KFL%mit-mc@sri-unix.UUCP (06/17/83)
From: Keith F. Lynch <KFL@mit-mc> Date: 15 June 1983 11:00 EDT From: Arthur L. Chin <ARTHUR @ MIT-ML> P.S. I also think that they should show this movie to a certain Congress: maybe even to a President! Don't they watch movies anymore? According to the Washington Post, president Reagan DID watch Wargames. They quote him as having said something like "The only way to win at Nuclear War is not to play the game". ...Keith
Uc.Gds%MIT-EECS@MIT-MC@sri-unix.UUCP (06/23/83)
From: Greg Skinner <Uc.Gds at MIT-EECS at MIT-MC> %% SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER %% I would like to start some discussion about War Games, first expressing my delight in seeing the movie -- it was action packed, exciting, filled with believable characters and just a joy to watch! However, there are a few (minor) details about the movie that seemed a bit beyond belief to me. I would like others' response to these. 1) (what was the kid's name's) ability to call the computer. I don't know exactly how the DoD provides access to its most internal computers, but I would imagine that they do not have dialups for them. (I would hope not ... imagine if someone actually DID start WWIII by cracking an internal defense computer?) 2) The idea of a "back door". Again, for security reasons, I would imagine that access would be severely restricted and there would be no access for a random user by supplying a random name. Also, I was a little surprised that the users did not have to supply passwords, just usernames. Comments would be greatly appreciated. --Greg (gds@mit-xx.arpa, uc.gds%mit-eecs@mit-mc.arpa) -------
leichter@yale-com.UUCP (06/24/83)
There were a LOT of unplugged holes in War Games, but they DID at least TRY to plug one - the existence of a phone line into a DoD super-security computer. Someone in the film asks the same question, and is told that the phone company "screwed up" and left in a connection that wasn't supposed to be there. Not likely, perhaps, but at least they did address it. -- Jerry
lauren%LBL-CSAM@vortex.UUCP (06/24/83)
From: Lauren Weinstein <vortex!lauren@LBL-CSAM>
Saying that "Wargames" presents "no worse" a view of computers
than most other television programs/films is no excuse. As you
implied (and as we all know) the typical view is terribly inaccurate,
to put it very, very mildly. It's even worse with Wargames, since
this particular film pretends it is "almost accurate". The generic
mass media review I've seen of the film runs like:
Wargames: An exciting, action-packed film that really knows its
computers.
That is virtually an exact quote. Dandy.
As for the payphones -- hey, I don't make statements unless I have some
reasonable basis for backing them up. Before I made my "1966" statement,
I checked with someone who has been in the vicinity of "The Mountain",
who informed me that, yes, the paystations in the area are
of the modern type which could not be subjected to the sort of attack
shown in the film. In point of fact, virtually all new (and many old)
payphone mouthpieces have been either glued (or "wrenched" using a special
tool) into position for years. Obviously they had to show an
"old-style" payphone in the film, since they probably tried (and failed)
to get the mouthpiece off of any of the "real" payphones at their location.
I repeat... Fantasy is one thing. A film that pretends to be something
it's not is something else again.
--Lauren--
P.S. The director of the film, at a local screening here in L.A., was
asked about the unscrewing of mouthpieces during a question and
answer period. He replied that "... since the film's release, the phone
company has begun gluing on the mouthpieces." This is simply untrue,
since such security measures have been taking place for years. However,
this is typical of the sort of lies the production staff is making
to protect their film's "integrity".
--LW--joe@cvl.UUCP (06/27/83)
I was under the impression that modern payphones used coded touch-tone-like frequencies to convey to the central switching system the fact and amount of coins deposited, making them vulnerable to attack by tape recorder, but not physical attack like that portrayed in Wargames. Is this wrong?
