Re: Nmap usage considered but rejected for Tron: Legacy

[Shinnok <admin () shinnok com>]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

First of all, this kind of insight into the backstage as well as seeing
Hollywood people that care about these kind of *politically correctness*
regarding this field is pretty cool.

On 04/06/2011 09:07 PM, Fyodor wrote:
> Hi folks.  Perhaps last year's biggest geek film was Tron Legacy, and
> special effects artist Josh Nimoy has finally received clearance to
> talk about the work he did there.  Interestingly, he considered using
> Nmap but decided that it didn't meet the needs of the character
> involved (killing a process).

Uhaa..that's a great chance for this GSoC for a project to turn Nmap
into a killing beast that can scan for open *processes* on a machine,
detect and identify processes and then have the ability to kill the
rogue ones. Hurr up, there's only so little time till the GSoC
application deadline. Hell, I think I will propose that too. :-)

>  I suppose we can't complain,
> considering how lucky Nmap has been in this respect
> (http://nmap.org/movies.html).  And at least he was able to get Emacs
> and Linux into the movie!  Here is what he says:
>
>    I take representing digital culture in film very seriously in lieu
>    of having grown up in a world of very badly researched user
>    interface greeble. I cringed during the part in Hackers (1995) when
>    a screen saver with extruded "equations" is used to signify that
>    the hacker has reached some sort of neural flow or ambiguous
>    destination. I cringed for Swordfish and Jurassic Park as well. I
>    cheered when Trinity in The Matrix used nmap and ssh (and so did
>    you). Then I cringed again when I saw that inevitably, Hollywood
>    had decided that nmap was the thing to use for all its hacker
>    scenes (see Bourne Ultimatum, Die Hard 4, Girl with Dragon Tattoo,
>    The Listening, 13: Game of Death, Battle Royale, Broken Saints, and
>    on and on).

A lot of people seem to forget Antitrust(2001) and Takedown(2000) when
debating this issue, that picture the world of programming and hacking
respectively pretty well(meaning decent language and tools, terminals
and desktops). I don't know why. I myself consider these movies pretty
respective and loyal to the scene, unlike any other.

Then there's the recent movie, The Social Network which features Linux,
KDE3, apache, wget and others.

> In Tron, the hacker was not supposed to be snooping
>    around on a network; he was supposed to kill a process. So we went
>    with posix kill and also had him pipe ps into grep. I also ended up
>    using emacs eshell to make the terminal more l33t. The team was
>    delighted to see my emacs performance--splitting the editor into
>    nested panes and running different modes. I was tickled that I got
>    emacs into a block buster movie. I actually do use emacs irl, and
>    although I do not subscribe to alt.religion.emacs, I think that's
>    all incredibly relevant to the world of Tron.

Vim fans are pretty damaged and angry right now. I sense a Vim:riot
heating up.

> The article includes many beautiful special effects shots from the
> movie:
>
> http://jtnimoy.net/workviewer.php?q=178
>
> Cheers,
> Fyodor

Thanks again for the Juicy bit.

Shinnok



-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.10 (GNU/Linux)

iQEcBAEBAgAGBQJNnLBEAAoJEAzuYPBIYMpXi/MH/1OSzurVP0sQ/nsEh/zzgpiK
TONv9DuM3ZHVcaPkJIrjadDcYiBvhlaaFDx+HcPbsFtJTTiPthifHIKA+jN/wLmu
Ryq+K2Eb19IctXidq1TKVaIT45ZvzT6VqJooL47uYRjVOuemJngfST1mNo9C0Uje
0+EngUpU7VeX1VcDkvtvh86K5v3OG567709as9frl0hQqBvNMTNGaWCBr3gIjH12
ZK6PGMpZCHpyMJzR72XoUEqvVGCQPThQ0eDAtTuGxkvn+pesjcwGYRQtMATmhK/s
Ov8NmJrkquKcmhCCRqibtfShnwNPgMsXlg1ARUSde4nA7anptS19UI3G1kXnX7g=
=CjZi
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
_______________________________________________
Sent through the nmap-dev mailing list
http://cgi.insecure.org/mailman/listinfo/nmap-dev
Archived at http://seclists.org/nmap-dev/