[meifun]

This movie helped me:

1. Relate to a blind student in our school when they could hear things differently than the rest of us.

2. 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.

3. Realize that a government can steal or in general can be sneaky/secretive.

[ethbr1]

> 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.

[meifun]

Agreed. I talked my way into the server room several times by different night janitors at my old high school back in 1996. I told them I was there to do maintenance and it wasn't entirely untrue but I was there for running wires and setting up new Macs as part of my class load.

[cestith]

I had a teacher in high school who asked me how secure the data on our lab network was. I asked if I could show her without getting in trouble for knowing how to do something. About fifteen seconds later I asked her if the directory we were looking at had all her tests for the year in it.

It was, and for anything not requiring an essay-style answer it also had the keys. This one really isn’t impressive to any sophisticated user. They removed the shell from the user menu list of programs, but they left the shell-to-DOS functionality enabled in a few programs they left enabled. The shared drive directory structure was straightforward to navigate, and being DOS had no real security once the user was at a prompt.

Many of us would spend our in-class lab time playing Scorched Earth or other games installed into hidden directories the students had created.

[imacomputertoo]

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.

[meifun]

Yes. And the part where he knew where the cryptography device was on the desk.

Don’t look, listen.

Then he taps two tuning forks together.

[gosub100]

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.

[meifun]

I can totally relate.

We had a Corvus (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corvus_Systems) and I managed to call them and pretended to have trouble with out system and they asked no questions. Ended up sending a manual to the school and I just watched out for it in the Librarians mail slot.

Then I formatted the Corvus after copying the various software packages I wanted to use on my Apple IIe.

[aksss]

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

[meifun]

another good movie!

[cestith]

Yet another movie that the “sequel” didn’t really live up to the name.

[muziq]

Had no idea that even existed!

[cestith]

$movie_name is not the worst movie out there by a long shot. It certainly doesn’t deserve to ride the coattails of the original movie though. It helps to keep that in mind if you decide to watch it. It prevents some amount of disappointment.

In this case, $movie_name is set to “WarGames: The Dead Code”, but I think we all understand why it’s a template.