Hacker Cinema
Mr. Robot
2015 · TV series · 4 seasons
Created by Sam Esmail
A young programmer, Elliot, suffers from a debilitating anti-social disorder and decides that he can only connect to people by hacking them. He wields his skills as a weapon to protect the people that he cares about. Elliot finds himself in the intersection between a cybersecurity firm he works for and the underworld organizations that are recruiting him to bring down corporate America.
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271 comments on Hacker News
That is part of the plot of the TV show "Mr. Robot". Not just the loans, but balances too!
Severance (Apple TV) and Fallout (Amazon Prime) are pretty amazing TV shows that came out somewhat recently. Nothing on top of my mind came out of Netflix for which I really felt the need of resubscribing.
I miss the quality of TV shows we reached with Mr. Robot, Silicon Valley, Utopia (UK), and Westworld :(
If you think this is going to stop at Samsung, think again.
And yes, Samsung (I used to buy their monitors starting in 2004), is an evil corp. I have a couple of videos on them.
If the corp is HUGE, it's evil run. If it's just regular large or medium, probably controlled & will be bought up if they haven't already.
It says that the comment has to be interesting. EVERYTHING about the Truth is interesting, and way WORSE than in the TV & movies. This is NO JOKE!
I just joined just to comment on this thread in HOPES someone will wake up to the TRUTH. I didn't even know it was for hackers.
If anyone is a whitehat & wants to fight with me in this WWIII, then please reach out. My site is my handle. Loved Mr. Robot. Again, NOT fiction. I don't are what kind of BS they tell you. They lie all of the time! Predictive programming, at least about what's going on, not anyone fighting back. sigh
Unless people just want to continue to be in denial about what is going ON to help them & harm HUMANITY!
If you think this will stop at ADS, again, you are NOT AWAKE!!! That's to condition you & no, you won't be able to turn them off. Now maybe, but not down the road. GUARANTEED.
Whatever happens in other countries will happen in the US & in fact, the US is tech dominated. Most 3rd world countries are safer due to lack of tech, but they are pummeled in other ways.
If it says SMART on your device, that's very dangerous.
Do you know what the acronym even stands for & what that means for Humans?
I have 3 animated shorts that do a great job at showing you our Future since no one is fighting BACK! It's called a silent WAR for a reason, & it's all done by TOXIC TECH. Stuff you don't even know about (including me.)
I used to love tech until I woke up & started to learn the Truth.
Everything they showcased in TV & movies was called predictive programming. If you ignore it (they are telling you what they are doing to us), that means you are giving your CONSENT. That's how it works.
I keep track of EVERYTHING done to us from brainwashing, manipulation & imprisoning our movements, & that's both on & offline. As much as I can anyway, b/c I'm by myself fighting, I can't do everything myself & I can't do almost anything online anymore & I've been a nettie & netreprneur since 1996. First got online briefly in '94. I'm NOT new to the net. NEVER EVER have I had to go thru this Tyranny.
Let's just start with CENSORSHIP. Then we can go from there. They are screwing with the email now, but they started doing that off & on at least 2 years ago. Now it's more frequent.
I just found out a few weeks ago they are screwing with your phone service. Of course they own that too.
Much more I can say with evidence, but I won't do that here. Site is my handle.
"HCF":
"In computer engineering, Halt and Catch Fire, known by the assembly language mnemonic HCF, is an idiom referring to a computer machine code instruction that causes the computer's central processing unit (CPU) to cease meaningful operation, typically requiring a restart of the computer. It originally referred to a fictitious instruction in IBM System/360 computers (introduced in 1964), making a joke about its numerous non-obvious instruction mnemonics." (Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halt_and_Catch_Fire_(computing)
The series is a memorable instance of what any self-respecting geek ought to have watched. It's better than "Silicon Valley", although the latter has pulled one scientific stunt regarding scientific advisory that is unique in film.
What other films/series are "must watch" material for geeks?
- War Games
- Silicon Valley
- The Social Network
- The Intern
- Mr. Robot
- Black Mirror
- Hackers
- 2001: A Space Odyssey
- ...?
Except that Mr Robot was always planned that way, you can go back and see references to what's revealed in the final episodes as early as the pilot. Things are revealed at the end of S1 that make you have to re-evaluate what you've seen so far. The same is probably even more true for S4.
Maybe that's a challenge for the audience to stay with it, but it's definitely worth it for the payoff.
And those s04 episode titles matching http error codes? That might be the most masterful thing I've ever seen pulled off from a TV show.
Seasons 3 and 4 did a really good job of capturing what it was like being in the industry and in SFBA in the mid/late 1990s, better than anything I've seen. I worked at McAfee (then NETA) at the time and the MCAF-ish stuff was uncanny; the last gasp of cubicle culture in the software product industry.
I liked the storytelling in it, but, like I said earlier, it's pretty Six Feet Under-ish, in that as it progresses it is less and less about the original concept of the show and more about the relationships between characters built up over years of episodes. Whether that's a good or bad thing for you depends in part on how much fan service you want; it's why I find Mr. Robot completely unwatchable.
> I've no idea which movies are a similar anthem for 2000s/2010s hackers. Let me know.
I really like Halt And Catch Fire but it doesn’t count since it also depicts the 80s. So, since Mr. Robot already got its mention, how about Silicon Valley? ;-)
What contemporary films, TV, it books scratch the same itch as "Hackers." Folks are mentioning Mr. Robot. What else?
The most interesting thing to show in film would be social engineering aspects. The actual hacking of spending time on the computer is always going to be boring command line stuff. At least Mr. Robot used real commands.
https://www.shodan.io/
I ironically found out about this website from Mr Robot tv show.
lots of things. Remember the Cartoon Network PR stunt where they placed DIY LED "signs" of characters from a show around Boston not long after the bombing there? What about the kid in Texas that was accused of bringing a bomb to show his teacher his DIY electronics Arduino project? What about the Mr Robot episode using a RPi?
Also, people putting these regulations in place are not normal people but people that think about how people might cause mayhem. None of the things I mentioned were real threats, but they very easily could have been is the point.
> I installed a BitTorrent client, found the release on Pirate Bay, successfully torrented just the subtitle file, and used an editor to read the subtitles for scenes with a lot of alien.
... while you were on the movies? That's "Mr Robot" level, kudos!
Not a bad thing necessarily, but some part of the plot, and usually with things going awry or emphasizing the scammy nature of blockchain.
Examples: Shameless season 11, The Simpsons S31E13, Superstore season 5, the good wife S3E13, greys anatomy S14E8, big bang theory S11E9, Billions season 5, some later seasons of Mr Robot, etc
guy thinks he is Mr. Robot? Hack computers jajajajaja people watched too many films
Check out Mr. Robot S2E1, where someone is terrorized by their hacked smart house. Or 1977's Demon Seed, a film where an AI house does worse things. I really thought the latter would remain fictional, but I'm less sure now.
this was a plot in a Mr. Robot episode, heh. Life imitating art?
So was House MD (well researched). Or Mr Robot. Or Silicon Valley. Heck, even Futurama did its research to the point they proved a new mathematical theorem for a joke. But being entertaining is always the priority for a TV show. Sure, maybe talk with the creators and get their inputs and insights, but don’t base your opinions on policies so heavily on simply watching the show. They’re called “dramas” for a reason.
> To put it another way: you have shows that have strong enough writers where they don’t need gimmicks to keep your attention. And you have shows that are intentionally about the gimmicks. Then you have shows that aren’t about the gimmicks but the writers don’t have enough confidence in their work to avoid putting them in anyway.
Can you elaborate a bit about the gimmick(s) in Halt and Catch Fire? I think it's a drama, so there are human concerns and interactions, but that's like, what tv shows are? I don't know what you mean specifically.
> Shows like The West Wing, House of Cards etc aren’t about gimmicks and don’t need them.
The West Wing is statist propaganda for liberals. House of Cards is statist propaganda for neocons.
> Shows like Mr Robot are about the gimmicks. And that’s ok too because you know it’s meant to be silly drama.
I actually really appreciate that every hack shown on Mr. Robot had a real world POC and used actually existing tools and techniques. The storyline is hokum and gives hackers a bad name, but black hats are kinda supposed to have a bad name. Elliot is kinda gray hat, but he definitely violated CFAA multiple times and would probably be dead or in jail irl.
Ransomware attacks against hospitals and a dark extortion economy churning tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars a year in losses and waste.
What would the "sky falling" look like to you? If you're expecting dramatic movie scenes like something out of Mr Robot, I'm afraid the reality is more mundane, just a never-ending series of basic programming errors that turn into remote code execution exploits because of language and compiler choices by people who don't pay the costs.
I'm reminded of the Mr Robot episode where they hacked into the Lawyers home and messed with all the smart appliances.
Rami Malek was before an outlaw hacker on Mr. Robot TV Show, now a hacker of the law as a CIA cryptographer on the upcoming film "The Amateur", which turns an assassin out of vengeance. Similarly, in real life, Luigi Mangione, an unassuming computer programmer, is the main suspect of the UnitedHealthcare’s CEO murder last week
Sounds like Steel Mountain from Mr Robot, cool.
In fact it sounds like the TV show facility was based on this, the 'have their own fire brigade' thing also created in the show.
> These films will soon exit the service because the rights acquired by Netflix as part of its licensing deal will end at the end of the month. This standard content licensing practice is also the reason why “Friends” is no longer available in the U.S. or Mr. Robot” is no longer available in Arabic countries.
So, a complete non story.
Not movie, but Mr Robot is the gold standard when it comes to film making. It is by far the best piece of produced that humanity has ever done.
Tbh all of that sounds like it would be completely impossible without either breaking all known encryption without anyone noticing, plus burning all possible backups (basically the Mr. Robot Season 1 plot) or with unilateral government backing. The first one is nigh impossible, the second one is completely up to us, as it's always been. It doesn't require an AGI for fascists to come into power and start shooting people they don't like with impunity.
I have fond memories of watching Leo Laporte, Patrick Norton, and Kevin Rose (of later digg fame) on The Screen Savers and Call For Help on the old ZDTV, then TechTV before it merged with G4. So many amazing hosts and shows got their start on that network, and many of them continue on their own shows/podcasts on YouTube and elsewhere, especially on the TWiT.tv video podcast network that Leo started. I met Leo once in SF at an impromptu meetup he announced on Twitter in the early 2010s, and he was the nicest person ever. Truly a larger than life personality and career, and you should check out all their shows if you're into IT on TV type content. They have like 10+ current active shows, including the namesake This Week in Tech and Security Now.
The closest to a show about IT support is Ask The Tech Guys, which is live in ~1.5 hours from now, and goes for 3 hours, and they have a Zoom link you can call in on @ call.twit.tv
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TechTV
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Screen_Savers
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TWiT.tv
https://twit.tv/
https://www.youtube.com/ThisWeekinTech
https://twit.tv/shows/ask-the-tech-guys
https://www.youtube.com/TechGuyLabs
I'll never forget watching Patrick accidentally break a brand-new ~$1-2K AMD 64-bit processor iirc live on TV while Leo watched in like 2002 due to misalignment or improperly mounting the heatsink. They were experts but they still make mistakes like the rest of us, and they took it in stride along with some good-natured mockery. It was the epitome of r/techsupportgore schadenfreude.
If instead you wanted a drama about IT support, I don't know of one - the closest would probably be a tie between the equally fantastic Mr Robot and Halt and Catch Fire.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Robot
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halt_and_Catch_Fire_(TV_series)
The closest thing I know to a show about IT support would probably be the British sitcom The IT Crowd.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_IT_Crowd
Last shows i (I'm Brazilian) remember pirating: Mr Robot, cause i didn't even know where to watch it legally and Cobra Kay, which for some reason was on YouTube originals. The latter I've download and disturbed to my friends back in college on a pen drive, i did the show a favor.
A sad thing, some what related to this is there's nothing worth pirating now a days. Every single movie or TV show is bad these days.
First time I realized this was possible was in the TV show Mr. Robot [0] and I thought it couldn't have been that easy. However, after my experience within the cybersecurity sector, I can see this happen easily. Old processes that require implicit trust don't work in the modern, connected world.
We already have the technology (PKI with smartcards) to fix this, but unless something really bad happens, there doesn't seem to be a rush to do so.
[0] From Mr Robot Season 2 Episode 9 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qTSoCzp-LY
Mr. Robot had some of the same vibe, but stretched out a bit at times. It'd be amazing if they could condense some of that into one movie very much like Sneakers but with more modern hacks.
2017: Open source web browser company silently to users, not even any discussion on bugzilla or anywhere else - installs a plugin made by an advertising company for a media conglomerate's TV show about hackers into everyone's Firefox installations.
The project manager responsible who used to work in the advertising industry tries to damage-control things and locks/hides the ticket. Another mozilla staffer unlocks/unhides it and states it was improperly hidden/locked.
The ticket is then made uber-double-super-secret so that not even mozilla staff can view it: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1423003
Other tickets about it are locked because of "off topic comments."
Coverage: https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/16/16784628/mozilla-mr-robot-arg-plugin-firefox-looking-glass
Then there was the Cliqz incident:
https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/74yo19/cliqz_and_mozilla_as_i_understand_it_and_metadrama/
They actively worked to hide the plugin's true nature: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1392855#c5
Cliqz was a division of Burda Media.
I vaguely recall something like this depicted in a TV show called Mr. Robot.
He was hired to find person of interest through a cell number. Impersonated or intercepted NYPD fax line? Forged some document that NYPD uses to obtain data from carriers. Sent the forged fax and just waited for a response.
Definitely more elegant than sending forged doc from a protonmail address. But nevertheless the same method.
edit: found it. https://youtu.be/AdHE5Nss4HI?si=b4Et34pHKx8p1uP9
Looks like he just used some public WiFi to remain anonymous and forged NYPD fax number to make it more legit haha. Have to rewatch this show.
This seems to be the case with virtually any profession. You have to just learn to live with it, mostly, maybe even laugh at it. It was damn near a pasttime when I was still in the Army to make fun of how the military is portrayed in film and television. Basic as fuck shit like almost no one even has a haircut that meets regulations. It also makes you doubly appreciate when someone gets it right. We all loved Band of Brothers for that. At least the first season of Mr. Robot stands out in light of so many ridiculous and shitty "hacker" portrayals. Having worked on classified projects is even worse. After working for the NRO for years, scenes of people willy-nilly taking over satellites are so silly you just have to take it as part of the way that fictional universe works, clearly unlike the real universe. The Mission Impossible movies are still pretty entertaining in spite of it.
Honestly, probably the worst thing I can recall is the first season of The Walking Dead when Rick hides inside of a tank turret. I was a tank commander back in my time. Do television writers really think there is that much space inside the turret?
Cool play on E-Corp from Mr.Robot! Wonderfully written show where every day that goes by makes it seem more and more like a documentary. Great watch even if you are only vaguely into tech.
This is similar to the first Episode of the "Mr. Robot" tv show. wow.
I know this is quite off topic, but does anyone else think that Mr. Robot was originally suppose to be a movie (or maybe a mini series)?
First season is good, it has some fluffy bits, but mostly it has a story it wants to tell and the technical aspect is pretty good. However it all falls apart in following seasons.
Season two is so slow and boring. It doesn't move to plot forward. It doesn't have (m)any technical things (just some hand wave-y "hacking"). The show just goes further and further from what attracted me to it in season one. To a point where I quit watching somewhere mid season three during the original run and only after the whole thing had concluded (and I think I was sick at home) I dredged through the rest of it.
Feels like these days everything has to be a series with multiple seasons. Writers aren't allowed to just tell a story, but instead everything is milked and it almost immediately becomes shit. Another example is Stranger Things. Season one was good and the last episode left me wanting more, but when season two rolled around they took such a big step back that I couldn't get through the first two episodes, I just didn't care.
I missed Mr Robot's first season when it originally aired. I watched the first 2 seasons, and then somehow life got in the way. I recently went back to this earlier this year, and holy cow was that a mind bender of a show. I also just happened to have had a recent friend go through a hard drug enhanced psychotic episode a few months prior, so the timing of watch the complete series and watching Elliot's journey was much more affecting than I would ever expect. The whole time, I was wondering if this was anything like what my friend's experience was like (minus all of the hacking). Reading about the show online, there were a lot of commentary on just how realistic people thought the portrayal was.
For a realistic depiction of hacking, bring back Mr. Robot.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4158110/
My personal quality bar I guess? It actually started quite well, but second half of the series drags down the average in terms of story/screenwriting/camera/VFX. It doesn't stand near the likes of Foundation, Mrs. Maisel, Mr. Robot
Doing TV is a marathon, perhaps Dark showrunners are more of sprinter people and should do movies instead.
Shellshock comes to mind as a vulnerability class. It was so popular, it made it even into the Mr.Robot TV series.
If I would describe the vulnerability series, it is something like SQL injection but for services that run shell commands in the background.
The parsers of both CGI and shells were/are so broken that I would just never run any shell command on a web server in a non-manual manner.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shellshock_(software_bug)
That's mostly because filmmaking is ceasing to be filmmaking, at least for big movies and TV shows.
I tend to ignore new TV shows these days. Why? I just know they're gonna be great for a few seasons at best then start sucking, and I don't feel like wasting my time in the meantime. I can count on one hand non-episodic TV shows in the last 25 years that have maintained their high quality throughout.
The Wire The Sopranos Breaking Bad/Better Call Saul Mr. Robot
Honourable mention for Twin Peaks: The Return, although Twin Peaks didn't exactly maintain its quality throughout season 2 even if Lynch swooped back in to save it near the end.
All cases where one person or a couple people had strong creative control of the project throughout.
I could sit here all day listing shows that started out really good but then it became clear the writers had no idea what they were doing, or the writers who did left.
