What follows gets quite geeky at times.
He is not incorrect.
Theres not much of it, but its still a point of pride to the man.
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As for the film itself?
The truth behind this is its not actually that interesting.
Swordfish, you may recall, stars Hugh Jackman as one of the worlds best computer hackers.
Like all computer hackers, hes a man, and hes a man positively dripping with testosterone.
Oh, and hes been banned from hacking computers come to that.
That ban is broken with no consequence at all.
But just how good a hacker is he, behind his fumes of manliness?
Thats just what were going to find out.
He has a broken marriage.
He has a daughter.
Ah, but thats instantly off the agenda.
Im not here to suck your dick, Berry pretty much straight away explains.
This is not the last bad penis joke in this article, I should warn you.
And like the host onThe Crystal Maze, Travolta sets Jackman a little task.
Firstly, this is a Department Of Defense data pipe that needs to be hacked into.
And there is DES 128 bit encrypted security, almosttauntinghackers to try and break in.
In 1997, the NIST announced that it was looking for a replacement for the DES standard.
In 2001,Swordfishcame out.
Nonetheless, the decision is made to up the difficulty level for Hugh Hackman.
Halle Berry, meanwhile, looks.
She knows whats coming.
Jackman mumbles about nothing being impossible.
Travolta grins, and springs his trap.
Thats after necking a drink and getting acquainted with Helga.
At no point, to my recollection, was he being fellated at any time.
I have the Blu-ray of said film, and like to think I would have spotted it.
Jackman, however, has 60 seconds.
60 seconds to perform a near-impossible hack.
All the while whilst Helga pays his X-man some special attention.
So, were down to 46 seconds.
That would make sense.
In fact, its hard to think of anything more logical.
This looks like the C programming language that Jackman is working with, but obviously the assignments are wrong.
As we all know, char buffer[200] is an array of 200 bytes.
they are assigning it an IP address!
An IP address!Its not being assigned a byte.
It could, of course, be an array of bytes were it enclosed in double quotes.
IP addresses too, of course, cant have numbers bigger than 255 in them.
Consider that added to the rap sheet.
So what chance does Jackman have of completing his task with shonky coding like that?
He gets his first access denied glitch notice 13 seconds after he bothers to get started.
Oh, hang on, no it isnt…
Other activities are occurring concurrently still.
That is the last penis joke in this article.
More access denied messages follow, interspersed by images of Jackman smacking mostly the middle row of his keyboard.
Thus, he hits all of them.
Furthermore, at one stage he claps his hands.
This does not achieve anything.
Jackman does complete the hack however, but not until 68 seconds after he begins.
Fortunately, Travolta was not serious about killing him.
At least not at the end of act one of the movie.
Undeterred, I pushed on.
It will use Vernam encryption, and 512-bit encryption.
This time, Jackman is adamant.
Thats definitely not possible, he firmly tells Travolta.
What if I were to tell you Id give you $10m?, Travolta retorts.
!, says Jackman, swiftly agreeing to said impossible job.
Berry introduces Jackman to his posh multi-screen system.
She explains to him that it has a DS3 connection, allowing access to seven different networks simultaneously.
Oh, and that to use it, he has to crack the central encryption.
By the look on Jackmans face, he is not.
But there is some code involved.
Obviously, the exact purpose depends on which UNIX platform is being deployed.
If you ask me, theyve overlooked the potential educational aspect of this film altogether.
Even Vinnie, look…
But tsk what kind of lessons does it teach the computer programmers and hackers of the future?
Bad ones, Id suggest.
Im sure thats a lot closer to real life.
In the meantime, hang your head in shame, Swordfish.
Youve not just let us down, but youve let yourself and Travoltas perfectly pruned face foliage down too.
Very special thanks to Wojciech Bojdol and Marcelo Vani for their help with this piece.
