History Main / EverythingIsOnline

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* ''{{Series/Probe}}'''s "[[Recap/ProbeComputerLogic Computer Logic]]": Someone is able to turn televisions and radios on and off at will, HackTheTrafficLights, and make neon lights explode. [[spoiler:In the next half of the episode, it's revealed to be an {{AI}} named Crossover, who has been given access to the power company and it is apparently able to control electronics by adjusting how much power is sent to them.]]

This trope is usually how an [[AIIsACrapshoot Evil Computer]] manages to subjugate humanity: By shutting down or reprogramming everything electrical in the world, from nuclear missiles to [[SinisterSurveillance street cameras]] to light bulbs.

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%%* Mocked in [[http://drmcninja.com/archives/comic/25p104/ this]] ''Webcomic/TheAdventuresOfDrMcninja'' strip.
%%** And more cleanly subverted [[http://drmcninja.com/archives/comic/26p21/ here]].

** It's less bad about this in the original Tokusatsu source material, ''Series/DenkouChoujinGridman''. Sometimes the scale or magnitude of the virus of the week is a bit high, but they never infect something that isn't at least plausibly computer-connected.

** Turned up to eleven during the 2020 United States presidential election when it was proven that Dominion voting machines connected to the internet could be surreptitiously monitored ''and the vote totals changed in real-time'' using techniques so trivial that anybody reading this is theoretically capable of doing it using standard features built into the Windows operating system.

** Turned up to eleven during the 2020 United States presidential election when it was proven that Dominion voting machines connected to the internet could be surreptitiously monitored ''and the vote totals changed in real-time'' using techniques so trivial that anybody reading this is theoretically capable of doing it using common features built into the Windows operating system.

** Turned up to eleven during the 2020 United States presidential election when it was proven that vote counting machines connected to the internet could be monitored ''and the vote totals changed in real-time'' using trivial "hacking" techiques.

** Keep in mind, outside of the obviously-supernatural elements, this episode's events are actually pretty believable nowadays, unlike when it first came out. Networked coffee makers and Internet-connected door locks are widely available. Motorized flag poles are also a thing, though they aren't as common. These days, it's pretty easy to imagine a computer-savvy elementary school student noticing various underused "smart" devices throughout a school, and offering to set them up to make things easier for the staff.

* The direct-to-video sequel ''War Games 2'' plays it straight. When RIPLEY gets control, it can view through every CCTV camera in the world (apparently), and [[HackTheTrafficLights control traffic lights]], and somehow make a UAV travel from the Middle East to eastern Canada in less than an hour. The main character books a plane ticket to Paris online. ''In 1983''.

** TEMPEST and all manner of passive and active sensing systems have existed for a while. Similarly, the old-school [=UK=] [=TV=] detector vans (if they really existed) used simple tricks to spot even televisions that had been turned off and unplugged (less useful nowadays with vastly more pervasive use of electronics). However, reading your screen or your keystrokes from across the road is not in the same ballpark as reading the same information from anywhere in the world. There have been documented cases of highly effective electronic warfare (such as the Israeli strike on a Syrian 'nuclear facility' in September 2007) but these are, once again, done using in-theatre devices and not by some hackers with a net connection somewhere else in the world. hacking local devices remotely is not even slightly the same game as hacking arbitrary devices via the internet.

** That's kinda reasonable if you accept that the robots were rooting for him at that point (as their only hope against Smith), and you really, really don't think about it.

** However the new "mesh" structure of the wireless matrix means that you need to be physically inside many corp facilities to hack their equipment.

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* ''Roleplay/GlobalGuardiansPBEMUniverse'': This trope is the default setting for internet research in most of the Guardians Universe campaigns.
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* ''Film/IndependenceDay'' is truly guilty of this. Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum find themselves trapped in an organic alien craft with, of all things, a laptop. They then manage to use this laptop to hack the "brain" of the craft and escape.
** It... Isn't quite as bad as it sounds. Although the ships look slightly organic it's never actually stated (no mention of a "brain" either), and they didn't just decide on a whim to try hacking the ship with a laptop they just happened to have; the point of going was to implant a virus they'd created in advance. This still leaves how someone could make a virus for an alien ship, let alone from a human computer (in a matter of hours!), but the original intent (made clearer in deleted scenes) was that our computing technology was based on the crashed ship at Area 51, and hence worked the same way. Handled better, this could've been a justified trope.

->'''Hacker Man:''' Wait a minute. [[TechnoBabble Using an RX modulator, I might be able to conduct a mainframe cell direct and hack the uplink to the download.]]\\

->'''Hacker Man:''' Wait a minute. Using an RX modulator, I might be able to conduct a mainframe cell direct and hack the uplink to the download.\\