What's some dumb science you've seen in fiction?

[bilby]

Almost every single example of computer science in the movies and TV is total bullshit. Computers are MAGIC!!! Hackers are always busily typing code on a keyboard at full speed, never using a brute-force attack to get passwords. It takes mere seconds to access the most heavily secured servers, and the hackers are always desperately trying to keep one step ahead of the IT guys who are trying to stop attacks in real-time.

And don't even get me started on the misuse of terms such as "upload," "download," "hard drive," and on and on. Oh, and the magical laptops that self-destruct with smoke and even fire when someone tries to hack them. And even when the good guys manage to get the heavily-encrypted hard drive from the bad guys, they always have 'one shot to get the information before it self-destructs.' Have these idiots never heard of cloning a drive?

Also, software in movies always has the worst possible user-interface design. If you are trying to match a photo of a suspect with one on file, do you really want to have random photos from the database pop up on-screen at the rate of five or ten per second until a match is found, or would you rather the thing worked quietly in the background until it found a likely match?

And who the fuck wouldn't be driven crazy by all those beeps and boings? Real computers can make sounds, of course, but wise programmers use sound VERY sparingly, due to the number of times hardware gets physically assaulted if people have to listen to it beeping all fucking day long.

 

[James Brown]

Almost every single example of computer science in the movies and TV is total bullshit. Computers are MAGIC!!! Hackers are always busily typing code on a keyboard at full speed, never using a brute-force attack to get passwords. It takes mere seconds to access the most heavily secured servers, and the hackers are always desperately trying to keep one step ahead of the IT guys who are trying to stop attacks in real-time.

And don't even get me started on the misuse of terms such as "upload," "download," "hard drive," and on and on. Oh, and the magical laptops that self-destruct with smoke and even fire when someone tries to hack them. And even when the good guys manage to get the heavily-encrypted hard drive from the bad guys, they always have 'one shot to get the information before it self-destructs.' Have these idiots never heard of cloning a drive?

Also, software in movies always has the worst possible user-interface design. If you are trying to match a photo of a suspect with one on file, do you really want to have random photos from the database pop up on-screen at the rate of five or ten per second until a match is found, or would you rather the thing worked quietly in the background until it found a likely match?

And who the fuck wouldn't be driven crazy by all those beeps and boings? Real computers can make sounds, of course, but wise programmers use sound VERY sparingly, due to the number of times hardware gets physically assaulted if people have to listen to it beeping all fucking day long.

File copies always involve briefly displaying the file contents on screen for a millisecond.

Incorrect passwords are communicated by flashing text boxes accompanied by repetitive buzzes.

 

[Derec]

And don't even get me started on the misuse of terms such as "upload," "download," "hard drive," and on and on. Oh, and the magical laptops that self-destruct with smoke and even fire when someone tries to hack them. And even when the good guys manage to get the heavily-encrypted hard drive from the bad guys, they always have 'one shot to get the information before it self-destructs.' Have these idiots never heard of cloning a drive?

I don't know about that. Presumably that is special kind of gear, and it's not that difficult to imagine pyrotechnics embedded into a laptop or even a hard drive for security when data not getting into the wrong hands is crucial. And why is it so hard to imagine the security device would not be set up to detect unauthorized cloning attempts?

 

[Keith&Co.]

I don't know about that. Presumably that is special kind of gear, and it's not that difficult to imagine pyrotechnics embedded into a laptop or even a hard drive for security when data not getting into the wrong hands is crucial.

But you want to protect the data more than the hardware. Explosives in the hardware are not worth the efforts.

Every time i've handled ordnance, i've had to complete a qualification card and regular ordnance handling training. There's usually a safety observer and often radio frequency protections. I can't imagine going through all that in order to boot up a laptop.

I have a hard enough time knowing that if i screw up one of my passwords three times, i have to drive an hour away to get my card reset. Imagine being a few typos away from your desktop exploding?
Every time you bump the Number Lock Key you need a new computer, new desk, new pants... Supply would eventualy stop ordering pyro-embedded laptops and just raise the standards for anti-hacking software.

 

[ideologyhunter]

...that the way for Joshua to get an extended day for killing and looting was to have the SUN stop traveling in the sky.

 

[Davka]

And don't even get me started on the misuse of terms such as "upload," "download," "hard drive," and on and on. Oh, and the magical laptops that self-destruct with smoke and even fire when someone tries to hack them. And even when the good guys manage to get the heavily-encrypted hard drive from the bad guys, they always have 'one shot to get the information before it self-destructs.' Have these idiots never heard of cloning a drive?

I don't know about that. Presumably that is special kind of gear, and it's not that difficult to imagine pyrotechnics embedded into a laptop or even a hard drive for security when data not getting into the wrong hands is crucial. And why is it so hard to imagine the security device would not be set up to detect unauthorized cloning attempts?

