H is for Hacking Magic

Although I am an ecologist and statistician by training, my previous and current job fall into the general field of 'working with computers'. Until I started at my last job, I had been blissfully unaware of how deeply Hollywood's assumption that computers are magic has permeated society. However, the surprising number of requests I got for programs that break the laws of spacetime soon got me to revise my thinking.

As a predictive modelling scientist, I use software to return hundreds of thousands of calculations a second, and turn those calculations into predictions, and sometimes into cool graphics. However, the models are not infallible, and do need human input and supervision, and can take awhile to run (a modelling stream is actually running in the background as I type this). There are also limits to what any one computer can do as far as decryption, encryption, network connections, and running various programs.

However, it's not all nonsense. A surprising number of devices with integrated software can indeed be hacked, including:
Cars
Phones
Insulin pumps
Webcams
Cash machines
Pacemakers

So maybe update your software patches while you're updating the plot of your techno-thriller novel.