This is off topic, but it felt like it was worthwhile putting here, because I've come across this page so many times, and every time I reread it and get to experience it again.
I realized that JT's site was down, and went searching around, found her Twitter and Instagram, realized she had been homeless for over two years, and apparently just recently passed away. Given that she was homeless, trans, and talked pretty openly open her internal and external struggles, I have my suspicions about what happened.
I feel pretty gutted because I support a couple of people on Patreon, and if I had come across her Twitter six months ago and saw the state she was in, I would have jumped at the opportunity to became a Patron to try to help her get back on her feet.
Not much of a point here, other than to try and pay attention to people a little bit more, and help out where you can.
tararist: The most terrible thing has happened. The smartest, most special person I’ve ever met has died. She was a veritable genius. She taught at MIT, was a pioneer in augmented reality, did CGI for the Tron film, and started a huge design company which she gave to her ex-wife before coming out as trans. Soon after that we met by complete chance at Kathmandu in Berkeley where she was trying on a dress. She came out of the dressing room and shyly asked the nice guy working there if it was too short. I was talking to him too and said, “if you put your hands by your side and the hem is above your fingertips it means you’re a slut.” “I guess I should hike it up then,” she replied. I don’t remember how but just like that we became best friends. She was the most creative, brilliant, funny, fearless person I’ve ever met and her life ended tragically because of our disgusting society. Despite her ridiculous accomplishments she was unable to find a job. “They just see a man in lipstick,” she told me once. Still, she wouldn’t say her life was tragic. Even when her savings ran out and she ended up on the streets of San Francisco, she was still cheerful, sitting on the sidewalk in a yogic cross-legged position with a laptop on her lap, producing her brilliantly original ideas. In the SF shelter system she was a trans-activist who changed the rules so that TERFs weren’t allowed. She was always finding things to delight in and never lost her sense of humor. I’m a changed person because of her and will always be in awe that biology could produce such magic as was her soul. Somehow I have no photos of us together, but the first pic is her dressed as her hero Anne Frank, and in the second I’m wearing a netted top she bought me, wearing a kandi she made me (that I didn’t take off for like a year because looking at it always made me feel loved), and in the background is an origami crane she absentmindedly made years ago and that I always kept and hung because of the good vibes she effortlessly imbued into everything. I forgot to ever tell her that I kept it and hung it up. JT Nimoy, the greatest gift fate has ever given me.
Can we just appreciate that someone did write that program for the Atari palmtop 30 years ago just so it would appear for 5 seconds in a movie. Crazy.
I wonder how the hiring for that position go? "Our movie studio is looking for a programmer to code a sequence that simulates PIN cracking on an Atari which will look cool and hackery on screen."
Either way, that coder did a stellar job in making it look really legit vs the shitty hacking sequences that followed in movies of the early '00 where you could hack the DoD by typing on the keyboard random words really fast or assembling some 3D shapes on an SGI machine to break encryption.
Big budget films (and TV series) can spend an incredible amount of effort and money on detail that most people won't notice or appreciate (or sometimes even makes it into the final cut). Of course, as you say, they can do dumb stuff too.
Which, depending upon your perspective, is an attention to detail that makes the film better even if most people don't consciously notice it or it's a symptom of why studio films can be astonishingly expensive to make.
I have a friend who does graphic and video design. He gets jobs occasionally (via several layers of subcontracting) for "alien operating system and interface video" and the like, which have appeared in a few movies. He showed me the brief for one once, and it was pretty interesting. A while different kind of design work than what I'm used to seeing.
Yeah, I have a friend from art school who has created fake posters and interfaces, etc for shows like Law and Order: SVU and I Am Legend (he created the Batman vs Superman poster in times square!). Cool job, but it sounds like it's feast or famine sometimes.
Yes, working with Hollywood sucks. Either they're in development and their credit cards bounce, or they're in production and they want a new feature yesterday.
