Hacker Cinema
NCIS
2003 · TV series · 24 seasons
Created by Don McGill, Donald P. Bellisario
From murder and espionage to terrorism and stolen submarines, a team of special agents investigates any crime that has any connection to Navy and Marine Corps personnel, regardless of rank or position.
3 positive13 negative1 mixed34 neutralfrom 51 commenters
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52 comments on Hacker News
NCIS used to use my English department building at University as their Hospital. Star Fleet Academy in one of the Star Trek movies was the front of my school's library.
Considering how much they did there it wasn't nearly as inconvenient as you would think. The school had a good process in place for controlling the chaos. It's still weird watching the movie and seeing my old library in it.
It's definitely. Notice how after the 1994 Crime Bill was put into effect you had a large wave of shows and movies that increasingly depicted police as tools of the state rather than as protectors of the public. The fact that police-centered media exploded in ever larger shockwaves after that, the Atlanta Centennial Olympic Park Bombing, 9/11, and the deaths of Trayvon Martin and George Floyd was no coincidence. Law & Order, NYPD Blue, NCIS, Chicago PD, and Blue Bloods each correspond to each of those periods. The shows and movies are designed to make the abusive and destructive actions of the police look gallant. The police themselves actually advocate on many of them in order to sensationalize depictions or manipulate points of view so that they can then take them and use them as emotional appeals when the public criticizes policing.
The name "Law & Order" is a blatant example of this, as it's a phrase used by Richard Nixon during his campaign in 1968, and was widely repeated when he created justifications for starting the War On Drugs in 1970. This same phrase was later used by Reagan and H.W. Bush when they planted their positions of wanting to wield state violence against countercultures that arose. The '90s was full of change as Gen-X started to become adults and formed their own powerful countercultures, and the title of the show was an emotional appeal to conservative older people who hated that change and wanted the state to shape society instead of the other way around.
> Are there specific movies/TV shows that you're thinking of?
Not GP, but NCIS is the big one offhand. Of course that show has simply gotten more and more ridiculous on general over the years
That sort of happened on "NCIS", Season 16, Episode 1: https://blog.cloudflare.com/statement-concerning-events-at-glowbeam-technologies/
The stats for watched shows are pretty interesting - https://fortune.com/2023/06/29/netflix-amazon-disney-others-spent-a-record-23-billion-on-original-new-content-last-yearso-why-is-everyone-watching-movies-and-tv-from-the-past-aden-ikram/
Nothing prestige, almost entirely NFLX. A lot of it is back catalog licensed stuff. NCIS, Criminal minds, lol. Disney+ on the scoreboard with basically a couple kids shows plus the Simpsons.
Previous year stats pretty similar - https://www.nielsen.com/insights/2022/streaming-grew-its-audience-in-2021-drama-reality-and-kids-programming-lead-the-content-wars/
Prestige stuff like Game of Thrones, Succession, even each of the Disney+ Star Wars shows is $100M/season. None of these make the scoreboard for views.
Meanwhile most people are watching boomer reruns and midbrow stuff. Even Seinfeld licensing only cost $100M/year for NFLX to end up one of the top 10 viewed shows.
I don’t think so, to be honest. The landscape for media consumption is so much different than 10-15 years ago. Without any supporting data, I have a hunch that, shows are mostly watched within a year of its original air date. New shows aren’t on a rerun (I recall Scrubs, House being on from time to time), they are not turning into a comfort background tv show (like The Office, Friends) or have a religious fanbase that’ll just follow along because there are 20 seasons of it (NCIS, Greys Anatomy and so on.).
On top of everything, media is extremely fragmented. So much choice that there isn’t any specific shows that people watch because everyone else is watching and will talk about it on Monday during lunch (a la Game of Thrones). So all these companies are left with churning new shows trying to find a holy grail of the Stranger Things size to bring them new subscribers. Until then, anything that doesn’t stick on the wall, will get cut off.
We have a huge movie industry scene in my city, so you hear from people who jump from working show A to show B. None of the shows I’ve ever heard of and never will. But producers are still hoping for a genre defining hit somehow.
Movies haven't done things bad out of ignorance for many decades. It's always a sound engineer or a director saying "no people expect a movie gun to do X nowadays"
Movie hackers don't work like that because nobody involved knows how computers work, even NCIS had dedicated Computer Consultants for that kind of stuff, but real "hacking" is boring AF, and most people are willing to put that kind of "reality" aside for a better narrative.
