Love the movie, but the entire premise is flawed almost from moment 1

I see the film as a fantasy, like another computer based film from the era "Electric Dreams". It is just exploiting people's naivety about computers at the time as well as exploring what if scenarios regardless of how silly they might seem.

The idea they would lock David in a sick bay rather than an actual cell is pretty silly too, he would be treated like a spy which is what they allude to in the movie but never go all the way with.

I don't think he would even been able to book tickets on flights let alone change grade's on the school's system.

Yeah, the 90s send up "The Net" was just as goofy.

A 'system' can't be 'highly encrypted' (also, what do you mean by 'highly'?), only data can.

Second, what you claim 'we all know' is wrong. David did not want to 'hack into' any system, secondly, the system was PROTOVISION, a game-making corporation. He wanted to PLAY those games, not HACK. Even if he HAD to eventually hack at some point, (which meant something different back then anyway), it was just a tool, a side effect, it was not his goal, it was not what he WANTED. His want was to play.

No one mentions Pentagon in this movie, by the way, and plenty of people have hacked into these surprisingly lax-security big tech, government and corporate systems WITHOUT PROBLEMS.

Also, even if you were right (and you aren't, because they didn't even think of 'encryption' that early, at least not too much, as it would also have taken so much computing power for basically nothing but more 'beefed-up security', which, again, most corporations and governmental entities didn't care or know much about back in the day), a proper hacker wouldn't just try passwords anyway (which actually are not 'laughable', they are actually surprisingly common - it was VERY, very common even in the nineties and '00s to not change the default router/server password, or to use 'password' or the username as the password - what IS laughable, is that there's only one logon, not 'login and password').

A proper hacker would use all available methods, which include things like SOCIAL ENGINEERING, which is still the weak link in many corporations and probably governmental entities as well. All this 'social stuff' always makes the beefiest security incredibly weak, when the secretary can just be charmed to give a tiny piece of seemingly useless info that can be used to gain a bit more importan info from someone else, and so on.

PLEASE read Kevin Mitnick's books and watch his interviews to realize how full of - no offence - manure your post is.

You could be right , and that fat guy mentions in the movie that his customers "add security on"
But in general security in the early 80s was laughable.
no one had home computers , so 'online crime' didnt exist .
default passwords reigned supreme
Security techniques grew at the same time as the rise of hacking , like an arms race . still is really.

I've seem plenty of attacks even recently where I'm thinking "how the hell did they not notice repeated failed attempts and lock out??"

What I thought was weird though was that David (and the systyem he accessed) only seemed to require a password , but no username.

unless its just taken as read he's trying "admin" as a username . Even having one of those these days would be bad idea.

It's like Badham's other films from his 'Techno Trilogy': Blue Thunder and Short Circuit.

I know all the technical stuff about helicopters and why some of the stuff in Blue Thunder is flawed also, but I still think it's the best film about helicopters ever made. And Short Circuit... could never happen, but clearly a sentient AI emerges, a new true life form, and yet it's treated so lightly by everyone in the movie.

Just a bunch of movies and for entertainment only, not to be taken seriously.

Whats flawed is they didnt show the username password "duet".
It was like the system had one user account

His IP wasnt an issue if dialling in by phone , and that could have been diverted/hidden

Yeah, it's pretty laughable. Getting top level access to this supercomputer that controlled the nuclear arsenal was about as easy as hacking some boomer's Yahoo mail account using some social engineering. LOL.

I could see someone leaving a back door into a system, but I'm pretty sure a computer genius wouldn't make it possible to get that kind of access with a single word password and make it the name of his kid. There are a couple of other things that are almost as ridiculous.

I still liked the movie a lot, though. I was so jealous of that computer setup Broderick had as a kid in the early 80s. And Broderick actually made being a computer geek seem kind of cool.

Yes it isn’t a realistic premise but most movies are based on “what if this happened?” and create scenarios that hopefully make sense or at least suspend your disbelief for a couple of hours.

If not, we’d all be watching documentaries and nothing else.

How boring.