Hacker Cinema
The Americans
2013 · TV series · 6 seasons
Created by Joe Weisberg
Set during the Cold War period in the 1980s, The Americans is the story of Elizabeth and Philip Jennings, two Soviet KGB officers posing as an American married couple in the suburbs of Washington D.C. and their neighbor, Stan Beeman, an FBI Counterintelligence agent.
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71 comments on Hacker News
The Americans, a great television series about Russian spies, really leaned into the wigs:
'The Americans' Wig of the Week: Nina's Emotional Disguises
https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/2014/04/the-americans-wig-of-the-week-ninas-emotional-disguises/360460/
>Each week we will be crowning a "wig of the week" from The Americans, FX's wonderful show about Russian spies who happen to wear a variety of insane wigs when doing their spy duties.
>Wig of the Week: As you might have already been able to tell, we've diverged from the theme a little this week to focus on double agent Nina Sergeevna.
>Why This Wig: There were some good wigs in this episode. Elizabeth pulled out her sophisticated blonde number to meet with Andrew Larrick, the dangerous Navy captain the Soviets are using. Philip, to bug the ARPANET, pulls out a Rust Cohle sort of look, which only makes him more horrifying when he murders an innocent who happened to get in his way.
https://www.reddit.com/r/TheAmericans/comments/el1o11/wigs/
https://www.reddit.com/r/TheAmericans/comments/1hn88mx/favourite_wig/
Competitive markets provide natural death of weak content, without premature euthanasia of strong content. With on-demand streaming, viewers can stop watching if/when a show deteriorates in quality. Some shows have maintained relatively high quality over multiple seasons.
The Americans (6 seasons, 75 episodes) Battlestar Galactica (4 seasons, 88 episodes) Borgen (3 seasons, 30 episodes) Burn Notice (7 seasons, 111 episodes) The Shield (7 seasons, 88 episodes) Slow Horses (5 seasons, 30 episodes) WestWorld (4 seasons, 36 episodes) The Wire (5 seasons, 60 episodes)
Netflix is still "competing" with discs at this point, although I would accept that discs aren't exactly winning. Most of the content I watch comes from blu-rays, and with a few exceptions (The Americans, grr), most of the things I want to watch have been released on disc. In fact, there is a small community of film enthusiasts who continue to purchase media outright, e.g., https://www.blu-ray.com.
I started using Netflix in 2001 as a DVD subscriber. It was wonderful for nearly 20 years. I ended up canceling before the service officially ended because it was clear that the writing was on the wall and the service was going downhill fast. You used to be able to get nearly any movie or TV series, domestic or foreign. It's a lot more work to find good stuff now, even with streaming in the mix.
I'm just keying off this thing you wrote:
For example, the suicide was very poorly handled. It was used as vehicle for discussing open source vs proprietary code. But you could have easily done that without the death [...]
It's totally fine if we're not making any productive progress in this part of the thread. It's art, it's all subjective, we can just disagree. I think the interpersonal dramas in HACF are as earned as they are in any series; certainly, I'd put every season of HACF several notches above Six Feet Under Season 4 and its Scooby-Doo finale.
At the same time, I don't think there's any kind of important broader theme or message or ideas in HACF; the A-tier of prestige dramas have that --- The Wire, Mad Men, Better Call Saul. Mad Men and The Americans are I think the best comparands; both period shows with high-concept settings, both bigger idea/theme shows than HACF.
A lot of kibbutzim are run collectively. As a joke in the TV show The Americans went, from an Israeli to a Soviet spy: "if you like socialism so much, defect to Israel, we do it better".
That kind of thing isn't in the American DNA. You'd have people demand a lawn and a fence after a month.
I was actually surprised at how boring and mundane their lives were and how ineffectual the program sounded. The only slightly interesting part was the possible spy at the nuke lab, but of course these agents’ part was to only drop something off at a dead drop, if even that (they may have only scouted a spot).
The Americans tv show was much more exciting and even that got a bit boring.
My wife and I (both 55) rewatch this probably once a year. It's a really solid film that holds up SUPER well -- so many great elements came together here. Obviously, the principal cast is outstanding; it's not just Baldwin and Connery.
Sam Neill we always love (Connery's XO; "I would like to have seen Montana"), and Scott Glenn (Mancuso, captain of the Dallas) rarely disappoints. We also get a late appearance by Richard Jordan (would would die only a few years later) and an early one by Courtney Vance as the Dallas' sonar tech. Stellan Skarsgard is Tupolev, the Soviet sub captain who pursues Connery. Jeffrey Jones, mostly of note to our generation as the principal in Ferris Bueller, has a small role as the former Navy intelligence man Skip Tyler. And there's a blink-and-you-miss-it role for Gates "Beverly Crusher" McFadden as Ryan's wife in the early moments of the film.
It was only on a relatively recent viewing that we noticed one of the Red October's minor officers was played by an actor we'd recently seen on TV. On THE AMERICANS one of the main Soviet characters is a man named Burov who eventually rotates back to the USSR to work in the same government ministry as his father. His father is played by Boris Krutonog, who 30 years before played Slavin -- his big moment is denouncing the political officer as a "pig" at the tense dinner scene early on.
I never know how film-nerdy people are, so I'll also note that Red October was directed by John McTiernan, who also directed the original Predator, Die Hard, The Last Action Hero, Die Hard with a Vengence, and the 1999 Thomas Crown remake. Unfortunately he did some deeply shady shit around one of his films and ended up in some significant legal trouble that basically blew up his career, but the films he made in the 20th century basically all hold up pretty dang well. The sense of momentum you get in October is present in Die Hard and in Crown as well.
I went into Lost thinking it was sci-fi, but in the end, it was all fantasy. So for me, Lost never really answered its core mysteries and that was before it threw in the whole purgatory flash-sideways stuff. I did actually start to lose interest because it felt like the show was stringing us along, but hung in there for answers. Instead I felt like all I got were narrative dead ends and then a conclusion where most of them die. It was immensely unsatisfying.
(I'm reflecting back now on 15 year old memories. I'm actually surprised to learn it aired from 2004-2010. Gosh, I remember this as being a show from the 90s.)
It's also not like there were a lot of options for other shows to watch at the time. I'd never stay with a show like Lost today. I punted on Yellowjackets as soon as it started bringing fantasy into the story.
You have to know that how a series wraps up is important to its viewers. A great or terrible finale can make or break how a show is later perceived. The Lost finale was the most disappointing of any show I've seen.
Great finales I recall are The Americans and Justified.
A terrible last book chapter or poor movie ending can ruin all that has come before for me. When deciding whether to read a book, I'll read the last chapter first. Spoilers don't ruin good stories for me. But bad conclusions do. And Lost's conclusion was just terrible. I'd rather it have been canceled.
It's not like I need literal answers for everything. I love Mulholland Drive. But I felt like Lost spent six seasons just jerking me around.
$0.02.