dhp@ihnp1.UUCP (06/29/83)
I think we have become oversensitive to the "computers are bad" scenario in the mass media today. Wargames was pretty tame in the computer paranoia department compared to some films of the past (think about "Colossus: The Forbin Project", or "Demon Seed", for instance). Things are getting better. In Wargames, it was human fallibility, on the part of Dr. Falkin, rather than the "naturally evil intelligence" of the machine which caused the problems. As for the portrayal of computer security, it can be put down to cinematic license. The fact that any truly computer-literate individual could think of 42 different ways of violating the security system presented is irrelevant. It was intentionally simplified for the mosting computer- illiterate people watching the film, not for us. What is an obvious hole to us is an EXTREMELY subtle nuance to those not of the priesthood. And finally, why all of the controversy over the attack on the pay phone? The point is that if you were out in the hinterlands, and it was an old style pay phone, and you could get the mouthpiece off, you don't need the dime. The fact that such phones don't exist ANY MORE in the area of the mountain is again irrelevant. -- Douglas H. Price Analysts International Corp. at BTL IH Naperville, IL ..!ihnp4!ihnp1!dhp (312) 979-6431
tfl@security.UUCP (Tom Litant) (07/01/83)
vis a vis Lauren and complaints concerning accuracy..... Years ago I took some unexpended free time and became a bonded locksmith. Over the years I have retained my status as a bonded locksmith. However, whenever I see realistic penetrations of physical security (realistic use of picks, thermal lances, doorframe spreaders, etc.) in the movies and on tv, it sends shivers up my spine. Realism, especially in the case of areas that involve illegal/immoral/terribly tempting activities, should be modulated by a well-tempered social conscience. How many juvenials, bent on destruction, do you want to instruct on how to construct phosgene nerve gas (very very easy!!)? How many do you want to instruct in the procedure of turning a semi-auto AR-16 into a fully automatic rifle (also very easy)? Tell the truth now, if there is a way to penetrate NORAD security, how many people do you want to inform of this fact? You may well respond that anyone who wants this information badly enough can get it anywhere. That is certainly true, but why even tempt people with the knowledge that such a thing is even possible? signed, A plea for social responsibility
gutfreund.umass-cs%UDel-Relay@sri-unix.UUCP (07/03/83)
From: Steven Gutfreund <gutfreund.umass-cs@UDel-Relay> My favorite scene in WarGames is the technician who walks around WOPR noting down the light show patterns in some sort of diary. I get this funny picture in my mind of someone doing the same for the RSTS, RSM-11M, or RT-11 displays on the 11's front panel. (RSTS has a set of lights rotating around in a circuit (RSX has lights that enter from the edges and collide in the middle (RT-11 has a ball that bounces back and forth and gets longer - Steven Gutfreund
Bergman.SoftArts%MIT-MULTICS@sri-unix.UUCP (07/03/83)
I enjoyed WARGAMES. I guess I saw the wrong commercials,
because I went to see a crummy movie about a young
hacker/wargamer, not a movie with a message. I was very
pleased with what I found. I certainly don't think the movie
is in the same class as Failsafe; I think it's unfair to
compare them. Perhaps the director and the PR people, and
maybe the producers, are all making the same mistake, and think
that the movie is truly a realistic senario; that's no reason
to come down hard on the movie. I feel that the
characterizations of the computer people were very well
handled, the science was perhaps a little bit of fantasy; but
at least grounded in reality, and after listening to reagan for
all these months, it was nice to see the point about mutual
destruction being made.
As for the voice over at the end, I think that was just a
dramatic effect, and quite reasonble. I don't feel that the
director intended us to think that WOPR had a voder connected
to it.
The exploding consoles were annoying, but we just groaned
and didn't let them ruin the movie for us. As for the
payphones and the touchtone lock...so what? C'mon folks.
These things work in some places and times, why not here? The
point was to make obvious to the audience that the kid was
heavily into electronics, security systems, and breaking them.
And I've seen plenty of 60's phones still installed.
I find the problem of WOPR not knowing the difference between a
simulation and a real war far more upsetting than the fact that
it had a modem attached to it. And the ending was indeed
ridiculous. Especially the fact that the computer played
faster and faster. Not knowing that no one wins the game of
nuclear war is perfectly reasonable for the computer, it's just
a question of having the wrong people decide what the victory
conditions are. Not knowing that tic-tac-toe is a draw/tie
game is a bit...well, I already said the end was ridiculous.
As for the film portraying computers as bad, I though the
villains were the military personnel who were responsible for
the whole problem. The computer, after all, realized that no
one wins a nuclear war, which is more than can be said for some
presidents of the United States. (Hmmm...I wonder if sending
that out over ARPA is such a good idea?)
