Nmap usage considered but rejected for Tron: Legacy

[Fyodor <fyodor () insecure org>]

Hi folks.  Perhaps last year's biggest geek film was Tron Legacy, and
special effects artist Josh Nimoy has finally received clearance to
talk about the work he did there.  Interestingly, he considered using
Nmap but decided that it didn't meet the needs of the character
involved (killing a process).  I suppose we can't complain,
considering how lucky Nmap has been in this respect
(http://nmap.org/movies.html).  And at least he was able to get Emacs
and Linux into the movie!  Here is what he says:

   I take representing digital culture in film very seriously in lieu
   of having grown up in a world of very badly researched user
   interface greeble. I cringed during the part in Hackers (1995) when
   a screen saver with extruded "equations" is used to signify that
   the hacker has reached some sort of neural flow or ambiguous
   destination. I cringed for Swordfish and Jurassic Park as well. I
   cheered when Trinity in The Matrix used nmap and ssh (and so did
   you). Then I cringed again when I saw that inevitably, Hollywood
   had decided that nmap was the thing to use for all its hacker
   scenes (see Bourne Ultimatum, Die Hard 4, Girl with Dragon Tattoo,
   The Listening, 13: Game of Death, Battle Royale, Broken Saints, and
   on and on). In Tron, the hacker was not supposed to be snooping
   around on a network; he was supposed to kill a process. So we went
   with posix kill and also had him pipe ps into grep. I also ended up
   using emacs eshell to make the terminal more l33t. The team was
   delighted to see my emacs performance--splitting the editor into
   nested panes and running different modes. I was tickled that I got
   emacs into a block buster movie. I actually do use emacs irl, and
   although I do not subscribe to alt.religion.emacs, I think that's
   all incredibly relevant to the world of Tron.

The article includes many beautiful special effects shots from the
movie:

http://jtnimoy.net/workviewer.php?q=178

Cheers,
Fyodor

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