EH-Net

It appears hackers have a good Hollywood agent, because a study of 50 movies involving hackers show that on average a hacker is 30 years old, a professional, and works in IT.  Pimply faced teens who live in their mothers basement and live for hacking the Gibson, need not apply.

Also, the majority (73%) of hackers are the good guys to boot.  Yay good guys!

I gotta respect this guy because he hits on the classics, Superman 3 and Wargames. :)

http://www.pcworld.idg.com.au/article/337522

Nice followup to that thread a few weeks ago, about movies with tech / hacking / security themes.

Thanks for the read, unsupported.

Good article! however i believe that the most populair ones always feature the young playing in his room with computers type. There is a link in the article referring to the 50 movies he used for his study. so if your on a friday night at home and dont have anything to do, just work up that list.

Hrm.. I tend to disagree, unless I just haven't seen the movies you are talking about j0rDy.  The popular movies where the young playing in his room?  I think that applies to two movies, Hackers and Wargames.  A borderline movie would be Anti-Trust, but he is a college student living on his own. 

Oh, wait, I think I missed Wargames 2: The Dead Code.  Even though it is blasphemy, I believe the kid is young and in his mothers basement.

There are other movies in this list (http://www.comp.dit.ie/dgordon/Publications/HackerMovies/Dataset.htm), where the "hacker" character is under 25, but I do not qualify most of them as living in their mothers basement.  Like The Italian Job, Serenity... but then I am just starting to split hairs between living in a basement and living on your own. :)

In regards to the older movies, he references Deskset, which is a good movie... even though it is in black and white.

hmm...maybe my opinion was based on the movies i saw and not the list. i see i missed quite a few. someway i see alot of movies like for example swordfish where the hacker is profiled like that. i really like the part where they compare languages, hehe  8)

You should see more hacker movies.  If you do not learn from history, you are doomed to repeat it. :) :) :)

I think that there was always a level of mystery surrounding hackers.  I think that most people are more interested in what a hacker does, than what he or she looks like.   I don't think that a particular appearance is attribute to hacker.   The pimply faced, hot pockets eating dude in a basement is more of a gamer stereotype. 

uhm...werent we all "ethical"?  8) and what i learn from most hollywood movies is that the profession is hyped ALOT! remembering flashy screens, countdown timers until youre traced etc. good example:

(http://www.terminally-incoherent.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2007/12/hackers.png)

the only situations i can think of are the following: or you succeed, or you dont. worst case scenario is you knock down a few (production) servers. and for that we have the NDA with an additional responsiblity part wich summons the following: for whatever I do, YOUR responsible :P

The first shot has been fired.  Let the Gamer/Hacker flame war of '10 begin!!!!

Isn't Gerard Butler (Leonidas in 300) the new "gamer" stereotype? Oh, wait...pimply kid eating hot pockets in a basement ran him like a puppet...nevermind.  :-\