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Keeping it Real
9 years ago
General
I'm really enjoying season 2 of Mr. Robot. The plot keeps me guessing and there's been one or two "holy smokes" moments. And the episode that started out all 80s Family Sitcom was great, even down to the throwback commercial break in the middle of it. But one thing that's been tickling my geek side is the writers' commitment to keeping it real.
There's an episode where the hacker group wants to plant a femtocell among an FBI work group. And while they're prepping the cell, we watch them ssh into it and see the OpenWrt log in screen spill down the terminal. Or after FSociety records another video to post on the internet, we catch a glimpse of ffmpeg being invoked (from the command line, of course) to encode the video into a suitable format for posting. And when there's trouble with the femtocell and the network interfaces need to be bounced, we listen to one of the hackers feeding the commands over the phone to the operative that's on site: "Okay, type ifconfig wlan0 up and then ifconfig wlan1 up..."
Eliot is helping someone else migrate their website to a new server and this person runs Windows 7. Eliot fires up PuTTY and makes an ssh connection to the server. We even get to glance the MOTD of the server as he logs in. Later when he's starting over, he buys a laptop and we watch him download the ISO for Kali Linux (which just about all of the hackers in the show are running) and next thing we know, we're watching the ncurses configuration screens that anyone who has installed Linux would recognize. And when they use Linux, they really do use Linux, right there on the screen.
But this latest episode... Angela is ushered into a room and upon seeing the contents of the room my first thought was "Wait, is that a 1701?" (Like I haven't seen enough of them in Halt and Catch Fire lately) Sure enough, it took only a few more seconds to recognize the silhouette of a Commodore 64 and a 1541 disk drive (later model, with the turn-down locking lever, instead of the "garage door" locking lever). And when a child sat down and powered it all on, my heart leapt with joy to see them type LOAD "$",8 and then LIST the directory structure, before loading and running one of the programs. But then, by this time I would have expected nothing less from the show.
Even the malware in the show is real: the hackers pwn a bank using CryptoWall.
The writers could have used any kind of fantasy hacking "tools" and "shells". They could have invented pretty OSes with fantastical powers. Instead, they're totally keeping it real, using the software and hardware that you and I could get our hands on. And I, for one, really appreciate that.
The episode titles have been fairly clever, too. They're all filenames, and in season one they were all video files (.mpg, .mov, .avi, .mp4), This season, they're security files (.asc, .p7z, .p12, .aes).
There's also a strange continuity sometimes... in the episode "k3rnel-pan1c.ksd" Eliot has a bit of a mental breakdown. That is followed by "init1.asec" where he gets past his mental issues and begins recovering. Several episodes later is "init5.fve" where things are supposed to get back to normal... little Easter eggs like that are appreciated by those who recognize them.
There's an episode where the hacker group wants to plant a femtocell among an FBI work group. And while they're prepping the cell, we watch them ssh into it and see the OpenWrt log in screen spill down the terminal. Or after FSociety records another video to post on the internet, we catch a glimpse of ffmpeg being invoked (from the command line, of course) to encode the video into a suitable format for posting. And when there's trouble with the femtocell and the network interfaces need to be bounced, we listen to one of the hackers feeding the commands over the phone to the operative that's on site: "Okay, type ifconfig wlan0 up and then ifconfig wlan1 up..."
Eliot is helping someone else migrate their website to a new server and this person runs Windows 7. Eliot fires up PuTTY and makes an ssh connection to the server. We even get to glance the MOTD of the server as he logs in. Later when he's starting over, he buys a laptop and we watch him download the ISO for Kali Linux (which just about all of the hackers in the show are running) and next thing we know, we're watching the ncurses configuration screens that anyone who has installed Linux would recognize. And when they use Linux, they really do use Linux, right there on the screen.
But this latest episode... Angela is ushered into a room and upon seeing the contents of the room my first thought was "Wait, is that a 1701?" (Like I haven't seen enough of them in Halt and Catch Fire lately) Sure enough, it took only a few more seconds to recognize the silhouette of a Commodore 64 and a 1541 disk drive (later model, with the turn-down locking lever, instead of the "garage door" locking lever). And when a child sat down and powered it all on, my heart leapt with joy to see them type LOAD "$",8 and then LIST the directory structure, before loading and running one of the programs. But then, by this time I would have expected nothing less from the show.
Even the malware in the show is real: the hackers pwn a bank using CryptoWall.
The writers could have used any kind of fantasy hacking "tools" and "shells". They could have invented pretty OSes with fantastical powers. Instead, they're totally keeping it real, using the software and hardware that you and I could get our hands on. And I, for one, really appreciate that.
The episode titles have been fairly clever, too. They're all filenames, and in season one they were all video files (.mpg, .mov, .avi, .mp4), This season, they're security files (.asc, .p7z, .p12, .aes).
There's also a strange continuity sometimes... in the episode "k3rnel-pan1c.ksd" Eliot has a bit of a mental breakdown. That is followed by "init1.asec" where he gets past his mental issues and begins recovering. Several episodes later is "init5.fve" where things are supposed to get back to normal... little Easter eggs like that are appreciated by those who recognize them.
Is Halt and Catch Fire good? I walked past it in a store, and had one of those 'wait a minute...' moments, where I wondered if it was the same reference as the kind of early model computer crash where that would actually happen.
Halt and Catch Fire got my attention for the same reason: I figured someone had to know what they were doing to name it that. It's set in the mid-80s personal computer heyday with various people trying to make it or just survive. It keeps it pretty real (I have never seen so many Commodore 64s!) and it parallels history a bit. When the start-up Mutiny starts their on-line service and starts creating a virtual graphical hangout, one might immediately think of Habitat/Club Caribe.
I like HCF enough I was anxiously awaiting the start of the third season (started just recently) but I could be biased. It's a pretty heavy nostalgia trip for me, not just the Commodore 64s and 1701s and 1541s, but seeing Gordon going through the Commodore 64 Programmer's Reference Guide (had that) and at Mutiny, a shot of the box from Gortek and the Microchips (had that too!).
I see a lot of things that make me yearn for my youth, back when you POKEd values right into memory locations and the future was a door yet to be opened, with limitless possibilities behind it.
By the way, a good book to read is Hackers, by Stephen Levy. About where the whole hacker movement began, with a model railroad club at MIT in the late 1950s, through the 1980s.