The Only Winning Move

I’ve seen two iconic “hacksploitation” flicks in as many weeks: Hackers and WarGames. Whether they deserve to be or not, these two somehow managed to end up the representatives of the genre for the 1990s and 1980s, respectively. I will now load my taste module and tell you what I think of them.

Alright, I don’t really ask Roger Ebert’s opinion on everything, I just wanted to point out that this is one of those he got more or less right. I would’ve given Hackers a lower rating than 3 stars myself, but Ebert redeems himself yet again another time already by recognizing WarGames for the classic it is. It gets a well-deserved 4 stars, and more importantly, he “gets” that it’s superior to its 1990s counterpart.

Why?

That’s actually something of an interesting question. There’s a lesson here for how to make movies - indeed, how to tell stories in general - that needs pointing out. When I was brainstorming about this myself, the answer I kept coming back to was that WarGames is just “more real” than Hackers. But obviously that’s absurd. Hackers, for all its many flaws, actually has something like a realistic plot. Trying to show off to his hacker friends, a kid hacks an oil company and does a half-assed job of it, getting caught. Normally the company would let it go, but unfortunately the security expert who catches him has been indulging in some salami slicing, and the kid just happened to have downloaded an incriminating file. So rather than take the fall himself, the security expert decides to frame the kid, and the rest of the story is, in addition to being about a rivalry between two hackers, largely about trying to put the blame back where it belongs. I mean, when you really step back and think about it, this is not only “realistic,” it’s probably actually happened not once but several times. Some security experts estimate that salami slicing happens all the goddamn time without ever coming to anyone’s attention. And what criminal won’t frame an amateur if he thinks doing so will get him off the hook? Hacking rivalries, for their part, are real and common. So what’s not to like? Contrast this with WarGames - where we have at the center of the plot an AI so advanced that it isn’t even on the horizon now, let alone 25 years ago when the movie came out. Not to mention - there are a host of glaring continuity errors. Joshua, for example, speaks in the same voice at NORAD that “he” does through David’s terminal, even though David himself tells us that the computer isn’t “really” talking, it’s just being modulated by his own voice synthesizing system. Since that system either doesn’t exist or would be different at NORAD, this seems hugely unlikely. And then there’s the bit about the computer going straight from Tic-Tac-Toe to “Global Thermonuclear War” when “learning” that you can’t win any games. How? No one told it to play “Global Thermonuclear War” with “number of players zero,” or to play any games other than Tic-Tac-Toe, for that matter. And while we can believe that a computer can run through all the possibilities of Tic-Tac-Toe in a matter of seconds, there’s simply no way it can do the same for “Global Thermonuclear War.” There are way too many variables. Chess alone (one of the games Joshua “skipped”) has 10¹²⁰ or so possible games - it’s a good bet that “Global Thermonuclear War” has many more. Anyone honestly think a computer can go through all of them in about a minute? More to the point, if we granted that it could, then the story itself is implausible. Joshua/WOPR’s full-time job, after all, it to do exactly that. If it had been doing its job, it would’ve reached this conclusion a long time before David Lightman hacked it.

Alright, so Hackers is technically more “real” than WarGames. Why does it seem the other way around?

That’s today’s big lesson in fiction writing, kids. It’s not enough to tell a convincing story; half of the craft is in selling it. I’m reminded of the part in Stranger in a Strange Land where Michael Valentine Smith is trying to earn a living as a magician and doing a poor job at it. Which is ironic, since as a telekinetic from Mars with spatial awareness of more than just our three dimensions, Mike actually can make things disappear for real. And yet he doesn’t really impress the crowd. I always thought this was one of Heinlein’s more convincing bits of insight. Magic is only 40% about having clever tricks: the other 60% is all in the show. Cleverness is important, but showmanship counts for more. So it is with movies too, apparently.

And dear ol’ Roger Ebert seems to pick up on this too. Here are some choice quotes from his reviews for each movie.

For Hackers:

The movie is well directed, written and acted, and while it is no doubt true that in real life no hacker could do what the characters in this movie do, it is no doubt equally true that what hackers can do would not make a very entertaining movie.

In other words, Ebert isn’t convinced, but then, he argues, he doesn’t hafta be. The classic defense: “just tell me a good story!”

