[HN Gopher] Simulating the PIN cracking scene in Terminator 2
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Simulating the PIN cracking scene in Terminator 2
Author : fanf2
Score : 368 points
Date : 2021-01-06 11:43 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (bert.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (bert.org)
| leecarraher wrote:
| Awesome, just watched this two nights ago. fun to think even in
| 1992 it was still acceptable to show someone cracking a password
| by whittling down the passwords one character at a time. To their
| credit at least it was a bit better than war games, where it just
| locks in one character at a time. Where this one could maybe
| construe that it started with some hash of the pin stored on the
| machine and accessible via the card reader in reverse..., and
| they were maybe factoring it. Still an awesome scene and by far
| my favorite james cameron movie.
| efdee wrote:
| I remember once writing an IRC script for Microsoft's IrcX
| implementation that unmasked a masked IP, literally one
| character at a time. Sometimes these things are by design. :-)
| bhauer wrote:
| My favorite feature of that scene in _Wargames_ is that when
| Joshua /WOPR gets down to two or one digit remaining, there is
| still time to have suspenseful dialog. This in spite of the
| fact that there would only be 100 or 10 remaining permutations
| to test with so few digits remaining, and the animation shows
| several dozen being tested per second. Nevertheless, Joshua
| seems to keep trying the wrong last couple digits to give the
| humans some more time to act.
| 10x-dev wrote:
| Terminator 2 and Turbo Pascal were my 2 favorite things during
| teen years!
|
| I have actually rewatched Terminator 2 about 50 times - every
| day after school. My parents started getting worried at some
| point. I still remember a good chunk of the dialogue.
|
| My parents sent me to my grandmother's during summer break, but
| they also allowed me to take my 386. I wrote DOS games in Turbo
| Pascal the entire time, and only saw my grandparents at
| mealtime. Then I got a talking to because of the monstrous
| electric bill a 386 running 24/7 racked up.
|
| These days I use Android Studio, which could really take some
| notes from TPX.EXE.
| viceroyalbean wrote:
| To be fair, some side channel attacks do allow locking in one
| character at a time. For example, if a password is evaluated by
| looking at the string character by character and breaking once
| an incorrect character is found you might be able to use the
| response timing to figure out how many correct characters you
| have.
| heywire wrote:
| I remember this being one of the fun levels in the Stripe
| Capture-the-Flag contest they ran a few years back. Still got
| my t-shirt :)
| dividuum wrote:
| Yep. Level 6 in the first one :-) IIRC their challenge
| machines were under quite a bit of load and I had
| difficulties getting the proper solution. If anyone is
| interested for some reason, here's my writeup including
| their code and my exploit:
| https://github.com/dividuum/stripe-ctf
| jleahy wrote:
| I once wrote a piece of software that cracked passwords for
| Windows 9x network shares. It looked just like the movies, it
| would crack one letter of the password at a time, each letter
| would cycle through the possibilities and then lock in, before
| it would move onto the next character. Those with a good memory
| of exploits will recall the exploit that was used.
|
| So it's not necessarily fictional, sometimes it does work like
| that. I wasn't alive in the 80s, but I would guess that such
| things were very common back then (but obviously are non-
| existent now).
| 10x-dev wrote:
| I used L0phtcrack for that. Fun times over dial-up!
|
| Sometimes I miss how easy things were. Passwords in
| type=hidden fields. Basic auth over http. Dumb hubs sending
| packets to everyone on the network. C$ shared drives on the
| Internet and, of course, Sub7.
| jleahy wrote:
| Ah Sub7... _a single tear runs down my cheek_
| nobrains wrote:
| Epitome of geekiness, coding, pop culture, and writing. Loved it.
| munro wrote:
| Looking for people actually doing this, and I stumbled up this
| interesting article:
|
| https://samy.pl/magspoof/
|
| It's crazy, if your electro magnet is strong enough, you don't
| even need a tin foil wrapped credit card to put in the machine!
