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Blackhat (2015)



Blackhat, the Michael Mann movie about hackers and international intrigue, was close to unwatchable. The plot was just an all-over-the-place mess.

In the action sequences, people were shooting at each other. I got who the good guys were and who the bad guys were (more or less) but I seldom really understood why they were where they were and how the showdown there had come about. I've had time to reflect on it since and "kinda" understand the plot but ...

don't see it if you don't like to work that hard.

But I'm not part of the hacker subculture, so maybe I just don't get the appeal ... right?

Maybe. Except that the movie makes some stupid technical mistakes of the sort that have apparently turned off those who are very much of that subculture. At one point, the protagonists asks to borrow another character's phone, asking, "is it an android" and proceeding to make valuable use of it after getting an affirmative answer. Apparently, though, the app he then proceeded to use doesn't actually come with the android system.

Similarly, the characters in the movie refer to a small doohickey that plays a role in the plot as a "thumb drive." Even I could see that it didn't look like a thumb drive. According to a "trivia" observation at imdb, it is a yubikey verification thingy. No, that means nothing to me either, but presumably the intended audience knows as well as I did that it isn't a thumb drive.

The above photo is of a thumb drive. A yubikey thing, on the other hand, is smaller and thinner (because it isn't really used to store anything) and can be recognized by the four 'fingers' at the business end --the outer fingers longer than the inner ones. As below....

And yes, I know that this is my fourth successive post with a headline that begins with the letter "B." Not a pattern, just a fluke. As it happens, I've got another B-post planned for tomorrow, though we'll be moving on to the rest of the alphabet after that.
Image result for yubikey verification

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