At the bottom he notes: "I’m sitting in the UK as I write this. Under UK law, I believe this should constitute fair dealing: the purpose is quotation for criticism and review, and this single screen capture is in no way an alternative to paying to see the original film. The film comes from the USA, and under USA law I think it similarly constitutes fair use: it’s for non-profit educational purposes, the amount of the full work used is extremely small, and the effect on the value of the full work negligible."
I took down my entire "Behind The Screens" YouTube channel and transferred it to my own site: https://behind-the-screens.tv because of copyright notices from YouTube that were heavily skewed towards the studios and I didn't have the energy to fight what was clearly fair use in my videos.
IANAL, but that's not quite true right? As per your own citation, återgivningsrätten gives the right to use any piece of art (not in digital form) in conjunction with a piece of critical text.
You should post on YouTube but blank out all the falsely strikable content and replace it with a pointer to your website. YouTube is necessary for discoverability.
You really need to put this on an RSS feed! I wish there was a way you could get paid for views for this stuff. I will be sending people this link when they ask "why are you so mad about that terminal scene in that movie?!?!"
Would you be interested in collaborating on a selfhosted CMS to aid in publishing a video series on one’s own site with syndication to rss and other platforms like youtube? I have been close to scratching this itch for most of a year.
Sure it sucks that you got takedown notices. Ideally it would have been revenue share. Your critique is mostly interesting because it's using famous IP. Critique something no one cares about to see how much your additions are adding vs the pull of the original content itself.
Commentary and criticism are by law protected as fair use. Why would revenue share be done "ideally"? News reporting is also covered under fair use, do you expect news organizations to pay for reporting on movies?
Ideally fair use would be defended, it is the law of the land, and when a takedown notice was emitted maliciously, with known bad faith, the actor that did that would have to pay for the amount of time that the legal content was down.
I believe the parent comment was saying that the YT poster should have gotten some revenue share. Since the work they put in would in theory be enhancing the original work. Obviously these sort of things are created and consumed primarily by “super fans” who probably buy director cuts etc etc .
At least that’s how I read the comment and I agree.
I don't think those laws will last. They were written in the 70s before youtube. Ideally the law would allow the critique but recongize it's the IP drawing in the users, and sharing some of the revenue.
Fair use was common law with judicial precedents for a couple hundred years before it became a statutory law in 1976.
Why would fair use law go away? Fair use for the purpose of critique is maybe the best & most favored defense of fair use by the Copyright Office, and ties together necessary copyright exceptions for supporting Free Speech and journalism, among other good reasons. Things also seem to be moving in the opposite direction with recent precedent deeming some AI uses transformative fair use. YouTube has done more that it’s fair share of playing fast and loose with copyrights for a profit, but YouTube, and more broadly Google, depends on fair use for massive portions of their business. I don’t see fair use going anywhere anytime soon.
I don't know if fair use laws will last, but I hope they do, and definitely disagree that sharing revenue would somehow be ideal.
I've read criticism of media I've never even heard of (and learned some insightful things), so clearly the original IP isn't always the pull, and even if it was I don't understand how talking about something suddenly means I need to pay the person who owns the intellectual property of the thing I'm talking about. I think it would make criticism less likely and put us in an even worse situation than today, when large corporations often use the DMCA to take down clearly fair-use criticism. Just a further stifling of speech.
Also, fair use has been around since the eighteenth century, even if in the US the US 1976 Copyright Act made fair use statutory.
One of my favorite details of this movie is that the semi-antagonistic ENCOM executive Dillinger uses emacs [0], while Flynn uses vi. Clearly, the VFX artist who made the film's UNIX shells had a preference!
(Dillinger is also shown running "ENCOM Linux" -- is the VFX artist a BSD user? As he cycles through his buffers, we see a split second of `hanoi-unix`; definitely not the type to pay attention during boring board meetings!)
The artist, JT Nimoy, was an Emacs user but still thought it would be fun to set up a dichotomy--some fun details on this blog. A few more details were shared at a talk at an HN meetup several years ago.
> The artist, JT Nimoy, was an Emacs user but still thought it would be fun to set up a dichotomy--some fun details on this blog
I don't see any details about setting up a dichotomy in that article (just that the author was a happy Emacs user). Or maybe that was in that HN meetup you mention?
and the comment there about using emacs for the different shells in different modes possibly explains the un-resolved nit in TFA about proportional and monospaced fonts in different areas
This section is disregarding a key lore element, the inhabitants of the grid are programs. Killing a process in this context more likely has an interpretation of an attempt to stop an individual such as the villain Clu. I would say an alternative explanation is is more story based, with Kevin Flynn trying to stop Clu from the outside world but being unable to and instead taking the last resort of entering the grid when he knows it would be dangerous.
That's a good idea, but remember that, up until CLU's outright betrayal, Kevin had no reason to be concerned, and after it, he had no way back into meat space to run those commands.
Also -- unrelated, but a nitpick of the article -- Kevin was using the laser to come and go from the grid for a while before he got stuck there. The laser would have been pretty well-tested by the time he made/edited the last will and testament, so the article's explanation that it was his first use of the tech doesn't make sense. (He could have just spontaneously decided to update it though, which isn't too far fetched)
There are a lot of movies explain their themes outright. You don't have to try that hard to remember what they're fighting for in the Incredibles for example. But what is the theme of Tron Legacy? I had to get Google to explain that the movie is about perfectionism. That's an interesting theme but I didn't realize that in the theater.
As someone in music, yeah, that was one of the best movie soundtrack’s of all time (not much like it in movies beforehand).
But kind of disagree about the film, think it was under appreciated. It isn’t a masterpiece, but the acting, the overall story, and the visuals were really good. And yeah, those dark Tron-visuals combined with the pulsing, digital daft-punk music really worked (at least for me), and when I want to get pulled into a different world, will rewatch that film.
Tron Legacy was, I think, only the second film soundtrack I ever purchased (first one being Lord of the Rings). It's still among my favorite music to listen to while coding; something about it just puts me in the "flow" frame of mind right away.
Yeah the movie’s got warts but if you allow for some plot holes and accept that young Flynn is completely 2D (maybe a meta joke for Tron? Nah just poor writing) the movie rips.
