Die Hard 4.0.0.1a

I went to see Die Hard 4 this evening - I am refusing to call it Die Hard 4.0 as there is no need for the decimal place! I was keen to see this at the cinema, mainly because I was not old enough to see any of the previous three Die Hard films on the big screen.

DH4’s plot sees Bruce Willis do battle with a cyber criminal who plans to bring the whole of America down via a laptop and broadband internet connection. Naturally, all the Yanks are thrown into a state of emergency when their beloved technology turns on them. If this happened in real life, I would probably watch it on BBC News 24 from the safety of my English home, laughing at them! :o)

Working in the I.T. industry myself, I noticed some obvious flaws in the film. I’ll list a few here. To be honest, the movie was so full of errors it would probably be easier to list what they got right!

• Many of the WAN IP addresses shown in the film were actually LAN ones, and contained octets values of 800+. They can only go up to 255.
• It was mentioned that the baddies may download the whole of the American citizen system (bank, insurance, health details, etc) onto a removable hard drive. It’s not like you can transfer this amount of data onto your USB memory stick! If they could find a portable device capable of holding petabytes of information, the time it would take to transfer would be far too long for a villain hell bent on world domination!
• And even if they did transfer it successfully, it would be encrypted.
• You would also have thought that even the Americans would have secondary backups!
• The hijacking of everyone’s webcam also amused me.
• As well as the fake footage of the Capitol Building blowing up. This was done as a serious scene in DH4, but Austin Powers 2 did it tongue-in-cheek (with The White House) almost 10 years ago!

The film did leave me with something though - a fear of pressing the “Delete” button on my keyboard. You never know if there is a bomb hidden in the room...