In the "NCIS" series in most episodes at some point the IP address of a hacker or however of a wanted person is found and it is invariably a 192.168.1.x one.
Every sentence of this piece screams "journalist who doesn't know what they are talking about". But my favorite bit is this:
> Replacing a screenwriter with AI to “save money” is like cutting out your daily Starbucks but buying a $25,000 La Marzocco espresso machine, if the La Marzocco was also bad at making espresso, but could, with careful human assistance, produce beverages that resemble espresso.
I LOL'd. Starbucks is LITERALLY a company that buys $25K (okay, $18K) espresso machines and, with careful human assistance, produce beverages that resemble espresso. Each producer doesn't need their own Starbucks LLC, but many will start a Franchise (finetune) and most will buy scripts by the token from s/Starbucks/OpenAI/g instead of making their own coffee at home. Maybe even if it's more expensive and not as good as what you can buy artisinally! That's what the Starbucks analogy tells us.
Anyways, the analogy is stretched, but that sentence was hilarious. Beyond analogy:
Training costs:
1. No one training huge models pays sticker public cloud price for GPU hours. Either you have your own cloud or you negotiate rates or you go with a hybrid approach and keep training runs mostly in-house.
2. MS, Google, and Amazon MAKE INSANE MONEY on their hosted GPUs even when their internal teams hog capacity for training. Why choose between selling shovels and digging for gold when you can have a triopoly on shovels, choose the best places to dig, then sell shovels to other people who want to dig on those same tracts (once you're done)?
Inference costs: Even unoptimized, hosting isn't that expensive (especially, again, if you're the cloud provider and not a cloud customer). Once you have a somewhat stable model size and architecture, you can drive the marginal cost way down. Even more so for a fixed model. And without that much effort. I'd bet that OpenAI's current token prices are already profitable on a per unit basis even if you throw in free tier.
Capabilities:
1. GPT models are still very new, the public ones are trained on kinda garbage datasets.
2. The models don't have to win a Pulitzer. Have you seen an NCIS episode?!
The economics work well and I have no doubt that a model tuned on the Alliance's huge backlog of scripts would write pretty good scripts.
> There are jobs, after all, that require very little besides spitting out plausible-sounding answers in response to prompts; jobs in which not understanding either the prompts or your responses is not disqualifying, so long as you are broadly guided in the right direction by one or two sentient human handlers.
Tech journalists writing about AI have to be pretty high on that list...
It'll never not amuse me that in the first season of NCIS (circa 2003), Seti@Home (or someones clone of it) was the screen saver on Gibbs computer in a couple episodes.
At the same time we had already installed Seti@Home on basically every computer we had access to... including school.
Good times.
The curriculum isn't being removed from existence, it's just being removed from the introductory classes. There are probably more people making their own OS from scratch in 2023 than in 1993 anyway--we have many more people with access to computers, and tons of free resources online for people who want to learn computer architecture, operating systems, assembly language, etc. This is not some kind of hypothetical supposition that "there must be people out there"; I know for a fact these people are out there because I keep meeting them, and some of them are damn young.
The idea of genius men making stuff from first principles is just some kind of Hollywood schlock version of programming anyway. It's the stuff you see on NCIS when they make an episode about hackers. All the good stuff has been a team effort, even if it starts out as a solo project. Maybe with a few exceptions like cURL.
They have, usually this is called a skeleton key. NCIS has done at least two separate episodes with it as the MacGuffin.
>It's in the public interest to hear from the president during significant events.
for the purpose of argument, let's assume this premise is true. It's not hard to imagine that a biden supporter would be amendable to the idea there's a "public interest" to hear from him. However, how would this work if it's a president you oppose? Would you support allowing trump in 2020 to hijack prime time TV so he could rant about how "biden and ANTIFA democrats are mounting a dangerous attack on the country’s values, and Americans must fight back"[1]? Absent a principled way of determining what counts as "public interest", what you're saying just boils down to "people should be forced to hear the speech that I like".
[1] quote adapted from https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/01/biden-slams-attacks-on-democracy/
>With on demand streaming and syndication folks with get their NCIS fix one way or another.