Computer hardware alone cannot detect anything at all. It's a s useless as a chai or a rock, without electricity and software/firmware. Software/firmware can be bypassed. Even in the extremely unlikely event that firmware has been installed in the circuit-board physically attached to the drive, all that's needed is to replace that circuit-board. There is simply no way to keep the ones and zeros on the stack of disks from being cloned as many times as you want. If need be, the drive can be disassembled in a clean room and the stack of disks transferred to a new drive enclosure.

As for pyrotechnics, once more we're stuck with the question of how the system "knows" when to go off. When you open the lid of the laptop? That's kind of dumb, nobody would ever be able to open it. Install some sort of physical lock on the lid? I guess, but then we're dealing with disarming a bomb (which is comparatively low-tech) rather than hacking software. In fact, the sort of bomb you would need to build in order to avoid blowing up the legit intended user would necessarily render the bomb vulnerable to defusing techniques.

Nope, it's pure fiction, written by folks who know fuck-all about computer science. I imagine that the very first thing the CIA does with a captured drive is to clone the data without interacting with the OS or firmware in any way. Hell, there are buttloads of malware programs out there that are designed to block access to the GUI and to stop any attempts to run anti-malware programs, and I safely copy the data from these drives all the time, simply by sledding the drive or hooking it up as a slave on another PC. Sometimes I can simply boot the machine from a CD and fix the mess from inside the OS on the CD.

 

[Kharakov]

I don't know about that. Presumably that is special kind of gear, and it's not that difficult to imagine pyrotechnics embedded into a laptop or even a hard drive for security when data not getting into the wrong hands is crucial.

But you want to protect the data more than the hardware. Explosives in the hardware are not worth the efforts.

Every time i've handled ordnance, i've had to complete a qualification card and regular ordnance handling training. There's usually a safety observer and often radio frequency protections. I can't imagine going through all that in order to boot up a laptop.

I have a hard enough time knowing that if i screw up one of my passwords three times, i have to drive an hour away to get my card reset. Imagine being a few typos away from your desktop exploding?
Every time you bump the Number Lock Key you need a new computer, new desk, new pants... Supply would eventualy stop ordering pyro-embedded laptops and just raise the standards for anti-hacking software.

Instant Secure Erase is a feature of modern drives. You set up a 65536 bit Encryption Key, and simply have the Decryption Key stored in drive RAM, so any power outage or RAM overwrite instantly prevents someone without sufficient computational resources from recovering the data.

In the case of ISE drives, you can set up lockout attempts, lockout time, and even build different enclosures around the drive's Decryption Key RAM which are sensitive to any attempt to gain physical access to the drive's DK.

You want to have more than one copy of the information, because you lose it all when you lose the DK due to power outage, or something triggering the DK being instantaneously deleted (such as multiple incorrect password attempts or correct password not entered in a certain amount of tries).

The thing is, normally you would only use an ISE drive to transport sensitive information if you are in a position of physical superiority. If you are in a position of physical inferiority, and have to worry about being watched, you would have to combine multiple ISE drives with movement of operatives, in addition to having each drive having a unique physical enclosure so that interception of one ISE drive doesn't teach someone how to get to the next ISE drive's RAM with the decryption key on it.

Not like privacy exists for many on the bottom of the information hierarchy, but if you believe you have it, at least you might have it from individuals who are lower in the information hierarchy. Or you are at the very bottom, and believe you have privacy or believe you don't (there are 2 divisions on the bottom of the information hierarchy).

 

[Davka]

Instant Secure Erase is a feature of modern drives. You set up a 65536 bit Encryption Key, and simply have the Decryption Key stored in drive RAM, so any power outage or RAM overwrite instantly prevents someone without sufficient computational resources from recovering the data.

Keyphrase bolded.

You still can't stop someone from copying all the binary data on the disk stack, transferring it to any number of "clean" drives, and taking as many cracks at decryption as they like. Trash a drive? No problem, we've got piles more. Sure, it's beyond the reach of a home hacker, but governmental agencies have clean rooms set up for precisely this purpose, and have for decades.

 

[Davka]

Another pet peeve: Quantum Flux = Deus Ex Machina.

 

[dystopian]

You still can't stop someone from copying all the binary data on the disk stack, transferring it to any number of "clean" drives, and taking as many cracks at decryption as they like. Trash a drive? No problem, we've got piles more. Sure, it's beyond the reach of a home hacker, but governmental agencies have clean rooms set up for precisely this purpose, and have for decades.

A 65536 bit encryption is beyond the reach of any government agency to brute force too. There isn't enough computational power on the planet to decrypt that in in any useful amount of time.