It's not crazy: You've just summarised filmmaking.
Costumes, sets, special effects, props, etc. all are like that. Specialised and skilled people spending a lot of time and effort for things that may or may not get a lot of screen time.
But even a short screen time can be very important for the film and have a lasting effect. Example: That very program.
Wasn't it an Atari Portfolio? If memory serves, it had a mostly functional MS-DOS, so writing a program for it was likely not an arduous task. That being said, rewatching those scenes, it was a striking little device for its day and ahead of its time.
I remember post credits narration of a 1990s Dorling Kindersly video about a black car morph into an insect (both beetle) and she said this took 3 weeks just for a 3 second animation.
Enjoyed the PIN .svg, but those old Turbo IDE screens got me right in the feels. Never used Turbo 7...Turbo 3 was the bomb back in the day. And yes, WordPerfect... those old enough remember "Reveal Codes" Why did we like this?
The loss of "reveal codes" is the greatest tragedy of the fall of Wordperfect. For me there was nothing more satisfying than cleaning up a bunch of empty "bold" blocks that had started to clutter up the text and would cause text to mysteriously embolden if inserted in the wrong place.
In Google Docs a number of times I've had to copy my text out to a temporary notepad to remove formatting and re-paste it in the original doc because for some reason it was starting a numbered list over again at 1 and there was no way to convince it that it's all part of the same list.
I still copy-paste into Notepad to remove formatting. Even that fails on Win10 if you used, eg, non-breaking hyphens ... thought I was going mad; no, just MS Windows doing its thing.
I've returned to MSWord after 15 years, it still seems incapable of doing numbered lists consistently. Would love some 'reveal codes' for that.
In a just world, CTRL-v would paste without formatting, and the more difficult CTRL-SHIFT-v would retain formatting. The vastly more desired (by users, not by product managers) operation should be invoked by the simpler keystroke.
How often do you cut and paste and actually want to bring over someone else’s colors and fonts? 1% of the time? 0.1%?
"paste with formatting" by default is a mistake. the thing you're pasting from and the thing you're pasting to inevitably have different ideas about what formatting is relevant / possible in the given textareas you're copying from / pasting to. it's almost always better to just paste without formatting and then fix formatting (so, the default should have been flipped, but the ship has sailed).
I played around with using hammerspoon to send cmd-shift-v whenever I typed cmd-v but I really needed to make it change depending on which app I was pasting into and that was just past my annoyance threshold.
Isn't it ctrl+alt+v? only seems to work in a few cases, not as a generic. Between OneNote and Word it only works in one direction IIRC, and I can never remember which way. around.
I was just having a get-off-my-lawn moment yesterday with a coworker who was struggling with pasting into a bulleted list in google docs. They had never heard the term "WYSIWYG".
Unfortunately this only shows things like paragraph markers and tab characters, not all formatting. It doesn’t help resolve, for instance, why only the top level number of my numbered list is displaying as a black box.
Borland Turbo C++ 3.0 was my jam. Not only was the interface really cool and feature-rich, but it also had a built-in language reference that was incredibly helpful to me at the time when I was learning to program.
Wow. Reading the bit about disabling the chip security makes me wonder what the point of a chip card is in the first place? All it takes is lifting the mag strip and altering it to declare that there’s no chip.
While you can get a chip-enabled card reader to accept a magstripe-only transaction by altering the magstripe, the final authorisation decision is with the card issuer.
And the card schemes are mandating the issuers to keep track whether a card was issued with a chip and then reject authorisation attempts with a magstripe that claims "no chip" available.
That being said, in reality there are again and again still issuers who did not implement this and similar security measures [1].
To this day I have never seen an engineer laugh as long as I did when I introduced the original Zombo.com to a coworker, back when it was new and somewhat unknown (I think I discovered it via Fark.com?)