These shows are all written by committee now. All these garbage Star Trek shows. Westworld has really neat sci fi premises for each season but other than season 1 they always devolve into action schlock because the writers don't understand how to actually write good sci fi.
As for big movies, they feel like they're written by marketing people not writers. They're optimised for getting people into the theatre and everything else is an afterthought.
There's still a handful of auteurs making great movies you could think of as big. People like Tarantino, Scorsese, the Coen brother. Christopher Nolan gets lucky sometimes, but most of his sci fi is ruined by sloppy writing for me(Interstellar...)
One thing is certain for me though. I can't think of a single recent movie I've enjoyed that had lots of CGI in it. The movies with the best writing are pretty much never the ones with huge effects budgets.
The true art of filmmaking lies in the writing. You can have all the effects in the world, the best actors and directors. Doesn't matter one bit if the script is terrible.
I'm a seasoned developer, so this is not for me, but I am impressed.
This kind of take always shows up in threads about simpler tools and it always amazes me. This reads to me as "I'm a seasoned developer, so I'm too good for this." I'm not sure what you consider seasoned as I've only be developing software for 25 years but one day I hope to achieve these lofty heights.
namely those that aspire to be the lead in the TV show Mr. Robot
I work with loads of hackers who avoid "real IDEs" like the plague. I think you vastly misunderstand that crowd.
>The interface looks very, um, VisualBasic or Microsoft Excel. That is fine. There is certainly a market for that. But it will turn off a huge segment of your market, namely those that aspire to be the lead in the TV show Mr. Robot.
I know that this is meant kind of in jest, but do younger people really have much opinion one way or another about computer UIs? There's so much UI fragmentation on the modern Windows desktop, the aggregate effect is an aesthetic mess no matter what you do.
I'm a seasoned developer, so this is not for me, but I am impressed. Especially the distinction between "ValueID" and "Value" that's a good way of explaining it to beginners, and a common source of error for junior software developers. My only two bits of constructive feedback would be:
1. F5 is unnatural on a Mac. Should be something like ^r (and ^R) or similar.
2. The interface looks very, um, VisualBasic or Microsoft Excel. That is fine. There is certainly a market for that. But it will turn off a huge segment of your market, namely those that aspire to be the lead in the TV show Mr. Robot. You may get some traction reskinning this whole thing to make it more slick like a machine gun you hide under your trench coat like in the Matrix and putting up a separate website or webpage and seeing which version gets more downloads.
Either way, I love this!
> the quality of films/TV produced in the west has been in steady decline for quite some time
I could agree the average quality has dropped. But surely you agree that the sheer volume of high-quality content has ballooned. How many high-quality TV shows can you name from the 90s?
Compare that to the last 10 years of shows like: Succession, Ted Lasso, The Queen's Gambit, The Handmaids Tale, Better Call Saul, Ozark, House of Cards, Stranger Things, Silicon Valley, The Crown, Fargo, Mr. Robot, True Detective, Veep, and even (controversially) Game of Thrones.
You know, for a while this seemed like a non-issue for me. I was naive. I just told myself "a company wouldn't do something like that, that's not how this stuff works". Boy was I wrong. 15 years ago I had nothing but glowing admiration for these large tech companies, now I avoid them at all costs. I pay for Kagi instead of using Google for free. I deleted my amazon account, and now just shop at normal retailers. It's not like the price is much different. I sold my Kindle, and just buy my books from Barnes and Noble. Oh, Netflix only has season 2 of Mr. Robot? Guess I'll just pirate that. I got rid of my Nest cameras (Google COMPLETELY ruined that product) and use Blue Iris locally now. Everything these companies touch turns to poison.
Unfortunately, for now I'm still stuck with google / apple maps and Gmail.
Chiming in to add onto this. Fantastic show that is very much worth watching. I'd describe it as similar to Mr. Robot: Halt and Catch Fire uses tech to talk not only about the history of the tech industry, but also to say a lot about people.
So, I mean, I know that not everyone loves The Lord of the Rings movies. But I just need everyone to remember that Peter Jackson did them. And I mean, I thought Heavenly Creatures was really interesting, and I think I'm one of the dozens of people who really liked The Frighteners (yes, I'm a hipster Frighteners fan.) But if you'd asked me, "Viking, should we trust Peter Jackson to make 11 hours and 21 minutes of The Lord of the Rings (extended editions)?" I would have said, "No," and I would have, in my humble opinion, been totally completely wrong.
I mean, I just need to remind people that great movies exist. LA Confidential. The Matrix. Hell, even the Fugitive is a lot of fun (for what it is.) Mr. Robot is simultaneously amazing and also boring as shit for huge stretches - but man, they committed to that vision, and when the big moments hit, they hit hard. True Lies. True Romance. The Abyss. The Fisher King. Good Will Hunting. Inglourious Basterds. Hell, even Hackers. And Sneakers.
I think Daemon and Freedom could be done wonderfully.
Just imagine ending the series with a nice cackle...
"I do so enjoy my vork..."
> The way I see it, the whole "chemical imbalance" thing is just one of many approaches, or ways of interpreting, psychological problems.
Well a lot of it can be enviornmental. Allergies can impede sleep, which impedes cognition, which lead to mistakes that can cost you your job, especially paired with economic precarity.
But if you're ALWAYS sad, even on vacation, even playing video games, even on a date with a beautful girl or guy or whatever... the issue might be chemical.
>I 100% agree about therapy. It's useful, but often used incorrectly. To be honest I think this comes down to incompetence,
Oh, therapists openly admit if you meet them at the GPSO mixers (grad and professional student org) that a big chunk of the industry relies on taking on clients for three sessions then passing them along.
They tend to break down if you show up and say something like "Well, I'm sad because I don't have reoccuring income, and paranoid because folks with a similar IQ and education level to myself seem highly incentivized to take away my autonomy so they can bill for services I don't need, to the point of purposefully misunderstanding what I say.
For example, I had someone try to send me into a facility overnight when I shared I was given an alaprazolam script around the time I found out someone was an agent of foreign power. I had to very bluntly tell her I'm happy to speak to an outpatient psychiatrist to renew my medical card, but if she didn't question the narrative that brought me to her office.
To paint a picture, this was a nurse practioner who I was seeing to get a strep test and an STD test, which I do regularly. I'd previously been in their clinic after nearly being murdered, since I felt my PCP had been homophobic and they advertised themselves as queer friendly.
She introduced herself as "Doctor [redacted], Nurse Practitioner" and promptly had a narcistic meltdown when I asked if she was a doctor or NP, then said I wanted a strep test to see if I need an antibiotic and to schedule a first session with a PCP other than the one I saw on my first visit, who had lectured me he had been sued for malpractice before but could document he didn't technically harm the person, told me he'd renew my medical card if I "got all my shots" (I'm not trans), then refused to do more than give me new bandages for puncture wounds so deep the ER had said they couldn't be stitiched (and to see a PCP about a further round antibiotics to keep them from being infected as they healed.)
>On this front I think psychology/psychiatry has been moving backwards since the days of psychoanalysis - there are still branches of analysis being advanced and improved to this day, but they are the fringe, while the majority of resources and effort is being put into more reductive methods while, while easier to train the average person with a bachelors degree to implement, are never going to lead to the level of understanding necessary to make leaps in progress in the treatment of mental illness
You're assuming psychology/psychiatry wants to advance -- I have seen zero evidence of that, the field peaked around 2009 and ever since the barriers have been helping consumers of MH care survive extortionary attempts to coerce them into the old ways if they luck into someone who understands acronyms like CBT instead of trying to throw lithium at anyone who exresses anything but the demeanor what I call a "sullen cherub dream boy". (For an example, watch Mr. Robot. Real mental illness is nothing like... that.)
Then again, Pittsburgh, my hometown just elected a mayor who ran specifically on a platform of making UPMC pay it's fair share in taxes, and it was a known thing I'd knocked a few local party officials out of office, so I can see why sometimes folks in the medical field are on edge -- I'd be a little uneasy if I knew folks had once literally rioted outside Bill Peduto's house after hearing some chicken fingers loving autisti's tight five.
(In addition to being a hacker, I'm also an amateur comedian, and I have one set I used to do back around 2020/2021 where I'e open by telling the audience in a monotone that this is not a movie or TV show, and that if we stop having elections then I'm just a bald, muscular five nine guy who can crash the internet and knows how to break out of the county jail, then move on to joking about how they made a whole Netflix documentary about now outgoing Senator Doyle is literally in a sex cult[1] and that maybe it's because I'm autistic I don't understand why after ten years with no raise of the minimum wage anyone votes for these milquetoast neoliberals.
The best part about being unemployed for a long time like I have been since I left an NGO riddled with agents of foreign power prior to Trump's election is that eventually, you get to stop caring if you ever work again and start reading out of what folks who now festoon their churches, bars, and coffeehouses with rainbows used to call your "gay little hipster notebook" and having them panic trying to imagine ways to lock you up before you show up next week and name them like some kind of dirtbag leftist McCarthy.
Anyways sorry for the wall of text, but I cannot stand how folks will often know damn well sitting down, doing a CV review, and pointing someone at a fair paying job (or a social event where they'll be welcomed), but instead choose to other that person and feel aggrieved that if they don't feel part of any community, they have no incentive to keep any community's secrets secret.
The comments you are making on HN right this very moment are contrary to what you preach. HN owns the data on your account, not you.
I cannot assume your jurisdiction, but if one were to believe what you have stated, these assumptions would need to be true:
1) you’ve never flown anywhere before 2) you do not belong to any single country (you need to be a nomad, as all modern countries have identification systems in place for their citizens) 3) you’re using internet at a cafe because if you are paying any bills to your ISP that’s game over
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I find it highly improbable you speak the truth. I’m sorry to say, but it really seems like the type of comment made by an “ignorance is bliss” type of individual that has recently watched an episode of mr robot.
Part of the problem here I think is the author is focusing on more metaverse style VR and also experiences that are more "documentary" like (as in watching a sports game) vs actual VR games. In my opinion VR is amazing for lots of video games (like a shooter or a flying space game) and the technology has seen tons and tons of development here. It is fairly mature (although takes a fast PC still) and attracts high end developers and artists. A project like "Poker Stars VR" is probably not very attractive to top end 3D artists and VR developers because it is kind of a boring use of VR. People want to work on cool stuff.
In my opinion what we really need is the metaverse but for hackers. A bunch of business suits meeting in real life or VR will always be boring and sterile. But a place that has the magic of early IRC where a group of whitehats and blackhats anonymously can meet virtually? That could be pretty damn cool and result in some whacky crazy avatars and out of the box environments. Imagine a completely P2P capable hackerverse that mashed together something like Mr. Robot and A Scanner Darkly and your friend shows up looking like a cybernetic android dolphin. You won't see the suits Hug in VR - they're all about Handshakes ;-)
Similar to the Mr. Robot episode where Elliot hacks a laptop using a Bluetooth keyboard from a nearby vehicle after an accomplice helps approve a pairing request on the device.
I would even argue the technical side was better than most modern movies/tv shows (not counting mr robot). Anything looks realistic compared to ncis style 2 people 1 keyboard, lets unplug the monitor when things get hairy.
Hackers is a fun movie. It has a fantastic time capsule soundtrack, fun sets (the arcade, the computer room) and some fun little performances (Matthew Lillard! Fisher Stevens!) It's interesting what the show gets right (little bits of phreaker culture, social engineering) and what it gets wrong (almost everything about how computers actually work). From a realism perspective, Mr. Robot blows this out of the water, but it's still fun.
Not a movie but have you seen Mr. Robot?
Sneakers is in a league of its own.
We've been desperate for more films of this type and quality ever since. Mr Robot was the only thing that came close in the first season.
There must be a bunch of obscure B movies containing authentic tech/hacking/social engineering methods that just fly under the radar. Anyone know of a list?
Watching Mr Robot encouraged me (a skilled tradesmen) to install Kali Linux, about a year ago. I am currently attempting to pivot into a more-technical lifestyle that is easier on my poor, yet-forty body.
Sneakers was recommended to me by a client, whom suggested my talkativeness (both depth and range) were similar to one of the movie's character behaviors. I deleted the movie afterwards, and ... I have plenty of available capacity.
Re: SciFi dating concepts: I just read BJ Novak's "One More Thing", which is a collection of short stories. My favorite is that of a man whose sex robot falls in love with him... so he attempts to return her (I haven't spoiled anything with this teaser).
Not a film but Mr Robot is probably the most accurate portrayal of hacker fiction so far
Also the TV Show Mr Robot with E-Corp.
Where reading PKD and absorbing his worldview ends and a career in infosec begins is incresingly vague. I've been in it since the 90's and tbh, sometimes I think cybersecurity is just a way of collecting undiagnosed paranoid schizophrenics and setting them against one another for sport. If it weren't, how would we know?
There is a great talk by him from about '77 where he outlines the basic idea that we are living in a simulation that became the basis for the plot of The Matrix movies, and the logic is pretty classic psychological disassociation and paranoia you get from using drugs over time. Not to diminish his huge contributions, but there's stuff that's right on the edge. One of the beautiful elements of the "Mr. Robot" series is that this underlying question is also a major plot point. You can see him in the video here (sorry, the better versions seem to haven scrubbed) https://youtu.be/_U6lgSbPj8Q?t=47 , and he's got the kind of blunted affect that is typically associated with decline. His book "Exegesis," which were the letters he was writing to people at the time are consistent with indications something was going wrong as well. When I was just learning synths and a new sampler over the pandemic, I produced a track from a live session with samples from the speech, albeit they were in reference to the "Computer Controlled" logo on the 303 bass synth I used in it: https://soundcloud.com/n-gram-music/exegesis , but I sampled just the best parts.
This is to say, neither PKD nor hackers concerned about surveillance dystopia today may have a reliable picture, as paranoia can be really enveloping. That said, of course that's what They would say - you can see how this becomes an inescapable spiral. Paranoia is the iterated logic of an idea and unless you uproot the foudational one, by virtue of perfectly reasonable and consistent logic, it's going to creep back.
Reviewing the categories of a movie I know well, I’m seeing a lot of votes aren’t solidly one way or the other, but there’s an upvoted comment explaining how it’s actually “yes”. Makes me wonder if some people are just quickly and incorrectly voting on things by memory.
On the other hand it’s also very incomplete. There are so many movies/show times the number of categories. For example, there’s a scene in Mr. Robot that I just can’t follow the discussion because of chewing sounds when some guy’s eating ribs with his mouth open while they discuss some plan (misophonia category) but for Mr. Robot misophonia it has 1 yes, 1 no, and the one comment doesn’t mention that. And whoever voted no was probably just guessing.
Changing a wikipedia article to get past Security is literally an episode of Mr. Robot Season 1. https://www.themoviedb.org/tv/62560-mr-robot
>But movies and video games I have severe analysis paralysis that leads to a lot of browsing and no actual watching or playing.
I suffered of this problem as well and I believe I managed to solve it.
## Netflix
- I only open Netflix when I know what I'm going to watch.
- When I don't know what to watch it means I'm not in the mood for anything I'm currently planning to watch. So I don't open Netflix, I go to YouTube instead.
- When I know what I want to watch (these days I'm binging Mr. Robot) I favourite things that catch my interest while using the app. This is the only time for new content discovery within Netflix.
## Steam
It might sound ridiculous but I've found that to power through I need to approach games like work. I have to dedicate time for it - a weekend, or even take a vacation (I found that the time around the end of the year works best for me). Since it is something I plan, I discuss what to play with my friends and make a decision beforehand.
When the vacation comes, I make myself play at least 8 hours a day on the same regime as if I was working. After a few days I get into it and then I can continue the game in some normal occasional schedule as well. I've been able to enjoy the Mass Effect games in this way the last winter and Witcher 3 the year before that. I don't think I've managed to enjoy a single player storytelling game to such extent in the decade before that.
I try to avoid opening my 500+ game 80% unplayed Steam library. When I don't know what to play, I don't open Steam, I open YouTube and watch some let's play instead.
> Firefox Focus, Firefox Suggest, Leanplum or the TV series Mr. Robot extension
Maybe privacy focussed users have just moved somewhere else or given up and installed Chrome after disasters like Firefox Focus, Firefox Suggest, Leanplum or the TV series Mr. Robot extension that was silently installed.
When will they learn? Mr. Robot is the only thing I can think of that actually cared about making "hacking" realistic. Even movies about hacking fail miserably.
It's a no-brainer. Hire literally any competent CS major to consult and do what they say
Interesting... lots of devices (industrial control, PBXs, even smart thermostats, etc.) have debug Tx/Rx pins with no authentication at all.
We have very small ESP32 boards so plug those in, find a power pin (most controllers will have a 5v/3.3v with headroom enough for esp32 to work) and bam, you're in.
Reminds me of the Raspberry Pi in a thermostat episode from Mr. Robot (but that needed a lot more power and was physically larger)
I believed it was like war games growing up. I knew it wasn't like hackers but still enjoyed it. I knew the takedown story and it didn't represent the whole community but presented a real slice from one person. Mr Robot is a show but played like a movie and represented a shared vision of what many secretly wanted until everything fell apart.
From my experience hacker culture is more like the movie: The King of Kong with all of the drama/bragging/pettiness of a high school musical fight.
Real Genius (1985) is a pretty good one. Apollo 13 has some hardware hack stuff. Wargames (1983) a little bit. Hackers (1995) did a good job of capturing what it felt like online during the tail end of the HPA BBS thing. Halt and Catch Fire is a good TV show. Others have mentioned Silicon Valley, Office Space and Mr Robot. The best related thing I’ve seen lately is Apple TV’s Mythic Quest, lolling right now thinking about it. Watch all of these.
Mr Robot is somewhat interesting (at least season 1)
Silicon Valley is a TV show, not a movie, but it seems to get pretty close to representing the evolution of a startup for a series which appeals to a lot of people. It's less focused on hacking as a plot device than, say, Mr Robot, and more focused on the business side of running a software company (so the technical details as explained by characters ring a little flat).
