This list at gideontech.com is stupid.  I like a good top ten list, particularly the geeky kind like “Top 10 worst portrayals of technology in Film”, but this one is anything but.  The summarized list, with abbreviated explanations of why each movie is on the list:

10. Wargames (1983) – “…the idea of a computer talking to you after you ‘hack’ into it is laughable in this day an age.”

This is just ignorant.  Firstly, the computer “talked” because Broderick’s character had a voice synthesizer attached to his computer.  My grandmother had one of those built into a little digital clock before I was born.  Secondly, he didn’t really “hack” into a NORAD system with technical wizardry like this article implies.  In the movie, the character (I forget his name) was simply dialing phone numbers to see what he could find.  Given that the internet was not “available” as they put it, it’s conceivable that NORAD didn’t properly defend some computers.  This one definitely doesn’t belong on this list.

9. The Italian Job (2003) – “So since his P2P file sharing program got stolen, Seth now makes a wire fram program that follows a Mini around perfectly through walls?”

Again (this lead-off will get old), the criticism is just dumb.  What’s dumber: portraying a character that wrote both a P2P file-sharing program and a 3D modeling program that can track a vehicle, or assuming that there is nobody that could do both?

8. Antitrust (2001) – “…One scene that jumps right out is the ability for the security team to lift code off a computer screen via a security camera.”

This is extra lame – is there any special reason why you couldn’t see code on a monitor by viewing it with a security camera?  The NSA can do things like see the contents being displayed on a monitor from inside a van outside the building where the monitor is located.  This item is simply anti-creative.

7. Hackers (1995) – “fly-through sequences of a supercomputer”?

I haven’t seen this one, but the “rediculous fly-through sequences of the supercomputer” could have just been a visualization.  Given that petroleum companies actually use supercomputers for exploratory techniques involving visualization, the idea isn’t so far-fetched, even if it’s unrealistic.

6. Transporter (2005) – “…he looks up a criminal on the computer. Within a
few seconds, that information is magically beamed to Frank’s car. How
in the world did they sync up? How did the computer at the police
station know where Frank was?”

Yes, it’s a little fantastic that a retired investigator from France could just hop on an FBI database and “magically beam” the information he found to a mobile system somewhere.  However, you don’t have to be terribly creative to imagine how this might work.  What if Frank’s car simply had a mobile phone system that tied into a telephony server?  Then one would only have to send data to an IP address – not implausable – and the telephony server could take care of the rest.  A simple FTP tranfer could have occurred.  They didn’t have to “sync up”, and the computer at the police station didn’t have to “know” where Frank was – that’s what routers and telephony servers are for.

5. Swordfish (2001) – “…worms and viruses looked like little gems”

Good grief.  This is their complaint?  One can visualize many things in many different ways.  The Linux kernel has been graphically visualized too, for crying-out-loud. 

4. Goldeneye (1995) – “…the lamest evil hacker to date, Boris. With the ability to ‘spike’ remote computer systems…”

Huh?  Ok, so he was a lame character.  But what’s wrong here?  Why can’t he ‘spike’ remote computer systems?  What if DDoS attacks were called ‘spiking’ instead of DDoS?

3. Mission Impossible (1996) – “…Ethan Hunt decides to start emailing people out
of the blue it seems. The emails he tries are not even formatted
correctly. Also, his un-canny ability to find information through
graphical newsgroups is something else.”

Must we do this again?  Can this list really be as contrived as it seems?  Anyway, the email addresses aren’t “formatted correctly”.  Ehem…*cough* AOL *cough*.  But what about the “graphical newsgroups”?  Did he mean to say “websites with pictures”?  Huh.  My ability to find information on pages like that is pretty uncanny too.

2. Jurassic Park (1993) – “Where on this planet is there a 10 year old girl who knows and can understand UNIX?!?”

Of all the far-fetched nonsense on this movie, and his complaint is based on the assumption that no 10-year-old girl can possibly know UNIX?  Give me a break.  By the time my daughter is 10, she’ll have forgotten more UNIX than this retard ever knew.

1. Firewall (2006) – “…is the dumbest and non-believable use of an iPod to date”.

This is probably the worst of the movies on this list, but that isn’t saying much. So, let’s break this one down: Ford takes an iPod (essentially a hard drive with a good-sized LCD and a microcontroller) and stores textual data that came from a scanner and was processed by an OCR program on it.  Then he takes this little hard drive and uses it to dump data back out to a wire-transfer terminal.  Big whoop.  In no way is this implausible.  The only implausible part is that A) Apple doesn’t release their hardware specs, and B) he did it in less than 12 hours.

This list was completely lame.

What about Enemy of the State, in which a satellite is used to peer through Will Smith’s body into a bag he was holding inside a lengerie store?  How about just about any Sci-Fi film that deals with space travel, or wormholes, or energy weapons, etc?

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