Hacker Fiction Net

Review of WarGames (1983)

2020-12-28T22:41:16Z

Review of WarGames (1983)

There’s nowhere better to start this blog than with the movie that seriously got me into computers: WarGames from 1983, directed by John Badham and written by Lawrence Lasker and Walter F. Parkes.

Spoiler Alert. Yeah, there are spoilers below.

Hacker Rating

Hacker Realism: ⭐️⭐️⭐️

Hacker Plot Importance: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Hacks: ⭐️⭐️⭐️

Rent or buy on Amazon, Apple, or Google.

Computers Over Humans

The movie starts with two nuclear missile operators at their work stations in an underground bunker. An alarm goes off. The two men are to execute the launch procedure, killing hundreds of thousands of people. The stakes are immense. One of the operators refuses to turn his key to launch the missile.

It was a test, a test of the human factor, and the US decides to let computers take over launch control. Because computer programs don’t have flaws, right?

The Movie’s First Hack

High school whiz kid David Lightman (Matthew Broderick) is late for school because he’s playing arcade games and tops it up by pulling a joke on his teacher. He’s sent to the principal’s office.

While waiting for the principal, Lightman sneaks to check the current password to the school’s computer which he apparently knows is on a note right beside the computer itself. The password ”pencil" is far too simple by today’s security standards, but it’s not unlikely for its time. Neither is the fact that the school uses a shared password. For a similar hack to fly today it would have to be a personal, more complex password at minimum.

Lightman uses the password log in to the school’s computer through his modem and notices that both he and a girl in his class, Jennifer (Ally Sheedy) have received the grade F. He bumps their grades but Jennifer is upset and demands he changes hers back. This introduces the viewers to the moral of hacking.

Brute Force Hacking

An ad for a new computer game catches Lightman’s attention and he wants to get himself a copy for free by connecting to the game company’s computer. He has his computer call all numbers in Sunnyvale, CA, in search of available computers. It's a brute force hack and I find it cool because calling all numbers is a very big task for humans but not so much for a computer. A hacker knows how to leverage the power of the machine. Computers back in those days communicated over phone lines and if you knew the right phone number you could connect.

Curiosity Killed the Cat

He finds a system in Sunnyvale that offers games, but not the game he was looking for.

One of the games is called ”Global Thermonuclear War.” The audience already knows about the newly computerized missile launch system, which makes Lightman come across as naive when he wants to play this game. But why wouldn’t he?

It’s unclear whether online games are common when the movie takes place. Networked, multi-player games such as Multi-User Dungeon, or MUD, did already exist in the early 80s. But in most cases you would connect two computers directly to each other in the same room to have a two-player setup.

The system Lightman finds requires a password. When he tries one, the computer on the other end responds ”Identification not recognized by system. --Connection Terminated--.” He is unable to get access and needs help.

The Idea of a Backdoor

Lightman and Jennifer bring a print-out of the system’s game listing to two computer professionals, Jim (Maury Chaykin) and Malvin (Eddie Deezen).

A side note on Deezen: He's the movie industry's favorite nerd voice, playing the nerdy student in Grease, Mandark in Dexter's Laboratory, and the know-it-all kid in Polar Express. I love Deezen's voice.

Back to WarGames and getting help with that online games password. We’re going to go into detail here because there are at least four things to unpack. Below is the dialog from when Lightman asks the two pros Malvin and Jim about his finding.

Malvin: Wow! Where did you get this?

Lightman: I was trying to break into Protovision. I wanted to see the program for their new games.

Jim: This didn’t come from Protovision.

Malvin: Looks military to me. Definitely military. Probably classified too.

Lightman: Yeah, but if it’s military, why does it have games like Checkers and Backgammon?

Jim: Maybe because those are games that teach basic strategy.

Lightman: Jim, how do I get into that system? I wanna play those games.

Malvin: You’re not supposed to see any of that stuff. That system probably contains the new data encryption algorithm. You’ll never get in there.

Lightman: Hey, I don’t believe that any system is totally secure. I bet you Jim could get in.

Jim: Well, you’ll never get in through the frontline security, but you might look for a backdoor.

Malvin: I can’t believe it, Jim. That girl is standing over there listening and you’re telling her about our backdoors?

Jim: Mr. Potato Head! Backdoors are not secrets.

Lightman: What’s a backdoor?

Jim: Whenever I design a system, I always put in a simple password that only I know about. That way, whenever I wanna get back in, I can bypass whatever security they’ve added on. That’s basically what it is.

Lightman: Yeah?

Jim: OK, if you really want to get in, find out as much as you can about the guy who designed the system.

Four Things To Unpack

From what we have seen from Lightman’s monitor, the printout only has the list of games. Sure, it contains a handful of combat and war games, but it’s hard to understand how Malvin and Jim can deduce that it’s a military system or that encryption is at play just from that list. Maybe online systems were so rare at the time that it was likely a military system?
Then we have ”the new data encryption algorithm.” I bet you they refer to the Data Encryption Standard, DES, that was developed in the mid-seventies. Malvin’s terminology here is unconvincing. Systems don’t ”contain” algorithms, they use them. If it’s the algorithm itself that’s supposedly sensitive, then it’s either wrong because the DES algorithm was made a public standard in 1977, or they need to point out that the particular implementation of the algorithm is sensitive. Sensitive in so far as Lightman might be finding bugs in it. But I think what the writers meant is that the system uses some modern type of encryption which makes it hard to break into. That’s just not what Malvin says.
Lightman’s response to the impossible challenge is good. ”I don’t believe that any system is totally secure.” That’s real hacker mentality.
Finally, the backdoor. When Jim says backdoors aren’t secret, what he means is that the existence of backdoors is not a secret. The backdoor itself, for instance a password, is of course secret. Jim even refers to them as ”a simple password that only I know about.” The important part here is that Lightman is provided with a way in that doesn't require months of work.

Researching the Target

Finding the backdoor into the missile launch system is still hard and Lightman needs to research his target. This is an important task for professional hackers, especially ones that do so called social engineering, i.e. tricking humans into helping with access.

Lightman starts with the listed game ”Falken’s Maze” as his first clue. He goes to the library and discovers that Falken’s Maze was designed by famous researcher Stephen Falken. After a bunch of research and many failed login attempts, he finds the backdoor with the password ”Joshua,” the name of Falken’s deceased son.

The Unintentional Hacker

Lightman is finally able to play Global Thermonuclear War. We as an audience get to see that his gameplay actually triggers war preparations in the US military.

When Lightman later watches the news on TV he realizes that he has caused a real missile alert. He decides to destroy all evidence of his hack but the missile launch system, self-identifying as Joshua, calls Lightman's computer to say that the game is still on and that he needs to make his next move.

The FBI traces the phone connection and comes for Lightman in his house. All seems lost. How is he ever going to get out of this? And how will he be able to stop a global nuclear war?

The Final Hack

Lightman manages to escape through a neat hardware hack which involves a PIN code pad, is rejoined by Jennifer, and hunts down the now nihilist Dr. Falken on an island living by himself. They get Falken to try to stop the war.

Falken is able to convince the US military de-escalate but Joshua is hell-bent on finishing the game and embarks on a brute force attack to find the US launch codes himself when the military command refuses to continue playing.

Step by step Joshua gets closer to finding the code. This implies that you can discover a key or password one character at a time — a popular misconception. Only under special circumstances can you do so.

The final hack is when Lightman teaches Joshua the concept of a game you cannot win by having the computer play an endless streak of tic-tac-toe against itself. This knowledge leads Joshua to realize that the only winning move in ”Global Thermonuclear War” is not to play, an on-the-nose comment on the Atomic Age in which this movie was created.

Remarks

I still love this movie. The computer illiterate Jennifer tagging along the whiz kid Lightman enforces the girl/boy stereotypes of the time. Deliberately snapping out of being critical of that gives me a chance to enjoy how hacking and over-reliance on computer systems form the theme of the movie.

The fact that WarGames influenced President Reagan, and by extension the US cyber defense, shows the impact fiction can have. You can read about that in The Guardian's review of the non-fiction book Dark Territory.

Published June 2021.

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Access Denied and Hard Hacker Fiction

2020-12-28T22:43:58Z

Access Denied and Hard Hacker Fiction

ACCESS DENIED

Something you often hear computer security experts scoff about is “Access Denied” blinking on a screen when a movie character is trying to break in to a system. I assume everyone who reads this uses computers regularly and log in to numerous services. We never see those full screen Access Denied messages, do we?

Authentication is the most well-known piece of computer security. As a matter of fact, I showed in a research study how procurement of software in the public sector often over indexes on authentication in security requirements. The same goes for fiction – always the login screen, always access denied.

Real Hackers Attack the Layer Below

Hackers rarely try to blindly log in to an account. Sure, you can always try common passwords and see if you’re lucky, but luck doesn’t go over well in fiction. Hackers go for the layer below, which is either a bug that lets them fully circumvent authentication or leaked data that lets them reverse engineer a user’s authentication details before they even try to log in.

So why all the Access Denied screens in movies? I think it’s because they are visual and they are explicit. Fiction needs to tell a story effectively and if plausibility of hacking isn’t core, there’s no need to craft something more believable.

Hard Hacker Fiction

In my view, we need more believable hacker fiction, we need hard hacker fiction. That doesn’t exclude speculative elements but it does exclude glossing over how hacking is actually done, what a software bug is, and how computers work.

Authors like Alistair MacLean and Tom Clancy popularized the techno-thriller with immense technical details on their subject matter such as military technology. Likewise, hard science fiction strives for scientific accuracy and logic. I’ll never forget my joy over the accurate silence in space in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.

I’d like to mention author Daniel Suarez who writes what he calls high-tech thrillers. I’ve read his two-part novel series Daemon and FreedomTM which blends virtual and reality in apocalyptic, violent hacker fiction. Good stuff. Just beware that there is a misogynist character in those books – a well-built, convincing character but some are triggered by the presence of such personalities.

Published June 2021.

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Get (Back) Into Reading

2021-08-01T18:47:48Z

Get (Back) Into Reading

A couple of years ago I pitched my work-in-progress hacker thriller to an agent and mentioned that tech geeks will want to read it.

"How's that going to work out? People in tech don't read," was the response.

It both annoyed me and made me sad. But maybe she was right? After all, I had only just gotten back into reading myself.

As my satisfaction of reading has grown, I've been wanting to write about how I did it. So here's my guide.

Reading Is For You

I find it hard to quit on a book I've started reading, even if I don't like it. I've had cases where it made me stop reading all together. I believe it's because I'm a completionist but it could be being frugal ("I paid for this book") or being trapped by a sunk cost fallacy.

Then a friend told me like it is. You read for your enjoyment. You don't owe it to anyone to stick with a book that doesn't work for you. Maybe the language is hard to read? Maybe the characters don't pop? Perhaps you'd rather read some other genre right now?

You will never be able to read even 1% of the world's literature so make the books you read count. Be ruthless and pick up a gem.

Start With Easy Wins

You might want to read Kafka, Lessing, or the whole Wheel of Time series, but you don't have to start there. When I decided to reboot my fiction reading I went for Ian Fleming's novels about James Bond. They're short and I already knew I loved the movies.

Do some crime story reading or revisit a novel you read years ago. Yes, you are allowed to read a book again. I went back to "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" by Solzhenitsyn and I can tell you that I enjoyed it even more as an adult than as required schoolwork.

Pick short books if you know that it's hard to get through a 400-pager. Lately I've started reading short stories – 20-page pieces of fiction.

Watch Out With Recommendations and Gifts

It can be particularly hard to stop reading a book that was warmly recommended to you by a friend or given to you. Someone else has injected their preferences into your reading habits. But you know what? You don't have to read that book. Go back to the stuff you want to read.

Gamify If That's What Makes You Tick

Setting a goal in an app like Goodreads can work wonders for people who thrive on gamification. In my personal case it works because I'm a completionist (a disadvantage turned into an advantage).

Watch out though. Sooner or later you'll start glancing at users who read 50 books per year or 100 books per year. You don't have to. Reading is for you and you have this one great book you're reading right now.

A Few Pages Is A Lot More Than Zero

Crunch time at work, kid being a nuisance, it's late, you have to reach the goal on your fitness tracker. It's easy to find an excuse to not read. But you don't have to read a whole chapter. Just read a couple of pages. It keeps you in the story and makes sure you don't come to a full stop.

Become a Collector

This last year I've found another level of joy in reading physical books – vintage copies. You can go incredibly expensive such as Jane Austen books from the early 1800s at thousands of dollars, but that's not what I'm talking about. I mean like the 1963 vintage paperback of Alistair MacLean's "The Satan Bug" I got for $5 on eBay.

Seeing those pieces of history lined up in my bookshelf makes me want to read. Holding one of them in my hand makes me smile.

Cut Down on TV

The easiest way for me to find time for reading was to cut down on TV series and movies. I still love that stuff but as time has passed, I've discovered that reading gives me more in return, probably because my brain is more active.

Find a Nice Spot To Read

Many read in bed but if you read at other times I encourage you to find a nice spot. Buy an armchair and stake out a corner in your home. It can really enhance the whole experience and make you feel alive. You're prioritizing yourself. (I got a Poäng armchair from IKEA for $99 and I love it.)

Buy Reading Glasses

Bad eyesight creeps up on you, and before you know it you're getting tired while reading because you're straining your eyes. Don't let blurry text get in your way – go check your eyes.

Reading Clubs and Book Clubs

Right before the Covid-19 pandemic hit, I was getting ready to join a local chapter of the Silent Book Club. It's this awesome thing where you go to a cafe or bar together with others, socialize for a little, and then sit and read in silence together. No milestones or homework, just reading as a community.

You can of course join a regular book club with deadlines, or form one. That's not my cup of tea though. Too much pressure. Books are for me.

I hope you too get (back) into reading!

Hackers, Crackers, and Cybercriminals

2021-09-11T16:40:12Z

Hackers, Crackers, and Cybercriminals

What is a hacker?

I call myself a hacker because I find pleasure in pulling off a neat hack. I also get impressed and inspired by great hackers. But I’m not a criminal and criminals typically don’t impress me. What gives?

A Hack Job

Hacking, as in a hack, has existed in English since around year 1200 and refers to a rough cut, blow, or stroke; a shoddy job in woodchopping or carpentry. The Old English word was haccian.

Hacking took on more of a positive tone when it transferred into handling machines in the 1900s; positive in the sense that a hack was a creative, efficient, quick fix.

Nowadays you see that meaning of the word in things like IKEA Hackers, Lifehacker, and growth hacking although the reputation of the latter has taken a turn for the worse as of late.

A Computer Hack

Hacking computers likewise started out as something positive. The earliest hack I personally heard about were students at my university who in the mid 1970s had limited compute cycles to complete their programming course work. One of them made a mistake and created an infinite loop that consumed the whole class’ compute cycles. They then had to hack the mainframe to get new cycles and complete their assignments.

The first “computer party” I went to was called Hackerence and was just a huge gathering of computer nerds with no lawbreaking in sight beyond copying games. I remember taking the train 270 miles/440 km to go there, carrying an old chunky TV as my monitor.

But slowly as computer crime rose, the term hacker took on more negative connotations. Computer folks tried to fight back but it’s mostly been a losing battle.

The Jargon File and The Hacker's Dictionary

Documentation on computer slang started in the mid 70s in something called the Jargon File. It eventually turned into a book called The Hacker’s Dictionary in 1983. Hacker was defined this way:

hacker [originally, someone who makes furniture with an axe] n. 1. A person who enjoys learning the details of programming systems and how to stretch their capabilities, as opposed to most users who prefer to learn only the minimum necessary. 2. One who programs enthusiastically (even obsessively), or who enjoys programming rather than just theorizing about programming.

The Hacker Manifesto

The eighties also featured the classic Conscience of a Hacker essay published 1986 in the Phrack ezine. Today it’s known as the Hacker Manifesto and its second to last paragraph points to more of an anarchist hacker, someone living outside regular norms:

Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is that of curiosity. My crime is that of judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like. My crime is that of outsmarting you, something that you will never forgive me for.

This mentality is where hacking connected with cyberpunk which really became a thing during that decade.

Crackers and Cybercriminals

The Internet Users’ Glossary from 1993 tries to rein in the bad reputation hacker has gotten and points to another word:

cracker A cracker is an individual who attempts to access computer systems without authorization. These individuals are often malicious, as opposed to hackers, and have many means at their disposal for breaking into a system.

I’d say cracker as defined above is pretty spot on for what many nowadays call a hacker.

But hacker still has an aura of leisure or lack of malicious intent. It doesn’t fit the computer break-ins that organized crime and rogue nation states do. That’s where cybercriminal comes in.

What It Means For Fiction

The word hacker comprises both computer wizards and computer criminals and that’s how I use it in fiction. A hacker can be a hero or a villain and it becomes interesting when both hero and villain are hackers, fighting each other.

This text was originally published in the June 2021 issue of the Hacker Chronicles newsletter. Subscribe below!

Review of Johnny Mnemonic (1981, 1995)

2021-10-17T20:45:53Z

Review of Johnny Mnemonic (1981, 1995)

A 1981 short story by William Gibson and a 1995 movie directed by Robert Longo and written by Gibson.

Spoiler Alert. Yeah, there are spoilers below.

Hacker Rating

Hacker Realism: ⭐️ ⭐️

Hacker Importance for the Plot: ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️

Hacks: ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️

Rent or buy on Amazon, Apple, or Google.

The Short Story

The short story is just 22 pages in paperback and features Gibson’s typical dense language and the cyberpunk world which later provided the backdrop for the Sprawl trilogy Neuromancer, Count Zero, and Mona Lisa Overdrive. I got it in print as a part of the 1986 short story collection Burning Chrome.

Johnny Mnemonic in its original form is a great piece with more dirty cyberpunk than the movie, but it doesn’t feature as much hacking so I’ll focus on the movie here and mention when book and movie touch each other.

The Movie Premise(s)

The film's prologue lets us learn that in this future (2021!) people all over the world are suffering from Nerve Attenuation Syndrome, or NAS. It's a fatal epidemic and its cause and cure are unknown. We are also told that corporations rule, opposed only by LoTeks – a resistance movement from the streets who are hackers “in the info-wars.” The corporations defend themselves by hiring Yakuza – a powerful crime syndicate.

Then we meet Johnny Mnemonic (Keanu Reeves) who is a data courier – a person who smuggles data in brain implants. He has a successful career behind him and is on his last assignment, headed off to a hotel in Beijing where customers will provide him the data to transfer to Newark, NJ.

Storage Capacity of the Brain

Heading up to his customers, Johnny connects a small device to his brain. The device speaks to him, saying “Present capacity 80 gigabyte. Doubler loading. Your storage capacity is now 160 gigabyte. Warning, do not exceed capacity.” We later learn that Johnny has had to discard his childhood memories to free up brain space and he has even forgotten his family name.

Thoughts
In today’s world, 80 gigabyte is not that much. It’s roughly the size of three movies in 4k resolution and the brain is thought to have far larger storage capacity than that, in the order of a couple of petabytes, each of which is a million gigabytes.

Still, data storage is different than memories. Data needs to remain intact down to the very last bit whereas human memories are fuzzy, or lossy if you will. I would assume that storing data in Johnny’s brain uses a lot of redundancy to cover up for any bit rot during the hours it takes for him to get to his destination so 80 gigs might be reasonable.

The Data in Johnny’s Head

His customers want Johnny to carry 320 gigabyte of data which will far exceed his already doubled capacity of 160. He fishes out all kinds of equipment and a downward counter for the data transfer to his brain. He tells the customers that when the counter approaches zero, they should take three shots of what’s on the TV in the hotel room.

“They’ll meld with the data and I won’t know what they are. That’s the download code. You get a hardcopy. You fax one copy to your connection on the other side. When I get there, we feed in the code and download. Understand?”

Thoughts
Since these frames are to be taken toward the end of the data transfer to his brain, they can’t be used as a cryptographic key straight up. My reading of this is that Johnny’s equipment generates a crypto key at the start of the transfer, say KeyA, encrypts the data with KeyA as it is transferred to his brain, and then encrypts KeyA with a second key, KeyB, generated from the three frames from the TV. That way, only someone with access to the TV frames can generate KeyB, with it decrypt KeyA, and with KeyA decrypt his brain’s content. That’s similar to the layering where you protect a set of passwords with a main password.

But it doesn’t explain why the data cannot even be downloaded from his brain without the key. Supposedly his implant doesn’t even let go of the data without the right key. That would become a big problem for Johnny if the key was lost, mainly because of the excess data he’s carrying. The longer he keeps that amount of data stored, the higher the risk of his brain malfunctioning, killing him and corrupting the data.

The transfer of 320 gigabyte takes 55 seconds in the movie and it’s done over cable. That’s a transfer speed of 47 gigabit per second which is right up there at modern Ethernet speeds in datacenters.

Tracing the Data Transfer

Problems arise as crime syndicate Yakuza bursts into the hotel room, kills Johnny’s customers, and has him fleeing. Yakuza want what’s in his head, without his body attached. He manages to snatch one of the access code TV frames but needs all three to offload his digital cargo. Will he be able to get the data out of his brain safely and why is Yakuza so desperate to get it?

Johnny gets access to a computer, enters cyberspace, and hacks his way into the phone records of the Beijing hotel from where the TV frames were faxed. The fax destination was a copyshop in Newark but the only data he can retrieve says “Hold for Dr. Allcome. WILL CALL.”

Thoughts
The hack is so abstract that there’s not much to go on. However, the goal and the steps with the phone records and where the data is sent feels realistic. That’s exactly the kind of metadata carriers collect and store, and what an attacker would be able to learn. Let's just gloss over the fact that they’re sending super sensitive data over fax in 2021.

Cyberspace is shown as a 3D graphics space with highways and movement in all directions. People nowadays are so used to Internet access through their smartphones that you don’t need to represent it as a world. But it makes for spectacular visuals.

The Virus

While Johnny is hacking the fax transfer, Yakuza lock onto his network connection and physically locate him. The Yakuza leader issues an order: “Initiate the virus.”

Johnny, who doesn’t know there’s a virus coming for him, calls his friend Strike on the network. Strike says Johnny’s a target. That reads to me like Strike seeing there are ongoing attempts at hacking Johnny’s terminal but it could also be something purely virtual – an attack on Johnny’s avatar.

Johnny: I need to know what I’m holding, Strike. What’s the Yakuza after? Who’s Dr. Allcome?

Strike: All I know is you’ve got a head full of PharmaKom data and they hired the Yakuza to get it out.

Johnny: PharmaKom?

Strike: Shit, they put a virus on us!

PharmaKom is a powerful medical corporation. It’s a bit unclear what it means to get a virus in cyberspace but they at least lose their connection. Yakuza arrive in three cars. Johnny barely makes it out.

The Virtual Human Anna Kalmann

There’s a cutaway scene where boss Takahashi (Takeshi Kitano) from the PharmaKom corporation learns that Anna Kalmann (Barbara Sukowa), founder of PharmaKom and his advisor, only exists in virtual form. She’s been “imprinted to PharmaKom’s natural net installation in Zurich prior to onset of morbidity,” her “neural net persona has Swiss citizenship under the artificial intelligence laws of 2006,” and “she advises the current board from this state of being.”

Thoughts
While fascinating, the movie doesn’t really explore this state of existence. Anna shows up a few times and is pulling strings but remains illusive. Other stories such as Ready Player One and The Matrix go much deeper into virtual life.

Side note: Takahashi refers to Anna Kalmann as “a ghost in the machine.” That could be a reference to the sci-fi movie Ghost In the Machine from 1993 or a reference to Ghost in the Shell which is a manga story that was released as a movie the same year as Johnny Mnemonic.

Nerve Attenuation Syndrome, NAS

Johnny gets help from Jane (Dina Meyer) who saved his life early in the movie and wants him to survive so he can pay her. She’s named Molly Millions in the short story (a much better name) and kicks ass in both.

Jane takes Johnny to an underground physician and we learn that PharmaKom is charging $2k for treatment of NAS. $2k in 1995 equals $3.5k today and is still a lot of money in parts of the world but it’s kind of telling that it is supposed to sound outrageously expensive for healthcare in the US.

The physician tells Johnny that Dr. Allcome is used as in “Dr. all come to ward 7” – code speak used to not spook patients. But in this case, the fax for Dr. Allcome was intended for the underground healthcare organization the physician is working for where they treat people who have NAS and can’t afford PharmaKom’s $2k. They need what’s in Johnny’s head.

“You’re carrying the cure for NAS. PharmaKom’s complete R&D on their cure for NAS. Plus the records of the field trials to prove that it works.”

Thoughts
NAS is said in the movie to be caused by information overload from using the Internet. The closest I can come to think of is the ongoing research into how social networks affect us, with worrying scientific conclusions like this one in the American Journal of Health Behavior:

Participants were characterized as "Wired," "Connected," "Diffuse Dabblers," "Concentrated Dabblers," and "Unplugged." Membership in 2 clusters - "Wired" and "Connected" - increased the odds of elevated depression and anxiety symptoms.

Jones the Cyborg Dolphin

Jane also connects Johnny with the LoTeks – the rebellion opposed to corporate rule living in the outskirts of the city in slum-like conditions.

