Mr Robot S02E01 easter egg
0x41.no
0x41.no
I watched the first one. I enjoyed the first few episodes, seemed like it was going to be a drama about people working in InfoSec. Definitely appreciated the relative plausibility of the hacks. Was very disappointed when it turned into a psycho-druggie-anonymous-whatever sort of thing. It went so quickly from a semi-plausible portrayal to a fetishization of [black hat] hackers.
I understand how that's more appealing to a wider audience. Just saying what I'd prefer personally for my own sake.
Agreed. I'm ok with both versions but a switch was definitely flipped in my head when elliot hacked a prison from the outside, via bluetooth in a police car, in order to release a prisoner from the outside. All with 24 hour notice.
That was so ridiculous. Oh and after he breaks out the prisoner he stands outside the prison in plain view of guard towers etc. for like an hour just to have a lengthy monologue. There is 0 chance you don't get caught in that situation. Oh and theres a dead fucking body next to him at the time.
I could be wrong of course, and that's what I like about this show: The viewer never truly knows WTF is going on.
Also, he has an attractive drug dealer girl that just comes over to give him free drugs and screw him? I'm sure this happens. But I doubt it's remotely representative to say that happens to introverted semiautistic "hackers".
There are also those three days Elliot lost that Mr. Robot took over to do the Evil Corp hack.
I wish they'd ditch the whole split-personality plot, but seems like we're stuck with it. It's not a disaster, just sort of tiresome. Seems cheap when compared to the rest of the show's plotting, and I was hoping there'd be less focus on it this season now the 'reveal' is done with. I think it's mainly that they want to keep Christian Slater on screen.
The trippy 'Lynchian' stuff really doesn't work for me here either, it seems out of place/poorly handled. Judging by the critics/friends though, I think I'm in the minority there. I think the show is generally a victim of its writer's grandiose ambitions; it wants to appear epic and sophisticated but it ends up oversimplifying.
Hacking is still great, though.
Yet I find the psychological issues and split personality exploration really fascianting. Is it realistic? No, not at all. But I like how the actor portrays Elliot's anguish.
Even the main character (that narrates) seems to think that the hacks and anti-corporate rhetoric are kind of pointless and juvenile.
If you didn't identify with that, then you're obviously not part of the subculture that the show portrays and is really made for. Mr Robot is not about the drugs or computer hacking, it's far more grandiose than that. Similarly to Fight Club, it can be viewed as a social study of a subculture that's operating on the frontier of consensus reality and could characterize where that reality will shift in the future.
Have you had to juggle multiple identities in your head, every day for years if not decades? Have you thought what this does to you?
Have you had to keep secrets from everyone around you?
Have you "felt" what cyberspace really is about? Have you experienced the VICIOUS feedback loop of projecting a thoughtform/idea (what the audience views as "hacking") into that new domain only to have it manifest and achieve its own reality, as if by magic?
The technical aspects of the show are by far the least interesting.
Usual disclaimer that this is my opinion, not trying to come off as snobbish though it might sound that way, but personally, like in Fight Club, I find the show's 'grandiose' attempts to be more than little simplistic. It doesn't effectively/subtly explore anxiety, isolation, schizophrenia, depression etc as well as I think it thinks it does. Honestly most of that narrative feels cheap and repetitive to me.
Taken as a satire ('Evil Corp', FSociety/Anonymous etc), the show works for me, but when it spends time plumbing Eliot's mental illness, it becomes dull to me. Some of it I appreciate, and in smaller doses it might work, but for me it's overblown and only elevated by the show's sense of style, not because it's telling the viewer anything of particular interest, or actually advancing any of the plotlines/character developments. I think the show is worse for it.
Having said all that I enjoy the show a lot. I'm just not willing to heap praise upon it since I have these reservations.
What would be an example of this?
Are you referring to something similar to multiple discovery:
The arrival of cyberspace however and its subsumption of more and more aspects of our everyday lives acts as a positive feedback loop. What was unthinkable or even heretical 20-30 years ago is now routine.
In a sense, we are witnessing a new paradigm shift where the intermediate substrates (mind/inception to manifestation) are being dissolved and the feedback loop gets shorter.
You can see this with the subsequent breakdown of social structure and monetary philosophy. The masses are reaching harmonization through their own voices rather than having a conductor leading them (politician/bankers/middlemen in general)
I tried watching the first episode of the season 2 and I just couldn't finish it.
One can already see from the first episode of season 2 (which I suppose you haven't seen yet) that it's much more complex than that.
In season one we saw the culmination of that extreme "fight club" ideology. In season two we're going to see the results of those actions. And so far it isn't pretty.
