[Movie] Untraceable

I have been watching way too many movies past 2 weeks, cannot even remember many of their names now. Last weekend I planned to go to Salem, but ended up in Fry’s (Wilsonville). I bought a Wii there and am thoroughly enjoying the games in it, but more about that in a different post. Amidst all these I am trying to finish up my office work too. See how hard working, I am? ;).

In this post, I want to talk about the movie Untraceable. I just finished watching it. My initial impression - "Great, that was interesting!". But now, after some 10 minutes, I realize all the holes and stupidity in that movie. But before I get to that, let me tell you what this movie is about.

******** Warning: Spoilers ahead ***********

Diane Lane plays the role of a computer specialist in FBI cyber crime division. One day she stumbles upon (no, not using StumbleUpon!) an underground sicko site, where somebody live-streams a cat die. That "somebody" doesn’t stop with the cat (obviously…else we won’t have this movie), he moves on to streaming humans die. The crooked but brilliant mind of the killer comes up with contraptions that are linked to the number of people watching the deaths online; More the people login to watch, faster those devices work to kill their subjects. Does the term contraption remind you of SAW?? It did for me. Coming back to the plot: Lane, along with her colleague, starts investigating and soon they both get in to trouble. Her colleague gets killed next — live-streamed, with millions watching. Now comes the big climax, where Lane figures it out all and exposes the criminal, but gets in to his trap herself. Does she fight it out and comes out alive? Of course, she does. What else can we expect from movies! There you go, the complete plot of Untraceable.

No doubt I enjoyed this movie. I started watching this movie with out knowing anything about the story/plot, didn’t even know what it was about. The moment I saw Diane Lane go in to the computer room and start talking about trojans, I got hooked Personally I love these stuff, but I am sure any computer professional would have felt the same. I also loved the technical talk that happened at the beginning of the movie - at least it made sense. But, when Diane Lane told her superior how the killer had "set up a botnet and keeps a mirror of the site in each compromised system and thats why the site keeps popping up again and again even after her repeated tries to shut it down", I was like "Hold on! Hold on! Is it technically possible? Lemme think…he is streaming a real live video, encoded and being distributed online, from a Russian server…AND what is this mirroring thing and botnet thing she is mixing up? AND what about the DNS refresh latency? And what about the live HD quality video…". Before my slow brain cogs could move, latch and find an answer, the next scene started and I forgot the question itself . Do you see what happened? The movie, to its credit, is not slow anywhere. So it keeps throwing all these technical jargon around, but zips on to the next scene so fast, people don’t get time to think about the technical feasibility at all. This is good tactics and has worked perfectly well for this movie. As I said earlier, I didn’t start thinking about the logic holes and the stupid scenes until the movie ended.

Now for some real bloopers:

• TTL being low. What the hell is Diane Lane talking about? Unless I have forgotten my TCP/IP basics, TTL is just a measure to determine when the packets need to be dropped. If you keep a lower value for it, like 1, the packet will be discarded in the next hop. Lower value doesn’t mean it travels faster, as shown in the movie.
• Botnet thing. Though the idea seems logical, I doubt its feasibility. Botnets are a bunch of compromised machines with agents running in each. You can use them to organize an attack (DoS) on a site or something, but streaming LIVE video is kind of far fetched, if not impossible (as far as my limited knowledge goes). You need to have a super-duper trojan developed for creating such a smart zombie network. The botnet should be kind of fault-tolerant, in the sense there has to be a real time way of a zombie picking up from another dead zombie. I probably have to think about this,  but the idea is good. Even then, a simple analysis of a compromised machine will tell you where the video is coming from, since it is a live feed. This botnet should not make the feed source totally untraceable, as shown in the movie.
• Cool server run off the basement. It is shown to take a load of nearly 17 million people at one point of time, watching the live video stream. Man…that must be one hell of a server, with an amazing pipe.
• Russian servers. The servers are supposed to be in Russia. FBI has no jurisdiction, ok…understandable, but can’t they talk to the Russian counterparts to find the server and shut it down? Or FBI thought Russia wouldn’t be interested in a bunch of Americans being killed live over a site?
• The killer pawns the car. I have never seen a car hacked like this before. The killer shuts down the car computer mid-way and Diane Lane’s car stops. STOPS! How can a car stop just because the on-board computer stopped? And, I seriously doubt the technical possibility of doing this car computer hack — unless you have access to the car’s CAN backbone and have the proprietary (I guess) interface software available on hand, it is next to impossible. At least, if the killer is shown to have used an electro magnetic pulse to disrupt the car electronics, it would have been somewhat believable.
• Diane Lane must be deaf. The killer is shown to be in the back seat, but still Diane Lane couldn’t hear him talk to her over the on-board speaker phone. Duh!
• Lane falls in the trap. If I were Diane Lane I would NEVER have come back in to a car that just got hacked by one of the most elite hackers around. What made her come back to the car, neatly close the door and all, when she just escaped out of it in the previous scene?
• Villain gets beaten by the leading actor. In the climax, Diane Lane is hanging from a rope upside down, with her hands tied, her mouth gagged. The killer keeps a gardening device under her. Computer is connected to the pulley so that as more people login, Lane is released to fall on that device and be shredded in to pieces. Not a bad trick, right? The execution (no pun intended) of this scene is laughable. You need to watch this scene to see how stupid it looked. Why didn’t she remove the gag from her mouth? It is not like her hands were tied behind or something. Man, I didn’t understand that at all. And, this is a big **AND**, why the hell did the killer keep her near a poll when she had this much mobility? The killer was shown a 1337 hax0r through out the movie, but this one scene blew that cool image.
• Diane Lane flashing her badge. After getting free and killing the killer, why did the movie end with Diane Lane showing her badge on the camera?? Was she afraid the people who were logged in would take her to be a killer rather than a licensed-killer (read, COP)?? If I were her, I would have got all the IPs that have logged on to the site, from his computer. Or at least, tell something like "You sickos…watching snuff films is bad for health!" to the camera so that all the people who were watching heard her. None of that, she flashes her badge as if she just won it beating the killer in a WWE match…*sigh*

Another interesting thing I noticed is, through out the movie you never see Linux (or some form of Unix). The FBI computer specialist uses…can you guess?….Windows VISTA. And the elite hacker uses……I bet you won’t get this!………Windows XP Oh man…haven’t you guys ever used Linux before? I shudder to think how ELITEEEEE the killer would have been if only he had used Linux!

Hey…its been ages since I wrote a movie review. Its actually good that I wrote this post immediately after watching the movie, when the movie is fresh in my mind and I have the enthusiasm to finish up this post I know how many posts I missed when I decided to write up something first thing in the morning! Laziness is a big killer, I tell you…

BTW, if my review got you interested in the movie, you can watch it online below Do let me know what you think of this movie.

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