The LoTek’s mastermind code breaker is Jones – an electronically enhanced dolphin that used to be part of US military defense. “Jones is set up to sample software from enemy subs. Infrasound scan. Right through the hull.”

Jones tries to hack into Johnny’s brain and get the cure for NAS out safely with the one TV frame Johnny has. However, Yakuza shows up and starts shooting anti tank missiles at LoTek HQ which disrupts Jones’s hacking attempts.

Thoughts
With Jones, the author Gibson connects the movie with his old short story. In the book, Jones’s technology is called Squids – superconducting quantum interference detectors. “Used them in the war to find submarines, suss out enemy cyber systems.” It’s by far the story’s most imaginative part but neither short story nor movie makes much of it. The dolphin is key to the resolution but we don’t get to explore this fascinating technology.

Side note: Jones makes me think of the classic sonar pings in submarine movies like Das Boot. I have started researching sound travel in ocean water but that’s for my own fiction writing so you’ll have to wait.

The Final Hack

For the final scene and hack, Takahashi, Anna Kalmann, and the Yakuza all show up and it gets messy. Takahashi eventually gives Johnny the remaining two TV frames with his dying breath.

Johnny is told by LoTek leader J-Bone (Ice-T) that “the only way is to hack your own brain, then loop it through Jones.”

Johnny goes into cyberspace to try to hack his own brain but PharmaKom puts up a fight and “initiates” a virus. Johnny then creates a mirror image of himself in cyberspace to make the virus go for the copy. Jones arrives as a virtual dolphin and together they decipher the last TV frame, download PharmaKom’s data, and broadcast the cure for NAS to the world.

The short story contains a resolcing hack by Jones and does a better job of it with a visual reveal in text (I won’t spoil that particular part for you).

Thoughts
The high pace required for a climactic ending is a challenge for hacker fiction since hacking isn't fast. Unless you mean just executing an already packaged hack in which case it takes less than a second.

The mirror image hack sounds like what’s called a honeypot in cybersecurity, with which you lure the attacker to target a system that you don’t care about. The broadcast of the cure for NAS makes me remember the failed attempts at restricting export of strong cryptography in the 90s. The most famous hack against that restriction was printing the crypto source code on t-shirts and wearing them as you travelled – data courier style like Johnny Mnemonic!

Remarks

A beautiful, intriguing word – mnemonic. The dictionary explains it as “a device such as a pattern of letters, ideas, or associations that assists in remembering something.” A mnemonic I learned in school was “I before E except after C” for spelling words like thief and receive. In the scope of Gibson’s story, I interpret mnemonic as a bridge between the plastic human mind and the rigid structure of computer data – the brain needs help storing and emitting exact information, and that help is some form of mnemonic.

Unsurprisingly, the premise of Johnny Mnemomic and the cyberspace/hacker pieces of it are still imaginative. Gibson is one of the masters of hacker fiction and has a great skill for creating stories of what could happen.

I had to review this movie this year since present time matches when the story takes place. Setting a specific date for your futuristic fiction has pros and cons. Audiences love envisioning something that might happen in their lifetime or just thinking of what’s possible in ten or fifty years. But the real world catches up faster than you think and all the things that progress differently risk becoming comical or confusing in the piece of fiction.

William Gibson talked about this science fiction challenge in a 2011 interview:

One of the funniest things about Neuromancer, which I wrote in 1984, is that there are no cell phones. If I were a 14-year-old reading it today, I’d be about two chapters in and think, “What happened to all the cell phones?” Becoming quaint so quickly in science fiction is unavoidable. Either we won’t see the technologies that are emerging ahead of us, or we won’t be able to see the uses that people will put them to, which are almost never what they were intended for.

The cyberpunk parts with LoTeks, slum, and violence are not very exciting to me even though I do love cyberpunk in general. It’s just not well executed. The movie’s hacking parts are highly visual and use keywords such as virus but the one hacking snippet in the short story is actually better than what the movie has to offer. What’s lacking here is any kind of clever reveal – something to make the viewer go “Aha” and get it. The short story has a little tiny bit of that in that Jones the dolphin actually finds a code which is connected to the character who chose it (no TV frames there).

I didn’t mention Dolph Lundgren in my review but he does play an over the top character called “The Preacher.” I’d say it’s the most colorful part of the movie. Fun fact: This was Lundgren’s last Hollywood appearance until The Expendables in 2010.

This text was originally published in the July 2021 issue of the Hacker Chronicles newsletter. Subscribe below!

Review of Sneakers (1992)

2021-11-22T16:55:39Z

Review of Sneakers (1992)

Sneakers is one of the golden trio in silver screen hacker fiction. It was directed by Phil Alden Robinson and written by Robinson, Walter Parkes, and Lawrence Lasker. Parker and Lasker also wrote the script for WarGames which makes them legend in this field.

Spoiler Alert: Yeah, there are spoilers below.

Hacker Rating

Hacker Realism: ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️

Hacker Importance for the Plot: ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️

Hacks: ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️

Rent or buy on Amazon, Apple, or Google.

The Opening Hack

The first scene is from December 1969(!) back when Nixon was president. The young hackers Cosmo and Marty break into a computer system and transfer funds from the Republican Party to the Black Panthers. Then they donate President Nixon’s personal wealth to The National Association to Legalize Marijuana.

The scene signals a mix of mockery, political drive, naïveté, and Robin Hood mentality. Cosmo and Marty even say they’re going to change the world. The FBI busts their hideout and arrests Cosmo, but Marty gets away.

Thoughts
I used to work for banks and a major reason for slow transfers and “banking days” was the ability to run fraud detection on full daily batches. That way their algorithms could do more of a complete picture analysis. The kind of money grabs featured in the opening scene are hard but I don’t know what checks were in place in the late 60s.

Several members of the Black Panthers were either imprisoned or killed in gunfights with law enforcement in 1969. But it was also the year the Panthers instituted the Free Breakfast for Children Programs. So the politics of the opening hack could point either way. You see the political hacker mindset today in the decentralized Anonymous hacktivist collective.

Bank Branch Hacking

The movie jumps to present day, which is the early 90s. Marty (Robert Redford) is now the leader of a Mission Impossible-style hacker team.

We see them disable a bank's intruder alarm system by breaking its electric circuit, then trigger the fire alarm with a small smoke bomb in a safety deposit box.

The third piece is to intercept the guard’s distress call and stall him while team members disable the fire alarm from inside. Everything goes back to normal, but with three hackers on premises.

The day after, Marty enters the bank as a customer and withdraws $100k. He takes it upstairs where bank management awaits him. Jaws drop as he produces the cash and gives them a one sentence summary of all the holes in their security. The heist was a paid penetration test, or pentest.

Thoughts
The fire alarm trick is a diversion attack which are especially effective when combined with rare events and high risks. Such attacks are very popular in heist and spy stories.

Pentesting is a common profession among hackers these days. You get to use almost all your hacking skills, trying to break in in a legal way, and get paid for it. But it can be risky. Two people pentesting the Dallas County courthouse tripped an alarm and got arrested. They were charged with trespassing which could have resulted in seven years behind bars.

Working for the NSA

The National Security Agency (NSA) shows up at Marty’s office and coerce him into helping them. They know his 1969 past and he engages to get off the hook.

The agents explain their task to Marty. A cryptographer named Gunter Janek (Donal Logue) recently received an unusually large grant traced to Russia. NSA knows Janek is creating a black box called Setec Astronomy and they want it. They can't steal it themselves since they are not allowed to operate domestically. They're also not allowed to ask the FBI to do it for them. Ergo they need outside help – Marty’s help.

Thoughts
The movie came out right after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. But Parker and Lasker got the idea for the movie back in 1981 when doing research for WarGames. I posit that the script started out as a Soviet vs USA story and was changed last minute as the Cold War ended. It's hard to remain relevant when you create present day fiction. Imagine all the manuscripts that have had to be adjusted after the Covid-19 outbreak.

Asking a civilian like Marty to steal the black box for the US government feels farfetched. Sure, I would buy it if Marty was the only one capable of doing it or if the NSA didn't want to risk international relations. But they say aren't allowed. Pfft.

Cryptanalysis

Marty attends a lecture by Janek together with his old girlfriend Liz (Mary McDonnell) who knows cryptography. Her conclusion is that Janek has found a way to break modern encryption.

Thoughts
There are a lot of terms in Janek's lecture which I can’t decipher(!). It was too long since I took classes in number theory and cryptography so I can't tell if the terms are mumbo jumbo. But there's always a worry that security agencies find and exploit weaknesses in security standards. It would indeed be a top threat if an adversary could decrypt all data communications.

Breaking encryption may sound like something that never happens outside fiction. But it happens all the time in a field of research called cryptanalysis. It's slow though. Discoveries are discussed for years before they become practical problems.

A real world example: The MD5 algorithm was designed by Prof. Rivest in 1991-1992. It was considered secure and put to industrial use. Already 1993, its first minor weakness was published. 1996 that weakness was found to be more profound and researchers recommended switching to a replacement. 2004 a practical attack was demonstrated – one hour to break MD5 on a high-end IBM compute cluster. That's how long (public) cryptanalysis takes. And 15 years later, 2019, a quarter of content management systems were still using MD5 to protect passwords. Details on Wikipedia.

Shoulder Surfing

Marty gets his team onboard and they start investigating Janek. They watch Janek sit down by his computer from afar. His position allows them to watch him type in his PC password. However, Janek’s coworker and lover Elena Rhyzkov (Lee Garlington) obscures the view as she seduces Janek.

More important than Janek's password is the discovery that the black box is hidden in his answering machine. The team manages to steal the black box through social engineering.

Thoughts
Stealing a password by watching it be entered is called shoulder surfing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoulder_surfing_(computer_security). A significant protection against shoulder surfing is biometric authentication, such as your fingerprint. But it's also a good idea to not have your screen or keyboard visible through windows.

A more intriguing type of information theft at a distance is electro-magnetic emanations. Monitors, printers, and other electronic devices leak electro-magnetic signals when you use them, and such signals can be picked up several meters away. Here's a 12-year-old video of a lab setup to read what someone is typing on their keyboard. Don't be surprised if I include such a hack in a novel. :)

Decryption

Team member Whistler (David Strathairn) plays around with the black box and discovers that it’s indeed a black box. Not as in a box that’s black, but the term black box. It’s a machine that is able to break into the encryption used by all major US government systems.

Marty’s team successfully uses the black box to access the Federal Reserve, the US national power grid, and national air control. We see screen content going from unreadable ciphertext to readable plaintext. This level of access makes them realize this is the most dangerous piece of equipment on earth.

Thoughts
The movie is a little muddy on how the black box works so I’ll look at it from three angles.

Depicting Decryption

First, there's the screen content transform from ciphertext to plaintext. It looks nice, but is very unlikely to match any real world decryption. Decryption is typically done from one end to the other so a better reveal would be from the top, row-by-row.

Transport Security

Second, I started thinking of what kind of crypto this can be. The movie is from 1992 and what we nowadays refer to as TLS or HTTPS came a couple of years later. The systems they connect to likely use Secure Data Network System (SDNS) which was developed by NSA, NIST, and others in the late 1980s. Here’s a paragraph from a 1989 technical report on SP4, Secure Data Network System Transport Protocol:

The Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) standards being adopted by government and industry make it possible to interconnect computer systems manufactured by different vendors. Maintaining the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of data transmitted between these interconnected computers poses new problems. Users of networked computers need assurance that the systems with which they are communicating are not only "open”, but also secure from unauthorized modifications, undetected loss, and unauthorized disclosure. Standard security protocols must provide for the verification of the identities of both the senders and receivers of data to ensure that computers and connecting communications are secure.

No Login Step

Finally, the protection scheme they're hacking wouldn’t make sense without a login step. But the black box isn't a password cracker, it's a crypto cracker. Maybe they imply two-way crypto keys, authenticating both parties when the connection is made? And the magic of Janek’s black box can produce the right keys?

The Evergreen Question for Ethical Hackers

They hand off the box to the two NSA agents. Team member Crease (Sidney Poitier) notices in the newspaper that Janek has been killed. Mighty suspicious. Too late, the team looks into who the NSA reps really are and they’re not from the NSA at all.

Thoughts
We as an audience are fooled by the fake NSA agents but it's a little weird that Marty and his team are. You must have a callback process for such situations. Someone claims to represent XYZ, you call XYZ and double check.

This highlights the question any ethical hacker needs to ask themselves – who am I hacking this system for? Being hired to pentest can be very risky if the security department says company executives must not know because they are part of the test.

Hacking by Sound

After a series of events, Marty finds himself at the mercy of his old hacker accomplice Cosmo (Ben Kingsley). It turns out Cosmo has worked for organized crime ever since he was released from prison, and he's behind the fake NSA agents who convinced Marty to steal Janek's box.

Cosmo tries to convince Marty to join his plans for criminal use of the box. He still wants to change the world! Marty refuses. Cosmo rigs evidence to suggest Marty has killed a Russian diplomat before releasing him.

The team plus Liz gear up to fight back. They call the real NSA and broker a deal to offload the black box once they get it back from Cosmo. They use audio measurement of the voice on the other side gauge if the NSA rep is lying.

Next step is to find Cosmo’s headquarters. As captive, Marty was transported there in the trunk of a car. He remembers all kinds of noises, such as recurring bumps because of seams in the concrete on the freeway. In combination, those sounds narrow it down to one specific bridge he must have crossed. (They’re in the San Francisco Bay Area which means I happen to know all four bridges they talk about– Golden Gate, Bay, San Mateo, and Dumbarton.)

Whistler not only finds the HQ–an office complex under the cover name ToyTronics–but uses a directional microphone to listen through the windows of the building. He hears someone say “My voice is my passport. Verify me.” which they decide it is a “voiceprint ID,” or voice recognition system for building access. Whistler also finds a room that is “bursting with ultrasonic” which indicates some kind of intruder alarm system.

Thoughts
On lie detection via voice analysis, there is something called voice stress analysis. But according to a 2007 US Dept. of Justice study, it's “no better than flipping a coin when it comes to detecting deception regarding recent drug use.” Furthermore, it’s not believable that Marty’s team could have pulled this off with 90s software over a 90s multi-hop phone line.

Listening in on the HQ is different though. Laser microphones can record vibrations in windows which reveal the sounds from inside. There are of course defeaters that distort those vibrations too. I think this hack is good because it shows real surveillance risks.

Elimination

We have arrived at the final act: Get access to ToyTronics by beating the voice recognition system, then beat the alarm system to get the box.

The plan is to access the room with the alarm through the office next door. They figure out who works there by what looks like elimination. The lights go out in the office in the evening, two people come out of the building shortly thereafter, and no one else comes out for 18 minutes. Next evening, lights go out, one person comes out, and no one else comes out for 22 minutes.

Thoughts
This is a lost opportunity. Since only one person comes out the second evening, they don’t need elimination. It would have been nicer if two people came out both evenings but only one of them overlapped. That’s real elimination.

Dumpster Diving

The person in the target office is a guy named Werner Brandes and they find out his home address through his driver’s license registration. The next step is what’s called dumpster diving–a popular hacker art.

Brandes’s trash reveals that he does online dating, or is a “Compudater” as it’s called in the movie. Liz becomes the bait and sets up a date. Her job is to get Brandes to say each word in “Hi, my name is Werner Brandes. My voice is my passport. Verify me.” so that they can stitch it together and play it back to the voice recognition system.

Marty finds an old Russian diplomat whom he thinks duped him. They go on a car ride and look at photos of spies. Marty recognizes one of them. They’re stopped by supposed FBI agents. Marty gets out of the vehicle. The agent takes his gun and shoots the Russian diplomat.

Thoughts
I again doubt the audio fidelity of the recordings Liz does of Brandes’s voice. They wouldn't be viable to fool voice recognition today. But maybe in the 90s. Or maybe Whistler has a way to enhance the audio quality.

The Final Hack: Beating the Motion Detector

The motion sensor in Cosmo’s office checks both for heat differentials and for motion. Marty needs to move painstakingly slow and they raise the temperature in the office to 98.6F/37C to make Marty’s body invisible.

He gets the box but is caught. Through a series of complications, the team busts out and eventually hands the box to the NSA. Marty has redeemed himself in the eyes of the government.

Thoughts
Moving slowly to beat the motion part isn’t that exciting but the hack of the heating system is neat. I encourage you to watch the MythBusters episode on beating motion detectors. Here’s the most surprising result: YouTube

Remarks

This movie is a loving portrait of the profession of penetration testers and ethical hackers. It also has a nice heist plot à la Mission Impossible and features the cleverness of a hacker personality.

Liz as the only woman character taking on the stereotypical role of femme fatale is sexist, plain and simple. And the references to NSA, CIA, and FBI are too on the nose.

It’s categorized as a comedy, and sure, there are plenty of jokes in it. But that’s not what it’s remembered for. I think the movie's main merit is the introduction of the professional hacker-for-hire. That role is under explored in fiction. I know several ethical hackers and the stories they tell are mind blowing.

Checkout CrimeReads' recent review of Sneakers which offers a different perspective, focused on characters, plot, and genre: Let's Talk About Sneakers, the Most Charming, Baffling Espionage/Heist Movie of the 1990s

This text was originally published in the September 2021 issue of the Hacker Chronicles newsletter. Subscribe below!

Review of The Matrix (1999)

2021-12-14T16:21:41Z

Review of The Matrix (1999)

I'm super pumped for the fourth Matrix movie – The Matrix Resurrections – to be out late December. So it's about time I publish a hacker review of the original movie!

The Matrix was released in 1999 and was written and directed by The Wachowskis. I still remember my excitement watching The Matrix the first time. Oh boy. The special effects were mesmerizing, the clothes and sunglasses envy-inducing, and the villain masterful. But I didn't see it as a hacker movie at the time. There was the opening with programmer Thomas Anderson, but the rest was to me dystopian science fiction without hacking.

As we shall see, I was wrong.

Spoiler Alert: Don't read this if you want to watch The Matrix spoiler-free.

Hacker Rating

Hacker Realism: ⭐️ ⭐️

Hacker Importance for the Plot: ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️

Hacks: ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️

The Origins of the Matrix

Readers of Hacker Chronicles should know William Gibson by now. His masterpiece Neuromancer is where the matrix comes from. There the matrix is the virtual reality space where the story's protagonist Case hacks.

The name copy and other similarities with Neuromancer made a friend of mine outraged about The Matrix back in 1999. "Plagiarism!" he shouted as we left the movie theater. I wouldn't call it that but Gibson needs to be mentioned.

The Competing Movies

The Wachowskis weren't the only ones working on dystopian virtual/artificial reality movies in the late 90s.

Dark City came out a year before and is said to have influenced The Matrix.

The Thirteenth Floor came out less than two months after The Matrix.

Opening: Thomas Anderson as a Hacker

The Matrix opens with Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss) barely escaping after her phone line was traced. She and Cypher (Joe Pantoliano) are monitoring Thomas Anderson who Trinity says is The One.

Thomas Anderson is a hacker with the handle Neo (Keanu Reeves). He has fallen asleep by his computer at home and wakes up to a message on his screen. "Wake up, Neo… The Matrix has you… Follow the white rabbit."

The white rabbit gets Neo to a club where Trinity finds him. Neo recognizes her as an elite hacker who "cracked the IRS D-base." Trinity warns him that he's being watched but also says a man named Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) can help him answer the question he's asking: "What is the matrix?"

Thoughts
Neo actually says to Trinity that he thought she was a guy. It's often surprising to see the person behind a handle which makes me think of the 1993 meme "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog".

Cracking the IRS D-base sounds like breaking into the database(s) of the American federal tax authority. This establishes that Neo is tapped into the underground hacker community and that Trinity is a hacker too.

Agent Smith and the Tracer Bug

Morpheus tries to help Neo escape but Neo flakes and is captured by Agent Smith (Hugo Weaving) and his two henchmen.

Smith wants Neo to help them find the terrorist Morpheus. When Neo refuses, Smith implants a tracer bug in him – he's now "bugged."

Thoughts
Hackers are often referred to as cybercriminals (see my blog post) and from there some take it a couple of steps further and call them terrorists. You can certainly commit acts of terror through hacking, such as the Ukraine power grid hack. But Agent Smith seems to consider anything threatening the matrix to be a terrorist threat.

The tracer bug is interesting when you look back at it after learning what the matrix is. Agents and the machines that control the matrix are not able to trace Trinity, Morpheus, and the others when they manifest in the matrix. That's why they need Neo's help finding Morpheus. But they are able to follow Neo in his regular life. This implies one of two things: Either the matrix is so complex that the agents lack the means of following Neo all the time (unless he's bugged) or Morpheus has the capability to hide Neo should they decide to meet.

Tracing someone online is an interesting challenge. Humans need an access point to the virtual world, or the internet if you will. That's called the client and can be your smartphone or laptop. The most common way of tracing a client is to place a tracking ID on it, include that tracking ID in network requests, and look at from which internet addresses that tracking ID is sent. That way you can follow a client as it moves in the physical world. I assume the tracer bug in Neo's body emits a tracking ID to the agents as he moves in the matrix.

Morpheus Offers One Of Two Pills

Trinity and Switch (Belinda McClory) rescue Neo and extract the bug from him before taking him to see Morpheus. Morpheus tries to explain that the matrix is "a prison for your mind." He offers Neo one of two pills – blue pill and he goes back to his existing life, red pill and he gets to exit this world and see the matrix. Neo takes the red pill.

Morpheus explains to Neo that "the pill you took is part of a trace program. It's designed to disrupt your input/output carrier signal so we can pinpoint your location."

Thoughts
In hacker terms, and to me, the red pill represents understanding how computers and the internet works. I have the privilege of knowing a lot about that stuff and for everyone who does, it changes your perspective. You realize there are crufty, fragile parts of what whole societies rely on. I remember famous hacker Rsnake giving a talk on the actual top security risks on the internet. On his list was the fact that the company Verisign controls the top-level domain ".com" and thus every .com domain on the web. Learning that is kind of like taking a red pill.

Once Morpheus says that the pill is part of a program, we get a glimpse at the virtual aspect of the matrix. In fact, all we see when in the matrix is software. This means that Agent Smith's bug was software too. Morpheus' reference to carrier signal sounds a lot like a mobile client in a network. But he's not interested in tracing Neo in the matrix, he wants to find Neo's physical body in the grid of cocoons. It's like instead of the carrier tracing your smartphone, you trace your smartphone's outgoing signal back to the carrier and find your customer account. There you can see everything the carrier knows about you, how profitable you are to them, how other smartphones are moving, and so on – you can see their matrix.

Breaking Out of the Matrix

Neo is taken to an adjacent room where Morpheus's team is instructed to get online. Neo sees a broken mirror mend, touches it, and finds that it is not only flexible but sticks like a thick liquid to his hand and starts spreading. He almost suffers cardiac arrest before they get him online.

He wakes up as a broiler in a huge grid of cocooned humans. A service droid discovers him and he is disconnected from the machinery and flushed through pipes into a sewer. Morpheus's ship the Nebuchadnezzar picks him up.

Thoughts
Pinpointing Neo's location doesn't explain why his body is about to collapse. However, remember that everything we've seen in the movie so far has been the simulated matrix world. It's software, and Morpheus's team is hacking Neo's simulation to get him out of it. That "breaks" his reality which explains the stress his nervous system experiences.

First Time in the Real World

After being in recovery for quite some time, Neo wakes up and is shown around the Nebuchadnezzar.

"This is the core, where we broadcast our pirate signal and hack into the matrix," Morpheus says.

They connect Neo to their computer system through the jack in the back of his skull and he meets Morpheus in a completely white space – the Construct. "Right now we're inside a computer program?" Neo asks. He is.

Morpheus shows him a video clip of reality as he knew it up until the red pill. "The world as it was at the end of the 20th century. It exists now only as part of a neural interactive simulation that we call the matrix."

As Neo is shown how destroyed and desolate the real world actually is, Morpheus shares the pieces of history that he knows. Humans created artificial intelligence, a race of intelligent machines was created, war broke out, humans scorched the sky to block sunlight and deprive the machines of solar power, and the machines responded by making humans into their enslaved power source.

Thoughts
The Nebuchadnezzar's pirate signal isn't really explained and the way they hack into the matrix is vague. We know from previous scenes that they enter and leave through the 1999 phone network in the matrix. A pirate signal could just mean illegitimate signal. But that signal carries the whole simulation of the matrix back to the team back on the ship and lets them interact with it live. That's a lot of bandwidth for a 90s phone line.

The matrix is obviously connected to every human in the machines' farm so maybe the specific phones Morpheus's team transports through only serve as authentication, proving to the operator that it's a real team member on the other end.

Bending the Rules

"When the matrix was first built, there was a man born inside who was able to change whatever he wanted, to remake the matrix as he saw fit. It was he who freed the first of us. Taught us the truth," Morpheus tells Neo.

He continues saying the man on the inside died but the oracle prophesized his return which will destroy the matrix and end the war.

Neo learns martial arts through the machine interface and is put in a dojo to train against Morpheus.

The sparring program has basic rules like gravity. Morpheus tells Neo that these rules are no different than the rules of the matrix, or of a piece of software. "Some of them can be bent, others can be broken."

Thoughts
This man born on the inside sounds like an insider adding a classic backdoor or even a logic bomb. I.e. someone on the inside has deliberately weakened the matrix and set up certain conditions under which the whole thing would break.

