WarGames and the Great Hacking Scare of 1983

James W writes "Yesterday was the 25th anniversary of the release of WarGames and Christopher Knight has written a retrospective about the film and its impact on popular culture. In addition to discussing how the movie has held up over time, WarGames was responsible for what Knight calls the Great Hacking Scare of 1983. Some examples mentioned are 'one CBS Evening News report at the time that seriously questioned whether parents should allow their children to access the outside world via their personal computers at home. A magazine article suggested that computer modems be 'locked up' just like firearms, to keep them out of the reach of teenagers. I even heard one pundit proclaim that there was no need for regular people to be able to log in to a remote system: that if you need to access your bank account, a friendly teller was just a short drive away. And Bill Gates once declared that the average person would never have a need for more than 640 kilobytes of memory in a personal computer, too.'" 2008 is also 25 years after the real-life prevention of a WarGames-style nuclear incident.

old news ...

if yesterday was the anniversary .. isnt this a bit late?

Re:old news ...

Naw, this is probably just a dupe of the one that was on time yesterday

WarGames and Disillusionment

I saw WarGames when I was 5 years old. Later on that year, my father bought us our first computer: an Apple //c. I was incredibly depressed when the computer exhibited neither near-human emotions nor a synthesized English accent.

Hottest nerds ever....

Matthew Broderick as David Lightman and Val Kilmer as...Christopher Knight...not the one who wrote the retrospective though....

Uhm...not the Peter Brady one either.

Jeeze. Will the real Chris Knight please stand up?

Ugh...

No. Bill Gates did not say that [google.com].

Lies!

I suppose next you'll try to convince everyone that Al Gore did in fact NOT invent the Internet.

Re:Lies!

Frighteningly close? Really?

Perhaps if the real inventors of the internet hadn't basically come out and validated his quote in full, you could get away with saying that, but since they did (and since you took that snippet out of a context that actually explains HOW he did it) I'm left with you having some axe to grind with Gore (and I can't imagine what it is at this point).

Anyway, for anyone out there who still thinks that gore even misspoke... he claimed to have taken initiative in creating the legislation which created (largely by funding) a larger version of ARPAnet that was accessible to the public at large. In other words, he has never claimed any (direct) technical contribution to the internet, but has claimed legislative, financial, legal, and social contributions to it. This makes sense, if you keep in mind that there are ways to contribute to technology other than coding.

What's more

DOS has absolutely zero to do with that limit. The limit came from the computers themselves, and how they addressed memory. They had a 20-bit address bus which gives you 1MiB of addressable memory. Now being 16-bit devices, that meant that they accessed it in 64k pages. However, as Gates noted, it was divided so you only had 100 pages that could be used for regular programs. The rest was reserved for hardware. Hence the 640k limit.

You can actually see a similar (though not the same thing) situation today when you approach 4GB of RAM in a 32-bit system. With a 32-bit address bus you can, of course, address 4GB. The problem is that hardware still needs memory areas to work, and actually far more than it used to. So you'll find that you get less than 4GB of RAM accessible, how much depends on what hardware you have installed. To actually get full use of the 4GB of RAM, you'll need to run on a 64-bit chip, which has a larger address bus and thus memory ranges for the hardware.

So DOS was never the reason here. It was the way the hardware was designed.

Re:What's more

Uh, no.

First, 64k/page * 100 pages is 6400k.

Second, the 640k limit was due to the video ram being mapped in the memory region between 640k and 1 MB, at address A000:0000. Which is why DOS extenders could get you that memory back in 386+, by remapping the memory to other addresses. Here's a memory map: http://www.infokomp.no/techinfo/doc/DosMemory.htm [infokomp.no]

Third, your 32bit/4GB ram stuff is garbage as well. Most OSs claim address space at the end (the upper 1/2GB) for the kernel. That makes it harder to use. It's not a hardware problem at all, OSs tend to have simplistic userland/kernel memory address space mappings. CPUs went to 64 bit before 4GB was cheap enough for this to be a problem, so no work was done to really reduce the kernel address space footprint (or to separate the address spaces altogether).

Re:What's more

Uh, no. First, 64k/page * 100 pages is 6400k.

