Why did Aaron Schwartz commit suicide? How does it feel to be Anonymous? How were the operators of The Pirate Bay tracked? How did open source originate and survive? How does WikiLeaks actually work, and why does freedom of speech only exist nominally?
It is unlikely that the films collected here will help you while away the evening after work. They can hardly be called light. But these pictures contain a lot of interesting data about the inside and the underground of the IT industry.
We once reviewed the best films about hackers, gaming and cyberpunk. As many readers have already noted, the list did not include more serious films and documentaries, which are no less interesting than fiction and entertainment films. They deserve special attention. Films that tell the stories of real people, tell about the ups and downs of real companies, films that try to analyze the emergence of new network phenomena and review high-profile lawsuits that have influenced the entire industry.
List of 15 best hacker and carder movies
1. PIRATES OF SILICON VALLEY USA, 1999
A story about old friends and sworn enemies Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. It all started at the dawn of the eighties, in small back rooms, where two unknown programmers invented and fantasized.
They dreamed that someday the whole world would know about their projects, which seemed incredible at that time. After a few years, dreams have come true. Yesterday's dreamers have turned into billionaires, founding their own empires: Jobs is Apple, and Gates is Microsoft.
2. CITIZENFOUR. THE TRUTH OF SNOWDEN (CITIZEN FOUR, CITIZENFOUR) USA, Germany, UK, 2014
The Snowden documentary was directed by renowned journalist, film producer, filmmaker and cinematographer Laura Poitras. Back in 2013, she began a correspondence over an encrypted channel with a certain anonymous person who always signed up as Citizenfour.
In correspondence, he claimed to be a high-ranking government official with evidence that the NSA is secretly tracking millions of people around the world. Later, the enigmatic Citizen Four turned out to be Edward Snowden, and Poitras called him a film pseudonym for which she won Oscar, Sputnik and BAFTA awards.
3. INTERNET BOY: THE STORY OF AARON SCHWARTZ (THE INTERNET'S OWN BOY) USA, 2014
The documentary directed by Brian Knappenberger follows the life of the famous American programmer, writer and Internet activist Aaron Schwartz, who committed suicide in 2013 under strange circumstances. During his lifetime, Schwartz had a hand in the creation of Reddit, actively fought against censorship on the Web (in particular, opposed SOPA and PIPA), was a member of the RDF group in the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
Shortly before his death, Schwartz was accused of downloading and intending to make documents from the JSTOR library publicly available. He was threatened with thirty years in prison and multimillion-dollar fines. Soon Schwartz committed suicide without even leaving a note. Many are still convinced that the government actually got even with the activist.
4. PIRATE BAY: REMOVED FROM KEYBOARD (TPB AFK: THE PIRATE BAY AWAY FROM KEYBOARD) Sweden, Denmark, Norway, UK, Netherlands, Germany, 2013
A documentary film directed by Simon Klose about The Pirate Bay and its founders: Peter Sund, Gottfried Svartholm and Fredrik Ney.
Among other things, the tape tells about the sensational trial in the TPB case and contains documentary footage from the courtroom. The painting took almost five years to complete. The film is officially licensed under a Creative Commons license, which means it's completely free.
5. REVOLUTION OS USA, 2001
There are plenty of documentaries and feature films about modern giant companies. A lot of screen time was also devoted to biographies of Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and other pillars of the industry. But what about free software? The history of the open source community and large open source projects is no less interesting, and sometimes this path is more thorny and difficult.
The documentary film "Revolutionary OS" directed by JTS Moore tells about the history of GNU, Linux, as well as about the development of open source and free software movements in general. This picture provides an opportunity to hear firsthand what it is like to fight the system and compete with Microsoft and Apple, while continuing to profess the principles of openness and freeness. Richard Stallman, Michael Thimenn, Linus Torvalds, Larry Augustin, Eric Raymond, Bruce Perens and many others share their stories and opinions here.
6. STEAL THIS FILM Germany, UK, 2006
The Steal This Film series of documentaries, as well as the film Pirate's Bay: Away from the Keyboard, is dedicated to the fight against intellectual property. The cycle consists of two parts, plus on the web you can find a draft version of the first part, which included a story about the trial of the administrators of The Pirate Bay.
