I was a CS major at the University of Washington in the mid 90s. In one of my intro courses we were touching on public key cryptography and this movie came up. The professor mentioned that Adelman was a consultant on the movie and that he was a notoriously slow replier to email. Like you would get a reply weeks or months after you sent an email to him. But, if you asked a question about this movie you'd get a reply to your email almost immediately.

> Fun fact: Leonard Adleman (the A in RSA) drafted the words and slides used for the lecture scene: https://molecularscience.usc.edu/sneakers/

One of the few movies to have a mathematical consultant in the credits!

I love the joke about being snubbed for mathematical consulting at the oscars.

"There isn't a government on this planet that wouldn't kill us all for that thing"

They spelled Len's name wrong in the credits. :/

> Realize that social engineering is thing and I tried to practice it in high school to gain access to computer rooms where the "fancy" computers were.

We realized that door bolts are easy to manually jimmy if not precision-fit.

Thankfully, our computer lab overseer was a hacker at heart, congratulated us, and got the door fixed.

I miss the 90s.

I saw this movie as a kid when it came out on vhs. it blew me away! I loved the blind guy. He was amazing. That part where he listens to the sounds on the road to determine where they took Robert Redford. You're right, it made blind people cool.

2. In high school I tried calling the manufacturer of the lockers and buying a replacement master key, said I was a principal or some nonsense. They turned me down but I forgot why, I doubt my voice even dropped yet.

2 & 3 for me came from War Games with Matthew Broderick

> "A computer matched her with him? I don't think so."

When I first watched this movie, I felt like this was a weak moment in the film. "Computer dating" at the time was laughably bad, so seeing a character regard it as infallible ruined the immersion.

With age and experience, I now see that some people just throw themselves behind certain technologies, and fail to find flaw. So maybe this character was just a misguided computer dating evangelist, blind to the technology's failings.

I saw Sneakers when it first came out in theatres and at the time I was in high school and working part-time in a shoe store..

I had learned from the store owner that you can tell so much from someone's shoes, often more than from their clothes.

Combined with that line in this very formative movie (for me), I still to this day can't help but check someone's shoes when I first meet them.

    Marty: Organised crime?
    Cosmo: Trust me, it ain't that organised!

I’ve always hated the thing about computer dating. Why would that have been so unreasonable?

I still remember that goofy looking run, haha

Dude, your mom just wanted to see Robert Redford. The guy was a chick magnet.

>I also can’t imagine the film masters were trashed, or that the show was composited to video tape.

So many shows very much were composited to analog video tape. I personally worked on edit sessions where multiple film-to-tape transfers were composited to 1" then BetacamSP then digital formats like DigiBeta and everything that followed. I get it is hard to grok for eople without direct experience only ever knowing digital comping with modern software packages without ever hitting tape. But us ol'timers remember the pain

> Were studios really that reckless with their properties?

yes. while it might not have been done out of malice, but just lack of future thinking. for a studio making the first season of an animated title, they might not have even considered their show would be so successful. also, there's no way that they could have predicted HD=>4K and digital streaming. they are only human and just trying to stay on schedule with barely enough time to meet deadlines. meeting air date deadlines are much more strict than whatever dot release your PM is pushing for in whatever software product you might be working.

The X-Files went the opposite way: The streaming release was remastered from higher quality originals that had been prepared ahead of time for the eventual arrival of higher resolution TV.

I’m not surprised that some shows were never archived at higher quality, though. The entertainment industry has a lot of people who just want to get their job done and go home, just like any other industry. Many classic series were not instant classics, they were shoestring operations trying to get a product out the door on too little budget. Getting anything across the finish line was the objective, not archiving the highest quality for future generations.

> I also can’t imagine the film masters were trashed, or that the show was composited to video tape.