| zmodem wrote:
| This is wonderful. Thanks for sharing!
| radres wrote:
| Downvote me to the ground...I honestly don't see anything
| appealing in this post. Just a code spits out some strings.
|
| Am I suppose to write a blog post on any of the useless solutions
| I can create?
| WrtCdEvrydy wrote:
| Nostalgia > Technical Capability in this case.
| [deleted]
| mpalmer wrote:
| No, just the stuff that you're excited to show other people.
| cinntaile wrote:
| It's a fun read mixed with nostalgia, I like it. I don't really
| see what's wrong with sharing this with the world?
| D13Fd wrote:
| I enjoyed reading it, mainly because I had forgotten about
| that scene and it was interesting to see the hardware used.
| joemazerino wrote:
| Then don't read it?
| Bjartr wrote:
| > Am I suppose to write a blog post on any of the useless
| solutions I can create?
|
| Sure! Write up your approach and results in a nice digestible
| way on some project you found personally interesting and there
| are plenty of people here that will enjoy that.
|
| Note that the difference between "Here's code I wrote that does
| X: '...'" and what appears in this blog post is bigger than
| what you're giving credit for. Documenting the process you went
| through from having an idea to arriving at a solution in a
| relatable and amusing way takes real effort. If you disagree,
| please, prove me wrong. Since if you do, you'd be a blogger I'd
| happily add to my regular reading.
| radres wrote:
| Maybe if I had watched the movie I would've felt differently,
| but I couldn't resonate with the comments stating the
| nostalgia and all. To me it read like "here is a code that
| does this".
| doovd wrote:
| Can't beleive they actually had "PIN IDENTIFICATION NUMBER"
| written on the display in the movie itself
| raisedbyninjas wrote:
| The app is called PIN Identification Program. It isn't
| redundant.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| That's like saying RIP in peace.
| Zsolt wrote:
| Or Sahara desert, Soviet union, ATM machine, CD disc, chai
| tea...
|
| Think my favorite is The Los Angeles Angels - the the angels
| angels
| xyzelement wrote:
| I don't understand why Sahara and Soviet Union are on this
| list?
| Zsolt wrote:
| It's a bit of a reach: "sahara" in Arabic means
| "deserts", and soviet means council or board.
| Shared404 wrote:
| https://www.etymonline.com/word/sahara
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_(council)#Etymology
|
| Much like Los Angeles, if you translate the words back to
| their original language they become redundant.
| xyzelement wrote:
| That's wrong then. The word "soviet" means "council".. To
| the extent that its etymology connects to "togetherness"
| it just refers to the group of people coming together to
| make decisions.
|
| The "union" refers to the union of the socialist
| republics. You can easily have "soviets" without a union,
| and you can obviously have a union without soviets.
|
| Source: born in the USSR
| Shared404 wrote:
| Good to know, thanks for sharing.
|
| Based on what it said the direct translation was I had
| thought it was weird, but I figured the Wikipedia page
| would know more than I.
| [deleted]
| m3kw9 wrote:
| You know I'm just gonna vid cap that and run it on my laptop with
| a hotkey
| dmd wrote:
| I had an Atari Portfolio in middle school. It was fun as hell but
| a _beast_ to type on; the keys took a huge amount of force to
| press. I switched to a Psion series 3, which was much better
| (though nowhere near as good as the later 5).
| unnouinceput wrote:
| Quote 1: "write('Strike a key when ready ...');
| readln;"
|
| Should've been "write('Press Enter when ready ...');" because
| "readln" will wait only for <ENTER> key to continue. Anything
| else you press meanwhile will just appear on screen.
|
| OR
|
| instead of "readln;" put "readkey;" - that one would've simply
| continued regardless of whatever you'd press (well, CTRL / SHIFT
| not included).
|
| ======================
|
| Quote2: "writeln(''); writeln('');"
|
| Unnecessary. If you want empty lines you can simply say
| "writeln;writeln;" - no parameters required.