FWIW I absolutely love The Shield, one of my favorite shows. The Americans is better. But it was also hard to get into, and I stopped a few episodes in the first time. It gets much better the more the story goes on.
As a fellow The Shield-lover, I highly recommend you try to finish The Americans.
For someone clearly interested in Cold War era espionage movies ("my voice is my password"), you should definitely go back and finish The Americans...
> season 7
Series 7
The Americans divide their TV into seasons. We don't do that in Blighty.
ARPANET TIPs had an obscure but documented low level feature that you could send commands on behalf of other users connected to the same TIP, configuring their terminal settings, disconnecting and reconnecting their sessions to other hosts and ports! You could also execute annoying commands like "@S B" (Send Break) that inserted an ^G into their input stream on ITS, or "@I 33" (Intercept 33 octal) that changed their TIP command intercept character from @ to ESC.
Ostensibly it was so you could configure and control a Teletype or line printer connected directly to a TIP without a modem, but you could also set up TIP-to-TIP links for chatting with other users on different TIPs by bouncing packets directly off a socket without actually logging in to any host!
MIT AI Lab Tourist Policy (why jslabovitz and I were able to get "tourist" accounts at the MIT AI Lab just by asking -- or actually just trying to log in as an unknown user, and automatically being offered our own account!):
https://donhopkins.medium.com/mit-ai-lab-tourist-policy-f73b77075631
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13518273
jslabovitz on Jan 30, 2017 | parent | context | favorite | on: PDP-10/its: Incompatible Timesharing System
Around 1982, I had an account on MIT-MC, an ITS computer. I was not an MIT student -- rather, a curious teenage hacker from DC. I'd found a text file with 'interesting modem numbers,' and one of those was to a DoD TAC (basically, a dial-in). I recall the text file had a note saying how to connect (via NCP, not TCP/IP) to MIT-MC.
I connected, and remember playing around (as we did) at the login prompt. I probably tried to login as 'guest' or something, and the result was basically, 'There's no user by that name. Do you want an account?' Of course, I said yes -- and shortly received my own account.
Stallman may have been sponsoring logins for folks like myself; he definitely was a little later when I got an account on MIT-AI (or was it MIT-OZ?), which was by that point a TOPS-20 machine.
ITS was a very bizarre system, really with its own social culture. Even in 1982, it felt strangely archaic. The debugger-as-shell was definitely an interesting concept.
Once I accidentally deleted a file. I felt awful, and emailed one of the admins, assuming they'd kick me off. He was like, 'Ah, no worries. We'll just restore it from tape.'
DonHopkins on Jan 30, 2017 | next [–]
NBS TIP: 301-948-3850
I dialed it enough times that I still remember it. Much thanks to Bruce of "Bruce's NorthStar" BBS in Virginia for that phone number. [1]
MIT-MC: @L 236
MIT-AI: @L 134
MIT-DM: @L 70
MIT-ML: @L 198
Anyone remember how to do a TIP-to-TIP link, as documented on page 5-4 of the "Users Guide to the Terminal IMP" [2], by connecting an input and output socket of one TIP to an input and output socket of another TIP, through an unsuspecting host, so you could chat back and forth directly between two TIP dial-ups, without actually logging into the host?
It went something like @HOST #, @SEND TO SOCKET #, @RECEIVE FROM SOCKET #, @PROTOCOL BOTH, making sure the sockets were different parity so as not to violate the Anita Bryant clause with homosocketuality. [3]
You could also add the octal device port number of any other TIP user on your same TIP after the @ and before the command, to execute those commands on their session. (See page 5-7, "Setting Another Terminal's Parameters".) BBN wrote such great documentation and would mail copies of it for free to anyone who asked (that's how I got mine), you couldn't even call it security by obscurity!
The "ARPANET" episode of "The Americans" really missed the boat about how easy it was to break into the ARPANET. I didn't even have to kill anyone! [3] [4] Makes me wonder about the part about squeezing your anus... [5]
What was your uname?
-A2DEH
[1] https://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=242967&cid=19681997
[2] https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_bbntipADA0eTerminalIMPAug75_2157363
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12422813
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arpanet_(The_Americans)
[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVth6T3gMa0
[6] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s3OMSMq9zPA
Highly recommend watching The Americans, an incredible show about Soviet spies pretending to be a regular American family. Based somewhat on real people, and very well-researched.
Shout out to FX’s The Americans, a fictional TV show about sleeper Soviet agents in the 1980s. It’s a fantastic show, easily one of my top 3 of all time.
I honestly thought “illegals” were an urban myth. It’s wild that suck a thing can exist with modern technology and does exist.
Around 10 years ago there were some Russian "illegals" captured in Germany. It was really a lot like in the TV show "The Americans".
They seemed to have communicated a lot with radio and coded messages. They also used some Windows software to decode some of those messages. And exactly there they made a mistake and some messages could be restored.
It seems like they only got very limited recurring training after their initial training in the 90s. So they might have had very limited IT opsec knowledge.
The analog radio technology is also far from perfect. In their case the neighbours became suspicious, because they never opened the door at specific times, probably when their transmissions were scheduled. They also sent some radio transmissions from a nearby hill, that might have played a part in their capture.
I'm convinced that some encrypted messages over a commonly used messenger or email provider would be way more secure. They would just disappear within billions of other encrypted messages.
The Americans was awesome, especially that last "showdown" climax. Best TV ever, along with parts of Breaking Bad.
I watched a couple episodes of The Diplomat and couldn't get into it. I'll give it another try.
Not to discredit South East Asia but Germany is where the Cold War took place. Especially the second part of it. RAF, for example, was pretty much sponsored by East Germany.
So many good series made involving the subject though. Both drama and documentary. I mean, you do want drama and not documentary? Cause the story The Americans is inspired by is documented.
For drama, check Deutschland '83 and the two successors. Has a great cast.
And of course there is Clifford Stoll's book about how he caught Hagbard Celine (see the movie '23' with a young August Diehl who later broke through in Hollywood).
German cinema, both West-German and modern, has gems regardless (I am not German btw, subs are easy to come by).
Try this: look up the most highly rated episodes on IMDB and watch only those. Missing the crummy episodes usually does not interfere with understanding the story arc. Often, I set a minimum IMDB score that I will watch, like 8.5 or 9.0 to capture only the best. This works well with series that:
- take a year or two to find their footing or
- have a large cast (some mediocre) that get their own story lines of no consequence occasionally or
- introduce cast members that don't make it or
- implode towards the final season.
I have done this for many series that are somewhat uneven:
- The Americans
- How I Met Your Mother
- Fringe
- Orphan Black
- Halt and Catch Fire
- House of Cards (watching the ratings allows you to miss all of season 6)
- Arrested Development
- Bojack Horseman
- Veep
- 30 Rock
- Jane the Virgin
- Black Mirror
- The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel
- Suits
- Six Feet Under
- La Femme Nikita
- The Blacklist
- Peaky Blinders
- The Romanoffs
- Ozark
- Westworld (sometimes dropping episodes does not matter)
- Succession
- Borgen
And all of these series have lots of strong episodes.