I remember seeing this exact attack portrayed in season 1 of Mr. Robot. Very similar setup too.
Is disclosure legally required? If something can be understood to be an ad instead of a testimonial or endorsement, I imagined disclosure wasn't required in any jurisdiction.
Regardless, there's precedent for "we'll have to imagine that Mozilla engineers have spent their time on working to promote a Disney movie just because it's cool and it is available on Disney+."
> Mozilla wasn't paid for the "Mr. Robot" tie-in, [Mozilla's chief marketing officer] Kaykas-Wolff said. "We've enjoyed a growing partnership with the show and the show's audience," he said.
https://www.cnet.com/news/privacy/mozilla-backpedals-after-mr-robot-firefox-misstep/
except for that one time they silently pushed an extension marketing a TV show, which is probably how anyone who's heard of Firefox studies found out about them.
https://www.theregister.com/2017/12/18/mozilla_mr_robot_firefox_promotion/
That one really felt like a written-version of a Mr. Robot episode.
Lovely!
If you aged the cast of Mr. Robot by a couple decades so that they're middle aged, and transported them and their memories back in time to the early 1990s, and the whole crew was focused on just one hack, that's pretty much the movie Sneakers.
For someone who hasn't seen it, how does it compare to Mr. Robot? (Season 1)
Obviously not a movie, but Mr. Robot deserves a mention here anyway for the highly realistic hacking supporting its less realistic plot.
As others have suggested, Mr. Robot isn't quite this but it's close, and extremely well made. One of the best TV shows ever in my opinion.
Tony Stark is a "next level" rich scientist, engineer/inventor, and ladies man. His IT related sides are incidental at best.
The only recent and decent "IT guy" series was Mr. Robot and the differences from any other field are obvious. The main "IT guy"-character is presented as socially dysfunctional. The supporting IT-people are tiny little gears turning in their cubicles.
Military - always fighting in the harshest condition, against the toughest enemies, saving the world.
Lawyers - good looking people, living a lavish lifestyle in corner offices of New York skyscrapers, having the cool monologues that wow the courtroom.
Doctors - brilliant but otherwise normal people facing very difficult decisions every day, making brilliant decisions to save life after life, and dealing with loss.
Spies - absolutely superhuman skills and knowledge, constantly capable of turning the tide of any way with a single person concentrated effort. (The more you go towards the "military/spy" side of things, the more likely it becomes about superhumans.)
IT focused movies/characters are probably just not attractive to the wider audience. Or at least nobody really proved that they can be. So even in Mr. Robot didn't focus on the hacking as much as on the larger plot. It simply made a very realistic point of that hacking.
Matrix the movie (first one, the good one) and Mr Robot the TV show! If you are not familiar with either, they are strongly recommended!
Ha, looking at the pictures, I thought "that looks just like the records building in the middle of season 3 of Mr. Robot", and it's the same building.
BTW this is unrelated to the thread, but Mr. Robot is an incredible show, and the middle of season 3 (where this building is featured) in particular is probably the greatest television I've ever seen. Episodes 5 and 6 are like a full two-episode climax to a story arc that had been building since season 2. I generally avoid any "hacker" type shows/movies for the cheesiness/cringiness of the hacker portrayals (and Mr. Robot does start off a bit cheesy), but I'm glad I made an exception here.
I still buy shows and movies I really like on Blu-Ray (though usually after a first watch on streaming services).
For one, I’m betting that bit rot on the disk will take longer to happen than shenanigans with the streaming rights.
For two, the video quality of most streaming services is god awful. The resolution is there but the bit rate absolutely isn’t. I watched Mr Robot on Prime Video recently and dark scenes (of which there are a lot) looked like a blocky watercolour mess.
Maybe because Mozilla collects a massive amount of "telemetry" on users, in a way that is personally identifiable, despite zero need for it to be so?
https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/toolkit/components/telemetry/
Or maybe it's because you can toss some money at Mozilla and they'll silently install a browser extension on behalf of an advertising company for a shitty TV show about a l33t haxx0r d00d?
By the way, the bugzilla report about that particular incident was locked, then made employee-only, then made public again...then restricted beyond employee-only...by a project manager...who used to work for advertising companies before she came over to Mozilla.
Or how about the fact that flipping on some of the anti-tracking features include munging the timezone, which means times in almost any website are wrong - which seems to be a poison pill to keep people from turning it on?
Edit with details regarding the extension controversy: https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/16/16784628/mozilla-mr-robot-arg-plugin-firefox-looking-glass
I'll go technical here:
Mr. Robot Who am I (a movie, which is released a bit earlier than Mr. Robot but eerily similar)
Leaving aside all the technical correctness especially on Mr. Robot, they both inspired me a lot.
Great suggestions here, many that I've either never heard of or never considered - I look forward to checking them out and please keep them coming, I'm hopeful this can turn into a masterthread to keep coming back and discovering motivational media.
Should maybe have done this earlier but adding a few of the ones I've already watched.
Technical Motivation:
- Silicon Valley (TV show, 2014-2019) - The Social Network (2010) - The Imitation Game (2014) - Halt & Catch Fire (TV show, 2014-2017) - Iron Man (2008) - Primer (2004) - The Martian (2015) - Hidden Figures (2016) - Flight of the Phoenix (1965 original or 2004 remake)
"Sales" Motivation:
- The Pursuit of Happyness (2006) - Door to Door (2002) - Underrated straight-to-TV film about a man with cerebral palsy who wants to become a door-to-door salesman - Glengarry Glen Ross (1992) - Pure sales, persistence and Pacino - Salesman (1969 documentary) (As above, but instead of Pacino it's real door-to-door bible salesmen and what they go through)
Honorable Mentions:
- Mr Robot (2015-2019): probably the most thrilling and technically accurate depiction of technology and hacking ever put to a screen, but as someone else said it's also very dystopian and depressing, and not too motivational except in the brief bursts that they show Elliot setting up a hack. Either way no VisualBasic GUIs here.
- Flash of Genius (2008): about the inventor of the modern windshield wiper who had it stolen from Ford and sued them. The premise is motivational, but I personally found it more of a cautionary tale on what you can lose for your principles when you go up against the giants.
I found the original “Indie Game: The Movie” very personally inspiring, the sequel less so. It’s a documentary about a number of indie game developers working really hard and risking it all to make it. The passion these people are pouring into their games is palpable.
“Mr. Robot” is great if you don’t mind it’s overdramatized dystopian atmosphere. Probably one of the most realistic use of computers in a TV show. It has ups and downs, some of its best and worst episodes are in its final season, it’s a pretty interesting roller coaster.
“Computer Chess” is a weird black and white fictional movie about people trying to build the best Chess AI in the 80s. I really enjoyed it. Does a great job capturing the vibe of the era.
Let me guess,is it E Corp from the Mr Robot TV series? https://mrrobot.fandom.com/wiki/E_Corp
My first thought: Your district had an IT department? I guess that's probably more common now than when I went to HS in the 90s but I'm fairly certain IT duties are still farmed out to a small business for the districts I live near.
Outside of that, though, I've talked to folks who worked in IT at a nearby hospital[0] and knew several who worked in IT at a University a town over and heard variations of your story. After ransomware hit a few hospitals across the country, my hope is that this is less common but I'd be surprised if anything is meaningfully better.
The problem with getting non-technical people to understand the importance of securing things is that they assume that everything provides a basic level of security. They read about hacks/attacks and hear about them on the news but they have probably not experienced one, personally[1]. They apply physical security considerations to the virtual world -- for instance, the keys you use to lock your front door are almost certainly terrible[2] but requiring physical access to the lock makes attacks on them rare. And that's the rub, it's the mistake in thinking that "Nobody cares about my stuff enough to hack me" which is the evidence used to justify the "it's never going to happen to me". It's a failure to understand that even if it were true that an attacker would literally have no use for anything you're protecting with a password (which is absolutely false -- your identity is enough) that another target will be chosen ahead of you[3]. On the internet, every target can be attacked at once, silently, from a distance and targets are chosen based on whether or not the attack succeeds.
In a High School, you can fully expect there's at least one of me in every graduating class. I'm surprised things like this don't happen all the time given how little attention is paid to network security/endpoint security in these places. No amount of threats of expulsion, legal action, etc will serve to help when your attackers are High School students[4]. The same part of their brain that makes them believe they're immortal/causes irresponsible behavior early-on in driving causes them to not understand the real probability that they will face criminal charges which is coupled with them not fully understanding how badly those criminal charges will affect the rest of their lives.
[0] The discussion arose after he had watched Season 1 of Mr. Robot and said "that's exactly how it is here except we have a (technical) staff of two rather than one"
[1] I can't tell you how many extended family members have shared that they still use a single password for every account and in a few cases, that password might as well be a variation of "Password".
[2] I have a close friend who learned how to pick locks as a hobby; he filed me off a bump key and taught me how to use it, whacking it with a branch of a tree; I was able to open my supposedly "extra secure" dead bolt pretty consistently with about 15 minutes of practice, he's picked each of my locks at one time or another.
[3] The old "You can't outrun the bear, but if you and your friend are being chased by the same bear, you only need to outrun your friend".
[4] I used to tell my kids that our High School not only had no doors in the stalls of the mens room, there had never been any doors designed into the plan. The partitions were brick, there were no holes, anywhere, where doors had been removed. I figured this was to make it easier to catch kids smoking but while fixing his PC, I asked the principal about it. His answer was "vandalism" -- students would rip them out. Reallt?! I couldn't imagine this. Fast forward to this year, the doors on the stalls at my kid's HS were ripped out by students during the first week of class. The kids were caught, criminally charged and had to pay for the damage. Their reason? They saw someone do it on TikTok and didn't think they'd get caught (there are 2 dome cameras at the entry to each bathroom!). Despite paying for the damage, the doors are not coming back this year -- I'd wager they'll never come back.
Mozilla has previously used it for a cross-promotion with TV show Mr Robot. They also used it to push an emergency update to everyone once.
That said, officially it is guaranteed to only ever be used for properly vetted academic experiments.
So it should be fine! /s
Reminds me of that episode in Mr Robot
> Man the good ol days. I remember when the movie Hackers came out
I had to look it up; I can't believe I have never heard of this movie, I should have been interested back then. Wargames (1983) was the film that my computer friends and I associated with our activities, and I was disappointed for years after that nothing came close to it, maybe Sneakers (1992), and 3 Days of the Condor (1975), though that is more of a spy intrigue genre, but it included a fascinating introduction to phreaking. More recently, I enjoyed Blackhat (2015) and Mr. Robot also scratched that itch. I'm going to look for Hackers (1985). Thanks for mentioning.
REALLY misleading. They created this feature for Mr. Robot, the TV show, too:
https://protonmail.com/blog/protonmail-mr-robot-secure-email/
Scroll down to comment:
> Liam, October 14, 2015 at 10:30 PM
> But https://protonmail.com/security-details page says “No tracking or logging of personally identifiable information. Unlike competing services, we do not save any tracking information. We do not record metadata such as the IP addresses used to log into accounts.” So, now it turns to be that you introduced tracking and logging? Is this data encrypted as well?
> Admin, October 17, 2015 at 9:14 PM
> We don’t save any of this data by default, the user must explicitly turn it on for us to save it.
There should be a reasonable assumption that given they have end-to-end encryption for the service, they just encrypt the logging for the user and store it encrypted without the key themselves like they do the emails.
Also to note, they at least have an onion link to use their email service.
This is basically the plot of the Amazon Video TV show Mr. Robot coming to life, haha.
Maybe one day they’ll decide to hire a college-educated IT major.
Mr Robot is a TV series about hacking where hacker simply uses social tricks and can't get past 2FA. It has lots of tech jargon.
Semi-coherent thoughts follow.
The most horrifying thing to me from that episode was that the judges and audience understood and agreed with the MC's denouncement of optimizing for user engagement (something that never happens today /s).
It made them feel horrified, ashamed, and aware. Feelings they weren't used to feeling. Feelings they needed to feel. And they loved it.
So they packaged it up and let people cash in their merits to hear him speak again. Like what the hell? Even awareness of the system can be sold as a commodity by the system.
It makes me think of subreddits critical of proprietary software and social media, or privacy-focused Telegram users. It makes me think of TV shows I love that happen to be owned by media conglomerates: shows like Mr. Robot. Selling criticism of yourself...that's a powerful way to control dissent.
The worst part is that the people profiting from this probably don't even realize what a genius move they're making. Most of this is likely unintentional. The most powerful actors don't even know how manipulative they're being; everything runs on autopilot at an organizational and individual level. That's what happens when you optimize for a singular metric.
Makes me think of Mr. Robot season 1...
Another thing for which DuckDuckGo is useless: finding media. It or whatever crawler it uses totally falls for those keyword-flooded sites that have a couple ads and then paragraphs of "wandavision watch free mr robot now free download all seasons season 1 101 dalmatians disney land[...]" autogeneration. I wish they'd do something about all the spam.
While climbing the middle ladder, something snapped in me, or perhaps covid accelerated the process.
A year or so ago, I was working on my undergraduate thesis project in deep RL, I had been working on the project for 8-9 months at the time. Due to covid, lack of support and computational resources from the university, I was behind, and making progress was difficult.
Shortly after I submitted the thesis, I felt an eerie disillusionment with the absurdity of the middle class, and whatever we are all doing, the pretentiousness, how we are all stuck in our own little bubbles where we find ways to feel special and 'serious' about things, how we focus and advertise the niche-ness of our field, and how we all advertise our lives in social media and so on.
Sam Esmail put it greatly in the first episode of Mr. Robot in Elliot's monologue on what in society disappoints him so much [1] and concludes that the reason is that we are all cowards, we are looking to be sedated. Which is absolutely true, capitalism feeds on that, bought something?, bam dopamine rush, got a promotion to the same shitty position but with more responsibilities ? congratulations, another dopamine rush. Buying overpriced sushi and eating it with that chopstick skill you have mastered, another rush. Sharing our lives on the internet bam rush, and you know what, of course we need to share pictures with our friends, it's the contract, we scratch each other's back here, and the funny thing is, it is never enough, and it will never be enough [2].
Deep down, we all know that the world is utter shit, but living in these bubbles allows us to pretend that it is not so bad, because that is easier, it allows us to live with the situation instead of taking the roads and demanding that things change, if anything, why should we demand a change if "it's working for us", if whatever we have gives us a dose big enough to forget but small enough to function? Heck, even if we start fixing the world, Machiavelli argues that given the opportunity, the middle class will bring it back [3], because the new state of affairs will not enable that kind of detachment.
The problem with this disillusionment is that you aren't willing to be sedated, not anymore, you realize how shit the world is, how everyone is pretending and is unwilling to accept it that we are not in control of anything.
But what the f do I know. All I can say is that I have seen and experienced the 'Michael Scott' behaviour from the people the author mentions, but again, I live in my own little bubble.
[1] https://soundcloud.com/flibber/mr-robot-101-elliots-monologue-about-society
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_adaptation
[3] In "il prince", when a new prince conquers a region with the help of aristocrats, if he changes the norm, he needs to squash any chance of future opposition as the previous norm worked for the aristocrats and they will try to revert back.
Edit:
I must have hit some nerves. Sorry for telling the silent part out loud, Michael.
> I mean...the smart controllers on the HVAC systems in these companies have to be replaced don't they?
Did you recently binge-watch Mr. Robot?
Mr. Robot episode names are also fun:
"eps1.9_zer0-day.avi" "shutdown -r" "404 Not Found"
Etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Mr._Robot_episodes
I think this is an exaggeration. Short/Long takes are an artistic decision. We have recent movies that are a few long takes (sometime pretending to be a single take) 1917, Birdman, Russian Ark (true single take) all shot in recent years. Same with TV: True Detective has a famous long take scene, Mr. Robot, BCS.
To recommend some good shows, Mr. Robot seemed to play out its episodes in a good amount of time (only had 4 seasons, 2 wasn't amazing but served its purpose). Another is Ozark, which has been pretty entertaining, and the show's Bateman has said the upcoming season 4 will be its last, so it's not going to be strung too long either.
This was a plot device used in the TV series Mr. Robot Season 2, Episode 3, about 27 minutes in.
I recall sometime in the mid 2000s there was a fever for achieving five-9s (99.999% uptime, I think -- it became fodder for a few episodes of Mr. Robot). Not that the metric ever went away, but back then a lot of BigIron(TM) vendors advertised achieving five-9s by replacing hardware while the OS remained running and continuing service. Sun 15K and 25K series (Gilfoyle had a used one in the garage running his network) were behemoths whose mem/cpu boards you could swap out wholesale while the entire frame and backplane was powered on, and while the OS the board came out of remains functioning. There were many caveats around the procedure but it worked. Execs and sales guys loved those demos. These monsters were expensive and banks and energy conglomerates were buying them by the dozens. There was also a big todo about hot swappable drives. The idea that you could be doing hardware maintenance while the machine was still running was a novelty, something like brain surgery while the patient was not only awake, but awake and eating, driving his car, talking on the phone, etc.
A decade later I look back with deep surprise that we didn't think to abstract out the service instead of the hardware. I don't know how many of those behemoths are still being bought, now I work almost exclusively with small server instances that can come and go on the fly. Micro services and AWS have taken five-9s in a different direction. I frequently think of Sun as a failed Hephaestus, in a Christopher Nolan film he would be brilliant but could only turn out clumsy tools because of his deformity, he hates the things he makes so he throws them away before completion. Men find these cast-offs and temper and refine them.
I think part of this is the limitations of interest that come from a film. You can write a whole movie about an electrical engineer building robots and visually show the struggles along the way. If you compare that to a software engineer searching for another fucking memory leak or something then it's just not going to be as visually interesting.