 

[Davka]

You still can't stop someone from copying all the binary data on the disk stack, transferring it to any number of "clean" drives, and taking as many cracks at decryption as they like. Trash a drive? No problem, we've got piles more. Sure, it's beyond the reach of a home hacker, but governmental agencies have clean rooms set up for precisely this purpose, and have for decades.

A 65536 bit encryption is beyond the reach of any government agency to brute force too. There isn't enough computational power on the planet to decrypt that in in any useful amount of time.

It's also mega-rare. 4096-bit is about as robust as it gets for the most part. Unless encryption has taken a huge leap in the past year?

But yeah, 65536-bit would require months (possibly years?) to crack. Easier to target the decryption key, at least until (if) quantum computing becomes a reality.

 

[fromderinside]

Planetary entanglement. Yeah that's the ticket.

 

[Keith&Co.]

Easier to target the decryption key, at least until (if) quantum computing becomes a reality.

Nah.
Plug it into a tricorder and reverse the polarity. Then the encryption become decryption.

 

[Davka]

Easier to target the decryption key, at least until (if) quantum computing becomes a reality.

Nah.
Plug it into a tricorder and reverse the polarity. Then the encryption become decryption.

OK, so long as you don't cross the streams.

 

[Kharakov]

Instant Secure Erase is a feature of modern drives. You set up a 65536 bit Encryption Key, and simply have the Decryption Key stored in drive RAM, so any power outage or RAM overwrite instantly prevents someone without sufficient computational resources from recovering the data.

Keyphrase bolded.

You still can't stop someone from copying all the binary data on the disk stack, transferring it to any number of "clean" drives, and taking as many cracks at decryption as they like. Trash a drive? No problem, we've got piles more. Sure, it's beyond the reach of a home hacker, but governmental agencies have clean rooms set up for precisely this purpose, and have for decades.

How long would it take to crack a 65536 key with the computational resources that are purported to exist?

A couple minutes, as long as we remember that the "minutes" are each a lot longer in duration than the current purported age of the universe.


Anyway, if you combined the computational capacity of all the acknowledged supercomputers in the world, it would still take longer to crack than the age of the universe (assuming someone doesn't have quantum computers or something like that). Now, if you have access to events/information in spacetime, it's pretty easy to "crack" anything, but that is not technically cracking- it's called being nebby.

0ne can prove discontinuity of storyline (that someone has been snooping through spacetime) if they claim to have cracked a key of more than 1024 bits (this applies to real life natural storyline).

 

[Kharakov]

Another pet peeve: Quantum Flux = Deus Ex Machina.

It's even more annoying when someone presents it as science fact, rather than as a plot device in science fiction.

 

[dystopian]

But yeah, 65536-bit would require months (possibly years?) to crack.

Lol, try 'several times longer than the universe will exist for'. Literally. It would require 10^38 of the fastest supercomputer (Tianhe-2) currently in existence to run for as long as the universe has existed in order to exhaust half the possibilities of a *256* bit AES encrypted key. You might make it more manageable with hypothetical future quantum supercomputers; but it's highly questionable whether or not those could shave the time down to a manageable century or so.

That's assuming of course that there isn't a deliberate flaw built into an encryption scheme as a backdoor.

 

[Davka]

But yeah, 65536-bit would require months (possibly years?) to crack.

Lol, try 'several times longer than the universe will exist for'. Literally. It would require 10^38 of the fastest supercomputer (Tianhe-2) currently in existence to run for as long as the universe has existed in order to exhaust half the possibilities of a *256* bit AES encrypted key. You might make it more manageable with hypothetical future quantum supercomputers; but it's highly questionable whether or not those could shave the time down to a manageable century or so.

That's assuming of course that there isn't a deliberate flaw built into an encryption scheme as a backdoor.

This is why I ask the maths people these questions. I simply don't have time to posit all the potential answers until I stumble on the right one.

(yeah, that's the ticket!)

 

[dystopian]

This is why I ask the maths people these questions. I simply don't have time to posit all the potential answers until I stumble on the right one.

(yeah, that's the ticket!)

I'm not a math person; just a person who has access to google and whose typing speed is roughly the same as the speed with which a person can verbally ask questions.

Instead of targeting my questions at specific knowledgeable people; I simply pose them to the planetary hive-mind.

 

[bilby]

This is why I ask the maths people these questions. I simply don't have time to posit all the potential answers until I stumble on the right one.

(yeah, that's the ticket!)

I'm not a math person; just a person who has access to google and whose typing speed is roughly the same as the speed with which a person can verbally ask questions.

Instead of targeting my questions at specific knowledgeable people; I simply pose them to the planetary hive-mind.

Sadly, it appears that the Planetary hive-mind is that of a sex-obsessed conspiracy theorist with severe multiple personality disorder and a very weak grasp on reality.

So you might as well just ask me directly.