Series I would not do this with:
- The Bear
- Breaking Bad
- Money Heist
- The Serpent
- Fleabag
- Chernobyl
- The White Lotus
Agreed. I learned this with Black Sails (first few episodes were huh?) and it evolved into something awesome. The Americans as well. I think that’s usually the case with shows that are trying something new and haven’t quite got the formula down. First season of Star Trek was a freak show of theater that somehow, worked. Thrived. And blossomed. Let’s just pray Bob Igor doesn’t get his hands on the franchise.
I now follow this advice with all shows. I’ll give it a full season to see if they develop something I’m interested in following.
Like a real life episode of The Americans
I loved the show, but in retrospect, the premise of 2 Soviet spies being the most prolific serial killers in the history of the DC area without being caught is a bit weak.
Masha Gessen did some work on making the spoken Russian be more authentic https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/translating-the-americans-and-seeing-a-mirror-of-my-own-american-experience ( She must have given up on Keri Russell )
Peter Jacobson (FBI Agent Wolf) appears in comedy Russian TV show inspired by the Americans "Adaptation" https://www.poconorecord.com/story/entertainment/2018/05/26/russia-has-its-own-tv/12133719007/ . I've seen episode 1 available on the internet, full series is hard to find.
This is my semi annual plug for all of you to watch the fantastic and somehow forgotten FX network TV show, The Americans, A spy drama set in Washington DC in the 1980s about KGB “illegals” posing as travel agents.
It’s way better than any basic cable TV show had any right to be. Plus, all seasons are streaming on Hulu, so you don’t have to worry about whether the story will be completed.
https://www.hulu.com/series/the-americans-6deba130-65fb-4816-acb1-aea5eb940f0f?dl=false
As depicted in the tv show The Americans. Best show of all time.
Interesting! This is the same as the “EST” sessions depicted in the TV series The Americans, for those familiar with it. Didn’t realize it went back so far.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30379919
DonHopkins on Feb 17, 2022 | parent | context | favorite | on: Who is squatting IPv4 addresses?
I know a naughty person who decades ago hijacked a /8 IPV4 network block when the company that owned it went out of business, by registering their expired domain name and sending in an email from that domain, transferring ownership of the block to himself.
It was "hot" so he couldn't just squat on it or sell it in the open, but he laundered it by trading it to some shady company in exchange for free network services for life.
If I were him, I would have printed out all the addresses on little slips of paper and taken an "IPV4 Address Bath" like Huell's scene in Breaking Bad:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7HrmD_vIMIk
>(sexy lip bite) ... "I gotta do it, man!" ... "Mexico, all's I'm sayin'!"
icedchai on Feb 17, 2022 [–]
Was it really an /8? I could believe a smaller block...
DonHopkins on Feb 17, 2022 | parent | context | favorite | on: Who is squatting IPv4 addresses?
Yep, it was a long time ago, and he was one of those "old net boys" who worked on the early ARPANET, but I won't say anything else that might identify him.
I have another naughty friend (not the same person) who worked at SRI-NIC implementing and maintaining the ARPANET TACACS database, and as a personal favor, he created our mutual friend Devon his own ARPANET TAC card.
So Devon's free vanity TACACS account was named "DEVON", while most other accounts like mine were something ugly like "DH32", using initials and numbers. One day his boss summoned him to his office and showed him a print-out of the TACACS accounts, with "DEVON" right at the top, and asked him who the hell that was. He sheepishly prevaricated that "DEVON" was actually a control code to turn the printer DEVice ON, which accidentally got printed at the beginning of the list because of a bug in his program missing an escape code, and he would fix it right away. And that's how Devon lost his TAC card. We still tease him about his name as a printer control code, and call him "DEVOFF" when he talks too much. I'm pretty sure his boss knew what was up, but just let it slide.
Network security was a lot different in those days. TAC cards only happened later when they finally put passwords on the dialup TACs/TIPs -- you originally could dial up and connect to any host on the ARPANET without a password, then you could ask nicely for a free tourist account at places like the MIT-AI Lab. It didn't even require any social engineering, just being polite and curious, reading documentation, and following instructions.
I asked BBN nicely about the TIP manual, and they helpfully mailed me a free hardcopy of the "Users Guide for the Terminal IMP", which documented how to take control of other people's sessions and even divert their output by prefixing @ commands by their terminal number! See "Section 5: Unusual uses of the TIP" page 5-7, "Setting Another Terminal's Parameters" and "The DIVERT OUTPUT Command":
https://usermanual.wiki/Document/ADA014398UsersGuidetotheTerminalIMPAug75.1728500100/view
The guy who originally wrote that TIP manual in 1971 was none other than Will Crowther, who also developed Colossal Cave Adventure with Don Woods! You're in a twisty little maze of IMPs, all different.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Crowther_(programmer)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossal_Cave_Adventure
ARPANET Psiber SPACE (circa 1986): This is the network of IMPs (Interface Message Processors) that comprised the ARPANET in 1986. The ARPANET is history now, but thanks to the magic of Pseudo-Scientific Visualization and the ScriptX language and class library from Kaleida Labs, you can now experience what it was like to be free ranging packet hopping around the ARPANET in 1986!
https://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/arpanet/index-large.html
MIT AI Lab Tourist Policy
https://medium.com/@donhopkins/mit-ai-lab-tourist-policy-f73b77075631
“The MIT machines were a nerd magnet for kids who had access to the ARPANET,”
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15080221
Keith F. Lynch wrote up a fascinatingly detailed and accurate history of the ARPANET from his perspective:
http://keithlynch.net/history.net.html
Keith mentions that ARPANET TACACS passwords were installed in 1986, and even mentions how Jerry Pournelle got himself kicked off the ARPANET for being obnoxious in 1985, which I can conform with the email messages he mentioned. The first message is about TACACS, and explains how MILNET TACACS was implemented in 1984, before ARPANET TACACS (in 1986). It was addressed to the same DEVON, and HN's own GUMBY chimed in with some salty remarks:
https://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/text/pourne-smut.html
jacquesm on Feb 17, 2022 | root | parent [–]
Your text is garbled:
"then you could even anity TACACS account "
DonHopkins on Feb 18, 2022 | root | parent [–]
Thanks, fixed! The "Arpanet" episode of The Americans featured a classic scene with an academic computer science professor dude bullshitting about the ARPANET -- I'm sure we both know somebody exactly like that from that period, who made eloquent hand-waving metaphors about Virtual Spaces and Post Offices and God and Disembodied Brains, trying to explain to skeptical people how vast and important the ARPANET was (with its 8 enormous bits of address space). But he kinda had a point, calling the PDP-10 "The Beast".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVth6T3gMa0
But the thing The Americans "Arpanet" episode got wrong is that you didn't actually have to slap on a Frank Zappa Soul Patch and a Beatnik Wig, dress up like a janitor, and brutally murder an unlucky grad student to get on the ARPANET, you just had to ask the right people nicely! (But it's still one of the best episodes, with the scene about passing a lie detector test by clenching your anus.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arpanet_(The_Americans)
I am fascinated by the fact that this leak happened, because it's so hard to imagine why.