Static-core 80C88 and an 40x8 mono LCD w/o a backlight. I can't imagine the energy consumption being much different than your average high school graphing calculator
I owned one in great condition as a university student in the mid-90's. It died one day and I got rid of it -- moving onto more modern pocket computers. But I totally regret getting rid of it -- now that I know so much more about electronics it probably would have been an easy fix.
That's wrong then. The word "soviet" means "council".. To the extent that its etymology connects to "togetherness" it just refers to the group of people coming together to make decisions.
The "union" refers to the union of the socialist republics. You can easily have "soviets" without a union, and you can obviously have a union without soviets.
Should've been "write('Press Enter when ready ...');" because "readln" will wait only for <ENTER> key to continue. Anything else you press meanwhile will just appear on screen.
OR
instead of "readln;" put "readkey;" - that one would've simply continued regardless of whatever you'd press (well, CTRL / SHIFT not included).
======================
Quote2: "writeln('');
writeln('');"
Unnecessary. If you want empty lines you can simply say "writeln;writeln;" - no parameters required.
=======================
Quote3: "while true do
begin
.
.
.
if (length <= 4) then
break;
end;"
Oh boy, do I spot a C/C++ programmer. Here is the better solution:
Awesome, just watched this two nights ago. fun to think even in 1992 it was still acceptable to show someone cracking a password by whittling down the passwords one character at a time. To their credit at least it was a bit better than war games, where it just locks in one character at a time. Where this one could maybe construe that it started with some hash of the pin stored on the machine and accessible via the card reader in reverse..., and they were maybe factoring it. Still an awesome scene and by far my favorite james cameron movie.
Terminator 2 and Turbo Pascal were my 2 favorite things during teen years!
I have actually rewatched Terminator 2 about 50 times - every day after school. My parents started getting worried at some point. I still remember a good chunk of the dialogue.
My parents sent me to my grandmother's during summer break, but they also allowed me to take my 386. I wrote DOS games in Turbo Pascal the entire time, and only saw my grandparents at mealtime. Then I got a talking to because of the monstrous electric bill a 386 running 24/7 racked up.
These days I use Android Studio, which could really take some notes from TPX.EXE.
To be fair, some side channel attacks do allow locking in one character at a time. For example, if a password is evaluated by looking at the string character by character and breaking once an incorrect character is found you might be able to use the response timing to figure out how many correct characters you have.
Yep. Level 6 in the first one :-) IIRC their challenge machines were under quite a bit of load and I had difficulties getting the proper solution. If anyone is interested for some reason, here's my writeup including their code and my exploit: https://github.com/dividuum/stripe-ctf
I once wrote a piece of software that cracked passwords for Windows 9x network shares. It looked just like the movies, it would crack one letter of the password at a time, each letter would cycle through the possibilities and then lock in, before it would move onto the next character. Those with a good memory of exploits will recall the exploit that was used.
So it's not necessarily fictional, sometimes it does work like that. I wasn't alive in the 80s, but I would guess that such things were very common back then (but obviously are non-existent now).
I used L0phtcrack for that. Fun times over dial-up!
Sometimes I miss how easy things were. Passwords in type=hidden fields. Basic auth over http. Dumb hubs sending packets to everyone on the network. C$ shared drives on the Internet and, of course, Sub7.
My favorite feature of that scene in Wargames is that when Joshua/WOPR gets down to two or one digit remaining, there is still time to have suspenseful dialog. This in spite of the fact that there would only be 100 or 10 remaining permutations to test with so few digits remaining, and the animation shows several dozen being tested per second. Nevertheless, Joshua seems to keep trying the wrong last couple digits to give the humans some more time to act.
I remember once writing an IRC script for Microsoft's IrcX implementation that unmasked a masked IP, literally one character at a time. Sometimes these things are by design. :-)
That's one of the things I still miss about my Palm Pilot Pro. It ran on 1 (or 2??) AA batteries, and it lasted a month (seemingly regardless of how much I used it; which is just my imagination, but regardless that's still the impression I have).