Interesting, then, what he says about WarGames:

The movie, however, could easily go wrong by bogging us down in impenetrable computerese, or by ignoring the technical details altogether and giving us a “Fail Safe” retread. “WarGames” makes neither mistake. It convinces us that it knows computers, and it makes its knowledge into an amazingly entertaining thriller. (Note I do not claim the movie is accurate about computers — only convincing.)

HA! What a nice way to put it. It’s not just that WarGames fails to be accurate. It’s way beyond that, actually. So isn’t it interesting that it nevertheless manages to be convincing? How?

Well, that’s the magic, of course. If we knew the answer, then presumably someone could write a “Scriptwriting for Dummies” book that would actually work and save us from all Hollywood’s tripe. I don’t know the full answer; I don’t think anyone does. But here are some things that occur to me in this context anyway. So here goes - some tips on how to make a hacksploitation flick and get it right.

(1) Show us a hack that isn’t magic. It’s worth noting, I think, that the only hack the audience can follow in Hackers is the social engineering hack that gets our hero into the cable company early on. He tricks a hapless hourly into giving him the number on a crucial modem. From there on, of course, it’s all black magic. YAAAWWWWNNN. There’s really nothing clever to see here. The “fraud” technique used is as old as the hills. If we were pulling this same trick before the computer age, the method would hardly change. We’d still need to mysteriously know enough about the company’s organization to know exactly which dude to call, we’d still need him to be naive, only back in the good ol’ days instead of ordering the computer to play us the video we want, we’d just have to fake some instructions from upper management. Big deal. Contrast this with the big hack in WarGames. In WarGames, David Lightman programs his computer to call every number in Sunnyvale and remember which ones answer with a computer tone. Not only is it within even the most computer illiterate’s grasp to understand how this might work, it’s a clever sort of solution that you can only do with a computer. Unlike Dade in Hackers, who is playing an old prank with a new tool, David’s playing a prank that wasn’t even possible before home computers. That’s crucial. More to the point, though, WarGames is light on “black box” hacks. In Hackers, we see a lot of people typing at a lot of keyboards and things happening as a result, but the mechanisms are all mysterious. We just have to trust that these people can do the things they can do, and that wears thin after a while. It’s like showing a wizard’s duel and asking us to understand when the characters start to run out of magic. Hard to relate, since none of US can cast spells and have no frame of reference for what’s “tiring” and not here. WarGames never strays from the path on this one. Yeah, sure, we can’t exactly see David’s (BASIC? *snicker*) code, but nothing that he does requires all that much suspension of disbelief. Logging in to the school’s computer to change his grades given the week’s password? Check. Dialing every number in Sunnyvale to find Protovision? Don’t know how he did it, but the point is I believe he could. And from there it’s really out of his hands. There’s no false tension built up by asking us to watch a duel in a medium we do not and CAN NOT have any familiarity with.

(2) Real characters. I would guess that Hackers‘ biggest downfall in the computer believability department probably has little to do with actual computers at all. It’s just that these kids are all obnoxious, unlikeable, and - fair or foul - just don’t really jive with our stereotypes of what hackers are like. They come across as ravers who happen to have hobbies in computers. Everything about them is so over-the-top that it’s hard to shake the impression that the moviemakers are trying to hedge the inevitable “not realistic!” criticism from real-life hackers by hanging flashing neon signs everywhere that say “this isn’t really happening!” Contrast that with David Lightman. There’s a great scene where the FBI agent is talking about how Lightman “fits the profile” for espionage. He’s “intelligent, an underachiever, a loner, bad grades in school.” Heh. Now THAT’s a hacker! Espionage isn’t the only profile that fits. And the people making the movie know that, obviously, which is why they included that line at all. More importantly, the romantic tension between David and Jennifer works as well. David’s outside the normal jock dating rituals, not a very masculine guy. Girls aren’t a priority for him because they can’t be. So what kind of girl does such a guy get? Exactly the kind of girl that Jennifer is, obviously. Shy guys need the girl to sorta make the first move, and Jennifer is that girl for guys like David. She’s popular, probably, but seems likely to be bored with her normal options. She can party with the party crowd if she wants to, but sex isn’t really her thing, and she’d like someone with a bit more depth that she won’t have to share with everyone else. It works. So what is going on in Hackers? Despite what Ebert seems to think, cliche city, actually. It’s the standard story about a guy who gets a bit intimidated by a girl who might just be better than him at “his thing.” She’s aloof, untouchable, he bides his time, make his move by showing her up at her own game and … YAWWWNNN. Yeah, got it. This is the romantic subplot of every *sploitation movie on the market. But even more important, I think, are the background characters. In WarGames, aside from possibly David’s parents, everyone seems like a real human. They’re neither good nor bad, really, they’re just sorta pluggin along doing their thing. The debate between Mr. McKitrick and General Barringer about whether to completely automate the missile launch procedure is intriguing because we don’t really know which side is right - both men make good points. And as for Stephen Falken, he has the right idea about war, but the wrong solution to the problem. It’s a believable position for a brilliant researcher out of the 60s who’s lost his son to take, and demonstrating why it’s wrong serves a real thematic purpose in the movie. But in Hackers? Everyone is an annoying cartoon. The oil execs are conveniently hapless, the cyber criminal is conveniently a prick, the FBI guy might as well have “Moral Majority Certified Witch Hunter” stamped on his forehead, the group of hackers all act like bad high school stoner stereotypes, and so on and so on. The only bit of character innovation we really get is that there’s a Puerto Rican in this movie. Way to go out on a limb, there, guys.