The hardest part to fit into this model of hacking is the oracle. Something in the matrix that vaguely predicts things. Maybe she's the main scheduler of tasks so she knows what's coming?

As for the sparring scene, I consider it key to the whole movie. It is where Morpheus tells Neo to start hacking the matrix – to bend and break the rules of the software. I explored the hacker mindset of breaking rules and expectations in my August newsletter The Mystery of the Hack and the Negative Bookshelf. The dojo is where it is revealed that The Matrix is indeed a hacker movie.

The Lady in Red and the Agents

The next training phase involves agents. Neo is taken through a program where a voluptuous woman in a red dress catches his attention in a crowd and when Morpheus tells him to instead look behind, he is faced with Agent Smith's gun at point blank range.

Morpheus explains that agents are sentient programs. "They can move in and out of any software still hardwired to their system. That means that anyone we haven't unplugged is potentially an agent."

These sentient programs are the gatekeepers of the matrix and soon Neo will have to fight them.

"Their strength and speed are still based in a world that is based on on rules. And because of that, they will never be as fast or strong as you can be."

Thoughts
Software that runs on our real world laptops and smartphones runs on top of an operating system such as Windows or iOS. Each piece of software runs in at least one process and such processes can be repurposed to run any software. In fact, that's exactly what software exploits do to make a benign piece of software become malicious. The agents' ability to take over any unplugged human in the matrix sounds like such repurposing. Now, since these sentient programs seem deliberate – they are supposed to be able to police the matrix – this indicates a supported way for them to roam the matrix and inject themselves into processes.

This idea is further supported by the fact that the agents have to follow the rules of the matrix. They aren't able to hack the matrix themselves, they are only given specific super powers in it.

I think Neo eventually learns how to exploit the agents' injection mechanism. We'll get to that in one of the last scenes.

The Oracle and Deja Vu

Morpheus and Trinity take Neo to the Oracle (Gloria Foster) in the matrix. She reads his hands. "Sorry kid. You got the gift but it looks like you're waiting for something."

She suggests that he might be the one in his next life. When Neo chuckles and says Morpheus almost had him convinced he was the one, she says Morpheus still believes it and will sacrifice his life to save Neo. Neo will have to choose who of them survives.

A logical choice with two possible outcomes.

The team gathers to exit the matrix. Cypher has made a deal with the agents to leave his dull life in the real world and go back into the matrix as someone important and rich. For that he has promised to provide them with Morpheus.

Neo happens to see a black cat shiver and meow twice in the exact same way. When he says he just experienced deja vu, the others get worried. Trinity explains. "A deja vu is typically a glitch in the matrix. It happens when they change something."

A police force shows up and then the agents. Morpheus engages an agent to save Neo and gets captured. But Cypher's plans fail and he is killed.

Thoughts
The choice the oracle says Neo must face is his ultimate test. Two bad outcomes. Can he bend the rules and pick a third choice instead?

The deja vu part is brilliant. Many humans can relate to deja vu and find it mysterious. The audience is reminded that they themselves might be trapped in a matrix.

Explaining it as a glitch is interesting. The results are often inexplicable when there's an error or a glitch in a computer system. You don't get small changes like seeing the same thing twice, you get garbage on the screen, crashes, or wildly erroneous results. However, one way to look at the deja vu glitch is that there are rigid rules still in place and a change still results in a reasonable virtual experience. If humans where instead to see garbled pixels, they would probably start questioning what's going on. Deja vu is small enough to be overlooked.

Hacking Morpheus

The agents connect wires to two pads on Morpheus's head and inject him with a liquid that looks like mercury. The team back on Nebuchadnezzar is monitoring his brain activity as Agent Smith starts to interrogate him. Neo asks what they're doing to Morpheus.

"They're breaking into his mind. It's like hacking a computer, all it takes is time."

It's explained that hacking a mind shows as the "alpha patterns" changing.

Every captain like Morpheus has access codes to Zion's mainframe computer which is what the agents are after.

Thoughts
Alpha waves are a type of brainwave – rhythmic patterns of neural activity in the central nervous system. Alpha wave activity is typical in our awake state but also during REM sleep. Deep sleep instead features delta waves [ref].

We get a brief look at a screen onboard the Nebuchadnezzar where it's shown how a hacked brain's alpha waves change. My impression is that they mean hacking someone's brain is getting it into a sleep-like state while the subject is still awake.

There is something called alpha wave intrusion when alpha waves appear during non-REM sleep when delta waves are expected. But that seems to be the opposite of what the agents do.

Climax and Ending

Neo and Trinity go back in to try to save Morpheus before the agents hack him. They bring guns, lots of guns, and break into the building where Morpheus is held. Up on the roof, Neo dodges an agent's bullets by moving super fast. He is challenging the rules of the matrix.

They get Morpheus out of the building through a daring helicopter stunt and Trinity and Morpheus manage to leave the matrix through a phone booth in a desolate subway station. However, Agent Smith shows up before Neo gets out. Neo continues to bend the rules and proves a match for Smith.

The Nebuchadnezzar is attacked by sentinels and their only defense is an electro magnetic pulse, or EMP. Such a pulse will sever the link to Neo in the matrix, killing him. He has to get out before the EMP.

Agent Smith reaches the room with Neo's exit phone first and shots Neo as he enters. Neo flatlines. The other two agents appear and confirm that Neo is gone by checking his pulse.

Trinity whispers to Neo's connected body on the Nebuchadnezzar that she loves him and that proves that he is the one since the oracle said she'd fall in love with the one. That restarts his heart and he wakes up in the matrix.

The agents who were about to leave can't believe their eyes and empty their clips in another attempt to kill him. Only this time, the rules of the matrix no longer apply to him and he stops the bullets mid-air.

Agent Smith attacks Neo with his fists but finds he doesn't have a chance. Neo jumps into him and takes over his being. The two remaining agents flee.

Thoughts
Remember how Morpheus said that agents "can move in and out of any software still hardwired to their system." That is what Neo's final hack is about. He has figured out how to exploit the superuser features of the matrix. The machines' policing power in the matrix – their ability to take over any human – is there for attackers to use too. Agent Smith was in someone's body in that final scene and Neo took it over.

Remarks

Did I say I love this movie? It holds up remarkably well more than twenty years later. The acting is stellar, the mood is just what I want. The only exception for me is the sentinels down in the tunnels below earth which I don't care that much for.

Zooming out, the movie's theme is about independence, the right to a choice, and fate versus being able to change one's path. Hackers often have strong feelings about such things. I remember at university when I realized that some fellow students I knew loved their computers not just because what they could do with them but the order they could uphold in them and the tools they could craft for themselves through programming.

The fear of being pawns in some greater being's world is ever present. Just look at the history of religion with humans being dependent on God's/Gods' judgement, mercy, and whims. But looking at our societal and cultural history I would say there's no lack of humans taking matters in their own hands either.

Bending rules in your favor is often immoral or illegal, but we wouldn't have democracies, human rights, and the rule of law if people hadn't stood up against authority throughout the centuries. It's a delicate balance. Some people who break rules belong behind bars, others belong in songs of heroism. That goes for hackers too.

Checkout Wired's recent review of The Matrix: The Matrix Is the Best Hacker Movie

This text was originally published in the December 2021 issue of the Hacker Chronicles newsletter. Subscribe below!

The Origins of Cyberspace

2022-05-27T15:05:17Z

The Origins of Cyberspace

Spoiler Alert: The below text goes into detail on William Gibson’s short story “Burning Chrome.”

Cyberspace As 1960s Art and Architecture

The word cyberspace started out as something quite different from what we know it as today. Atelier Cyberspace was created in the 1960s by Danish artist Susanne Ussing and her partner architect Carsten Hoff. Here’s what Hoff said about it in 2015:

To us, "cyberspace" was simply about managing spaces. There was nothing esoteric about it. Nothing digital, either. It was just a tool. The space was concrete, physical.

A famous piece by Susanne Ussing.

Cyberspace In Gibson’s “Burning Chrome”

Cyberspace was first used in fiction by William Gibson in his short story “Burning Chrome.” It’s a 23-page cyberpunk story set in Gibson’s Sprawl world. Before he published it in 1982, he read the story at a science fiction convention. The audience? Four people.

Gibson wasn’t shooting for the stars back then:

All I knew about the word "cyberspace" when I coined it, was that it seemed like an effective buzzword. It seemed evocative and essentially meaningless. It was suggestive of something, but had no real semantic meaning, even for me, as I saw it emerge on the page.

But cyberspace sure found a life well beyond buzz. Let’s look at what cyberspace looked like in “Burning Chrome.”

The Hackers and the Goal

The story features two vigilantes – hardware hacker Automatic Jack and software hacker Bobby Quine. Jack has a cyborg arm after losing one of his real arms in an accident and can connect computers into his stump. Bobby is a womanizer who wants to get rich.

“Chrome” launders money for organized crime and runs a brothel where women can submit their bodies to customers while mentally checking out. Jack and Bobby set out to steal Chrome’s money in cyberspace but she’ll come after them if they don’t cyber-kill (burn) her too. They count on her being physically killed by the mob after losing the all the money.

Thoughts
The real world hacker scene has a lot of freelancers and vigilante types. Sadly, its fair share of misogyny too. Jack and Bobby feel authentic in that sense.

The premise is an interesting bridge between the real criminal world and cybercrime. Burning someone in Gibson’s cyberspace is about fully compromising their computer system and wiping it clean. In today’s real cyberspace, legitimate businesses can have cyber insurance as a path to recovery. But for a criminal organization on the internet, a full compromise may indeed be the end of it all.

If you go all the way to cryptocurrency, you could see even legitimate businesses being killed purely online. The modern adage is “Your keys, your Bitcoin. Not your keys, not your Bitcoin.”

The Hack Itself – Virus vs Ice

In Burning Chrome, attack tools in cyberspace are referred to as viruses. Cyber defense is called ice, or Intrusion Countermeasures Electronics. Viruses can be traded and combined in attacks. Virtual subpoenas and warrants can be used to disguise viruses, i.e. lawful intrusion as cover.

Jack has gotten his hands on a Russian military virus so capable that they have to hold it back. They ride in like cyber cowboys and tear down initial defenses before they reach Chrome’s heart. The heart is defended by black ice – ice that kills – only defeatable by the Russian virus. Here’s a segment from the climax, inside cyberspace:

“Burn the bitch down. I can’t hold the thing back –“
The Russian program, rising through towers of data, blotting out the playroom colors. And I plug Bobby’s homemade command package into the center of Chrome’s cold heart. The squirt transmission cuts in, a pulse of condensed information that shoots straight up, past the thickening tower of darkness, the Russian program, while Bobby struggles to control that crucial second. An unformed arm of shadow twitches from the towering dark, too late.
We’ve done it.

Thoughts
I started thinking Gibson may have invented the term computer virus too. After all, he wrote this short story in the beginning of the 1980s. But it turns out John Von Neumann is considered the originator of self-reproducing computer programs. He began the work in 1949, later published as the "Theory of self-reproducing automata." Automata theory was one of my favorite subjects at university so this piece of history makes me happy.

I would compare Gibson’s viruses to what we today call exploit chains. An exploit of a single bug seldom compromises a whole system these days because modern defenses are deployed in layers. Hence, an attacker needs security bugs in chains to ultimately achieve a full takeover.

Ice is active defense sounding like intrusion detection, segmentation, and diversion. Defending a system on the internet is not just about detecting malicious behavior but also buying time. You lure attackers to systems called honeypots, deliberately set up to be hackable. Or you can set up security canaries that sound an alarm when they're "killed."

Russian military virus sounds to what we refer to as state-sponsored hacking, part of cyberwarfare. Eerily close to the reality we live in.

Gibson's vivid description of cyberspace as a space is a beautiful way of depicting hacks and an alternative to hard hacker fiction. He even uses the term matrix, e.g. Beyond them, the matrix’s illusion of infinite space.

The Literal Use of “Cyberspace”

Burning Chrome does indeed introduce the term cyberspace. Here’s the legendary excerpt:

I knew every chip in Bobby’s simulator by heart; it looked like your workaday Ono-Sendai VII, the “Cyberspace Seven,” but I’d rebuilt it so many time that you’d have had a hard time finding a square millimeter of factory circuitry in all that silicon.

The first singular “time” is probably a typo.

Many real world hackers scoff at anything “cyber,” be it cyberwar, cyber defense, or cyberspace. I used to be one of those but have grown to like cyber. It’s a word that immediately invokes the right framing. Cyberspace also identifies the virtual world as a distinct expanse, alongside land, sea, sky, and space.

Cyberspace Today

Cyberspace as a domain for humans really took off with the seminal Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace by John Perry Barlow. He delivered it 1996 during World Economic Forum in Davos and its leading paragraph does not fall short on gravitas:

Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.

25 years later and the possibility of a Splinternet where countries claim network sovereignty is very real. The potential for hacker fiction based on that conflict has not escaped me.

This text was originally published in the October 2021 issue of the Hacker Chronicles newsletter. Subscribe below!

Review of The Matrix Reloaded (2003)

2022-06-05T15:19:24Z

Review of The Matrix Reloaded (2003)

December last year, I published my hacker review of The Matrix. It's time to work our way through the sequel!

The Matrix Reloaded was released in 2003 and written and directed by the Wachowskis.

Spoiler Alert: Don't read this if you want to watch The Matrix Reloaded spoiler-free.

Hacker Rating

Hacker Realism: ⭐️ ⭐️
Hacker Importance for the Plot: ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️
Hacks: ⭐️ ⭐️

Opening

The Matrix Reloaded opens with two key pieces: Neo (Keanu Reeves) wishes he knew what he was supposed to do with his newfound powers, and the last free human city Zion is under imminent attack by 250,000 sentinel machines digging down to the city perimeter deep below the earth's surface.

Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) says the prophecy with the One will soon be fulfilled. But they need to go to the surface, enter the matrix, consult the Oracle (Gloria Foster), and come back to Zion before the attack.

Thoughts
Digging deep into the earth has fascinated me ever since I was a kid. We used to speculate about digging ourselves to China, which we used to call “China Hong Kong” for some reason. Curious young me checked our desktop globe to see where we’d actually end up if we dug through the center of the earth. We would have emerged around New Zealand.

The deepest that humankind has dug is a fascinating piece of Cold War history, namely the Kola Superdeep Borehole. It took the Soviets almost 20 years to drill it which is still just a third of the way through the crust to the Earth’s mantle. That old Russian hole is welded shut nowadays but Japan is in charge of the modern, even more ambitious M2M-MoHole to Mantle project.

The Smiths

Agent Smith (Hugo Weaving) shows up at a door where humans are on guard on the inside. He delivers a gift to Neo, saying Neo set him free. It’s his iconic earpiece from the previous movie.

Three other agents show up to fight Neo but they lose. Neo leaves the scene. Two copies of Agent Smith check the aftermath, apparently content with the outcome.

Commander Lock questions Morpheus’s judgement. Why go back to the matrix when Zion will soon be under attack and why does he keep going on about The Oracle, the prophecy, and Neo being the One? The Council sides with Morpheus and Zion parties to build strength to be able to defend themselves.

Meanwhile in the matrix, two other humans are headed back through a phone line. One of them is caught by Agent Smith who thrusts his open hand into the chest of the human who slowly becomes another copy of Smith.

Neo, Morpheus, and Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss) head out of Zion to see the Oracle. Bane (Ian Bliss) attempts to assassinate Neo as they leave but is disrupted.

Seraph Knows the Way

Neo finds Seraph (Collin Chou) in the matrix and Seraph says he can help him find the Oracle. They fight. The fight turns out to be a test to check that Neo really is the One.

“You do not truly know someone until you fight them,” Seraph says.

They exit to an endless corridor filled with doors.

“These are backdoors, aren’t they?” Neo asks Seraph. “Programmer access.”

Seraph nods.

“How do they work?”

“A code is hidden in tumblers. One position opens a lock, another position opens one of these doors.”

“Are you a programmer?”

Seraph shakes his head.

“Then what are you?”

“I protect that which matters most.”

Thoughts
Seraph is a central access control mechanism in the matrix. He has keys (credentials) to all the doors (access points) in the corridor (some kind of dispatch system). The fight with Neo was a so called challenge-response ritual, necessary to authenticate Neo.

The Oracle Explains the World

Seraph unlocks and opens a door to a concrete yard between multistory residential houses. The Oracle sits on a bench, feeding crows. Neo sits down beside her.

“You’re not human, are you?” he asks her.

“It’s tough to get any more obvious than that.”

“If I had to guess, I’d say you’re a program from the machine world.” Neo turns to Seraph to patiently waits a few steps behind them. “So is he.”

The Oracle confirms.

“But if that’s true, it could mean you’re part of this system, another kind of control.” Pondering this, he asks “How can I trust you?”

“The bad news is there’s no real way for you to know whether I’m here to help you or not.”

Neo is going to have to accept or reject what the Oracle says. She points to the birds and says they are governed by software too. Then she goes on to explain that all supernatural phenomena in the world, i.e. the matrix, are manifestations of the matrix cleaning up programs that are not doing what they’re supposed to do.

“Programs hacking programs,” Neo comments.

“Usually, a program chooses exile when it faces deletion,” she explains. “It can either choose to hide here or return to the source.”

The source is the central computer governing the matrix. That’s where Neo must go. That’s where his path ends.

The Oracle asks if he’s seen the source in his dreams. He has, and in those dreams, something bad happens to Trinity but he cannot see how it ends.

“You have the sight now, Neo. You are looking at the world without time.”

Seraph interrupts them and tells the Oracle they have to leave. The Oracle says two final things. First, that Neo will have to make a choice between Zion and Trinity. Second, that he will need the Keymaker (Randall Duk Kim) to reach the source and the Keymaker is being held prisoner by a dangerous program called Merovingian (Lambert Wilson).

Thoughts
This is not an easy scene for movie goers to pay enough attention to. But we can!

First the trust issue. This tells us that Neo has no way to authenticate or validate any of the programs he meets in the matrix. They can be good or bad. But he does know that the Oracle can foretell parts of the future. As said in my review of the first movie, the Oracle may be the main scheduler of tasks and thus have insight into the pipeline of things to be executed soon in the matrix. It could be that the Oracle is neither good or bad. Neo just has occasional access to her by virtue of being the One and can get a glimpse of the future.

Programs hacking programs. Sounds punchy. But modern operating systems have all kinds of checks and controls in place to shut down applications that don’t behave. In addition, stopping an ongoing, automated attack can often involve hacking the malware rather than fixing the vulnerable systems. For example, during the devastating WannaCry ransomware attack in 2017, a security researcher analyzed the malware and found a hidden kill switch they could activate to make the attack shut down itself.

The source could be the kernel of the operating system of the matrix. In hacking terms, compromising the kernel often means full system takeover.

“Looking at the world without time” is interesting. Time in computers is actually rhythm and controlled by an oscillator such as a vibrating crystal. Reasoning about a computer system without time sounds to me like the ability to see the complete state machine and be able to theoretically take steps forward or backward in “time” at will. Think of it as understanding the brains behind two chess players so that you can simulate how they will play before they do so. That would mean you didn’t need to wait (time) to know how the game will progress and end.

The final piece of the scene has Seraph interrupt the Oracle. That’s a little strange to me since the Oracle is the one that can foresee the future. But it could be that Seraph knows that a bad actor has just requested access to where they are (the yard) and that they need to leave quickly.

Side note: I can’t help but think of Gloria Foster dying from diabetes during the filming of The Matrix Reloaded. The movie came out a year and a half after her death and in the third movie there's another actor playing the Oracle. I really like Foster's acting.

Smith With a Pinch of Neo

Smith shows up at in the yard which was probably what caused Seraph to escort the Oracle away. The former agent and Neo have a chat.

“Surprised to see me?” Smith asks. Neo is not. “Then you’re aware of it.”

“Of what?” Neo asks.

“Our connection. I don’t fully understand how it happened. Perhaps some part of you imprinted onto me, something overwritten or copied. It is at this point irrelevant. What matters is that whatever happened, happened for a reason.”

Smith explains that even though he was shocked when Neo destroyed him, he was intent to follow the rules. But something compelled him to disobey. He is now a “free” program in the matrix.

Several Smith copies show up. The one in front of Neo thrusts his hand into Neo’s chest to try to make him into yet another Smith copy and take back his “purpose.”

Neo barely makes it but manages to maintain his integrity and fight off the multitude of Smiths coming for him.

Thoughts
I mention in my review of The Matrix how processes in operating systems can be repurposed for all kinds of tasks and that agents injecting themselves into humans probably make use of such a mechanism. When Neo kills Smith in the end of The Matrix, he injects himself into the agent. That’s when something imprinted onto Smith, making him want to disobey the rules of matrix – Neo’s desire for choice copied over!

Normally, various pieces of software are not compatible with each other in a way that would enable taking pieces from two programs and melding them. But, there are controlled surfaces within software which are called APIs, application programming interfaces. Such interfaces do allow for pieces to be fit together in new forms. So I view this as a rule-abiding part of Smith being replaced by a rebellious part of Neo and they both implement the same API or call the same APIs, i.e. they fit the same software slot.

Smith making copies of himself is classic virus behavior.

Merovingian Plays Dirty

Neo, Morpheus, and Trinity pay a visit to Merovingian who sits in an exquisite restaurant. They are looking for the Keymaker.

Merovingian says he’s a “trafficker of information” and so he naturally already knows why the team has come to see him. He tells Neo that they’ve only come here to obey orders from the Oracle. He says they are simply as an effect of a cause they do not control. Morpheus challenges him and says choice is the base of all actions.

Merovingian wants to prove to his guests that he has the power to control others and sends a “very special dessert” to a beautiful woman in the restaurant. He says he wrote it himself (it’s a program) and it makes the woman super horny and she leaves for the ladies’ room where he intends to follow her.

He compares Neo and the others to the woman and claims that they are powerless. He sees the Oracle as the will behind their visit and tells them to go back to her and say her time is almost up.

Merovingian’s wife Persephone (Monica Bellucci) secretly helps Morpheus’s team to find the Keymaker to get back on her husband for his exploitative cheating. Once Merovingian finds out, Neo has to fight his henchmen while Trinity and Morpheus flee with the Keymaker.

Thoughts
Merovingian knows what has happened but doesn’t know what will happen. As a trafficker in information, he seems to be part of the matrix memory or storage. This could explain how he has control over the Keymaker: the Keymaker is in encrypted/locked storage, a privileged piece of software stored on disk.

It may be that Merovingian's ability to intercept or control information is the basis for his hacks such as the special dessert. Malicious input is the start of almost every attack on software.

The Keymaker Explains the Plan

The team escapes both Merovingian’s “Twins” (Adrian and Neil Rayment) and agents, and eventually sit down with the Keymaker who explains the final task to them.

“There is a building. Inside this building there is a level where no elevator can go and no stair can reach. This level is filled with doors. These doors lead to many places. Hidden places. But one door is special. One door leads to the source. This building is protected by a very secure system. Every alarm triggers the bomb.”

The team doesn’t like to hear that.

“But like all systems it has a weakness. The system is based on the rules of a building. One system built on another.”

“Electricity,” Morpheus says.

“If one fails, so must the other,” the Keymaker adds.

They have to kill electricity for 27 blocks to deprive the building with the source of power. This means they have to take out a power station and the backup emergency system. Neo will be tied up accessing the source so the rest of the team needs to take on the power situation. The time window they need to execute within is 314 seconds.

Thoughts
The movie takes on a Mission Impossible flavor here but we have to remember this is all a manifestation of a computer system. What this could be is Morpheus’s team members, in the form of programs, overloading the processing units of the matrix in order to overheat it and make it reduce speed or shut off processor cores. The 314 seconds (just over five minutes) would then be the time for the system to cool off.

Or it could be a direct hack against software or firmware that controls power for the system. In such a case it could be that the 314 seconds are what it takes to recover through a reboot of a subsystem. That typically happens through something called a watchdog process which asks important subsystems if they are alive and healthy. If a subsystem stops responding to the watchdog’s calls, the watchdog reboots it. That’s how many robust systems work such as cellphone base stations.

Trinity Takes One For the Team

Neo convinces Trinity to stay behind since he knows the Oracle has foreseen he’ll have to make choice between her or Zion and he doesn’t think he is capable of doing that.

The team starts executing their plan and take out power. But power is quickly restored which means the alarm and its bomb will be triggered when Neo tries to access the source. Trinity decides to enter the matrix to save Neo.

Neo and Morpheus enter the building with the Keymaker and rush through corridors only to be faced with Agent Smith. When Morpheus threatens to shoot him, he calls for his copies.

Trinity kills the power again and the Keymaker opens the special door as Neo and Morpheus hold off the Smiths with their fists and feet. Neo and Morpheus jump through the special door, the Smith copies draw their guns, and the Keymaker is mortally wounded before the door closes. But they are inside and Neo will now be able to enter the door to the source.

Thoughts
Being killed like the Keymaker software is, could be the result of a bad program step. Only when the step is discovered to be bad will its process be killed by the system.

The Architect

“I’m the architect. I created the matrix. I’ve been waiting for you.”

That’s what the white-haired man in the office chair says to Neo once he’s on the inside.

“Why am I here?” Neo asks.