I haven't had cable for a while, but I'm pretty sure that "on demand streaming and syndication" doesn't allow you to watch episodes as they're being aired. Moreover, not everyone knows how to operate a streaming service. In contrast if you wanted to hear biden's speech you could easily tune into CNN or c-span. Therefore it's pretty clear that canceling prime time TV has more of an impact on people's options than not airing biden's speech does.
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.
The one that always comes to mind for me is NCIS which has been running for a gazillion seasons and I think it did a lot to normalize and glorify surveillance with its "let's hack into the computer / hijack the home cameras of the perp" plot device that's been in virtually every crime TV show ever since. (and seemingly always coughs up the correct suspect)
If you have seen JAG or NCIS (tv shows), you probably know some of these and with NCIS being a top (broadcast) show for a few years, it is quite likely a lot of (dare I say older) people have heard of these
Reading your process I have that stereotypical TV series image in my mind of a person so deep into the subject matter that plaster every wall with notes and pull string all across the room at head height to hang up ever more notes kinda like that one NCIS episode (S8 E6 "Cracked"): https://img.sharetv.com/shows/episodes/standard/616591.jpg (although that image is only a small part of that whole view).
> (Also this is why SF directors love transparent or "holographic" displays, because you can film the person looking at the screen and the thing being displayed at the same time)
I caught an episode of NCIS a few weeks ago and noticed they had a plexiglass screen up in the interrogation room cuz of covid.
But I also realized it let them get both characters' faces in the shot at the same time thanks to the reflection, despite sitting across the table from each other (and they of course framed everything to take advantage of this).
Same thing just 2020 version.
Trinity used an actual exploit (ssh IIRC). This sets it apart some movies like Jurassic Park with the girl looking at some UI made of 3D shapes and says "unix, I know it).
Or NCIS - of which I copied for an awareness training the part where the two geeks "go though the firewall" both on the same keyboard.
Yeah, German TV in general is just pathetically bad, however the documentaries produced by NDR ("die nordreportage") and some others of the "Dritte"/"Spartensender" [0] are really quite good most of the time. Interesting topics, rarely any fluff or artificial tension, almost no overly dramatic music just for the sake of it, just all around well produced programmes. An interesting programme from one of the "Dritte" called WDR was e.g. "Feuer & Flamme".
On the topic of "Krimis" (crime drama type shows) however I have to agree with the other commenters that it's just formulaic trash. "Tatort" for example is by many regarded as a good or even excellent show, from when I tried watching it a few times over the years, it was often just the "moral education packaged in flat drama" with a very see-through "current issues" topic selection. Just pathetic.
Don't get me wrong, I also rewatched some less recent American crime dramas like NCIS etc. and especially in one episode of NCIS LA (really lame spin-off IMO) it was very much "How dare you be a hacker and government whistleblower, don't you know how that hurts Our Troops(tm)?" with the black bald guy saying that to and then assaulting that suspect. YAY, moral panic!
[0]: for foreigners, these are the state-run/-sponsored TV channels for different large parts of Germany, like NDR for the northern part etc. Basically smaller regional parts of the ARD/ZDF.
These lava lamps were also a key plot point in an NCIS episode (a popular crime procedural on CBS).
[spoiler below]
https://twitter.com/ncis_cbs/status/1044751471927947264?lang=en
I'd say a majority of people are fascinated by crime.
Exactly. I’ve googled stuff after seeing it on CSI or NCIS. Or on the news, or in a movie, or whatever. You could definitely cherry-pick stuff out of my google search history to make out like I’m a big time terrorist criminal mastermind.
One of my go-to examples of high-context is The Wire's "fuck" scene. Two professionals in perfect sync investigate a murder scene. The communications themselves are not very important because they are relying on a high level of context -- they already have familiarity with the case and with each other.
[nsfw] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lElf7D-An8
On the other side of the spectrum, think about any episode of CSI or NCIS where the characters narrate everything they do and think to each other. It's necessary exposition for the viewer, and perhaps in a real-life setting collaborating in this way keeps everybody on the same page. It isn't bad at all, it is just a lower context mode of communicating.
That's fine but considering NCIS is the most watched TV show of 2019 I'm sure it holds as a reference for "mainstream".
Edit: I know downvote edits are frowned up but... I need to ask: why are people downvoting this? Do you not think NCIS is good example of a mainstream show?