Graphical Restraint. Hackers really pulls out the stops on the computer imagery stuff. If it doens’t exactly take it up to 11 like The Matrix did, it still gets a comfortable 10. There’s too much neon and techno dayglo, and it only takes the average viewer about 20seconds to get really sick of it. In fact, in my case, I can honestly say it’s the biggest barrier to my ever seeing this film again, superficial though that may sound (and be). I don’t like the style, and I can’t get away from it. So Done. WarGames looks like real life for the most part. Aside from the scenes at NORAD headquarters, there isn’t really anything in the movie that looks too technological. David’s computer equipment was dated even when the movie came out, and in any case we don’t get to see too much of it. This is a movie about the computer age, to be sure, but it mercifully doesn’t feel the need to make a fetish out of it. Unlike in Hackers, all the images we see in WarGames are things we’ve either seen before or can easily extrapolate from things we’ve seen before. There are no endless lines of purple code scrolling implausibly quickly across people’s faces.

Well, that’s my stab at it, anyway.

To be perfectly honest, I liked Hackers a wee bit better than I’m letting on here. Yeah, the romantic rivalry thing between the two main characters was cliched and irritating, and I really wanted the movie about computer culture they advertised rather than the one about rave culture I got instead. But it’s not as bad as it might have been. The central villain is interesting for being not too different from the kids we’re supposed to take as the “good guys,” which casts the whole story in a nice amoral light. Our villain isn’t doing anything these kids won’t try themselves someday - he’s only “bad” because circumstances have forced him to pick on their friend. Something to think about. Also, however unconvincing the final product turned out, it’s clear that they hired some real hackers for background research. I appreciated that the Dragon Book made an appearance, for example, and with the right cover and everything! And OK, the reference to RISC architecture was dopey, but hey, I’m pretty sure the scriptwriter doesn’t know how to fix that! Most importantly, I appreciated the general lack of sex. To the extent these characters do it at all, it’s for fun and not really an obsession of theirs. If this movie got nothing else about hacker culture right, at least it stayed true to that one. It isn’t that hackers are asexual people, but they’re certainly less obsessed with sex than the general population, and it’s nice to see that come across in a teen movie. WarGames did it better, of course, but then, WarGames did everything better.

So I’ll see Ebert’s three stars and raise him negative half a star. Hackers wasn’t good, but neither was it terrible. Tone the graphics (and wardrobe) down a bit and I might waste another two hours on it someday.

Which still gives it nothing on WarGames, of course. I’ll be watching that movie again and again till the Singularity.

I’m not usually one for paparazzi reports, but this is some very encouraging news. It seems Matt Damon was spotted at a coffee shop test-driving a Tesla Roadster, which I have blogged about before. It’s to be the first “cool” green car - a $90k sportscar (actually, a variant of the Lotus Elise) that runs entirely on battery power. At the equivalent of about 135mpg, it’s certainly efficient. The only thing keeping the rest of us from buying one is the price.

The report is that Damon is impressed and will probably buy one. I hope so. The more celebs seen in these things, the “cooler” they become, and Tesla is actually banking on the cool factor for reinvestment capital in a more affordable line.

The market will provide. The link goes to an article in the International Herald Tribune about the rising crime of stealing used cooking oil from fast food joints.

Yes, cooking oil.