I think Tron 1 has the shallowest plot! Guy goes on an adventure to take credit for his game. The idea of MCP vs the users is good (and still topical!), but a lot of the other stuff - nods to religion, romance...they feel like afterthoughts. The point was the graphics. And that's fine! I like the movie.
Legacy, on the other hand, has a ton of depth to it! The father/son stuff. Living under the weight of expectations. The nature of perfection. Being open to the unexpected. Resistance by withdrawal. Flynn in End of Line Club - God entering the room - was probably the coolest moment in the entire franchise. And of course the visuals and soundtrack were good. The plot's a little stilted to start, but once the movie hits Flynn's arcade, it takes off. Finally, I should note that the way it was able to walk the line of being a sequel and a reboot and something new entirely is remarkable; people absolutely do not give it enough credit for that.
I liked Ares as well. People seemed to not like Leto and the fact that they rebooted again (and the fact that Tron is not in a Tron movie), but I thought the visuals were good, the soundtrack really grew on me, and there are some ideas to chew on in there as well. Think of it as a big-budget TNG episode where Data's learning about being human. Having just watched Ex Machina, it's actually an interesting companion film: both involve an embodied AI brought into existence by a megalomaniac tech bro, but Ares and Ava take very different paths based on the nature and actions of Eve and Caleb. Dillinger is a bit mustache-twirly but I think he captures the way that corporate pressures can lead people without a strong moral compass down a bad road.
Anyways, 2 and 3 are really good and I just wanna stick up for them.
Tron 3 would be fine if not for the main character. Every other character/performance is great IMO, and the Trent Reznor soundtrack. The main performance was just incredibly bad, which sinks the whole movie.
Michael Sheen is apparently such a fan of TRON, that he might have been lucky to not negotiated himself down to a $0 pay packet - just in case someone else might have gotten the role :D
I have such a soft spot for this scene. I saw this movie in theaters when I was a high schooler, and this exact scene with Sam entering in commands piqued my curiosity to learn if it was a real thing. I eventually discovered that OS X came shipped with a bash terminal, and that I could manipulate a computer in just the same way. It really made an impact on me, which I certainly wasn't expecting when buying tickets to this film I knew nothing about.
The author notes a possible error that the laser config file never seems to get copied to the location the laser software will actually run from, but it could have been done directly from vi.
$ login -n root
Login incorrect
login: backdoor
No home directory specified in password file!
Logging in with home=/
#
I think this is supposed to be something like CVE-1999-0113 (or its very recently discovered/disclosed friend CVE-2026-24061). It's the sort of thing you might just know off the top of your head that would be handy for getting into a computer that hasn't been updated in 20 years.
> something like CVE-1999-0113 (or its very recently discovered/disclosed friend CVE-2026-24061)
Interesting that you remember CVEs by ID and how they relate one to another. Do you know if they are visualization of CVEs? I'm wondering if that would help newcomers to security to get some memorable insights.
I'm confused. The whole point of the post, as stated in the title, is to nitpick that one movie scene. Why does the inclusion of one specific nitpick bother you when it's completely on-topic?
I was luck to know Josh Nimoy who is responsible for a lot of this in the movie, who has since sadly passed away. Josh took great pride in the fact that he was able to put Emacs and a bunch of Unix commands in a major Hollywood blockbuster.ed
FYI, (and sorry for the intrusion since you were a friend and I only learned of this person through this HN post) but it appears that you have used their deadname (which is an unfortunate term in this case).
Thank you for identifying them though, thanks to you I learned of a badass, and I regret the loss.
The funny thing about all of this to me is that, compared to most 'hacking' scenes in movies, this bit is wildly realistic, almost too good. If they were like "run upload_me" we wouldn't even be talking about it.
you'd first have to program it to take the picture, and look back at the photographer's eye to get the reflection of the screen with the IP address on!
$ login -n root
Login incorrect
login: backdoor
No home directory specified in password file!
Logging in with home=/
#
I don't agree with the interpretation that Sam tried and failed to login as root, and THEN tried to login as a different user, backdoor. Because if that's what happened, shouldn't there be another $ prompt before he types `backdoor` and gets the #? It seems to me that's an unobfuscated password field and `backdoor` is the password.
At some point we all have to remember that the monitor showing these commands is also an actor, and not actually a computer hooked up to a special laser that scans your body, destroys it, and pulls you into a 1980's era computer still managing to have, per the screenshot in the blog post, about 4GB of memory free in some respect.
Same as how Garrett Hedlund is neither a youthful stock owner in a computer company, nor intrinsically knows Unix shell commands.
I like the fun in this article, but some nitpicks don't seem right to me. This kinda reminds me of cinemasins.
1) I would assume his dad talked about always having a backdoor as a kid, so that's why Sam tried backdoor as the second username
2) temp.cfg isn't an unreasonable config filename. We don't know what the source code is. My guess would be that he hardcoded temp.cfg in the source because something wasn't working, and continued working on the actual bug
3) Killing processes to free memory? He reached for a kill -9 and then a regular kill. That hints to me that he recognized those two processes and knew -9 was required only for the first. He probably checked to see if he had enough memory, saw that he did, and then started cleaning up the processes.
4) Linux and SolarOS? Couldn't the other terminal just have been sshed to another box? That seems most reasonable to me.
I for one, am absolutely fascinated with Tron Legacy. It was the first Tron movie I saw as a kid in middle school. In some ways, it's responsible for the trajectory of my career.
Apart from the obvious reasons about the DP soundtrack and the visuals, I love the theme of chasing perfection and the way it backfires.
Kevin Flynn says to CLU in the end "The thing about perfection, is that it's unknowable. You don't know that because I didn't know it when I created you" and I love the fact that it says how we can put our best and our worst into what we create. That we're not just responsible for lifeless machines, that it's more than that. And it's a hauntingly beautiful thought.
I doubt they put this much thought into it, but I'd say the backdoor is actually the "-n" flag and this is some modified version of login that just does setuid(0) for whatever you put after.
This is something that really upset me going into Tron Ares. I had a blast rewatching Legacy beforehand and picking out somewhat realistic shell commands. Ares ditches a lot of these shell commands in favor of everything being a script. `./start_ares_program`, etc. IIRC, we still see a `systemctl` or two in the movie, but definitely less fun than Legacy.
Weirdly, the shell commands seemed perfectly fine as helper tool scripts (my ~/bin is littered with these to this day) but the syntax highlighting is what exceeded my disbelief.
