Matrix Reloaded

[Viper]

every summer there's one movie that ranks on my "have to see that one in the theatre for sure list"

this year was attack of the clones and next year this is without question gonna be a blockbuster and i'll be in Kingston on Opening night to see this one

DIS you busy ............. ;D

[Patty Roy]

Don't forget The Matrix Revolutions that will be coming out next fall sometime. Should be cool to see 2 sequels coming out so close together, although i'm not really a die hard fan of the original.

I don't know about you guys, but i'm itching to see Punch Drunk Love, the new Adam Sandler movie that was written and directed by the very talented Paul T. Anderson (Hard 8, Boogie Nights, Magnolia). It's been getting great reviews, but it hasn't opened in Ottawa yet.

[Viper]

Patty said:

Don't forget The Matrix Revolutions that will be coming out next fall sometime. Should be cool to see 2 sequels coming out so close together, although i'm not really a die hard fan of the original.

I don't know about you guys, but i'm itching to see Punch Drunk Love, the new Adam Sandler movie that was written and directed by the very talented Paul T. Anderson (Hard 8, Boogie Nights, Magnolia). It's been getting great reviews, but it hasn't opened in Ottawa yet.

please bring on November ..........

Reloaded was absolutely worth the anticipation and wait. Now it ranks in my top 5 all time movies for sure.

wow what a great show.

[M. Beaux-Eaux]

What Isn't The Matrix?

I SAW THE MATRIX: RELOADED Wednesday night. After having seen the movie and
read the very mixed reviews, I was at first confused about the negative
opinions. This is a really great movie.

In scanning the reviews, I've discovered that the film is something of a
Rorschach test -- it's seen as different movies by different people.

For romantics, it's a love story about the triumph of human connection over
all. Neo and Trinity gaze into each other's eyes. They mate like bunnies.
Their love is tested in myriad ways during the film.

For the spiritually inclined, it's about religion. Neo emerges as a cross
between Buddha and Batman. Morpheus constantly spouts all manner of vague,
quasi-religious mumbo jumbo. Awed, starry eyed acolytes follow Neo around
with religious offerings to lay at his feet. Neo performs miracles.

Those with a philosophical bent will see The Matrix: Reloaded as a movie
about ethics -- the ol' free-will-versus-predetermination question -- with a
heavy emphasis on the importance of individual choice.

Bloodthirsty cinema-goers will view the movie as an action flick. The
Matrix: Reloaded has more kicks, punches, head-butts, flying combat
gymnastics and gunplay that any other three movies combined.

Those who walk out of the movie thinking they just saw a love story,
religious movie, ethical film or action flick will be disappointed. OK, the
action people won't be disappointed. It's a first rate, shoot-em-up guy
movie by any measure.

Anyone who sees the movie for what it really is will love it.

The Matrix: Reloaded is not primarily about love, religion, ethics or
violence (although these are supporting themes), but rather -- wait for
it! -- software!

It's about programming and code. It's about software design and hacking. And
it's about the unintended consequences of self-replicating software. It's
about the challenges of perfecting a total-immersion world-simulation
environment for people who don't even know they're playing the Mother of All
Multi-User Online Games.

And, yes, the software concepts addressed and depictions of hacking are
surprisingly convincing.

Critics who don't understand software won't understand -- and may not
like -- Reloaded. I've actually heard, for example, some refer to the bad
guys as "robots" as if they don't understand the difference between a robot
and a software agent.

(And speaking of software, the computer-generated graphics in the movie
break new ground for realism and technique -- the special effects alone are
worth the price of admission.)

Critics attacked the first movie when it first came out as absurd sophomoric
philosophy dumped into a karate flick. Now that four years have past, the
old movie is suddenly respectable. Many critics are saying that the new
movie is shallow, making insufficient references to philosophy, the plight
of real humans and, well, just isn't as deep as the first. Please. It's just
a movie.

I saw the The Matrix: Reloaded here in Silicon Valley in a theatre packed
with engineers, programmers, hackers, dot-com entrepreneurs and others who
really understand software. They loved it. So did I.

