Firewall: Burn in hell! (Spoiler alert)

Posted by Johnny at 11:08 p.m.

Firstly, Reid, no need to challenge my opinion on the existence of hell. I was using it in a common expression of hatred towards an object/person, not in a literal sense.

Now, to business: Fuck Hollywood. They have done it to me again.

Tonight, we rented the movie Firewall, with Harrison Ford. Anyone who knows anything about the Internet knows that a firewall is a security appliance designed to, amongst other things, restrict incoming and outgoing traffic to and from a network. The first thing about the movie that I hated was that it had pretty much nothing to do with firewalls. The only time a firewall took the spotlight was in the first 5 minutes when Harrison's character, who shall henceforth be known as Jack, typed in some very convincing iptables (or maybe pf) rules to make changes to his bank's firewall ruleset.

And that was the last mention of any kind of firewall. I think they just chose the coolest sounding computer buzzword they could think of. "Bluetooth" and "CD-ROM" weren't thrilling enough, I guess.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Summary: Jack Whatever is the network security manager for a big bank. Some bad guys take he and his family hostage and force Jack to steal a collective $100,000,000 from the bank's 10,000 richest customers.

On its own, completely ignoring any technical details, the movie is reasonably entertaining. As a technical person, however, I... just... can't... ignore!

The technical accuracy ended in the first 5 minutes, after the low-level tech guy stopped using Ethereal to monitor the bank's network and Jack started changing the production firewall for a bank on the fly. You just don't do that, even if you're Han fucking Solo AND Indiana fucking Jones.

The next big innacuracy is the device that Jack MacGyvered to read account information off of a computer screen and store in an iPod. He basically took some kind of PCB from a fax machine, hooked it up to a screen-reader and an iPod, and taped it to a screen in the bank security room. *Poof* Now they had account information. Yeah, right.

Next, he uses a bank security employee's cell phone to take an image of a computer screen in a secure area. This is not technically inaccurate, it is socially inaccurate. Anyone who works in some kind of secure area is most likely barred from having any kind of recording/capturing devices in that area, including a camera phone. This would be especially true at a bank.

The biggest flaw that just pissed me the hell of and sparked this post was easily the biggest plot hole I've seen in a long time.

While with his secretary in her car, he gets her to pull over somewhere in the city, not close to downtown. He takes out her shitty laptop, puts it on the roof of the car, and surfs to a website that allows people to track their pets via GPS. You see, his family, including the dog, were being driven to some strange place and he remembered that his dog's collar had a tracking device.

Ok, this seems reasonab... WAIT! How the FUCK do you have Internet?!?

First of all, you're using a shitty laptop outside. I guarantee you aren't in range of an unprotected wireless network with a strong enough signal for that site to load instantly. I also guarantee that, judging by the model of your daughter's iPod (Mini), your city does not have universal wireless Internet access. Furthermore, you're laptop is running Windows XP, which means that even if you somehow found a wireless signal, it would take you at least 3 minutes and 2 reboots before you could actually get an IP address.

Ok, how could he possibly be getting Internet? Well, perhaps the secretary has a satellite receiver in her car. NOPE. Ok, perhaps he had a PCMCIA card that plugs into a cell phone to get "dial-up" Internet. NOPE. Correct me if I'm wrong, kiddies, but a consumer laptop can't just magically get Internet from nothing. Right?? The pair kept using their magical powers of Wireless Anywhere Internet to track the dog outside the city limits while driving.

The reason this pissed me off so much was because the entire conclusion of the movie hinged on the inclusion of this big gaping plot hole. I mean, with this one detail, they managed to morph genres from Thriller to Sci-Fi.

Fuck! Gah, I'm so angry that I don't know what to say.

FUCK.