It’s not as interesting as it sounds, I wrote a lot of code and moved a lot of assets around for the compositing of all the glow on the suits on to the live action and CG elements… basically I was doing a lot of logistics work making sure outsourced work from around the world was arriving in the right places at the right times and with some amount of QC having been done ahead of time.
So I got to look at Tron: Legacy mainly from within a tcsh session, but could look over the shoulder of the artists and leads doing the actually pretty stuff.
If you're curious, the longest uptime I've had someone report back was in excess of 4 years.
P.S. I also remember working at a big investment bank and the oldest Good Till Cancel order in the mainframe was a Buy CSCO @ $6 from the late 1990s (this was in 2010).
until quite recently I dealt with a machine that had uptime in excess of 16,000 days. Before anyone panics, it was on a closed network. It was a second hand machine and we were very worried that if it was shut down the disk wouldn't recover, hence just not touching it. It was in a hut in the back of beyond so exceedingly tedious to replace if we needed to.
I always remember when, as a young geek writing games for my C64, I was thrilled when I saw the Terminator and a lot of the code scrolling past in its HUD was 6502 assembly code!
Now I'm watching this thread for the consultant hired by the film to show up and explain why each of those goofs was caused by the director explicitly asking for them...
I'm purely guessing, but I can imagine quite vividly how some of these things might have happened. Probably, a consultant was asked to generate a plausible version of some of these elements and they were quite careful in doing so. They delivered material (text transcripts etc.) to a graphics designer who was tasked to turn this into a cool-looking animated sequence. Software like AfterEffects doesn't naturally emulate terminal behavior and that's how the perfect word wrapping and proportional fonts were introduced. That whole animation was then essentially cut into the movie in post. There's no direct interaction between Sam and the console shown, only his reactions.
It's interesting that the terminal window running top does have a proper non-proportional font. This is likely an actual screen recording of a Linux system terminal pasted into the animation.
That whole sequence is less than 30 seconds packed with information presented on a screen together with unimportant elements that are borderline confusing to non-technical audiences. I would have forgiven the art direction if they had reduced the visual complexity of this screen layout into something more cartoonish to make the story clearer.
> To [switch users], /bin/login would need to be setuid, and it certainly isn’t on Linux... _Perhaps_ Solaris (or SolarOS) is different?
The login command is indeed setuid root on SunOS 4, to which the movie pays homage, as its documented behavior is "to [permanently] change from one userID to another". The su command explicitly means "temporarily switch to a new user ID".
Here are copies of the SunOS 4 manual pages, if you're curious:
I was in the theater when that first played. Half of the theater were cheering, some standing up. Many movie-goers were very confused. Yes she used nmap [1] and then sshnuke [2] and given she was hacking a power company it would not surprise me if that exploit worked in some utility companies today.
lol. I remember seeing LLLSDL go by when I originally saw the movie. The funny but is I had just written the internet draft for LLSD, so I was wondering g if someone on the writing staff had been following our work at Linden Lab. More likely it was a coincidence and all the L's meant "Laser."
As I pointed out to the OP on Mastodon, I very much believe that it was a reference to Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, where they filmed a big door, and the original laser sequence from the first TRON movie.
The video tech one of my startups made was used to do "On-Set Video Playback" exactly like this for a bunch of movies and TV shows. We didn't make the product for that purpose and only learned this was a thing when a playback company contacted us asking for a change in the firmware to enable external synchronization to a 48fps source clock.
Since it wasn't a difficult change and the use case was neat, we made a custom version for them. That's how I got to know some of the people who do this work and even got to visit some movie and TV sets. So, based on that, here are some insights relating to TFA.
The first thing to know is on-set video playback for film and TV production is a specialized service because it can require arcane knowledge to properly interface various video displays with 24 fps film cameras. This used to involve a lot of custom modified displays, hand-built or modified interface boxes and various arcane cables/adapters but it's gotten somewhat easier with the advent of variable frame rate displays and GPUs.
Since time is money on-set, productions just hire this out on a project basis to one of a few specialized firms in Hollywood. As it's a niche thing, these firms are usually just a handful of knowledgeable A/V guys who've acquired a variety of customized interfacing gear over many projects along with different types of displays and have practical experience in making it work quickly and reliably with various cinema cameras.
There are two main parts to a project: 1) Making the screen look right on camera, and 2) Getting the right images on the screen at the right time.
1) Making it look right breaks down into three parts: A) Getting the source on the screen, B) Synchdronizing the source with the cinema camera so there's no screen flicker or rolling, and C) Adjusting the screen's brightness, contrast, gamma, saturation, etc to 'read' well on-camera along with minimizing any light glare and reflections. Depending on the ambient scene brightness and the camera's shutter speed, iris, etc these adjustments can sometimes be more extreme than the display's native adjustments allow. The playback team has tools for this including stand-alone signal processing boxes that range from simple knob adjustments all the way to 3D LUTs that can remap any pixel value to any other. They might also use old-school tricks like covering the screen with neutral density film similar to window tinting.
2) Getting the right images on the screen at the right time breaks into two parts. A) Creating the source imagery, and B) Triggering the playback on cue. For most projects the production will just have the playback team create the source imagery. The only exceptions tend to be shows where on-screen shots are frequent and integral to the story. In those cases, the on-screen content will usually be the responsibility of a designer working under the production's art director and the playback team's job will be getting it on the screen. The on-screen imagery for Tron: Legacy is pretty minimal and contained to a few scenes so it was probably designed and created by the playback team as a per-hour line item on their project bid.
In those cases, the playback team will receive the relevant script pages and a few storyboards. Based on those and perhaps a phone call with a line producer or AD, they'll make some comp stills and send them over for pre-approval. Once approved, they'll do the actual source content and send clips for approval. Depending on the production, this may just be signed off by the line-producer or an AD but, in other cases, the director will want to at least see it. If the playback team is providing the display they'll send over photos so the production designer and set dressers know what will be coming.
On the shoot day the team gets there early and coordinates with the set dressers to get the display in place, then electricians for power and finally the DP and camera crew to test sync, brightness, etc. The type of content going on-screen and how interactive it needs to be will determine if they've already pre-recorded the source and just play it back on-set, use an interactive video source to sequence or animate the content or actually use a "live" source. They tend to use whatever software can do the job, is easy, reliable and flexible. This can range from as basic as Powerpoint to more sophisticated presentation tools to scripting tools and, when necessary, even custom command line apps they've cobbled together over the years. For video clips, they'll record what they can and then modify or composite elements together with standard tools like Photoshop and AfterEffects.