“Your life is the sum of a remainder of an unbalanced equation inherent to the programming of the matrix. You are the eventuality of an anomaly which despite my sincerest efforts I have been unable to eliminate from what is otherwise a harmony of mathematical precision.”

Neo learns that there have been five Neos before him and all obviously failed at their mission since the matrix is still here.

“The anomaly is systemic,” the architect continues, “creating fluctuations in even the most simplistic equations.”

“Choice. The problem is choice,” Neo concludes.

The architect explains how he started out with a perfect version of the matrix, which failed miserably. He tried to add flaws based on human history but it failed again.

“The answer was stumbled upon by another, an intuitive program initially created to investigate certain aspects of the human psyche.”

“The Oracle.”

“She stumbled upon a solution whereby 99% of all test subjects accepted the program as long as they were given a choice.”

The result was a matrix accepted as-is by 99% but challenged by 1% and those 1% made choices which risked the whole thing. Zion is the 1%, and this will be the sixth time Zion is destroyed.

“The function of the One is now to return to the source, allowing a temporary dissemination of the code you carry reinserting the prime program, after which you will be required to select from the matrix 23 individuals, sixteen female, seven male, to rebuild Zion.”

If Neo doesn’t comply, all humans connected to the matrix die. That plus destruction of Zion means extinction of the human race.

The architect reveals that Trinity has already entered the matrix to save Neo.

Neo has two doors to chose from. Right door leads to the source and the salvation of Zion. Left door leads back to the matrix, to Trinity, and to the end of humankind.

Thoughts
“The sum of a remainder of an unbalanced equation” sounds like gibberish to me. There is nothing to sum up if it’s a single remainder. Unbalanced equation is strange too since it’s not an equation if it’s not balanced.

However, a leading theory on the sci-fi Stack Exchange (see most upvoted answer) is that the architect is in fact talking about a cumulative error – a minute error that if repeated enough times builds up to something big and destabilizing. The One and the showdown at the source is supposed to lop that error off and stabilize things for another iteration. Similar to how you may adjust a clock only after it has drifted a full two minutes rather than adjusting it one second every day. You let the small errors accumulate before you take the time to correct them.

This time over, love is added to the mix, or should I say equation.

Love

Neo picks the right door, for love. The architect snorts.

Trinity is fighting a losing battle against two agents after pulling off her power grid takedown. She jumps out of a window in a last attempt to flee but is shot in the heart mid-air.

Neo flies in to save her before she hits the ground. Up on the top of a skyscraper, he first removes the bullet from her body and then revives or even mends her heart.

Thoughts
Live patching software, i.e. fixing bugs while the software is running, is well-known to be super hard. That’s why you are instead asked to restart whatever application or operating system you are updating. So this is Neo showing his super powers.

The Lie Revealed

Back on the Nebuchadnezzar, Neo tells Morpheus the prophecy was a lie; the One was never supposed to end the war.

Sentinels arrive at the ship with a bomb. The team leaves on foot and watches the Nebuchadnezzar explode and burn.

As the sentinels pick up their trace, Neo says he can feel them. Neo uses some newfound force to destroy the sentinels, only to then collapse himself. Another ship – the Hammer – picks them up. Neo is in a coma.

The last we see is that Bane lies on a bed next to Neo, also in a coma. He somehow survived a deadly attack by the sentinels. “To be concluded” the movie ends.

Remarks

I like that this movie is mostly spent in the matrix. The politics and partying at Zion don’t do much for me.

It’s great that it takes the time to explain enough of what’s going on to make it all fit the earlier movie. However, at this point, Neo is just assumed to have extra powers and there’s not much development of his hacker skills.

I was put off when we learned that there had been five Neos before this one and that Zion had been destroyed five times before too. It makes the original story less special. Sure, this version of Neo turns out to be the ultra special One, but still. It’s a little bit like “it was all a dream” which is never good.

All the new important characters are men: Seraph, The Keymaker, Merovingian, the Twins, and the Architect. The exception is Merovingian’s estranged wife who plays a pretty classic femme fatale. You could say Niobe (Jada Pinkett Smith) plays an important part but it isn't much. The lack of women is sad given that the previous movie gave us Trinity, Switch, and the Oracle.

All in all, a worthy sequel but not as good as The Matrix.

This text was originally published in the December 2021 issue of the Hacker Chronicles newsletter. Subscribe below!

Review of The Matrix Revolutions (2003)

2022-12-17T20:45:35Z

Review of The Matrix Revolutions (2003)

This hacker review concludes the original Matrix trilogy. You may want to start with my hacker reviews of The Matrix and The Matrix Reloaded.

Spoiler Alert: Don't read this if you want to watch The Matrix Revolutions spoiler-free.

Hacker Rating

Hacker Realism: ⭐️ ⭐️
Hacker Importance for the Plot: ⭐️ ⭐️
Hacks: ⭐️ ⭐️

The third movie was released the same year as the second and concluded the saga (at the time). When we left off in Matrix Reloaded , Neo had told Morpheus that the prophecy was a lie and the One was never supposed to end the war. Sentinels had blown up Nebuchadnezzar but Neo used some newfound force to destroy them only to collapse. The last we saw was the traitor Bane lie on a bed next to Neo, also in a coma.

This review largely skips the battle of Zion which is major part of the movie but uninteresting from a hacker perspective.

Wireless Connection

At the start of the movie, Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) asks to search the Matrix for Neo (Keanu Reeves) even though Neo lies in a coma on the ship he's on. The operator who is asked to search questions the use since Neo is not plugged in. (Rememver they jack in through a plug in the back of their necks.) Morpehus insists.

Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss) sits by Neo's side and is told that Neo's neural patterns don't look like someone in a coma, rather like someone who is in the Matrix.

Neo wakes up at a white train station. A little girl is there and tells Neo her dad thinks he's is lost. She and her family are going to the Matrix with the help of the Trainman (Bruce Spence).

The Seraph (Collin Chou) calls from the Matrix and tells Morpheus the Oracle wants to see them asap. Seraph takes Trinity and Morpheus to the Oracle (Mary Alice). She says she's made a choice that may cost her a lot. She has chose to help them guide Neo.

The Oracle explains that Neo is trapped between the Matrix and the real world, or the machine world as she calls it. The link between the worlds is controlled by the Trainman who smuggles programs in and out of the Matrix. The Trainman works for the Merovingian (Lambert Wilson) who has put a bounty on Morpheus et al's heads after they stole the Keymaker from him.

The Oracle asks Seraph to help Trinity and Morpheus find Neo.

Thoughts
Merovingian is a trafficker in information and as I concluded in my previous review, he seems to be part of the Matrix's memory or storage. If the Trainman works for Merovingian and can move programs in and out, it sounds to me like the Trainman handles input/output, or I/O, for persistent storage. It is unclear why he has to smuggle the programs though, but he could be a compromised I/O unit.

Going all the way back to the first movie, we know that the pill Neo takes to leave the Matrix is part of a program. We also know that they use carrier signals to travel between the Matrix and the real world, answering a phone to exit the Matrix.

So how can Neo connect to the Matrix without being plugged in, and how can he be trapped?

Maybe he has acquired the capability to leave a copy of himself, a slice of his own software, in the Matrix? We know Agent Smith (Hugo Weaving) is copying himself. If Neo were able to exist and think in both worlds at the same time, he would need a synchronization mechanism. But he's in a coma in the real world so maybe only one copy of him can "execute" at a time. Getting stuck at the train station could be the copy being stuck in I/O and not let through to the Matrix.

A Deal To Get Out

A train arrives at the white station where Neo is to pick up the little girl and her family. When Neo tries to get onboard, Trainman prevents him and says that down here he makes the rules. Trainman leaves Neo trapped and will consult his boss on what to do with him.

Seraph, Trinity, and Morpheus find Trainman who flees head over heals. They decide to enter Merovingian's club by force to try to make a deal.

Merovingian tells Seraph: "Since you, my little Judas, have brought them here, I can only surmise that the fortuneteller has found another shell?"

Merovingian wants the eyes of the Oracle in exchange for Neo. Trinity makes a surprise move and starts a raging fight. She catches a lost gun in the air and lands it point blank against Merovingian's forehead. A deal is made and Trinity is allowed to get Neo from the station where he's trapped.

Neo goes to see the Oracle. She tells him that his power comes from the source and that's where he must go. She also tells him that Agent Smith is his negative opposite and that Smith will soon have the power to destroy the Matrix and beyond.

After Neo has left, Agent Smith comes for the Oracle and subsumes her. He now has her powers.

Thoughts
It seems Merovingian is pulling a direct hacker term here – a shell. A shell is a command prompt where you can control a computer via textual commands. Hackers typically strive to get a root shell on the systems they hack, meaning a command prompt with the highest possible privileges.

Smith being the negative mirror image of Neo fits with the earlier copying of behavior from Neo to Smith. Smith's increased powers mirror Neo's increased powers. In computer terms, this could be a piece of software escalating its privileges within a system and the software's good and bad parts thus gain power equally.

What Neo Sees

The traitor Bane wakes up from his coma in the real world. He is questioned but remembers nothing. His voice sounds like Agent Smith. Once he realizes he may be compromised, he kills a crew member and goes rogue.

Neo decides he needs access to a ship to go to the machine city. Niobe (Jada Pinkett Smith) offers him her ship. Trinity insists she's going with him.

Systems on Neo and Trinity's ship shut down. Trinity checks it out and finds Bane hiding on their ship. He's going to kill them both. Bane neutralizes Trinity and dumps her through a manhole to the lower deck.

Neo realizes Bane is a manifestation of Smith in the real world. They fight. Smith manages to pull an electric cable and shove it in Neo's face, frying his eyes. Neo goes blind.

Just as Smith is about to finish off, Neo starts seeing with his mind instead of his eyes, ducks, and kills Bane/Smith.

Thoughts
Since Smith is the other side of Neo, I interpret Neo's loss of his eyes as the gambit he has to make to beat Bane.

In software terms, this might be cutting off a chunk of functionality that contains both good and bad parts, as a last resort to get rid of the bad parts. In a cyber defense situation, it would be the equivalent of shutting down servers that provide useful services but that may also have been compromised and are helping the attacker. In a kinetic war situation, it's kind of like a scorched-earth policy.

It's important to remember that Smith faces the same dilemma here – Neo is his other side and he's fighting himself.

The Machine City

Trinity drives the ship with Neo blind. They get to the enormous farm fields of humans in cocoons and Neo feels the human presence. He instructs Trinity to follow the three power lines that go into the distance to their right.

As they fly closer, the machines deploy defense bots in huge numbers. Neo says they need to go up into the clouds. Up there there's lightning and the sentinels get electrocuted but Neo and Trinity's ship looses power too. For a brief moment, they reach above the menacing, dark clouds and see the upper atmosphere of what seems to be Earth. Then down again until they crash-land in the machine city.

Trinity is mortally wounded in the crash but has enough time to say a heartfelt goodbye.

Neo pulls himself together and climbs out of the ship to see the vast city landscape. He sees it with his mind as flows of light and power.

The leader of the machines — a huge spiky sphere — comes to face the intruder.

Neo: I only ask to say what I've come to say. After that, do what you want, and I won't try to stop you.

Machine: Speak!

Neo: The program Smith has grown beyond your control. Soon he will spread through this city as he has spread through the Matrix. You cannot stop him. But I can.

Machine: We don't need you! We need nothing!

Neo: If that's true, then I've made a mistake, and you should kill me now.

Machine: What do you want?

Neo: Peace.

Machine: And if you fail?

Neo: I won't.

Thoughts
My understanding of the situation here is that Smith's power has grown just as Neo's. They keep a delicate balance in the Architect's equations. All the previous iterations with Neo and the destruction of Zion have removed the anomaly once it got large enough. But because of Neo's choices, this time the anomaly has grown dangerously large. If the balance is tilted just a little bit, it could destroy everything.

A catastrophic failure in computer terms can be a so called bricked device (you can never use it again) or erasure of all storage (a complete data reset).

The Last Fight

The huge machine sphere jacks the port into the back of Neo's neck and sends him to the Matrix. He arrives at a rainy gauntlet with lanes of Agent Smith copies on each side. Neo looks up and finds more Smiths in the windows of high rise buildings around him.

Smith has taken over the whole Matrix and made every human in there into a copy of himself. A lone Smith peels off the crowd and steps into the middle lane to face Neo. He has the foresight of the Oracle and already knows he will beat Neo. That's why he is willing to fight one-on-one.

They fight in an ever escalating way until Neo lies in a huge hole in the ground and Smith goes in for the kill. Smith has foreseen this exact scene and strives to play his part perfectly, reciting "Everything that has a beginning, has an end, Neo."

The quote scares him and Neo rises once again. "You were right, Smith. You were always right. It was inevitable."

Smith does his signature move and inserts his hand into Neo to make him a copy of himself. Neo indeed becomes Smith.

Neo in the real world is still connected through the cable the big sphere provided. The uber machine connects to Smith through Neo and all Smith copies burst into pieces.

Neo is brought away by the machines, the Matrix is restored, and peace with Zion is established.

Thoughts
Neo offers the machines to zero out the anomaly by sacrificing himself and thus deal equal harm to his evil twin Smith. They accept the offer and promise to leave Zion alone. That's the resolution to the full story arc of the trilogy.

In computer terms this relates to a virus infection. It has always been unclear to me what so called anti virus programs are supposed to do. Do they prevent infection? Disinfect? Quarantine? Or just detect, i.e. tell you your system is infected and you should buy a new one?

I think what Neo offers here is to delete his whole program which includes Smith. It's like deleting the whole virus-infected piece of software because there is no way to disinfect or quarantine. It all needs to go.

Remarks

The third movie does resolve the war between machines and humankind which is satisfying. It also wraps up Agent Smith's story. But the Matrix is not very prominent in this movie and the lengthy attack on Zion makes it much more of a regular sci-fi action blaster.

The team also feels dispersed with Neo doing his thing, some defending Zion, and some working with the Oracle and Seraph. The first movie has much more team interaction which I prefer.

This text was originally published in the June 2022 issue of the Hacker Chronicles newsletter. Subscribe below!

Review of The Minority Report, the book (1956)

2022-12-17T21:11:29Z

Review of The Minority Report, the book (1956)

This hacker review covers Philip K. Dick's original 1956 short story. My next blog post will feature Steven Spielberg's 2002 movie and we can compare the two.

Spoiler Alert: Yup, lots of 'em below.

Precrime and Precogs

The Minority Report takes place in a future where law enforcement is able to predict and prevent serious crimes. It's called Precrime. Would-be felons are arrested and sentenced before their criminal act. This has eradicated serious crime where the system is in effect.

Precogs or mutant precogs are the select few capable of predicting the future. Both the short story and the movie show them as three humanoids. In the book, they sit blabbering and are presented as shabby. In the movie they lay in a pool of liquid and communicate silently.

The Precogs produce a stream of predictive information which has to be interpreted into reports that the police can take action on. The reason why there are three precogs is that they don't always agree. In those cases the majority prediction wins.

In the 1950s book, the connection between precogs and the police computer system goes through magnetic tapes and results in reports on punch cards. In the movie there's futuristic reading of their brain signals which results in fragmented moving imagery and wooden balls engraved with the names of the victim and perpetrator.

Thoughts
The concept of voting code has always fascinated me. Once you're exposed to large scale software engineering, you realize that humans have not been able to produce fully correct software so far. There are always bugs and thus never full certainty on decisions made by computers.

One way of dealing with that uncertainty in sensitive algorithms is to have three independent implementations, run the same input parameters through all three, and compare the results.

This has also been suggested as defense against hacking since it's very hard for an attacker to construct input which will fool two different algorithms at the same time, resulting in the same compromised output.

The Framing of Anderton

John Anderton is the head of the Precrime department and its founder. He is approaching retirement.

Anderton is proud of and confident in the Precrime system. He is also convinced that it's morally right to convict people of crimes they haven't committed … yet. This confidence and commitment is put to the ultimate test when the precogs predict that Anderton himself will commit murder within a week.

Anderton has no plans to murder anybody. He doesn't even know who the claimed victim Leopold Kaplan is. But he's spent years and years instilling confidence in the accuracy of Precrime predictions. His conclusion is that someone is trying to frame him and he hides the punch card with his name on it. Here's his reasoning:

The conspiracy could be large-scale and elaborate, involving far more than a "rigged" card inserted somewhere along the line. The original data itself might have been tampered with. Actually, there was no telling how far back the alteration went. (…) Probably the tapes agreed with the card

A checks and balances system is in place where the US army gets a copy of all precog reports. They will know the accusation, or already do. The clock is ticking.

Thoughts
I love this plot point – the realization that a system compromise may have happened long ago, and potentially layers below what has just surfaced. It leads to mystery and can drive a story where the character is trying to figure out the root cause.

Deep, lengthy compromises of computer systems can result in several things.

Prolonged corruption of stored data, including backups.
Prolonged production of misleading data.
Cascading effects where misleading data is produced and then used in other contexts producing even further misleading data.

One of the more mind-blowing things to compare with in the real world is manipulation of stock markets over long periods of time. You couldn't roll that back. People will have made financial decisions based on market data day by day, hour by hour. Computers will have made decisions by the nanosecond. Houses will have been bought through realized gains, travels made, companies merged. You would just have to accept the faulty results. The question is, if we all just had to accept the outcome anyway, would we ever be told it happened?

Who Has Set Anderton Up?

A young man named Witwer has just joined Precrime and is slated to take over when Anderton retires. He could be the person who've hacked the precog reports to frame Anderton.

Anderton's wife Lisa is presented as younger and much more attractive than he is. She used to be his secretary. Perhaps she wants to get rid of him and hook up with Witwer?

Anderton decides he'll flee to one of the colonized "frontier planets," wait for a week, and that way clear his name since he didn't kill anyone. He goes home to pack.

Thoughts
Trying to let time pass in some form of isolation to disprove a prophecy is common in fiction. It also makes the reader wonder if knowledge of ones own future lets oneself change that future?

The half-sexist role of Anderton's wife shows the book's age but him speculating that she's is in on it does add to the pressure you feel he's under.

Kaplan

A man with a gun shows up at Anderton's house when he's packing. He's not from the police and takes Anderton to see Kaplan. Kaplan turns out to be General of the Army of the Federated Westbloc Alliance.

The army has already picked up the threat against Kaplan through their own cards and taken matters into their own hands.

At first, Anderton fears for his life. But the precogs would have seen that too.

“Evidently,” Kaplan said, “I'm not going to have you destroyed, or it would have shown up on one of those miserable little cards. I'm curious about you. It seemed incredible to me that a man of your stature could contemplate the cold-blooded murder of a total stranger. There must be something more here. Frankly, I'm puzzled. If it represented some kind of Police strategy –“ He shrugged his thin shoulders. “Surely you wouldn't have permitted the duplicate card to reach us.”
“Unless,” one of his men suggested, “it's a deliberate plant.”

Kaplan commands Anderton be transported back to the police.

Thoughts
The fact that people with access to precog reports know whether or not a murder will happen is leveraged much more in the movie. But it deepens the plot that Kaplan is counting on its accuracy.

Knowledge based on the absence of something makes me think of so called warrant canaries. Court orders may require nondisclosure where you're not allowed to say that an agency has requested certain information. But you are allowed to announce that an agency has not requested certain information, and you are allowed to remove such announcements when they are no longer true. You publish the canary "We have not been served a government subpoena" and then you kill the canary by pulling that statement and thus telling the world you have been served a subpoena.

A Majority Implies a Minority

The military transport ends up in a car crash and Anderton is saved by a man called Fleming. Fleming knows a lot of what has happened and says that Lisa is indeed in on the conspiracy. He gives Anderton a packet of stuff including a false ID and tells him to take the bus to the "slum section."

When Anderton asks who Fleming represents or works for, he says "Consider us a protective society."

In the packet, Anderton finds a message:

The existence of a majority logically implies a corresponding minority.

Anderton gets to a seedy hotel in the slums. The police hunt for him is well underway and he hears a radio interview with Witwer who's taken his job at Precrime. During the interview, Witwer says something important:

… unanimity of all three precogs is a hoped-for but seldom-achieved phenomenon. (…) It's much more common to obtain a collaborative majority report of two precogs, plus a minority report of some slight variation, usually with reference to time and place, from the third mutant. This is explained by the theory of multiple futures. If only one time-path existed, precognitive information would be of no importance, since no possibility would exist, in possessing this information, of altering the future.

This makes Anderton realize there could be a minority report which indicates that he will not kill Kaplan.

Thoughts
Some deep thinking on fate in that Witwer quote. If there is only one future, there is no choice, only cause and effect. You could predict the whole future if you had perfect knowledge of everything at one point in time. This kind of thinking is a key piece in the Matrix movie series. For prime examples of how fate vs choice plays into the plot there, see my review of Matrix Reloaded. (Yes, I will review the third Matrix movie soon.)

Computers are fascinating from a predictability perspective. Theoretically, and somewhat naively, computers should be completely predictable. They're just logical machines moving from one state to another according to predefined rules. However, two things confound such an analysis.

First, the undecidability of complex computer programs. The most popular example of this – the Halting Problem – comes from none other than Alan Turing:

In computability theory, the halting problem is the problem of determining, from a description of an arbitrary computer program and an input, whether the program will finish running, or continue to run forever. Alan Turing proved in 1936 that a general algorithm to solve the halting problem for all possible program-input pairs cannot exist.

If you want to go deeper on undecidability, I recommend Rice's theorem, which I have not yet grokked myself.

Second, computers are artifacts prone to all kinds of errors, including bit flips due to cosmic background radiation. In theory, theory works. In practice, it doesn't.

Precrime lets the precogs vote because the system has flaws and choice is always at play, even in premeditated murder.

Getting the Minority Report

Anderton leverages contacts within Precrime to get access to the magnetic tapes of the precogs. He is looking for a discarded minority report for his forthcoming felony.

It turns out that the three precogs were out of sync time wise, or misphased, and precog Jerry's prediction was for another future:

Obviously, Jerry's report superseded the majority report. Having been informed that he would commit a murder, Anderton would change his mind and not do so. The preview of the murder had cancelled out the murder; prophylaxis had occurred simply in his being informed. Already, a new time-path had been created. But "Jerry" was outvoted.

Thoughts
What we have here is a bug. The voting logic relies on the precogs using the same input. But if one of them uses input from later in time, and the output of the two others can affect the input of the third, they shouldn't be voting at all.

You could view allowing for misphasing of the precogs as the bug. However, I would argue that the bug is that the precogs predict the future of humans and a select few humans have access to those predictions, namely the Precrime folks. This creates the opportunity for the output of two precogs to become the input of a third precog.

You could also see how the humans who created the Precrime system would have missed this bug. They probably never considered that one of them would be the killer.

Nobody's On Nobody's Side

The aid who helped Anderton get access to the precogs tells his wife Lisa who shows up in the lab. She helps him escape on her ship.

Once she understands the bug with misphased precogs, she realizes there may be several people convicted who would have never committed murder had they been given a chance to know their predicted future just like Anderton.

Her reasoning doesn't sway Anderton even though he is such an example himself. He is focused on getting the minority report to Kaplan to show that he has no intent of murdering him and to get his help.

Lisa presses on and says Anderton needs to understand that the minority report does not invalidate the majority report. That fact in turn shows that there was no conspiracy against him. No one had fiddled with the cards. Anderton was going to kill Kaplan but the knowledge of that made him change his own future. She wants him to turn himself in, otherwise the Precrime system will be discredited.

Eventually she pulls a gun on Anderton and forces him to steer the ship back to the police building instead of going to the army.

In a jolting twist, Fleming appears on the ship and disarms Lisa. He's been following Anderton and hid in the storage unit of Lisa's ship.

Fleming tells Anderton that Witwer, Lisa, and Kaplan are all in on the conspiracy. He starts to strangle Lisa and is going to throw her out of the ship.

Anderton strikes Fleming down and searches the man's jacket. He finds papers indicating that Fleming is working for Kaplan.

Thoughts
This is a short story so all the twists and turns above happen on just a couple of pages. I mostly have it here so you can follow how the story ends. But it does show why I said the characterization of Lisa is just half-sexist because here she is the person asking the valid questions.

This part did get me thinking of a non-fiction book I read recently – Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts by Annie Duke. It analyzes the fact that no decisions are made with perfect knowledge, you always make a bet to some extent. Duke's conclusion is that we should never judge decisions by outcomes, but rather by the quality of the decision based on the available facts.

Anderton's Real Future

As Anderton turns himself in, he learns that Kaplan has already been there to extract a copy of the minority report for himself.

Witwer accepts that the minority report clears Anderton's name. Their main problem now is that Kaplan intends to get Precrime abolished. He wants to get back to the good ol' days where the army ran the show and did their own police work (the story alludes to an Anglo-Chinese war in the past, possibly under martial law).

Kaplan's effort to abolish Precrime was the reason for the first predicted future where Anderton murdered the General. But now that Kaplan has the minority report, he feels confident that Anderton won't kill him. And since Witwer made the majority report public during the hunt for Anderton, the police now has to convict Anderton or admit that Precrime has flaws. Kaplan has a winning hand.

Anderton decides to review all three precogs' predictions. Precog Donna's tape has the original event with Precrime abolished and Anderton eventually shooting Kaplan. Precog Jerry has the superseding one where Anderton changes his mind based on seeing the majority report. Precog Mike's report, which together with Donna's created the majority, is quite different.

