🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Sep14.150328.11198@b11.b11.ingr.com> craig@jido.b11.ingr.com writes:
>Saw [Sneakers] yesterday. I, too, really wish they had gotten some competent
>technical advice.

Ummm... their technical advisor was the A in RSA.  I think most people
would regard him as fairly compentent.  

What matters is not just who the advisor was but how much they
listened to him or her.  Given the constraints of trying to make a
mass market movie on computer security, I think they did a quite
credible job.  Sure, the details of the box are a little impracticle
(it would be software, not hardware, and if it was hardware it probably
wouldn't be surface mounted unless it was in quantity production, etc.).
The important point of the movie was "we are becoming dependent on
cryptography, and that dependency could turn out to be a liability if
we aren't very careful."  I think that's a fairly accurate summary of both
reality and the movie.

(By the way, my mental model of the box is that it has a miniaturized
13 year old kid inside who calls secretaries at the company being
hacked and says "This is Bob in tech support.  I need you to tell me
what your password is.")

>I still managed to enjoy the movie, but I don't think I'd watch it
>again -- unless I wanted to play "how many technical flaws can you
>spot"!

Agreed.  Instead, why not sit down with a copy of _The_Cuckoo's_Egg_,
by Cliff Stoll.  It's a much better story, and everything in the book
actually happened.

-don