|
| =======================
|
| Quote3: "while true do begin
|
| .
|
| .
|
| . if (length <= 4) then
| break; end;"
|
| Oh boy, do I spot a C/C++ programmer. Here is the better
| solution:
|
| "repeat
|
| .
|
| .
|
| .
|
| until length <= 4"
| lbj wrote:
| I have no idea why Im such a sucker for these monstrous time-
| sinks for no reason whatsoever. But I loved it.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| Can we just appreciate that someone did write that program for
| the Atari palmtop 30 years ago just so it would appear for 5
| seconds in a movie. Crazy.
|
| I wonder how the hiring for that position go? _" Our movie
| studio is looking for a programmer to code a sequence that
| simulates PIN cracking on an Atari which will look cool and
| hackery on screen."_
|
| Either way, that coder did a stellar job in making it look
| really legit vs the shitty hacking sequences that followed in
| movies of the early '00 where you could hack the DoD by typing
| on the keyboard random words really fast or assembling some 3D
| shapes on an SGI machine to break encryption.
| calciphus wrote:
| I have a friend who does graphic and video design. He gets
| jobs occasionally (via several layers of subcontracting) for
| "alien operating system and interface video" and the like,
| which have appeared in a few movies. He showed me the brief
| for one once, and it was pretty interesting. A while
| different kind of design work than what I'm used to seeing.
| utexaspunk wrote:
| Yeah, I have a friend from art school who has created fake
| posters and interfaces, etc for shows like Law and Order:
| SVU and I Am Legend (he created the Batman vs Superman
| poster in times square!). Cool job, but it sounds like it's
| feast or famine sometimes.
| Animats wrote:
| Yes, working with Hollywood sucks. Either they're in
| development and their credit cards bounce, or they're in
| production and they want a new feature yesterday.
| marlowe221 wrote:
| I wonder what he would charge to make a DS9 style
| interface... :)
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| It's not crazy: You've just summarised filmmaking.
|
| Costumes, sets, special effects, props, etc. all are like
| that. Specialised and skilled people spending a lot of time
| and effort for things that may or may not get a lot of screen
| time.
|
| But even a short screen time can be very important for the
| film and have a lasting effect. Example: That very program.
| aitchnyu wrote:
| I remember post credits narration of a 1990s Dorling
| Kindersly video about a black car morph into an insect (both
| beetle) and she said this took 3 weeks just for a 3 second
| animation.
| ghaff wrote:
| Big budget films (and TV series) can spend an incredible
| amount of effort and money on detail that most people won't
| notice or appreciate (or sometimes even makes it into the
| final cut). Of course, as you say, they can do dumb stuff
| too.
|
| Which, depending upon your perspective, is an attention to
| detail that makes the film better even if most people don't
| consciously notice it or it's a symptom of why studio films
| can be astonishingly expensive to make.
| syndacks wrote:
| Especially in T2:
|
| >My CPU is a neural-net processor, a learning computer.
|
| Costly tech for a movie, but well worth it.
| gecko wrote:
| Well, there's that line, which is brilliant, and then
| there's the fact that he clearly runs on a 6502,
| soooooo.....
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| You can indeed simulate a neural net on a 6502. Not
| enough nodes to model a T-800, but...
| nonesuchluck wrote:
| Just like Bender! https://i.redd.it/e5ocvyizvk521.png
| ant6n wrote:
| Futurama is full of obscure geek references, I wonder
| whether this is a jab at T2.
| dragonshed wrote:
| More of a tongue-in-cheek reference to the reoccurring
| joke that bender wants to kill all humans, except for his
| pet Fry.
| disgrunt wrote:
| Wasn't it an Atari Portfolio? If memory serves, it had a
| mostly functional MS-DOS, so writing a program for it was
| likely not an arduous task. That being said, rewatching those
| scenes, it was a striking little device for its day and ahead
| of its time.