In the case of Tron: Legacy, it's hard to tell if they pre-recorded the sequences from a Linux computer and triggered playback in steps on-set or used a live Linux computer since, done properly, they can look essentially identical. There's a strong preference to pre-record everything and sequence or animate it for playback but sometimes that's not possible due to keyboard/mouse activity. The reason is that any live computer might crash or respond at slightly different speeds from take to take complicating editing, especially when there's repeated re-takes or on-set heat from lights, etc. Power on set can also sometimes be from generators and very dirty, even on studio sound stages and back lots. Any delay due to playback not being ready, or worse killing a take, can have severe reputational consequences.
In cases where a live computer is unavoidable, the strong preference is for someone from the playback team to do all the operation off-camera while the actor uses a dummy keyboard and mouse. This usually works fine because there's rarely a need to hold on an all-in-one medium shot showing the screen and keyboard/mouse during actual interaction. On-screen interaction is almost always shown in an insert close-up of the just the screen and bezel. Either way, the sound of keypresses and clicks are dubbed in later by foley artists just like footsteps and doors closing, etc. The absolute nightmare scenario for any playback artist is when a live computer is required that an actor actually operates. It never goes well. Not because the actors are dummies but because they have to focus first on hitting their marks, saying their lines and actually, you know, acting. Under those conditions, typing the exact same techno-gibberish in exactly the same way, with the same timing, while repeating lines over 30 takes would likely give most of us trouble too.
I forgot to add that in the case of Tron: Legacy's on-screen graphics, the fact they're so good is probably due to a combination of two things. First, the director cared enough to make it credible instead of just plausible. Blocking out and shooting a couple extra rounds of "type, read, then react" can easily add another hour to an already packed schedule which equates to at least thousands of extra dollars and increased schedule risk. There's always pressure from producers to just trim "that techie stuff" from the script.
Second, IMHO, it's likely that the playback team decided to over achieve and spend more time on the project than they were paid for. The guys I met were almost all computer nerd, sci-fi fan, film buffs and this kind of over-achieving occurred fairly often, even on projects where the director didn't care to do more than "plausible", when the playback team liked the project, they'd work late to make it as good as they could. They know at least their fellow computer nerd, sci-fi fan, computer buffs will appreciate it even if no else does. In one case I know of first-hand, the playback team successfully pitched the production on doing a more involved sequence than initially written to make it more realistic.
While the article credits "the filmmakers", the level of Unix veracity and depth seen in those on-screens was almost certainly thanks to one or two playback engineers going above and beyond when the script direction probably just said something as vague as [HE LOGS IN AND LOOKS FOR TRACES OF HIS FATHER, THEN ACTIVATES THE LASER] combined with the director liking the look enough to keep it in.
I have only seen The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011) once, but fifteen years on I distinctly remember a scene where Daniel Craig is trying to use a Mac and accidentally drags Safari off the Dock. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W84AhBMRNOY#t=1m25s
I think we can assume any hacker worth his salt has a dead man trigger. I imagine that if he doesn't reset it before a given period elapses then a script imports that will and testament text file into LaTeX and emails a lovingly rendered PDF off to the local lawyer.
Since logging into the backdoor account produced a `#` prompt instead of `$`, it was uid 0, so the last will and testament was either in `/root` or in `/`, depending on how the non-backdoor root account was set up.
Plus, if Flynn was running those commands while logged in as "backdoor" rather than while logged in as "root", the text displayed on-screen specifically says that the backdoor account doesn't have a home directory configured so it would treat `/` as the home directory. Which would mean the computer now has a `/last_will_and_testament.txt` file. That's pretty prominent and attention-drawing. It's going to be found by anyone who investigates that computer.
Wonderful!
At the bottom he notes: "I’m sitting in the UK as I write this. Under UK law, I believe this should constitute fair dealing: the purpose is quotation for criticism and review, and this single screen capture is in no way an alternative to paying to see the original film. The film comes from the USA, and under USA law I think it similarly constitutes fair use: it’s for non-profit educational purposes, the amount of the full work used is extremely small, and the effect on the value of the full work negligible."
I took down my entire "Behind The Screens" YouTube channel and transferred it to my own site: https://behind-the-screens.tv because of copyright notices from YouTube that were heavily skewed towards the studios and I didn't have the energy to fight what was clearly fair use in my videos.
You're lucky if that's right. In Sweden there's no fair use of imagery at all. "Citaträtten" (the right to quote) only covers words.
https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citatr%C3%A4tt
IANAL, but that's not quite true right? As per your own citation, återgivningsrätten gives the right to use any piece of art (not in digital form) in conjunction with a piece of critical text.
As a hardened criminal then, I should probably avoid visiting Sweden
You should post on YouTube but blank out all the falsely strikable content and replace it with a pointer to your website. YouTube is necessary for discoverability.
> YouTube is necessary for discoverability.
It will remain necessary only as long as people do this.
Feel free to be as smug as you went while your brand fades to irrelevance. I'm telling you what will happen, not what should happen.
Go live in the woods and live off the land.
You really need to put this on an RSS feed! I wish there was a way you could get paid for views for this stuff. I will be sending people this link when they ask "why are you so mad about that terminal scene in that movie?!?!"
The parent commentator is the former CTO of Cloudflare, I don't think he's worried about monetizing his passion project :)
Would you be interested in collaborating on a selfhosted CMS to aid in publishing a video series on one’s own site with syndication to rss and other platforms like youtube? I have been close to scratching this itch for most of a year.
That's not a project that excites me but good luck with it.
Thanks for that. A very entertaining watch.
Sure it sucks that you got takedown notices. Ideally it would have been revenue share. Your critique is mostly interesting because it's using famous IP. Critique something no one cares about to see how much your additions are adding vs the pull of the original content itself.
Commentary and criticism are by law protected as fair use. Why would revenue share be done "ideally"? News reporting is also covered under fair use, do you expect news organizations to pay for reporting on movies?