An interesting thing about this is that I think it's easier to show in print. I can read a book about a maverick developer and have it describe the errors and the trials and tribulations and it isn't as slow by comparison. Hollywood then feels the need to emphasize what they show with wild CGI, which is a whole other issue when it comes to entertaining portrayals. I think the only realistic portrayal I've seen onscreen is Mr. Robot, and even that goes into fiction when it's most needed for the plot.
That is great to see someone who has being doing this for so long. True respect for someone like this instead of someone who is just jumping the band wagon because tv show like Mr. Robot, the React FB, side effect.
I think it comes from recent popular media, like the Watch_Dogs games and the TV show Mr. Robot. Hoodies are a way to prevent people from seeing or identifying you, so media people use it as a visual shorthand for "this person wishes to conceal their identity". Back in the 90s, hackers were all cybergoth ravers; this image is more in line with the $CURRENT_YEAR zeitgeist in which pervasive surveillance is a top issue.
So a few minutes ago I wrote code for a company, producing economic value. Last night I kept up with family, maintaining healthy personal relationships. Right now I'm engaging in intellectual discussion of major issues with other people. And last night I watched an episode of Mr. Robot, engaging my brain with a stimulating story. And yes, sometimes I just look at animal gifs on imgur.
I see no problem continuing any of this for 34 collective years.
First of all, they deliberately destroyed my bookmarks.
https://drewdevault.com/2017/12/16/Firefox-is-on-a-slippery-slope.html
> For a long time, it was just setting the default search provider to Google in exchange for a beefy stipend. Later, paid links in your new tab page were added. Then, a proprietary service, Pocket, was bundled into the browser - not as an addon, but a hardcoded feature. In the past few days, we’ve discovered an advertisement in the form of browser extension was sideloaded into user browsers. Whoever is leading these decisions at Mozilla needs to be stopped.
> Here’s a breakdown of what happened a few days ago. Mozilla and NBC Universal did a “collaboration” (read: promotion) for the TV show Mr. Robot. It involved sideloading a sketchy browser extension which will invert text that matches a list of Mr. Robot-related keywords like “fsociety”, “robot”, “undo”, and “fuck”, and does a number of other things like adding an HTTP header to certain sites you visit.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/7/17326184/firefox-ads-sponsored-content-pocket-suggestions
> Mozilla’s motto is “internet for people, not profit,” however the realities of having to fund all of its ventures are forcing the company into adopting one of the web’s less human-friendly aspects: sponsored content. Having acquired read-it-later service Pocket last year, Mozilla has been populating new tabs in Firefox with Pocket reading suggestions — and those are now going to include links that an advertiser has paid for.
I also thought the ending was subpar compared to the genius narrative twists in the first two seasons of Mr Robot. I agree with your take on the system, Eric Weinstein's latest podcast has some pretty interesting remarks about it. The youtube video is not up yet so link to the specific portal episode
https://podcasts.apple.com/nl/podcast/the-portal/id1469999563?l=en&i=1000471686956
> Mr. Robot was about Occupy
I'm a Mr. Robot fan, and a real fan of Kor's influence (an ex security guy at Toyota!) on the show but I likely took a very different perspective from it than most as I'm a crypto nerd.
To me the series was like a dramatization of Naomi Campbell's Shock Doctrine [1] with very well portrayed hacks and exploits (I'm not a pen tester but some OPESEC stuff was quite accurate). And their crypto stuff was actually well developed and researched. And some hero vs villeins characters to keep things going.
SPOILER ALLERT
The occupy overtones felt like a distraction, and a tired trope to me; the masks were an obvious nod to the Guy Faux maskes representing Anonymous, but beyond that I think it was rather lacking any real substance--Season 3's riot at E-corp showed how quickly things escalate to violent mob-rule even against the supposed protagonists. The redistribution of wealth via a hack against the 1%'s seemed forced and cobbled together because Sam wanted the ending to fit that narrative and quite frankly it felt forcefully coaxed; whereas the mental health, loneliness and substance abuse plot was very well paced and fleshed out throughout the series.
I wasn't really satisfied with how that last hack drove the series end and how the last 'hack' saved the World was rather ridiculous to me as result--and this is from perhaps one of the most anti-nuclear voices on HN! And he survived to see his plan triumph, because reasons we cannot and will not explain beyond some far fetched off scene make-believe you will just have to accept.
I've never seen Homeland; to be honest I don't really watch TV much as popular shows feel boring to things that happen in the many sub-cultures and communities I'm involved in. That guy from Occupy I mentioned before got me into Mr. Robot at the end of season 1 but I didn't get into it much until the E-Coin vs Bitcoin plot development in S2 and binged most of it until that part.
Even during this lockdown I've been mainly re-watching/listening to old races, concerts and DJ sets while I study and do stuff. I have like 5 audio books I'm waiting to sink my teeth into so I'm afraid I won't get to see Home Coming anytime, either. I'll check out the trailer, but that's rather glib representation I imagine.
1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mGmB63TIHLY
Edit: Saw trailer: eh, Black Mirror's Men Against Fire did that plot brilliantly, and this seems like an elongated version of it. And what is Sam's obsession with fish tanks?
PS: I don't think I've clarified my position with the Shock Doctrine; I agree with Campbell's premise, but not her conclusion(s), as Free Market Capitalism is not what is inserted in the 'window of operation' from the disaster/shock to the system, but rather a very parasitic corporate plutocracy emerges in the way Mussolini defined Fascism (the merging of State and Corporate power) is what inserts itself in practice. Even Pricenton has defined the US as an Oligarchy.
One big reason is the Mr Robot TV series. The main character uses Kali Linux for "hacking", and it was quite a popular show amongst casual computer users. As a result, many people who had limited knowledge about security started installing Kali Linux on their laptops so they could be "hackers" too.
Netflix’s recommended content has become so terrible outside things I want like Better Call Saul or Mindhunter, that I’ve cancelled the sub. Most of what they push to the top is straight garbage. Really badly written stuff.
Meanwhile I can pay the same for amazon and get more Picard, Mr Robot, The Expanse... and if the TV sucks there are plenty of movies on rotation.
This doesn't work well in apps but games do incredible things to hide that state; and it's partially a consequence of avoiding a patent on minigames inside loading screens.
e.g. back in the 90s with Resi 1, the loading screen was hidden by a slow and tense animation of a door opening. It totally fit the atmosphere.
Plenty of games add an elevator or a scripted vehicle ride, or some ridiculous door locking mechanism that serves the same purpose without breaking immersion, especially as those faux-loading screens can be dynamic.
It's pretty much the exact same technique used in cinema when a director wants to stitch multiple takes into a single shot (e.g. that episode in True Detective; that other one in Mr Robot; all of Birdman).
I would say its more suprising that ProtonMail shows up in a movie like Knives Out (which has no technical content), than it is for it to appear in Mr. Robot (a purposefully technical series, and being underwritten by Michael Bazzel, who is an advocate of ProtonMail).
1) It's a visible hand now. Adam Smith was a while ago and much has changed across economics. Enough that what you'd think are timeless truths have also become false.
2) We have a name for this hand - the federal reserve of the united states of america. If you saw the last Mr. Robot season, there's an episode where Mr. Robot says "behind every great fortune lies a great crime, this is the corporate motto of these United States". He was only slightly wrong. Behind all great fortunes since the advent of central banking lies the hand of the federal reserve.
Does watching Netflix, HBO, or Hulu count as watching TV? That's how I usually watch television shows and none has commercials.
If I watch broadcast TV it's through my DVR and I skip commercials.
Pretty much the only live TV I watch is sports and there's a lot of advertising there.
I'd argue that TV isn't trash though. There's an unbelievable amount of stuff being made and it isn't hard to find something great to watch. My to-watch list still has Sopranos, The Wire, Breaking Bad, Mr Robot, Westworld S2, Game of Thrones, and about 20 other series on it.
US TV is so disappointing when you expect an hour long episode but, because of the ads, it's only 42-43 minutes long. A mid-way intermission would be fine, but instead you get shallow plots driven by the need to shove in ads every 12 minutes. And all the procedurals are built around that, like the lives of those characters in that universe pause so some shitty marketing material can play. Of course, they're also 24 episodes long so they run for most of a year, and 90% of the show is the baddie of the week. The 10% of actual substance is distributed in 3-4 episodes throughout so you have to deal with all of it to get the real plot.
I've been watching the last season of Mr Robot on Amazon (and my god is it a cracker). As soon as I went to reddit to check out the fanbase reaction, so many of the posts were about how the vibe was ruined by ads appearing so often. But for me...it was a solid 50 minutes of TV, completely uninterrupted. I imagine those who enjoyed The Expanse on cable are now delighted about season 4 being a pure continuous stream on Amazon. I was.
Of course, you still get the blatant product placement. Death Stranding is my recent fave example for that, where you get Monster energy cans rubbed in your face. Same as with the old Splinter Cell games you'd be climbing across a massive billboard advertising Axe body spray.
I think the US has a serious problem with its special blend of capitalism, individualism, and consumerism. Everybody is out there to get something from you.
It’s not a matter of paying for stuff, at least not in Europe. I have 3 different streaming subscriptions (still cheaper than 8 channels of flow tv with its 50% commercials), and I absolutely hate watching a tv show, only to find out the European version of the streaming service doesn’t have the last 4 seasons yet, despite the show being over and the finale having “aired” in the US.
In cases like that I turn to torrents and download whatever seasons I’m missing, watch them and delete them again. I still keep my streaming subscriptions though.
It has gotten better, and the problem is mostly confined to cross studio/service shows, or services not available in Europe.
HBO Nordic hasn’t even announced an air date for Mr. Robot season 4 yet, which I guess is great as I can only dodge spoilers for so long, so when it eventually hits I’ll know the ending.
Even if the show was available on a European streaming service, I’d probably stream it anyway. There’s a limit to how many streaming services I care to have, and torrenting is so much easier than trying to navigate the dark patterns most streaming services put around their unsubscribe pages.
I’m also too lazy to subscribe/unsubscribe multiple times per year to multiple services.
Perhaps a “pay per view” model that bills you X per show watched, up to a maximum equal to the monthly subscription fee. That way I could have multiple subscriptions and only pay subscription fees to the services I actually use, and once I stopped watching them I’d automatically be unsubscribed.
Of course that will never happen while there are a million services.
I had the same experience watching Mr Robot season 3. I just waited a week and it came back to watch for free.
Seems like a classic bait and switch and probably shady.
Mr Robot season 5
I asked for the most notable movies and shows. A few choice specimens which you think would resonate would work.
For example, if I were to pick a few top candidates for nerd representation in media I might pick the IT Show or CSI or Mr Robot.
There have been a few Firefox commercials on cable television that aired during season 3 of Mr. Robot.
Mr. Robot directly referenced it several times. Off the top of my head they used an instrumental of "Where is my mind" in the finale of the first season, which is also used in the ending of the film.
Mozilla has a proven record of remotely installing extensions on your browser to advertise TV shows[0] and sending your entire browsing history to a third party ad company[1]. A clean record indeed.
[0] https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/16/16784628/mozilla-mr-robot-arg-plugin-firefox-looking-glass
[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/press-uk/2017/10/06/testing-cliqz-in-firefox/
If the plot was 1) I wouldn’t watch your movie. It sounds worse than some episodes of Mr Robot.
Mr Robot lost most of its audience[1] probably because Season 2 was super slow and focused more on the character than the hacking.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Mr._Robot_episodes#Ratings
It just sounds like they’re doing what every other network does. A bunch of it is trash you don’t care about but another subset of their customers do. It’s not all commissioned for us personally, and Netflix will always prioritise their own shows before others in the app.
It’s not like you watch HBO 12 hours a day expecting pure content that you love from start to finish.
That said, apart from the tent pole series they [plan to] push out each year (stranger things, better call saul, Fargo, mindhunter, nightflyers, etc.) the rest is clearly data driven garbage that doesn’t realise it’s working a cliche. With a couple of exceptions even the marvel universe shows fell into their pattern.
In that sense it’s Netflix Unoriginal Content. But you still get the diamond in the mine.
Being in the EU I get about 8 different translations of two different kinds of zombie story, but you’re not really paying for that.
And on the same level, it’s a shame that streaming is now split. American Gods, Good Omens, The Expanse, and Mr Robot are all on Amazon. Netflix definitely dropped a ball on some of that. The TV show costs the same but I have to pay 2x to watch because of the networks.
I recommend you watching Mr.Robot :)
> I don't think mozilla is as privacy oriented as HN would make you think.
> * They pushed ad/extension for a TV show to everyone
I assume you're talking about the "mr robot" thing here as well. One can accuse it of being many things, but it wasn't a privacy violation, as no data was sent (or planned to be sent) to anybody, either to Mozilla or any third-party. (It was silly, an abuse of studies, a source of worry for those who monitor their list of add-ons for suspicious items, and a strategic error.)
I'm with you on this one. I don't think mozilla is as privacy oriented as HN would make you think.
* They pushed ad/extension for a TV show to everyone
* They silently served modified installers to a small subset of users downloading firefox which sent all browsing data to a 3rd party by default.
* Disabling experiments used for pushing the mr robot ad does not disable "normandy" - which is practically the same thing and they used to push new certificates once their old ones expired and broke addons recently. This feature is hidden in advanced settings.
And then as you say, using google analytics everywhere (giving google data), painting google indirectly as evil while having it as a default engine and collecting google money.
They copied their plan from a TV show called Mr. Robot https://youtu.be/1ee-cHbCI0s
There is no RPi vulnerability(in this article). The RPi was just used as a bastion into the internal network. It could have been any SBC. Once your already inside the internal network things get stupid lax.
EG. I can't see your Windows shared folders from the internet, but the PC in the next room can. Someone sneaked an RPi into JPL to be that PC in the next room.
See Also; Season 1 Mr Robot had this exact scenario as a plot point.
Society glamorizes hackers hard. Have you ever seen War Games? The Matrix? Live Free or Die Hard? Mr Robot? Blackhat? Any recent spy movie? What about the multitude of other movies/shows where hackers aren't the focus, but are certainly glamorized, a la NCIS, CSI, Limitless, etc. There's an entire genre of film & television about hackers and they are almost always portrayed as cool, attractive, powerful people with the world at their fingertips.
A bit like the Mr Robot episodes with Craig Robinson (guess that needs a spoiler alert, apologies!)
There was a similar technique used in the tv show Mr. Robot, season 3 episode 9, to hide some secret information (trying not to spoil anything). Ryan Kazanciyan, the Technical Consultant, wrote a blog piece on this technique.
https://link.medium.com/x7YFdksWrR
>Suddenly, you are no longer fighting your browser.
I mean, if you're okay with Pocket showing you ads in your home page, your browsing data being sent to Cliqz, addons that publicise the "Mr Robot" TV show being installed without your consent, Mozilla pages that use Google Analytics scripts that cannot be blocked, then Firefox is a solid choice.
This reads like some bootleg Mr. Robot episode.
This reads like a Mr Robot episode...
Man, this is literally my Plex library. <15 shows that I ever enjoy watching (ATHF, Mr Robot, The Wire, Sopranos, GoT, Squidbillies, House, King of the Hill, Silicon Valley, Buffy, Futurama to be exact.) They still take up a full 1.5TB because I like to get the highest quality rips possible.
Some shows like House I have edited personally to create 'binge versions,' with the intro and outro cut out, with only special episodes that have special endings or intros included. Saves a good chunk of time with House and The Wire when I rewatch them. I wish a lot of other people did this as well. Instead groups stick to following scene rules that leave us with ugly formats, poor management and naming schemes and more. They were created for a different era.
Maybe I'll try to put it out there.
Most of the time when you walk on the beach, you don't have an amazing encounter.
There's a long list of television shows I haven't started yet and wish I had. Game of Thrones, Sopranos, The Wire, Mr Robot, and lots of others. It's surprising how often conversations with friends and strangers revolve around our common culture.
I think a lot of people my age credit their love of sci fi while growing up in the 70's and 80's with putting them on their career path.
My advice would be to watch the TV you want to watch, then take your dog out for a walk after. Best of all worlds.
Is this a Mr. Robot episode?
This is neat. Reminds me of the MR robot episode where he puts a link to track the FBI in season 3
I'm a bit surprised by that comment. I actually find Prime to have pretty good content and typically better movies than Netflix (who's movie library has been shrinking pretty drastically over the years).
If you haven't already watched it, I'd highly recommend Season 1 and 2 of "The Expanse" on Prime. There are a lot of pretty great shows on there as long as you don't rely on DC/Marvel shows for all your entertainment. Other shows that are reasonably acclaimed are:
- The Man in the High Castle
- Avatar: The Last Airbender
- The Nightmanager
- Mr. Robot
- Boardwalk Empire
- Downton Abbey
- Sneaky Pete
- Orphan Black
- Dr. Who
- Veep
- The Good Wife
- Transparent
- Hannibal
- Deadwood
- Curb your Enthusiasm
- The Wire
- Six Feet Under
- The Sopranos
You must have missed this:
https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/16/16784628/mozilla-mr-robot-arg-plugin-firefox-looking-glass
And I do use Firefox.
But they really should not have done that, even if in the end the actual harm done was nil it broke trust.
There is also this:
https://github.com/amq/firefox-debloat
I actually take exception to your classifying my comment as FUD, I'm in nobody's pocket (pun intended) and the worst you could accuse me of is being wrong. That said I was happy to trust the Mozilla of the past a lot more than I'm willing to trust the Mozilla of the present. Their forced upgrade strategy breaking my workflow and the Mr. Robot episode on top of that did little to assure me that they still have my best interest in mind. The thing that keeps me from switching is that I'm pretty sure all the competition is much worse.