Most other wars there are understandable reasons on both sides, and it's easy to imagine people in the military or with the right security clearance who are motivated to leak something because they genuinely believe the US or the West is the bad guy.
But who has access to this stuff who wants to help Russia and harm Ukraine? When this is not a war where people are siding with the Russians. I just... it's so hard to see where that Venn diagram overlaps.
Do the Russians have spies in the US government that can access this stuff? How have our security processes not caught that?
Or did Russian spies pay someone with clearance to get these? Why did that person go along with it? Did they know they were Russian spies or did they think they were helping good guys, like Ukrainian spies? (Something like that was depicted in the TV show The Americans.)
Most leaks it's pretty easy to understand how somebody with access to information would have had motivations. This one, it seems very non-obvious.
I very briefly dated someone whose brother was a police officer when I lived in DC, and prior to grad school I was encouraged to consider law enforcement by the very field office I’m complaining about a little over ten years prior to this thread.
I find your comment condescending considering it’s in reply to an admittedly emotional rant stemming from the fact my local police failed so thoroughly in their mission it made an FBI agent’s eyes go wide and say they’d open a civil rights investigation.
(Though maybe they were more focused on the fact I also very bluntly said “I’m not a Russian spy” and listed off the people making want to re-enact the scenes from the hit HBO television series “The Americans”.)
Being a police officer is less risky than say, a construction work flagger, but people feel coerced into giving them unearned respect since a construction work flagger can’t misunderstand on purpose and shoot you dead if you don’t kiss their butt like they’re an aggrieved military officer in 1930s Germany they will lie through their teeth and not follow through on their claim that they will do their damn job.
Please pick up a copy of “Rise and Fall in the Third Reich” and get back to me before replying again because I think you have no grasp of history.
Malick isn't the best example here. Tree of Life was made for around $30 mil and his most recent, A Hidden Life was made for in the vicinity of $8 mil. In the context of our current blockbuster climate where the latest Bond movie costs upwards of $300 mil to make, I wouldn't call Malick's films "big expensive movies," and I certainly wouldn't compare it to Coppola's $120 mil+ price tag. Hollywood has shown that it will only give that kind of money to films that fit a strict, suffocatingly rigorous formula (i.e. existing IP, car chases, explosions, world-saving heroes, etc). It most certainly will not fund a project to the tune of seven figures based on an original idea that has been described as “a love story that is also a philosophical investigation of the nature of man.” If you don't have a remake or reboot of an existing IP, you're not getting funded, period.
Also Malick is a consistent awards contender in years where he releases a movie. Tree of Life is one of the most critically acclaimed films this century and studios like to invest in critical prestige when they can, given a reasonable budget. His movies also generally make their money back. This is also why networks will let TV shows like Crazy Ex Girlfriend and The Americans go on towards a natural conclusion, instead of canceling immediately, even if viewership is low. Coppola simply does not have that reputation anymore. In fact, I think he lost it all the way back in the early 80s. After Apocalypse Now, he failed to make a movie that captured unanimous critical favor like his string of hits in the 70s. Four of his last five movies have been largely panned. His 1996 flop, "Jack," is one of the worst movies I've ever seen and a lot of other critics agreed. A movie like that typically ends careers. He does not have the cachet to warrant an investment of $120 mill on an idea that appears at first glance to have dubious mainstream popular appeal. With that said, I would certainly see it.
Thanks, fixed!
The "Arpanet" episode of The Americans featured a classic scene with an academic computer science professor dude bullshitting about the ARPANET -- I'm sure we both know somebody exactly like that from that period, who made eloquent hand-waving metaphors about Virtual Spaces and Post Offices and God and Disembodied Brains, trying to explain to skeptical people how vast and important the ARPANET was (with its 8 enormous bits of address space). But he kinda had a point, calling the PDP-10 "The Beast".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVth6T3gMa0
But the thing The Americans "Arpanet" episode got wrong is that you didn't actually have to slap on a Frank Zappa Soul Patch and a Beatnik Wig, dress up like a janitor, and brutally murder an unlucky grad student to get on the ARPANET, you just had to ask the right people nicely! (But it's still one of the best episodes, with the scene about passing a lie detector test by clenching your anus.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arpanet_(The_Americans)
On the ARPANET (the original one running the NCP protocol), not only didn't you need a special protocol to have an online chat with somebody at the other end of the country, you didn't even need a host or a talk daemon running on a server!
From an earlier post:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13519489
NBS TIP: 301-948-3850
I dialed it enough times that I still remember it. Much thanks to Bruce of "Bruce's NorthStar" BBS in Virginia for that phone number. [1]
MIT-MC: @L 236
MIT-AI: @L 134
MIT-DM: @L 70
MIT-ML: @L 198
Anyone remember how to do a TIP-to-TIP link, as documented on page 5-4 of the "Users Guide to the Terminal IMP" [2], by connecting an input and output socket of one TIP to an input and output socket of another TIP, through an unsuspecting host, so you could chat back and forth directly between two TIP dial-ups, without actually logging into the host?
It went something like @HOST #, @SEND TO SOCKET #, @RECEIVE FROM SOCKET #, @PROTOCOL BOTH, making sure the sockets were different parity so as not to violate the Anita Bryant clause with homosocketuality. [3]
You could also add the octal device port number of any other TIP user on your same TIP after the @ and before the command, to execute those commands on their session. (See page 5-7, "Setting Another Terminal's Parameters".) BBN wrote such great documentation and would mail copies of it for free to anyone who asked (that's how I got mine), you couldn't even call it security by obscurity!
The "ARPANET" episode of "The Americans" really missed the boat about how easy it was to break into the ARPANET. I didn't even have to kill anyone! [3] [4] Makes me wonder about the part about squeezing your anus... [5]
What was your uname?
-A2DEH
[1] https://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=242967&cid=19681997
[2] https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_bbntipADA0eTerminalIMPAug75_2157363
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12422813
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arpanet_(The_Americans)
[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVth6T3gMa0
[6] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s3OMSMq9zPA
"The Americans" is not only a great classic TV series but has lots of examples of cold-war era tech and planning complex missions.