Ideally fair use would be defended, it is the law of the land, and when a takedown notice was emitted maliciously, with known bad faith, the actor that did that would have to pay for the amount of time that the legal content was down.
I believe the parent comment was saying that the YT poster should have gotten some revenue share. Since the work they put in would in theory be enhancing the original work. Obviously these sort of things are created and consumed primarily by “super fans” who probably buy director cuts etc etc .
At least that’s how I read the comment and I agree.
I don't think those laws will last. They were written in the 70s before youtube. Ideally the law would allow the critique but recongize it's the IP drawing in the users, and sharing some of the revenue.
Fair use was common law with judicial precedents for a couple hundred years before it became a statutory law in 1976.
Why would fair use law go away? Fair use for the purpose of critique is maybe the best & most favored defense of fair use by the Copyright Office, and ties together necessary copyright exceptions for supporting Free Speech and journalism, among other good reasons. Things also seem to be moving in the opposite direction with recent precedent deeming some AI uses transformative fair use. YouTube has done more that it’s fair share of playing fast and loose with copyrights for a profit, but YouTube, and more broadly Google, depends on fair use for massive portions of their business. I don’t see fair use going anywhere anytime soon.
I don't know if fair use laws will last, but I hope they do, and definitely disagree that sharing revenue would somehow be ideal.
I've read criticism of media I've never even heard of (and learned some insightful things), so clearly the original IP isn't always the pull, and even if it was I don't understand how talking about something suddenly means I need to pay the person who owns the intellectual property of the thing I'm talking about. I think it would make criticism less likely and put us in an even worse situation than today, when large corporations often use the DMCA to take down clearly fair-use criticism. Just a further stifling of speech.
Also, fair use has been around since the eighteenth century, even if in the US the US 1976 Copyright Act made fair use statutory.
One of my favorite details of this movie is that the semi-antagonistic ENCOM executive Dillinger uses emacs [0], while Flynn uses vi. Clearly, the VFX artist who made the film's UNIX shells had a preference!
(Dillinger is also shown running "ENCOM Linux" -- is the VFX artist a BSD user? As he cycles through his buffers, we see a split second of `hanoi-unix`; definitely not the type to pay attention during boring board meetings!)
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-86iKkn6k0#t=3m55
The artist, JT Nimoy, was an Emacs user but still thought it would be fun to set up a dichotomy--some fun details on this blog. A few more details were shared at a talk at an HN meetup several years ago.
https://jtnimoy.cc/item.php%3Fhandle=14881671-tron-legacy.ht...
> The artist, JT Nimoy, was an Emacs user but still thought it would be fun to set up a dichotomy--some fun details on this blog
I don't see any details about setting up a dichotomy in that article (just that the author was a happy Emacs user). Or maybe that was in that HN meetup you mention?
and the comment there about using emacs for the different shells in different modes possibly explains the un-resolved nit in TFA about proportional and monospaced fonts in different areas
> Killing some processes to free up memory
This section is disregarding a key lore element, the inhabitants of the grid are programs. Killing a process in this context more likely has an interpretation of an attempt to stop an individual such as the villain Clu. I would say an alternative explanation is is more story based, with Kevin Flynn trying to stop Clu from the outside world but being unable to and instead taking the last resort of entering the grid when he knows it would be dangerous.
That's a good idea, but remember that, up until CLU's outright betrayal, Kevin had no reason to be concerned, and after it, he had no way back into meat space to run those commands.
Also -- unrelated, but a nitpick of the article -- Kevin was using the laser to come and go from the grid for a while before he got stuck there. The laser would have been pretty well-tested by the time he made/edited the last will and testament, so the article's explanation that it was his first use of the tech doesn't make sense. (He could have just spontaneously decided to update it though, which isn't too far fetched)
As an aside the Daft Punk soundtrack that accompanies this film is an absolute masterpiece. I think it's their best work.
It's such a shame the film doesn't live up to it's own soundtrack.
There are a lot of movies explain their themes outright. You don't have to try that hard to remember what they're fighting for in the Incredibles for example. But what is the theme of Tron Legacy? I had to get Google to explain that the movie is about perfectionism. That's an interesting theme but I didn't realize that in the theater.
As someone in music, yeah, that was one of the best movie soundtrack’s of all time (not much like it in movies beforehand).
But kind of disagree about the film, think it was under appreciated. It isn’t a masterpiece, but the acting, the overall story, and the visuals were really good. And yeah, those dark Tron-visuals combined with the pulsing, digital daft-punk music really worked (at least for me), and when I want to get pulled into a different world, will rewatch that film.
Yeah I still rewatch it occasionally. I feel like it’s full of missed opportunities, and you have to shut your brain off, but it’s still good fun.
I think of the film as a Daft Punk music video, and from that perspective it's great.
Made more or less this point at the time. As a movie? Eh, it was fine. As a Daft Punk music video? Easily their best.
Second best in my opinion. Interstella 5555 is a masterpiece.
My personal preference is Interstella 5555 is Daft Punk's best music video.
Edit: Jinx! Gracana beat my reply to an 11 hour old comment by four minutes.
I'll unjinx you by replying to you instead:
I'm aware of and like it, but prefer TRON. De gustibus non est disputandum.
Tron Legacy was, I think, only the second film soundtrack I ever purchased (first one being Lord of the Rings). It's still among my favorite music to listen to while coding; something about it just puts me in the "flow" frame of mind right away.
>It's still among my favorite music to listen to while coding
In that case you may want to try the Dark Ambient genre in general. Lots of similar vibes.
Yeah the movie’s got warts but if you allow for some plot holes and accept that young Flynn is completely 2D (maybe a meta joke for Tron? Nah just poor writing) the movie rips.
People were calling the film "a two-hour Daft Punk video" at one point. Which would be pretty cool, come to think of it.
I do think they were a pretty good choice to follow on from the original movie's electronic score by Wendy Carlos.
Related, Interstella 5555 is actually Daft Punk's Discovery album as a one-hour animated movie.
Tron 1 for the plot, Tron 2 for daft punk, Tron 3... we don't talk about.
I think Trent reznor did a fantastic job with the soundtrack, maybe the only person that could’ve fit in daft punks shoes
I think Tron 1 has the shallowest plot! Guy goes on an adventure to take credit for his game. The idea of MCP vs the users is good (and still topical!), but a lot of the other stuff - nods to religion, romance...they feel like afterthoughts. The point was the graphics. And that's fine! I like the movie.
