About hackers

Well, hello again.

Basically, this thread is about a question which has been meandering through my brain for quite some time now since the day I listened to this [URL="http://cre.fm/cre202"]German podcast. And I hope that its suitable to be posted under "The Characters".

To bring it to the point, do you think that there is a possibility to depict hacking with the means of an audio podcast in an appropriate way? Obviously, the characters are not living in a IT-friendly world anymore. However, I remember at least two IT-related, important situations which had an important impact on the show.

The first one revolves around the Mallers doing some serious social engineering / spying on the Tower inhabitants by using different methods (Kalani, even some sort of cryptanalysis on the non-scrambled radio traffic to gain more information about the situation during the trip of Michael's group to the other colony - which gave them at least a slight advantage for the near future.

The second one was much more crucial, Michael's denial-of-service attack at Fort Irwin. Without it, the show would already be over. :)

Back to the initial question. I think that hacking cannot be presented in an appropriate way. It is to complex to describe what a specific action by a hacker will do, it therefor always will require a lot of explanatory overhead. This however will most certainly hamper the story's progress.

I mean, even Hollywood is not able to depict hacking for the most part.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jb5ygQZVqgw

Hollywood tends to simplify or exaggerate a lot:

A multi million supercomputer which cannot play a couple tic-tac-toe games simultaneously in WarGames?

Jeff Goldblum who blows out his computer virus with some neat graphical user interface on the alien ship in Independence Day? Yeah, well, he did not use at least Windows, I guess. :)

And my personal favorite from the movie Stealth: programming artificial intelligence can be done by using the text processor I used for writing my bachelor thesis.

In addition, I do not think that we will never find out what has caused the zombicalypse by just compiling (I love the word play) the analog information found at various parts of the world. That would be a typically Hollywood explanation, deus ex machina. If it has been orchestrated by someone, most information will be digital and encrypted.

Gosh, we lost Lewis, did we not?

What are your thoughts on this?