It's understandable that a lot of people on HN went in expecting a realistic show about hacking, and wound up with a much more abstract (and arguably ambitious) show about mental health, drug use, the role of corporations in society and politics, hacking, etc. I can see how that might be disappointing, but personally I like it.
But I don't think it's a fetishization of hackers. It's a stylized, exaggerated portrayal of many elements of society, that happens to include hackers.
The show's creator expressed his motivations being from the Arab Spring. I'm starting to see the parallels when looking backwards at season 1. Elliot appears to represent the varied nature of the masses. Not all who want change are willing to commit such extreme acts. To me, Elliot represents that by being both the most revolutionary and quite neutral. In a way, it gives the show's creator a moral pass by showing Elliot as both the instigator of bad things and as a passenger just watching it happen. From a moral point of view, Elliot is not really a good guy, but it is hard to hate someone who is so deeply broken.
I'm starting to agree with you. From a personal point of view, I'm starting to tire of this neutral zone that is entered by Elliot's inability to take a moral stand.
So in season 3, Elliot is staying away from computers and the Internet and trying to get a life and go outdoors. But Mr. Robot is there trying to take control. Elliot speaks to his friend who he describes as a monster inside him, but really it is the audience he speaks to, like he is breaking the fourth wall like Deadpool does.
Wish there was a clip on YouTube but their tech consultant Kor Adana explains it in the "Hacking Robot" panel discussion they ran after the season premiere (around 8:50 tons of ads sorry): http://www.usanetwork.com/mrrobot/videos/hacking-robot-101
Only part that's not quite accurate is Cryptowall would never be used for this, since it's a specific ransomware family used to collect money from generally unknowledgeable end users. In reality, they probably would've written their own lightweight ransomware.
If they changed it to some other pun ("Cryptofence" or something), that would've made it a bit more realistic.
https://mobile.twitter.com/KorAdana/status/75348166244558028...
@KorAdana @ryankaz42 @AndreOnCyber @MOBLAgentP @IntelTechniques @marcwrogers
I'm not sure how the data tapes got erased, but they planted a Raspberry PI to the heating system to turn up the heat and fry them all? Bypassing safety checks and displaying normal readings to the people monitoring it? Wouldn't those people feel the heat going up and panic?
It's a show about hacking, but hacking is secondary to the other aspects, it just moves the plot forward, and that's why it works so well.
USA has posted an interesting making-of of sorts on the show: https://youtu.be/1BbTUASfrAI
Mr. Robot consulted with people industry because their hacking scenes more closely resemble Sherlock Holmes detective work than action sequences, so they don't have to make things happen fast to get viewers' adrenaline flowing and can have time to give lay-people more room to understand the context. Without this story structure any expert consultations would be wasted.
If they are not aiming for realism, they could, at least, try to be coherent in their own 'universe'. Sometimes, the things that come from Hollywood feel like they don't respect their public.
We leave for another day the discussion about if their public deserve the respect.
When writing shows like Star Trek, writers often put things like Insert Technobabble Here into the first draft of the script, and it gets filled in with Reverse Tachyon Inductors later. This works for SciFi, since any explanation can be RetConned. But its glaringly obvious when done with real tech. The tech terms and snippets are more than just buzzwords dropped into a middle of the sentence. They are clearly defined plot devices with real world meaning.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fsn
edit: fsn is lowercase
From what I remember about the book, the dinosaur motion-tracking system was programmed to only find N dinosaurs each day because there was no reason for there to be more dinosaurs. It's why the dinos were able to breed undetected, because even though they were being picked up, the system only looked for N dinosaurs.
Or... Film is a visual medium, and so things have to look gee-wizy, because light grey text on a little black window looks incredibly boring. Have you you not seen a movie featuring computers in the last 35 years? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pe6gGUR3Ga4
Anyway that line got a huge reaction of cheering and applause, bigger than any other during the movie.
I think the in universe answer is that everything uses plasma or something.
Kirk and company basically had a Siri they could talk to and it would do things. "Computer show me yesterday's video log on the bridge at 3:32 PM" or whatever.
And its story was good, too. I'd recommend it to people just for that.
Yes, you have to make believe some things about bandwidth and just how smart one person can be. But classifying POI, an incredibly high quality and well researched show, as "worse than Cyber" is doing nothing but hurting the cause you claim to support. And the reason I'm pissed off about that is that I support it too.
Sorry that science fiction show is not a documentary about the NSA. May I recommend Citizenfour instead?
It was really entertaining that it started right before Snowden released.