Legacy, on the other hand, has a ton of depth to it! The father/son stuff. Living under the weight of expectations. The nature of perfection. Being open to the unexpected. Resistance by withdrawal. Flynn in End of Line Club - God entering the room - was probably the coolest moment in the entire franchise. And of course the visuals and soundtrack were good. The plot's a little stilted to start, but once the movie hits Flynn's arcade, it takes off. Finally, I should note that the way it was able to walk the line of being a sequel and a reboot and something new entirely is remarkable; people absolutely do not give it enough credit for that.
I liked Ares as well. People seemed to not like Leto and the fact that they rebooted again (and the fact that Tron is not in a Tron movie), but I thought the visuals were good, the soundtrack really grew on me, and there are some ideas to chew on in there as well. Think of it as a big-budget TNG episode where Data's learning about being human. Having just watched Ex Machina, it's actually an interesting companion film: both involve an embodied AI brought into existence by a megalomaniac tech bro, but Ares and Ava take very different paths based on the nature and actions of Eve and Caleb. Dillinger is a bit mustache-twirly but I think he captures the way that corporate pressures can lead people without a strong moral compass down a bad road.
Anyways, 2 and 3 are really good and I just wanna stick up for them.
Tron 3 would be fine if not for the main character. Every other character/performance is great IMO, and the Trent Reznor soundtrack. The main performance was just incredibly bad, which sinks the whole movie.
Tron 2 for Daft Punk and Michael Sheen chewing scenery.
Michael Sheen is apparently such a fan of TRON, that he might have been lucky to not negotiated himself down to a $0 pay packet - just in case someone else might have gotten the role :D
And the animated show, Tron: Uprising?
Listening to it now [1]
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lILHEnz8fTk&list=PLO6S2qKFLc...
The film looks great too. It was such a missed opportunity.
Agreed, that dark tron world is visually super interesting.
I have such a soft spot for this scene. I saw this movie in theaters when I was a high schooler, and this exact scene with Sam entering in commands piqued my curiosity to learn if it was a real thing. I eventually discovered that OS X came shipped with a bash terminal, and that I could manipulate a computer in just the same way. It really made an impact on me, which I certainly wasn't expecting when buying tickets to this film I knew nothing about.
The author notes a possible error that the laser config file never seems to get copied to the location the laser software will actually run from, but it could have been done directly from vi.
Amazing that CVE-2026-24061 is basically exactly the same vulnerability, 27 years later.
CVE-1999-0113: https://seclab.cs.ucdavis.edu/projects/testing/vulner/18.htm...
CVE-2026-24061: https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/cve-2026-24061
> something like CVE-1999-0113 (or its very recently discovered/disclosed friend CVE-2026-24061)
Interesting that you remember CVEs by ID and how they relate one to another. Do you know if they are visualization of CVEs? I'm wondering if that would help newcomers to security to get some memorable insights.
Why is this guy so obsessed with the variable vs fixed-width font, you'd think he's the guy who wrote putty or something
I'm confused. The whole point of the post, as stated in the title, is to nitpick that one movie scene. Why does the inclusion of one specific nitpick bother you when it's completely on-topic?
it's a joke: the author of the post is literally the guy who wrote PuTTY
Thank you I KNEW I recognized that domain name
I was luck to know Josh Nimoy who is responsible for a lot of this in the movie, who has since sadly passed away. Josh took great pride in the fact that he was able to put Emacs and a bunch of Unix commands in a major Hollywood blockbuster.ed
FYI, (and sorry for the intrusion since you were a friend and I only learned of this person through this HN post) but it appears that you have used their deadname (which is an unfortunate term in this case).
Thank you for identifying them though, thanks to you I learned of a badass, and I regret the loss.
Personal site: https://jtnimoy.cc/about.php.html
I'm unsure why the other comment is dead. You've seemingly deadnamed her and used the wrong pronouns.
She apparently passed away after becoming homeless due to struggling to find work because she was trans.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25660152
The funny thing about all of this to me is that, compared to most 'hacking' scenes in movies, this bit is wildly realistic, almost too good. If they were like "run upload_me" we wouldn't even be talking about it.
I’ll quickly create a GUI interface using Visual Basic to track the killer’s IP address.
you'd first have to program it to take the picture, and look back at the photographer's eye to get the reflection of the screen with the IP address on!
At some point we all have to remember that the monitor showing these commands is also an actor, and not actually a computer hooked up to a special laser that scans your body, destroys it, and pulls you into a 1980's era computer still managing to have, per the screenshot in the blog post, about 4GB of memory free in some respect.
Same as how Garrett Hedlund is neither a youthful stock owner in a computer company, nor intrinsically knows Unix shell commands.
Maybe it's a compromised sshd that dropped him in after printing the "Login incorrect".
I also wouldn’t put it past Flynn to rename ‘root’ to ‘backdoor’ as a joke.
I like the fun in this article, but some nitpicks don't seem right to me. This kinda reminds me of cinemasins.
1) I would assume his dad talked about always having a backdoor as a kid, so that's why Sam tried backdoor as the second username
2) temp.cfg isn't an unreasonable config filename. We don't know what the source code is. My guess would be that he hardcoded temp.cfg in the source because something wasn't working, and continued working on the actual bug
3) Killing processes to free memory? He reached for a kill -9 and then a regular kill. That hints to me that he recognized those two processes and knew -9 was required only for the first. He probably checked to see if he had enough memory, saw that he did, and then started cleaning up the processes.
4) Linux and SolarOS? Couldn't the other terminal just have been sshed to another box? That seems most reasonable to me.
I for one, am absolutely fascinated with Tron Legacy. It was the first Tron movie I saw as a kid in middle school. In some ways, it's responsible for the trajectory of my career.
Apart from the obvious reasons about the DP soundtrack and the visuals, I love the theme of chasing perfection and the way it backfires.
Kevin Flynn says to CLU in the end "The thing about perfection, is that it's unknowable. You don't know that because I didn't know it when I created you" and I love the fact that it says how we can put our best and our worst into what we create. That we're not just responsible for lifeless machines, that it's more than that. And it's a hauntingly beautiful thought.
I doubt they put this much thought into it, but I'd say the backdoor is actually the "-n" flag and this is some modified version of login that just does setuid(0) for whatever you put after.