Haha, no problem, but it's mostly just practice. The key thing seems to be recognizing that there's anything worth picking out in a piece of art to begin with—those with little practice don't notice it anywhere, or else will see it everywhere because of course it's possible to bullshit deep themes into an average episode of NCIS if you're so inclined—then questioning why for various decisions. If you're not sure what something means in a thematic or thesis sense, look at which possibility or possibilities go best with the rest of what you've seen (or read, or heard—works for books and music, too).
FWIW I find most of the rest of Black Mirror a lot less rich than Fifteen Million Merits, though I like most of it. I couldn't write as much on most of the episodes as that one, because I'm just not sure there's as much there. Most are a fairly straight route up to usually some kind of twist, with a little worth saying about the relation of the twist to the rest but mostly what they're up to is pretty on the surface. Nothing wrong with that, and that fact that it consistently tries to say anything at all puts it above most TV, so far as that goes.
To expand a little into other episodes, though, to give some more idea of what I mean by asking why about choices creators make in art: take The National Anthem, for example. When a Certain Pivotal Scene (you know the one) happens, the creators could have depicted it several ways without changing the actual story. A few possibilities: 1) actually show it, entirely, 2) show it but crop out the worst of it, 3) keep the camera nearby, say on people in the room or in the next room over, or on the fictional production crew "shooting" the event, 4) any of the above but show only a little and cut away, 5) just skip straight to after, don't have any footage that takes place during it at all, among other options. There was a choice to make, and the one that was made isn't exactly revolutionary, but also isn't one of the most obvious ones: keep the camera going for all of it (or maybe just most? I can't recall for sure) after showing us every moment at the scene of the event leading up to it, but only show the faces of people watching it on TV. Why? It wasn't the only way they could have avoided putting the event itself onscreen, why do it that way?
Showing people watching a screen, especially something sensational that's been teased from the very first scene of the episode, and holding the camera on it that long does a couple things, I think: in the general case, it invites identity with or comparison between the real life viewer and the viewer in the show; in this particular case, I think the show is also delivering on a kind of implicit promise of horrible spectacle by showing us the most disgusting thing that's happening in that moment, by the creator's judgement. Anyone watching the show, even if they hope the event won't happen or that it won't be depicted at all if it does (which is hopefully most people?) was still held in suspense and to some degree entertained by that will they/won't they dynamic. The result is that this choice both casts judgement on the viewers-in-the-show and prevents the real-life show watcher from casting them as Other and distancing themselves from those voyeurs. This option was chosen by the show's creators because it conveys a message different from what others would have (most of the other options above wouldn't convey much at all, without some further effort, but would advance the plot just the same) and does so effectively. That single choice causes multiple effects on and messages to the viewer, working toward one end.
To take that a step further, both reinforcing the likelihood that this was intentional and possibly adding insight into other episodes, the show repeatedly returns to themes along these lines, of the viewer-as-complicit. White Bear's a huge one, obviously, featuring punishment essentially for the act of watching a crime (and filming! The show also loves to jab at itself and its creators pretty viciously, as Fifteen Million Merits manages to also do in addition to everything else) with a kind of Greek hell of... having crimes done to them while "normal people" watch and record, which is called justice. A couple others tread similar ground—Shut Up and Dance, notably.
Moving into more tenuous territory: Jan Junipero may also be doing something like this, forcing the viewer into more direct confrontation with some message in it by identifying them with some element of or character in the show, at the end, just a bit. The long sequence of server farms and robot arms at the end definitely adds a sense of melancholy and unease over the happy ending and neatly reframes our own emotions about the episode, which is probably the main thing it's intended to do, but that also looks an awful lot like any modern-day server farm. Like where Netflix episodes come from. Like the episode you just watched, finding temporary joy in this fiction while sitting, apparently lifeless... and oh look it's suggesting another show or movie, how nice, this could just go on forever, couldn't it? And that's the season Black Mirror transitioned to Netflix, I'm pretty sure.
That's quite stretch from the pretty clear use of those themes and mechanisms in other episodes and I wouldn't say I'm anywhere near as sure of it as some of the other stuff, since it's pretty abstract and there are other, stronger ways to explain why the scene is there and why it looks the way it does... but then again Bandersnatch came out a few years later and hits some of the same notes explicitly, which makes it just a tad less likely that that wasn't on the creators' minds when they decided how the end of San Junipero should go, and a little more likely that that connection was intended.