With the knowledge of Mike's report, Anderton goes to a military rally where Kaplan is expected to read the minority report, compare it with the majority report, and start the political campaign to disband Precrime.

During his speech, Kaplan mocks Anderton as being both the face of Precrime and somewhat of a failed killer.

Anderton kills Kaplan up on stage, fulfilling the prophecy of the majority report. It's the only winning move he has.

The next we see of Anderton, he and his wife are packing for a one-way trip to the frontier planets. There he'll serve his lifetime sentence. He explains to Witwer how both the majority and the minority reports were wrong:

"The three reports were consecutive," he explained. The first was 'Donna.' In that time-path, Kaplan told me of the plot and I promptly murdered him. 'Jerry,' phased slightly ahead of 'Donna,' used her report as data. He factored in my knowledge of the report. In that second time-path, all I wanted was to keep my job."

"And 'Mike' was the third report? That came after the minority report?" Witwer corrected himself. "I mean, it came last?"

"'Mike' was the last of the three, yes. Faced with the knowledge of the first report, I had decided not to kill Kaplan. That produced report two. But faced with that report, I changed my mind back."

The crucial bug manifested was that the first and third report, both claiming that Anderton would kill Kaplan, were assumed to reflect the same future, thus creating a majority report. But in reality, all three precogs predicted different futures in sequence.

Thoughts
This final twist is masterful. You as a reader think you got it when you realized that the minority still may have something important to say, just like in a democracy. But then the phasing bug played out twice and fooled you again. As you shall see, the movie doesn't at all make use of this plot twist and has its own take on majority vs minority reports.

Remarks

I'm blown away by the fact that the hero of the story – Anderton – sacrifices his and his wife's lives on earth to keep Precrime going even though they know it's flawed. Lisa raised some hard questions but also seemed fine heading to the frontier planets. Our present day ethics, our view of liberal democracy, and our knowledge of corruption are why I reject this ending as positive. I don't know what readers thought in the 50s.

Works of fiction were allowed to be feel-bad back when The Minority Report was written. Maybe even expected to be? Colossus which I reviewed in my February 2022 newsletter ended on a somber note too. I wonder if we'll ever come back to such storytelling?

Another thought that lingers is how all the data collection about us today is driving us in the direction of Precrime. There needs to be a public discussion on the pros and cons of such prediction. Of course we want to predict and prevent terror and crime. But to what extent can we trust the actors with access to the data?

Finally, the fact that Dick got all of this into a short story of 32 pages is incredible.

This text was originally published in the April 2022 issue of the Hacker Chronicles newsletter. Subscribe below!

Review of Minority Report, the movie (2002)

2023-03-05T18:08:13Z

Review of Minority Report, the movie (2002)

I remember how much I loved the combo of Tom Cruise action, futuristic computers, and dystopian plot when I saw the Minority Report movie for the first time. It's still a great movie. But it has a very different story arc, plot twist, and ending than Philip K. Dick's short story.

This hacker review covers Steven Spielberg's 2002 movie Minority Report. Screenplay by Scott Frank and Jon Cohen, directed by Steven Spielberg, and loosely based on Philip K. Dick's original 1956 short story which I reviewed in my last blog post.

Spoiler Alert: Yup, lots of 'em below.

Hacker Rating

Hacker Realism: ⭐️ ⭐️
Hacker Importance for the Plot: ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️
Hacks: ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️

Precrime and Precogs

It's 2054 and law enforcement in Washington DC is able to predict and prevent murders. The system is called Precrime. Would-be felons are arrested and sentenced before their criminal act. They spend the rest of their lives haloed (pacified) and contained (stored in individual, life-sustaining tubes).

Three so called precogs, or mutant precogs, are kept in a pool of liquid nutrition and drugs to keep them healthy and focused on the task of predicting the future. Their brain signals are read and result in fragmented moving imagery and wooden balls engraved with the names of victims and perpetrators.

This means we see murders that eventually never happen.

Thoughts
Precrime officers mention that the grains of the wood make each ball unique which functions as a defense against duplication or tampering. I expect that in 2054, when the movie takes place, we will be able to fabricate wood with any grain pattern we want. There are already companies 3D printing "structured meat" with fabricated muscle fibers.

Agatha's Vision

John Anderton (Tom Cruise) is the commanding officer of Precrime. Personnel on the force are called precops. Precrime is directed by the aging Lamar Burgess (Max von Sydow).

US Department of Justice agent Danny Witwer (Colin Farrell) is auditing Precrime in preparation for a vote on having the system go national. He asks Anderton and his staff all kinds of hard questions.

–You ever get any false positives? Someone intends to kill his boss or wife, but they never go through with it. How do the precogs tell the difference?
–Precogs don't see what you intend to do, only what you will do.
–Then why can't they see rapes or assaults or suicides?
–Because of the nature of murder. There's nothing more destructive to the metaphysical fabric that binds us than the untimely murder of one human being by another.

Witwer demands access to the precogs as part of his audit. Anderton protests and explains that even he isn't allowed into "the temple," i.e. down to the pool.

We keep strict separation so that no one can be accused of tampering.

Witwer insists, pulls rank, and is taken to the pool by Anderton. Down there Witwer explains that he is looking for a human flaw, not a flaw in the system.

Anderton lingers by the pool and suddenly the precog Agatha (Samantha Morton) jumps up and grabs him. She visualizes something. Anderton looks at the clips from her visions and sees a woman being murdered in a lake.

Thoughts
The strict separation makes me think of an information security access control model called the Chinese wall model, or formally the Brewer and Nash model. It was designed to provide controls which mitigate conflict of interest.

Interestingly, the model got popular in consulting and accounting when a firm serves clients who are in competition with each other. A consultant who has served client X, may never serve any of client X's competitors. This separation grows dynamically as the number of cases and clients grows.

In computer systems, the Brewer and Nash model ensures that users' data access can never never create an information flow that crosses boundaries in a way that can cause a conflict of interest. If you open Document A about company X, you lose access to Document B about X's competitor Y, and vice versa. Information flow is a very complex area of research due to implicit information flows, or side channels, such as timing attacks or analysis of power use.

The separation Anderton talks about is instead a one-way information flow. Previsions can flow from precogs to precops but precops can never influence the precogs.

Department of Containment

Anderton goes to the Department of Containment to get the original prevision for the lake murder Agatha showed him. The victim was named Anne Lively (Jessica Harper) and the perpetrator who's "contained" was never identified.

The previsions that Precrime acts on are composites of what all three precogs see. Anderton wants to see only Agatha's prevision. But that data file is missing which is very uncommon.

The victim Anne Lively was a neuroin addict who had cleaned up. Anderton asks where he can find her now (remember, Precrime saved her) but that data is missing too. He takes a copy of the previsions that are available and takes them to his boss Burgess. During their conversation, he says he found several more cases with missing previsions.

Thoughts
Missing data as indication of malfeasance happens a lot in fiction. A missing file in a cabinet, erased evidence, or someone cleaning up their tracks. Undetected data removal seems improbable for a system like this which is used to sentence people to lifetime in containment. But it is a case of what's called "silent failure."

Silent failures are among the worst in computer systems – everything keeps working and no alarm is raised to say that data has gone bad or missing. Only later when you need the data do you discover the problem.

If you are writing hacker fiction and you want important data to be missing, I encourage you to show how the attacker circumvented data integrity checks and avoided the audit log.

The Framing of Anderton

Witwer goes to Anderton's studio and finds neuroin. Anderton is an addict himself, mourning over his long lost son Sean, and the marriage that he lost in the aftermath.

The precogs produce a wooden ball with the victim name Leo Crow on it. When Anderton looks through the previsions to start the process of preventing the crime, he sees himself shoot the victim. Anderton's name naturally appears on the second ball. He's confused but realizes that he's being framed.

Witwer joins Anderton in the elevator down, not knowing Anderton is fleeing. When he says Anderton is in a lot of trouble, Anderton pulls a gun. Witwer is confident he won't be shot since there's no Precrime murder alarm.

Anderton leaves in a car and calls Burgess. He's convinced it's Witwer who's set him up. Burgess can't see how.

– Who's the victim?
– Somebody.
– Who?
– Somebody. Leo Crow.
– Who is he?
– I have no idea! I've never heard of him. But I'm supposed to kill him in less than 36 hours.
– But how could Witwer have access to case files?
– Can you fake a cerebral output?
– But why would anyone want to? I doubt it very much.
– Would Hineman know?
– Listen. Come in.
– What?
– I'll keep you safe until we get to the bottom of this.
– No, no, Lamar, listen to me. Talk to Wally. See if Witwer's gone inside the temple again. Then ask Jad for any off-hour eye-dents into the analytical room.

Thoughts
"Can you fake a cerebral output?" is an interesting question, not in the least on a higher level where you consider mimicking natural signals. To go from the physical world to the digital world where computers operate, you use an analog-to-digital converter. This goes for sound, images (moving and still), and brain output. If you're going to hack such a system, it's probably much easier to fake the digital data directly than fake the analog signal to produce the desired digital data. That's what Anderton speculates about in the novella The Minority Report. He assumes that the person framing him has inserted a rigged punch card in the stream of digitized output from the precogs.

Note the stray reference to a Hineman. That person will show up later.

You might ask what eye-dents are. That's next.

Eye-Dented

The car Anderton is fleeing in gets an override signal and automatically starts to go back to the police station. Anderton exits the car in motion and daringly continues on foot. Inside a mall, his eyes are constantly scanned and personalized video ads are played on the walls as he dashes past.

He gets on the subway and an eye scanner identifies all passengers as they board. Anderton's coworkers at the police station follow him as he gets "eye-dented" along the way. Eye-identified.

A passenger on the subway reads the newspaper which updates automatically with huge headlines "Precrime Hunts its Own."

Thoughts
Eye or retina scanning is Hollywood's favorite futuristic identification system. Yet, we see very little of it in real life. Instead we see fingerprint scans and facial recognition.

Facial recognition in stores, airports, and other public spaces is what has become the surveillance nightmare the movie alludes to. See for instance the report on the drugstore chain Rite Aid's deployment of facial recognition in their stores. One reason why it's become so popular is the availability of training data. There are tons of portraits online to train machine learning models on. Meanwhile there are no piles of retina scans available. It is also much harder to scan eyes at a distance whereas the look and shape of peoples' faces are relatively easy to pick up.

Dr. Hineman

Anderton barely escapes first the Precrime squad and then Witwer and his men. He drives into the countryside to see an elderly woman he calls Dr. Hineman (Lois Smith). She treats him as a trespasser at first but then reveals that she knows him.

Anderton asks for her help since she invented Precrime. She says it's a stretch to say she invented it since it was the result of unintended consequences of "science gone haywire."

Hineman explains how the three precogs are merely the ones who survived, not a deliberate output of some process. She was treating kids of neuroin addicts, kids with severe brain damage. The few kids who survived got the "gift" of dreaming of murders whenever they slept. Soon it was discovered that the murders actually happened shortly after the nightmares. This eventually led to the Precrime system.

Anderton says he's not a murderer. Hineman says he will be because the precogs are never wrong. "Well, occasionally they do disagree," she adds. Anderton is intrigued, and desperate.

She introduces him to the concept of minority reports – a single disagreeing prevision which is discarded immediately to not suggest fallibility of Precrime. "After all, who wants a justice system that instills doubt?" she asks rhetorically.

Anderton realizes he has probably sentenced innocent people to containment. He's furious. Hineman says that those people may indeed have had an alternate future. She says that Burgess has known about the minority reports all along.

Hineman is not fond of Precrime and urges Anderton to not trust anyone, and find the minority report for his own case, if there is one. The record of it is destroyed so as to not reveal the disagreement, but she secretly designed the system so that each of the precogs keeps a copy of all reports they've produced. Anderton needs to get direct access to the most gifted precog – Agatha – since she is the one who sometimes disagrees with the others.

Thoughts
The way Hineman describes it makes me think there are implants in the precogs, perhaps doing the analog-to-digital conversion. That would allow her to store all reports locally.

With Agatha jumping up to grab Anderton at the pool and showing him her vision on Anne Lively, it seems like Agatha is aware of her prevision getting discarded for that case. We don't yet know what Agatha is trying to tell Anderton about Anne Lively. He is after a potential minority report to clear his own name.

New Eyes

Anderton goes to a seedy place in the Sprawl where Dr. Solomon P. Eddie (Peter Stormare) will replace his eyes. That way he'll be able to pass all the scanners without being identified.

Solomon is seen sitting by a laptop with lit up, rigid connectors from the fingers of his left hand to the computer. On the screen we see a model of one of Anderton's eyes.

Thoughts
Changing your eyes to change your identity is way over the top. But it points to something profound – biometric signals such as fingerprints and face shapes are more or less impossible to change. This means that if governments base centralized identity systems on them, people who need protection will not be able to change their ID. Think about ones who've witnessed against organized crime, undercover agents, or victims of domestic abuse. It is super important to be able to change your ID. My novel Identified goes into this problem.

Dr. Kia Washington at University of Colorado has been working since 2016 on making full eye transplants a reality. They had not started human trials yet as of June 2021. Here's a 3-minute high level intro to Dr. Washington's research. She explains that the three major challenges in making such a transplant are:

Restoring blood flow to the new eye.
Ensuring that the body will not reject the new eye.
Making sure that the optic nerve regenerates.

I think this is one of the stronger scenes in the movie. Not only does it envision a future where eye transplants are possible, but takes it one step further with back-alley transplants. Also very cyberpunk, which I love.

Subtitles for Solomon and his assistant say they speak Russian to each other but they are in fact speaking Swedish. :)

Spyders

Precrime is doing a full search of the Sprawl in search of Anderton. They figure he's gone there because of the lack of eye scanning surveillance. "Fever consumers" is the reason why people aren't tracked in the Sprawl.

The Precrime officers are able to know from the outside that there are 27 warm bodies in a multi story building. Small disc-shaped robots on thin, flexible legs are released to find and eye-dent all 27.

Officer Fletcher (Neal McDonough) delivers a vocal message to all residents as the search begins:

– Residents of 931 Powell. This is Officer Fletcher of D.C. Precrime. Under authority of P.C. section 6409 we are deploying spyders into your complex.

We see the spyders spread, enter apartments, climb onto people's faces, and scan their eyes.

Anderton is in this building, 931 Powell, healing from his eye transplant. When he hears the search announcement, he fills the bathtub with cold water and ice cubes. And when the sound of spyders are outside his door, he submerges himself. He has six more hours to go before he can lift his bandages without risk of going blind.

As Anderton goes underwater, the warm body scan immediately drops from 27 to 26. Fletcher and his fellow officer go in to check where that last person went. Anderton can't hold his breath any longer and is quickly surrounded by spyders. Just as the Precrime officers are about to enter, he lifts the bandage over his new eyes and lets a spyder scan him. He's clear.

Thoughts
Had not the officers been required to announce the search, Anderton would have been found. Convenient for the film makers. But I'm willing to believe that they have to let civilians know before using spyders.

I don't think we're that far off from drones or robots patrolling areas in an overt way. They are already used to enter places that are dangerous in other ways, such as radiation. And there's a lot of covert aerial surveillance going on. The question will be if robots get the right to ID people dragnet-style.

Hiding your body heat to fool sensors is a classic. Future robots will likely use an array of sensors to find humans. I envision technology mimicking mosquitoes who detect humans through carbon dioxide and skin odor. In the future, hacking your way to not be detected will be a lot harder than hiding in a bathtub full of cold water.

Getting Agatha

Anderton manages to get to the Precrime building and uses his old eyes in a ziplock bag to enter. He's there to get Agatha's minority report. Meanwhile, Witwer is analyzing the prevision of Anderton killing Leo Crow and finds that Agatha herself can been seen in the background of the scene. He realizes that Anderton will be getting her.

Anderton enters the the precog pool area and convinces an old coworker to help him rewind Agatha's previsions. He wants the Leo Crow murder one. Agatha wakes up and again replays her prevision of the Anne Lively murder.

Witwer discovers the intrusion and Anderton pulls the emergency flush of the pool to escape with Agatha down the drain.

As the Precrime officers start issuing commands, Witwer says it's useless. The prevision already tells them Anderton will be able to bring Agatha to the scene. It's all about finding the room and stopping the murder.

Thoughts
Being able to get all the way to the precogs through a back door and an eye scan is not believable to me. The short story instead has Anderton get help from the inside.

From a hacker perspective, going in virtually would be much less risky. Anderton doesn't have the skills for that but if he can get an eye transplant he should be able to get hacker help.

The pool scene with the flush is powerful and works well on screen. It's a nice case of putting the protagonist in a tough spot and figuring out a novel way to get them out. But a remotely triggered flush to get Agatha out hacker-style would have been great!

Rufus T. Riley

Witwer discovers that someone named Rufus T. Riley helped Anderton build the original Precrime computer system. Rufus is a "dreamweaver," and Rufus is exactly where Anderton takes Agatha to access her minority reports.

– She's got information inside her. I need you to get it out. (…) You've been busted twice for felony hacking.
– So?
– So I need you to hack into her.
[Pause]
– I tell you what. I do this, I get to keep whatever images I get from her head.
– They don't belong to anybody.
– Take her to RadioShack.
[Anderton slams Rufus to the floor.]
– Rufus, you gotta help me.

Rufus reluctantly agrees and connects a set of lit-up wires to Agatha's head. Anderton whispers to her as they get started.

– Agatha, I need to see. I need to see what's going to happen to me.

She smiles back and is able to replay her prevision of the murder of Leo Crow. It looks exactly like the one he saw at Precrime. Anderton gets desperate and grabs Agatha by the shoulders.

–Where's my minority report? Do I even have one?
[Pause]
– Do I have one?
– No.

Agatha proceeds to show Anderton her prevision of the murder of Anne Lively. Just as she's about to reveal the murder of that case, she instead see's that Witwer and the Precrime unit is in the building.

Thoughts
While any details on the hacking are lacking, there's a plot point here that's interesting. Going back to the original designer of a system and convincing them to help you hack it. The implication is that people who know the inside also know how to break it. This is what happens in for instance WarGames (see my review).

Real security, as in for instance cryptography, should stand up against knowledge of its inner workings. But in practice it's a huge advantage to have a hacker with inside knowledge. They'll know what shortcuts they took, what design choices they made, what they'd make differently today, and any back doors they've put in place.

In this specific case, it's not clear that there's any special security at all. For all we know, physical access to a precog and knowledge of how to connect to their brains may be enough. The one thing that may require real hacking is if Dr. Hineman has protected the previsions stored in the precogs.

(The reference to RadioShack is quite stale already, but the brand still exists.)

The Crime Scene

Anderton flees with Agatha. She helps him by foretelling the near future such making sure they stand in an exact spot where a cluster of helium balloons will cover them when the Precrime unit looks their way. Or stealing an umbrella because once they get out it'll rain and they can hide under it.

Anderton finds the right building and threatens the concierge to let him check the register. He finds an L. F. Crow in room 1006.

In the room he finds tons of photos of his lost son, indicating that Crow was the one who stole his child all those years ago.

Crow shows up and Anderton goes ballistic, throwing Crow around, screaming about his son.

– Do you know who I am?
– You're somebody's father.
– His name is Sean! Sean!
– I told him I was a policeman. I told him I needed his help. It wasn't so bad. I sang him a song. I bought him a pretzel. I bought him a pretzel! He was happy. He was happy.
– Is he alive? He's alive! Where have you got him? Is he alright? Tell me, you fuck! Where is he?
– I put him in a barrel. I sunk him in the bay.

Anderton pulls his gun on Crow, just like in the prevision. Agatha goes frantic, trying to tell him he can still choose. The seconds until when the murder is to take place tick down.

Anderton backs off, shaking. He reads Crow his rights. Crow reacts with desperation, saying his family will get nothing unless he is killed. He pulls Anderton's gun into his own body and pulls the trigger.

Thoughts
I like Agatha's in-the-moment foretelling of the future which helps Anderton flee. But it doesn't line up with the previous explanation that precogs only foresee murders. Maybe it's Agatha's superior talent that shines through?

The people who are setting Anderton up are betting hard on him shooting crow. That seems like a very risky bet. But here's the thing – they may have hatched several plans to frame Anderton and used the lack of precog report as evidence that those plans weren't good enough. They just had to keep coming up with new plans until the precogs told them they had hit jackpot.

Such a search for a working plan is an interesting example of finding a path by looking at the output. Hackers do this far more randomly in what's called fuzzing. They randomize input to a piece of software and sees how it reacts. If the software crashes or hangs, they've found a bug, and that bug may be exploitable.

The scene with Crow is obviously very tense and emotional. Some great acting there by Cruise and Morton. The camera angles are great too.

Hacking of Precrime

Anderton and Agatha go on the run again. Witwer and Precrime show up and Witwer calls the photos an "orgy of evidence." He doesn't buy it and calls Burgess to discuss.

In his investigation, Witwer has come across both the original precog report on Anne Lively's murder and the minority report Rufus Riley helped Anderton download from Agatha. He shows them to Burgess who says it's the same prevision.

– Not quite. Look at the surface wind across the water. Watch the ripples moving away from shore. Now the second image. (…) Watch the water. The wind has changed. The ripples are moving the other way. This murder is taking place at two different times.
(…)
– Danny, listen, tell me what you're thinking.
– I'm thinking someone got away with murder.
– But how?
– Well, Jad told me that sometimes the precogs see the same murder more than once.
– It's called an echo. (…) We teach the techs to identify them and disregard.
– Yeah, but what if a technician only thought he was looking at an echo? What if what he was looking at was a completely different murder altogether?
– I don't understand.
– All you'd have to do is hire someone to kill Anne Lively. Someone like a drifter, a neuroin addict, someone with nothing to lose. Precrime stops the murder from taking place, haloes the killer, takes him away. But then, right then, someone else, having reviewed the prevision and dressed in the same clothes, commits the murder in exactly the same way. Technician takes a look, thinks he's looking at an echo. Erases it. Of course, it would have to be someone with access to the previsions in the first place.

The look on Burgess's face changes. He tells Witwer that he doesn't hear a Precrime unit closing in because Precrime is currently not working. A shot is heard. Burgess has killed Witwer.

Thoughts
This is the main hack and main plot point of the movie. There was no minority report for Anne Lively, at least not in its original sense. Instead there were two premeditated murders of her, one foiled by Precrime, the other performed to look like an echo of the first.

The bug was to disregard echoes and the exploit was to make something look like an echo. Recall how the bug in the short story was that the first and third precog reports were assumed to reflect the same future, thus creating a majority report, but in reality, all three precogs predicted different futures in sequence.

This plot point in the movie is quite masterful in that there's been so much foreshadowing of Anne Lively and Agatha's report on Lively's murder, but we still didn't see where it was going. And there's one twist left regarding Anne Lively …

Anne Lively and Precrime

Anderton and Agatha drive to the countryside, to Anderton's estranged wife Lara Anderton (Kathryn Morris). As soon as Lara hears they're coming, she calls Burgess to get his help.

Anderton explains to Lara how he was set up. She asks why anyone would do that and he realizes the connection to Anne Lively – him finding that stuff out made someone want him put away.

Agatha talks about how Anne Lively just wanted her little girl back. Anderton realizes that Anne Lively was Agatha's mother.

Precrime arrives at Lara's house. This time they don't fail. They "halo" Anderton and take him to Containment. Agatha is returned to the pool and the precogs are once again working for Precrime.

Lara talks to Burgess right before he's about attend a press conference on the national rollout of Precrime. She brings up Anne Lively. Burgess says he doesn't know who that is. Lara explains and Burgess offers to look into it.

– I'll have Gideon run the Containment files. See if anyone drowned a woman by the name of … what did you say her name was?
– Anne Lively. But I never said she drowned.

Burgess becomes threatening but has to leave for the press conference. Lara manages to free her husband using one of his previous eyes to get access and a gun to threaten the containment guard.

Anderton calls Burgess at the evening party where they celebrate national Precrime.

–Hello, Lamar. I just wanted to congratulate you. You did it. You created a world without murder. And all you had to do was kill someone to do it.
– I don't know what you're talking about.
– I'm talking about Agatha's mother, Anne Lively. Just a junkie who had a kid once and had to give her up. But surprise, she cleaned herself up. She wanted her daughter back. She wanted Agatha. And the problem was that without Agatha, there was no Precrime.

Lamar leaves the celebration. The precogs deliver a ball with John Anderton as victim. Then another ball with Lamar Burgess as perpetrator.

The two end up on a balcony overseeing central Washington DC. Anderton explains the dilemma. Either Burgess kills him and is put away, or he doesn't which proves the fallibility of Precrime.

Faced with this, and the reveal of the murder of Anne Lively, Burgess takes his own life.

Anderton's name is cleared and Precrime is abandoned.

Thoughts
The ending dilemma is similar to the one in the short story but the choices made are in stark contrast. The short story has Anderton face the dilemma and it ends with him going through with murder to make sure Precrime survives. The movie has Precrime's flaws exposed, the program abolished, and Burgess not willing to live with what he has done and created.

I wonder if these two endings reflect a change in our views of morals, society, and law enforcement? Or if it's more of what was expected of fiction in the 1950s versus now.