| noisy_boy wrote:
| Apart from the obvious feels (I love that movie), the big
| takeaway from this for me is https://github.com/nbedos/termtosvg
| - makes me think, considering how much I enjoy creating
| documentation (sort of as a relaxing technique), why the hell
| haven't I jazzed up my READMEs yet?!
| deanebarker wrote:
| The perfect blog post doesn't exi---
| metalliqaz wrote:
| The blog post ends with "Easy money!". You are correct sir,
| this post is perfect.
| HighChaparral wrote:
| I've been waiting almost thirty years for this post, I just
| never knew it.
| jgrahamc wrote:
| Can I interest you in the original source code of all the
| snippets of code seen in Terminator?
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YRnnjoiSV-U
| fortran77 wrote:
| Plus this one: https://twitter.com/ThrillScience/status/124
| 9742678532620293
| tantalor wrote:
| Warms my heart: https://html5zombo.com/
| pmarreck wrote:
| To this day I have never seen an engineer laugh as long as I
| did when I introduced the original Zombo.com to a coworker,
| back when it was new and somewhat unknown (I think I discovered
| it via Fark.com?)
| the-dude wrote:
| That is not a laptop, but a _palmtop_.
|
| I owned one.
|
| edit: I should have never sold it as a student. But alas.
| sneak wrote:
| I'll sell you my Toshiba Libretto for cheap.
| wvenable wrote:
| I owned one in great condition as a university student in the
| mid-90's. It died one day and I got rid of it -- moving onto
| more modern pocket computers. But I totally regret getting rid
| of it -- now that I know so much more about electronics it
| probably would have been an easy fix.
| tra3 wrote:
| 3 AA batteries!
|
| 4.5v at probably 1000 mAh each cell? Or 5Wh. Do you recall how
| long it lasted for?
|
| Also the last frame: "PIN identification number" for your "ATM
| teller machine"...
| the-dude wrote:
| I don't recall how long it lasted. I don't remember it to be
| a problem though.
|
| Also, I asked my mother to sew me a inner-pocket? in my
| jeans-jacket for it, so I could carry it around.
| utexaspunk wrote:
| Static-core 80C88 and an 40x8 mono LCD w/o a backlight. I
| can't imagine the energy consumption being much different
| than your average high school graphing calculator
| dmvjs wrote:
| even a hardcoded PIN is correct 1/10000 of the time
| mattbgates wrote:
| How to be a Hollywood Hacker ;)
| makach wrote:
| Ah, computing powered by 3*AAA
| UI_at_80x24 wrote:
| That's one of the things I still miss about my Palm Pilot Pro.
| It ran on 1 (or 2??) AA batteries, and it lasted a month
| (seemingly regardless of how much I used it; which is just my
| imagination, but regardless that's still the impression I
| have).
|
| The other thing I dearly miss: being able to read it in full
| sunlight.
| Pulcinella wrote:
| In contrast to my old Sega Game Gear which ran on on 6 AA
| batteries and would last less than 2 hours. Though to its
| credit it, it came out about a year after the original
| Gameboy but had a backlit, color screen. Too bad so many of
| the games were terrible.
| philjackson wrote:
| The Atari Lynx was even worse, if I remember...
| nallic wrote:
| Thats pretty much how I remember them as well. And you could
| use plucker to crawl all the news site and compile a single
| archive of todays news, to read on the train - offline
| ofcourse. Everything was offline back then and I kind of
| begin to miss that :) - I read several books on a palm - all
| of Harry Potter, some A. C. Clarke and HHGTTG. The thing
| could go on forever.
| outworlder wrote:
| > 80C88 @ 4.9152 MHz
|
| > 128 KB of RAM and 256 KB of ROM
|
| We can do much better nowadays with incredibly cheap
| microcontrollers.
| Abishek_Muthian wrote:
| That's a great read, congratulations to the author.