Yes, this is what I'm finding with many Netflix shows, they are extended movies. The problem is that each episode isn't really an episode, it has no "arc". Like when you watch NCIS for example, there's resolution after an hour or so. There's sometimes a bigger plot line if you watch all the episodes in a series but you don't have to.
..and because its better for them once they've hooked you to keep you there, the series usually provides a cliff hanger, but many times the series isn't renewed so the risk/investment in time is high. If it is renewed then they really have no new idea so they just rehash the first series and do it again (e.g. the OA, I guess, I stopped after the beginning of the second series). So you never get the closure you get from watching an old school tv series or movie, there's no high's or low's of a good story, there's just time used up.
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 huge portion of the American TV-watching demographic doesn't pay very much attention to shows while they are watching it. So they prefer shows that have predictable rehashing of the same plot each season. Think Supernatural, Grey's Anatomy, Once Upon a Time. You don't really need to put effort into remembering previous episodes because you've seen them enough to get the gist without any background.
Shows like NCIS, Law & Order, and Criminal Minds will literally run the same plot each episode. These are some of the most popular TV shows in history.
Studio executives don't want to accept that they have a hit show that doesn't cater to this demographic. Once the main story wraps up, usually after 4-5 seasons, the original creator will get fed up or fired because they are unwilling to drag the story out any longer. Then the studio brings in a generic writing team to transform the show into one of those a predictable rehash shows.
It never works because the people who are into those shows won't get past the first four seasons, and the original fans of the show get tired and stop watching.
An CNI company employs non USA nationals in sensitive roles I would hope not this isn't NCIS (the TV Show)
I have noticed a change in the interview techniques portrayed in some police shows. Gibb's team in NCIS is one of those but the British TV series Scott and Bailey really comes closest to what is discussed in this Guardian article. Sometimes Soren in Law and Order comes close as well.
Any police officer who wants to try this could get started by learning some basic psychology and watching a few episodes of these TV series. And also, you need to fix your own psychological issues because these techniques work best when you are not choked up with hate or other emotions. They require empathy for the criminal and to do that, you need to have firm control of your psyche otherwise it will break you to try it.
I am reminded of one of those Sales empowerment books of the 60s and 70s written by a luxury car salesman. He said that you could not be successful unless you genuinely liked your customer, and only then could you help him to spend his money on what you are selling. Part of the book was exercises on how to turn on that "genuine like" within your own psyche.
Let's face it, it takes years of daily practice to become a skilled musician, or a skilled skateboarder or a skilled parcour athlete or... Humans can do amazing things if only they apply themselves with a few years of daily practice. Stage magic is even more so because those folks never stop practicing the most impossible actions.
You mean like State sponsored hacking? Sure... I don't know I would say that it's something else entirely.
The core mindset still comes from the same place. Understanding everything. Understanding the implications of bugs and features of known systems, using that for grand exploitation to achieve things they weren't designed for.
What inspired them to start hacking in the first place may or may not have come from a place of not having everything. Perhaps their trigger of interest were movies or TV shows: War Games, Hackers... or James Bond or the nerdy guy from NCIS, 24, Bourne Identity, MI5 or countless other TV shows and movies where hacking is glamorized.
The start of that career path is the same, regardless of what brought you there - a need to understand your tools, deeply.
The TV show NCIS borrows from this philosophy. Gibbs always smacks the back of his underling's heads when they do something stupid. But if he doesn't, they worry he has given up on them. They also made it a point saying that smacking the front of the head would be offensive.
I mean, you're comparing real life with a fictional TV show, what did you expect? People don't watch NCIS with the expectation that it's anything like the real world. I mean, even if you were going to criticize the show, you should probably start with its overly broad definition of the NCIS mission, or why they were in Africa in the first place.
I am traveling in West Africa right now, and the same applies to this part of the world.
This place is very, very different from that portrayed by the Western Media.
I was sitting in the Nigerian Embassy waiting for a visa, and an American tv show was on.. NCIS or something, and they had these American "heros" over in some African hell-hole saving the world.. of course they get attacked and then work hard to survive and find their way to some place. People are being dragged out of cars, men smashed in the face by the butt end of AK47s, women thrown to the ground. People's eyes show pure hatred - enough to actually scare me, even though I was just watching TV.