My big concern is all of the media and spoilers that surround these popular shows. Why do I know who died in Orange is the New Black? Why does Google think I need this as part of my news feed that I check only once or twice a day because I just need the most important news items.
And even those that do follow the show through non-legal channels probably haven't downloaded the episode yet, since it has aired in the middle of the night for us.
I enjoy binge watching, so I always wait for the season to complete; sometime for multiple seasons. However, I don't find the occasional spoiler detrimental to my viewing pleasure. I can only speak for myself, but I have watched many classic movies with prior knowledge of the plot; and I believe they have not significantly affected how I perceived them. Of course, it is impossible to tell if I would have enjoyed them more had I not known anything about them
A good story should work even if you know what will happen. The components of the story (such as the easter eggs in the present discussion) should be more interesting than some gimmick of a big reveal. The whole concept of spoilers is extremely modern, probably invented by Hitchcock as marketing to sell more tickets to his movies. When you go see the ballet or an opera, you're given the whole plot upfront as part of the programme.
How else would you know what is going on?
Ballet is a bit more like miming, but overall, the plots are still obvious, and frankly, very thin. We don't watch the Romeo and Juliet ballet wondering if they will survive or not, but rather wondering how they will express their anguish and suffering through dance.
It's also a case where knowing the twist in advance really would profoundly affect a lot of people's experiences of the film, probably even more so in 1992.
On the other hand, some movies are simply too intense to be enjoyable for me. So I often pull up Wikipedia first to make sure that the payoff is going to be worth it.
An example that falls into both categories is "The Fugitive" (Harrison Ford movie based on the TV show). I already know who the villain is and who dies at the end, but I can still enjoy Harrison Ford piecing it together and Tommy Lee Jones trying to stop him. And the last part of the movie is more intense and action-heavy than I really like, but I can take it because I know how it turns out.
I sometimes joke that I'm a member of the "Wikipedia Film Club" because I read about more movies than I actually end up watching.
I'll admit, for a while, I spent a lot of time on themoviespoiler, a website dedicated to, well, movie spoilers. Like you, I sometimes can't take an emotionally exhausting ride. I like to watch movies for a little escapism, not to come out of the other side drained.
That's so funny. I definitely do that too. However, a lot of the times I don't end up watching the movie unless it's really good. That's probably my favorite use of Wikipedia.
'Law & Order: Criminal Intent' explicitly based its plots on discovering the motivations behind the crime, while the perpetrator was known to the audience from the start.
'Criminal Minds' similarly examines profiles the state of mind of the perpetrator to identify a suspect, with the person's identity known to the audience in advance more often than not.
Agreed. My first play-through of Dark Souls was thoroughly spoilerified, because I was consulting a walkthrough and reading a little bit ahead of my current progress, from start to finish. And you know what? It was still a phenomenal experience.
In fact, the experience was enhanced somewhat by knowing what was coming ahead. I could look forward to facing a boss like the Four Kings, having already read some of the lore and knowing it would be a brutal encounter.
Later in the series, my first play-throughs of Bloodborne and Dark Souls 3 were blind and unspoiled, but I don't think the experience was gigantically better for it. Some reveals were pretty cool [1], but I don't think I would have suffered to have known about them in advance. In fact, I still thoroughly enjoy all of those games, despite knowing them inside out and back-to-front.
[1] I'm thinking specifically of the transition from The Consumed Kings Garden to Untended Graves in DS3. Probably better unspoiled.
You don't know anyone? At all? Isn't that a bit... arrogant to presume?
I feel like this idea is present at many levels in the story -- including the dynamics of Elliot's personality disorder and his attempts to construct trust in his perception of reality and his own motivations.
Intermingling these themes with the idea of hacking -- the art of finding/manipulating unexpected behavior in systems -- is incredibly rich -- and mesmerizing.
If this is the kind of anarchy you envision, you're going to be sorely disappointed if something like that happened in real life. Real anarchy would look more like how people would react if zombies broke out. There would be mass looting, killings, raping, and people taking advantage of the chaos (opportunists). It would literally be the wild west with all services, including power and the internet going down.
The "anarchy" in Mr. Robot is a falsehood, it's a libertarian/hackers fantasy. That's not anarchy at all. Not even close.
The activists leveraged some technical know-how and swashbuckling intrusions to bring down a big bank's systems, but the opening episodes of season 2 point to a mobilization of the democratic government forces to restore order by force. They didn't create anarchy by destroying the source of financial truth, they handed the keys to democracy to the very conglomerate they attempted to take down.
The series was supposed to have been composed as a three-act movie originally, and it'll be interesting to see how it unfolds moving forward in the second act.