Happens more than you'd think (in the past, at least - it's obviously much easier now with digital storage.) Couple of examples I remember off the top of my head:

re: Adrian Maben making a Director's Cut DVD of "Live In Pompeii"[0]

"While searching in the French and English film laboratories for the unused negative we learnt of a disaster. On the initiative of the French Production Company, MHF Productions, the 548 cans of 35mm negative and prints of the rushes had been stored at the Archives du Film du Bois d’Arcy outside Paris. One of the employees, a certain Monsieur Schmidt, "le Conservateur," unfortunately decided that he wanted to make extra storage space on his shelves for more recent films and that the Floyd footage was without interest or value. The 548 cans of negative and the prints of the Pink Floyd unused rushes and outtakes were incinerated."

re: Dr Who missing episodes[1]

"Further erasing of Doctor Who master videotapes by the Engineering Department continued into the 1970s. Eventually, every master videotape of the programme's first 253 episodes (1963–69) was destroyed or wiped. The final 1960s master tapes to be erased were those for the 1968 serial Fury from the Deep, in August 1974."

[0] https://www.brain-damage.co.uk/other-related-interviews/adri...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Who_missing_episodes

I believe Technology Connections on YouTube did a video on film vs video where he touched on this. Film was much more expensive, and people weren’t always thinking about remasters 30 years later. If something was being shot just to air on TV, sometimes VHS was all they did.

> Were studios really that reckless with their properties?

Some were. Once the film made its money in the theaters it was then put in a vault and forgotten about. The theaters were supposed to return the release prints but sometimes the projectionist would "lose" them. The studio vault those films sat in sometimes catch fire or water leaks in. If the originals are destroyed then hopefully a few release prints are floating around in the hands of theaters, individuals (where those lost prints end up), or television stations. If not, then its gone forever.

Over the years I’ve met several people that worked in the cartoon industry because where I live (Toronto) used to be an outsourcing market for many 1980s/1990s cartoons.

The vast majority of the people that commissioned them, including very successful series, wanted it done as fast as possible to get it to TV ASAP. Often they had toys lines up for Xmas that needed to be synced up with schedules. I know people that had worked on some very famous cartoons, including the 1980s Ninja Turtles, Care Bears, etc and the studios commissioning them were very willing to take errors, substandard, and otherwise less than ideal work to get it to market on time (much to the frustration of the artists who were being treated like factory line workers). They did say the creators of Ren and Stimpy were fantastic to work for and they had all sorts of fun Easter eggs added.

Anyways, it does not surprise me that a lot of the work from this era was not taken care of, especially some of the more forgettable episodes of popular shows. A lot of the early licensed work on Netflix was obviously copied from DVD/Blue Rays at the time, too. It can be a lot of work to properly deal with aspect ratios, colour correction, de-interlacing, as well as upscaling the very low analog resolutions.

Maybe AI can get good enough to fix it now, though.

Shows like The Simpsons that were only made for broadcast never had a film negative. It was likely mastered to analog tape.

> Were studios really that reckless with their properties?

The first two seasons of Monty Python’s Flying Circus were almost erased because the BBC wanted to reuse the broadcast tapes. [0]

[0] https://www.cracked.com/article_42008_monty-pythons-flying-c...

> can’t imagine the film masters were trashed, or that the show was composited to video tape

The first few seasons were meant to be just a segment inside a sketch-based tv show (i.e. some of the most disposable, worst-aging, least-resyndicated material that tv studios will ever produce) and the budget was very small.

Sometimes it happens by accident. See the 2008 Universal Studios fire, which destroyed music and film masters:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Universal_Studios_fire

Tell me you haven’t worked in entertainment without actually…

My experience in entertainment has given me the following perspective: be happy anything gets made. The entire industry is so awash in drugs, egos, and money that pushing ANYTHING out the door is an accomplishment.

Speaking of, I am desperately trying to get hold of Then Came Bronson that is of reasonable quality. Great and well known TV-series that came out in 1969. It's simply impossible to get a good rip though.

