no escape

[bitching pop culture tech]

posted by tom / January 10, 2005 /

• The prospect of a season about cyberterrorism had me pretty psyched for a minute, because the amount of bullshit necessary to make an attack on the internet seem like a truly dire threat would be highly entertaining. As I've complained in the past, it's going to take some significant advances to translate cyberterrorism into human damage. The case for the Y2K bug was obviously overstated, but it was at least somewhat plausible that it could shut down critical, life-supporting systems. But nobody builds systems where network failure A (backhoe fade) produces tragic output B (charred corpses).

  So no cyberterrorism, but the bad guys did try to do something nasty to the internet... sort of. A few quibbles:

  1. NAT tables are an actual thing, but they happen at the edge of private networks and the internet, not on "prominent nodes" on the internet (they probably meant backbone routers).
  2. I'm assuming that this year's hip young person/terrorist quarry was supposed to be downloading source code when he said he was "stealing software from Microsoft and Adobe" -- although doing both at once would be quite a feat. This happens occasionally, most recently with the high-profile theft of the Half Life 2 source. And I suppose if you cracked a corporate network, you might actually see their firewall's NAT table (although it wouldn't magically pop up on your screen). But again, it'd have nothing to do with the internet at large.
  3. This is a highly technical point, but if you're going to be doing a webcast about how you just kidnapped the Secretary of Defense, you probably don't need to take over the internet to get people to watch it.
  
  
  
  
• The bad guy's magical cellphone eavesdropping didn't make much sense. If hip young person is using a particularly old cell phone, AND the bad guys needed to get the number to it off of his dead mom's phone, AND the bad guy happened to be in the area of the same cell tower at the time as either HYP or Jack Bauer at the time of their conversation, then this is plausible. Otherwise, not so much.
• I was too preoccuppied last night to notice if they're still using it, but between season 2 and 3 CTU switched from Mac to Linux (using a KDE desktop). Kudos! Maybe OpenBSD this year?

I guess it's nice that the writers try, but making a half-assed attempt to get stuff right ends up making you look worse than if you just bullshit everything. There's not much point in talking about IP relays or SSL tunnels if, a minute later, you're going to have folks cracking encryption in under an hour, or government professionals instructing each other to hack federal systems in the same way they'd ask each other to make some xeroxes.

It's a better idea to just start spewing bullshit about dilithium crystals and flux capacitors. That way you'll get nerds excitedly repeating your technobabble on the internet -- instead of just petulantly belittling it (see above).