Whenever there’s a computer in a movie, it can’t just be a normal interface. It’s got to be a big, colorful, elaborate holographic one, with lots of bells and whistles and absolutely no connection whatsoever to anything resembling reality. At least, not yet. The government is working on making it happen.
Yes, we are once again making fun of something insane that DARPA is actually throwing money at because, well, read this and try not to wonder how many times they’ve watched Hackers:
Attacks would be translated into rich display graphics and 3-D visualizations so it’s impossible to miss them as they happen. Military specialists could defend against them by literally dragging blocks of code from a virtual shelf or marketplace similar to Apple’s App Store onto their network. They may one day even use 3-D visors like the Oculus Rift, a video-gaming headset, to launch these operations in a fully immersive virtual reality.
Essentially, The Lawnmower Man. DARPA wants to make mid-’90s cheese real. Hell, why not. They’re already hacking cars.
To be fair, they have a point. Currently, it’s difficult to know when a computer system is under attack as it’s happening. You’ve got to study packets of data, sometimes line by line, or analyze other information quickly without a clear, simple way to understand it. The idea is that by using this interface, cyber attacks will be intercepted and dealt with more quickly, thus giving us an advantage in any particular war they may or may not already be fighting with other governments.
It would also create an alarm system, something we don’t actually currently have, which would be highly useful. Finally, it would standardize all those ridiculous Hollywood computers, so we can stop making fun of them and focus on the plot and acting of bad movies to make fun of those, like the gods intended. Truly, no better use of taxpayer money can be conceived of.