The other thing I dearly miss: being able to read it in full sunlight.
Thats pretty much how I remember them as well. And you could use plucker to crawl all the news site and compile a single archive of todays news, to read on the train - offline ofcourse. Everything was offline back then and I kind of begin to miss that :) - I read several books on a palm - all of Harry Potter, some A. C. Clarke and HHGTTG. The thing could go on forever.
In contrast to my old Sega Game Gear which ran on on 6 AA batteries and would last less than 2 hours. Though to its credit it, it came out about a year after the original Gameboy but had a backlit, color screen. Too bad so many of the games were terrible.
That's a great read, congratulations to the author.
I wish newer movies featured devices like Cosmo Communicator, Pro1X or upcoming PinePhone with keyboard case in the hacking scenes to give the handhelds with keyboards a second chance. Last time I saw a cool handheld in a hacking scene(movie, so no Mr.Robot) was Nokia N8 in Tron Legacy(2010), but it really should have been N9.
His instructions at the bottom include "ft.com". I couldn't find anything by googling. It turns out the "index" file on the FTP site describes each file:
Portfolio/Telecomm:
Index 0 Verbose list of files in this directory (this file)
acom11.lzh 16 Terminal program
dial.lzh 2 Xterm dialer
ft.com 11 Parallel module file transfer program
pfboot.lzh 1 symbolic link to -> utilities/pfboot.lzh
port8bit.lzh 3 Tech doc describing pofo to Atari 8 bit connecting
porttost.lzh 5 GET Xterm on the Portfolio without files transfer
quick.lzh 7 Input cheques in the field and upload to Quicken later
slave.lzh 18 Host program (Pofo to any terminal supporting X-Modem)
xterm2.lzh 5 Term program, includes XMODEM file transfer capability
I have that palmtop and implemented it in qbasic after seeing the movie.
(of course also only the animation)
Wrote some more "hacker-simulators" after that.
Got me into programming.
Apart from the obvious feels (I love that movie), the big takeaway from this for me is https://github.com/nbedos/termtosvg - makes me think, considering how much I enjoy creating documentation (sort of as a relaxing technique), why the hell haven't I jazzed up my READMEs yet?!
Way back in 1994 or thereabouts I coded a faux PIN-number-cracker inspired by this scene on my Psion Series 3 (128 kB total memory) in the natively available OPA language (which is basically BASIC). It was a fun project for a thirteen/fourteen year-old.
I had an Atari Portfolio in middle school. It was fun as hell but a beast to type on; the keys took a huge amount of force to press. I switched to a Psion series 3, which was much better (though nowhere near as good as the later 5).
I wonder what the speed of installing software off of 4 floppies on an emulator is like (not enought to try it myself of course). Does the emulator recreate the slow read speeds or the sound of the read heads seeking?
I use DosBox, like the article's author. No, it doesn't. Sometime it's faster than what you want to be. For example an old DOS program that was cycling ON/OFF between the keyboard LED's for CAPS LOCK / NUM LOCK and SCROLL LOCK was making them to be too fast, while generating sounds too. When I ran it a few years ago to show off to my son, it was horrible. I had to fire up Turbo Pascal inside that DosBox emulator and introduce delays in the program to make it behave like it did in 1995 when I wrote it on a 286.
> Am I suppose to write a blog post on any of the useless solutions I can create?
Sure! Write up your approach and results in a nice digestible way on some project you found personally interesting and there are plenty of people here that will enjoy that.
Note that the difference between "Here's code I wrote that does X: '...'" and what appears in this blog post is bigger than what you're giving credit for. Documenting the process you went through from having an idea to arriving at a solution in a relatable and amusing way takes real effort. If you disagree, please, prove me wrong. Since if you do, you'd be a blogger I'd happily add to my regular reading.
Maybe if I had watched the movie I would've felt differently, but I couldn't resonate with the comments stating the nostalgia and all. To me it read like "here is a code that does this".
