Hollywood's Tech Mistakes in TV and Movies

In movies and TV shows, Hollywood often misrepresents technology, including hacking, computer viruses, and cybersecurity protocols, leading to unrealistic and inaccurate portrayals.

### Hollywood's Hacking Fails: Debunking Scenes from TV Shows and Movies
* 🎬  Hollywood has been portraying hacking inaccurately in movies and TV shows since the invention of computers, making it difficult to **overlook the mistakes and focus on the story**.
* 💻  In a scene from the TV show "Bones," the computer catches fire due to malware causing the cooling fans to turn on at **750 degrees** instead of **75**, which is unrealistic.
* 🔥 " Even if the cooling failed catastrophically, the computer wouldn't **catch on fire**. Sometimes the wires will **catch on fire**, but that would be at the **back**.
* 🦠  The concept of a virus being uploaded through a bone scan, similar to a **malformed PDF file taking over a computer**, is considered a stretch.
* 🚫 " Looking at a PDF should be a perfectly safe operation, but it **takes over and does stuff**.
* 💰  While the TV show "Castle" depicted a remote access tool as a "remote access Trojan," the idea of **multiple firewalls providing layered security like Swiss cheese** is inaccurate.
* 🧬  In a scene from a movie with a $200 million budget, "Fast & Furious 7," the "God's Eye" hacking device that can **access anything on the digital network** is surprisingly close to reality.
* 🚗  The depiction of Bluetooth signals from tires reporting low pressure is inaccurate, as it would use a **low-frequency signal** instead.
* 📺  The scene where two people frantically type on a single keyboard to stop a hack is a classic example of an **unrealistic Hollywood trope**.

Hollywood has been using Teek in movies since the computer was first invented, and they've been getting it wrong for just as long. And just like the corridor crew, when we see mistakes in movies, it's pretty hard to overlook and focus on the rest of the story, which is why we were here at Computex, and we invited Wendell from Level One Tex to help take a look and break down some scenes from TV shows and movies to see what they got wrong, but maybe also some stuff they got right. I was wandering outside and they brought me in. That is actually true. And we also brought in this message from our sponsor, Ugreen. Their NEX ode x 160 W charger is smaller than the original NEXE and comes equipped with four charging ports. Bring your 16-inch MacBook Pro from 0 to 50% in just 27 minutes with its 140-watt USBC port. Check it out in the description below. [Music] Starting with the TV show Bones in season 7, episode 6, their computer gets

hacked because someone accidentally uploaded a virus by scanning a skeleton. Let's watch. Once we scan the bones, the computer can predict scenarios consistent with the damage. Yeah, now. Now that's realistic, especially these days. Okay, now the computer should tell us what caused the internal injuries. A gunshot there. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. I'm not even into the computer stuff yet, and that is straight up not how that would work. It's not even pointing at a bone. Okay, they fire under the rib cage. I'm sorry, was it a shotgun? Whoa, whoa, whoa, what, what just happened? You think I smell something. System F. I smell something. Oh, wow. No, yeah, the computer wouldn't catch on fire, even if the cooling failed catastrophically. It wouldn't catch on. Sometimes the wires will catch on fire, but that would be at the back. Yeah, you can get little, like, spot burns. Now, there is a product that is specifically designed with a kill switch that is supposed to heat up the circuits and

Destroy them. A lot of the flight data stuff in classified airplanes also have explosives. So you just pull the thing and it's like thermite. And it just and then it's gone. But it would have to be designed for that. Also, that first flame was about as convincing as when we did our April Fool's video where I said our server room was on fire. So it turned out the malware killed our fans. They're supposed to turn on when the CPU reaches 75°, but the malware added a zero and made it 750. How did this malware get past our fire? It doesn't go past 255, sorry. Okay, for everyone who gets that, that's hilarious. It doesn't catch fire immediately. What it would slow down or turn off. It's also weird 'cause like you wouldn't unless the program is badly written and your adversary knows exactly the software that you're using and the version you could do this with like a buffer overflow. So like the data is parsed as commands instead of data. But most of the time when you're scanning.