|
| I wish newer movies featured devices like Cosmo Communicator,
| Pro1X or upcoming PinePhone with keyboard case in the hacking
| scenes to give the handhelds with keyboards a second chance. Last
| time I saw a cool handheld in a hacking scene(movie, so no
| Mr.Robot) was Nokia N8 in Tron Legacy(2010), but it really should
| have been N9.
| canadian_tired wrote:
| Enjoyed the PIN .svg, but those old Turbo IDE screens got me
| right in the feels. Never used Turbo 7...Turbo 3 was the bomb
| back in the day. And yes, WordPerfect... those old enough
| remember "Reveal Codes" Why did we like this?
| unbalancedevh wrote:
| F3-F3 was your friend!
| taeric wrote:
| Reveal codes is still hella nice. Have the reason I hate Word
| is because I have no way of knowing why it made a change
| sometimes.
|
| At least with TeX, I can see all of the commands. Word? Best I
| can hope is I saw it make the change and that undo actually
| works.
| bluedino wrote:
| There is a show/hide button on the default ribbon in Word
| 2019 that will show you the hidden formatting codes
| relaxing wrote:
| Unfortunately this only shows things like paragraph markers
| and tab characters, not all formatting. It doesn't help
| resolve, for instance, why only the top level number of my
| numbered list is displaying as a black box.
| andrewla wrote:
| The loss of "reveal codes" is the greatest tragedy of the
| fall of Wordperfect. For me there was nothing more satisfying
| than cleaning up a bunch of empty "bold" blocks that had
| started to clutter up the text and would cause text to
| mysteriously embolden if inserted in the wrong place.
|
| In Google Docs a number of times I've had to copy my text out
| to a temporary notepad to remove formatting and re-paste it
| in the original doc because for some reason it was starting a
| numbered list over again at 1 and there was no way to
| convince it that it's all part of the same list.
| philsnow wrote:
| I was just having a get-off-my-lawn moment yesterday with a
| coworker who was struggling with pasting into a bulleted
| list in google docs. They had never heard the term
| "WYSIWYG".
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| I still copy-paste into Notepad to remove formatting. Even
| that fails on Win10 if you used, eg, non-breaking hyphens
| ... thought I was going mad; no, just MS Windows doing its
| thing.
|
| I've returned to MSWord after 15 years, it still seems
| incapable of doing numbered lists consistently. Would love
| some 'reveal codes' for that.
| bagpuss wrote:
| ctrl+shift+v strips formatting yet I still find myself
| doing the notepad thing you describe.
| ryandrake wrote:
| In a just world, CTRL-v would paste without formatting,
| and the more difficult CTRL-SHIFT-v would retain
| formatting. The vastly more desired (by users, not by
| product managers) operation should be invoked by the
| simpler keystroke.
|
| How often do you cut and paste and actually want to bring
| over someone else's colors and fonts? 1% of the time?
| 0.1%?
| jsight wrote:
| Probably more like 50% of the time for me. Copying code
| with formatting from an IDE to Google Docs is amazingly
| useful.
| philsnow wrote:
| "paste with formatting" by default is a mistake. the
| thing you're pasting from and the thing you're pasting to
| inevitably have different ideas about what formatting is
| relevant / possible in the given textareas you're copying
| from / pasting to. it's almost always better to just
| paste without formatting and then fix formatting (so, the
| default should have been flipped, but the ship has
| sailed).
|
| I played around with using hammerspoon to send cmd-
| shift-v whenever I typed cmd-v but I really needed to
| make it change depending on which app I was pasting into
| and that was just past my annoyance threshold.
| jmkb wrote:
| The closest thing to "reveal codes" in Word is to save as
| .rtf and open in a text editor. But you're in for a wild
| ride.
| sedatk wrote:
| Yes, TP7 had syntax highlighting too!
| jsight wrote:
| Today I still prefer my editors to let me edit the HTML
| directly. I'm not sure that we've changed away from liking
| this.