The first part of the series was filmed in Sweden in 2006 and is entirely devoted to the history and work of famous pirate organizations in this country: The Pirate Bay, Piratbyrån and the Pirate Party of Sweden. In 2007, the second part ("Steal This Film 2") was released, which can be called analytical. She generally considers contemporary issues of intellectual property, copyright, copyleft and piracy. All parts of the series are distributed free of charge.
7. DOWNLOAD: THE TRUE STORY OF THE INTERNET USA, 2008
The four-episode documentary miniseries attempts to tell no less the history of the Internet (or at least highlight its key points). Each of the series tells about one important milestone in the history of the development of the World Wide Web. The films were originally shown by Science Channel in the United States and Discovery Channel in other countries around the world. The first part tells about the browser wars, that is, the rise and fall of the legendary Netscape browser and its desperate battle with its main competitor - Internet Explorer. The second part describes the search boom on the web using the examples of Google and Yahoo. The third part centered around the dot-com bubble, as well as the two largest startups of the time, Amazon and eBay. The fourth part is devoted to P2P technology, the birth of Web 2.0 and the development of social networks.
8. MEDIASTAN Sweden, 2013
In a selection of entertaining hacker films, we wrote that Julian Assange himself did not like the art picture "The Fifth Estate", which tells about his difficult fate and the history of the WikiLeaks project. Anyone who wants to know how WikiLeaks really works, Assange advised to watch the documentary "Mediastan", filmed by a group of journalists and WikiLeaks activists led by the Swede Johannes Walström.
The film's film crew travels across Central Asia (Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Afghanistan) and tries to get local media outlets to publish WikiLeaks documents. The outcome of this venture is quite predictable. However, the situation with freedom of speech in The Guardian and The New York Times is not much better, as the editors of these editions personally tell in interviews.
9. NAME US LEGION: THE HISTORY OF HAKTIVISM (WE ARE LEGION: THE STORY OF THE HACKTIVISTS) USA,
UK, 2012 Another documentary directed by Brian Knappenberger, filmed two years before The Internet's Own Boy. As the title suggests, the film focuses on the phenomenon of online hacktivism in general and the history of Anonymous in particular. Knappenberger tried to trace the origins of this phenomenon, from the hacker groups Cult of the Dead Cow, Electronic Disturbance Theater and the image board 4Chan to the development of a full-fledged mass movement on an international scale.
The film not only attempts to analyze the essence and tell the story of Anonymous, but also examines the most famous and resonant cases of attacks carried out by the Legion and their reasons. Interestingly, Knappenberger managed to show the face of Anonymous, usually hidden under the guise of Guy Fawkes: most of the characters in the film do not hide their faces from the cameras and personally talk about what it is like to be Anonymous.
10. DEEP WEB USA, 2015
Director Alex Winter tried to analyze what intelligence agencies and the best information security specialists cannot fully understand - the darknet. The documentary "Deep Web" focuses mainly on the history of the underground trading floor Silk Road, as well as the trial of its owner Ross Ulbricht.
But at the same time, Winter touched on the topics of bitcoin, cryptocurrencies and the "dark side" of the Internet in general. The author of the tape spoke to the developers, editors of Wired and many other representatives of the industry, and the voice-over here is read by Keanu Reeves, who, in his free time from acting, is a big Bitcoin enthusiast.
11. CODE RUSH USA, 2000
David Winton's documentary provides a unique chance to become a mediated witness of key historical events. The film documented in great detail 1998, the last year of Netscape Communications engineers as employees of an independent company, and by that time things were already bad. It has already become clear that Microsoft has won the browser race and that Netscape is facing an almost imminent collapse. In a desperate attempt to survive and save the company from the ruins, a project was born that will become the Mozilla Firefox browser in the future. Unfortunately, this desperate last-minute fix did not save Netscape Communications, which was acquired by AOL in 1999.
12. STARTUP.COM USA, 2001
An excellent documentary on what it is to create your own startup (and its complete collapse). As in the film Code Rush, here the viewer has the opportunity to watch the work of two entrepreneurs: Kaleil Isaza Tuzman and Tom Herman, who created the famous website GovWorks.com in the early 2000s.
In just a year, startups earned $ 60 million, hired about a hundred people and even personally met US President Bill Clinton. And then the dot-com bubble burst, and the project quickly went to the bottom, leaving entrepreneurs with nothing. Startap.com is a beautifully told story of a failure from which many valuable lessons can be learned.
