HACKING – Expectations:
Reality:
I did my undergraduate in Information Systems and Management. I had to endure programming classes, in which the theoretical parts were alright. The practicals… well… I hated them. I was particularly weak in programming so I have no clue how I passed with good grades (No, I am not a nerd). I really hated it but I’ve seen my fellow smartass friends who are leagues ahead of me, excel in it to such an extent that they had won accolades from participating in Hackathons and other coding-related competitions.
So, from all these experiences, I’m here to tell you, it’s really not like in the movies.
First of all, when you’re setting up a program, you have hundreds of lines of codes and about 15 errors that you need to fix. That, and about 10 warnings. Once you fix those 15 errors, congratulations, you now have 35 errors.
On that note, it absolutely fascinates me how hackers in movies access secret government files in less than twenty minutes. Like bruh, please teach me how. I want to hack into databases as well. If anyone asks me to do that, I’d just say, “Sure, give me two decades.”
Another one of my favorite tropes from movies is when the cops have a surveillance image or any low-resolution image for that matter, which serves as potential evidence and they need to identify the criminal in it or something, they ask the tech guy to enhance the image. Somehow, Mr. Tech Guy is able to zoom in 100x and somehow produce a clear picture of the details.
Um…
That image has ten times more pixels than the 144p videos on Youtube. I need to know what programming they use because I too have poor quality images in my phone. It would be a great help to get them ‘enhanced’.
At this point, it’s suspension of disbelief. But a long time ago, I actually believed that this was how hackers worked, that they could do virtually anything. Break into anywhere. Well, technically, they can in real life, since almost all technology nowadays is hackable, but there are certain things in movies that are just ridiculous. I thought if I learned programming in college, I would be able to do just that.
Yeah, right.
I still remember those basic C programming classes we had in the first semester, and we were supposed to print ‘Hello World’ or some rubbish like that. I used to be so embarrassed when the program, which was supposed to print the message 5 times, went into an infinite loop and started printing non-stop. I used to cover the screen, hoping my classmates and the professors didn’t see it.
Then we advanced onto the great world of Java, which I… prefer not to say anything about. I literally passed the tests only because I copied the program codes from a classmate.
But in the end, they’re just movies. And to be honest, it’s rather entertaining to watch them hackers access databases and get information, and thus save lives. Kudos to them.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a secret government database to hack into.
Paperback Writer 