Well, Gabbi, Dave and I went to see Firewall tonight. I was plesently surprised. I expected another “oh I’m a hacker” watch me do cool things just by clicking twice on a screen. It wasn’t terribly off it’s rocker for technology. They also didn’t use a floppy disk to hold gigabyets of data. š I noticed the actuall real screen shots of Cisco IOS, and Windows XP. There were a few others too that looked familliar. There were one or two silly tech blunders but overall, for Hollywood it wasn’t to bad. I did call a “deus ex machina” about 20 minutes before they used it. Spoiler: It has to do with the dog.
There were a couple of non tech DUH moments where we wanted to reach up and slap Harrison Ford’s character for missing obvious outs to the situation, but I suppose placed under the strees that he was, I wouldn’t think of them either.
I’m curious as to the point of the list of Tea’s on the whiteboard in one office. “Green Tea”, “Earl Grey”, and a few others I couldn’t make out fast enough. There was a second list on the board too, but I couldn’t catch what it was for either.
OH, and this movie was compleetly sponsered by Dell. The number of product placements were insane.
I’d also like to point out that the number of servers in use by this bank would make Citibank jelous… I’m guessing it was shot on location in a webhosting center or something. I didn’t see it mentioned in the credits.
Overall it was an enjoyable movie. My biggest complaint was that it felt as if it just stopped. As if the studio said.. “Oh… whooops we ran out of money… Just stop it right there, that will do fine. No one will notice if we don’t resolve a bunch of things.”
[spoiler alert]
Ok here is a list of tech blunders and or questionables we/I noticed:
- I’ve never seen a laptop with a built in sim card reader
- How exactly were the bad guys able to remote control HF’s computer to erase the text he was typing, w/o already having comprimised the banks network?
- Why in one scene was the program the crooks were going to use on a USB key, and then the next scene it was a CD?
- Cabling for the removed “maintenence” terminal appeared to be serial, thus negating the use of USB device for program insertion…
- WiFi does not exist everywhere on the planet, although… the bad guys COULD have been using a dell laptop with the built in cellular data service… So its not compleetly impossible.
- Cell phone service in the middle of nowhere? Interesting… This had to work for both the Dog collar, and the villian’s laptop, not to mention the secretarys phone.
- Blocking out a Class B subnet on a router/firewall is NOT going to deterr a hacker for long, especially if they are using random systems compromised by a virus or other method to attack from.
- I don’t think cell phone cameras have the resolution to show a crystal clear picture of Harrison Ford reflected in a monitor.
- The kid’s remote control car should not have affected every TV in the house, especially not those on cable. That’s one seriously high powered transmitter on that thing if it does.
- The fax/printer scan head was a nice touch, but what exactly did he use to interface it to an ipod??? an SBC? I guess it would have to be in order to time the scan head to the flow rate on the screen.
- “Movie OS” OCR software pre designed to read just a specific series of numbers in a “scan”
Ok, so there are a few “leaps of faith” but average Joe is’nt goign to catch those. I know… I’m a geek… Deal with it…
John's Musings 