10 Things I Hate About Computers in Movies & on TV

Computers are now a common item to see in homes, offices, and schools. This fact hasn't seemed to change the way they're depicted in films and on TV. In fact, computers don't do most of the things that we see them do within a movie or TV program, yet many people still seem to accept these things while watching.

I've been using computers for more than 20 years now. I'm an I.T. person who deals with fixing and operating computers on a daily basis. I use computers as a source of entertainment and information at home. I'm also one of those annoying people who seem to notice all the things wrong in a movie ("hey, that glass was empty in the last frame!"), so it is no surprise that I've chosen to put together a list of the things that bug me about computers in movies and on TV... so here goes:

1. Windows into the soul. With around a 90% market share, Microsoft Windows (one version or another) is clearly the operating system that is most likely to be found on computers no matter where you are in the world. So why is it so exceedingly rare to actually see Windows in use on a computer in a movie? Linux is great and all, which is what appears to be used most often (probably because they can get it customized to look and do whatever they want for the movie), but the truth is - most people cannot use it because they've never even seen it before!
2. Psst... what's the password? This is one area that has improved over the years. In older movies, we used to see a blank screen with 'Enter Password:' on it. It didn't seem to matter what was trying to be done, you just had to enter a password to do it. Now the password screen has been livened up a bit, but the same old problem still exists: poorly chosen passwords. It seems that computer experts and evil geniuses still haven't learned the virtues of a strong password. No matter what, it always seems to be a word from the dictionary or a name of a pet or person (or in seemingly smarter films, a highfalutin name like 'Sisyphus' might be used) or some title of a book/project, but whatever is chosen - they always seem to figure it out. What really gets me annoyed is when the password has a self-destruct mechanism that wipes out the data or does something else bad if the password is entered incorrectly too many times... see, they're smart enough to think of a system like that, but not smart enough to come up with a stronger password. It may be that a password like 'z^21R*9iB.g%u7' isn't as thought-provoking or interesting to an audience as 'KRONOS' might be. Hmm...
   
3. Backdoors galore! This computer cliché seems to almost be a thing of a past. It seems that this could have been a way of avoiding the previously mentioned password problem in shows. See, why try to figure out a password when you can get into the system using a little-known backdoor into it... which always seemed to be put there by software writers 'just in case'? Well, in this day and age we call that a security hole/vulnerability (not to mention a legal liability) and it just isn't done in the real world.
   
4. Everyone is an expert. Having "officially" worked in the I.T. field for the last 8+ years has given me some insight into the amount of computer knowledge the general population has. What I have come to learn is that most people really don't know how to do much more than operate software that they use at work and/or at home - and at a limited capacity, I might add. I'm talking about a word processor, an email client, a browser, games, maybe a photo editor, etc. Beyond that, most people just don't have the time, interest, or inclination to figure out what else their computers are capable of doing ("what, exactly, is defrag?"). The movies would have you believe otherwise. We are often led to believe that a character in a movie is able to sit down in front of a computer, that uses an operating system they've probably never seen before, with software they've never used - but somehow they intuitively know how to not only crack the password (or find the backdoor), but to then pull up the information they need, and sometimes even find useful correlating data.
5. Six degrees to Kevin Bacon. I don't know about you, but I've often wondered where this expansive super-database about people can be found (since we now know that the FBI doesn't have one) and how it can be so easy to query for exactly the data you're looking for without even knowing the database structure! Movies will try to convince you that there is this massive collection of personal data, residing somewhere out there that's accessible to almost any government agency, big corporation, or hacker. This database apparently contains everything from photos and relationships to dental and phone records... all easily accessible from one interface and in an easy to discern and understand format. It also conveniently happens to be that the character within the film knows how to use this system with ease as well.
   
6. Universally compatible. Movies and TV try to tell us that every computer is able to communicate with every other computer system out there... no matter how different or foreign. Remember the movie Independence Day? Jeff Goldblum's character has an Apple PowerBook G3 that is not only compatible with the invading aliens' computer system, but it is also able to upload a computer virus (I'll get back to these) to them that brings down their force fields, allowing our primitive weapons to take 'em out. YEAH! It's a good thing for us that alien programmers use the same programming software, language, and operating system that we humans use - yet they don't bother to use anti-virus software!
   