The show was set in Mali, they were supposedly in Bamako.
The kicker?
I was sitting in Bamako that very moment, having spent over a month there already, walking around every day, on my own, perfectly safe and happy. I even walked around at night multiple times. People would say hello and invite me into their homes.
The reality is that I met hundreds and hundreds of the kindest, friendliest and happiest people I have ever met in Bamako, yet millions of Americans are seeing realistic looking images that it's a complete hell hole.
I have driven through more than 500 road blocks in 10 countries in West Africa, and I have never, ever seen anything remotely scary or threatening. Not even once.
It's simply not true. It's fake.
When Africans see super heros flying around New York saving us from Aliens they know it's not real. When Americans see African Hell holes on TV, they have no idea it's not real. They are being lied to en-mass and have no idea.
(if it makes any difference, I'm white, and driving a not-cheap Jeep around Africa)
It's such a major and pervasive genre that many people now consume sci-fi media without even realizing and/or knowing it.
It's a pity that establishment literary circles still mostly ignore it outside of a few token examples. This drives educational circles and now most literary curricula (even K-12) leave any kind of serious analysis or discussion off the list.
Science Fiction requires some very different analysis tools than many other literary genres and as a result, readers (consumers) are so ill prepared that they often can't even recognize it when they're consuming a genre piece, or consuming something with science fiction elements, if it doesn't explicitly involve Star Wars like space opera cliches. But literary criticism, by largely ignoring the genre, is failing to develop those analysis tools.
There's plenty of people who'll say "I hate sci-fi" and then go on to binge watch several seasons across several shows that are all members of some sub-genre of sci-fi.
Note: IMHO I have a very expansive view of what Science Fiction is. I consider the genre to be basically any story where some non-existent "technology" (or science, or engineering or medicine, etc.) exists, and the story is set in motion around that technology. The technology can be as inconsequential as a grain of sand in the story, or a major plot driver. It can be so important to the story that the entire setting of the story becomes incomparable to anything that we can currently experience, or so mundane that the world of the story is exactly our world, but with this one twist. And I assume technology can be anything from physical stuff to cognitive concepts.
As an example of how expansive my view on this is, I would consider a show like NCIS to be sci-fi because many of the plots can only exist or move forward based on some impossible or non-existent forensic or cyber technology.
"Walking Dead", sure I consider that sci-fi because it relies on the assumption of some nonexistent disease to drive the entire show.
The "James Bond" series (and many spy movies and series) are basically sci-fi because the stories can only function in the presence of non-existing or impossible technology.
An amazing number of Horror, Spy, Police, Thriller and Action stories all fall into the same category.
If you disagree with me on this, that's fine. But I'll put this another way, "The Man from Earth" is a movie that essentially takes place in one room of a small house. There's no technology, gizmos, spaceships, aliens, or other things that can't exist in this world. It relies on a single premise, an improbably genetic condition, that without which the entire story can't exist. Every other single thing in the story is entirely plausible as a small-set drama and if you conclude that the main character is lying or crazy, then the story is still science fiction because it still causes the viewer to consider an improbable science. In fact, I think the genetic condition is only mentioned once in the entire movie.
So if NCIS can get away with 15-20 minutes of impossible forensics and hacking per episode and not be sci-fi, then "The Man from Earth", which dwells on the genetic twist for a few moments can't be either.
Well the potential audience is small, that's true for most TV shows out of the bat which is why competition is so hard.
Any show that can't be turned on at a random moment for some entertainment will be at a disadvantage which is why various talk shows/entertainment shows are usually the most popular ones. And as far as serials go then vanilla shows tend to work best, this is why NCIS is one of the most popular shows even tho it's pretty darn dumb (I still like it somewhat, tho it used to be better, I can't deal with skinny Tim).
Scifi and Fantasy shows have not to only perform well but to outperform their competition by a mile because they are so expensive to make (a sitcom or a run of the mil cop drama costs nothing), same goes for historical/periodic shows which is why Rome got canceled (it actually was more expensive than GoT with the exclusion of maybe the last season of Got) and since the licensing was shared between BBC and HBO neither saw enough revenue to continue pouring so much money into it.
But yeah Fox butchered Firefly this is was one of the ads for it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1iWbgQUpRo they sold it as a kick ass action show and the people who tuned in were dissapointed, it had action but it was more of a goofy space comedy than a serious thriller.