Outside Seattle, cooking oil rustling has become such a problem that the owners of the Olympia Pizza and Pasta Restaurant in Arlington, Washington, are considering using a surveillance camera to keep watch on its 50-gallon grease barrel. Nick Damianidis, an owner, said the barrel had been hit seven or eight times since last summer by siphoners who strike in the night.

“Fryer grease has become gold,” Damianidis said. “And just over a year ago, I had to pay someone to take it away.”

Why? Well, it seems that fryer grease is actually a commodity - as in traded on the market - and that its value has increased from 7.6 cents a pound in 2000 to 33 cents today - which is to say it’s up over 400%. Who would’ve thought that buying fryer oil futures was even an option, let alone a good idea? But there you have it. An ambitious fryer oil thief - one who hits several restaurants in a night - can rake in $6000 on a typical haul on the black market.

Why the sharp increase in value? That’s the interesting part. It turns out the fryer oil is a legitimate biofuel. You mix it with alcohol in a process that any old boob can duplicate in his home, and cars will run on it. So what we have here is yet another example of the efficiency of markets. Gas prices rise sharply, and suddenly there’s a market in alternative fuels, even in the most unlikely of places. It’s like that old story about the wind and the sun. Government bureaucrats can spin as many schemes as they want to try to get people to go green - but what actually works is incentive, not coercion. If gas prices rise, people will go green on their own - no socialism required. Oh, and this is probably good news on the obesity front as well - since the added security measures to protect waste frying oil is bound to drive up the price of fried chicken bits.

Well, well. You know all those arguments that legalizing prostitution would lead to some kind of explosion in the rates? Not true in New Zealand, where “a comparison between the number of sex workers in Christchurch in 1999, before decriminalisation, and 2006 - after the act was passed - showed the total had stayed about the same.”

More goodies:

Before the act, the illicit status of the industry meant workers were open to coercion and exploitation by managers, pimps and clients. Research indicated there had been “some improvement” in employment conditions “but this is by no means universal”.

In other words, laws banning prostitution actually work against prostitutes by making them complicit in the “crime.” They are reluctant to go to the police with abuses for fear of arrest. Who knew?

Not to mention - sex work isn’t all (or even mostly, or even at all in many cases) about exploitation.

Around 93 per cent of sex workers cited money as the reason for getting into and staying in the sex industry.

“The most significant barriers to exiting are loss of income, reluctance to lose the flexible working hours available in the sex industry and the camaraderie and sense of belonging that some sex workers describe.”

So sex work is a good part-time job, actually. That’s backed up by this UChicago working paper, which reports that prostitutes in Chicago work an average of 13 hours a week for $26-31/hour. Better money than most of these women can earn anywhere, with flexible hours. One of the women in the study, in fact (the one with a pimp) was earning more like $50/hour for about 12 hours a week.

Is there any reason at all why this should be illegal? Oh, right, the danger of violence. Certainly that comes with the territory, but making anything against the law guarantees it will be more dangerous. Again from the New Zealand article:

More than 60 per cent felt they were more able to refuse to provide commercial sexual services to a particular client since the enactment of the law.

Other findings included that the majority of sex workers felt the act could do little about violence that occurred, although a significant majority felt there had been an improvement since the passing of the act.

So violence remains a problem, but sex workers now feel more in control of the situation. A step in the right direction rather than a panacea, in other words - exactly what one might expect.

I realize that New Zealand is a demographic outlier in the world and that its experiences with policy implementation can’t be taken as definitive for that reason. But these results are just intuitive; there is no reason to believe the situation after decriminalization or (better still) legalization in the US would be any different. Let’s legalize it already.

If This is to be believed, the Tesla Motor Company will be introducing a $98,000 all-electric sportscar soon - possibly next year. Some circles claim that it will run at an average cost of $0.01/mile, do 0-60 in 4 seconds, and require only 3.5 hours to charge (though not from a standard wall socket - it will need special “fueling stations” of its own).

It’s the 1cent/mile fuel cost that strikes me, of course. That’s really spiffy!

So where’s the catch?

Well, the price tag, obviously. By comparison, I drive a 1999 Maxima that I bought used for around $15k. Taking the current mileage and comparing it to what it was when I bought it and dividing by the number of years, it seems I drive about 6,000 miles a year. OK - ‘99 Maximas get about 21mpg (that feels about right to me). So that implies I use 286 gallons of gas a year. Since I have to fill up with premium, I’m currently paying $4.20/gallon. All other things being equal, I would drop that to an even $4 to factor in this year’s cheaper months - but since I expect gas prices to continue rising a bit, let’s just do the math at $4.20. Assuming a solid rate of $4.20/gallon, I could expect to pay just over $1200 in gas a year. Since my total expenditures on gas for the Tesla Roadster would be only $60, I would save $1040 or so a year in gas by buying one.

