Ramona stares at her computer screen, annoyed. There's an error from the rust compiler, telling her she may have at most one mutable reference to something.

She has a flashback to thirty years ago - a racist corrections officer "You get one call. Uno. Understand?". Asshole.

She begins to type unsafe {...

"Hackers" actually hired the guy behind 2600 magazine as a technical advisor. While the movie took significant liberties, the method Phreak uses to dial the operator was real. Rotary phones signal dialing by "flashing" the hook. With practice, this can be done manually on a touch tone phone.

@ryanc See also Hannibal Lecter: https://video.infosec.exchange/w/7oDpz9V3mDnrLziH82Copv :)

@ryanc Doesn't take much practice, even. The mechanical decoders were notoriously tolerant. You'd just need to know how many ticks number 1 was, and whether the subsequent numbers were more ticks (common on the Northern heimsphere) or less ticks (which apparently was, for some reason, common in Australia). But the rotary dial didn't run the other way in Australia; the dial's direction is determined by the right-handedness supremacists. Only the numbers appeared in the opposite direction, because the proximity of a number to the finger-stop was mechanically coupled to the tick-count of the number.