A good post-mortem summary does a few things: (1) describes the actual event timeline clearly and precisely; (2) describes the negative consequences of the event (if they are not implicitly clear) from the end-user's point of view; (3) lays out exactly what mistakes were made that led to and continued the event--whether in assumptions made, process failures, inadequate process, unanticipated consequences, side effects to remediation attempts, etc; (4) describes planned and potential changes that will avoid the problem in the future along with a communication plan for keeping stakeholders informed of any future changes. A good post-mortem does all of this while taking a broad, organization-level view of the event and a user-focused view of its consequences.
Maybe the internal document covers all of this, but this blog-post summary does not. And what is included here does not bring me great confidence.
Firstly, this summary indicates they were far too narrowly focused in their assessment, talking only about the Mr Robot promotion's compatibility with the purpose and restrictions of the SHIELD tool. And I suspect that maybe internally the story now is that some marketing staff misused the SHIELD approval process to get this plugin around other more robust processes.
But the intricacies of which particular avenue within Firefox or Mozilla this occurred through is a backwards view of the problem. Users aren't upset that the SHIELD tool was misused to push an ad on unsuspecting and confused users. They're upset that _Firefox_ was misused to push an ad on unsuspecting and confused users. The problem here is the entire idea of a "TV show tie-in" to Firefox.
And lastly, the action items here are pretty pathetic, and fail to address users' concerns (not a surprise since users' concerns are never explicitly recognized in the post, either). Yes, SHIELD studies should be actual studies; and yes, SHIELD studies should be clearly named; and yes, it's bad that the SHIELD program was used to ship a commercial. But never once does this post promise that Mozilla will take a broader view of the actual needs and desires of their users, or that they will correct their internal mindset that led to anyone thinking this tie-in was ever remotely a good idea.
can't wait for the Mr. Robot episode where RetroClip is mentioned and the hackers use the last 60 seconds of someone's screen without their knowledge.
The Expanse is not their content, so it will always take longer to get to Netflix (if it ever shows up).
Amazon had a teaser for The Expanse, and season 1 was free. I ended up buying season 2, because I couldn't find good subtitles for the torrent I downloaded. I did this with Mr Robot, too. I can't hear as well as I used to and subtitles are really important to me.
The Mr. Robot thing was not "malware". It was an easter egg, just like about:mozilla. You may say it was poor taste on Mozilla's part, since it was essentially a paid-for promotional tie-in with a TV show, and I would probably agree with you. But it did not damage anyone's computer, compromise any data or do anything that could put it on the "Malware" category.
Something similar that noone has complained about are the Android version names which are promotional tie-ins: Kit Kat and Oreo. Mozilla's biggest screw up IMO was failing to disclose properly what was going on.
>If it's an add, it's the most well-hidden ad in history
So well hidden, it's practically underwater.
http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
Yet in spite of how well hidden it was (or rather, because of), we're now all talking about Mr. Robot, somehow. Funny how that works!
> No, it doesn't [parasitically hook in and waste resources]. [...] since you need [...] a specific and non-documented website to let it display anything
Yes it does hook into and waste resources and potentially display ads on ALL web pages.
Hover text injected into headline on Washington Post #39: https://github.com/mozilla/addon-wr/issues/39
Have you read the source code?
background.js: https://github.com/mozilla/addon-wr/blob/master/addon/background.js
content-script.js: https://github.com/mozilla/addon-wr/blob/master/addon/content-script.js
The extension literally injects ads for Mr. Robot in the form of popup tooltips with links on every web page that contains certain keywords. And it also wastes memory, CPU time and battery life for web pages not containing those keywords.
How much more like parasitic adware does it have be before you can see that it walks and quacks like a duck, because its intended purpose is to advertise a television show?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15936727
>It injects a blob of CSS and some JavaScript into every tab, then it does a regular expression search of every text node on each page, filtering out everything but paragraphs, then for each occurrence of a keyword in the text, it creates a new text node to split the current text node, then inserts a new span element between them, containing its own text node, then it creates an additional tooltip element containing six text nodes, five br elements, and one anchor element linking to https://support.mozilla.org/kb/lookingglass , and it also configures css class names to associate all those new nodes it created with the blob of css styling and animations that it injected.
If you wanted to develop your own malicious adware like Superfish that injects your own ads into every web page, this code and the browser hijacking techniques it uses would be an excellent starting point.
Browser Hijacking: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_hijacking
Threat Introduced via Browser Extensions: https://blog.sucuri.net/2014/10/threat-introduced-via-browser-extensions.html
How to find Chrome extensions that inject ads into any webpage I browse? https://superuser.com/questions/893843/how-to-find-chrome-extensions-that-inject-ads-into-any-webpage-i-browse
Mr Robot advertises Firefox in the TV show.
It is unclear if Mozilla is paying them or if this is an unpaid thing in both directions.
> We didn’t think hard enough about how our actions would affect the community
Which can be interpreted as "we didn't expect you to be such whiny bitches". I was hoping for something along the lines of "this breaks our principle <<Transparent community-based processes promote participation, accountability and trust.>> [1]". But PR seems to be more important than respecting principles.
This time it was a disabled marketing addon. Next time it might be something worse. Betraying your core principles is a serious red flag.
> Over the course of the year Firefox has enjoyed a growing relationship with the Mr. Robot television show
And this is the first time I hear of it.
[1] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/#principle-08
The point is that Mozilla prides themselves on transparency, but the name of the config option was "extensions.pug.lookingglass" -- meaningless buzz words with no reference to Mr. Robot -- and the description was just "MY REALITY IS DIFFERENT THAN YOURS" -- an enigmatic Alice in Wonderland quote.
It's actively trying to be opaque. That's the opposite of transparency.
Curious adventurous people install the test build because they want to try out new features and extensions. Those are the users who are most likely to know about and use "about:config". The config option and description of the plugin are mysterious and enigmatic, which tempts your curiosity into turning it on to see what it does, because you presumably trust that Mozilla wouldn't distribute just any old extension that didn't have a purpose other than scanning and modifying the content of every web page, inserting dynamic content adjacent to keywords, and advertising a TV show.
The extension is essentially just an advertisement for Mr. Robot, which has a big budget. Presumably they pay for their other advertising, and pay their employees to develop their own web sites, whose URLs are built into the extension, and which receive special treatment by sending a custom header in each request.
The obvious problems with how the extension was distributed and described aside, I think Mozilla still deserves to be paid for developing and especially distributing such advertisements, because it has cost them time, resources and reputation.
Pre-installing a plug-in in the development build is a service that many people would pay for -- please install my bitcoin mining extension (and don't forget to enable its configuration flag "extensions.pug.lookingglass.super.awesome.download.accelerator"), it needs a lot of testing!
How much does Google (or whoever) pay to be the default search engine, and how much is automatically installing an extension in the test build worth?
If the Mr. Robot show is sincerely activist, they should be happy to pay Mozilla what it's worth for Mr. Robot to benefit from such special treatment. Especially if it was their idea to distribute and describe it the problematic way it was. At least Mr. Robot could barter in kind, by doing an episode all about the virtues of Mozilla, with a flashing download link at the bottom of the screen? ;)
Fixed Firefox spelling and URL master (#43) @gregglind gregglind committed 4 days ago:
+ "description": "MY REALITY IS JUST DIFFERENT THAN YOURS.\n\nLooking Glass is a collaboration between Mozilla and the makers of Mr. Robot to provide a shared world experience. Are you a fan of Mr. Robot? If so, join the hunt for answers!\n\nParticipating in this shared world experience requires explicit user opt in. If you are not actively participating in the ARG (Augmented Reality Game) no modifications will be made to Firefox.\n\nhttps://support.mozilla.org/kb/lookingglass",
Sigh. Again [2], it's definitely not an "Augmented Reality Game". And it hardly qualifies as an "Alternate Reality Game", which is defined as "intense player involvement with a story that takes place in real time and evolves according to players' responses". [3] How does this extension affect the evolution of the TV show's plot? If there's not interactivity and feedback, it's Alternative Reality Static Content (aka Alternative Facts), not a game.
For what it's worth, we developed a TV show with Current TV called "Bar Karma" [4..7] along with a web site and mobile app, enabling viewers to collaboratively write, discuss and vote on the scripts of each episode. But as far as I can tell, that's not the point of this extension.
[1] Fixed Firefox spelling and URL master: https://github.com/mozilla/addon-wr/commit/fdd61682e5b8ef778a5c3e8dd688d1cd28b2a4a6
[2] Not AR: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15936727
[3] Alternate reality game: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternate_reality_game
[4] Will Wright's Current TV show shooting pilot this week: https://www.engadget.com/2010/08/20/will-wright-current-tv-show-shooting-pilot-this-week/
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bar_Karma
[6] Bar Karma | Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JIlTVoedDXY
[7] Will Wright Talks Bar Karma: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tsWTb9RHSQ
Why does Mozilla have a relationship with a television show?, does the show promote Firefox?.
"..Firefox has enjoyed a growing relationship with the Mr. Robot television show.."
> Over the course of the year Firefox has enjoyed a growing relationship with the Mr. Robot television show
This line is just absolutely crazy by itself when you think about it.
Why does a browser team have any kind of relationship at all with some TV show? What is going on?
So let me get this straight.
Mozilla did a free advertisement for Comcast owned TV Series Mr. Robot?
What The Proverbial F?
you mean the few remaining Mr. Robot users? Egads. Never in my life have I struggled to get through a season. Season 2 was just mind-numbingly slow. I quit for a while.
> i have a question: why do any of this?
As far as I can tell, to get Mr. Robot viewers to try Firefox Quantum.
The Mr. Robot episode from Wednesday, as aired in the U.S., had a Firefox ad on a commercial break.
(Note that I'm not endorsing or excusing the ad extension or the manner in which it was delivered, or claiming a positive effect on the number of users. Having contributed to Quantum technically, I'm very upset about this.)
I've been a die-hard Firefox guy for a long time ... I stuck around while the browser was being surpassed in performance by Chrome[0]. I left briefly when developer edition was updated in a manner that prevented my most relied upon add-ons from working.
This move, when I first read about it, rubbed me the wrong way. As things have settled out, though, I'm a lot less quick to want to jump ship. In the context of a simple "easter egg" kind of thing, it's actually somewhat cool (I'm a fan of Mr. Robot, personally, so hey -- that helps a little)[1]. I think what bugged me the most is the lack of communication. Upon first reading about the "bug", it sounded like it was something that was "on by default" and potentially being used to collect data. It at least sounds like it was disabled unless you intentionally turned a setting on in about:config. OK, I guess. It would have been nice if there was better communication once the crap hit the fan and The Internet started panicking.
The "easter egg" idea isn't something most of us would complain about if a very clear explanation was available upon discovery, but the fact that it was a promotion with NBC Universal, I think, is where a lot of folks got seriously upset. I know it was the first red flag I latched onto. Frankly, it's hard to imagine a worse company to enter into this kind of an agreement with and the way this was implemented just looks really bad -- as an add-on that appears to be a telemetry-type service.
I think NBC Universal and the first two things that come to mind are the MPAA and their desire to burn down the internet if it keeps people from downloading movies ... and Comcast -- bandwidth caps, JavaScript injection, abysmal customer service, ever rising Internet bills (especially if -- as is often the case -- you live in an area where they are the only provider). It's a shame they had to suffer such a poor lapse of judgement at a time when the press around Firefox was turning so heavily in its favor. This was, hopefully, a painful enough shot in the foot that something like this won't happen, again. But who knows? Out of the options, available, I'm sticking with Firefox for now.
[0] Part of this was my stubborn refusal to import my bookmarks mixed with the convenience of sync being setup everywhere I used it, part of it was a general dirty feeling I got from using a browser from a company (Google) who's becoming increasingly aggressive in asserting their monopoly positions.
[1] And there's no irony lost about the fact that a show that would directly appeal to security engineers was being promoted in a way that would cause a security engineer to lose his/her mind.
> Mozilla and Fox Entertainment did a “collaboration” (read: promotion) for the TV show Mr. Robot
This is just a side issue (I agree with the OP's main point) but Jesus, how do you make an error like this in the beginning of the post? Mr. Robot is from USA Network, which is owned by NBC Universal. Fox has nothing to do with it. The technical problem here is clear to me as a techie. I was going to post this to r/mrrobot but realized it'd have no credibility among show's fans -- would you read past such a major error on a topic you cared about even if it eventually got to a correct core point? e.g. a rant about YouTube censoring videos of a certain political bent that began with "YouTube, a subsidiary of Baidu..."
The show Mr. Robot rails against corporate greed, corrupt government officials, and other unethical practices that's rife in our society. In a twist of fate, in one episode someone at E Corp gets arrested for secretly installing malware in products without the user's knowledge. He is prompted arrested by the FBI after a tip-off from Elliot.
They create a global revolution over this behavior. To do what's just. For the people to have a say once again.
It is highly ironic that USA Network and Mozilla did the exact opposite of what the show is all about and promoted it this way. In fact, Mozilla's principles about creating a no-fuss browser runs counter to this very behavior.
Mozilla has taken on all of the worst qualities of a modern University...ostensibly for the "public good", but really just a vehicle for the whims of a few "enlightened intellectuals" who will "save us all" (from ourselves apparently)
but hey, Mr Robot uses Kali Linux (they only show us this about twenty times per episode) so he should be fine
Mr Robot is a tv show repeatedly showing how you can pwn other people computer by pushing seemingly innocuous code.
It has been praised for its technical accuracy, basically the show warns us about exactly what mozilla did as this could be exploited to hack into computers.
I loved Mr. Robot season 2 precisely because it refused to follow the first season's buildup to a dramatic peak with some sort of cliche revelation that it was all just part of what would now be an even bigger build up to yet another dramatic peak. Instead, the show did something courageous and compelling by forcing us, along with its characters, to confront the fact that life isn't all about the peaks, to spend some time understanding and dealing with the consequences of what had just happened. In season 3, that is paying off with a broader, more critical understanding of the world the characters are living in, directly challenging any lazy assumptions we viewers may have been making about the significance and moral complexity of the events we're watching.
It's a good show and it continues to engage me. They get the hacking right, and they get the mindset behind the hacking right, so they've bought my trust, and the story they're telling is anything but simple.
That would be a valid complaint if this was an advertising arrangment, rather than one where if you watch the TV show, you learn that you can activate a firefox addon to participate in an small AR game that changes your normal web experience into a Mr Robot style web experience for the duration.
The addon itself does not advertise for Mr. Robot, Mr. Robot advertises for this addon.
> It would also all but entirely nullify a major chunk of government power and control.
At the danger of being somewhat off-topic: The tv show Mr Robot explores a scenario comparable to that in a very interesting and well-made way.
If you truly believe the 1% don’t know how to stay on top and pull strings so they always win then you’re dreaming.
It may just be a TV show, but Mr. Robot touches on this subject. Give it a try
Must've been after it's feature on last night's episode of Mr. Robot....
Who is going to bet some future Mr. Robot episode would feature it?
It's gotta be sheer coincidence that every article/thread on HN critical of China, all the comments questioning the Chinese state get voted down.
Season 3 of Mr Robot hasn't gone far enough IMO.
There's a massive gap between the pirate service and the "legitimate" media service.
For one, you can just type something in, and get the movie you want. You don't have to navigate between 15 different services, and then find out the film is only available on mail-order DVD, or in other countries.
For television, the networks are HORRIBLE about providing their content to cord-cutters. Want to watch the latest episode of Mr. Robot, which airs on Wednesday at 10pm? You're gonna have to wait AT LEAST until 9am on Thursday morning, WITH YOUR PAID SUBSCRIPTION. Or, you can pirate it for free.
I'm not sure how many times it needs to be said, but Piracy is not a payment issue, it's an access issue.
Also, companies being greedy is a bad look. CBS hiding Star Trek behind their proprietary $10/month service is going to kill Star Trek, because the intended audience sees it as a bullshit cash grab. Put it on Hulu you greedy bastards.
Is this a Mr. Robot episode?
Silicon Valley, Halt & Catch Fire, Scorpion, Mr. Robot. Lots of TV shows center around programmers. As with doctor shows however they don't focus on the medicine but the interactions of the people.
I hate this because it suspends my suspension of disbelief. I can only think of three instances of tv shows and films that get it right: the US version of Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (at least she uses a terminal emulator and ssh); The Social Network; and Mr. Robot. It's so commonly botched that I get really excited when someone gets it right. It doesn't even have to be perfect; just not laughably ridiculous.
The most anthologized one, "The Red Wheelbarrow", is often referenced and even cited in an amazing TV Show, "Mr. Robot".
I would suggest "Mr. Robot" tv show, both its storyline and hacks.
Video compression is not understood well enough throughout the whole stack yet.
I recently got a 1080p projector for home use, so now movies / TV series in my home are viewed on a 100" screen. Content is mostly from Netflix and Amazon Prime Video.
Netflix does a really good job with encoding. I cannot say the same for Amazon Prime Video; even with their exclusive (in UK) offerings, like American Gods or Mr Robot, the quality of the encode is quite poor when viewed on a big screen. Banding, shimmering blocky artifacts on subtle gradients, insufficient bit budget for dimly lit scenes - once you become aware of the issues, it becomes really distracting.
OTOH a really big screen is a fantastic ad for high quality high bitrate content. Anything less than 2GB/hour is noticeably poor.
There are some people who would benefit--those who watch one or two channels only--but there are people who would get screwed. I watch maybe 5 hours of cable tv a week, but it's many different channels during the course of the year. USA when Mr. Robot is, AMC when TWD and BCS, FX when Fargo and Americans, Sundance when Hap and Leonard, some random channel playing a movie I want to watch.
And it will only save money for people who watch less channels than average. You might say people who watch more channels should pay more, but that really doesn't make much sense really.
Should someone who watches Fox News 18 hours a day pay 10 times more than someone who watches 10 channels a month for 2 hours combined a day?
