[Gllug] OT computers in the movies

[Dave Cridland]

On Tue, 2002-08-27 at 11:49, SteveC wrote:
> Hope everyone has had time to recover from the carnival :-) [or for those 
> in Geneva, you had a nice day at work while we had a bank holiday :-)]

Well, I spent it mostly getting tied up in the tube after a night-flight
from Chicago... *yawn*.

I have no idea why F16's would be shown with nav lights on, other than
guessing that being filmed wouldn't be a good enough reason to turn them
off when running in close formation - assuming they're actually not a
CGI. (I assume that they routinely leave them on in peace-time, of
course, but this is again largely wild speculation).

> Also when encrypting mail, you get
> to see the encrypted chars in a pane below your email as you type...
> fascinating stuff..

Well, the problem here is that if you do these things "right", then
there's nothing obvious that suggests the email is, actually, being
encrypted.

Equally, the perception of a computer in text-mode is that it's
extremely old, hence all these things have GUIs, even when you're
hacking into them across a network.

*We* know this isn't the case, but it's a matter of what the scene
implies. Generally, films showing some encryption/decryption process
need to show, clearly, that the email is being encrypted, without using
the relatively weak method of actors saying so.

So encryption works by the above method you quoted, or else by showing a
progress bar, which, as it goes on, gradually obfuscates the email shown
on screen. Equally, email addresses tend to always be shown as US ones,
because they're globally recognisable, etc.

I realise plenty of people on this list will turn their noses up at this
sort of artistic license, but I don't really object to that. Removing it
would make the plot more difficult to follow for 99% of people.

I do, however, object to the plain impossible or intrinsically unlikely
being an integral part of an otherwise realistic plot, such as the good
old "Press escape twice to override the password" stuff.


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