get onto the LAN, but he'd mess with the local
> config.sys's. He eventually got fired and I do something else.

Unfortunatly, the lusers here are brain-dead and don't care about 
anything.  They don't even know the first things about DOS.  We do have a 
couple of geniuses who think they know Windoze (or want to learn it) who 
occasionally play with the icons and groups: one such genious once closed 
a group window, then claimed someone "erased it."  What a dork!  The 
worse is that I have to clean up after them no matter how stupid they are.


> I guess byte values>255 are the IP equivalent of 555. Better than 127.0.0.1 -
> someone might telnet to 127.0.0.1, then ask mgm/ua whose address this is. :)

Well, the loopback is only a single IP address.  If they used that, every 
net.entity would have the same IP.  Not too good. :-)

> My 6yr-old's IBM Aptiva comes with a sound board and the software that reads
> English text and pronounces it in much more lifelike manner than the gizmo in
> the movie. That gizmo sounded annoyingly computer-like, but had intonations
> obviously coming from a human actor.

Nope, sounded right the like the Apple MacinTalk II Pro voices.  They've 
got some really cool voices, some even human sounding.  Check it out if 
you get a chance.  Real intonations: you can hear the voice flex, etc.  
There are some voices that follow songs or other tones.  (i.e. Big Ben, 
Bells, etc.)  They sound like they're singing.

> The notion is very realistic (but the flashy displays in the movie were not).
> At the recent PC Expo at the Javitz Center in NYC, there were tens of PCs
> running various Web browsers to try out. No one was watching over most of them.
> I entered the URL telnet://uunet.uu.net:119, and sure enough, got connected.
> It accepted 'IHAVE', but I was too lazy to type in an entire Usenet article.
> I (and the heroine) could have telnetted to someone's port 25 just as easily.

Yep.  Those be the same machines where I dropped my Cypherpunx PC EXPO 
V2.0 disks.  Just left a few dozen infront of each machine as I used 
them.  Sort of the sleight of hand that theives use to lift stuff; only I 
didn't take, I put. >;-)


> Brighton Beach Boardwalk BBS, Forest Hills, N.Y.: +1-718-261-2013, 14.4Kbps

Say, what's on this BBS anyway... (send me email, enough noise on this list.)

=================================================================93=======
 + ^ + |  Ray Arachelian | Amerika: The land of the Freeh. | \-_    _-/  |
  \|/  |sunder@escape.com| Where day by day, yet another   |  \  --  /   |
<--+-->|                 | Constitutional right vanishes.  |6 _\-  -/_  6|
  /|\  |    Just Say     |                                 |----\  /---- | 
 + v + | "No" to the NSA!| Jail the censor, not the author!|     \/      |
=======/---------------------------------------------------------VI------/
      /  I watched and weeped as the Exon bill passed, knowing that yet /
     / another freedom vanished before my eyes.  How soon before we see/
    /a full scale dictatorship in the name of decency? While the rest /
   /of_the_world_fights_FOR_freedom,_our_gov'ment_fights_our_freedom_/

Ray Arachelian writes
>Well, the loopback is only a single IP address.  If they used that, every 
>net.entity would have the same IP.  Not too good. :-)

Nope.  *Any* IP address starting with 127 is a host loopback address
and shouldn't appear outside the host.  This from the "Assigned
Numbers" RFC (STD 2).

127.0.0.1 is only convention.  It's the "first" loopback address.

In message <9o809c19w165w@bwalk.dm.com>, Dr. Dimitri Vulis writes:
[...]
>The notion is very realistic (but the flashy displays in the movie were not).
>At the recent PC Expo at the Javitz Center in NYC, there were tens of PCs
>running various Web browsers to try out. No one was watching over most of them
>I entered the URL telnet://uunet.uu.net:119, and sure enough, got connected.
>It accepted 'IHAVE', but I was too lazy to type in an entire Usenet article.
>I (and the heroine) could have telnetted to someone's port 25 just as easily.

That's odd.  "uunet.uu.net" has had no A records for over a year.
Perhapse you mean "news.uu.net"?

At a recent the-net-is-hot-and-we-want-in show I appear to have
torqued off some sales drones 'cause I managed to get their Kosak-mode
web browser to give me a telnet.

They had left a "search the net" link on their pages (pointing to
Lycos or Info Seek - I don't remember which), and I used it to
locate one of my pages which has a "type the URL" field (it issues
a redirrect).

I guess they didn't realise that if they give you a "global" search
box you can get anywhere as long as you remember enough of the text
on the page...

"Josh M. Osborne" <stripes@va.pubnix.com> writes:
> That's odd.  "uunet.uu.net" has had no A records for over a year.
> Perhapse you mean "news.uu.net"?

Yes, sorry.

---

Dr. Dimitri Vulis
Brighton Beach Boardwalk BBS, Forest Hills, N.Y.: +1-718-261-2013, 14.4Kbps

Tim wrote :
> I saw "The Net" yesterday and was moderately entertained. Lots of leaps of
...
> 
> The portrayal of her job as a "beta tester," with a couple of Mac screens
> running and lots of MacTCP connections, was well done. In fact, maybe the
> most interesting look at computer screens I've seen. (But maybe I'm
> biased...)
As long as you realize it.
:)

[after all, what could beat the scene in Jurassic Park : "This is Unix. I 
 know this..." followed by what looks like a 3-d landing into zany-land.
 In slow motion. ]

-- Serue the SUNite

(hmm. so it's entertaining, mindless and devoid of reality? I'm there!)

> hallyn@cs.hope.edu (Kenshiro) writes:
> [after all, what could beat the scene in Jurassic Park : "This is Unix. I 
> know this..." followed by what looks like a 3-d landing into zany-land.
> In slow motion. ]

Bad example -- it's a real interface to Unix for SGI machines, and you can
pick it up from their ftp site.  It made perfect sense for the girl (Lex?)
to be familiar with it...  I'm sure her doting grandfather (or whatever he
was) wouldn't have bought her a measly Sparcstation for her home computer.

	Jim Gillogly
	Highday, 11 Wedmath S.R. 1995, 05:53