The only copy that exists (as far as I know) came from a VHS recording of a TV-channel in the 1980s. But surely the film rolls still exist?

> unacceptable for a digital format that you pay for

> Were studios really that reckless with their properties?

These corporations could not care less, it's just money to them. Streaming services will take your money and ship you "high definition" nonsense that's so horribly compressed it has artifacts in 90% black frames.

If you want quality, you need to find the obsessives out there who will not be satisfied unless they have the absolute best version of everything. These are the people who will track down and scan the negatives the company left lying around to rot using equipment worth tens of thousands of dollars.

https://www.thestarwarstrilogy.com/project-4k77/

These people really put these billion dollar corporations to shame.

They're at their best when they're reckless... it gets so much worse. There was a 4th tv network in the 1950s that died quite soon, and they had a Jackie Gleason show of their own that is now lost to time. At some point in the early 1960s, they had a board meeting to discuss what to do with the accumulation of taped archives (quadruplex I guess?), and the lawyer spoke up "I'll take care of it". He loaded them up into his car that weekend and dumped them in the river.

If they were only careless, one might be relieved that there was no intention of being so destructive. Often though, they're criminally negligent or malevolent. And that was back when things were easy... now days they have to contend with digital materials that need a petabyte array.

Funny some of the best "home theater" experiences I have lately are VHS tapes which, when decoded by something Dolby Pro Logic compatible, have a great 5.1 soundtrack.

Contrast that to DVD-era 5.1 soundtracks which are usually nerfed because they are afraid you'll play them on a 2 channel system or Blu Ray-era 5.1 soundtracks which are nominally 7.1 or 9.1 but are illegible on any sound system whatsoever because modern movies don't care if you can understand what the actors say. You're going to watch with the subtitles on anyway. But heck, even downmarket platforms like Tubi are crammed with subtitled Italian crime dramas and subprime anime, so every cloud has a silver lining.

If you look close at the early silent movies: the campfires are burning the film from even older movies that are thus completely lost.

Film begins degrading immediately even if well stored. Television was seen as largely disposable and was treated as such.

Same for older family guy episodes also on Disney +… maybe it’s a Disney + thing where they can’t be bothered?

I recall reading that they assumed TV shows did not have as much long-term value as films.

From a business perspective, each movie is generally its own LLC. So once everything's wrapped up the things need to be disposed, and where those things go is unclear.

I mean, storage is forever...but who wants to pay for storage forever?

> I also can’t imagine the film masters were trashed, or that the show was composited to video tape.

I obviously can't speak for a level of acclaim something like The Simpsons, but more broadly speaking: creating something is fun but being sentimental and treating projects as precious is something that is increasingly burdensome with each day that passes.

Let's say I do the following:

1) I take a photograph of a flower

2) I remove dust spots, adjust saturation and a few other settings in post-production

3) I crop and resize it

With each step, copies of the image are made.

After that, I export to several file types.

Then consider that one photo shoot might have 15 photos of that same subject alone, with minor or small "in camera" settings changed. Then add different angles + in camera setting changes. Then add all of the other subjects I shot that day.

Should I keep everything from every change? Would anyone truly, genuinely care about seeing some...particularly unremarkable image of a flower captured by a complete "nobody"? I'm not Ansel Adams after all. Most people probably don't even care about the finished product. It feels arrogant to presume that anyone would be that into my work. The whole idea of having a fan base just feels...preposterous. I might be okay, or even good at creating some specific sort of thing, but retaining high resolution, originals is just kind of insane. Unless you've got some kind of public validation by way of taking in millions and millions of dollars, or you're a household name with a team of people assisting you, it just feels almost humiliating to think that anybody would be clamoring to see your work decades later.

Maybe other people who do creative things feel differently. I just tend to assume that even with something as time intensive as animation, in the heat of the moment, someone like Matt Groening thought that people probably wouldn't remember The Simpsons decades afterward. There's a kind of secret hope in creation, in hoping that maybe others will enjoy it, but it feels pompous to entertain the notion that you should treat it like some kind of artifact.

