Long live the hacker

From this week's column:

When I saw The Matrix Reloaded on opening weekend, like most hard-core techies, I was excited when Trinity (played by Carrie-Anne Moss) prominently used nmap to exploit a known SSH CRC-32 security vulnerability in the course of the action. It's about time that computing on the big screen was represented in a real way, not ridiculous holograms and blinking images more suitable for toddlers than adults. Trinity's exploit got most of the attention in IT circles, but for me, the key IT moment in the film comes when Link (the operator of their "ship," the Nebuchadnezzar, played by Harold Perrineau), running out of immediately sensible options, grits his teeth with steely resolve and solves the problem at hand the only way he knows how, muttering "This has got to be the ugliest hack I've ever done." The hack works, and the immediate issue is settled. Of course, the plot thickens, but for the moment, the hacker is the hero, and deservedly so. Every IT staff needs a few good hackers. [read the rest here]

The column above is a close cousin of this one, which got a lot of attention on Slashdot.  (By the way, The Matrix: Reloaded is pretty amazing on IMAX -- just saw it last Friday.)