13. STARTUP Russia, 2014
One of the few feature films on this list. Although the film "Startup" did not become a hit in theaters and received very mixed reviews from viewers, it was simply impossible not to include it in this selection. This biographical drama tells about the creation of a large Russian search engine "Holmes" from scratch. But "Holmes" is an allegory here, since initially the film was based on the history of the company "Yandex", and the prototypes of the main characters were Arkady Volozh and Ilya Segalovich. "Startup" is the first attempt to tell in film language about the creation of a technology company in our realities and about the conduct of such a business in Russia.
During the filming, the film managed to change the director, and the Yandex company now stubbornly denies all the parallels that arise during the viewing. And nevertheless, it is worth getting acquainted with the film, nevertheless there are not so many pictures about the Russian IT world.
14. INDIE GAME: THE MOVIE Canada 2012
Another interesting side of the industry is game development, including by independent developers. This tape will tell the stories of three independent games and their creators: Edmund McMillen and Tommy Refenes working on Super Meat Boy, Phil Fish, who is preparing the first prototype of Fez, and Jonathan Blow, already reaping the rewards of Braid's success.
Funds for the film were raised through Kickstarter, and in total the team, led by directors James Swirski and Lizanne Pageot, shot over three hundred hours of footage. Initially, they wanted to include more stories from different developers in the feed, but in the end they limited themselves to three projects, which should reflect the "past, present and future" of indie games.
15. MINECRAFT: THE STORY OF MOJANG USA, 2012
When it comes to indie games in general and successful projects in particular, one cannot help but recall the eccentric Marcus "Notch" Persson and his Minecraft. A strange open world game where the whole world consists of cubes (from which you can even make a real working calculator), unexpectedly won millions of fans around the world and brought millions of dollars to its creator. The filming of the documentary Minecraft: The Story of Mojang was sponsored by the community through Kickstarter.
The picture is, in fact, a series of interviews with developers, including Markus Persson and Jens Bergensten, where they themselves talk about the work on Minecraft and the creation of Mojang. The film is distributed freely, but its authors - 2 Player Productions - urge viewers to "vote with a ruble" and still pay for the picture.
It is unlikely that the films collected here will help you while away the evening after work. They can hardly be called light. But these pictures contain a lot of interesting data about the inside and the underground of the IT industry.
We once reviewed the best films about hackers, gaming and cyberpunk. As many readers have already noted, the list did not include more serious films and documentaries, which are no less interesting than fiction and entertainment films. They deserve special attention. Films that tell the stories of real people, tell about the ups and downs of real companies, films that try to analyze the emergence of new network phenomena and review high-profile lawsuits that have influenced the entire industry.
List of 15 best hacker and carder movies
1. PIRATES OF SILICON VALLEY USA, 1999
A story about old friends and sworn enemies Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. It all started at the dawn of the eighties, in small back rooms, where two unknown programmers invented and fantasized.
They dreamed that someday the whole world would know about their projects, which seemed incredible at that time. After a few years, dreams have come true. Yesterday's dreamers have turned into billionaires, founding their own empires: Jobs is Apple, and Gates is Microsoft.
2. CITIZENFOUR. THE TRUTH OF SNOWDEN (CITIZEN FOUR, CITIZENFOUR) USA, Germany, UK, 2014
The Snowden documentary was directed by renowned journalist, film producer, filmmaker and cinematographer Laura Poitras. Back in 2013, she began a correspondence over an encrypted channel with a certain anonymous person who always signed up as Citizenfour.
In correspondence, he claimed to be a high-ranking government official with evidence that the NSA is secretly tracking millions of people around the world. Later, the enigmatic Citizen Four turned out to be Edward Snowden, and Poitras called him a film pseudonym for which she won Oscar, Sputnik and BAFTA awards.
3. INTERNET BOY: THE STORY OF AARON SCHWARTZ (THE INTERNET'S OWN BOY) USA, 2014
The documentary directed by Brian Knappenberger follows the life of the famous American programmer, writer and Internet activist Aaron Schwartz, who committed suicide in 2013 under strange circumstances. During his lifetime, Schwartz had a hand in the creation of Reddit, actively fought against censorship on the Web (in particular, opposed SOPA and PIPA), was a member of the RDF group in the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
Shortly before his death, Schwartz was accused of downloading and intending to make documents from the JSTOR library publicly available. He was threatened with thirty years in prison and multimillion-dollar fines. Soon Schwartz committed suicide without even leaving a note. Many are still convinced that the government actually got even with the activist.