To put it in developer terms, suppose that someone would be interested in combing through the archives of our GitHub repos for some random side-project we worked on 20 years earlier. "Wow! Version 0.2.44! This was before he took out all of those crazy comments talking about the famous bug. It's so cool to be able to see this code in its original state!" It just doesn't happen. Maybe some other professionally-minded person glances at some iteration because they are trying to discern why or how you did some specific thing, but it's not like we expect our software to be beloved the way someone might think of a world-renowned film. It'd be amazingly gratifying, but what are the chances?

It was none other than Leonard Adleman of RSA fame.

I think the only part that really pulled me out of the movie was when they were testing the device and it was decrypting a dial-up feed random character by random character on the screen. It wasn't "Hackers" bad but it was still pretty unbelievable.

> … OF GAUSSIAN PROPRTIONS!

Also "Live At Pompeii"[0] (although to my disappointment, it's the cinema version with the DSOTM studio clips - my original experience was the Laserdisc and VHS versions which omitted those because IMO they're not interesting and just get in the way. I'd probably watch "Pink Floyd: DSOTM: BTS" as a standalone thing but it has no place, for me, in "Live At Pompeii".)

[0] https://superdeluxeedition.com/news/pink-floyd-at-pompeii-mc...

Just before I left the UK in 2018 there was starting to become this trend for voice verification on some services, in one particular one I had to go through the setup of (perhaps it was Virgin Media? I forget), they had me say "My voice is my passport" to train it on how I sound. I smiled to myself.

Heavily referenced in Uplink, the hacker video game by Introversion Software.

I totally say this under my breath every time I have to enter sensitive information while other people are around.

This is always the first thing I remember about the movie...

COOTYS RAT SEMEN

"No, I don't."

"No. No."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GutJf9umD9c

Setec Astronomy is also the name, obviously inspired by the movie, of a successful MIT Puzzle Hunt group.

I think you keep too many secrets.

"Setec Astronomy" is the SSID of my home wifi network.

The password is the missile launch code from War Games.

I think you mean cootys rat semen.

Heard a Verizon tech on a phone call to tech-tech (tech^2?) support and the automated attendant stated "Repeat after me, my voice is my password" and the tech responded "my voice is my password" then had to wait on hold. Felt a little dystopian.

You're gonna love the answer to that. Disney's 1994 family holiday treat, The Santa Clause, starred Tim Allen as a guy who (I'm remembering this as I'm typing it and holy cow) sort of kills Santa Claus by startling him into falling off the roof. He then puts on the Santa suit and becomes the archetype himself. But in that movie, there's an off-hand reference to a phone number: 1-800-SPANK-ME, meant entirely sarcastically. Turns out, either that was already a real number or some enterprising pornographer recognized that there's no such thing as bad publicity, and precocious youngsters who called the line after watching the movie were invited to pay $5/minute for "the hottest phone line in America".

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/santa-clause-deleted-scene...

Tossing a few ARG links here, since the heyday of larger games (and especially ones with PTSN connectivity) is old enough some HNs might not have experienced them.

https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0119174/

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_alternate_reality_ga...

It's a shame too, as they were unique. Would love to see a nationally-accessible Meow Wolf tie-in.

PS: ilovebees

That, and its cousin the shaky cam.

"Let's make things difficult to see and hear. That makes for better cinema!"

Jackie Chan once discussed action scenes in US movies versus his movies. Western films: cut before the punch lands, maybe cut a few more times. Hong Kong moves: just show the action in one scene.

I'm not a fan of baseball, but I liked Field of Dreams (at the age I was back when it would have made it to Australian TV).

And the music is by none other than James Horner. He's a legend in film scoring.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Horner

Here I was thinking I was clever also naming one of my companies an anagram of that phrase.

oystermen coast ;)

amnesty scooter

coyote smartens

economy tasters

I have a sticker for it on my laptop. You're not alone out there.