I absolutely hated watching Mr. Robot. Gave up after 4 episodes.
Comcast is nearly the worst internet provider and the worst company that has ever received my money. The only worse experience I've ever had is with AT&T.
Comcast is also a huge content provider of crap I'd never watch: NBC, CNBC, MSNBC, Bravo, E!, CNBC World. I watch a couple of shows from USA (Mr Robot) and SyFy(The Expanse) that I prefer to purchase by the season. I don't want to live in a world where those stations are fast laned and NEtflix (which will pay), crunchyroll, curiosityTV, youtube (will pay), various documentary streaming sites etc are in the slow lane.
One possible resolution I can see where this has a happy ending is that it causes Google, my municipality, etc to enter the ISP market. Unlikely because of the legal costs.
More likely option, I'll get SpaceX internet and deal with the 25ms latency. I'm already running a VPN, degrading my service, so that I'm not just another data point for marketers and advertisers to manipulate.
Look forward to your response and that you give me some hope
I don't know if this is a trend. The major coffee shop in my small college hometown has mandated for as long as I can remember that the seating upfront be used for only conversation or newspaper-reading. In New York, it seems about as common to find coffee shops without WiFi and with it. Think Coffee only has it in some of their locations. In fact, I believe the Think Coffee in which the first scene of "Mr. Robot's" first episode was shot (12st, East Village) does not have wi-fi, in contrast to its fictional portrayal.
I loved SE:L. But like many hacking-oriented shows (I'm looking at you, Mr.Robot) it felt a need to go out into weird philosphical "what is reality?" and psycological strangeness.
I would love to see something that stays with the stuff I actually like about them. Philosophy and psychological exploration can be fine but I would absolutely love to see a show like one of those that stays closer to the ground.
GitS is primarily cyberpunk as I see it rather than focused on hacking. Hacking is just an element. Lain is focused on philosophy, psychology and spiritual weirdness and uses technology for aesthetics and as a tool to explore the bigger themes.
I'd love something like a heist-movie that stays close to the keyboard, like the most techie and coherent parts of Mr. Robot.
The image appears to have a capacitor (? it's green, which is unusual) just randomly poking out at the bottom-right. I'm assuming that's a doctored image.
I also get a couple of strange images:
* One says "TT" and has the Manx triskelion, suggesting a relationship to the Isle of Mann motorcycle race, The TT.
* One says "poslednee gac" in cyrillic script, presumably "Last Hour" in Russian.
* One shows a tight shot of a large piece of heavy equipment, painted white and with a whiteboard with intriguing notes written on "Impete Forman / 3 Heat sheets from training / ..." or somesuch. [appears to refer to Kearny volunteer fire house in LA?]
* Another shows a man, wearing the garb supposed to be on sale, astride a black motorbike.
* Yet another shows an arrangement of 2048 in the stones stuck to the tyre of that motorbike.
* Another again quotes the Bible and has a large "60", but has a phone number "+1628 444 97 91" which appears to be a Russian number.
* And so on.
The music appears to be a serious of multiples of beats with some ambient sound and a small amount of speech. I'm guessing at least part of it can be interpreted as hex and converted to ascii or something similar. Later there is some chanting and partial word elements with scrambled speech too.
My best guess is viral marketing for a movie/tv-show at this point. I thought of Mr Robot, but it seems 12 Monkeys like from what little I remember seeing.
Whatever it is it's well made with a good degree of intrigue IMO.
This could be a fun premise for an episode of Mr. Robot or something.
1.) Someone sets up a "take a fraction of a cent off every online transaction you make and put it in a brokerage account for you" app to get a lot of seed capital.
2.) Hack a lot of newswires to spread viral false information about (a non-trademark violating analogue for) Twitter that tanks its stock price.
3.) Use your pile of app-money to buy out a majority stake in (N-TVAf)Twitter at its new low price.
4.) Open up the platform, sell off any now-pointless assets.
5.) HACK THE PLANET! HACK THE PLANET!
That page ought to have a list of TV series in addition to Mr. Robot: X-Files and more so its spinoff show https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lone_Gunmen
After the November election, I started rewatching "The West Wing."
Yes, as a "cast" show it is somewhat unrealistic with respect to the scope/number of people involved in daily West Wing activity, policy, administration, etc. And it is purposely idealistic. Nonetheless, it summarizes and states well many principle and practicalities of the Executive, Administration, the other two branches of government, and provides a not insignificant education to the general viewer of how all that works and why.
As well, it portrays the idea of good -- but imperfect -- people doing their best within an imperfect system.
Next up, perhaps: "The Wire." I started it about a year ago, but I was not in a place at that time, myself, where I could easily/reasonably take its message as I've heard/read it described.
"Mr. Robot" I've found excellent at describing a contemporary technical but also a social milieu, and thoughts on same, with which I'm all too familiar.
Recently, I've been revisiting old/classic movies starring Bogart. There is an essence of the American character in them, perhaps both reflected and thereby instantiated down the succeeding years and decades. A taciturn but thorough awareness and expectation of self-reliance.
Viewing such as this seems to inform me, to some degree. Hopefully not in too distorted nor misleading a fashion.
A lot of contemporary viewing reflects some contemporary thinking and news items, but comes with a lot of bulk. There's only so much Marvel content I can take, for example. It becomes distracting, consuming, rather than informing.
What concerns me in good part now, with the direction paid streaming is going, is that while production values are increasing, with limited libraries and historical content, it may be trending towards a contemporary consuming as opposed to informing.
Yes, we're living in Hell's Kitchen. (Well, I feel that way, more than infrequently.) But I don't really think we are going to punch our way out of it.
I purposely do not watch "shows" anymore. I feel like it is a major waste of time. Bingewatching? Really? Only shows like Mr. Robot are worth my time. There is just too much out there.
During downtime, I watch reruns of The Office (US) and Parks and Rec. Both of those shows have no music throughout the show, just dialog. I use that time to mentally relax, but I am not "into" the show, it is more in the background.
I guess its okay if its subtle, but I'm still scratching my head over an episode of Mr. Robot that was pretty much an Amazon Alexa commercial. The Alexa dialogue didn't do anything to advance the plot or build out the characters or build drama. It was completely tacked on and a bizarre attempt at several minutes of product placement. Worse, the USA Network also runs ads. So it was needless double-dipping.
Although to be a successful movie the characters would get recruited into a secret organization which turns their leet skillz to battling back other hackers in other countries. Sort of Nikita meets Mr. Robot. That meme can be done badly as CSI:Cyber showed.
I agree, and it is by no means exclusive to the US. It's lucky for the US that it's still in a position to easily lure people from almost every country.
And this won't chance too soon, most TV shows and films, e.g. Big Bang Theory, Mr. Robot, do nothing to normalise the perception of these kinds of jobs. Workers are always portrayed as weird/quirky/dysfunctional. The closest portrayal to normality has been the workers in Westworld. But those jobs weren't exactly aspirational either...
I wrote Mr. Robot off the moment i watched the first preview. Psycologically troubled, hooded protagonist that blackmails a guy about a pedo exchange running out of the back room of a restaurant. No matter how accurate the computing may be, that just got too ham fisted for my tastes.
As for Hackers the movie, i wonder if one best treat it similar to Streets of Fire[1]. a fable that happens to be set to New York.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streets_of_Fire
There's an interesting article on how the movie Wargames[1] influenced the public consciousness surrounding hacking.
Another movie similar to Mr Robot is Algorithm which I'm surprised nobody has mentioned:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6qpudAhYhpc
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/21/movies/wargames-and-cybersecuritys-debt-to-a-hollywood-hack.html
What annoyed me about Mr Robot is the stereotype / trope of a hoodied punk teen wielding their talent with a computer which has been done to death already in other movies (I class Mr Robot as an extended movie with episodes).
Hackers can be anybody infact, and it doesn't help that the hoodied punk stereotype is perpetuated. Think Stallman, Zimmermann, & Eric Raymond, not Zero Cool or Neo.
man, so useless.
Of course we've seen the difference between "hackers" in Holliwood movies and Mr.Robot, thats precisely why this TV serie worked in the first place. Of course future movies will have to up their acting if they want to compare, WTF.
Next article "usb 2.0 killed usb 1.0"?
I agree that Mr Robot was above standard. But already in the first episode in the first few minutes he talks bullshit about Tor :/
To each their own of course. Perhaps it's the underlying plot that really bothers me with Mr. Robot -- it feels very 90s to me, even if the surface details are much better. Today, we live in a world where "lone genius hacker" types are becoming thoroughly commoditized. It's all about careers, money, thesis papers. Weaponised exploits are now bought and sold. To people with capital it might as well be magic, why should they care? If you're a kid who identifies with a character like Elliot on some level, you may not realize that's what you're getting into. Maybe this is toched upon in a way I didn't get or see in Mr. Robot?
Then Westworld is basically science fiction, with a good bit of philosophy (which I didn't expect when I started watching it). I liked the way it shifted perspective between the guests, hosts, and operators throughout each episode so much, it left me questioning reality a bit for a few minutes after each episode.
> When they drop the bombshell of that reality in the second series, that the narrator is unreliable, was a great moment that had me giggling with glee.
(spoilers) The Fight Club parallels were there from the very first time he saw Mr. Robot in the episode one. So I kind of expected what was coming.
SPOILER-ish comment: I tried not to be explicit about the details.
>Mr. Robot is that it's told through the eyes of an unreliable narrator //
When they drop the bombshell of that reality in the second series, that the narrator is unreliable, was a great moment that had me giggling with glee. I'd been guessing "oh, that guy is another element of his own dissociated personality", but never quite guessed the full gravity of it.
The "breakdown" episode [there's just one!?!] where his family are on vacation in pseudo-flashback with smaltzy sitcom styling whilst not great to watch was a real testament to how different this show was IMO.
>I care more about a good story... Which is why I stopped watching Mr. Robot at the beginning of season 2. I just didn't care about the characters or story any more...Personally, if you're looking for a good story, involving technology and morality, I can't recommend West World enough.
Interesting. The same critique you have of Mr. Robot, I have of Westworld: plot lines that are irrelevant, huge loopholes, and characters that don't develop and that I don't care for.
>>Now, any biologists worth their salt would cringe at many scenes [in Jurassic World].
Jurassic World is science-fiction, which makes it a hell of a lot easier for subject matter experts in the audience to suspend their disbelief when it comes to the technical parts. Furthermore, said technical parts take up maybe a few minutes of the film at most, keeping the need for the suspension of disbelief to a minimum.
Mr. Robot, on the other hand, is drama, and the main character is a hacker who hangs out with other hackers. In order for it to be viable as a show, it needs to be technically accurate.
Yeah its not exactly an apt comparison I suppose anyway.
Westworld is quite brutal to the characters and you're right, mostly plot driven. And I did find much to like in the first season of Mr. Robot, but then I got bored with the story arc near the end and into the beginning of season 2.
This is somewhat tangential (although related to the "good guys" hacker trope), but one detail I loved from the begining of Mr. Robot was the reference to Enron with the Evil Corp logo. I will definitely give the show credit for its self awareness of it's 90s roots...
When hackers hack in Mr. Robot, they talk about it in ways that actual hackers talk about hacking.
Mr Robot exists as it does because there are now enough people familiar with computers and the relevant concepts to constitute an audience, rather than due to any sudden insight on the part of screenwriters (of which I am one). We know, and have always known, that there's a distinct hacker subculture with its own linguistic tropes, ethos, etc. etc. and that there's been a big gap between reality and how it's portrayed in movies.
We also know (or learn the hard way) that there's a big gap between including enough detail for verisimilitude that will satisfy people who are competent in a particular field, and what the general public wants to watch - which is why you'll continue to see shallow or outright stupid portrayals of hacking in the entertainment industry's output. Why? Primarily [1] because the mass of people are just not interested in any given field that requires nerd-level commitment to understand. The larger the budget required for the film, the larger and more general the audience has to be, and the more accuracy and authenticity will be sacrificed in favor of spectacle and symbolism, which is the most reliable method for getting people to fork over their money in the first place.
Take a recent example from a different context - Jurassic World. The 'plot': capitalists and scientists employ DNA technology to produce a bigger, smarter, more aggressive dinosaur than has ever existed in nature; said dinosaur escapes from confinement and menaces everyone in the vicinity, especially the attractive hero, anti-heroine, and small children that are introduced early in the story. It's basically Frankenstein only with dinosaurs. Spoiler alert, the attractive proxy for the family unit survives and the bad dinosaur is defeated, though not before killing off the most ethically deficient characters by eating them like ham sandwiches.
Now, any biologists worth their salt would cringe at many scenes (if they watch such nonsense at all). Any genetic scientists had to suffer through yet another scene of an annoying smartass mumbling a few meaningless phrases about 'advanced gene splicing' while screens in the background display animations of double helixes and molecules. I think they might have mentioned CRISPR, I'm not sure and have no intention of watching it again to check.
Would Jurassic World have been better if it was more like Primer or Mr Robot, with in-depth discussions of structural factors and real-world constraints, and a hard-science approach that admitted of 1 (one) speculative assumption, from which the rest of the plot flowed organically? Sure,,,if you wanted to make Gattaca - Herpetology Edition. But though gattaca is one of my all-time favorite sci-fi films, neither it nor Primer will ever appeal to a mass audience and so films like that will never have the most recognizable actors or the most astonishing visual spectacles or the same sort of short-term existential anxieties that would result from having to run or your life from a creature the size of an apartment building.
People go to Big Movies to allay their quotidian existential anxieties (about which they often feel helpless) by seeing them safely reflected [2] in contexts that are outside normal human experience. How far outside is primarily inversely proportional to the budget and corresponding box-office performance requirements, while being secondarily proportional to the depth of the underlying existential anxiety.
Hacking in films has simply been a proxy for magic, in line with Clarke's observation that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Magic serves an important dramatic function as the source of the unknowable solution to the Intractable Problem with which the story's characters are presented.Thus, magic and its various proxies (specialist bodies of knowledge, from hacking to legal procedure to medical knowledge) is not a black hole which encapsulates the ignorance of the writer (although many inferior or lazy writers abuse it for that purpose) but a singularity which offers the possibility of escape from the otherwise-inexorable logic of the story world; it symbolizes the hope of a future discoverable solution to an otherwise insoluble problem.
A few examples from popular films may illuminate this. In Star Wars the insoluble problem is a spaceship that can blow up an entire planet. The magical device is The Force, a limited but still useful psychokinetic ability. In the Alien films the insoluble problem is an ambulatory disease; the magic device is an artificially intelligent android that can approach the alien closely enough to observe a weakness of some kind (but which has to be temporarily decommissioned first, like Dumbo losing the magic feather). In the Terminator films, the insoluble problem is nuclear conflagration as the crystallization of war in general; the magical device is industrial capitalism's promise of reducing economic inequality (represented by the vast technological superiority of the Terminators themselves).
To wrap up, Mr Robot hasn't killed the Hollywood hacker at all; it has just crushed his dreams and forced him into getting a day job, which is the function that television shows perform relative to movies. You'll still see hackers in movies, but strictly as lip service to a real and increasingly less aspirational employment demographic. This might seem like an odd conclusion to draw, but it's worth bearing in mind that that serial television dramas are general occupational comedies (I'm using the term 'comedy' in the technical sense of everything basically going back to normal at the end of the episode, even if the subject matter isn't funny at all). Consider cop shows; they follow a nice steady formula with an initial outrage, a bit of detective work, an uncomfortable moral confrontation, a setback, and finally a little bit of legal procedure. On the other hand if you watch a movie about cops, they almost invariably take place at the beginnings or ends of the lead characters' careers, and the Best Person in the movie almost invariably has to die.
1. there are other reasons but I don't want to turn this into an essay on screenwriting.
2. A few films address this dichotomy as their subject matter, albeit indirectly. All films have a political dimension insofar as the choice of subject matter and its portrayal reflect some aspect of their originating policy which the creators aim to praise or criticize, but relatively few dramatize the critical process itself; invariably, the subtext of such films is that critical awareness forces us to choose sides in an ongoing moral conflict; or put another way, moral agency comes at the price of other kinds. Generally in these films the lead has to either die or give up the old life completely in an anti-hero pattern.
Yes. The story arc matters more than technical detail. And the moral tropes are boring.
I've come to realize that I actually care less about the technical inaccuracies than I do about a good plot. I don't expect the general public to know a lot about hacking, and I don't care that much. Sometimes it can contribute to the plot (e.g.: prison SCADA systems being easy to break), but often it isn't that important, if it's not too ham-handed.
I care more about a good story. So yeah, the story arc matters, the dialogue matters (the conversations, the attitudes of the characters) -- all the basic elements of a good film/tv show/movie matter first. Which is why I stopped watching Mr. Robot at the beginning of season 2. I just didn't care about the characters or story any more.
Maybe it gets better? Personally, if you're looking for a good story, involving technology and morality, I can't recommend West World enough. There's some "hacking" involved and the show over all is genius. Just my $.02.
[edit] I'll add that the article does bring up the point of the societal harms technically "dumb" plots can cause -- making computing/hacking seem like magic for example. This is an interesting point, but I still think this is less important than a good plot. The potential social benefits of good writing outweigh everything else, if you ask me.
> Smart coders design elegant solutions that don't require frantic typing
Two things. First, that's going to depend on coding style and how you operate. Personally I'll give great thought to the particular problem and then hammer away at the keyboard as I crank things out.
Second, the world of hacking isn't some grand operation where folks are working in some lab run by the Russian Mafia or whomever. I work for a cyber security company, albeit as a software engineer, but a lot of this shit is taking pre-built kits (which often times are not not that great either) and changing some configs, adding a little extra functionality or whatever.
I don't see this so much in Mr. Robot but I saw a good point is that a lot of movies and shows uses hacking as an action sequence instead of just using it to move the story forward.