something it's just going to be data. I feel like by giving it that thorough of a debunking, you're almost respecting it too much. Even if what he said wasn't true, there isn't a processor on Earth that would manage to heat up that fast, even if you turn the fans off. It originated in my computer. Wait, but it wouldn't have gotten in there unless you had downloaded something. Yeah, or uploaded. All you uploaded were the scans of those bones. Are you telling me that there's a computer virus in the bones? The computer virus is in the bones. Imagine you had like a CT scan and you have a malformed CT scan file, and you give it to your hospital, and they parse that, and then it turns into a virus. That's kind of what happens with PDFs or anything in your emails. Like you get a malform PDF, you're not running a PDF thing, and it takes over your computer. Looking at a PDF should be a perfectly safe operation, but it takes over and does stuff so that.

part is the least unrealistic part, and it's really a stretch. And no two scans are likely to be exactly identical because that's largely an analog process. Again, I think you're respecting it far too much. Also, what was the point of that? Just to light their computer on fire? A molotov cocktail would get you there a lot faster and a lot cheaper. Anything promising? It's hard to say. All the documents were photographed are in Chinese. He got his hard drives scans of everything in. Now hold on just a moment here. This is disappointing because like some of the stuff is like there, there's artistic creative license, you know, maybe they scan the bones, that could have been a bomb. This is just, they didn't Google it. Does that even have chain of custody again respecting it far too much? Now just a minute, we've got as hard drives for one thing, that is one hard drive for another thing. Really, you couldn't afford any more than a do stop power supply from the P3 era. Is that a 20 pin connector?

yep, yeah, that's like a 300 W power supply. You will have plenty of stuff to go through in the morning. He has so many questions. He's like, that's not a hard drive. I haven't talked about this much, but Luke and I actually did a little bit of unpaid consulting on a high-tech script for some medium. Don't worry about the details because I'm pretty sure I'm under NDA. But speaking from that experience, if I had to guess how these things happen, I would say it's not because nobody knew better. It's not because a tech expert wasn't hired to come in and tell them something different, but because they actually made a conscious decision to not care. Or they did it too late. Like there were some changes that we had suggested that were like, well, we can't do it now. I think they could have sourced an e-w hard drive instead of an e-w power supply system breach. Go firewall one. We got a problem. This is from Castle. Someone sent a rat to one of my servers.

a remote access tool. We're being hacked. First of all, it's remote access Trojan. Like, is it the more firewalls I have, the more safe I am? No, no, it's like swiss cheese defense, right? All the firewalls have minor vulnerabilities, and you just have a variety of them the whole way through. Yeah, that's the Battle Star Galactica model. I love the percentage to breach thing. I love that they have this tool where they're like, we know we suck, let's make sure that we can measure exactly how screwed we are. Yeah, what's the morale of the team that develops that breached in red? I mean, if you could figure this out, it would be great 'cause as firewall one hits breached, you just message the backup battery and be like, hey, you need to turn off right now, and it turns off. Yeah, no, that would be too sensible. And look, I know that this is probably going to be the most pedantic nitpick of all, but that's not how you spell synced. I'll start an intrusion.

inspection and find out who IR ran is who hieroglyphs uh oh oh they're hold on you don't decrypt a firewall no firewall number four he stopped respecting them too much his brain's broken yeah it's not this is terrible view options yes no it's coming from inside the city trying to narrow it down okay what even is this it's supposed to be narrowing down which is funny because how this circle Works they already know theoretically that it's in the middle I can ping it a friend that's three states away has a lower ping than my neighbor across the street so I don't this is like oh let's figure out how far away it is it doesn't always work like this yeah tight faster oh my God this scene is like 3 minutes long that barely slowed him down I'm sorry but he's going to find us in less than a minute should we abort no we we've only got two of the Blinky boxes left to go I like that that's good come on got

