Kevin Poulsen in The Register - Matrix Sequel Has Hacker Cred:
The average American moviegoer taking in the Matrix Reloaded this weekend will likely be wowed by the elaborate action sequences and dazzling special effects. But hackers who've seen the blockbuster are crediting it with a more subtle cinematic milestone: it's the first major motion picture to accurately portray a hack.Basically, instead of some cinematic hocus pocus, Trinity uses a well known tool of today called Nmap to scan the target and find an opening for an exploit.
That's right: Trinity uses a 'sploit.
"I was definitely pretty excited when I saw it," says "Fyodor," the 25-year-old author of Nmap. "I think compared to previous movies that had any kind of hacking content, you could generally assume it's going to be some kind of stupid 3D graphics show."There's more by following the link.
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Fyodor notes that the filmmakers changed the text of Nmap's output slightly "to make it fit on the screen better," but he's not quibbling over the details. The white hat hacker's stardom even gave him new appreciation for the speed of the Internet's underground. After seeing the film late Wednesday night, Fyodor put out a request to an Nmap mailing list asking for someone to get him a digital still of the program's three-seconds of fame. He expected it to take hours, or days.
"Twenty minutes after I send it, I'm getting a bunch of screens shots, some of them have suspicious Windows Media Player outlines to them," he says. "Now I've got screen shots, Divx copies of the movie, all sorts of stuff." If the Matrix borrows from real life, the Internet, it seems, already has the Matrix.