7. Resolution of image clarity. This is probably one of my biggest pet peeves in movies and TV: No matter how low the resolution an image or video is, regardless of how far away an object within it was; a computer can refine, adjust, tweak, restore, zoom-in, and correct it - often in near-perfect clarity. The first time I noticed (and then balked at) this was during the movie No Way Out (1987), starring Kevin Costner. They scanned a damaged Polaroid (yeah, remember those?) negative into their computer system - a behemoth that took up nearly an entire room - and it was able to recover the image perfectly. Or how about a security camera 2 blocks away that picks up a crime that ends up helping investigators catch the "perp". We've all seen what these videos look like on the news - the quality is abysmal at best. Yet time and time again in movies and on TV they process these through a computer and are able to zoom in and "enhance this area" with perfect clarity.
8. Graphic violence. So much eye-candy happens on the systems in shows. Windows and screens slide and move behind or in front of one another. The interfaces are slick and very eye-appealing, using some very cool-looking visuals. The movie Hackers really annoyed me because they made hacking/ cracking seem as though it were a cool interactive 3-D videogame where you flew in and out of graphically represented filesystems and saw other users (and hackers) floating around doing things. To most, hacking is rather dull looking - scrolling through code, running scripts, sniffing packets, and the like. What bugs me about all of this is that not only is this all happening on a system that nobody has, but the hardware requirements alone would make the system incredibly slow to use (oh - I forgot to include that computers are impossibly quick and responsive in shows... nah, no need to make another number). At this point I'm tempted to drift off into a tangent about obvious or over/mis-used CG (computer graphics) in movies, but that would take an entirely new entry to go over. I almost didn't include this one because Linux & Mac systems already do a few of these nifty visuals now - and the upcoming Windows Vista will also do a lot more (if you fork over the cash for a very fast computer with a kick-ass video card), but I'm writing this based on movies current and past. Mostly computer-fiction (CoSci?) now, but some of this stuff is definitely on the horizon.
   
9. The bleeping computer is making funny noises again! When was the last time text scrolled across your screen and you heard some sort of magical blipity bleep buzz sound accompany it? I'm not talking about system event sounds or when using a Flash interface on a webpage, either. I'm talking about hearing a descending zipping muted phaser sound when you zoom in on something - even the amazing Google Earth doesn't do this. The answer is most likely "never" (sorry, the voices in your head don't count). For the most part, computers are quiet things; sounds happen only when certain things occur - like to acknowledge a click, a dialog pops up, an error occurs, etc. Computers in the movies or on TV have all sorts of cool interactive sounds while they do stuff, don't they? This used to be something they could get away with when computers were a novelty and people didn't have them in their homes, but the practice of adding sounds to a computer's operations in a movie persist. I find this distracting and odd nowadays.
   
10. Diagnosis: Computer Virus. Yep, these bugs are always out there... lurking in the shadows... ready to pounce upon an unsuspecting user and cause their computer to smolder or explode in a magnificent fireball. Why is it that people seem to think that computer viruses are these extremely complex things that can cause an entire city's traffic signals to go haywire while make a building's lights turn on and off and display a dancing character that pops up on screens singing a song (don't mind the fact that there aren't even speakers on some of these computers - you still hear it, along with those strange sounds I mentioned earlier). Viruses are rather simple in nature - they delete files, cause computer system instabilities, sometimes monitor keystrokes in hopes to capture passwords or other private data, or they open a Backdoor (yes, I dismissed these earlier, but it helps illustrates why legitimate software programmers don't put them in) allowing outside intruders to do a bunch of other things to an infected computer. They won't cause your computer to overload and explode, either - unless your computer contains C-4. They're made to do very specific things and try to be as uncomplicated as possible to help avoid detection. Getting infected with one of these is no picnic, for sure, but they're not as big a deal as movies and TV tend to make them out to be... nor could they infect a system they weren't specifically designed for - like say, an alien's forcefield systems...

This entry was bleeping, flashing, twisting, and turning
before I reminded it that it wasn't on camera.