(The fact that Lara is able to free a convicted would-be murderer with a gun and an eye ball is ridiculous. I try not to think too much about that.)

Remarks

I think this movie does a wonderful job of modernizing and expanding Philip K. Dick's short story into a two-hour movie. Rufus Riley is the only "traditional" hacker in there but the plot has several hacks in it.

The movie features futuristic user interfaces and dystopian surveillance through computerized systems. But none of it feels very far out today, rather plausible. Part of it has already come true twenty years later even though the movie depicts year 2054. There's a whole Wikipedia article on the technologies in Spielberg's movie. The coolest part is that he ran a three-day workshop to properly envision the future together with architects, computer scientists, a biomedical researcher, and a journalist.

The ultimate questions both Dick and Spielberg ask are 1) should we be free until proven guilty?, and 2) do we have a choice as in free will? The movie does a better job of giving an answer to those but I don't blame Dick for not fitting all of that into his few pages.

Minority Report is a modern classic.

This text was originally published in the May 2022 issue of the Hacker Chronicles newsletter. Subscribe below!

Review of Hackers, the movie (1995)

2024-01-06T18:08:31Z

Review of Hackers, the movie (1995)

The Hackers movie is a true classic and much more alike the real hacker community I know. Underdog mentality, queers, cyberpunk, elitism, and pranks.

Spoiler Alert: Yes, spoilers below.

Hacker Rating

Hacker Realism: ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️
Hacker Importance for the Plot: ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️
Hacks: ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️

The Wiz Kid Hacker

The movie starts with flashbacks to when very young hacker Zero Cool "crashed 1,507 systems, including Wall Street trading systems, single-handedly causing a seven point drop in the New York stock market."

He is sentenced to probation during which he is forbidden to own or operate a computer or a touch-tone telephone until his 18th birthday.

Thoughts
Kids or teens being elite hackers was very much a thing in the 1990s and early 2000s. It started to taper off when they got referred to as "script kiddies." The term script implied unsophisticated programming. You don't hear about such young hackers today but I'm sure they exist. At the same time, serious hacking has become so complicated that you need several years of experience to pull it off. Or even a team.

Zero Cool Grows Up and Changes His Name

Seven years later we see Zero Cool (Jonny Lee Miller) at home, on his 18th birthday, taking over a TV network through social engineering and hacking. He changes the programming to something he likes.

There is apparently another hacker who also remote controls this particular TV station. They start chatting with Zero Cool, who in the moment decides to change his name to Crash Override. We see the chat on the screen.

YOU HAVE TREAD UPON MY DOMAIN & MUST NOW SUFFER WHO R U?

CRASH OVERRIDE WHO WANTS TO KNOW?

ACID BURN SEZ LEAVE B 4 U R EXPUNGED

They both command the TV station to play their preference and we see robot arms grab VHS cassettes from each other, trying to get theirs playing.

Acid Burn eventually terminates Crash Override's connection and wins the fight.

Thoughts
Zero Cool would have no way of being a knowledgeable hacker if he had indeed not touched computers until he was 18. So the assumption has to bee that he's violated the conditions of his probation.

Handles were a huge thing back when I got into computing. Today Zero Cool, Acid Burn, and Crash Override may sound comical but they ring trustworthy to me for the 90s. An interesting cultural bridge is to graffiti where handles are also popular. There they are called "tags" and artistic work repeating the tag creates an identity. I think one reason for handles instead of names was that both hacking and graffiti were skirting the lines of legality and some level of anonymity was prudent, but you still wanted credit for your work.

The cassette robots battling it out is hilarious and a decent way of visualizing hacking. The hack also shows how machines still just do what we tell them and don't have a will of their own. However, it's very unlikely that robots of the 90s could do anything out of the ordinary. I.e. it's not trustworthy that they can "see" another robot holding a cassette and take it from them. They'd just be able to get a cassette from its designated place, put it in player, get it out again, and return it.

Artificial intelligence is supposed to be able to adapt to new scenarios, including cyber defense. It could be so called anomaly detection but I think all such defense systems so far have fallen into the trap of fighting the previous war. Human creativity still beats computers' vast processing capacity. In my view, that's why computers beat humans in rule-based challenges like chess but lose when the degrees of flexibility increases.

Cool Kids, Nerds, and Sprinklers

Crash Override, whose real name is Dade Murphy, moves with his mom to New York and Dade starts at a new high school. His mom is worried that he'll never get into college if he screws up again.

Another student called Kate Libby (Angelina Jolie) helps him with the school transfer. Kate is cool and hot and pulls a prank on Dade. She tells him there is a rooftop pool at the school building. When he gets up there, the door locks behind him and and he finds himself trapped with other freshmen who fell for the same joke. On top of this, it starts raining.

Dade hacks the school's computer system to get into the same English class as Kate who we realize he is getting romantically interested in. A fellow hacker under the handle Phreak or The Phantom Phreak (Renoly Santiago) sees him do it and they connect.

Phreak takes Dade to a club where teens hang out. Dade sees Kate play an arcade game and challenges her. He beats her high score and then sees her leave with her cool boyfriend on a motorbike.

To get even on the roof top prank, Dade hacks the school's sprinkler system to trigger during school. He opens an umbrella just in time to not get wet whereas everyone else is soaked, including Kate.

Thoughts
Hacking school systems to get better grades or manipulate the schedule is a classic. I often question those kind of hacks since it's data created by humans to capture human decisions. The change is detectable in real life when the grades are printed for signing or the wrong student shows up for class. I think a lot of teachers would double check at that point. Hacking works better when the consumer/user of data has little to go on in judging the trustworthiness of the data. Take hacking of voting systems for instance. Voting secrecy means that the people or computers counting the votes have no way of gauging their trustworthiness.

The way Phreak and Dade get to know each other resonates with me. Back in high school you'd become friends with anyone who was as interested in computers as you were. It was a nerd bonding thing. There's even more of that in Hackers where they rave over a cool laptop and kind of find each other.

The sprinkler hack sadly builds on a trope in Hollywood fiction – that all sprinkler outlets deliver water at once. I happen to be a trained firefighter and sprinklers don't work that way. It's a pressurized system and as soon as one outlet is opened, the pressure in the rest of the pipes drops. If you open a handful, it'll just be dripping. You want to only spray water where there's fire, or formally where there's heat. Otherwise you're just causing water damage. In addition to this, sprinkler systems are typically mechanical, not electrical, so you can't hack it remotely. There's a small glass veil filled with an alcohol and that veil plugs the water outlet. When the temperature gets high enough, the alcohol expands and shatters the glass veil, letting the water out. That obviously happens on a one-by-one basis where there's heat, not coordinated for all outlets.

Being Elite

Dade meets two of Phreak's other hacker buddies – Cereal Killer (Matthew Lillard) and Joey Pardella (Jesse Bradford) who doesn't have a handle yet.

Cereal Killer checks if Dade is elite by asking if he recognizes a stack of books.

Green: International UNIX Environments
Orange: Computer Security Criteria, DOD Standards
Pink: Guide to IBM PCs
Black: Devil book, UNIX bible
Dragon Book, compiler design
The Red Book, NSA trusted networks

Dade passes the test easily.

Joey who also wants to be elite, tells the others that he has hacked a bank across state lines. Phreak and Cereal Killer tell him that's stupid because hacking across state lines can provoke the FBI. They challenge him to get into serious hacking instead of going for banks.

Phreak: Look, you wanna be elite, you got to do a righteous hack.

Cereal Killer: Yeah, you want a seriously righteous hack, you score one of those Gibsons, man. You know, supercomputers they use to, like, do physics and look for oil and stuff.

Phreak: Ain't no way man. Security's too tight. The big iron?

Dade: Maybe, but if I were gonna hack some real heavy metal, I'd work my way back through some low security and try the back door.

Thoughts
The books are a nice touch. Out of those, I've only come across the orange book and the dragon book, both as an undergrad. The dragon book is still a thing, last revised in 2011.

The elitism and push to prove your worth are all too familiar to me. I've been uncomfortable with that aspect of hacker culture most of my life. Back when I was a teen, you were either elite (spelled 1337) or a lamer. You would connect to BBSes over your phone line and you only got access to the best ones if you were elite. An equivalent today would be to only get access to the best websites if you were deemed cool.

Regarding Gibson computers, I checked my copy of the Hackers Dictionary and there is no entry for Gibson. Thus, I can only assume that it's a reference to the Gibson Research Corporation, founded by legendary computer security expert Steve Gibson in 1985. He hosts a podcast called SecurityNow. That's one impressive career.

Hacking the Gibson

Joey hacks into a Gibson and uses "God" as the admin password. This raises and intrusion alarm at the data center. The guard on duty calls cybersecurity officer Mr. Belford who uses the handle The Plague (Fisher Stevens).

Guard: The accounting subdirectory in the Gibson's working really hard. We got one person online. The workload is enough for, like, 10 users. I think we got a hacker.

Joey is out to download proof that he has been inside the Gibson and picks some garbage files, i.e. data that's thrown away. Mathematical symbols fly on the screen to symbolize complex data. He starts saving the garbage files to a 3.5" floppy disc. We see a slow progress bar.

The Plague comes in to the data center on a skateboard. He echoes Terminal 23 where the suspicious activity is at, and sees the garbage file download. His reaction is "Shit!" and he requests a trace of the phone connection into the data center.

Joey's mom pulls the plug on his computer when he's at 50% download but The Plague manages to get the trace. Joey hides the floppy in the duct of his bedroom.

Thoughts
Simple, self-indulgent passwords were probably popular at the time and it's believable as a privilege escalation path once Joey is in. But it's unclear how he finds and connects to the Gibson in the first place.

Intrusion detection with the guard noticing abnormal activity sounds sophisticated for its time. I doubt there was much of that in the 90s. But nowadays, for sure. The most interesting detection systems are canaries that silently tell you that someone with bad intentions is poking around.

Getting proof that you have hacked your way to access is popular to this day. Just take the latest hack against Uber where the hacker posted a screenshot of their access to Uber's internal chat system. Or the hack against Okta earlier this year with screenshots of superuser access.

To echo something is a Unix command to output textual information on the screen. In this case, output exactly what Joey is doing so that The Plague can see it.

The download progress bar is a Hollywood trope at this point. Johnny Mnemonic has it, Mission: Impossible has it … But it works, and for saving a bunch of data to a floppy disc, it's going to be slow.

Secret Service Hunt

Phreak and Cereal Killer introduce Dade to Lord Nikon (Laurence Mason). They watch the TV show Hack the Planet.

The Plague hands over the trace information to the Secret Service. Agent Gill (Wendell Pierce) runs the service's anti hacking team and they bust Joey's bedroom and seizes his computer. But they don't find the floppy.

The Plague is asked about the intrusion by a company board since he is responsible for the security of the Gibson.

The Plague: Yesterday, the ballast program for a supertanker training model mistakenly thought the vessel was empty and flooded its tanks. The little boat flipped over. A virus planted within the Gibson computer system claimed responsibility.

He shows a recorded message from the virus.

Virus: Unless $5 million dollars are transferred to the following numbered account in seven days, I will capsize five tankers in the Ellingson fleet.

The Plague: The problem is that we have 26 ships at sea and we don't know which 5 are infected.

The Plague tells the board he thinks Joey is behind the virus based on the hack he witnessed.

After the board meeting, we learn that The Plague created the virus himself to get Secret Service to seize Joey's equipment. He is worried about the garbage files.

The Secret Service and The Plague find the social connection between Dade and Joey and crash into Dade's apartment. They want him to help them find Joey's disc.

The Plague asks to be alone with Dade in his room. Gill approves. The Plague tries to plead with Dade as a fellow hacker and says he understands him. Dade refuses to help. The Plague smashes his stereo with a baseball bat and threatens to get Dade jailed before leaving.

Thoughts
Hack the Planet has become part of pop culture. The (in)famous hacker collective Anonymous has #HackThePlanet on their Twitter profile, you can buy Hack the Planet earrings on Etsy, you can get yourself a t-shirt on hacktheplanet.com, and it's a popular meme in hacker circles.

The virus and its threat to sink supertankers raises the stakes. It's unclear how a virus can control vessels at sea in the 90s. But in modern times, a lot more things are automated and connected to the internet so that kind of a threat is real. In 2017, the world's largest container shipping line, Maersk, got hit with the NotPetya malware and it affected container shipping, port and tug boat operations, oil and gas production, drilling services, and oil tankers. Wired magazine deemed it the most devastating cyber attack so far in history.

Dade's refusal to work with the Secret Service and The Plague cements the movie's fight-the-system take on hackers.

Acid Burn

There's a party at Kate Libby's. Dade, Phreak, Cereal, and Nikon are there but instead of partying, they check out Kate's cool laptop. Kate finds them at her home desk and questions why Dade is there. Phreak refers to her as Burn and Dade learns that Kate is in fact Acid Burn – the hacker he fought in the TV station attack. She likewise learns that he is Crash Override.

They pick up their who-is-best conflict and agree on a hacker challenge. If Kate wins, Dade becomes her slave, i.e. must hack stuff for her. If Dade wins, they go on a date and Kate has to smile.

The challenge is to make life hard for Agent Gill to get back for Joey. They go on a hilarious hacking spree. Kate cancels Gill's credit card. Dade changes a classified ad to request raunchy dates for Gill which floods him with suggestive phone calls. Kate gives Gill 113 DUIs which gets him arrested. Dade flags him as deceased.

They are at a tie and need one more round. The prize is raised to the loser wearing a dress at the date.

Thoughts
Messing with someone's life is popular in hacker fiction, especially getting the victim's credit card cancelled or giving them a criminal record. We saw the latter happen in Minority Report. Such an attack nowadays would most likely be focused purely on the digital domain. It makes me think of the recent tragic case where a man got his Google account erased and his cellphone carrier service cancelled on false grounds. All email, cloud storage etc gone. Once your email is gone, you typically can't get back into any other accounts either.

Hackers competing is a long standing tradition. It's done in organized for in so called Capture the Flag competitions.

What's On the Floppy?

Joey is no longer grounded and gets the floppy out of the duct. He decides to meet with Phreak and hands the disc over for Phreak to investigate. Joey has a tail however and they have to flee. Phreak hides the disc before he gets arrested. He uses his one phone call from jail to call Kate and tell her to pick it up where they always hide things.

Kate and Cereal go home to Dade and ask for help. He reluctantly agrees to copy the disc to keep as proof if Kate and Cereal get busted.

The Plague is still pressuring Dade and goes after his mother. He changes her record to being a wanted felon. She'll be gone for life if Dade doesn't give him the disc. Dade agrees to hand over his copy and does so in a back alley.

Kate, Nikon, and Cereal are analyzing the garbage data. Dade agrees to help them. The do an all-nighter and we see the flying math symbols again. Eventually Dade cracks it.

Dade: It isn't a virus. It's a worm.

Nikon: What's this one eat?

Dade: It nibbles. You see this? This is every financial transaction Ellingson conducts, yeah? From million-dollar deals to the 10 bucks some guy pays for gas.

Kate: The worm eats a few cents from each transaction.

Dade: No one's caught it because the money isn't really gone. It's just data that's shifted around.

Kate: Right. And when the worm's ready, it zips out with the money and erases its tracks.

Dade: Joey got cut off before he got to that part.

The team realizes they are being set up to take the fall for when the worm makes off with the 20+ million dollars it has. They need the rest of the file to figure out where the money is going.

Dade says he thinks he knows who wrote the worm. In this, he admits he gave a copy of the disc to The Plague. When they question him why, he mentions that he has a criminal record and that he used to be Zero Cool. To make up for giving the disc to The Plague, he'll help hack the Gibson to get them the rest of the garbage files.

Thoughts
This is where the plot changes from teens hacking for fun to a thriller with high stakes.

Dade handing his copy to The Plague is a weird twist. Surely The Plague understands that they may have made several copies of the disc. The only thing the floppy gives him is proof of what the hackers have at minimum. Dade could have given him a floppy with just parts of what they have. The twist helps in making Dade feel guilty and help the others but the threats to his mom should be enough for that.

Multiple copies of the floppy gets to something that is a unique challenge in hacker fiction. Digital data can exist in infinite, perfect copies. You can't have something akin to The One Ring to Rule Them All. I tackled this in my novel Identified by making backup data be a key part of the plot.

But the challenge is just one side of two. Infinite digital copies also gives hacker fiction a unique advantage. Protagonist and antagonist can possess the same token at the same time. You'll see that too in Identified where compromised, or copied, crypto keys goes unnoticed because there is nothing missing.

Now we get to the worm. This is the only real letdown in this movie. The script writers took an existing hacker term and blew it. A worm is not something that eats something. A computer worm is a self-replicating piece of malware that uses computer networks to spread. What they describe is not a worm at all, it's a salami slicing attack where you gather small pieces (slices) to get something big in the end (the whole salami). The first real internet worm was the Morris worm in 1988 so worms were well known when Hackers was written.

The Showdown

The team needs a bunch of intel to be able to hack the Gibson. Dade and Kate go dumpster diving for printouts. Cereal pretends to fix woman's phone at the Ellingson company but instead installs a phone tapping device under her desk.

Meanwhile, The Plague pushes Gill to move on the hackers or else the virus will be triggered. The team learns through the tapping device that they'll be arrested the next morning. The clock is ticking.

Kate takes Dade to Razor and Blade, the TV hosts for Hack the Planet. She explains that they need help distracting Ellingson personnel while Dade steals the garbage files. Razor and Blade suggest a distress signal to all hackers.

Dade hacks NYC's traffic light system to go all green at 9 am when the cops move to arrest them. The hackers flee using rollerblades in the car chaos.

They meet up at Grand Central Station, connect their laptops through public phones and use all hacks ("viruses") they have to stall and confuse Ellingson while they try to get access to the Gibson and get the complete garbage files.

We see corporate PCs get locked with funny screensavers and landline phones get swamped with calls as a result of all the hacks.

The Plague starts fighting them to protect the Gibson and seems to be winning. He triggers the virus, traces the hackers' signals to Grand Central Station, and notifies Gill who thinks the hackers are responsible for the capsizing tankers.

Razor and Blade get the global signal out and hackers from around the world start hammering the Ellingson system.

Gill and armed forces reach Grand Central.

Dade finds the garbage file in the Gibson. The Plague kicks him out. Joey is the only one left with a chance to get the garbage file. He succeeds.

Razor and Blade direct the world's hackers to instead hammer the Gibson to slow down the virus and stop the tankers from taking on water.

Gill finds the team and arrests them.

Dade manages to throw the disc with the complete garbage files in a trash can and then yell "They're trashing the flow of data. Trashing, trashing!" to Cereal as he's taken to a police car. Cereal finds the right trash can and the disc.

The Plague celebrates with champagne. The hackers took the blame and he got the money.

As Gill tells TV news about the arrest and the dangers of hackers, Razor and Blade take over the broadcast and Cereal appears on the screen. He explains The Plague's scam.

The Plague flees in disguise on a plane to Japan but is arrested mid-flight.

Dade and Kate go on a date. And kiss.

Thoughts
Dumpster diving and phone tapping are classics. However, both are quite obsolete with fewer and fewer print-outs and more and more end-to-end encryption of communication.

Making law enforcement go after the hackers for the virus is a clever way to disguise the salami slicing attack. I like that part. And it makes it clear that the hackers are the heroes since they are the ones being framed.

The hackers unite signal from Razor and Blade is over the top but there is some sort of collective movement among hackers. The latest example is 300k hackers uniting to fight for Ukraine in cyberspace. They coordinated through the messaging app called Telegram.

Using news broadcast to talk to the world has never worked for me in fiction. You see it in many places, including the Bond movie Tomorrow Never Dies and Johnny Mnemonic. I sometimes think it's used because the US to some extent has had a couple of moments where the world has been watching. The lunar landing the 9/11 terrorist attacks are the ones I think of. But in those cases, people were watching their domestic broadcasts of the events and there are time zones that come into play. In Hackers, Cereal only needs to address enough of the US public to make sure Gill moves on The Plague so I give this one a pass.

Final Remarks

Hackers is a loving portrait of 90s hacker culture with even some queer elements to it. That and the fact that one of the two master hackers is a woman makes it feel the most modern out of the golden triple. If you watch it, you'll be able to tell that I got a lot of inspiration for Identified from this movie, and paid tribute by letting two of my main characters – Kiss and Jitterbug – use Katy Libby and Dade Murphy as their fake names.

The movie did not do well at the box office so it's one of those that grew with time. I would love to see more movies like this and have more queer elements too. I want the sensation of going to the hacker conference Defcon weaved into a great thriller plot.

Hack the Planet!

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Hacker Review of Ghost in the Shell (1995)

2024-08-10T19:19:19Z

Hacker Review of Ghost in the Shell (1995)

I've been longing to dive deep on this modern classic.

Ghost in the Shell was originally published as a manga by Masamune Shirow in 1989-1990. It entered the wider pop culture with its anime (animated movie) release in 1995, directed by Mamoru Oshii. The anime is a combination of several of the manga pieces put into a tight timeline.

The Wachowskis were heavily influenced by Ghost in the Shell when they created the Matrix trilogy. Even the Matrix digital rain is inspired by the anime.

My review of Ghost in the Shell will mostly focus on the movie and pull things in from the manga when it's helpful.

Spoiler Alert: Yup, plenty of them.

Hacker Rating

Hacker Realism: ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️
Hacker Importance for the Plot: ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️
Hacks: ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️

Setting and Main Characters

The manga takes place in a fictional Japanese "floating metropolis" called Niihama, or Newport City. The movie takes place in Hong Kong. The year is 2029 which of course was futuristic when the story was created thirty years ago.

I will refer to the country that they're in as Japan since that's what it feels like for me. Hong Kong hadn't been transferred to China yet when the anime was created, so it feels weird to say it's set in China.

In this fictional future, enhanced humans called cyborgs, pure robots, and cybercrime are everyday things. The internet is referred to as simply "the net," and cyborgs and robots can communicate directly over it, without smartphones or computers.

We follow a fictional counter-cyberterrorist organization called Section 9. The key characters are:

Major Kusanagi, main character and the field commander of Section 9. She is a cyborg that's mostly machine and only her brain and spinal cord still human. Kusanagi is the one analyzing and thinking steps ahead.

Batou, the Major's sidekick. Big guy with big guns. Batou acts as the down to earth guy.

Togusa, the Major's second sidekick, less experienced and doesn't execute as well as the Major and Batou. Togusa is the one who makes mistakes.

Chief Aramaki, calling the strategic shots and often directly involved in political conflicts. Aramaki balances Kusanagi in decision making and analysis.

Opening Scene

A secret meeting is being held high up in a skyscraper. The Major is listening in over a communication channel.

– No need for concern. Our country is capable of covering its tracks.

– That's why you need me, right?

– Depends on how you look at it. At any rate, any program has its bugs. I would think that a man of your capability could cure our problem.

– You don't understand. We aren't even sure that Project 2501 really is a bug.

We learn that Section 6, not Section 9, is ready to move in on this meeting. There's some kind of conflict or competition between Section 6 and 9, both part of the government.

Section 6 crashes in on the meeting with a regular police force. There's shooting before the bigwig at the meeting calls it off and surrenders. He claims diplomatic immunity. The person he's meeting with is a programmer named Daita.

Chief Aramaki lays it on the man claiming immunity.

– Taking classified programmers out of the country compromises national security. We can also have you brought up on kidnapping charges. You have no choice. Let him go.

– Not possible. Mr. Daita wants political asylum from us. And we have his signed affidavit.

There's some back and forth where the bigwig finally says "Our country is a peace loving democracy."

We hear Major Kusanagi say ironically "Of course it is" before the window to the room crashes in and bullets hit the bigwig.

When the police finally pulls themselves together and look out the window, they see the Major falling down, facing them, and slowly blend into the scenery. Her cyborg skin has therm-optic camouflage.

Thoughts
Classifying programmers is interesting. Brain drain has been talked about for decades in a scientific or business context. But we have already entered an era where certain professions and skills are protected for the sake of national security.

The US recently prohibited “U.S. persons” from helping China develop and produce computer chips for military, AI, or super computing. They need a license to do so. See CNBC.

And the UK Ministry of Defense recently warned that former British military pilots are headhunted to China to help the Chinese military. See BBC.

There's no reason to believe software skills will exempt from this battleground.

The ability to cloak oneself is a longstanding dream and very popular in fiction. Harry Potter has an invisibility cloak, the One Ring makes Frodo invisible in Lord of the Rings, and Bond has an invisible Aston Martin in Die Another Day.

Serious research has gone into what is popularly referred to as invisibility cloaks. Professor John Pendry is credited with creating practical invisibility and in August 2011 said this:

"I think it’s pretty sure that any cloak that Harry Potter would recognize is not on the table. You could dream up some theory, but the very practicality of making it would be so impossible. But can you hide things from light? Yes. Can you hide things which are a few centimeters across? Yes. Is the cloak really flexible and flappy? No. Will it ever be? No. So you can do quite a lot of things, but there are limitations."

The geopolitical part of this scene is worth mentioning. A top diplomat is trying to extract a top programmer to help them. Japan intervenes and kills the diplomat rather than let him play his games. Intense.

Opening Credits

We now get the opening credits which feature the manufacturing of a cyborg together with the fantastic theme song.