Mike Bergman
bergman.softarts@mit-multicsron%brl-bmd@sri-unix.UUCP (07/09/83)
From: Ron Natalie <ron@brl-bmd> Ok...I just saw it and I thought it was really worth seeing. Humerous (and OK because I get the feeling that it was designed to be partly so) and it did have a reasonable point (even if it sometimes did some really stupid things to express it). It's obvious that they have the real ARMY philosophy about computer repair (even though it is supposed to be Air Force). They are trying to deactivate WOPR, so what is everyone doing...Taking apart the tape drives!! Anybody catch the line on the TV newscast in the movie about the prophylactic recycling plant? -Ron Whopper is a trademark of Burger King.
edmond%bbn-unix@sri-unix.UUCP (07/11/83)
From: Winston Edmond <edmond@bbn-unix> RSaunders seemed to feel that the WOPR's missle attack was accidental. I didn't get that impression at all. WOPR had studied how to fight and win a war. Part of the problem was how to start the war. Although the firing was changed to be under computer control once the signal had been given, the order to launch was still in the hands of people. The whole purpose of the fake attacks was to provoke the decision makers to order a "retaliatory" strike. That would give WOPR a first strike. By forcing the U.S. into a series of alerts, the USSR was forced to go on alert itself in response, and it became difficult then for either side to back off. This was obviously part of WOPR's strategy. It happens that the details of the attack were tied to the game being played, which no one else had played since the time WOPR had been put in charge of running things. WOPR is quite happy to play with real missles. In the film, when told it should only be a game, not real, WOPR says "What's the difference?" Indeed, since the whole point is that a good "game" strategy may someday become a real war, the "game" must be considered as quite real to be sure of accounting for all factors and ensuring the highest probability of "success." To WOPR, by design, it isn't just a game. From a more mundane viewpoint, if you write a program to solve a heuristic problem, is it likely your program will stop to wonder if what it is doing is "just a game" or will it just take what information it gets and apply it to analyzing the problem at hand until it meets your built-in criteria for winning? Part of the message, if you will, is that if you build a machine to win against all odds, remember that trying to stop it makes you one of the odds it may try to overcome. In this film, the problem was finally solved, not by defeating the computer, but only by convincing it that it no longer wanted to do what it had been doing. -WBE
tad@aplvax.UUCP (07/11/83)
Re: Steve Gutfreund's remark When I was still in the Navy, we had to record what light patterns showed up when the computers went bannanas and this is fairly recent vintage military hardware. Terry (bailed out long ago) Dexter tad @ aplvax
MDP@SU-SCORE.ARPA (07/22/83)
From: Mike Peeler <MDP@SU-SCORE.ARPA>
Let me start by saying that I enjoyed the movie.
Since I make a point of evading reviews and previews
before seeing a movie, it did not occur to me, at the time,
that people would think the scenario was realistic.
There is a big difference between "not impossible" and
realistic. Interstellar space travel is not impossible.
It is clear to me, in retrospect, why so many people,
even intelligent people, thought WarGames was realistic.
The setting is very much here-and-now. Dr. Strangelove was
a comedy and plainly was not meant to be taken seriously.
Colossus was a fantasy computer buried under a mountain
somewhere, and it wanted to take over the world--faraway and
farfetched. The home computer, on the other hand, is
commonplace, everyday, ubiquitous.
"So," thinks Joe Average, "maybe they made the computer
a little too human. Maybe the bit with the tic-tac-toe at
the end was a little hokey. Home computers, though, I know
about them, and I read where a person can use one to dial up
the big computers. Maybe it takes more cleverness than I've
got, to break into one of them, but I'm always hearing about
the clever 8-year-olds who know how to beat those things.
It could happen. I bet it could."
This kind of thinking stops being funny when Joe Average
turns out to be your congressman and he starts demanding to
know how come this kind of thing could happen. He will end
up wasting his time, as well as that of his colleagues; they
will set up investigative bodies to report on "the sad shape
of the internal security of our country's national defense
organization" brought about by their reliance on computer
systems, for "as everyone knows, computers are inherently
unreliable". Urk.
Cheers,
Mike
-------greep%SU-DSN@sri-unix.UUCP (07/22/83)
From: Steven Tepper <greep@SU-DSN> I finally got around to seeing War Games and noticed lots of little things that didn't quite click, some of which I don't think have been mentioned so far. For example: One of the visitors from Alabama was carrying a camera. Cameras are not allowed at military bases. When the FBI apprehended David, he was coming out of a store with a drink, which he had presumably just bought. Later he found himself at a pay phone without even a dime. Seems unlikely he would have spent his last dime buying a coke, and they don't usually take your money unless they're throwing you in the clink. WOPR could not possibly known what phone number he was calling from -- there's no way for the telephone subscriber to determine this. (Someone *must* have brought this up so far, but I don't remember seeing it.) Teachers usually keep paper records of test scores and class grades. I doubt anyone could get away with changing substandard grades into better- than-average ones without getting caught (at least in high school, where the teachers know the students -- I can easily believe that could happen at a megaversity). Anyway, I really liked the movie. A lot of SF movies give me the impression of being little more than copies of other movies, and this one didn't.
turner@rand-unix@sri-unix.UUCP (07/23/83)
The writers for WARGAMES came by the other day to do some research
on expert systems. Their next movie ("Sneakers") is about an expert system
that NASA builds which is subsequently stolen by the Mafia. Or some such
crazy thing. At any rate, that is probably only a germinal idea.