- www.mikeslist.com/63.htm

[M. Beaux-Eaux]

Matrix Sequel Has Hacker Cred

By Kevin Poulsen, SecurityFocus May 15 2003 5:01PM

The average American moviegoer taking in the Matrix Reloaded this weekend
will likely be wowed by the elaborate action sequences and dazzling special
effects. But hackers who've seen the blockbuster are crediting it with a
more subtle cinematic milestone: it's the first major motion picture to
accurately portray a hack.

That's right: Trinity uses a 'sploit.

A scene about two thirds of the way through the film finds Carrie-Anne
Moss's leather-clad superhacker setting her sights on a power grid computer,
for plot reasons better left unrevealed.

But at exactly the point where audiences would normally be treated to a
brightly-colored graphical cartoon of a computer intrusion, ala the 2001
Travolta vehicle Swordfish, or cheer as the protagonist skillfully summons a
Web browser and fights valiantly through "404 Errors," like the malnourished
cyberpunk in this year's "The Core," something completely different happens:
Trinity runs "Nmap."

Probably the most widely-used freeware hacking tool, the real-life Nmap is a
sophisticated port scanner that sends packets to a machine -- or a network
of machines -- in an attempt to determine what services are running. An Nmap
port scan is a common prelude to an intrusion attempt -- a way of casing the
joint, to find out if any vulnerable service are running.

That's exactly how the fictional Trinity uses it. In a sequence that flashes
on screen for a few scant seconds, the green phosphor text of Trinity's
computer clearly shows Nmap being run against the IP address 10.2.2.2, and
finding an open port number 22, correctly identified as the SSH service used
to log into computers remotely.

"I was definitely pretty excited when I saw it," says "Fyodor," the
25-year-old author of Nmap. "I think compared to previous movies that had
any kind of hacking content, you could generally assume it's going to be
some kind of stupid 3D graphics show."

But the unexpected nod to hackerdom doesn't end there. Responding to the
Nmap output , Trinity summons a program called "sshnuke" which begins
"ttempting to exploit SSHv1 CRC32."

Discovered in February, 2001 by security analyst Michal Zalewski, the SSH
CRC-32 bug is a very real buffer overflow in a chunk of code designed to
guard against cryptographic attacks on SSH version one. Properly exploited,
it grants full remote access to the vulnerable machine.

"I think there are at least two public exploits in circulation right now,"
said Zalewski, in a telephone interview. "They just got released about a
month after the advisory. And I know there are some that are not public."

The actual program Trinity uses is fictitious -- there is no "sshnuke," yet,
and genuine exploits sensibly drop the user directly into a root shell,
while the big screen version forces the hacker to change the system's root
password -- in this case to "Z1ON0101." (Note the numeral in the place of
the 'I' -- more hax0r style.)

But then, the film does take place in the future. Is Zalewski surprised to
see unpatched SSH servers running in the year AD 2199? "It's not that
uncommon for people to run the old distribution," he says. "I know we had a
bunch of boxes that were unpatched for two years."

Fyodor notes that the filmmakers changed the text of Nmap's output slightly
"to make it fit on the screen better," but he's not quibbling over the
details. The white hat hacker's stardom even gave him new appreciation for
the speed of the Internet's underground. After seeing the film late
Wednesday night, Fyodor put out a request to an Nmap mailing list asking for
someone to get him a digital still of the program's three-seconds of fame.
He expected it to take hours, or days.

"Twenty minutes after I send it, I'm getting a bunch of screens shots, some
of them have suspicious Windows Media Player outlines to them," he says.
"Now I've got screen shots, Divx copies of the movie, all sorts of stuff."
If the Matrix borrows from real life, the Internet, it seems, already has
the Matrix.

- www.securityfocus.com/news/4831

[RSteg]

Matrix reloaded is awesome!

[Lord Stanley]

I saw it twice(second time on IMAX) and it's unbelievable...I love it

aaaaahhhhh Percephone