it exact address that's Castle's office. He must be working with Haley. She's got the skill set for this, and she is about to breach our firewall. If she does, they'll have instant access to our entire investigation. No, they won't. Okay, tell me this. You have breached the URL of apple.com. Do you have instant access to all of the data that's on it? No, although Dell, if all of it's public. Dell's public suffering lately with that though. They did exfiltrate a lot of data to do with the customer orders and names, and but it would take time. Yes, and if they were, if Dell was literally sitting there preventatively anti-hacking, yeah, no. In fact, they would not have access to everything. I can launch a cybernuke, but it'll completely fry a cybernuke. Cyber what is this interface, why do they have this interface, but they don't have the ability to sh off the [Music] power. Oh, what just happened? We got Cyber News Armageddon. I'm afraid it doesn't

work that way. You don't just have like digital icbms. I mean I assume that what's supposed to happen there is like you can trick the person attacking you into running some executable code and it wipes something, but it doesn't work that way. Someone hacked a curtain ad on the scroll MD site. Looks like a normal ad, right? And this is the code for the ad, but peekaboo, there's actually two codes written right on top of each other. Okay, we were doing really good, surprisingly good for AIT. I was convinced this was quite solid. That was actually really cool, like, and pretty realistic, injecting a malicious redirect into some kind of seemingly real advertisement, especially a pharmacy where you'd collect a lot of personal information and valuable personal information about people. Maybe that guy was just thinking his coworkers are morons and is using that to explain it, and it's like, okay, this code actually injects this other code. It's not like code on top of another code. I'm convinced that dude wants to claim that.

he has like two weeks to a month of work to do, and he's going to do it in like four hours. Now that sounds realistic. The target had to breach the scroll MD service to inject this Cod. Not true. Actually, you could just exploit, uh, kind of delivery Network. This happens all the time. He's operating almost entirely on the surface web where he can reach millions of everyday sys on the surface web. What is the surface web? Uh, well, as opposed to like the dark web or better script dialogue for that would have been, it's like they're you're utilizing like public ad networks, and they're flying under the radar of public ad networks. Yeah, are you, you should do this. Are you auditioning for your next career move? Consulting for Hollywood. They won't listen to you. No 218 gone. Okay, no. What I mean, if it's a pharmacy website, there's probably tens of I mean just bot traffic is going to be tens of thousands of ips, but look at the IPS 164 387 that it'll never be more than 255 on.

any number whoopsy Doodles no that might be on purpose just cuz like you could accidentally have an IP address in there and it's like oh look it's bang are all of these breaking that rule think you might be right whole like there's reserved IP ranges for kind of like 5555555 there's fake IPS so they could just use those if they actually knew they need like a whole ocean of them and these all look like they broke that rule yeah none of these are are can be real IP I don't think any of them are maybe it was on purpose then let's give them that one and their whole narrowing exercise doesn't work at all because the guy working in the mail room and the executive would actually have the same public facing IP likely yeah God kidding me Target's using an IR LED array makes his license plate on B the cameras all four tires up okay yes that's actually kind of cool and like that and the the whole none of those IPS would be working stuff like

there's there's you know there traces in here all four tires give up Bluetooth signals report when they're low on pressure what do you think I don't know if they're Bluetooth Bluetooth no they really don't yeah that would be done over low frequency signal yeah that's not even a little bit Bluetooth uh the there is something really wild that's happening with self-driving cars and that is the standard for aircraft like the aircraft to aircraft communication uh has been co-opted and modified slightly for carto car communication so a lot of smart cars are emitting tons of radio and can be uniquely identified if you drive a Tesla your Tesla can be fingerprinted and and tracked without a license plate now Wendell this is something I legitimately don't know would a Bluetooth device have a MAC address okay okay okay I've never looked up the MAC address of my Bluetooth device well Apple actually has been worried about this for a long time and so they've been doing Mac randomization and Android got that feature later so

when you connect to a public Wi-Fi, uh, actually, I used to work on a project for a very large commercial entity where we were doing Bluetooth, uh, Beacon tracking, and you could track somebody moving through a commercial store like a Marshalls or something like that. It's like, oh, the same people are coming back. We don't know who they are, but they're, they're probably somebody that bought something. Oh, yeah, that's kind of like what they do on the cruises where they can bring your drink right to you. See that little white box right there? The Department of Transportation traffic monitoring system picks up Bluetooth signals to report traffic patterns. Sadly, this has become reality. It's not Bluetooth, no, but if you're trying to communicate this to people that are going to watch this show, it's not that bad. Why don't you just say Wireless? Yeah, yeah, no way I'm getting HED. This is classic. No, no, this is okay. Like there's just so much they already burned to the NC. My goodness, my frontal lo. I have never