Maybe, did you catch White Rose's fire side chat at the end of season one? Who is handing the keys to who in season two?
This does not have to be the case at all. Look at Catalonia in revolutionary Spain. To quote Proudhon: "Anarchy is order." People naturally organise to support each other, and not necessarily through the power of a ruler or a state.
Also I was pleasantly surprised to see Joey Badass in the show (his first acting gig I think). Hopefully they will allow the character he plays to shine. Great show!
Suits already has a character like Mike from Suits. The characters name is, surprisingly, named Mike.
If Elliot were to be like Mike from Suits, Mr Robot would need to change the name of the show to Suits.
And it follows that the space of sitcoms is a singleton.
That explains a lot.
They would have standup meetings each day (ever second episode) and you would see how a large organization would operate efficiently using something similar to Nexus-Scrum.
I'm now at my third company where I'm the only techie that thinks internal code names are useful and everyone else just uses very generic terms like 'the app'. And when a second app is made, they all seem oblivious to the amount of time wasted in describing which app is which in nearly every damn bug or feature request.
Given that I'm the only ops guy and I have to package this stuff, I give them a damn name and that proliferates back through the rest of the techs. Anyway, the point of this comment is that the latest thing to come my way was a notification service called 'notification service', a seven-syllable horror that will cause confusion with another service that sends notifications, and it does things other than notify (it'll touch and mediate a few things over the network). I said "Can we please call it 'nexus' - because every company needs a bit of software somewhere called 'nexus'" :)
As a bonus, today I set up the first nexus server, for testing...
My favourite shortening was a netadmin friend of mine who worked at a bank a while back, describing coding schemes for network hardware: "blah blah ethernet concentrator blah address blah city makes XXXECO1" => "What's an 'ethernet concentrator'?" => "Is it a switch? Is it a hub? Is it (*rattles of a couple of other things I can't recall)? Who cares? They do similar things in the grand scheme..." And shorten down to a clear 'EC' to cover them all.
And when push comes to shove, while it's great to see actual tech in action, it doesn't actually matter that much to the story. As long as the characters aren't doing things that actively break immersion (blue ribbon award goes to NCIS having two people type on the same keyboard...), it doesn't matter to me so much if the 'hack' is real or not.
"We need to hack NORAD!"
Guy reaches for keyboard (without touching it), "Done!".
Sarcasm apart, while Mr.Robot has good tech, I got bored by the story line around episode 4 or 5. I think it was just too slow for my taste.
Edit: Link to first "Hack" mentioned: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=boEb8zKfPBo
Edit2: Link to the double keyboard NCIS video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8qgehH3kEQ
In my mind (though future episodes could prove me wrong), Mr. Robot is taking its favorite tropes from hacker culture, anarchic culture, and corporate culture, and using them to paint an interesting picture of helplessness and instability.
Apparently I have more in common with Jefferson than I thought (Re my numerous comments in the past regarding the danger of consumer credit).
http://i.imgur.com/4H0M2hj.png
I tried to isolate the image but it's not reading:
At the time, I marked it up as "awww, too bad I missed it", especially since I tend to binge shows after they're all available at once. But I wasn't able to find any evidence of this promo existing on the web, and now there's this thing with morse code and so on. Soooo maybe there's a nice hoodie at the end of this road.
____ SPOILER INFO HERE: http://decider.com/2016/05/18/mr-robot-season-two-trailer-se...
I didn't look at it closer, there might be more in there.
It's cool that they get the tech right, but I just feel as though the protagonist has the mentality of an angsty teenager trying their best to be 'edgy' by 'fighting the man'.
Maybe if the show took itself a little less seriously I might enjoy it more.
[view-source:http://www.evil-corp-usa.com/]
Sites
I get the feeling this will be ongoing...makes the show more fun and a little interactive
Anyhow, can't wait to see what this season has in store. I find myself relating to a lot of the personal struggles in the last season. Maybe that makes me crazy. ha.
It would be controversial but really interesting if they dropped an actual 0-day during the show as well.
I sincerely doubt Elliot turned on the machine just for popcorn.
One fan tinfoil theory is that he killed Tyrell and the last two episodes have been him sitting in a jail cell.
I don't really buy that, but he probably did shoot or try to shoot someone.
I still think Tyrell is alive and was really on the phone, but the fan theory isn't nullified just because his voice was heard.
Tyrell's wife could know about his personalities and just not care, hence the weird conversation at the end of season 1.
Maybe he used the gun to threaten Tyrell after them finishing their work, and has locked him away somewhere. Maybe he shot to incapacitate him, and Tyrell is passed out in some hospital.