[ClassicSpiderman]

I haven't gone to a movie in quite some time, but after I got off work, I went to see _Live Free or Die Hard_.

I wasn't expecting much, I did find many of the action sequences to be the most ridiculous and over-the-top I've ever seen (even more so than Ah-nuld or Stallone in their most outlandish moments).

*** SOME SPOILERS ***

Basically, the villain of the movie is a super-hacker who was the US government's top network admin/programmer who lost his job when he pointed out how ridiculously insecure the US govt agencies' networks were. He assembles a team of hackers who seem to have access to everything: telecommunications networks, NORAD, Dept. of Defense, Financial Records for all the major banks, right down to traffic lights in practically every city.

Basically, they bring down the New York Stock exchange, panic ensues, then they bring down the power grid in the whole of the US and the natural gas pipelines as well. Panic and chaos flow out into the streets.

As an IT guy, I would rate this film a 6/10 in terms of respecting the intelligence of IT geeks (I rate Independence Day, with the "I'll upload a virus to the alien computer" a 1, and WarGames a 9). To have so much control over almost everything that is connected to a network of some sort seems almost impossible, but at least the scriptwriters have an "out" with the fact that the villain was an insider, and would certainly have given himself backdoor access to many crucial networks prior to getting fired. It's not like Swordfish where a hacker decodes 128-bit encryption in realtime.

There was one scene I had a lot of trouble with--the villain causes one power plant to blow up by directing a a huge excess amount of natural gas from the NG lines.

[mmasters]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('ClassicSpiderman', 't')hey bring down the power grid in the whole of the US and the natural gas pipelines as well.