> and squeezed a lot more juice out of it than I’d realised was there to be squozen.
I barked out loud when I read this.
The style of the desktop in the screenshot looks a lot like the XWindow manager twm:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twm
If you like that general esthetic, you can try that today in your GNU/Linux distro.
SunOS 4 did not have /proc, that was a BSD-based system.
Interesting indeed. The bit about Solaris -> Solar is nice/funny. I guess its an update to some system or kernel config file.
Or for super hacker points, edit appropriate binary using adb :)
This is something that really upset me going into Tron Ares. I had a blast rewatching Legacy beforehand and picking out somewhat realistic shell commands. Ares ditches a lot of these shell commands in favor of everything being a script. `./start_ares_program`, etc. IIRC, we still see a `systemctl` or two in the movie, but definitely less fun than Legacy.
Weirdly, the shell commands seemed perfectly fine as helper tool scripts (my ~/bin is littered with these to this day) but the syntax highlighting is what exceeded my disbelief.
I worked on this movie, mainly from a CentOS shell, and I approve this nitpick.
don't stop there....
It’s not as interesting as it sounds, I wrote a lot of code and moved a lot of assets around for the compositing of all the glow on the suits on to the live action and CG elements… basically I was doing a lot of logistics work making sure outsourced work from around the world was arriving in the right places at the right times and with some amount of QC having been done ahead of time.
So I got to look at Tron: Legacy mainly from within a tcsh session, but could look over the shoulder of the artists and leads doing the actually pretty stuff.
whenever I join a new firm (usually as a DevOps or SRE) I ask the Linux team which server in the firm has the longest uptime.
Invariably, I then send them this post where it shows the uptime from the host in the movie (I'll let the reader click through to see the time): https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/9041/whose-hardwar...
If you're curious, the longest uptime I've had someone report back was in excess of 4 years.
P.S. I also remember working at a big investment bank and the oldest Good Till Cancel order in the mainframe was a Buy CSCO @ $6 from the late 1990s (this was in 2010).
until quite recently I dealt with a machine that had uptime in excess of 16,000 days. Before anyone panics, it was on a closed network. It was a second hand machine and we were very worried that if it was shut down the disk wouldn't recover, hence just not touching it. It was in a hut in the back of beyond so exceedingly tedious to replace if we needed to.
I always remember when, as a young geek writing games for my C64, I was thrilled when I saw the Terminator and a lot of the code scrolling past in its HUD was 6502 assembly code!
Now I'm watching this thread for the consultant hired by the film to show up and explain why each of those goofs was caused by the director explicitly asking for them...
I'm purely guessing, but I can imagine quite vividly how some of these things might have happened. Probably, a consultant was asked to generate a plausible version of some of these elements and they were quite careful in doing so. They delivered material (text transcripts etc.) to a graphics designer who was tasked to turn this into a cool-looking animated sequence. Software like AfterEffects doesn't naturally emulate terminal behavior and that's how the perfect word wrapping and proportional fonts were introduced. That whole animation was then essentially cut into the movie in post. There's no direct interaction between Sam and the console shown, only his reactions.
It's interesting that the terminal window running top does have a proper non-proportional font. This is likely an actual screen recording of a Linux system terminal pasted into the animation.
That whole sequence is less than 30 seconds packed with information presented on a screen together with unimportant elements that are borderline confusing to non-technical audiences. I would have forgiven the art direction if they had reduced the visual complexity of this screen layout into something more cartoonish to make the story clearer.
Simon writes:
> To [switch users], /bin/login would need to be setuid, and it certainly isn’t on Linux... _Perhaps_ Solaris (or SolarOS) is different?
The login command is indeed setuid root on SunOS 4, to which the movie pays homage, as its documented behavior is "to [permanently] change from one userID to another". The su command explicitly means "temporarily switch to a new user ID".
Here are copies of the SunOS 4 manual pages, if you're curious:
http://www.typewritten.org/Manual/Sun/SunOS/4.0.2/man1/login...
http://www.typewritten.org/Manual/Sun/SunOS/4.0.2/man1/su.ht...
And here's a link to the relevant bits of the SunOS 4.1.3 source code:
https://github.com/Arquivotheca/SunOS-4.1.3/blob/2e8a93c3946...
this makes me remember Trinity doing the power plant escalation hack in the 2nd Matrix movie
the code apparently was legit, I think it was an SSH exploit
(btw that movie is TWENTY-SEVEN YEARS OLD)
I was in the theater when that first played. Half of the theater were cheering, some standing up. Many movie-goers were very confused. Yes she used nmap [1] and then sshnuke [2] and given she was hacking a power company it would not surprise me if that exploit worked in some utility companies today.
[1] - https://nmap.org/movies/
[2] - https://blog.doyensec.com/2025/03/04/exploitable-sshd.html
The first Matrix is 27 years old; Reloaded is 23 years old.
lol. I remember seeing LLLSDL go by when I originally saw the movie. The funny but is I had just written the internet draft for LLSD, so I was wondering g if someone on the writing staff had been following our work at Linden Lab. More likely it was a coincidence and all the L's meant "Laser."
As I pointed out to the OP on Mastodon, I very much believe that it was a reference to Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, where they filmed a big door, and the original laser sequence from the first TRON movie.
LLL also made an in-house video when they were filming the original movie - https://www.spyculture.com/dept-energy-invent-making-video/
Very fun analysis!
The video tech one of my startups made was used to do "On-Set Video Playback" exactly like this for a bunch of movies and TV shows. We didn't make the product for that purpose and only learned this was a thing when a playback company contacted us asking for a change in the firmware to enable external synchronization to a 48fps source clock.
Since it wasn't a difficult change and the use case was neat, we made a custom version for them. That's how I got to know some of the people who do this work and even got to visit some movie and TV sets. So, based on that, here are some insights relating to TFA.
The first thing to know is on-set video playback for film and TV production is a specialized service because it can require arcane knowledge to properly interface various video displays with 24 fps film cameras. This used to involve a lot of custom modified displays, hand-built or modified interface boxes and various arcane cables/adapters but it's gotten somewhat easier with the advent of variable frame rate displays and GPUs.