Apparently they have seat pads for lie detectors to detect anal clenching, a technique for fooling lie detectors.
https://lafayettepolygraph.com/products/seat-activity-sensor-lx4000
>Activity Sensor Seat Pad for LX4000, Model 76879S. Price: $ 475.00*
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20312004
>Does the technique of clenching your butt hole actually work to beat a polygraph? (As described in my favorite "The Americans" season 2 episode 7, "Arpanet".) Does it also help to visualize someone you love at the same time? ;)
If it actually works, the photo of Charles Wayne Humble in the article looks like he could lie through his teeth while passing a polygraph exam with flying colors!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arpanet_(The_Americans)
After consulting with Arkady and Oleg, and with the promise of coaching from Oleg, Nina tells Stan that she will take the FBI's polygraph test. Oleg suggests a few techniques including that she visualize him in the room as well as clenching her anus.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s3OMSMq9zPA
The Americans Season 2 Episode 7 "Arpanet" Review: "I like when I learn something from an episode, and now I know ..." "If you're having to do a polygraph, squeeze your anus."
https://tv.avclub.com/the-americans-arpanet-1798180091
(One of the ways to beat a polygraph turns out to be clenching one’s anus. This show is full of helpful hints.)
>https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/tv/a28316/spy-on-the-americans/
>ESQ: The show featured Nina learning to beat and eventually beating a polygraph. How easy is it to do that?
>PE: We have a number of real-world instances. The Aldrich Ames case. He went through the polygraph twice, after he went to work for the Soviets. Administering a polygraph is an art, not a science. That's why it's not admitted in court. People have claimed to have had training to beat the polygraph. Everything from tightening your sphincter to breathing a certain way, and so forth.
>ESQ: Speaking of sphincters, the trick she's told is "squeeze your anus." Is that a thing?
>PE: I can't confirm. [Laughs] I took several polygraphs. Taking them is a standard thing in the intelligence life.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20311928
>Or if you deliberately clench your anal sphincter, that's enough to change results. And yes, that actually works; that's why some lie detectors now feature ass-clenching detention technology.
I imagined a conspiracy theory (please build a lot of skepticism around this), that Trump asked for "covert ways" to damage china.
The CIA knew about this lab, they worked to cause the leak, maybe it was not done properly, the CIA people were not informed on the science, and they did not really know it would infect the entire world. There is a similar plot in the TV show "The Americans".
I don't believe this theory, but I'm guessing China could easily use this kind of narrative in disinformation campaigns.
My only worry is diplomatic tensions with china. I guess everybody is a little anxious now and wants peace.
Sounds like the TV show "The Americans", although that focuses on KGB sleeper agents in America during the Cold War.
> It's curious though that most of the unrealistic scenarios are the ones who portray the Americans are great and never the other way around. Ideology masquerading as entertainment.
Sorry I'm not sure what you're trying to say.
Are you saying that Americans should lose more in film directed at Americans? It's not that it doesn't happen. It's just that it's hard to do. An example that immediately came to mind is the ironically named (for this conversation) show, "The Americans", where the Russians definitely win more than they lose. From Wikipedia:
"The series's final season earned Rhys the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series, while Weisberg and co-lead writer Joel Fields won Outstanding Writing for a Drama Series; it was also awarded the Golden Globe Award for Best Television Series – Drama. Additionally, Margo Martindale won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Guest Actress in a Drama Series twice for her performance in the third and fourth seasons. It also became one of the rare drama shows to receive two Peabody Awards during its run."
It's easily my favorite show.
Looping back to Queens Gambit, I think the basic idea is that it's juuuust unrealistic enough without being too unreasonable to take you out of it. It's not unrealistic that Americans can be the best at chess. Hell, an American faced Magnus last world championship for the title and is still world #2. It's also not unrealistic that a Woman could get there as well. Hou Yifan is 84th right now.
But the combination is just unrealistic enough without taking you out of it, which makes it very entertaining.
A documentary about an orphan Russian or Chinese guy who ascends to the top? Might be more realistic, but not a good enough story for a Netflix #1 level of entertainment to a US audience.
Hard disagree.
First of all, most streaming shows are 10 episodes per season, 12 at most.
But as for the number of seasons, what's amazing about television is how deep and intimate your knowledge of the characters becomes. The kind of emotional depth and resonance you get with characters in the 4th and 5th season of a show is simply unparalleled -- we know their life histories, and the smallest of scenes can shake us with the amount of meaning they convey.
If you think of Mad Men or The Sopranos or The Americans or Breaking Bad -- my god, each season is better than the last because it's like they approach infinite richness. The last seasons get to levels none of the first seasons were able to.
Also, it's a huge rarity for shows to make it to 7–9 seasons. The ones that do are because they're hugely popular and people want to watch them. If Game of Thrones had still had books to work off of, I think pretty much everybody would have loved 3 or 4 more seasons.
Me too! (You might also appreciate the FX show "The Americans" that's set in that era and area. One of the kids on that show had the exact same Star Wars blanket as I did!)
https://www.ebay.com/itm/Vintage-STAR-WARS-Blanket-Throw-1977-Approx-4-5X6-5FT-EXTREMELY-RARE-/164050327261
The "Life in the Universe" exhibit was on the first floor of the West wing, from July 1, 1976 through March 1, 1979:
https://www.si.edu/exhibitions/life-universe-event-exhib-3464
It also featured the original "Powers of Ten" movie:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0
And they had a cool interactive "Pick-a-Star" display that let you press buttons to select hypothetical planetary systems and extraterrestrial life forms:
https://airandspace.si.edu/collection-objects/museums-smithsonian-institution-si-exhibits-nasm-life-universe-gallery-107-13
Did you ever see the "Person to Person" Telephone Exhibit in the History and Technology museum? My mom was a docent at the Electricity Discovery Corner, right next to that. So we'd go to the museums every Saturday!
https://siarchives.si.edu/collections/siris_sic_955
More photos of the "Life in the Universe" exhibit (it was cool and dark and really great place to hang out if you were stoned):
https://airandspace.si.edu/collection-objects/museums-smithsonian-institution-si-exhibits-nasm-life-universe-gallery-107-1976
https://airandspace.si.edu/collection-objects/museums-smithsonian-institution-si-exhibits-nasm-life-universe-gallery-107-1976-0
https://airandspace.si.edu/collection-objects/museums-smithsonian-institution-si-exhibits-nasm-life-universe-gallery-107-1976-1
https://airandspace.si.edu/collection-objects/museums-smithsonian-institution-si-exhibits-nasm-life-universe-gallery-107-1976-2
https://airandspace.si.edu/collection-objects/museums-smithsonian-institution-si-exhibits-nasm-life-universe-gallery-107-1976-3
https://airandspace.si.edu/collection-objects/museums-smithsonian-institution-si-exhibits-nasm-life-universe-gallery-107-1976-4
https://airandspace.si.edu/collection-objects/museums-smithsonian-institution-si-exhibits-nasm-life-universe-gallery-107-1976-5
https://airandspace.si.edu/collection-objects/museums-smithsonian-institution-si-exhibits-nasm-life-universe-gallery-107-1976-6
https://airandspace.si.edu/collection-objects/museums-smithsonian-institution-si-exhibits-nasm-life-universe-gallery-107-1976-7
https://airandspace.si.edu/collection-objects/museums-smithsonian-institution-si-exhibits-nasm-life-universe-gallery-107-1976-8
https://airandspace.si.edu/collection-objects/museums-smithsonian-institution-si-exhibits-nasm-life-universe-gallery-107-1976-9
https://airandspace.si.edu/collection-objects/museums-smithsonian-institution-si-exhibits-nasm-life-universe-gallery-107-10
https://airandspace.si.edu/collection-objects/museums-smithsonian-institution-si-exhibits-nasm-life-universe-gallery-107-11
https://airandspace.si.edu/collection-objects/museums-smithsonian-institution-si-exhibits-nasm-life-universe-gallery-107-12
https://airandspace.si.edu/collection-objects/museums-smithsonian-institution-si-exhibits-nasm-life-universe-gallery-107-13
https://airandspace.si.edu/collection-objects/museums-smithsonian-institution-si-exhibits-nasm-life-universe-gallery-107-14
https://airandspace.si.edu/collection-objects/museums-smithsonian-institution-si-exhibits-nasm-life-universe-gallery-107-15
Reminds me of the TV series, The Americans[1]. It did a great job of humanizing people on both sides of the Cold War. Sure, there were those that were blinded by their nationalism, but a majority on both sides we just trying to live their lives in a not so dissimilar way from the other.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Americans
Also could be "drovosek". But you need to understand that GRU officers are so obsessed with America that they practice their English all the time and their Russian becomes neglected because of that. Look at the API they designed - not a single Russian word or a misused English word! They probably achieve this by beating you up if you say anything in Russian in the office as seen in the documentary "Americans".