If you have a high-quality digital version of a movie, you can use one of the CRT shaders from modern emulators to make it look like any old TV you want.

I just watch it with my eyes closed

the audio quality of the popular streaming versions is pretty bad

Hey dang, do you do this manually or semi-manually or is it just automated from your a/c?

I always liked how they framed the gun being jammed into Gregor's back at the opera, the entire scene carries a certain tension that modern films often fail to sustain or rely on things like explosions or handcannons rather than a .38 and a well acted angry whisper that you will be quietly exiting this theater or your brains will be exiting your fucking skull that is a much more accurate depiction of what it's like to operate under non-official cover.

Sadly, the movie really shows it's age when the "cultural attaché" starts lecturing Robert Redford's character that "our countries are friends now". It's hard to suspend disbelief watching it nowadays.

To swing the discussion back to cinematography:

I'm going to avoid spoilers despite it being an older movie since a disturbing amount of folks in the hacker scene have not seen it but the later scene in the tunnel, arm extended was another great cinematic... shot :-)

The parts of the soundtrack are on one of my coding playlists.

I wouldn't fully remake it. It's a classic. Just watch it with that explanation in mind. It makes it more plausible.

Maybe what the mathematician did was crack a gigantic outstanding problem in scaling quantum computers that allowed e.g. extraordinarily effective quantum noise reduction at scale.

Life is great on the high seas. I've spent nearly 16 years "Passing the Popcorn" and couldn't be happier.

Yeah. I see overcompression on a lot of shows. Dark scenes and star fields tend to make it obvious. Three Body Problem was the worst -- I imagine it would have been consistently visually spectacular if they hadn't compressed it to shit. I've seen it on Apple TV too though-- e.g. really visible on Silo title screens. Love, Death and Robots on Netflix quality was great.

Netflix is "4K Ultra HD: Up to 7 GB per hour". Blu ray is 25GB per side, so max 50GB for 2 layers. Typical movies are 35-50GB. So, BR, and think even DVD still looks much better than any streaming service!

They all give you "4k", but ATV+ has by far the best bit rate.

I mostly see a lot of stuttering. Either during high action scenes or when there's little happening at all. It's especially noticable on HBO / MAX at 4k DV. I assumed it was due to aggressive encoding.

I would describe Disney as barely 720p when used in any web browser.

Part of my headcanon for Sneakers is that Agent Abbot (Jones) is actually Admiral Greer (Jones' character from The Hunt for Red October/Patriot Games/Clear and Present Danger), set a bit earlier in his career, and going under a codename while working CyberOps for NSA ;-)

Sneakers is a very popular movie in the HN community. It's a great movie, well written, well cast, well acted, suspenseful, interesting, funny.

It beautifully captures the golden age.

Hacker culture.

I was surprised to read they're not affiliated with Blu-ray RTM (registered trade mark) - I guess Blu-ray RTM are unusually choosing not to bite the hand that feeds them.

https://trademarks.ipo.gov.uk/ipo-tmcase/page/Results/1/UK00...

The best movie about physical pentesting and grayhat hacking in general.

Sneakers is a popular show with folks interested in tech.

If you haven't seen it I think it is worth a try. Great cast, from that exciting age of computers when everything felt like it was just on the edge of possible.

Even for folks not of that time, the cast and script are so good it's worth a watch.

hacker movie news on hacker news. seems pretty straight-forward...

It appears to be a subtle announcement that the film has been restored and will be rereleased on Blu-Ray soon

The movie was partially responsible for creating the stereotype. This was 1992 and hacker culture wasn't yet mainstream.

Do you love the movie Hackers? I submit there are two camps of moviegoing nerds: those who love Sneakers and those who love Hackers. I will admit though, many many years later I softened to the sheer goofness of Hackers (which offput me much initially).

Compared to stereotypes I thought it was an interesting mishmash of lively / different characters.