Hollywood's favourite geeky catchphrase is a rather harder catch in the real world...

Having just seen yet another set of hackers (in the season 9 X-Files episode 'Providence') draw the great big message ACCESS DENIED, undoubtedly Hollywood's favourite shorthand for computer-related activity, I thought I'd go and see if there is actually any software anywhere in the world that gives this message in response to an incorrect password or protocol.

Because in 20 years of computer use, through many iterations of Mac (OS6-X), Windows (admittedly I stopped with XP) and Linux (Red Hat, Ubuntu), I have never once seen this exact message, no matter how badly I screwed up (and that covers a lot of occasions). In the hundreds of websites and web-services that I have subscribed to in that time,  and for all the thousands of times I have put in the wrong password, or just mistyped it, I have always been greeted by some or other more genteel declaration suggesting that I try again. I have never seen the words 'Access Denied' anywhere in real-world software or websites.

But now I think I have found a real, professional example of a piece of software that gives this harsh and uncompromising message without the programmer necessarily having been inspired by the movies.

According to this post, trying to add a printer to the network with insufficient permission or a wrong IP address on Windows Server 2008 will get you possibly one of the very few ACCESS DENIED messages outside of a movie theatre...

Even this example is less strident that the UPPERCASE IMPERATIVE! that Hollywood prefers. I'd be interested to hear from anyone else who has actually drawn this uncouth message from real-world software or websites. If you see one, send a screengrab to this address. It must be 'Access Denied', preferably with bold lettering, uppercase and a big fat exclamation mark. There are one or two "Access is denied" programs out there, and they're not admissable.

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