actually seen this this this is a super legendary scene. If someone is stealing your documents, the documents that are being stolen are not opening on your screen. Like it doesn't, you're not going to get a million. It would be impossible to do any work on this computer because of all the popups. Remember the '90s, like you get all the popups and bad things happening on your computer because of the malware. It's like, Oh, what is this? Take the node and dump them on the other side of the router. I'm trying. It's moving too fast. Have you seen this before? Oh my God, this is so like, Okay, two people, one keyboard does not work in any... There's just no Universe where two people, one keyboard works. Ah, where'd it go? Abby, I didn't do anything. I thought you did. No, hence why you don't have two people on one keyboard. He unplugged it. Well, that's the first person with a brain. We did it. Literally the most reasonable thing in that entire scene with all the submissions you guys gave.

us from crime show like CSI and NCIS, we could probably make an entire second episode just from that. So hit the like button if you guys want to see a second one of these. I mean, according to IMDb, NCIS has a budget of only $25 million per episode, so that would explain why they just didn't have the budget to accurately represent hacking and Technology on the show. Um, let's pivot though and take a look at a movie that had a budget of a mere $200 million. Surely they did a much better job. Oh, good. It's F. Ramsey has created something interesting. Bring it up. Yes, sir. Say hello to God's eye. Now this little bastard hacks into anything that's on the digital Network. That means every this is certainly the intelligent Services want this. If we look at it, it's like we, we, and they try to make components of this, the headlines for the Pegasus malware and the Dual elliptic curve incursions by the intelligence services. And this is scary close to re reality, possibly maybe. I say thank God it can

only access anything on the digital Network as opposed to the analog networks that we're still rolling. One thing that I may argue is that I don't know that the Fast and Furious universe is actually the same as our own. Really, I think at this point I think it's arguable that it is not actually the same universe. Dr. Chan, recalculate the new Thruster data and relay it to Blue Oyster, called immediately. Insens, he Roger that. Do to [ __ ] what's wrong? Seriously, you auto updating now, General. I won't be able to calculate the right data for the satellite for 49 minutes. How long you impact? 11 minutes and 44 seconds probably. Do it on a different computer, Microsoft. It do be like that sometimes. Okay, this is actually pretty funny, but you could probably use a different machine on the network. I'm enjoying this one enough though that I don't feel like I need to pick it apart. It didn't pull me completely out of the scene. Elijah actually has some inaccuracies in.

there that we were supposed to notice. Their group policy almost certainly would have prevented an update from happening at such an inopportune time. Although Microsoft has started ignoring group policy and they can for certain things. Yeah, Group Policy is not as Ironclad as it used to be if they're like Microsoft if they're like this is important enough of an update they'll just. Our last clip also from The Fast and Furious universe as Luke calls it. Yeah, wait, he's in a giant motorcade in a city and they weren't sure. Okay, they found him those coordinates to's copy that. So like if that was a dude that was under surveillance already and they had malware on his phone like the Pegasus malware they absolutely could do that. Yeah, turned the microphone on surreptitiously like the whole nine. Also, am I going to be the one to point out that they have planes yeah that are just in the air all the time and yet they choose to pursue on the ground in The Fast and the Furious.