My "guess" is the "forensic" "examiner" watched CSI Cyber or NCIS the night before, an episode where the show's forensic "sees" patterns in Matrix-style flow of data.
That's great. Straight out of an NCIS episode except it actually makes sense this time. :)
Yes a terrible security risk what happens when some one tailgates a bunch of contractors with a made up pass. Easy way to smuggle bad stuff onto a ship.
Sounds like the start of a NCIS episode.
That makes more sense. So to me, the headline reads as "Location can be tracked just by measuring battery usage" when in reality its "Location can be tracked if: A) they know the tower you are speaking to B) they have information on how buildings are constructed in this area C) You move around D) they have some other crowdsourced info about how much power is required to talk to the tower you are connected to."
I can see this "technique" being used in an episode of NCIS, CSI or similar cop show. <plot> We need to find this guy, but all we have is his cell number.
Police tech #1 "Sure no problem, I will just connect to his phone and measure the battery drain..... Got him, he is Downtown at 5th and Main- lets go arrest him!!!" </plot>
Nowadays you have teams of two or three, which are at the same time up against the external threat and the institution within which they work. Lone heroes saving the day in spite of the incompetence (or corruption) of their colleagues.
While they are small teams (were they ever big?), with regard to "fighting the institution", frankly, that's not the impression they leave me.
They have their moments of rogue colleagues or corrupt departments, but for the most part, what I see is a small team backed up by a larger institution fighting Evil (criminals, terrorists, etc).
I'm talking about the mass market, mind you, not The Wire but NCIS, CSI, Law & Order, Hawai Five-o, Criminal Minds and all that crap.
And then there's this recent influx of zombie movies - the libertarian paradise, where no one tells you what to do, there is perfect free trade facilitated by the proliferation of firearms within general population, and where everything that moves in a group larger than 20 is a mindless mass trying to kill you.
Which movies? I had to admit I haven't watched recent zombie flicks, but The Walking Dead has been the most successful show, and it's pretty much the opposite of that description. It's constantly reinforcing how much the breakdown of The System sucks and gets people to kill each other.
My father is a big fan. I saw some "enhance" sequence once and decided no thanks. I was at his house and this episode came on. cringe It seems like there should be a reasonable middle ground between NCIS and reality. Sneakers was pretty good. :)
As a former ESL teacher, I think TV can be helpful but it's better to be very selective about which shows you watch. Pick shows that have a lot of dialogue in English.
Older TV shows tend to be more dialogue-centric. If you have the TV Land channel, I'd suggest: MASH, All in the Family, I Love Lucy, The Honeymooners, The Dick Van Dyke Show, &c.
Contemporary shows that would be good for this purpose might be: Modern Family, NCIS, Mad Men, Big Bang Theory, Parks and Recreation, Arrested Development, Parenthood (advanced: lots of simultaneous talking).
CBS is really pumping up the PR for the NSA.
Recent episodes of NCIS have a NSA agent on loan to the NCIS staff. She's cute, smart, and quirky and does a great job protecting us all from the scary people.
Also, Hawaii 5.0, had a hack attack on an episode lately and they were all "Thank god we have the NSA to protect us". Ok, I forget the details on that one, but I remember rolling my eyes.
Now with 60 minutes jumping on board, it's plain to see there's a coordinated effort to spin the NSA in a good light. Not just a whitewash, the message is "The NSA spying on Americans is a good thing".
It's a little hard to take someone seriously when they come up with a grand theory on some particular topic and then use a TV show as their supporting example. I had the same problem back in the Bush years when people would support torture by saying it worked on '24'.
I understand that nobody is REALLY saying that something is valid just because it was in a TV show. But the fact that they couldn't think of a real life example of their position suggests to me that maybe they aren't informed enough to be having such strong opinions in the first place. For the Hacker News audience, it would be like opening an article on computer security with an example of "hacking" from the show NCIS (anyone who's ever watched it knows what I'm talking about).
> they've been conditioned by film and television to believe that the government has those powers and uses them routinely.
My unscientific observation (I don't watch these but my SO used to) is that major (USA) network "crime drama" TV shows (fictional) such as NCIS* depict, in every episode, a fully omniscient surveillance state in action [edit: and as a perfectly normal state of affairs]. My suspicion is that the underlying purpose of same is to condition the viewing citizenry of the fact that such exists and is a normal state of affairs, so there will be no problem with the preconditioned citizenry when such becomes real (if it hasn't already).