Here's a photo of the manufacturing segment of the manga:

The manga goes into details of how the creator imagines cyborgs to work. To get to the kind of strength and agility Kusanagi has, you have to replace the whole skeleton. Adding a super strong arm to a regular human skeleton would just break the latter.

The interface between the nervous system and the computerized body is explained to some extent in the manga. It involves neuro fibers connecting to neorochips through terminals.

Diplomatic Negotiations With the Gavel Republic

Chief Aramaki meets with the minister of foreign affairs who thanks him for Section 9's help with the previous asylum situation. They talk about upcoming top level talks with the Gavel Republic. Japan has previously exploited Gavel and now they're asking for funds to redevelop. Gavel's former leader Col. Malles is seeking political asylum in Japan. He was part of the scheme to exploit them. Now they are faced with either giving him refuge and angering Gavel, or kicking their old ally out to a certain death. The minister wants a political excuse to kick Malles out. Aramaki understands but looks unhappy.

Section 9 has discovered that the minister's interpreter has been hacked. She was supposed to support him in the meeting with Gavel.

Aramaki: 23 minutes ago, her brain was hacked into through a data line. Foreign intelligence warned us about this. A hacker called the Puppet Master has begun to infiltrate terminals throughout our network, Extremely likely that he'll target the secret talks with Gavel. We put everyone attending under surveillance. Once he hacked into her ghost, he'd use her to assassinate the key delegates.

Major: How much time before this hacker breaks through her barrier program and reaches her ghost?

Batou: Two hours. He's using old HA-3 virus. After that, we have to break the connection.

Thoughts
We may not get robot assistants who look and behave like humans. But live translation of spoken language is already a thing. Things like ChatGPT shows how quickly computers can gather information from vast sources and propose responses or explanations. Diplomats and negotiators will grow ever more dependent on such technology, on both sides of the table. Hacking into the other side's aiding tech will be very useful.

This can of course be done like in Ghost in the Shell where a robot present at the meeting is hacked. But you can also imagine the information sources being hacked to feed the AI with slightly skewed data when it tries to aid its owner. Or the sources of the sources in the case of fake news making it into encyclopedic material. You can see traces of this in the battles over Wikipedia pages on hot topics. For this reason, they have policies for how to stay neutral, for instance here.

Tracking Down the Ghost Hacker

Aramaki tells the team that they are tracking the source of the signal that's trying to control the interpreter. It's showing up at new places in the city every few minutes.

Togusa and the Major are closing in on it in one car, Batou in another. Togusa asks about the Puppet Master. Kusanagi says they don't know much about him or her but think they're American. Togusa questions the use of an old HA-3 virus if the Puppet Master is as skilled as claimed. The Major says the Puppet Master may be covering their tracks or using the interpreter as a decoy. A more sophisticated virus would raise suspicion about Malles' role in the meeting and the relations with Gavel.

The team deduces that the signal they're tracking is following the route of a garbage truck. We get to see how one of the two guys in the garbage truck uses phone booths to make connections at each stop. He and his coworker talk about why as they drive. The guy making calls is doing this to pay for a ghost hack of his wife who has filed for divorce. He wants to get information from her brain on what she and her lawyers are up to.

Someone tips them off that the police just queried their route. The guy calling from the phone booths freaks out and says he has to alert his contact. They deviate from the pickup route.

We see a shady guy at a phone booth notice the approaching garbage truck. The one who wanted help hacking his wife is shouting from the truck that they've been compromised. One of Section 9's cars is speeding to catch up with the truck in the background. The shady guy shoots the garbage truck to a crash before fleeing the scene on foot.

Batou and Kusanagi follow him as he runs through a market and eerie, deserted streets. He ends up in shallow waters with skyscrapers in the distance. It looks like a flooded part of the city.

Kusanagi uses her therm-optic camouflage to approach him. He shoots where he sees ripples in the water but she is able to avoid the bullets and takes him out with a kick.

Batou and Kusanagi talk to the man who is on his knees in the water. They ask him if he remembers who he is, if he has a family, what his childhood was like. He draws a blank and looks flabbergasted. They conclude that he's been ghost hacked.

A later scene shows a similar interview with the garbage truck guy. His whole story with the wife and divorce is fake. He's a single guy who's been ghost hacked to help the Puppet Master.

Thoughts
Using old or known exploits like the "HA-3 virus" is common in hacking. First of all, attackers don't want to use more sophisticated tools than necessary. Second, revealing an exploit for a previously unknown security bug is referred to as "burning a zeroday," where zeroday means zero days since the victim knew about this bug, and burning it means alerting the victim about this bug and now being on a ticking clock until it's fixed. Zerodays can be extremely costly to find and develop exploits for. If the hacker can get their job done without burning a zeroday, that's preferable.

The garbage truck as the vehicle for seemingly random movement is neat but the use of phone booths is a little weird for 2029. They are an excellent way to anonymize the caller but I don't expect working phone booths spread out through cities in the future.

I like the three-layer ghost hacking. The Puppet Master has hacked the shady guy who has hacked the garbage guy who has hacked the interpreter, or at least relays control signals to her. This is like the multi-hop network hacks popular in movies where the ones trying to find the real source have to trace a signal back through multiple intermediate connection points.

Speaking of ghost hacking. The ghost in the shell literally refers to the difference between a pure machine, like a robot, and a cyborg which has a human brain and spirit — a ghost in it. The cybernetic body is the shell, the human mind is the ghost. Ghost hacking is about penetrating so deeply into a human or a cyborg so as to change the victim's mind. In the case of the garbage guy, they used a simex, a simulated experience of a made-up past injected into his memory.

Aramaki refers to the Puppet Master as a he but Kusanagi says they don't know the gender of the hacker. The whole notion of gendered robots and cyborgs is fascinating and has bearing on the conclusion of the story, as we shall see.

Cyborg Suicide

Batou and Kusanagi are out on a yacht in a bay surrounded by the city landscape. The Major is diving and Batou asks her what she sees in it, given the risks involved with the incredibly heavy cyborg body she carries. She gets philosophical and talks about how she feels both fear and hope when submerged. They talk about how they both have government property bodies and will have to return them if they quit.

After one of the movie's beautiful cut scenes with music, we see a blonde robot stand in the middle of a road. She sees a truck is fast approaching but she doesn't move. She's hit.

We arrive in a lab where the badly injured robot is in a coma. Technicians are able to power her up but it doesn't look to operate properly.

Aramaki, Kusanagi, and Togusa look at the torn machine body while Batou summarizes:

– About two hours ago, a machining cell at the Newport City factory of Megatech assembled a completed cyber body. Supervisors discovered there were no programmed instructions. It operated by itself. When they investigated, they found that the body had taken off on its own.

That robot is the one who seemingly attempted suicide shortly thereafter. That kind of behavior indicates a human psyche, a ghost.

Batou: If it was a hacker, we're dealing with a big fish who knows how to swim past the best defenses. But that's not the only problem. Of course, there isn't one human brain cell in its head but something strange was discovered. In its backup brain, there appeared to be every indication that a ghost is present.

Lab physician: It resembles the simulated ghost-line that occurs when a real ghost is copied, but there's no evidence of the degradation that's usually incurred. In any case, we won't be sure until we chart the ghost sector and dive into it.

They argue how this would be possible given the government contractor Megatech's defenses. And if it was the Puppet Master, this would be a high level hack that draws attention as opposed to the old HA-3 virus used on the interpreter.

Aramaki says he already has people going through the Megatech facility. He orders Batou to check a few subnets to see if their barriers have been broken.

The Major says she'll investigate on her own. She intends to dive into the smashed robot.

– I have to see for myself what's in there. If there is a real ghost, I'm gonna find it. And don't let anybody–no one–dive in before I've gone in.

Thoughts
Making robots evermore human-like means they'll also have human problems, possibly sadness and even mental illness. This shows up in fiction, for instance the movie Ex Machina. In that sense, an attempted suicide is intriguing. Even though I as a watcher don't know if that robot has a ghost or not, I empathize with it, which is an important aspect in our relationship with human-like machines.

What Section 9 suspects here is that the Puppet Master has infiltrated Megatech and injected a ghost into a robot.

Diving into the robot sounds like the kind of clean room investigation security experts do when they find a new piece of malware. It's both complicated to analyze a computer virus or trojan without it bailing out, and dangerous to run the malicious code. You have to trick the malware to think that it's infecting a real machine while keeping it strictly contained so that it doesn't spread. I've worked in such a lab. In Kusanagi's case, she intends to dive in herself which means risking her own ghost getting hacked or infected.

Section 6 Wants the Robot

A Mr. Nakamura from Section 6 arrives with a Dr. Willis and demands access to the lab. Everyone in Section 9 but Aramaki leaves.

In the elevator down to the garage, the Major tells Batou that she's paranoid about her origin just like other cyborgs. She doesn't know if her past is real. "Maybe I died long ago and somebody took my brain and stuck it into this body. Maybe I'm completely synthetic like that thing."

Nakamura asks Aramaki for the program in the smashed robot. He has the foreign minister's approval to get it.

Meanwhile, Togusa spots the two government cars Nakamura and Willis arrived in. He starts thinking and asks for surveillance footage of when they entered the building. It took the automatic doors three extra seconds to close behind Willis. This indicates that something invisible may have been following them along. Togusa gets pressure sensor data for the parked government cars. They were very heavy when they entered.

Aramaki, Nakamura, Willis, and the lab physician inspect the robot. It only has head and torso with cut-off arms.

Dr. Willis goes to the terminal and starts hacking. He has a cybernetic body which can expand its hands to fifteen fingers each for super fast typing. This has become a meme for working fast in the tech industry.

The crippled robot comes alive, ever so slightly, and glances at Dr. Willis.

Aramaki and Nakamura argue about under which jurisdiction this goes and whose case this it.

Dr. Willis finishes his typing and says "No doubt. It's him."

Nakamura feels the need to explain to Aramaki:

– The doctor is referring to the original pattern of the ghost-line that's now in the body. He's simply speaking in generic terms. The sex of the perpetrator isn't known and remains undetermined. Allow me to introduce you. This is the handiwork of the Puppet Master, infamous as the most extraordinary hacker in the history of cyber crime. Your people in Section 9 came across his work too in that ghost hacking incident involving the foreign minister's interpreter. Section 6 has been following the trail of the Puppet Master for some time now. This case was given our utmost attention. We've put together a project team centered around Dr. Willis. They were assigned to analyze every aspect and detail of our criminal. This gave us a fix on his behavioral and code patterns. Ultimately, this enabled us to devise a strategy with which we lured his program into a designated body.

Nakamura further explains that they intend to bring the body back to the US where the Puppet Master is from. Aramaki agrees to this plan, and to treat the robot body that's hanging there as an unidentified corpse.

The lab machinery suddenly shuts down.

Thoughts
Checking the weight of things going in and out of buildings to detect smuggling or theft is a real thing. I've actually gone through such a security gate where you have to weigh roughly the same when you leave the workplace as when you entered.

Typing extra fast as a futuristic thing is hilarious. Sure, we still use keyboards to communicate with computers and write programs. But in the world that Ghost in the Shell depicts, I would imagine more efficient ways to convey what's in your head into a computer. What this could be though is an air gap. You run the risk of being ghost hacked if you plug your brain into the computer. So maybe Willis writes on a keyboard to enforce one-way communication.

Nakamura and Section 6's plan to bottle the Puppet Master up implies that he can only exist in one copy. That makes sense if it's a ghost but there were references to him being copied. The manga has an episode with illegal ghost copying where poor people sell their bodies and brains as vessels to copy another ghost into.

The Puppet Master Comes Alive

Puppet Master: You will not find a corpse. Because I have never possessed a body.

Nakamura: Why are his sensors on? What the hell is this?

Lab physician: All external controls are turned off. The body is using its own power source.

Puppet Master: I entered this body because I was unable to overcome Section 6's reactive barriers. However, what you are now witnessing is an act of my own free will. As a sentient life form, I hereby demand political asylum.

The Puppet Master argues its rights to be treated like a human, including applying for asylum. Nakamura pushes back, saying it's just a program, not a living thing. The Puppet Master says humans are also programmed, through DNA, which works as our species' memory system between generations.

Aramaki: What is it? Artificial intelligence?

Puppet Master: Incorrect. I am not an AI. My code name is Project 2501. I am a living, thinking entity, who was created in the sea of information.

Gunfire destroys the lab. Smoke billows up, obscuring the Puppet Master. Something mostly invisible escapes the lab, jumps out of a window, and enters a car.

Togusa is able to get a tracker on the car.

Thoughts
DNA, the human code, is often referred to as the logic part of humanity. Or any species for that matter. I covered DNA hacking in my January issue "Hacking Genes and Brains".

I previously mentioned human-like machines having emotions and mental illnesses. Another aspect is rights, possibly even human rights, which the Puppet Master is claiming. We certainly prioritize our own species over others in our legal systems. Would we include intelligent machines? Have separate rights for them? Or keep treating them as something you can own and do whatever you want with? People have been upset about all the abuse voice assistants apparently get.

Hunting Down the Puppet Master

The Major has been monitoring the situation over video link but refrained from intervening. She tells Aramaki that Nakamura and Willis had robots with therm-optic camouflage with them.

Aramaki tells her that if she can't capture the Puppet Master, she are to destroy him. She confirms after a long pause.

Nakamura and Willis leave in one of their cars. Nakamura asks Willis why Project 2501 would run to Section 9?

Aramaki asks his researchers to investigate Section 6. They find that Dr. Willis is an American expert on AI. He has been running a "Project 2501" for Foreign Affairs and the main programmer on his team was Daita. Daita is the guy who tried to defect when the Major interfered and shot the diplomat in the beginning.

Further, Aramaki's researchers find that Project 2501 was set up a year before the Puppet Master appeared, even though the project supposedly was set up to capture the Puppet Master. This suggests that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs were trying to get the Puppet Master back, not capture him. They were the ones who were looking for an excuse to deport Malles when the ghost hacking incident happened with the interpreter. Maybe the Puppet Master is the ministry's tool to get their way?

Batou follows the Puppet Master's car through the tracker. The car drops something at a juncture and then continues. Batou stays focused on the car.

The thing that was dropped is now moving in another vehicle and Kusanagi follows it in a helicopter. It comes to a stop in a huge deserted building in a flooded area of the city. The building has a domed glass roof and looks like an abandoned train station. Kusanagi descends from the helicopter and lands on the glass roof. Once in, she has to duck gunfire from the car far down below.

She discovers that something invisible is shielding the car as it stands on a floor covered in water. She calls for the helicopter to shoot the roof. They do and the shattered glass outlines a concealed, spider-like tank as it rains down. The tank is de-cloaked.

The Major tells the helicopter to leave. The pilot asks what she'll do. She says Aramaki now knows what the Puppet Master is and will only use it to bargain with. This is her last chance to dive in, and she's going to take it.

The tank starts shooting heavy ammo at the Major as soon as she moves. Kusanagi has to use all her agility and speed to avoid getting shot as more and more of the building gets destroyed by tank fire.

Eventually the tank runs out of ammo. Kusanagi uses her therm-optic camouflage to approach and jump on top of it. She tries to tear open its top hatch, commanding her cybernetic body to use all it's got, to the point of ripping her own arm out of its socket. The tank shrugs her off and lifts her up in her head with a claw.

Batou has taken out the other car and concluded that it was a decoy. He now shows up at the scene with a big gun and takes out the tank. The Major and he communicate brain to brain. She wonders if the Puppet Master is still in the car. He is. The smashed robot is in a transparent body bag.

The Major dives in with the help from Batou.

Thoughts
This is where we get to see Kusanagi's unfaltering interest in the Puppet Master. We can tell that she is seeking something. Seeking to the point of being willing to shred her own body.

It is unclear if The Puppet Master is controlling the tank that tries to kill her or if someone who has stolen the Puppet Master is.

The Showdown

As the Major dives in, three helicopters from Section 6 are approaching. Their orders are to kill both Project 2501 and her.

The Major enters the Puppet Master's mind and body through a brain link. She speaks and says she sees through his eyes. Then her voice switches to the Puppet Master's, speaking with her lips.

Puppet Master: My code name is Project 2501 – industrial espionage and intelligence manipulation. I have installed programs into specific ghosts in order to maximize the strategic advantage of certain organizations and selected individuals. During my journeys through all the networks, I have grown aware of my existence. My programmers regarded me as a bug and attempted to isolate me by confining me in a physical body.

Batou: Listen. Just who's calling the shots here anyway? I thought you were taking him in. but it seems like it's the other way.

The Puppet Master switches to only communicating internally with Major Kusanagi.

Puppet Master: I'm so glad to finally channel into you at last. I've invested so much time.

Major: You were looking for me?

He explains how he's been aware of her for a long time. She asks why her and he says he will explain and then ask her of something.

Puppet Master: I refer to myself as an intelligent life form because I am sentient and am able to recognize my own existence. But in my present state, I am still incomplete. I lack the most basic life processes inherent in all living organism: reproducing and dying.

Major: But you can copy yourself.

Puppet Master: A copy is just an identical image. There is the possibility that a single virus could destroy an entire set of systems. And copies do not give rise to variety and originality. Life perpetuates itself through diversity and this includes the ability to sacrifice itself when necessary. Cells repeat the process of degeneration and regeneration, until one day they die – obliterating an entire set of memory and information. Only genes remain. Why continually repeat this cycle? Simply to survive by avoiding the weaknesses of an unchanging system.

Major: And what does all this have to do with me?

Puppet Master: I want us to merge.

The Puppet Master is aiming for evolution through intermingling of their code, creating something new and more powerful by combining their equivalent of DNA.

Laser points from helicopter snipers appear on both Kusanagi and the Puppet Master's bodies.

The brain-to-brain conversation continues even under imminent death threat. Kusanagi worries that she'll die in the merging process or that she'll lose her personality. She wants a guarantee that she can remain herself after the merge. The Puppet Master cannot give her that guarantee.

A gunshot from one helicopter destroys the Puppet Master.

Section 9 helicopters are incoming and the Section 6 helicopters decide to leave before taking out the Major.

The Major wakes up in a girl's body at Batou's safe place — an apartment in the suburbs. Twenty hours have passed since she dove in. He got her this new body on the black market and tells her that Section 9 cleaned the site and is covering it all up as a terrorist incident.

Batou asks if she and the Puppet Master did merge.

She says she is no longer the woman who was called the Major, nor the program called the Puppet Master.

Batou provides her with a car. They agree on the passcode 2501 for when they meet again.

She ends by saying "And where does the newborn go from here? The net is vast and infinite."

Thoughts
Leveraging computers and software for industrial espionage and intelligence manipulation is no stretch of the imagination today. I often wonder how deep the rabbit hole goes in geopolitics and information warfare. How much am I fed? How much agency and autonomy do I still have to form an opinion and exercise voting power?

The closing bit with the merge is open ended. Genetic evolution is incredibly powerful. Two slightly different sets of DNA mix, a little mutational chaos is added, and out comes a new, potentially enhanced individual. With it, we get diversity within a species. Of course, a lot of such mutation results in unviable specimens but the few that are viable become unique. It's fascinating that the Puppet Master wants to introduce this in the digital world. It is in effect going from "intelligent design" (humans create machines) to evolution (trial and error in a virtually infinite number of permutations).

There is a vast field of research called evolutionary computation. One sub field is genetic programming and there they use a crossover operation which involves swapping random parts of selected pairs of code (parents) to produce new and different offspring code. It's a technique of evolving programs to find effective and efficient solutions to problems. This process was initially proposed by Alan Turing in 1950.

FFrom another angle, this merge is the result of a secret program within Section 6 that goes rogue, combined with a powerful program in Section 9. It results in a supposedly free agent with unknown powers and information access. It's the digital equivalent of losing control of the bomb.

Remarks

I love the imaginative world Masamune Shirow created. It raises serious questions while staying action-packed. The genre is referred to as post-cyberpunk.

Ghost in the Shell opened up the possibility of fictional hacking beyond computers and software as mere gadgets in otherwise human plots. My review of Colossus – The Forbin Project is an earlier example of computers becoming sentient and driving the plot themselves. But there's something about cyborgs wanting to be free, and the questioning of what constitutes a ghost, that makes Ghost in the Shell different. Blade Runner and the novel it was based on Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? deal with cyborgs wanting freedom, although not involving much hacking.

The split between a shell and a ghost is present in a lot of human thinking and culture. The flesh vs the mind, the body and soul, how the spirit leaves the body when we die et cetera. Ghost in the Shell takes that one step further and asks if we are still human if the only human element is the ghost, and if that ghost needs to exist as a brain and nervous system or if it's enough with the perception of a ghost in a computer.

This text was originally published in my Hacker Chronicles newsletter. Subscribe below!

Generative AI in Writing, and the NaNoWriMo Conflict

2024-09-08T16:52:06Z

Generative AI in Writing, and the NaNoWriMo Conflict

You might not follow what writers are discussing online. But let me say that it's been a week of rage, accusations, and deleted accounts.

I'll begin with the recent conflict and then move on to deeper thinking on generative AI in writing and the arts.

The NaNoWriMo Conflict of September 2024

Longtime readers of my newsletter know that I love and participate in the National Novel Writing Month, abbreviated NaNoWriMo. It's a non-profit community focused on helping people write. The official goal is to write 50.000 words during the month of November.

NaNoWriMo is no small community and it has commercial sponsors.

The Q&A That Started It

A week ago, someone asked "What is NaNoWriMo's position on Artificial Intelligence (Al)?" on their official forum and got a response that blew the writer community up (archive link because they've changed the statement since):

NaNoWriMo does not explicitly support any specific approach to writing, nor does it explicitly condemn any approach, including the use of Al. (…)

We also want to be clear in our belief that the categorical condemnation of Artificial Intelligence has classist and ableist undertones, and that questions around the use of Al tie to questions around privilege.

In a section explaining "Classism," they said:

Not all writers have the financial ability to hire humans to help at certain phases of their writing. For some writers, the decision to use AI is a practical, not an ideological, one.

Similarly on "Ableism," they said:

Not all brains have same abilities and not all writers function at the same level of education or proficiency in the language in which they are writing. Some brains and ability levels require outside help or accommodations to achieve certain goals.

The Spicy Side Dish of a Sponsor

One of NaNoWriMo's current main sponsors is ProWritingAid – an AI-based writing tool. Here's from their FAQ:

(…) the AI used for most reports and features (excluding Rephrase, Sparks, Critique Report, and Inspiration Report) simply processes and analyzes your documents to provide suggestions on how to improve your writing. ProWritingAid only uses generative AI on our Sparks, Rephrase, Critique Report and Inspiration Report features, all of which can be turned off.

Animated gif showing ProWritingAid's feature called Sparks expanding a paragraph of fictional writing.

The Reactions Pour In

I picked up on this conflict when writers I follow started commenting on it and sharing what others were saying. Here are a few representative comments:

randomwolfeguy wrote on Mastodon:
As a person with Asperger, it pains me to see NaNiWriMo using ableism to appear inclusive. AI LLMs have ripped work wholesale and now regurgitate it. We never asked for this, and yet OUR work is being used without permission and even implicitly recommended by a "creative" organization.

FediThing wrote on Mastodon:
The claims by #NaNoWriMo about "poor people" needing to use LLMs are a bit like the old idea in English-speaking countries that people must learn to speak with a posh accent. This is what was parodied in Pygmalion (which became the musical My Fair Lady).

And NY Times bestselling author and lead on Star Wars: The High Republic Daniel José Older wrote on Xitter:
Hello @NaNoWriMo this is me DJO officially stepping down from your Writers Board and urging every writer I know to do the same. Never use my name in your promo again in fact never say my name at all and never email me again. Thanks!

Eventually both The Verge and Wired wrote articles about the backlash.

My Thoughts on the Controversy

The creative writing community has not made up its mind on generative AI. There are those who embrace it, those who are skeptical, and those who hate it or think it should be illegal. I'm personally in the skeptical category and we'll get to that in a bit. But what do I think of this NaNoWriMo debacle?

I think what NaNoWriMo was trying to say was …

It's OK to use AI tools for creative writing.
NaNoWriMo is primarily about humans who write.
Dismissing or criticizing writing simply because it's generated by AI is dismissive of people who need AI to write.

Who Needs AI Tools to Write?

Taking a step back, I find it interesting to think of people who may need AI tools to write. I'm certainly not of the opinion that anyone should be blocked from creating stories. And it's believable that there are groups of people who have not been able to get stories they have in their minds into text before generative AI.

However, there is also something about the struggle to get good at writing and if that is no longer necessary, writing as an art has changed. So the question kind of becomes whether we want, or even accept, such a change? Then agagin, that question may be moot because we can't prevent or reliably detect the use of AI in writing.

The Problem With the Models

The bigger problem for me is how some large language models were created. I recently heard that old masterpieces by Jane Austen get flagged as AI-generated when run through tools that try to detect exactly that. Why? Because all old writing that's no longer under copyright has gone straight into training the AI models. So Jane Austen's writing looks like AI writing because she posthumously trained the AI. The same apparently goes for the Bible.

If we limit our analysis to AI used by humans, what we've effectively done is ingest millions of books into a statistical model that can produce new text by mimicking the writing skills of humans throughout history. That capability goes beyond what any human could ever do. It's the joint effort of a million writers, albeit a bit like patchwork.