Actually, I recall x86's real mode pages actually overlapped in the bus address ranges that they mapped to. So in this case number of pages * page size doesn't give total addressable real memory. Can't remember the actual numbers, however.

Second, the 640k limit was due to the video ram being mapped in the memory region between 640k and 1 MB, at address A000:0000. Which is why DOS extenders could get you that memory back in 386+, by remapping the memory to other addresses. Here's a memory map: http://www.infokomp.no/techinfo/doc/DosMemory.htm [infokomp.no] Third, your 32bit/4GB ram stuff is garbage as well. Most OSs claim address space at the end (the upper 1/2GB) for the kernel. That makes it harder to use. It's not a hardware problem at all, OSs tend to have simplistic userland/kernel memory address space mappings. CPUs went to 64 bit before 4GB was cheap enough for this to be a problem, so no work was done to really reduce the kernel address space footprint (or to separate the address spaces altogether).

Actually, although what you say is true, the OP was also entirely correct in noting that hardware sometimes makes large regions of memory unavailable, even in relatively recent computers. The situation in question is independent of the OS memory model, although that has its own implications for memory use.

PCI memory mapped IO needs to be put somewhere at a physical address that the CPU is able to access. Although since the Pentium Pro it's been possible for x86 machines to address 36 bits of physical address space, some motherboards only actually give them 32 address lines to use.

If you stick 4GB of RAM in such a box then the memory mapped IO regions need to go somewhere that the CPU can still address them using only 32 address lines. Since the CPU has only 2^32 bytes = 4GB addressable this necessarily means that they have to alias real RAM regions. Those RAM regions are rendered inaccessible. There's nothing you can do to get them back, either - you can't remap them to a different place because you're limited by the 32 physical address lines. This is sometimes called a "memory hole".

This is compounded by the fact that some BIOSes are worse at allocating memory mapped IO spaces than others. They sometimes seem to use up hundreds of megabytes for these IO regions. I think that's more a case of the allocation policies being stupid than that quantity of addressable memory actually being needed. The problem isn't entirely trivial, though, since I think PCI devices can request certain alignments of their memory regions, so they can't just be placed anywhere.

Event 32-bit server grade hardware typically offers support for the CPU physically to address more than 32-bits of physical memory, enabling these systems to play games with remapping memory to make all 4G (or more) of RAM be accessible, whilst providing the necessary MMIO regions. Those of us who are using lower grade hardware (me, for instance!) are limited to smaller memory sizes by the motherboard, regardless of what the CPU chip and OS are capable of addressing.

I was not pleased when I discovered my own machines suffered from this "feature" but equally well I was pleased when I got this machine cheap. I guess you can't have everything!

It Was Close

I was pretty close with some people who had actually hacked into some of those military systems back then. Like Strategic Air Command and others - some people were even showing off evidence they'd hacked the Shuttle's robotic Space Arm. We all watched _Wargames_ together, and were impressed with how basically accurate so much of it was.

Sure, the voice synth following the kids around was fake, and the exploding monitors when driving the AI into a paradox was typical Hollywood BS, as well as a couple other details of the action. Like the geek scoring Ally Sheedy. But overall, it wasn't that wrong about the vulnerability of those systems to any halfway-determined, fairly clever crackers. Of which there were more than just my friends: 1983 was the height of the Cold War, and the Russians still had budgets to spend.

In fact, the public portrayal of our private hobby convinced several of my friends to get out of the game for good, right after seeing the movie. And I've heard that a lot of the cracks portrayed stopped working shortly afterwards.

I just expect that today's even more complex, widespread and lethal systems are just as vulnerable. While not to the same elementary tricks, today's crackers have progressed along with those defending. We really have to be sure that there are a lot of human consciences in the loops, absolutely required to accept passing on an order that could kill or harm millions, maybe billions of people - maybe indeed destroy the world. If there's any lesson to learn, it's that the hairtrigger to extinction itself is the greatest risk, no matter how much those with their fingers on it would like to believe that the safety is engaged.

Suspending Disbelief

>Like the geek scoring Ally Sheedy.

That's how you know it was a science fiction movie and not a documentary.