Universe cars are the best thing that exist at all, other than family. Well, wait. If they've got a New York police escort, just radio the New York police. Would be like, Stop. This is what I've been saying. They had to try to track this person down, but they have a giant motorcade in the middle of a huge City. Wait, why do we need to read his license plate? This is what I'm, this is what I'm saying. They definitely know this is happening. Do these guys work for the Department of redundancy Department? If you have this level of control, can't you just turn a stop light red? Yeah, want every chip with a zero die exploit in any idiot with a flipper zero. Whoa, who every chip with a zero day exploit in a certain mile radius. I thought, why do they need a chip with a zero day exploit? They've got God's eye. They should have everything. Got to use the orange text on the video them all. That's like in the Batman movie that made Alfred upset. Yeah, what this hacking.

they're going to start driving the cars to crash the motorcade. Oh my God, excellent. This will also be a thing. Why would they want it to do that? How did they want the windshield wipers to go? Now there's a lot of intelligence services that would be really happy for this level of functionality 'cause it's like, Oh, look, this problematic person died in a horrible car accident. Whoops. Okay, where did those coins come from? Whoa, wo wo w, did the coins just come out of the ground? What the happened to that parking meter? I think those were added in post, really. Also, notice how much rust there is on the ones that are real. Shoot their engines. There's people in those. C, wo wo w, did you see the spread? What are these bullets hitting? That's epic. [Music] Dude. Oh, interesting when you shoot the engine, it naturally diverts away. Massive thanks to Wendell for joining us to critique some scenes from TV shows and movies. If you guys have any suggestions for ones we should check out.

in the future, make sure you leave a comment with them down below. And while you're down there, why don't you check out this message from our sponsor, Squarespace. Creating your own website doesn't have to be difficult, and luckily with Squarespace, it isn't. Their all-in-one platform makes it easy to get your website up and running quickly, and designing with their fluid engine site builder is easy. It's so easy. Start with a template and customize the details to your heart's desire with an intuitive drag and drop elements on both desktop and mobile. You can also use their asset library to manage all your files from one central hub and use them across the entire Squarespace platform. Plus, with Squarespace's analytic insights, you can see what's working well and what needs a little TLC, a little it, you know. And if you need help, Squarespace has got your back with helpful guides and a 24/7 support team. They do not sleep. Head to squarespace.com, get 10% off today. If you guys enjoyed

this video why not checking out the one where James my wife and I watched some in some cases pretty scintillating Tech ads it was awkward it involved a glory hole at one point

Tech Experts React to Bad & Great Tech in Movies

Linus Tech Tips is a passionate team of "professionally curious" experts in consumer technology and video production who aim to educate and entertain.


Linus Tech Tips

Hollywood's Misrepresentation of Computers in Movies

Hollywood has a long history of inaccurately portraying computer technology in films.

The TV show "Bones" depicted a computer getting hacked through a virus uploaded by scanning a skeleton, showcasing unrealistic scenarios.

The video provides a thorough debunking of the show's portrayal of computer hacking, highlighting the significant inaccuracies in the representation of technology.

Incoherent Rant on Tech and Security Measures

The speaker criticizes unrealistic tech scenes in a movie, questioning the accuracy of scans and the use of firewalls.

They express frustration with the portrayal of hacking and cybersecurity measures.

The speaker also comments on the inefficiency of certain tech processes and the unrealistic nature of a specific scene.

Cybersecurity Threats and Hacking Techniques

Castle is collaborating with Haley to breach the firewall and access the investigation data.

Launching a cybernuke is mentioned, but the reality of its effectiveness is questioned.

Injecting malicious code into advertisements is discussed as a realistic hacking technique.

The use of IR LED array to evade surveillance cameras is highlighted as a clever method.

Smart cars and Tesla vehicles emit unique radio signals, allowing for tracking without license plates.

Bluetooth and Wi-Fi devices are being used for tracking in commercial spaces, raising privacy concerns.

Popular TV shows and movies often misrepresent hacking and technology, leading to misconceptions.

Confusion in the Fast and Furious Universe

The Fast and Furious universe is being questioned as to whether it is the same as our own.

There are inconsistencies and inaccuracies in the scenes, from ignoring group policies to the unrealistic use of technology.

The questionable actions and decisions in the movie are being scrutinized, such as the choice to pursue targets on the ground instead of using their aerial resources.

Critiquing TV and Movie Scenes with Wendell

Intelligence services would appreciate the functionality of causing a problematic person to die in a car accident.

The video also includes a message from the sponsor, Squarespace, promoting their website creation platform.

The host encourages viewers to check out another video and promotes a previous one with his wife.