Yup, at least in Germany that's the legal situation: They send out cease&desist letters because torrent upload counts as "sharing the copyrighted work without a license", and because of bit-torrent high connectivity they just assume by default that you are doing it on the "scale of a business", stipulating absurd damage sums.
I once torrented an episode of the show The Americans, my last option as my usual sources were weirdly all offline and it was the middle of a season, the show wasn't even legally distributed in Germany at the time.
Turned out some German publisher picked up the distribution rights to the show and their first action wasn't to make it legally available in Germany, but trying to profit from Germans who followed the show trough piracy by sending out serial c&d letters demanding 800€ payments and stipulating damages in the range of 10k€
It's a pretty wide-spread and annoying situation to such a degree that using public torrent is a very quick way to get expensive mail as there's a whole lot of anti-piracy outfits in Germany that monitor public torrent trackers for German IPs downloading files named after copyrighted works to send out those c&d letters.
New Year’s Resolutions 2020
Family
2019: Dinner with family 4/7 nights a week (success, mostly)
2020: Continue status quo
2019: 10 vacations and/or road-trips and/or weekend get-aways (success)
2020: Increase to 14
2019: Park/Recreation together 20 of 40 non-winter weekends (success)
2020: Continue status quo
2019: No non-emergency office work on weekends (complete failure)
2020: Aim for more realistic 8 or less weekends in office spent on non-emergency work
Health
2019: BMI 30 → 25 (complete failure)
2020: BMI 30 → 25
2020: 25% reduction in triglycerides
2019: Gym 3x week (success)
2020: Gym 3x week -- but with HR reaching cardio zone at least 30 cumulative min each visit
2019: Bike/Walk to Work at least 20% non rainy/snowy days (success)
2020: Bike/Walk to Work at least 40% non rainy/snowy days (success)
2020: Added Goal: Cumulative Bike+Walk+Peloton mileage of 1000mi for the year
2019: Track all meals with data (failure, tracked ~20%)
2020: Track all meals with data
2019: Sleep no later than 3am every day except 5/yr (failure)
2020: Sleep no later than 2am every day except 5/yr, use weight training to force exhaustion
Personal Growth
2019: 12 books for the year (wild success)
2020: 24 books for the year (audio or dead-tree), double-time with exercise hours
2020: Added Goal: 24 long-form articles (audio or dead-tree), double-time with exercise hours
2019: Write 5 blog posts (failure)
2020: Write 12 blog posts
2020: Create Podcast Series with at least 5 episodes
2003-2019: Read Atlas Shrugged (failure)
2020: Read Atlas Shrugged
Training
2019 Three certifications in tech I want (failure -- did only 1 -- on NVIDIA RAPIDS)
2020 Certifications: Fast.ai; Azure Cloud (any 2 certs); Google Cloud (any 2 certs)
2020 One CGE at grad school with credit
2020 One CGE at grad school just auditing
Career and Networking
2019: 3 talks/presentations at conferences (success)
2020: Continue status quo + 1 major main-line talk
2020: 3x/month talks/meetups
2020: 2/year meetups speaker/presenter
2020: Meet 2/month new interesting people
2020: Dinner with former work colleague 1/month
2020: Phone catch-up with former work colleague 2/month
Job
2019: Mentor 3 interns (success)
2020: Mentor 3 interns
2020: Three brand new demos for marketing Achieve 95% test coverage on my code
Family Office
2019: 5 deals (failure)
2020: 52 in-person meets with angel-stage teams
2020: 10 deals (albeit smaller dollar amount) or high-conviction PME, if that is better
Side Hustle
Convert 3 of my graduate school projects into working projects (not business successes, just working projects to ensure I have the tech process locked down.) Outsourcing and managing is OK, delivery is the key here.
Tinkering
2019: Play with Jetson Nano (failure)
2020: One mini-demo with RPI
2020: One mini-demo with Jetson Nano (colab w/ friends OK)
2020: One mini-demo with Google Coral (colab w/ friends OK)
2020: One mini-demo with Azure Kinect DK (colab w/ friends OK)
Arts
2020: Discover 5 new amazing artists i’ll listen to forever
2020: Finally finish watching series I love (The Americans, The Good Wife)
Self Organization
2019: No loose articles (everything in Evernote/Pocket) (FAILURE)
2020: No loose articles (everything in Evernote/Pocket)
2020: No one-off reading -- everything through RSS reader or tracked
Leaving aside the politics, Fauda and The Americans are excellent in terms of being gritty and attempts to make the tradecraft a bit more realistic than typical spy stuff. I still think there is a long way to go for someone to make a really realistic intelligence series - there would be some great stories from the Northern Ireland conflict for example.
The documentary "Inside the Mossad" is also very interesting.
Sex, debts and gambling are THE go to blackmail avenues for recruiting assets.
It needn't be someone cheating either, being gay is still not socially acceptable in MANY circles remove wife/daughter from the above and change it to pastor, co-worker, employer, mother, father.
It doesn't have to be just the fact that the individual is gay or bi either, a listed kink could be used to coerce someone into a mildly compromising situation to maintain their privacy, then once you get them to do something compromising with their employer you now have even more leverage "oh well we could tell them you did this for us, so you'd better keep co-operating".
This is also used in television, an example being I believe season 2 of Madam Secretary with the gay Russian student at the war college and the FBI secretary in The Americans is compromised through a vanilla heterosexual relationship.
It's also used in non-espionage/corporate sabotage stages, like sextortion with both adults and minors by ether coercing someone into doing sexual things on camera or hacking a webcam/hiding a camera and catching them doing something sexual (or just naked) and using it as leverage against them.
