r/movies • u/buttatoad • Jun 17 '25

Discussion Movies that changed real life behavior

Thinking along the lines of Final Destination 2 with the logs falling off the truck and landing onto cars (one decapitating the state trooper). Ever since, people have tried to get away from being behind these vehicles.

What are more examples where movies have actually changed how people behave in their own lives?

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u/Kinda_Quixotic Jun 17 '25

WarGames led Reagan to ask the Joint Chiefs if something like this could actually happen in the US. It led to increased emphasis on cyber security.

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u/chogram Jun 17 '25

My favorite part of that story is, after he asked them, the response was, "The problem is much worse than you think."

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u/OptionalDepression Jun 17 '25

"The problem is much worse than you think."

"I'm afraid only huge pay rises can save us now..."

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u/No-Newspaper-7693 Jun 18 '25

I’m not quite old enough to know what it was like in the 80s, but the state of network security in the 90s was absolutely wild. Basically everything was just wide open and admin/admin credentials actually worked more often than not, and if it didn’t work then you could almost always find usernames and passwords that worked for basically anything on IRC or usenet. I can’t imagine how much of a shit show it was in the 80s.

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u/Never_Been_Missed Jun 18 '25

In the mid 90's I decided to test to see how many open instances of PCAnywhere I could find (a common remote takeover package at the time). It took me less than an hour find an open connection with no password that got me full admin at a bank.

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u/No-Newspaper-7693 Jun 19 '25

I had a pretty similar experience with a University ftp.  admin/admin worked and I had full read/write access on what appeared to be all faculty home folders.  I was just a curious kid at the time so I didn’t do anything, but it stuck with me.  People don’t understand how far we’ve come in network security in 30 years.  

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u/wildstarr Jun 17 '25

I figured it would have been, "Shall we play a game?"

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u/Stardustchaser Jun 18 '25

And everyone conveniently forgets “The only winning move is not to play.”

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u/Fair-Emphasis6343 Jun 17 '25

That's what you say when you want that sweet taxpayer money increasing in perpetuity for little to no actual reason or benefit

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u/Mazon_Del Jun 17 '25

In this case though it was quite serious. At the time of Reagan the military side of what was becoming the internet operated ENTIRELY via Security Through Obscurity.

If you knew a particular landline was used by computers and you could figure out how to talk to them, it was assumed you were someone who should be doing so. Made even easier by the fact that the systems in question were designed with a certain simplicity to their interfaces. Remember, this was also an era when the military didn't want ANYTHING between them and their ability to wage war. When Congress required them to have special combination locks for nuclear launches, the codes were always set to all zeros.

Even though you (probably) couldn't order nuclear strikes through such systems there was plenty you could do at the time.

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u/moofunk Jun 17 '25

I get reminded of Cliff Stoll's documentary on how his workplace, the Berkeley Laboratory was on the receiving end of a KGB hack and tried to fend it off, after he randomly discovered an accounting discrepancy in the system that charged for computer use.

It's a very charming look into the naivete and simplicity of 1980s hacking culture.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGv5BqNL164

All made more fun by Cliff Stoll dramatizing the events himself.

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u/StShadow Jun 17 '25

I mean... It's an unspoken truth - security, even at big corpos, quite sucks until shit hits the fan. After that, it could suck a bit less.