One other comment.
If anyone watches the tv show NCIS, you'll notice that while others use smartphones, Gibbs uses what looks to be a ruggedized no-name flip-phone. Maybe a Motorola government model.
While the character is portrayed as a luddite, it's more likely the character persona sticks with the things which he knows works.
Some of these seem like cheats -- either a science demonstration with a ton of PR spin or worse. The hoverboard, for example, is a piece of art that will only "hover" over its pedestal and won't support any weight. I saw a similar DIY project in either Electronics Illustrated or Popular Electronics 40-some years ago where a tin globe would levitate in a magnetic field. (If the globe dipped, it obscured a light beam aimed at a cadmium sulfide photocell which increased power to the electromagnet.)
As for the "teleportation", demonstrations of quantum effects have been around for quite a while. I remember having my mind blown back in the 1960s when I read up on how the tunnel diode <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunnel_diode> was a practical demonstration of quantum tunnelling.
The jetpack entry made me smile. Last year there was an episode of NCIS whose plot revolved around jetpack technology. McGee, the computer geek member of the team, was so taken with the technology that he had created his own video presentation of jetpack history and would inflict it upon his team mates in a manner similar to pictures taken on his vacation.
Similarities between this essay and an episode of CSI - both rely on cardboard cutout characters, simple binary motivations, cleat cut good/bad guys and almost completely no basis in reality. The more you understand how the things they portray actually work, the more your enjoyment diminishes (I'm more of an NCIS fan :)
Differences between this essay and an episode of CSI - CSI knows full well its entire purpose in life is to be mildly entertaining. It never pretends to be a reflection of what real life CSI is like. It's entertainment, nothing more, and it knows it. Unlike the author of this essay, who for some reason thinks he has a deep understanding of "Hacker culture" and the entire saga, and needs about 3000 patronising words to explain his great insights to us.
oh, and if I ever see/hear the word 'cypherpunk' again I think I shall probably vomit.
Your last is one reason for the microprint on the bills. You can't upsample "into" microprint, except on CSI/NCIS type TV shows...
Games, especially MMO's and Social Gaming exploit their addictiveness to keep people paying them.
Certain TV shows exploit similar addictiveness. CSI, CSI: Miami, CSI: New York, NCIS, NCIS: Los Angeles, Law & Order, Law & Order: SVU, Law & Order: Criminal Intent, Law & Order: Trial by Jury . . . all still supplying ~24 new episodes a year during prime time slots. To put it roughly, 9 days worth of programming that is essentially identical. Then there's the more unique (to some degree) procedurals (IE NUMB3RS, Castle, etc. Incidentally, the only procedurals I like, I can't stand the CSI crap as my mind is violently raped by unscience almost every other episode I watch) that appear.
I personally did stop watching TV for a prolonged period, but for no elitist reason as I love TV . . . perhaps too much. However, I'm satisfied watching only the show, so I'm more a DVD person.
Movies, again, strike at this addictiveness with the 'unnecessary sequels' market. It's one thing when a movie plans multiple parts, a la the Borne trilogy. However, then there are the Bond series that maybe only hit a good movie every 3rd or 4th produced, but still take in millions. Then there are the totally unnecessary sequels that appear because the studios dangled hundreds of millions of dollars off an ACME sized mousetrap to bag a producer.
Books similarly can get into this trouble of unnecessary sequels. I believe Agatha Christie inadvertently suffered this problem as her publishers forbid her from killing off Poirot, it took her 40 years for the novel that killed him off to be published.
Ironically, the most addictive TV shows and books appear to be detective dramas. This is easily illustrated by the fact that Mystery/Crime novels is the biggest market in literature, and by the fact there are over 9 procedurals routinely running during prime time slots, year after year for almost a decade.
Ouch. $2 an episode would be harsh for me.
Our cable bill is like, $80 and that includes internet. So maybe $40 of that is for TV.
And I watch a bunch of different shows. CSI x 3, Law and Order, Bones, House, NCIS, Fringe, The Mentalist, Psych, Criminal Minds, Numbers, Law and Order, Lie to Me.
At $2 a show, per week, that'd set me back.. about $110 a month!
Far more than I pay for cable right now.