This is a fairly competent wiki article with the TL:DR being
>There have been various attempts to explain why people become spies. One common theory is summed up by the acronym MICE: Money, Ideology, Compromise or Extortion
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motives_for_spying
Compromise or Extortion being the important parts as far as Grindr is concerned.
Very few shows are good after the first couple of seasons. Breaking Bad is probably the only TV show I know longer than 2-3 seasons that maintains its quality from beginning to end. The Americans is also pretty good.
Even Game of Thrones went downhill on its last seasons.
Stranger Things has also gone down the hill. I watched the first 3 episodes of the new season and I'm done with it. It has gone from a sci-fi show to a teenager drama.
Breaking Bad spun off Better Call Saul, which I really hope they wrap up in Season 5. The Americans and Justified are two other shows that ended when they should have. Fargo is a fresh story every season, so it can probably go on a bit longer. Fleabag was a perfect two season show.
Does the technique of clenching your butt hole actually work to beat a polygraph? (As described in my favorite "The Americans" season 2 episode 7, "Arpanet".) Does it also help to visualize someone you love at the same time? ;)
If it actually works, the photo of Charles Wayne Humble in the article looks like he could lie through his teeth while passing a polygraph exam with flying colors!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arpanet_(The_Americans)
After consulting with Arkady and Oleg, and with the promise of coaching from Oleg, Nina tells Stan that she will take the FBI's polygraph test. Oleg suggests a few techniques including that she visualize him in the room as well as clenching her anus.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s3OMSMq9zPA
The Americans Season 2 Episode 7 "Arpanet" Review: "I like when I learn something from an episode, and now I know ..." "If you're having to do a polygraph, squeeze your anus."
https://tv.avclub.com/the-americans-arpanet-1798180091
(One of the ways to beat a polygraph turns out to be clenching one’s anus. This show is full of helpful hints.)
https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/tv/a28316/spy-on-the-americans/
ESQ: The show featured Nina learning to beat and eventually beating a polygraph. How easy is it to do that?
PE: We have a number of real-world instances. The Aldrich Ames case. He went through the polygraph twice, after he went to work for the Soviets. Administering a polygraph is an art, not a science. That's why it's not admitted in court. People have claimed to have had training to beat the polygraph. Everything from tightening your sphincter to breathing a certain way, and so forth.
ESQ: Speaking of sphincters, the trick she's told is "squeeze your anus." Is that a thing?
PE: I can't confirm. [Laughs] I took several polygraphs. Taking them is a standard thing in the intelligence life.
Exactly. Common methods of execution are putting a tire around your arms and chest and setting you on fire, and cooking you alive in a giant microwave. Just hearing about this stuff is enough to give you nightmares, and that's the whole point. There was an episode of The Americans where someone was killed with the tire method and even on TV it made me sick to my stomach and left me feeling disturbed for several hours.
Clench your anus, a la ‘The Americans’ tv series.
Of all the shows you mentioned the only ones I have watched is, OITB (left it at after watching S04 I think), Master of None (both the seasons), I realise that its a drama that leans toward being a rom-com but I do not watch rom-coms at all. Kudos to Mindhunter, indeed that was entertaining and right in my ballpark. Liked House of cards till the time Spacey was there, S06 disappointed me. Season 1 of Making a Murderer was outstanding, season 2 didn't catch my interest. Also the last comedy I watched end-to-end I think was Entourage (which was produced by HBO), The Office (US) and Parks And Recreation, not surprisingly Netflix doesn't stream any of these in my region, Prime Video does the last two and Hotstar streams Entourage.
These are good shows not great ones like The Wire, The Sopranos, Mad Men, BB, Six Feet Under you know about the stuff that critics rave about etc. I don't care if Birdbox was watched by all of Netflix's subscribers, thats precisely the sort of thing that I don't watch the majority of the time, you watch that thing once and you forget that you ever watched it again. I'm now on probably my sixth or seventh rewatch of The Wire, that should tell you something about my viewing habits and why Netflix's content just doesn't work for me. I don't expect a network to consistenly churn out shows like that but at least some of the shows should be somewhere close to that level which HBO continues to do with The Deuce, Succession, True Detective(I know they fucked the dog on S02) etc.
Also you have the time to watch ALL of that, I don't. I work in tech too, I have an hour on weekdays and maybe 2-3 on weekends for leisure, so its only natural that I would be picky about what I watch, the absolute best, currently that would mean shows like The Americans, Escape from Dannemora and shows from the past like Halt and Catch Fire(from AMC), Six feet under, Deadwood which not surpisingly were also made by HBO. Netflix doesn't stream any of that.
I also don't understand how you think AMC won't exist, are they going to be insolvent ? Doesn't look like it, they have a cash-cow in The Walking Dead(I only watched till S06 then got bored) They got two of the best TV shows I liked BB and BCS, BCS is gonna kill it in the next season. They also produced The Terror, a brilliant mini-series which Netflix didn't stream as well and again Prime Video did. As a viewer I don't care about Netflix's subscriber numbers or HBO's lack thereof, I want to watch content I like which sadly Netflix doesn't produce on a consistent basis, this is entirely subjective and I realise that I might be one of the edge-cases in all the millenials when I say Netflix don't tickly my fancy.
I'm not biased towards HBO, hell HBO doesn't even stream in my country, I'm incredibly picky about what I watch since I'm short on time, Netflix churns out a LOT of shows, its only natural that some of them turn out to be brilliant and some of them indeed are, but the rest, like 90% of the shows are just average, they don't work for me, I simply do not have the time to watch them.
In that sense, Netflix is like the Y-Combinator of producing original content. You produce(invest in) hundreds of TV shows(startups) and hope one of them makes it big (becomes a unicorn) and the rest of them, well they would be probably cease to exist after some time.
I find that my rate of exercise is much higher when watching action movies/shows than when watching sitcoms/dramas. So I save my NCIS: LA for the gym, and watch The Americans while cleaning the kitchen.
I also find that I row the fastest during commercials, so Netflix/Amazon Prime shows are actually worse for me when working out.
It's interesting that everyone is talking about the newly produced original series on HBO and competitors. I wasn't thinking of those; Netflix and Amazon between them have many of the great films ever made in any country, plus many 3rd party series that are great (nobody has mentioned Broad City, the best comedy TV in history, and there are shows like (EDIT: Man in the High Castle,) The Americans and Transparent, which many people love though I haven't watched them). It takes some digging to find them, but that's ok; my Netflix and Amazon queues are filled with films better than any HBO series IMHO, except The Wire, and are so large that I won't live long enough to watch them all.
Social media and Bluetooth played a role in the Arab Spring [1]. Your average spy movie or series (I am currently watching The Americans) contains loads of [fictional] examples. Some other examples: SSH over Tor to get around firewall(s). USB sticks in concrete as a means of a drop point.
