Shown Their Work/Film: Difference between revisions

* ''[[Sneakers]]'' is a very accurate depiction of cryptology and hacking. It, in fact, ''literally'' shows its work: in one scene, a character is using an overhead projector and transparencies. The mathematics there were written by the movie's consultant, Dr. Len Adleman. As in, [[wikipedia:RSA|Rivest-Shamir-Adleman encryption]].

** Even the {{spoiler|magic decryption box}} is fairly plausible. Like every cryptographic algorithm ever invented except one (one time pad cryptography), public key cryptography has yet to be proven secure. If someone figured out how to reduce the time complexity of prime factorization from exponential to polynomial time, they might be able to decrypt things that we currently consider to be completely secure.

* The ''[[Apollo 13]]'' movie. There are a few [[wikipedia:Apollo 13 (film)#Technical accuracy|technical inaccuracies]] and [[Composite Character|blended characters]] and such, but these are primarily in service to the [[Artistic License]] and [[Rule of Drama]]. The director and Tom Hanks, in the "making of Apollo 13" documentary which was part of the collector's edition, were referred to as the "accuracy police" by someone who worked on it. The actor who played the flight director compared working on the film to cramming for finals - getting all this information in their heads and focusing on it the night before they did it. They even had Dave Scott, commander of Apollo 15, there every day to make sure that they flipped the right switches and everything.

{{quote|'''Scott''': "I'm really impressed with the authenticity of the way they're doing this. They're so interested in getting this accurate and precise down to not only the word, but the inflection of the word and the meaning behind the word."}}

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[[Category:Shown Their Work]]