Random 'Net' Is A Mess Of A Movie That Gets Almost Everything Wrong About How Internet Works (13 items)

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  (#8) Chat Rooms Are Populated By A Few Recluses

  Chat room users in the film are limited to about the five most lonely people in the entire world. There definitely aren't many people in the chat room, as evidenced by the fact that they're all able to score super easy handles like "Angel" and "CyberBob." No one is forced to resort to clever misspellings of their actual name mixed with numbers from their childhood address.

  Thankfully, we can breathe a sigh of relief that chat rooms never managed to get quite as obnoxious as the ones in the world of The Net. Poor Angela is forced to listen to everything every user types as it is relayed in a terrifying cyber voice, which is a little odd and ultimately unnecessary, considering she can clearly read their comments on the screen. 
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  (#12) Cyberpunks In The Movie Keep Their Top Secret Passwords In Their Wallets

  Have you finally managed to become entangled in an Illuminati-type organization that plans to overtake the world via an unstoppable computer virus? What better place than your wallet to store a secret password that grants you instant access to world domination?

  As the evil Jack Devlin discovers, it's best to be a little more stealth next time, lest it ultimately leads to your prey's lucky triumph. 
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  (#11) The Characters Think Games Can't Get More Violent Than 'Wolfenstein 3D'

  "The game is literally as bloody as it gets," states Angela's boss as she plays through a game called Wolfenstein 3D. One can only imagine that cartoon soldiers getting blown away was considered violent and edgy back in the day. These days, however, you can't help but imagine what the same characters would have thought of a solid copy of Grand Theft Auto.

  Since then, video games have gotten increasingly better graphics and more violent.
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  (#1) The Movie Has A Pretty Extreme Idea Of What 'Identity Theft' Is

  One day, you're a bit of hermit, chatting up strangers online and working from home. The next, it's as if you've never even existed at all. What caused the big shift? Little more than a few mouse clicks by a secret online shadow organization. Such is the plight of The Net's Angela Bennett when cyber terrorists change her online identification records. 

  In its attempt to put the fear of this new, subversive, and unknown technology into would-be internet users everywhere, The Net presents a pretty fragile version of identity security. Though identity theft can and does happen, it's virtually impossible to erase every trace of yourself from the web - even if you want to. If someone were able to pull it off, many social media companies today keep their own records of a person's profile - even if that person deleted their account. Thoroughly wiping someone's entire existence off the internet would take weeks or months just to track who has access to your information.

   
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  (#5) The IP Address In The Film Is Impossible To Have

  When Angela finally reaches the super suspenseful scene where she's able to find Praetorian's IP address, it's revealed to be 23.75.345.200. Though you'd have to have an eagle eye and a knowledge of computers to notice, such an IP is actually impossible because no IP  can contain numbers greater than 255.

  Granted, this one may have been used on purpose to avoid being sued by somebody who actually used it in real life. 

   

   

   

   
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  (#4) The Movie Presents Every Internet User As A Secluded Hermit

  When it first came out, The Net played like a cautionary tale about all the dangers that could come along with the internet's rise in popularity. Our heroine, a sexy tech nerd, spends most of her days in front of various screens and rarely leaves the comfort of her own home. Consequently, she becomes so withdrawn from the world that her whole identity is drawn into question when a cyber terrorist rearranges her online identity records. 

  While there's definitely something to be said for the danger of too much time online, it's certainly not the whole story. If anything, technology is now so advanced that it makes it easier to stay in touch with more people in our lives. These days, if online bad guys ever try to change our names, all we'd really have to do would be to ask for a little help on Twitter. Within 10 minutes, we'd have everyone from our fifth grade classmates to our great aunts stepping forward with old Instagram pictures that could help validate our identities. 

  
   

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