Yeah, but it costs so much more than my current auto. Even if we buy these numbers (and let’s face it, we don’t: I find it hugely implausible that there are cars in existence that run on $0.01/mile, not to mention that new technology like this that expects to sell only 10,000 units or so exclusively in California in its initial offering is bound to require frequent and expensive repairs), it would take me over 80 years of driving to break even (a $15k car vs. a $98k car).

The irony of all this, of course, is that people who are in a position to shell out $90+k for a car probably aren’t sweatin’ the $1000/yr gas bill much. So I don’t really see the point in talking about fuel efficiency for an electric-powered luxury car.

Fortunately, Tesla gets this. From a post by the CEO on the company’s blog:

Almost any new technology initially has high unit cost before it can be optimized and this is no less true for electric cars. The strategy of Tesla is to enter at the high end of the market, where customers are prepared to pay a premium, and then drive down market as fast as possible to higher unit volume and lower prices with each successive model.

Without giving away too much, I can say that the second model will be a sporty four door family car at roughly half the $89k price point of the Tesla Roadster and the third model will be even more affordable. In keeping with a fast growing technology company, all free cash flow is plowed back into R&D to drive down the costs and bring the follow on products to market as fast as possible. When someone buys the Tesla Roadster sports car, they are actually helping pay for development of the low cost family car.

Needless to say, this is encouraging, a really smart strategy.

Ah, but do the cars work? Popular Mechanics seems satisfied!

I will be needing a new car in exactly two years. If they have family cars on the market by then in the $50k range, I’m in.

More inspiring green technology news from Scandinavia. Apparently there is a Swedish company that makes gas from human waste. Yup - what you flush down the toilet every morning. Here comes the science:

Chemically, biogas is the same as natural gas from fossil fuels, but its manufacture relies on a process where bacteria feed on fecal waste for about three weeks in an oxygen-free chamber. The result is two-thirds methane and one-third carbon dioxide, as well as a nutrient-rich residue that can be used as soil or construction material.

Once the methane is purified, it is pumped through Goteborg’s network of gas pipelines to specialized filling stations, where it is pressurized for delivery. Any car with an engine and tank configured for compressed natural gas can use biogas.

Apparently, it’s cheaper than gasoline and diesel, and though slightly more expensive than ethanol per unit, it’s more efficient, compensating for the price gap.

So what’re the downsides? Plenty, actually. First, the fuel isn’t all that efficient. Car fuel tanks are huge (crowding out trunk space), but only hold enough for about 2-3 hours of driving. Some owners have apparently also complained that the cars don’t do well on steep climbs and can be sluggish in certain kinds of weather. Perhaps as a result, Volvo stopped making biofuel cars in 2006, dealing a blow to the prospects for market expansion. Also, from an American perspective, part of the supposed “low cost” of biofuels is almost certainly artificial - fueled by high Swedish taxes on gas, government subsidies for biofuel station construction, and tax breaks for people who buy biofuel cars. Furthermore, it doesn’t seem to be that great of a supply:

Ola Fredriksson, an engineer at Gryaab, the sewage facility in Goteborg, said that what an average person flushed down the toilet each year created enough biogas to drive 120 kilometers, or 75 miles.

The average American (as well as the average Swede, for that matter) travels quite a bit further than that in a year. Even with the recent drop in highway miles travelled, Americans still clocked 688.7billion highway miles in March alone. If every American gets 75 highway miles a year, that comes to a total of 22.5billion miles - or just over 3% of what we actually travelled in just one month. Which is like saying that people would have to poop at least 396 times more than they do to cover yearly highway travel in the US.

No one has that kind of time or dedication.

Still, the idea of dumping human waste into the city’s natural gas grid (which is how it actually works in some places in Sweden: the drivers put natural gas in their car, and in return the city natural gas grid accepts an offset amount of biofuel) is appealing. It doesn’t solve any large-scale energy problems, but it does at least find something useful to do with the sewer system.

The prospects? This 2007 Swedish government report claims that there are 11,000 biofuel cars in Sweden being served by at least 71 fueling stations. That’s a start.