hacker. False information. Surveillance. CYBER is a podcast on Motherboard, covering the dark side of the Internet.
The camera scanned a dark nightclub. Dragula, Rob Zombie’s industrial metal anthem, runs through the speakers. Unfettered revellers dance and communicate. In one corner, Neo leaned awkwardly against the wall, apparently dressed for the occasion-or perhaps excessively -. He caught someone approaching him with the corner of his eye.
“My name is Trinity,” she said.
“Trinity?” Neo paused. “The Trinity? Cracking the Trinity of the IRS D-Base?”
This is the first time matrix Imply that this is a hacker movie.
This movie is not necessarily about the way of hacking hacker or sports shoes Yes, but it is probably the movie that best embodies the hacker spirit and the movie that has the greatest impact on hacker culture in the past two decades.
Just look at the aesthetics of the movie. If you go to a hacking conference like Def Con or Chaos Communication Congress, it’s hard to tell whether the hackers there are playing cosplay. matrix, Or if sisters Wachowski, the thought behind the masterpiece, stole their eyes.In fact, the Def Con spokesperson said matrix It is the main content of the conference movie channel, which is available throughout the hotel where conferences are held in Las Vegas.
“As far as I can confirm, we showed it at least 20 times,” Melanie Ensign, a longtime spokesperson for Def Con, told Motherboard.
But hacker references, computers, and cool looks are just superficial things matrix Such an iconic hacker movie. After all, there are several ways to read a movie and unravel its meaning.This movie is a fable For the Christian faith, for Psychoanalytic Journey, And—perhaps most importantly—for the transgender experience, As Emily VanDerWerff explained in an eye-opening article in 2019.
The sequel shifts more to the religious realm, but there is still a very clear hacking reference.
Matrix reloaded Is “the first major movie that accurately portrays hacking”, According to an article in 2003 Written by Kevin Poulsen, a well-known cybersecurity journalist and former hacker.This film not only accurately portrays hacking, but also actually shows Trinity using a real tool often used by hackers—nmap—and a kind of Kiss, This was made by Michal Zalewski.
matrix Purposefully attract the already thriving generation of hackers.
“For decades, hackers have been building their own space matrix Appeared, so the idea that you can be part of something only when you are part of an “in group” is nothing new to anyone who was active in the hacker community before 1999,” security researcher, former security researcher Researcher Emily Crose NSA analyst stated in an online chat: “Accessing these hidden information and participating in the underground information exchange is part of the hacker’s identity. If you are curious enough to discover that world, you can enter that world. Curiosity was the whole reason Neo took the red pill in the first place. “
Cross said that the hackers of her generation “started our careers as outsiders,” focusing on technology and following their curiosity-“our white rabbit”-just like aboard the Nebuchadnezzar Neo is the same as his crew.
This is what attracts young hackers from all over the world.
“I totally agree with Neo,” Patoklos Argyroudis, a researcher who specializes in unknown vulnerabilities and works for the security company CENSUS, told Motherboard. “Do you think that is the air you breathe now? I still say that when someone I’ve been trained in exploitation cannot find (obviously to me) a solution to a technical barrier.”
Argyroudis said that when the movie was released, he was already around 18 years old, and his night “looks like Neo at the beginning of the movie. Staying up until around 4:00, trying to understand something, to an obsessive level. Get up late. , Trying to find a job, instead of really wanting to be assimilated by the 9 to 5 people.”
“My first reading of the theme of the movie is actually like this. The matrix, as a metaphor that assimilates the ordinary nine-to-five life, becomes a cog in the social machine,” he added.
This is made clearer in the first sequel, Reload, Where Morpheus told the crew and captains of other ships, “We know very well that the reason most of us are here is because we like disobedience.”
The film was released at the right time for those of us grown-ups. Senior researcher John Scott-Railton of Citizen Lab was still in high school when he was released. He told me that a week before the movie was released, his school librarian asked him to take his old computer home to “play”.
“The Matrix has me. It clicks deep inside. I am a sophomore in high school, and I am in the process of figuring out who I am.” He said, explaining that he knew hackers and their culture at the time, But he has not participated in it yet. “You may be a clumsy teenager. There are a lot of things that just feel that your body is a fucking cage, preventing you from doing what you want to do. Here, here is the promise of movement, freedom, and unlimited possibilities.”
For the security researcher named x0rz, matrix Literally lead him to become a hacker. When he chose to go to a private school that offered cyber security courses in around 2004, he said, “It might be because they had a very cool guy in their brochure, very similar to Neo.”
However, this movie is not only suitable for millennials. Hacker and technologist Amelie E. Koran said that she felt identified with the now-outdated technology shown in the film.
“See matrix, Where you have to deal with things like analog phones and dial tones, just like the old ones, such as Feike culture, or, you know, the old ones [bulletin boards] Types of things. I think this is a cool callback,” she said on the phone.
The credibility of old-school hackers also comes from all those who choose to escape matrix Has the same handle or nickname as the most famous hacker at the time, such as Dead cow worship.
“The Matrix has me. It clicks deep inside.”
For transgender but not yet converted Quran matrix After it came out, the movie introduced the same concept of “genderless characters” as the character Switch. Over time, she understood the queer identity in the movie as “the hidden subtext in the story.”
When rumors about Lana Wachowski’s transition began to spread, the Koran understood the subtext, and the media reported it in a way that was sensational, insensitive, and fearful of transgender.
“I know why she concealed this story is a fable, because like a handle or something like that, you have been trying to hide it all your life, but still continue to enjoy your life,” the Quran says. “The whole thing is about thematrix is you got rid of that […] When people can live their lives truly, this is to lift people’s dark clouds. I think this is another part of the movie: when you can live a real life, you have superpowers. “
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