[bitwize]

"1984? Yeah, RIGHT, man, that's a typo. Orwell's here now and he's living large. We have no names, man, no names. We are NAMELESS. Can I score a fry?" —Cereal Killer, Hackers, whose words ring even more true today even as we watch tech billionaires attempt to build an all-watchful god in silico

[drivers99]

Right before that, he says, "FYI man, alright. You could sit at home, and do like absolutely nothing, and your name goes through like 17 computers a day." Whenever I rewatch that movie, I think 17 is a tiny number compared to today. Probably 17,000+ now.

[bitwize]

Indeed. On one of the many occasions I rewatched it with my wife, when it came to that bit I said "17? Those are rookie numbers these days."

Many jobs ago one of my colleagues was Steve Summit, perhaps best known as the comp.lang.c FAQ maintainer. One Friday afternoon, the rest of us except for Steve met up at our usual haunt for lunch and beer. Orders were placed and served, and the table's discussion turned to DRM and the benefits and drawbacks thereof. Half an hour into lunch, in the midst of this conversation, Steve burst in, sat down, and immediately joined in with "The problem with DRM is one of ownership. Any system with DRM is no longer under your total control, therefore you don't own it. You've ceded control, therefore ownership, to some company somewhere."

Then he paused, pointed to another coworker's plate of half-finished fries and said "Are you gonna eat those?"

You couldn't have gotten a better recreation of that Cereal Killer routine if you had scripted it as an homage. But Steve had never seen Hackers; that's just who he was/is as a person.

[genewitch]

if you google your name (or handle, every hacker needs a handle, man...) it goes through double that, if memory serves (i might be off by a factor of 10 either side...)