4. PIRATE BAY: REMOVED FROM KEYBOARD (TPB AFK: THE PIRATE BAY AWAY FROM KEYBOARD) Sweden, Denmark, Norway, UK, Netherlands, Germany, 2013
A documentary film directed by Simon Klose about The Pirate Bay and its founders: Peter Sund, Gottfried Svartholm and Fredrik Ney.
Among other things, the tape tells about the sensational trial in the TPB case and contains documentary footage from the courtroom. The painting took almost five years to complete. The film is officially licensed under a Creative Commons license, which means it's completely free.
5. REVOLUTION OS USA, 2001
There are plenty of documentaries and feature films about modern giant companies. A lot of screen time was also devoted to biographies of Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and other pillars of the industry. But what about free software? The history of the open source community and large open source projects is no less interesting, and sometimes this path is more thorny and difficult.
The documentary film "Revolutionary OS" directed by JTS Moore tells about the history of GNU, Linux, as well as about the development of open source and free software movements in general. This picture provides an opportunity to hear firsthand what it is like to fight the system and compete with Microsoft and Apple, while continuing to profess the principles of openness and freeness. Richard Stallman, Michael Thimenn, Linus Torvalds, Larry Augustin, Eric Raymond, Bruce Perens and many others share their stories and opinions here.
6. STEAL THIS FILM Germany, UK, 2006
The Steal This Film series of documentaries, as well as the film Pirate's Bay: Away from the Keyboard, is dedicated to the fight against intellectual property. The cycle consists of two parts, plus on the web you can find a draft version of the first part, which included a story about the trial of the administrators of The Pirate Bay.
The first part of the series was filmed in Sweden in 2006 and is entirely devoted to the history and work of famous pirate organizations in this country: The Pirate Bay, Piratbyrån and the Pirate Party of Sweden. In 2007, the second part ("Steal This Film 2") was released, which can be called analytical. She generally considers contemporary issues of intellectual property, copyright, copyleft and piracy. All parts of the series are distributed free of charge.
7. DOWNLOAD: THE TRUE STORY OF THE INTERNET USA, 2008
The four-episode documentary miniseries attempts to tell no less the history of the Internet (or at least highlight its key points). Each of the series tells about one important milestone in the history of the development of the World Wide Web. The films were originally shown by Science Channel in the United States and Discovery Channel in other countries around the world. The first part tells about the browser wars, that is, the rise and fall of the legendary Netscape browser and its desperate battle with its main competitor - Internet Explorer. The second part describes the search boom on the web using the examples of Google and Yahoo. The third part centered around the dot-com bubble, as well as the two largest startups of the time, Amazon and eBay. The fourth part is devoted to P2P technology, the birth of Web 2.0 and the development of social networks.
8. MEDIASTAN Sweden, 2013
In a selection of entertaining hacker films, we wrote that Julian Assange himself did not like the art picture "The Fifth Estate", which tells about his difficult fate and the history of the WikiLeaks project. Anyone who wants to know how WikiLeaks really works, Assange advised to watch the documentary "Mediastan", filmed by a group of journalists and WikiLeaks activists led by the Swede Johannes Walström.
The film's film crew travels across Central Asia (Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Afghanistan) and tries to get local media outlets to publish WikiLeaks documents. The outcome of this venture is quite predictable. However, the situation with freedom of speech in The Guardian and The New York Times is not much better, as the editors of these editions personally tell in interviews.
9. NAME US LEGION: THE HISTORY OF HAKTIVISM (WE ARE LEGION: THE STORY OF THE HACKTIVISTS) USA,
UK, 2012 Another documentary directed by Brian Knappenberger, filmed two years before The Internet's Own Boy. As the title suggests, the film focuses on the phenomenon of online hacktivism in general and the history of Anonymous in particular. Knappenberger tried to trace the origins of this phenomenon, from the hacker groups Cult of the Dead Cow, Electronic Disturbance Theater and the image board 4Chan to the development of a full-fledged mass movement on an international scale.