Re:It Was Close

On the DVD commentary track, director John Badham talks about how they used several technical advisers from a specific phreaker club (in Michigan I think) to handle the film's technical details and hacker culture. They did a good job. It is easily the most technically accurate of the hacker films (not that it has much competition, really). And it has a good story too. Holds up amazingly well even today (wish they would release an anamorphic DVD of it, though).

Re:It Was Close

Pity that they've stopped getting advisers for movies.

The list of movies with factually correct technical details is small.
It was nice that they did it properly for The Matrix though.

Well the US military follows that doctrine

Humans are always in the loop when it comes to weapons systems. Even things like modern planes. Humans don't actually trigger bomb releases anymore. It's far too complicated and there's a lot involved in guided weapons. It's all programmed in prior to the mission. Ok so what does the pilot do then? They consent to release. When they activate the trigger it doesn't drop the bomb, it just enables the plane to drop it when it is time.

That is, of course, unnecessary in a technical sense. The plane could simply drop at the programmed location. However it is part of the doctrine that a human always has the final call. Should the pilot decide something is wrong, they don't press the trigger and the bomb won't drop.

So at this point at least in the US, it is very much a system where humans are always in the loop. Machines may do the actual work, but there is always a human with their finger on the trigger who has to make the decision to fire.

Re:It Was Close

You mean like the old "using a paperclip to short the receiver against the coin slot on a payphone to make a free call trick"?

Hi! It looks like you're trying to make a free call, would you like some assistance?

it certainly cost me

The day after my parents saw that movie my modem was taken away, never to return.

Apparently they were genuinely afraid that I might start a war inadvertently by logging into the wrong computer by mistake.

Ok, so I had, um, well, logged into a mainframe that sort of didn't belong to me, but I was a kid, and this was the eighties, it was still harmless fun back then, more likely to see you employed then arrested. Nowadays for the same thing I'd be sent to prison.

Now that's scary.

Might as well mention the DEFCON game

By Introversion Software [introversion.co.uk]. It's the "Global Thermonuclear War" game from the movie, mostly. Fun, though a little disturbing at times. Runs on Linux and Mac, too. Inexpensive as well.

In fact, I think I'll go home and play some.

Re:Might as well mention the DEFCON game

> I think I'll go home and play some.

Spoiler alert:
The only way to win is to not play the game.

I'm still amazed at

how well this movie still remains relevant today.

- The introverted genius, but under-achieving nerd.
- Does not RTFM, but asks for expert help first in understanding the program.
- Hours of relentless researching to find the flaws (hacks) in the target.
- 3rd party vendor mistakes allow entry point for unwanted intruders.
- Hacker not realizing they are not in the system they think they are.

Best quote ever by a end user:
General Beringer: Mr. McKittrick, after very careful consideration, sir, I've come to the conclusion that your new defense system sucks.

Enjoy,

Elementary School

I think the year was 1990 or 1991 -- I was about 6 or 7. On a tour of the school library, the librarian made a point of telling us about the modem they had connected to the computer in the library.

I had an old Leading Edge computer at home, running DOS 2.0. I asked if it were possible for someone to dial into the library's computer and erase their overdue fines.

Thus was ended the tour of the library, and the modem was never mentioned again.

It Has Held Up Well...

Ultimately, the film was not about showing off flashing technology. If it were, it would be dated and obsolete. Thankfully, the film was actually a well done commentary on human condition and how we relate paranoia and war. On that front, it succeeded and shall continue to. That kind of thinking doesn't age, it's all relevant. Perhaps even more so nowadays.

same basic computer hacks as today

I saw War Games on AMC Tuesday night and hadnt seen it for years. The ancient computers brought back nightmares of the limitations of that time. However, many of the tricks then-very-skinny Matthew Broedrick used to hack computers are still relevant. He systematically scanned ports, looked up personal info on people for password clues, used social engineering to fleece information. The strangest thing was him physically going to the library to do research. People use online search now.

Re:Movie wasn't that good

Everybody knows the way you fry a computer's brain is to ask it to calculate pi to the last digit.

PI has a last digit?!

/brain explodes

Locking up modems

Don't lock up the modems. Get them out and make minors use them. No broadband for you. Nothing faster than a Hayes 2400 until you turn 21. :-)