While they (two fellows, one older, one younger, didn't get their names)
were here they made an interesting statement: they claimed that the more
technically aware a person was, the more possible they believed the WARGAMES
plot was. I chuckled politely under my breath.
When I heard they were coming, I prepared to run off copies of all the
recent SF-LOVERS comments on WARGAMES, but the idea was pooh-poohed by
one of my bosses. Since I'm only a summer intern, I meekly agreed. [ To
be fair, I was also uncertain about the legal problems of re-distributing
writing from mailing lists. ]
The writers seemed fairly intelligent, but technically ignorant. The
younger one was also an "accident watcher". He was always most interested
in what might go wrong. "But this can't handle anything unusual, can it?"
was a typical question. He also didn't believe that an expert system could
be as good as a human expert.
All in all, I wasn't too impressed. I didn't stay for the whole encounter,
since it was clear that the writers were only hearing what they wanted to
hear.
-- Scott Turner
turner@v.ucla --JLarson.PA@PARC-MAXC.ARPA@sri-unix.UUCP (08/02/83)
d (somehow) by the physicist
Stephen Hawkins.
* They have seen (and enjoyed) the SF-LOVERS Digest flames about the movie.
* Their new movie will pit the Mafia vs the NSA (National Security Agency).
They have been getting LOTS of technical help and advice, but it's an
open question as to how much of this will get into the movie given the
Holywood process ..
JohnSteven.Clark@CMU-CS-A@sri-unix.UUCP (08/02/83)
Did anyone notice that what's-his-face (the hero) made airplane reservations
for his heroine, and later he was accused of having two ticketstickets to Paris
("Who is he?" (the spy that got him into this)). The reservations were not
his nor was there any way to trace them to him.
Oh never mind. You can't expect a movie to be @i(consistent)!
-steveturner@rand-unix@sri-unix.UUCP (08/12/83)
The really sad thing about WARGAMES is that it did not show the kid getting punished for his clearly illegal acts. Point of the movie aside, none of these problems would have ocurred had the kid not clearly and intentionally violated another's privacy. If nothing else, he should have been punished for his actions. Instead, he is a hero by movie's end -- a hero for having caused a great deal of trouble and expense and for almost starting a nuclear confrontation. How sad. I heard on the news this morning a small teaser about a group of "computer geniuses" in Minnesota who had broken into "many college grading systems, a Los Angeles bank, and a computer at a nuclear testing site in Los Alamos." Presumably they were proud of their actions. Such an attitude is morally reprehensible. Crime is crime no matter what the popular movies say, and should be punished appropriately. The blatant violation of a person's right to privacy is no laughing matter. I'm certain society wouldn't have condoned WARGAMES had it shown rape as the violation of privacy. Grow up, Hollywood (preaching to the converted). -- Scott Turner turner@rand-unix
zeil%umass-cs@UDel-Relay@sri-unix.UUCP (08/30/83)
From: Steven Zeil <zeil%umass-cs@UDel-Relay>
The following quote is taken from "Software Engineering Notes", the
newsletter for the ACM Special Interest Group on Software Engineering.
The editor, Peter Neumann, is reviewing previously reported bugs
failures in critical computer systems. One of these bugs occurred on
Nov. 9 1979, when "the effects of a simulated attack were allowed to
propogate into the real world, triggering an alert." - SEN Notes 7/80
In the July 1983 issue, Neumann states,
"It is indeed valuable for us to be aware of pitfalls, both actual and
potential. (The movie WARGAMES - although technically flawed - is
probably useful in helping to alert the public to some of the latent
problems. [A note is in order for those who carp about the fishy plot
dependence upon dial-up lines to NORAD. A simulation with an unsuspected
live connection to the defense system is indeed one of the actual problems
noted above! And easily guessable passwords present a common pitfall in
many systems. <The movie's reference to "silicone diodes" provides a
parodization in the spirit of earlier uses of "nucular" and "prevert"
{e.g., from Dr. Strangelove}.>])" - SEN Notes 7/83
Steve Z.