| Minor49er wrote:
| Borland Turbo C++ 3.0 was my jam. Not only was the interface
| really cool and feature-rich, but it also had a built-in
| language reference that was incredibly helpful to me at the
| time when I was learning to program.
| msmith wrote:
| Turbo Pascal 7 was my intro to programming and it was such a
| great learning environment
| bdowling wrote:
| A similar project recreated the Apple IIc computer program from
| the 1985 James Bond film, _A View to a Kill_ :
|
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YGVfwEEjRfs
| dylan604 wrote:
| I wonder what the speed of installing software off of 4 floppies
| on an emulator is like (not enought to try it myself of course).
| Does the emulator recreate the slow read speeds or the sound of
| the read heads seeking?
| unnouinceput wrote:
| I use DosBox, like the article's author. No, it doesn't.
| Sometime it's faster than what you want to be. For example an
| old DOS program that was cycling ON/OFF between the keyboard
| LED's for CAPS LOCK / NUM LOCK and SCROLL LOCK was making them
| to be too fast, while generating sounds too. When I ran it a
| few years ago to show off to my son, it was horrible. I had to
| fire up Turbo Pascal inside that DosBox emulator and introduce
| delays in the program to make it behave like it did in 1995
| when I wrote it on a 286.
| jevinskie wrote:
| Interestingly I've only found one commercial product to simulate
| Magstripe cards: https://ims.ul.com/6-benefits-ul-brand-test-tool
| jonplackett wrote:
| He cut the first clip right before he says 'EASY MONEY'.
|
| A travesty.
| umvi wrote:
| Don't worry, he gives an easy money shout out at the very end
| csharptwdec19 wrote:
| > Despite running html5zombo.com for over 10 years now,
|
| Thank you for that.
| cheschire wrote:
| So many nostalgia elements in this article but zombocom really
| was the one that got me too.
| WalterGR wrote:
| His instructions at the bottom include "ft.com". I couldn't find
| anything by googling. It turns out the "index" file on the FTP
| site describes each file: Portfolio/Telecomm:
| Index 0 Verbose list of files in this directory (this
| file) acom11.lzh 16 Terminal program dial.lzh
| 2 Xterm dialer ft.com 11 Parallel module file
| transfer program pfboot.lzh 1 symbolic link to ->
| utilities/pfboot.lzh port8bit.lzh 3 Tech doc describing
| pofo to Atari 8 bit connecting porttost.lzh 5 GET Xterm
| on the Portfolio without files transfer quick.lzh 7
| Input cheques in the field and upload to Quicken later
| slave.lzh 18 Host program (Pofo to any terminal supporting
| X-Modem) xterm2.lzh 5 Term program, includes XMODEM
| file transfer capability
| ssalazar wrote:
| In a similar vein, JT Nimoy has an illuminating writeup on her
| work for Tron Legacy's "futuristic hacker interfaces":
| https://www.talisman.org/~erlkonig/misc/tron-legacy-effects-...
| auto wrote:
| This is off topic, but it felt like it was worthwhile putting
| here, because I've come across this page so many times, and
| every time I reread it and get to experience it again.
|
| I realized that JT's site was down, and went searching around,
| found her Twitter and Instagram, realized she had been homeless
| for over two years, and apparently just recently passed away.
| Given that she was homeless, trans, and talked pretty openly
| open her internal and external struggles, I have my suspicions
| about what happened.
|
| I feel pretty gutted because I support a couple of people on
| Patreon, and if I had come across her Twitter six months ago
| and saw the state she was in, I would have jumped at the
| opportunity to became a Patron to try to help her get back on
| her feet.
|
| Not much of a point here, other than to try and pay attention
| to people a little bit more, and help out where you can.
| sneak wrote:
| I marvel at the visual design of that film regularly; it is
| frequently playing on mute on ambient displays in my home.
|
| This is sad news. :(
| [deleted]
| ionwake wrote:
| Thank you for the update, I did not know who she was but
| found the article and your text important, thanks.
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(page generated 2021-01-06 23:00 UTC)