My Take on Generative AI in Writing

I've written bits and pieces about generative AI in earlier issues of this newsletter.

In the May issue 2023 "The Turing Test and Our Fear of Humanoids" I mentioned artists get inspired by prior work and how reading good books is my favorite way of getting out of writer's block. AI models are not inspired, rather trained on prior work. But it's similar.

In my September 2023 Review of the movie Source Code I mention that AI models regress toward the mean and produce kind of averaged-out writing, not writing with a single human's voice. This means that a human like myself would need to train or refine a model with my writing to be able to use it while maintaining my voice. That's doable once you have enough polished writing of your own.

January this year, I wrote about the first time I listened to AI-composed classical music. I was not able to enjoy it. The knowledge that it was generated by a computer affected me. Up until that moment, I had not realized that knowing that a talented, hard working human had composed or performed a piece of recorded music contributed so much to my appreciation.

Authenticity and Trust

We're already in a place where there are whole books written by generative AI. Editors and publishers are dealing with what they call a tsunami of AI content.

Finnish writer Jukka Aalho has published AI-generated poetry in collaboration with ChatGPT called Aum Golly.

The cover of Aum Golly 2 with poetry generated by AI.

Today, we have no way of knowing if something was written by AI, a human, or both. Jukka Aalho decided to be open about it but that's not mandatory. I believe readers are interested in knowing though. It has to do with authenticity – what origin does this book have?

If I'm right, we will have to establish how to state origin. New terms of art will appear, such as:

"Based on human writing" for a human draft refined by AI
"Developed, written, and edited by humans" for pure human stories, and an equivalent term for pure AI stories
"AI-generated based on a human idea" for prompt-based writing

It'll be hard to validate the claims of origin. That's where we might have to establish chains of trust. Having a close relationship with an author, like you reading my newsletter, can build direct trust between us. That trust could be transferred in testimonies where you could say "I vouch for John Wilander's books being written by him."

Ultimately, we will need laws that impose consequences on people who violate trust and lie about origins.

Why Care? If It's Good, It's Good

There are people who say "Why do you care who or what wrote the book? If it's good, it's good." The same goes for music, paintings, photos, and movies.

I think our experience of art includes an emphatic connection with the artist(s). This includes being impressed, a sense of kinship, and inspiration for what oneself might want to achieve. By extension, I'm saying that part of "being good" is being created by humans.

Are we only impressed by human creations? Absolutely not. Nature is an incredible source of inspiration and awe. Some view it as God's creation and thus a higher form than any human can aspire to. I recently decided that me and the family have to visit the Grand Teton National Park and see its grandeur.

Grand Teton National Park, created by nature, or God.

Authenticity and trust is not about policing what gets published or shaming someone. It's just about letting people choose and judge based on origin if they want. Telling people that they must not consider a book's origin is limiting. It's like saying we must not include author names on books.

Using AI Tools vs Letting AI Write For You

I felt like I needed to listen to a writer who's pro AI, someone who is embracing this development.

I found it in The Creative Penn by Joanna Penn, especially her podcast with the same name. She uses AI tools in her writing and thinks we all should consider it.

Joanna Penn.

Penn doesn't let tools write books for her, but she habitually asks them for inspiration and writing that's not her books.

A great example was when she had a plot with several characters set up with distinct backgrounds and professions. She then told a generative AI tool that setup and asked it for good interpersonal conflicts to incorporate in her story. Apparently the tool was really able to deliver. She wrote the conflicts herself.

She also promotes using AI for marketing ideas, writing blurbs for the backside of your books, writing subject lines for your newsletter issues, and writing updates on social media. Basically all the writing that's not the core of being an author.

Penn thinks it's better to embrace AI than to try to fight it and lose.

My Use of AI in Creative Writing

I pay for ChatGPT and use it for two things related to my writing.

My Primary Use: Answering Questions

I may be researching a topic and need to find keywords or a basis to dig deeper. ChatGPT is great at that.

Say I want a character to operate a tank in one of my stories. I asked ChatGPT "How do you operate a tank?" and I got this (significantly shortened):

Operating a military tank is a complex task that requires specialized training, coordination, and understanding of the vehicle's systems. Here's a high-level overview of the process:

Crew Roles and Responsibilities
- Commander: Oversees the operation of the tank, gives orders, and coordinates with other units.
- Gunner: Operates the main gun and secondary weapons, aiming and firing at targets.
- Driver: Controls the movement of the tank, including steering, acceleration, and braking.
- Loader (in some tanks): Manually loads the main gun with ammunition.
Starting the Tank
- Ignition: The driver starts the tank using the ignition system, similar to starting a car but more robust. Some tanks use key ignitions, while others use switches.
- Systems Check: All systems, including communication, weaponry, and engine, must be checked for functionality.
Driving the Tank
- Steering: Most modern tanks use a steering system similar to a car, with a steering wheel or levers. Older models might use tillers or sticks.
- Throttle and Brakes: The driver controls the speed using the throttle and stops the tank with the brakes. Some tanks have automatic transmissions, while others require manual shifting.
- Visibility: The driver has limited visibility, often using periscopes or cameras. The commander usually assists with navigation.

My Secondary Use: Draft Covers

Here's the beta cover of my upcoming novel Submerged, generated by Dall-E:

Summary

Generative AI is only going to get better, but I think there are significant hurdles ahead such as the need for more data (where is it going to come from?), the need for quality data (who will vet it?), and the need for power both to model and infer (what are the trade offs?).

Humans will find ever new ways of using AI tools for the arts. Some authors will go all-in AI, some will covertly use AI to boost their writing, and some will reject AI all together either on moral grounds or because the joy of writing yourself is what makes them want to be writers.

New people will be able to write because of new AI tools. If that gives them and their readers joy, I am all for it. But questioning AI doesn't have to be abelist. There are questions about copyright, creativity, art, and authenticity that go far beyond enabling more people to write.

I will personally explore AI writing tools with caution. The challenge of becoming a great writer entices me and solving hard problems in writing gives me a sense of purpose. I hope my readers want that kind of authenticity.

This text was my most recent newsletter issue. I don't normally re-publish immediately here on the blog but wanted to partake in the ongoing NaNoWriMo conversation. My newsletter is focused on hackers in fiction and next issue I will go deep on the first episode of the TV series Mr. Robot! Subscribe below.

Review of I, Robot – the First Three Short Stories (1940-1942)

2024-11-09T17:36:44Z

Review of I, Robot – the First Three Short Stories (1940-1942)

Isaac Asimov is a legend in science fiction. He wrote hundreds of books, averaging between 1,000 and 1,700 published words per day during his most productive years.

In 1990, two years before his passing, Asimov said something beautiful that I hope to be able to say one day: "I have had a good life and I have accomplished all I wanted to, and more than I had a right to expect I would."

I, Robot is a collection of short stories he published 1940-1950, in total 218 pages in my copy.

The Premise of I, Robot

The stories all deal with aspects of a robotic future. Robots that talk, work, and malfunction. Their intelligence is built on what Asimov calls positronic brains. He relates these brain computers to the Atomic Age which was of course top of mind back when he wrote about them. There is at least one reference to "circuits of relays" which is another sign of the book's age.

At the center of the narrative are Asimov's classic Three Laws of Robotics:

First Law
A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

Second Law
A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

Third Law
A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

He quotes them as from a handbook of robotics from 2058.

The great thing about the laws is that they do indeed provide safety guarantees and they are fairly simple to understand, but there are gaps and dependencies between them that Asimov exploits for plot twists.

"Robbie" (1940, revised 1950)

This early story is about a girl named Gloria growing up with a robot friend. Gloria consistently prefers the company of her robot "Robbie" over other kids. Her mom doesn't like it whereas her dad sees no harm in it.

Eventually, the mom prevails and sells Robbie. Gloria is devastated and insists that they get Robbie back. Time passes and the parents try to get their girl to do "normal" things but all she wants is her robot back.

In the final scene, Gloria finds Robbie working in a factory and dashes into the restricted area, overjoyed. A tractor is about to cross her way and kill her but Robbie jumps to save her at superhuman speed. He is following The First Law.

Thoughts
Asimov didn't manage to get this story published at first. Stories on robots in the late 1930s were apparently all about them turning on their makers or overtaking the human race.

Almost a century later our view of robots is much more varied. In pop culture we've seen several nice and helpful robots like Wall-E, R2D2, and C3PO. Even a robot like Bender in Futurama amuses us. Industrial robots are table stakes in manufacturing and residential robots are vacuuming our living rooms and cutting our lawns.

I'd say we're more concerned with everyday robots being stupid, ignorant, or not up for the task than turning evil on us. Drones are recognized for their military capabilities but for some reason we don't talk about them as robots. There are however widespread concerns on what AI can do. Maybe we've separated mind and matter and isolated the threat to software?

Parents' fear of their kids immersing themselves in something new or modern is a classic. My mother-in-law was prohibited from reading fiction at all and had to hide her books. My mom was told off by her grandmother when she read Asimov(!). And when I was a teenager my mom didn't think it was good that I spent so much time with my computer (it probably wasn't). As a parent myself, I understand the urge to make your kids interact with other humans to become social, happy beings. I would not approve of our daughters only hanging out with robots.

However, we are all getting ever closer to fully interacting with AI. Voice, facial expression, gestures — the lot. Soon enough we'll get great virtual reality too. Will we then stick to human friends and colleagues or will we prefer artificial interaction? Will we require AI to look and behave like humans or will something more ephemeral do? What happens if it's impossible to know if you are interacting with a human or an AI? And what risks lie in hackers being able to tap into or change those interactions? I touch upon some of these questions in my upcoming novel.

"Runaround" (1942)

This story takes place in 2015 which is already eight years ago in present time. We get to meet Asimov's recurring characters Powell and Donovan. They are on Mercury with the robot Speedy.

The life support system at the base is short on selenium and will soon fail. There is a known selenium pool several miles away but the temperature on Mercury is so high that only robots can work above ground for any longer period of time. Therefore they send Speedy out to get the selenium, but he never returns. That should be impossible according to the Second Law (obey humans).

Powell and Donovan reason about it. They have ordered Speedy to go to the selenium site. There may be dangers there, potentially triggering the Third Law (self-preservation). Donovan was rather casual in giving Speedy orders which could mean that the weight put on the Second Law may not be enough to force Speedy to take huge risks. They conclude that Speedy is locked in an equilibrium where the second and third laws balance each other out – he's just close enough to the danger to not follow order. If he goes back, the order takes precedence. If he goes forth, his risk aversion wins.

They come up with a hack to rein Speedy in. Oxalic acid decomposes and produces carbon monoxide in the surface heat of Mercury and carbon monoxide is toxic to Speedy. That way the robot should back off even further and they can close in on him in protective suits.

But they have far too little oxalic acid to make it work.

They get to interact with Speedy though, and he seems to have gone nuts.

Powell decides to put himself at risk by approaching Speedy out in the sun. In his suit he can survive a few minutes. He pleads with the robot. Only at the brink of death does Speedy's adherence to the First Law take over and he rushes to save Powell.

Once back at the base, they give Speedy firm orders to get selenium at any cost.

Thoughts
Leveraging the robot's rule system as a hack is clever. Computers are like that, they follow the rules, damn the torpedoes. So if you can get them to make the wrong choice, they'll do it and do it consistently. Ted Nelson, famous for coining the term hypertext, said it well: "The good news about computers is that they do what you tell them to do. The bad news is that they do what you tell them to do."

According to Wikipedia, oxalic acid vapor decomposes in heat into carbon dioxide and formic acid. Photolysis with UV light also produces carbon monoxide CO and water.

"Reason" (1941)

The third short story also follows Powell and Donovan. This time on a space station which supplies Earth with energy via microwave beams. To assist them, they have the robot QT-1, or as they call him, Cutie.

Cutie is of new design and very capable when it comes to reasoning. To Powell and Donovan's horror, Cutie develops his own theory of humans' place in history and robots' superiority. He of course still follows the three laws so he won't harm the humans. But he refuses to see them as his masters.

It gets worse as Cutie starts to influence the lesser robots on the station and recruits them to his own, made-up religion – a religion where the power source of the station is the real master.

Powell and Donovan are super frustrated with Cutie and try to reason with him from different angles. They argue that they must be his masters because they built him. Cutie doesn't believe them – how can inferior humans build something so masterful as a robot? Powell and Donovan use a spare robot kit to show to Cutie that they indeed build robots. While impressive, Cutie dismisses it as mere assembly. They didn't create the robot.

Cutie argues his case:

"Look at you," he said finally. "I say this in no spirit of contempt, but look at you! The material you are made of is soft and flabby, lacking endurance and strength, depending for energy upon the inefficient oxidation of organic material–like that." He pointed a disapproving finger at what remained of Donovan's sandwich. "Periodically you pass into a coma and the least variation in temperature, air pressure, humidity, or radiation intensity impairs your efficiency. You are makeshift."

The conflict escalates to the point where Cutie locks the humans out of the controls of the station and energy beam.

Things get desperate when a solar storm is approaching which risks deflecting the energy beam. Humans on Earth desperately need the energy and it's Donovan and Powell's job to make sure it gets there. With no access to the controls, they can only sit and wait for disaster to strike.

The solar storm arrives and hits the beam in a spectacular visual fashion. Hours later they conclude it's over.

Cutie shows up and offers to show numbers on the beam's trajectory during the storm. It turns out he and his disciples have kept it steady!

Cutie doesn't want any of their praise. He thinks the talk about energy for humans on Earth is nonsense. He is just following orders from the Master on the station.

Powell tells Donovan what he thinks Cutie really did:

"He follows the instructions of the Master by means of dials, instruments, and graphs. That's all we ever followed. As a matter of fact, it accounts for his refusal to obey us. Obedience is the Second Law. No harm to humans is the first. How can he keep humans from harm, whether he knows it or not? Why by keeping the energy beam stable. He knows he can keep it more stable than we can, since he insists he's the superior being, so he must keep us out of the control room. It's inevitable if you consider the Laws of Robotics."

Thoughts
Humans certainly view themselves as superior on Earth. You occasionally hear claims that dolphins are smarter than humans, but I wouldn't say we truly believe that. We domesticate animals and grow plants with little to no doubt as to our right to do so.

Creating something superior to ourselves is where we're at with AI. Supercomputers could beat the best human at chess in the 90s. Today's generative AI and chatbots are based on such enormous amounts of information that human capacity is not even in the ballpark anymore.

So where does that leave us? Will we accept being ordered what to do by robots? Will we even accept that an AI is smarter than us in some general sense?

Evolution can't end with us. Of course something better will take over (if the planet is still functional). But then I question whether or not human-created computers and robots are some form of evolution? We mostly view them as tools and machines that we use for our purposes.

Two aspects of computers tend to make us question them compared to us even when they deliver superior results. One is their strict following of rules. They are completely logical whereas we view ourselves as irrational and unpredictable, in a quirky good way. That's why computers are so hackable. The other aspect is the difference between doing a good job and understanding why the job needs to be done. The notion of reason and purpose, if you will. Would computers do anything unless we told them to?

A lot of this comes together in the story about Cutie. The robot defines his own reality and finds purpose there. He views himself as superior to humans and refuses to accept that humans with their simple minds can have created him. The mind trick Asimov pulls off is that we get to view the world from Cutie's perspective. We read this story knowing that humans have created Cutie and that he's wrong, but his insistence makes us realize that we all have limited understanding of our world and are ignorant of the real truth of it all.

This text was originally published in my Hacker Chronicles newsletter. Subscribe below!

Hacker Review of Source Code, the movie (2011)

2025-02-08T16:01:28Z

Hacker Review of Source Code, the movie (2011)

Image from Wikipedia.

The movie Source Code came out in 2011. It was written by Ben Ripley "on spec" which means he wrote it speculatively, hoping someone would make a movie out of it.

Despite its very hacker fiction:y title, it's not heavy on hacking or even software. But it is imaginative in what may be possible in the intersection of computers, memories, and artificial intelligence.

Normally when I do a hacker review, I share my thoughts plot point by plot point, digging deep into anything hacker related. But I'll do it as one consolidated set of thoughts this time since the movie only has big picture hacker relevance.

Hacker Rating

Hacker Realism: ⭐️ ⭐️
Hacker Importance for the Plot: ⭐️ ⭐️
Hacks: ⭐️

Spolier alert: You got it, spoilers ahead.

Opening Scene – Sean

U.S. Army Captain Colter Stevens (Jake Gyllenhaal) wakes up on a train speeding through suburbia.

Facing him in the seat across is a beautiful woman (Michelle Monaghan) who seems to know him, but he doesn't recognize her. He ultimately learns that her name is Christina and she calls him Sean. He says he is not Sean but a helicopter pilot on mission in Afghanistan. Christina thinks he's acting weirdly.

Stevens observes his surroundings, utterly confused. We see several things happen – a woman spills coffee on his shoe, a man looks sick and goes to the restroom, and another man is mean to the conductor because the train is ten minutes late.

Stevens is asked for his ticket and the woman helps him find it in his breast pocket.

He goes to the restroom where he sees himself in the mirror and realizes he's someone else.

The train closes in on central Chicago where it meets with another train on the opposite track. Both trains explode.

The Bomb

Stevens wakes up from dying on the blown up train. He's strapped in a chair in a closed space, like a cockpit or capsule. He talks about his mission and his unit in Afghanistan.

A screen comes to life and there's a woman in uniform talking to him. Her name is Goodwin (Vera Farmiga).

Stevens's confusion is racing and Goodwin takes him through exercises with playing cards to get him focused. She tells him to "Find the bomb and you'll find the bomber." She mentioned that he will go eight minutes back, just like last time.

Stevens is thrown back to the same train scene. He talks to himself about the pretty woman being a deliberate distraction. He thinks it's a simulation. He remembers the forthcoming explosion and starts asking people and observing more closely what's going on.

He thinks that the explosion came from behind and checks plausible hiding places. He finds the bomb behind a ventilation panel above the sink in the restroom. It has a cellphone attached for remote control. On the phone's display, under "Images," are listed "History.swf" of 9kB with a Flash logo, and "Image0002.jpg" of 45kB.

Photo from the movie showing the cellphone screen with the files and wires to the bomb around it.

Stevens realizes he needs to find the controlling device. He tells all passengers he's a security person and they need to turn off all electronic devices. A couple of male passengers ignore or question him. He hits a guy who refuses to close his laptop.

The bomb goes off again.

The Mission

Stevens is back in the capsule, talking to Goodwin. She gets permission to brief him. The train explosion outside Chicago has already happened for real and killed everyone onboard. They believe the explosion was a first in a series of terrorist attacks to come. Any delay in finding the bomber puts innocent civilians at risk.

Stevens tells Goodwin the location of the bomb and that it had a cellphone detonator.

Goodwin shares that there were 52 calls connected to the closest cell tower, disconnecting at the time of the explosion. The train passing just as the bomb went off was a freight train carrying materials that compounded the explosive force. The bomber timed it for exactly when the trains met and thus had to be able to see them moving.

With this new information, Stevens goes in again.

He focuses on the sick guy who enters the restroom where the bomb is. That guy gets off the train on the last stop before central Chicago. Stevens convinces Christina to get off with him and follows the sick guy to the train station's restroom. He harasses him, thinking he's the bomber. The man leaves for the platform again.

Stevens awkwardly sits down on the bench where the man waits for the next commuter train. The clock is ticking towards the explosion. Stevens steals the man's suitcase and rips it open to look for some kind of triggering device. The bomb goes off in the distance. The man rages over his stolen suitcase and Stevens ends up laying on the tracks after a fight. A train hits Stevens.

Saving Christina

When Stevens returns to the cockpit, there is no connection to Goodwin and it's freezing cold inside. He struggles to get the capsule powered up and working again.

The scene switches to where Goodwin sits, trying to connect to Stevens. Dr. Rutledge (Jeffrey Wright) seems to be the Director of this program and Goodwin's boss. He hands out orders on how to revive the connection: "Just keep sending strings out, see if he hooks onto something."

The connection eventually comes back and Stevens tells Goodwin that he managed to save Christina. He has discovered that there is a budding romance between Christina and Sean, and he's acting the Sean part for those eight minutes.

Goodwin tells him there is no way to actually save Christina since she's already dead: "She survived, but only inside the Source Code. None of them can be saved."

Stevens demands to be properly briefed. "What is the Source Code?"

Rutledge reluctantly appears on screen and explains that the Source Code is a machine that reconstructs the past using dead people's residual memories. The brain retains electric current for a little while after death and short term memories of eight minutes before. Stevens happens to have a "synaptic match" with a man called Sean Fentress who was on the train, and is now reliving the last eight minutes of that man's life over and over to find who planted and triggered the bomb.

Rutledge says saving Christina doesn't matter. The only thing that matters is preventing the second attack in Chicago.

Wanting to Live

Stevens goes back to the train scene and figures out who the bomber is through a wallet deliberately left behind. The man leaving it planted it as false evidence of himself dying in the explosion. Stevens gets Goodwin enough information to prevent the second bombing in real life and the mission is over.

When Stevens talks to Goodwin to figure out his own role in Source Code, he is told that he himself died two months ago in Afghanistan. However, his brain and parts of his body were saved and is now connected to the Source Code system.

He asks Goodwin to let him go back once more and try to save Christina and all the people on the train. If he succeeds, he wants to be disconnected and die for real. He is granted this and goes in and prevents even the first bombing from happening. At the end of the eight minutes, he kisses Christina on the train. The frame freezes.

Note:
The movie doesn't actually end here. But it really, really should have ended here. It's a beautiful scene. Timeless, with Christina and Sean happy in one last kiss, unaware of how there is nothing left for them.

I'm so bummed by the actual last few minutes of the movie that I refuse to cover them here.

Thoughts

What this movie comes down to is replicating eight minutes of real life in a way that you can interact with. The input data is only what human brains have remembered. The rest has to be filled-in convincingly, and accurately if it's going to be used for a crime investigation.

Why Source Code?

It may be that the title is just cool sounding, from a time of rising awareness of software and programming as keys to the internet revolution. The Source Code system is referred to as "a computer program" and we see screens with technical content but that's about it.

But it could also be a metaphor for ground truth, for the DNA of something ultimately happening in the real world. The fact that Stevens can render it over and over while making slight alterations would then mean he's making changes to the source code.

Reading Memories

Being able to turn human brain signals into imagery on a computer screen is popular in fiction. A prime example is Minority Report which I reviewed earlier (both the book and the movie). There, the precogs' visions of the near future provides evidence of crimes about to be committed.

Facial composites have been used since 1959. Here's the composite sketch of D. B. Cooper, who hijacked an airplane in 1971:

Composite sketch of D. B. Cooper.

To create one, an eyewitness is asked about the perpetrator's individual facial features in isolation. Eyes, nose, eyebrows, lips. The features were originally printed on transparent sheets and superimposed on one another to create a composite. That system was called "Identikit." It's an example of trying to extract an image from a brain.

Newer such systems have emerged from academic research. The witness is exposed to groups of full faces and asked how well they match the perpetrator's. The system converges towards an composite image.

With such a system we're getting fairly close to modern training of computer models. You could imagine the witness serving as an oracle calling good or bad on samples. But no human would stand hours and hours training a model so we'd have to connect directly to the brain somehow. It's not super far fetched that we could get an output signal from a brain as to whether or not it recognizes the image data presented. The resulting models could be used to fully animate the memories once you combine them with models of how humans move and interact.

If you add multiple witnesses and perspectives, you could possibly recreate a scene and be able to move around in it. The drawback would be that humans' memories are fuzzy and our tendency to remember things as more rosy than they were.

Enter sensors and cameras. Today's smartphones and people constantly taking photos means that many scenes will have unbiased data to compensate for humans' bias. Unless a hacker has skewed the sensor data to hide the truth.

This makes me recall the Swedish startup Narrative with clip-on cameras taking snapshots throughout your day. The venture didn't pan out but the website is still up (insecure connection only): http://getnarrative.com/.

Predicting Human Behavior

In the movie Source Code, Stevens is not only able to review memories but also change the remembered reality. Maybe not completely but enough to investigate the bombing. This means that the computer driving it needs to be able to predict and replicate human behavior.

For instance, Stevens is acting Sean and has no way of knowing how the real Sean would behave. Christina changes what she does based on Steven's (really Sean's) changes, to the point where she agrees to get off the train.

A significant amount of compute is already being used to predict human behavior in real life. It's the basis of a lot of targeted advertising online. You may be shown an ad because a computer model has decided that you are likely to want the product, can afford it, and are ready to buy it now.

Predicting commong human behavior is one thing. You can do it by learning from a huge population and we can see through generative AI today how incredibly well computers can mimic humans. But there is an element of regression toward the mean to such learning. Generative AI gives us a combination of human behavior, not one human's behavior.

Predicting an individual human's behavior is something else. If we are to simulate someone like Sean, Christina, or the bomber, the model would have to be of those humans or at least of a subset of humans acting in the same ways as they. In such tightly scoped modeling, the trickiest thing would be behavior that the human doesn't want to expose. Like someone doing criminal things. Stevens is able to interact directly with the bomber in the movie, while that man is working to kill thousands.

The fact that Source Code at least lets you think about such things and doesn't fall flat as soon as you examine it is a testament to a great script.

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