Simmoril’s Domain

I was watching 24 today, and although it is one of my favorite shows, today’s episode was somewhat disappointing. The plotline went something like this:

Jack Bauer had Nina Meyers in captivity, and to prevent her own death, she agreed to help Jack locate a man named Amador. She relayed to Jack a series of instructions that he was to enter into a telephone. Believing Nina was helping him hunt down Amador, Jack complied, but unknowingly released a worm into CTU’s mainframe. The worm begins to chew through all of the systems at CTU, threatening to take down the firewall and make lists of all undercover CTU agents up for grabs.

As the worm continues to propogate, Chloe and the rest of CTU scramble to stop the worm before it takes down everything. As they’re running around, Chloe starts barking orders at everyone like “Open up gateways 10 and 12″, “start pinging the systems, when you start getting packet loss, freeze the process”, “set the permissions to 577 and propogate it down the file tree”, and “that’ll expose the kernel”.

I will be the first to admit that it takes alot for me to suspend my disbelief. I don’t ask for much, but I would really like, for once, to see a movie or a TV series put some real effort into getting a technical advisor to make situations like this believable. I can’t honestly understand why this is so difficult: shows like ER can make medical situation believable, so why not this?

Even movies that have had advisors still don’t get it right. Take a look at Swordfish. They had one of the premiere companies, RSA, assist them in the making of the movie. And yet, Swordfish didn’t even come close to getting the techincal aspect right. I swear, every time they didn’t know what they were talking about they would just throw out the word ‘firewall’. About the closest anyone I can think of has ever come is the use of an SSHv1 exploit in Matrix Reloaded to break into a system. And that was just a short 2-3 blurb. (No, I’m not going to mention “Hackers” here, there would honestly be no point in that).

I know it wouldn’t take much to get a team of advisors together to take this “pedantic soup” and turn it into something believable. Hell, I’ll do it if need be. And I’ll do it cheaply.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 10th, 2004 at 10:08 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.