The film not only attempts to analyze the essence and tell the story of Anonymous, but also examines the most famous and resonant cases of attacks carried out by the Legion and their reasons. Interestingly, Knappenberger managed to show the face of Anonymous, usually hidden under the guise of Guy Fawkes: most of the characters in the film do not hide their faces from the cameras and personally talk about what it is like to be Anonymous.
10. DEEP WEB USA, 2015
Director Alex Winter tried to analyze what intelligence agencies and the best information security specialists cannot fully understand - the darknet. The documentary "Deep Web" focuses mainly on the history of the underground trading floor Silk Road, as well as the trial of its owner Ross Ulbricht.
But at the same time, Winter touched on the topics of bitcoin, cryptocurrencies and the "dark side" of the Internet in general. The author of the tape spoke to the developers, editors of Wired and many other representatives of the industry, and the voice-over here is read by Keanu Reeves, who, in his free time from acting, is a big Bitcoin enthusiast.
11. CODE RUSH USA, 2000
David Winton's documentary provides a unique chance to become a mediated witness of key historical events. The film documented in great detail 1998, the last year of Netscape Communications engineers as employees of an independent company, and by that time things were already bad. It has already become clear that Microsoft has won the browser race and that Netscape is facing an almost imminent collapse. In a desperate attempt to survive and save the company from the ruins, a project was born that will become the Mozilla Firefox browser in the future. Unfortunately, this desperate last-minute fix did not save Netscape Communications, which was acquired by AOL in 1999.
12. STARTUP.COM USA, 2001
An excellent documentary on what it is to create your own startup (and its complete collapse). As in the film Code Rush, here the viewer has the opportunity to watch the work of two entrepreneurs: Kaleil Isaza Tuzman and Tom Herman, who created the famous website GovWorks.com in the early 2000s.
In just a year, startups earned $ 60 million, hired about a hundred people and even personally met US President Bill Clinton. And then the dot-com bubble burst, and the project quickly went to the bottom, leaving entrepreneurs with nothing. Startap.com is a beautifully told story of a failure from which many valuable lessons can be learned.
13. STARTUP Russia, 2014
One of the few feature films on this list. Although the film "Startup" did not become a hit in theaters and received very mixed reviews from viewers, it was simply impossible not to include it in this selection. This biographical drama tells about the creation of a large Russian search engine "Holmes" from scratch. But "Holmes" is an allegory here, since initially the film was based on the history of the company "Yandex", and the prototypes of the main characters were Arkady Volozh and Ilya Segalovich. "Startup" is the first attempt to tell in film language about the creation of a technology company in our realities and about the conduct of such a business in Russia.
During the filming, the film managed to change the director, and the Yandex company now stubbornly denies all the parallels that arise during the viewing. And nevertheless, it is worth getting acquainted with the film, nevertheless there are not so many pictures about the Russian IT world.
14. INDIE GAME: THE MOVIE Canada 2012
Another interesting side of the industry is game development, including by independent developers. This tape will tell the stories of three independent games and their creators: Edmund McMillen and Tommy Refenes working on Super Meat Boy, Phil Fish, who is preparing the first prototype of Fez, and Jonathan Blow, already reaping the rewards of Braid's success.
Funds for the film were raised through Kickstarter, and in total the team, led by directors James Swirski and Lizanne Pageot, shot over three hundred hours of footage. Initially, they wanted to include more stories from different developers in the feed, but in the end they limited themselves to three projects, which should reflect the "past, present and future" of indie games.
15. MINECRAFT: THE STORY OF MOJANG USA, 2012
When it comes to indie games in general and successful projects in particular, one cannot help but recall the eccentric Marcus "Notch" Persson and his Minecraft. A strange open world game where the whole world consists of cubes (from which you can even make a real working calculator), unexpectedly won millions of fans around the world and brought millions of dollars to its creator. The filming of the documentary Minecraft: The Story of Mojang was sponsored by the community through Kickstarter.
The picture is, in fact, a series of interviews with developers, including Markus Persson and Jens Bergensten, where they themselves talk about the work on Minecraft and the creation of Mojang. The film is distributed freely, but its authors - 2 Player Productions - urge viewers to "vote with a ruble" and still pay for the picture.