I'm not a fan of the character's narrative ramblings it seems conspiracy theories and paranoid rants are far too common these days.
Suspension of disbelief is one thing but when characters who are experts have to explain to each other what they should already know to me a real groaner in TV and movies.
One character on Mr. Robot at the security company didn't know what a rootkit was, really?
I'd argue that Mr. Robot just perpetuates the Hollywood Hacker stereotype. Sure, the logistics of hacking have moved closer to the truth, but it was unable to escape the moralistic 'greater good' story arc of most hacker movies. It seems like, given the distribution of breakins and news articles about discovered hacks, there are very few morally motivated hackers and when those hackers do surface - their hacks take the form of much broader less targeted attacks than those of the show. i.e. It's a lot more of grab Xtb of data and then find the weak passwords than everyone has weak passwords.
Hackers killed the Hollywood hacker. (Hackers as in people, not Hackers the film.) Dominic Sena, in his director's commentary for Swordfish, stated that the people who were likely to complain about the inaccuracy of the hacking shown in his movie were nerds who ultimately didn't matter. In this era where the internet response can make or break a film or TV show, the nerds do matter and directors go the extra mile to please them. This started before Mr. Robot. Think Tron: Legacy.
Mr. Robot may be technically correct, but I couldn't get past a few episodes of the first season.
Comically bad/cliche companies that are polluting the earth, killing innocent people, and robbing the poor. A closeted gay, masochist antagonist and a smug, patronizing protagonist that regularly demeans the people around him and feels they are less intelligent than himself. This was all in the first few episodes.
I assume the characters and plots have changed since the first season, but not by much.
I felt like the writers were ignored in high school and used the show as a way to passive-aggressively get back at their perceived enemies.
It's interesting to point that it was at the center of Mr Robot season 2 ! Maybe they knew
I feel the last season offers a different perspective than the others (excluding San Junipero - which is similar to the first two seasons).
The first two seasons are about a hypothetical future any person could experience (society).
The last season is from the perspective of an individual's very specific circumstances (except for San Junipero).
Society versus the individual?
I liked the ending of the first episode of Season 3 (freedom achieved), episode 2 was more horror than scifi (a la "Brainscan"), episode 3 could have been a subplot in a single episode of Mr. Robot, episode 4 was more like the first two seasons, episode 5 was some nazi-esque Verhoeven-wannabe hegemony meh, and episode 6, to me, was like episode 2, more horror scifi.
Funny, I'm the exact opposite. I binged on Mr. Robot recently, and did similar for some of the other netflix/prime shows in the past. It's something akin to that Civilization "just-one-more-turn" phenomenon.
But i hardly watch movies at all anymore.
Although the trend now is for streaming services to offer a subscription to that one good show, though at a pretty steep price. Mr. Robot was something like $25-30 on amazon for season 2.
edit: But some are included at no extra cost. Amazon Prime customers got AMC's Humans the day after it aired for free.
The alternative is to mint an evergreen series like Law & Order. Someone finds a dead body in NYC; investigation, trial, and silly social commentary ensue. Then vary the parameters a bit and you get SVU, Criminal Intent, et al. Characters are interchangeable, guest spots abound, social commentary changes with the politics of the day.
Walking Dead -- eh, it's getting a little old. I thought they were going to explore some primitive economics, and maybe they will, but the cliffhanger gag last season reminded me too much of "Who Shot JR?" Not sure I care. And the spinoff went too heavy on the social commentary, couldn't even finish Season Two.
Mr. Robot is more promising, but I haven't seen one yet that comes close to the satisfaction I got from the clear arc of the story in Breaking Bad. Sons of Anarchy tried, but fell short somehow.
I had the first twist in the pilot. As soon as Elliot entered the ... club rooms, I figured it out. I'm very good with patterns, and one thing that annoys me is knowing how TV shows are going to end before they do. I had BSG early on, Sixth Sense ("I'll bet he dies and we see a ghost. No, that's just too obvious."), watched three episodes of the Mentalist and had the culprit in the first five minutes of each episode - even within the first minute of the first episode I saw. I'm almost at the point where I can quote some more ordinary movies while I'm watching them. (That's not as odd as it sounds, it's the patterns that are used to build each scene and the overall film that are the giveaway, but it's more subconscious than deliberate.)
So where is Mr. Robot going?
Damned if I know. That's what I like about it. As you say, some of the scenes were so odd that it was clear something was up - why is he watching the game from the bench? Why were they so angry with Elliot, and why was the friend such an influence on them? I didn't pick that one, although perhaps I should have re-watched season 1 before starting 2. I don't think that was the big twist, though, that came later - Juvgrebfr'f fhecevfr gung Ryyvbg qbrfa'g xabj jung Cunfr 2 vf tvira gung vg'f uvf cebwrpg, naq nyy gur cbgragvny snyybhg sebz gung. Vf Juvgrebfr hfvat Ryyvbg sbe uvf bja raqf? I think the other shoe has yet to drop on that one.
I think that people who write it off as "just Fight Club" are hugely missing the point - the narrator in that is just too reliable after we learn the twist, and after all, Fight Club was just a backlash against the overall commercial exploitation of the world at the time. Mr. Robot is about n qryhfvbany cnenabvq fpuvmbcueravp jvgu n fbpvny nakvrgl qvfbeqre, jub unf n zhygv-ynlrerq cyna. Jr'ir bayl frra gur Svtug Pyho cneg bs vg pbzcyrgrq, jung ryfr vf pbzvat?
Really hanging out for the finale tonight.
I've watched both in their entirety (so far). I definitely agree that POI is more watchable with a non-tech person. POI had a few stinker eps, especially ones involving "baddy of the week" type standalones or the "very special episode" where we explore the hidden pain of main character X.
The upside is the ensemble is very strong and likable, the writers worked hard to preserve continuity and development of the characters, even a few side characters that only show up one or two times per season, and it rewards careful watching.
My issues with Mr. Robot are they have been overusing some of the tricks you saw in Fight Club for example, and the characters are much more Breaking Bad in that you can like them but not admire them. The portrayal of tech is amazing though, and the direction and editing stays mostly in the "clever homage" of Hollywood genre films rather than straight ripoff of them. The cast is also very good.
And let's not forget the other big genre series, Orphan Black, which I highly recommend.
Season 1 had a clear goal, to hack E Corp to collapse banks, every chapter was about hacking E Corp, it was a little more simple.
Season 2 is slow, not as exciting, and who knows what the goal is, maybe to survive after the hack, maybe something that will be revelead in the last season episode that only Mr. Robot knows, still, it is more slow paced, and tries to over analise the complicated behavior of the characters. IMHO,Elliot's double personallity should have ended in season 1. Another thing is that despise the collapse of the banks, the series doesn't show an apocalyptic world, everything is just like season 1, like if nobody cares about the collapse.
And
Every character is overcomplicated, Elliot with his double personallity, Angela with her ackwardness, Darlene a control freak, White Rose a time freak, and so on, and every damn character always has a monologue, it gets boring, it tries to hard and there is little substance in the story.
One of the developers hosting Kali posted about it here once. Basically he remembers one morning waking and seeing that traffic had spiked and he was really puzzled about it. Up until he clued in to the fact that a certain episode of Mr Robot (where Kali Linux figured prominently and was advertised quite profusely) had been aired the previous night. So yes, there has definitely been a spike in Kali Linux downloads over the course of the show.
I read and loved Fight Club, loved the movie, and love Mr Robot. Sam Esmail (Mr Robot creator) even says in interviews that Fight Club is his favorite movie, and certain threads, characters, etc are an homage to that. I mean, he even plays the same song ("Where is my Mind") during part of the "reveal" in Mr Robot. However, as other viewers have mentioned it wasn't really MEANT to be that big of a reveal. In fact, the /r/MrRobot subreddit had that theory nailed very early on in Season 1, and I would argue that knowing that reveal was coming didn't detract from any enjoyment.
Anyway, I totally get why you feel that way about the Fight Club similarities, and at first I felt that way too. But if that is the main reason you stopped watching, I urge you to give it another shot! I think there is so much more to the show than that story thread.
Edit: Also, just curious, how far did you make it before you decided to stop watching?
Ignoring everything else, Mr. Robot builds a spectacular atmosphere, which is an almost impossible task in television. This show is wonderful. I'd say it competes with Game of Thrones on quality and it's my favorite show right now.
They get the technical details right enough to earn respect. Sometimes you need to give artistic freedom to the writing as long as it doesn't devolve into a graphic of Pacman eating data. Gives you some meaningless pride when you see a protagonist empty a can of Pringles into the trash, knowing exactly what they are doing.
If someone has a problem with the series, my natural reaction at this point is that they're pretentious... it's not fair but imo really that's what all the criticism has boiled down to:
You noticed the heavily telegraphed twist? Good job! Gold star for you!
You're going to criticize a show with such wonderful atmosphere building for having long episodes? Wow, your time must be really important!
He uses the wrong text editor or Linux flavor? You must be a master, could you please fix my iPad?
The characters are flawed or mercurial? Could you please elaborate on the strengths of two-dimensional characters?
All of the characters in H&CF are great but god damn I love Lee Pace's Joe MacMillan. The overall production is great as well with mostly correct terms and hardware for the time.
I really enjoyed season 1 of Mr. Robot but season 2 really hasn't been the same, it is way too mind trippy for me now.
Yeah true. It seems like that's the trend for a lot of shows. The events and characters keep getting more and more ridiculous. I guess they have to keep introducing new things to keep the show interesting.
I think it’s starting to happen with Mr. Robot already. I liked season 1 a lot, but I’m not as big of a fan of season 2. I think they’re going too far with the whole “delusional acid trip” kind of thing.
If you like Mr. Robot, you should watch Person of Interest.
I strongly disagree. You could maybe say that about season 1. It devolved into a pretty crappy show after that and I bailed completely by season 3.
I binge watched the entire series, because so many people liked it. Though I wouldn't recommend it.
The transition into sci-fi was very subtle, and where they took the show was interesting for it's time. But the technical aspects are like almost other TV show. NCIS levels of inaccuracies.
Mr. Robot should not be utter in the same context as POI, because unlike POI, they did their research. They made a show that has both a good story, but also mostly technically accurate and plausible.
I liked season one of Person of Interest but for me it started to get old after that so I stopped watching somewhere in season two (but that didn't yet happen with Mr. Robot).
I completely agree. I admit that I'm following season 2 because it's still an enjoyable show, but every single one of those points is valid. At times it feels like Esmail is insulting your intelligence or pandering to extreme cliches (points 8 and 9), all the while entirely ripping Fight Club off. And no, he didn't seek Fight Club for "inspiration". He utterly and completely replicated the plot, but executed it poorly. The laziness of his storytelling is clear when we can pretty much assume all of Elliot's confusion is the result of Mr. Robot intervening on his behalf. Except that mysterious intervention doesn't even appear to be attributable to a well-defined and somewhat believable circumstance (Norton's insomnia in Fight Club). Instead, Elliot has some odd lapse in memory, and what do you know, some unthinkable event has occurred.
It's an entertaining show, but only in the same sense as corny superhero movies. Esmail has been trying to wrangle a sensible plot with an interesting premise, but unfortunately he's not as skilled as his execution implies.
1) That was on purpose
2) The vast vast majority of twists have been predicted far in advance if they are of any significance. And frankly the ones that people missed the missed clues are dug up after the fact to show what people missed. Having problems with Mr Robot is fine, but claiming LAZY writing is lazy analysis.
3) in the short term the pacing felt weird, but as things have been revealed everything has started to fit together and see WHY it is paced the way it is.
4) This is entirely incorrect. He started writing a movie, but when he was 90 pages in (1 page = 1 minute of screentime) before he hit the end of act 1 (which was the first season of the show) he changed his intention and plotted it as a TV show after that.
5) this if fair, the characters are wildly naive.
6) Eh this can be argued both ways so can't really disagree
7) I've seen at least some people who struggle with similar issues who are impressed with how accurate Elliot seems. Others may not feel that way, but like anything else relating to people how different people experience different things means no one person can represent an entire thing.
8) She hasn't been unstoppable, though she is the most daunting character in the show other than possibly Joanna.
9) This is totally fair. He's a psychopath as was shown by his whole talk on wanting to be the most powerful person in the room.
10) What? People have CONSITANTLY been right on subreddit. Obviously bad theories are also going to show up, but the accurate ones regularly bubble to the top.
You need to watch the condescendence here, Fight Club is a well known movie and I've watched it, so have a lot of people who, like me, appreciate Mr Robot and a lot of them, like me, appreciate Fight Club.
Of course I can see the parallels. But, like I said, watching the two shows is a completely different experience. I work in the games industry, I'm quite familiar with what a "rip-off" looks like. Mr Robot is not a rip-off. Inspiration is not a rip-off.
Good god man. You asked that question? Movies rip-off books, books rip off real life, tv rips off movies. Format doesn't stop one from appropriating material.
Just google Fight Club and Mr. Robot. There are plenty of interviews with the creator of Mr. Robot where he explicitly discusses the Fight Club connection. Straight from the horses mouth.
I don't have a problem with referencing other works, but it's got to the point of a simple rewrite.
Fight Club: A prototypical, disillusioned male worker with daddy problems has a psychotic break causing him to make an imaginary friend, and this immaginary person pushes him to destroy all debt records to set everyone free to have a fresh start. In order to do this they start an undetground club that collects members who band together to accomplish this task, who are not totally in the know regarding the immaginary friend. In the process one of the main members of thr club is shot in the head and dies. There is a woman who has a very close relationship to the main character, who is central to plot development, who is portrayed as being very antisocial and rowdy.
I could go on. Sound familiar?
Its a decent and sometimes good show but certainly not one of the greats, and has more than a few major flaws. I'll try to minimize spoilers.
1. The plotline is pretty much Fight Club with computers and telegraphs this early on. This is clearly not on purpose as we see hints dropped all the time and the reveal is given with such a flourish. Lets stop defending Esmail here. The reveal is really hamfisted and the show borrows VERY generously from Fight Club, for better or worse.
2. The twists are largely unpredictable. Sure you can argue that some clues were dropped beforehand, but they're so ambiguous as to be meaningless. Anything can happen on that show and to me, that's lazy writing. The universe that show lives in should have a rational set of rules that govern it. Its basic world-building. If the finale involves aliens or time travel, it woudn't surprise anyone, in fact /r/mrrobot is full of people expecting this. Anything should not be possible, especially when you're 30+ hours in.
3. The pacing isn't very good and gets especially bad in season 2. I don't think we needed several episodes dedicated to Elliot being in [spoilers] or other events that look stretched out to fill episodes. This is a common issue in TV, and I'll let it slide, but the first few episodes of S2 are like pulling teeth and turns off viewers. I know people that quit watching during this period. Its a hard sell to say "Look there's about 10 hours of nothing, but it kinda picks up after an experimental episode where the characters are bizarrely on a 90s sitcom for artsy fartsy cred."
4. The content is lacking. My understanding is that Esmail and his team originally wrote a movie and pretty much retrofitted that into one season of television. Once the [big event] happens in season one, the show lost its footing. I would have loved to spend more time at Allsafe instead of jumping straight into [big event].
5. The politics and hacktivism are pretty naive, if not just stupid. Its a lot of alt-left/far-left politics and having the characters act dumbfounded and guilty when regular people lost their homes and jobs seems ridiculous. What exactly did they think would happen after [big event]? We never really get to see anyone's moviation for this, other than some throwaway comments about "evil bankers" and "evil ceos." We know Elliot has a secret motivation and master plan (of course we have no details of it), but what about Trent and Mobley and Darlene? Why are they doing this? None of them remotely seem to have the zeal of a revolutionary and very soon regret all their actions. Its like some middle class hipster kids decided to overthrow society on a whim.
6. The show has a lot geek fan service where it can alienate non-geeks. I think its possible to show hacking without getting into the weeds of it and have it be semi-authentic. I can go either way here, but it would be nice if the show was more accessible to people like my wife and her friends.
7. The exploration of mental illness seems hackneyed and, well, boring. Season 2's long strange cinematography focusing on Elliot's tortured face just doesn't make for good TV. I think this stuff works best in small doses and has been done better by almost everyone else, including season 1 of this very show! Thankfully, Esmail has moved away from this kind of thing about mid-way through S2.
8. Whiterose as an unstoppable mastermind is a cliche and she's tiresome to watch on the show. Writers please stop using the mastermind cliche and start making your characters have flaws and screw-ups. For a show that's suppose to be complex, most of the characters aren't terribly deep or anti-cliche. Its almost distasteful to play up "the Chinese are inscrutable" cliche and have almost all the Chinese characters be unstoppable, unpredictable, and near perfect robots, constantly toying with the dumb and emotional westerners. We see the Dark Army, Chinese state hackers, the CCP, etc win pretty much every engagement but the FBI is clueless and there's no NSA or CIA at work at all here.
9. Less so than Whiterose, but Price is written to be stereotypically evil. He's only missing a mustache to twirl. I wish he was a more complex character, not just a sociopathic CEO who cares about nothing but himself. This doesn't necessarily upset me considering the general low complexity of secondary characters on this show, but the actor playing Price is so good, it seems like a waste of talent for him to play a two dimensional character. Price has a lot of potential that has so far been ignored and perhaps anything humanizing him would upset the far-left politics of the show, which I find disappointing.
10. The show has slowly degenerated into Lost, where meaningless clues lead to a surprise. Fans argue on /r/mrrobot but no one is ever right because its all so damn ambigious. Or someone is right, but only by dumb luck or perhaps marketing plants. I wish the show had less of a mysterious air about it. I also don't like the marketing led approach of "Check out the finale to get the real answers you've been waiting for all season!"