Since time is money on-set, productions just hire this out on a project basis to one of a few specialized firms in Hollywood. As it's a niche thing, these firms are usually just a handful of knowledgeable A/V guys who've acquired a variety of customized interfacing gear over many projects along with different types of displays and have practical experience in making it work quickly and reliably with various cinema cameras.
There are two main parts to a project: 1) Making the screen look right on camera, and 2) Getting the right images on the screen at the right time.
1) Making it look right breaks down into three parts: A) Getting the source on the screen, B) Synchdronizing the source with the cinema camera so there's no screen flicker or rolling, and C) Adjusting the screen's brightness, contrast, gamma, saturation, etc to 'read' well on-camera along with minimizing any light glare and reflections. Depending on the ambient scene brightness and the camera's shutter speed, iris, etc these adjustments can sometimes be more extreme than the display's native adjustments allow. The playback team has tools for this including stand-alone signal processing boxes that range from simple knob adjustments all the way to 3D LUTs that can remap any pixel value to any other. They might also use old-school tricks like covering the screen with neutral density film similar to window tinting.
2) Getting the right images on the screen at the right time breaks into two parts. A) Creating the source imagery, and B) Triggering the playback on cue. For most projects the production will just have the playback team create the source imagery. The only exceptions tend to be shows where on-screen shots are frequent and integral to the story. In those cases, the on-screen content will usually be the responsibility of a designer working under the production's art director and the playback team's job will be getting it on the screen. The on-screen imagery for Tron: Legacy is pretty minimal and contained to a few scenes so it was probably designed and created by the playback team as a per-hour line item on their project bid.
In those cases, the playback team will receive the relevant script pages and a few storyboards. Based on those and perhaps a phone call with a line producer or AD, they'll make some comp stills and send them over for pre-approval. Once approved, they'll do the actual source content and send clips for approval. Depending on the production, this may just be signed off by the line-producer or an AD but, in other cases, the director will want to at least see it. If the playback team is providing the display they'll send over photos so the production designer and set dressers know what will be coming.
On the shoot day the team gets there early and coordinates with the set dressers to get the display in place, then electricians for power and finally the DP and camera crew to test sync, brightness, etc. The type of content going on-screen and how interactive it needs to be will determine if they've already pre-recorded the source and just play it back on-set, use an interactive video source to sequence or animate the content or actually use a "live" source. They tend to use whatever software can do the job, is easy, reliable and flexible. This can range from as basic as Powerpoint to more sophisticated presentation tools to scripting tools and, when necessary, even custom command line apps they've cobbled together over the years. For video clips, they'll record what they can and then modify or composite elements together with standard tools like Photoshop and AfterEffects.
In the case of Tron: Legacy, it's hard to tell if they pre-recorded the sequences from a Linux computer and triggered playback in steps on-set or used a live Linux computer since, done properly, they can look essentially identical. There's a strong preference to pre-record everything and sequence or animate it for playback but sometimes that's not possible due to keyboard/mouse activity. The reason is that any live computer might crash or respond at slightly different speeds from take to take complicating editing, especially when there's repeated re-takes or on-set heat from lights, etc. Power on set can also sometimes be from generators and very dirty, even on studio sound stages and back lots. Any delay due to playback not being ready, or worse killing a take, can have severe reputational consequences.
In cases where a live computer is unavoidable, the strong preference is for someone from the playback team to do all the operation off-camera while the actor uses a dummy keyboard and mouse. This usually works fine because there's rarely a need to hold on an all-in-one medium shot showing the screen and keyboard/mouse during actual interaction. On-screen interaction is almost always shown in an insert close-up of the just the screen and bezel. Either way, the sound of keypresses and clicks are dubbed in later by foley artists just like footsteps and doors closing, etc. The absolute nightmare scenario for any playback artist is when a live computer is required that an actor actually operates. It never goes well. Not because the actors are dummies but because they have to focus first on hitting their marks, saying their lines and actually, you know, acting. Under those conditions, typing the exact same techno-gibberish in exactly the same way, with the same timing, while repeating lines over 30 takes would likely give most of us trouble too.
I forgot to add that in the case of Tron: Legacy's on-screen graphics, the fact they're so good is probably due to a combination of two things. First, the director cared enough to make it credible instead of just plausible. Blocking out and shooting a couple extra rounds of "type, read, then react" can easily add another hour to an already packed schedule which equates to at least thousands of extra dollars and increased schedule risk. There's always pressure from producers to just trim "that techie stuff" from the script.
Second, IMHO, it's likely that the playback team decided to over achieve and spend more time on the project than they were paid for. The guys I met were almost all computer nerd, sci-fi fan, film buffs and this kind of over-achieving occurred fairly often, even on projects where the director didn't care to do more than "plausible", when the playback team liked the project, they'd work late to make it as good as they could. They know at least their fellow computer nerd, sci-fi fan, computer buffs will appreciate it even if no else does. In one case I know of first-hand, the playback team successfully pitched the production on doing a more involved sequence than initially written to make it more realistic.
While the article credits "the filmmakers", the level of Unix veracity and depth seen in those on-screens was almost certainly thanks to one or two playback engineers going above and beyond when the script direction probably just said something as vague as [HE LOGS IN AND LOOKS FOR TRACES OF HIS FATHER, THEN ACTIVATES THE LASER] combined with the director liking the look enough to keep it in.
Great comment, thank you.
I have only seen The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011) once, but fifteen years on I distinctly remember a scene where Daniel Craig is trying to use a Mac and accidentally drags Safari off the Dock. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W84AhBMRNOY#t=1m25s
Good luck finding his will in the home directory of the backdoor account.
I think we can assume any hacker worth his salt has a dead man trigger. I imagine that if he doesn't reset it before a given period elapses then a script imports that will and testament text file into LaTeX and emails a lovingly rendered PDF off to the local lawyer.
Since logging into the backdoor account produced a `#` prompt instead of `$`, it was uid 0, so the last will and testament was either in `/root` or in `/`, depending on how the non-backdoor root account was set up.
Plus, if Flynn was running those commands while logged in as "backdoor" rather than while logged in as "root", the text displayed on-screen specifically says that the backdoor account doesn't have a home directory configured so it would treat `/` as the home directory. Which would mean the computer now has a `/last_will_and_testament.txt` file. That's pretty prominent and attention-drawing. It's going to be found by anyone who investigates that computer.
Given what we learn about Flynn, the will was in fact found by the only person he cared to find it.