I feel this show is a bit like Halt and Catch Fire. Its decent, but not very good and is constantly trying to find its footing. Like Halt, I suspect it will never really find its proper footing and will be passable geek popcorn fare with moments of brilliance. It doesn't seem to be reaching out past modest ratings. I've heard comparisons to Breaking Bad, but BB had a general appeal that Mr Robot doesn't.
That said, this is destined to live in geek fandom, which frankly has a low barrier to entry. I just wish it was a better and more accessible show. I do look forward to the shows that will be made after being inspired by this. Mr Robot 2.0 will be good. 1.0 is just too uneven and unfocused. Compare how tight Walter White's world was or the world of The Wire compared to the manic world of Mr Robot or how complex and flawed the secondary characters were on that show compared to Mr Robots'. Those are mature and very good shows. Mr Robot? Not so much.
If you like Mr. Robot, you should watch Person of Interest.
POI is a pre-snowden series about a world "in which the NSA has a system which spies on every american citizen in order to fight terrorism" (sounds familiar?).
The show begins with the weak premise of "help us fight crimes we predict will happen", but don't be fooled by its appearance of a run-of-the-mill CBS show. Without spoiling it too much, I do want to say that by the end of Season 1, it transitions from "monster of the week" to an extremely high quality science fiction show, nearly invisibly.
I don't want to oversell it, but if you're reading HN it's very likely to be a show that you will appreciate. And like Mr. Robot, it's one of the very rare shows that has a lot of respect for tech and doesn't vomit gibberish on their audience.
(I tried to be vague to avoid spoilers but now fear my post makes no sense)
One of my favorite things about the twists though is that I feel like they actually lay a lot of groundwork and foreshadow them very well. For example, I think the twist before the main "first season twist" that you mention was foreshadowed beautifully at the beginning of the episode. By the end of the pre-opening credits scenes, I knew something was up.
Similar story this season. There were so many scenes that felt weird to me (things weren't "matching") that I knew something was up. And as soon as that twist was revealed, they had laid the background/groundwork for it so well enough in season 1 that I immediately knew why it was that way.
Edit: My point was that I've heard some people complain about the twist in season 1 being predictable, but I don't think a "twist" being unpredictable is always a good thing, sometimes it's shitty writing. Almost every time I'm surprised by something in Mr. Robot, I had suspected something was up and thought, "I should have seen that coming". It's almost like watching a really good magic show: I know how a lot of tricks are done, I know they're going to try to trick me, and I'm still surprised when they pull it off.
I'm going to play fan boy here. After almost finishing the second season I have to say Mr. Robot is the best TV show I think I have ever watched. Even better than Homeland.
The funny thing is if it didn't even involve hacking I would still consider my favorite show. The psychodrama existentialism of the show is so good. The plot is so damn good. The acting is so damn good.
Th music, the timing of title screen and the font used. I love it all.
So maybe this is because I've recently binge watched Mr Robot, but would this type of device be useful to destroy sensitive data? My assumption is not really.
Disclaimer: I'm not a hacker but I've seen plenty of portrayals of hackers microwaving ram or using giant magnets to wipe hard disks.
>I had a boss once that thought programmers just typed away for hours, how hard could it be
Just look at the movies. "Hackers" always manage to break in to remote systems by typing lots into a terminal very fast. The more difficult the system, the faster they need to type. (Mr Robot has been a refreshing change to that stereotype).
Not always. Also, there seems to be only one audio track per product, so e.g. "Mr Robot" and "Mr Robot [OV]" are two different products (you can't just switch half-way through an episode like you can with a DVD or Netflix). This is possibly infuriating if you actually rent/buy a TV show and find out you either can't keep up with the original voices or the dubbed audio is unbearable.
Well let's say i do the plots for the sitcom "Mr Robot" from time to time.
I agree with Gates's sentiment, but if you consider the state of specialization, some people are going to be skilled in combating diseases and others are going to be skilled in designing new longevity paradigms. Just because Mr. Robot is an amazing TV show doesn't mean all TV shows should be dramatized representations of hacker culture, for example.
I heard a lot about Mr. Robot so decided to check out the hype. Started watching with interest - the first episode really blew my mind when they started discussing GNOME and KDE, I was like wow I love this show already. Like you said the mental illness took over and I'm like this is going into la la land now - there's less hacking and more of a human angle, which is great and all, until you realize the human angle is superseding the hacking and computers, which is what drew me in in the first place. There's some real "holes in this firewall" if you get my meaning, and not in a good way. I guess part of me wanted it to be this really geeky show, but I suppose they might have gone too far already for the (comparatively) 'technologically challenged' populace already. I guess I will save my dime and wait to spend on Season 2 until after reviews are out. I hope they fix it.
The show is heavily inspired by Fight Club and season 2 essentially picks up where Fight Club (and season 1) ends. As someone who is both a "hacker" and a huge fan of Fight Club this makes season 2 even more interesting to me.
I remember reading the foreword to Fight Club where the author stress that the "Fight" in Fight Club is not what the book is about. He even considered other types of clubs/themes to convey the ideas in the book.
So perhaps that's a way to look at it: Mr Robot is Hacker Club and hacking play the same role as fighting does in Fight Club.
I would like to take this moment to remind everyone the new episode of Mr Robot is out.
It's a _super_ tropish twist, but I think that's a knowing choice. There's a great Extra Credits episode (usually a video game analysis show) exploring that theme at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ghrI2Vb8u2U
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.
I'm trying not to spoil the show, but Mr. Robot exists in Elliot's head and is based on his dad who died when he was young. The show changed when Mr. Robot showed up on the subway and said "We live in interesting times!", from there it started to turn into a black hat hacker/Anonymous spin to take out Evil Corp by deleting their bank database and record of debt. Eliot thought Mr. Robot controlled F-Society, but Mr. Robot takes over Elliot's body sometimes and has him do black hat/Anonymous style things.
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.
I would agree that the technical aspects of the show aren't very interesting, but the way that they are dealt with is remarkable and refreshing for a TV show. Usually these plot lines are jarring to me, but in Mr. Robot they aren't, because they're well researched to be in line with the verisimilitude the rest of the show seems to strive for. It's an aspect of the show (along with it's characters and more on-the-nose satire) that I enjoy.
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.
My favorite hacking scene is still from Scorpions (well there are two, the one below and the one where they are hacking a jet, with a RJ45 cable, from a car while landing).
"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
Mr Robot propelled Kali Linux into the top of the Linux OS rankings. After watching the Season 2 premiere yesterday even I decided I'm going to check Kali Linux out - either on Virtual Machine or my Raspberry Pi 3.
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!
Mr. Robot is a drama, not a documentary.
Total tangent, but I can't recommend Mr. Robot enough, especially to the HN crowd. It is about a group of anarchists hackers that are trying to take down a global conglomerate. It might be the first critically acclaimed TV show/movie that goes out of its way to make sure the tech they talked about is accurate. You will see it as early as the pilot episode when two of the main characters debate the merits of their favorite Linux distros. And they do it in such a way that it is entertaining to both the people who know what they are talking about while not alienating the common folks who just hear it as technobabble.
I just warn you shouldn't read too much up on the show beforehand because there a lots of twists and turns in the first season that you won't want ruined.
Mr Robot is an excellent TV show [0], I highly recommend it.
0) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4158110/
<scrambles to find an upcoming conference in NYC>
I'd never heard of 'Story' - nor the notion of a store that 'changes themes' regularly. Cool concept - but far cooler still with the Mr. Robot theme currently on display.
Given the realism of the show, I was hoping for something a bit more elaborate with regards to 'hacking the ATM' - but then, who knows? Maybe there's more to finding the 4-digit code than just browsing the shop.
Run some packet captures to sniff insecure communications, or exploit a vulnerable PHP app, or other Pen Testing goodness. Something that would make Elliot proud. I'm guessing, with a $50 'prize', it can't be trivial.
Eager to see what Season 2 has in store for us: they definitely set a high bar in the first season.
Funny you should mention demographics and House of Cards - it was literally created because Netflix's data suggested that many subscribers enjoyed the Social Network (Fincher), Kevin Spacey movies and the British version of House of Cards.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/25/business/media/for-house-of-cards-using-big-data-to-guarantee-its-popularity.html?_r=0
It's not demographics in the traditional sense, but make no mistake - Netflix and the like do not create unique pieces of art just because they feel like it. They are also making a show to fit a market, just with better data.
> it's an echo chamber for older, more conservative folk.
I'm not so sure about that. One of the best shows I saw last year, Mr. Robot, was made by the USA Network, of all people.
This reminds me of the last episode of Mr.Robot
Agree that its possible (and that Mr. Robot is great haha) I just think that the way things are moving socially with millennials who hang out together and barely look away from their phones it is more likely they will binge watch more shows rather than less. Just an opinion though.
Maybe not at scale, but to some degree. About a year ago I went from watching TV series on streaming services about 1-2 hours per day to...well almost nothing.
Initially it was because I had exhausted all the series I was interested in. But now there are many seasons worth of content that....I'm probably not going to watch any time soon. Because my habits have changed. The time I spent on watching shows is now spent doing something else. A show has to be extremely good for me to bother watching it. (Like Mr Robot. What a great show).
I've started watching a few shows again. But now it is at the rate of 1-2 episodes per week across all shows. Rather than 2-3 episodes per day. And it is a bit...boring now.
I'm not typical, but the industry has to be aware that people can change their habits. And they won't necessarily change them back.
(So what do I do instead? I spend more time making stuff and reading / listening to audio books while making. In the last year I read / listened to somewhere between 55 and 65 books. Not counting technical or scientific books)
Mr. Robot is a popular TV show about hacking which coincidentally just won a Golden Globe.
This Reddit account has no real relationship.
They have a final season 5 scheduled for some time in the next few months.
I'm very excited myself. It's the only show, other than Mr. Robot, that has plausible tech scenes and often drops real bits of hacky trivia, remaining very enjoyable for a techie despite the premise itself being far-fetched. And their political commentary on mass surveillance is beautiful.
And the way it transitions from criminal procedural to scifi ... beautiful.
Based on your username it seems possible to me you're a fan of the TV show MR Robot as the main character has a fish called QWERTY. The main character Elliot suffers from anxiety, depression, insomnia and mania.
I would consider that unless like Elliot you're trying to reset society's debt to zero it's unlikely you're being targeted. What makes you worth targeting over anyone else?
I think you should speak to a medical professional (get multiple opinions if you don't trust them) and move on from there.
There's a lot we can learn from Mr Robot, for me the biggest lesson is you can't always trust what you see and feel. Find somebody who can help you with that.
For instance, I'm partially convinced this is just someone trolling hacker news whilst bored on a Sunday...
I love Mr. Robot (even though it borrows rather heavily from Palahniuk, among others) and strongly recommend it to anyone who liked the movie Hackers. I particularly enjoyed the Hackers reference in that episode you mention. The character's contempt at the technical infeasibility of the data visualizations is well captured as I've probably heard that same criticism a million times by my "real hacker" friends who may have snorted derisively but still watched the film to its end multiple times.
Kind of feel weird posting this but a recent show, Mr. Robot feels like the next attempt at something kind of like "Hackers".
One of the early on episodes actually has a character musing aloud if some screen writer is making the next Hackers to incorrectly portray this generations technologist. As they watch Hackers on TV in a hotel. A bit tongue in check, because the show itself is doing exactly that.
It's actually quite good and surprisingly "accurate" on the technology bits and even some of the personalities.
-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Robot_(TV_series)
I've seen so many ridiculous "hacking" sequences in films that I really wasn't expecting this series to go into as much realistic detail as they do. Also most hacking stuff in films is at its worst when it comes to the dialogue which somehow always has to have something to do with shutting down a "mainframe".
But this series does a great job both from a tech and dialogue perspective. There's even a scene where the main character and the CTO of another corp (trying not to spoil anything), have a conversation about gnome vs. kde.
EDIT: after doing some reading looks like the writer/creator is responsible a lot of this realism see: http://www.slate.com/blogs/outward/2015/06/24/mr_robot_gay_character_sam_esmail_explains_why_the_show_needed_one.html. Here's an interesting reddit response feed from him: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/3bp1zz/i_am_sam_esmail_creator_of_mr_robot_ama/
I don't know, I feel like they're one of those attempts to look hacker-y that ends up falling a bit flat. 1337speak isn't really all that trendy anymore, except for people who make really bad passwords. I actually really cracked up about a Mr. Robot line though:
"I bet you right now some writer is working hard on a TV show that’ll mess up this generation’s idea of hacker culture."
This is the tool that Elliot uses in the last episode of Mr. Robot, right?
Kind of want reply both to you and @pjc50:
I think moving images with sound as part of hypertext/hypermedia is a given -- and has been since (at least) the 60s. That's not just "TV". And "TV" isn't just video.
We've only recently entered the era where users can reasonably make live and recorded video, and use that as a form of expression (from video chat, to youtube/vimeo to snapchat etc). And just like you could take a tv camera and use that for video conferencing in the 60s[1] -- video-the-medium is much more than "TV".
"TV" is indeed very pacifying. For myself, I can on days off, do two very different things that are very immersive: watch tv series, or play Star Wars: Online Galaxies. Now, I mostly play SWTOR solo, so for the purpose of this discussion, lets just use "play a single-player computer game". I enjoy both, but if I read a book or play a computer game -- I'm mentally invigorated. If I watch a TV series, even something interesting like "Humans"[h], "Mr. Robot"[r] -- or more interesting drama like "True Detective"[t] -- I always end up more passive. Even watching documentaries, or news -- TV ends up a very passive medium.
And that's (IMNHO) just the good "TV". I find that a good movie is usually between "book" and "TV" -- something with the format/runtime that drives a different expression both in writing and directing.
> We've been trending away from the 'web as a collection of books' to 'the web as a series of TV channels' for many years now.
I don't think the web has ever been much like a "collection of books". It might have been "a collection of essays" -- and I don't think we're really trending towards "a series of TV channels". I think we'll still see video expression and communication evolve, and I think user generated communiques ("content" is more something that oozes from a (corporate) organization) will continue to dominate.
It is my impression that young people (~3-20) are much more inclined to use video than I am -- I don't much like it. But I expect rich media images/sound/video will continue to increase, as bandwidth/storage gets cheaper.
I think that trend in media is different from the trend in centralization, commercialization though. There's nothing wrong with videologs (other than that I prefer a well-written text...) -- as long as we can host them in a more distributed manner than we do today.
I think we'll see interesting times ahead, as the people that are now 5 years old grow up to master both rich media and various forms of programming/automation as a natural part of their life. We've seen nothing yet. Nothing.
A post-script on quality: I think many of us want quality. And I think we'll continue to make it, and find it. Be that small Internet radio-stations that do curated music (as opposed to things like soundcloud that I also like, but unfortunately is just as hopelessly centralized as youtube) -- or "real" blogs -- or whatever.
It remains to be seen how/if this will all be funded. Maybe we won't have as much paid-for content/art -- maybe we'll all have more free time -- assuming we don't kill each others as jobs are automated away, and those who own the robots keep all the riches.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY
[h] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humans_(TV_series)
[r] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Robot_(TV_series)
[t] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_Detective_(TV_series)
Good tv show, but IP addresses still fake :-) "The IP-address Elliot is instructed to leave in the .dat-file is 218.108.149.373. The highest number in an IPv4-address is 255." Source: http://www.tvrage.com/mr-robot/episodes/1065781052
0:50sec; "Oh hi... Elliot, just a tech!" LOL
Article Mirror @ https://archive.is/nCIZH
Mr. Robot is an absolutely fantastic show -- my only worry is that USA isn't really a network known for this sort of quality, and I feat it'll end up going the route of their other shows like White Collar, Suits, or Burn Notice and become an episodic heist/case/espionage-of-the-day type show.
Mr. Robot (generally) gets tech right. There are a few weird parts and some overwrought moments, but they for the most part get tech/hacking/code better than any other show. Also, it's just shot very well, reminds me a lot of House of Cards first season.
Highly recommended if you have not already started watching.
Mr. Robot showed promise in the first episode, until he got near a computer. Then it became ridiculous.
Lets say this service is generating truly random bytes. If a subset of the bytes that you download happen to describe, say, the last episode of Mr. Robot encoded in MP4, does that actually constitute piracy?
My friends in the industry seem to like it a lot, but I couldn't make it through the first episode. It's like the sterile hybrid of BBC Sherlock and Fight Club, with the computer plotline of the movie Hackers and DDOS substituted for Gibsons.
If you're watching Mr. Robot now and haven't watched at least the first two seasons of BBC Sherlock, stop what you're doing and switch shows.
Halt and Catch Fire was, I thought, a lot better than some of the reviews I'd read.
> the awesome Mr. Robot TV series
The one where the anti-establishment hacker hero is a paranoid schizophrenic drug addict and the only other "hacktivists" are portrayed as terrorists?
> This kind of attention to details is what makes an awesome show!
Attention to details is not enough.
No, the corporations will simply adapt and learn to play the anti-corporate tune to turn a profit.
See Continuum, American Odyssey, Mr. Robot, The Lego Movie, and so on. You want an anti-corporate message and you are willing to pay for it? There are corporations ready to fulfill your need :-)
Isn't this kind of what they're doing on Google Play, or what was done with Mr. Robot, minus the torrent? The first episode or two are free, then you either pay per episode or watch via TV subscription. I frequently download free pilot episodes to see if there are any shows I might be interested in watching. I would say that Mr. Robot was a great example of this. I heard about the show by word of mouth (it might have been here, or possibly on Reddit). I do not watch any other shows on USA, so it is likely that I would have never heard of the show had I not had the pilot recommended to me and easily available to watch on YouTube. I think that last part is key. I probably would not have made the effort to download a "USA" app, or jump through hoops to watch it on a web browser. Having it easily available on my phone where I could watch it with the built in YouTube app was perfect.