And what is fiction, might become reality. Just a matter of how far you wanna look. Snow Crash pretty much described Second Life or MMOs with the Metaverse. Plus, I remember around 2000 a joke IIRC called the iBrator. It was a remote, internet controlled vibrator. Back then it was an April Fool. Look where we are now? You can pay to make a person's (most likely a woman) vibrator vibrate, live, over the internet. You can call that an unintended consequence of the internet, USB, video conferencing, javascript, or what not.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_Spring
Actually, it wasn't quite as secure a physical or virtual space as you imagine.
It was quite easy for anyone to get into the 9th Floor at 545 Tech Square simply by thumping on the door in the elevator lobby, because anyone on a Lisp Machine within earshot would just press Terminal-D to buzz open the door without getting up from their chair [1]. (And they could summon an elevator by pressing Terminal-E.) And many students and non-laboratory people (referred to as "random turists") knew the series of digits to tell a locksmith to make a key to those locks, or somebody who could make them a master key in the robot machine shop. And even if you didn't have your own key, there was always the MIT Lockpicking Guide. [2]
[1] http://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/41180/AI_WP_235.pdf (figure 5-1 and 5-2)
[2] https://www.lysator.liu.se/mit-guide/MITLockGuide.pdf
The physical locks on those doors certainly never stopped me from showing up unannounced, gaining physical access, and wrecking havoc by playing around with the Lisp Machines [3] and PDP-10's [4], spying on other people's sessions with the Knight TVs, printing out and Velobinding reams of documents on the Dover laser printer, and sleeping on the beanbag chair in the "Lounge Lizard Lispmacho" office.
[3] http://donhopkins.com/home/catalog/images/cadr.jpg
[4] http://donhopkins.com/home/catalog/images/mc-console.jpg
And then there was this thing called the ARPANET that you could use to log in without even knocking on any doors, picking any locks, or being physically present in Cambridge Massachusetts. Breaking into the ARPANET wasn't as difficult as depicted in The Americans "ARPANET" episode [5] (S02E07) where the KGB agents had to actually break into campus and murder somebody to gain access.
[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVth6T3gMa0
The dial-up TIPs themselves actually had no passwords, and BBN would mail you a free copy of the "Users Guide to the Terminal IMP" [6] if you asked nicely -- including "APPENDIX A: HOST ADDRESSES". Then all you had to know was a phone number (301 948 3850 for example) and what to type (E, @O 134, :LOGIN RMS, RMS), and you were in.
[6] http://www.walden-family.com/dave/archive/bbn-tip-man.txt
You didn't even have to know RMS's password. If you tried to log in to MIT-AI with an unknown user name, it would ask you if you wanted to apply for an account, what your name is, and why you wanted to use the system, etc. If you answered sensibly (like "learning LISP"), you'd have your very own free off-hours "tourist" account [7] within days.
[7] http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/text/tourist-policy.html
Steven Levy wrote about the Hacker Ethic and MIT-AI Lab culture in his classic book, "Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution" [8].
[8] https://murdercube.com/files/Computers/Heroes%20of%20the%20Computer%20Revolution/Hackers%20(Stephen%20Levy)/part1/chapter5.html
The basic acquisition of every lock hacker was a master key. The proper master key would unlock the doors of a building, or a floor of a building. Even better than a master key was a grand-master key, sort of a master master-key; one of those babies could open perhaps two thirds of the doors on campus. Just like phone hacking, lock hacking required persistence and patience. So the hackers would go on late-night excursions, unscrewing and removing locks on doors. Then they would carefully dismantle the locks. Most locks could be opened by several different key combinations; so the hackers would take apart several locks in the same hallway to ascertain which combination they accepted in common. Then they would go about trying to make a key shaped in that particular combination.
It might be that the master key had to be made from special "blanks" unavailable to the general public. (This is often the case with high-security master keys, such as those used in defense work). This did not stop the hackers, because several of them had taken correspondence courses to qualify for locksmith certification; they were officially allowed to buy those restricted blank keys. Some keys were so high-security that even licensed locksmiths could not buy blanks for them; to duplicate those, the hackers would make midnight calls to the machine shop a corner work space on the ninth floor where a skilled metal craftsman named Bill Bennett worked by day on such material as robot arms. Working from scratch, several hackers made their own blanks in the machine shop.
The master key was more than a means to an end; it was a symbol of the hacker love of free access. At one point, the TMRC hackers even considered sending an MIT master key to every incoming freshman as a recruitment enticement. The master key was a magic sword to wave away evil. Evil, of course, was a locked door. Even if no tools were behind locked doors, the locks symbolized the power of bureaucracy, a power that would eventually be used to prevent full implementation of the Hacker Ethic. Bureaucracies were always threatened by people who wanted to know how things worked. Bureaucrats knew their survival depended on keeping people in ignorance, by using artificial means like locks to keep people under control. So when an administrator upped the ante in this war by installing a new lock, or purchasing a Class Two safe (government-certified for classified material), the hackers would immediately work to crack the lock, open the safe. In the latter case, they went to a super-ultra-techno surplus yard in Taunt-on, found a similar Class Two safe, took it back to the ninth floor, and opened it up with acetylene torches to find out how the locks and tumblers worked.
With all this lock hacking, the AI lab was an administrator's nightmare. Russ Noftsker knew; he was the administrator. He had arrived at Tech Square in 1965 with an engineering degree from the University of Mexico, an interest in artificial intelligence, and a friend who worked at Project MAC. He met Minsky, whose prime grad student-administrator, Dan Edwards, had just left the lab. Minsky, notoriously uninterested in administration, needed someone to handle the paperwork of the AI lab, which was eventually to split from Project MAC into a separate entity with its own government funding. So Marvin hired Noftsker, who in turn officially hired Greenblatt, Nelson, and Gosper as full-time hackers. Somehow, Noftsker had to keep this electronic circus in line with the values and policy of the Institute.
[...]
They went wherever they wanted, entering offices by traveling in the crawl space created by the low-hanging artificial ceiling, removing a ceiling tile, and dropping into their destinations commandos with pencil-pals in their shirt pockets. One hacker hurt his back one night when the ceiling collapsed and he fell into Minsky's office. But more often, the only evidence Noftsker would find was the occasional footprint on his wall. And, of course, sometimes he would enter his locked office and discover a hacker dozing on the sofa.
Have you seen the TV series "The Americans", which is set in the early 80's, and has spot-on era props and scenery? They have a Commodore Pet (with the adult-sized non-chicklet keyboard ;) in their real estate office! It makes sense that deep cover KGB spies like Phillip and Elisabeth would have the computer for the masses not the classes, comrade!
The kids Paige and Henry even have the exact same Star Wars blanket I had (which their parents tuck them into at bed time, then sneak out and skulk around stealing Star Wars secrets from the US Government).
> sometimes the only available option is to pirate it
I once had to pay 500€ for torrenting an episode of The Americans that I had no way of buying legally, at least in my country at that time.
The only thing I regret? Using torrent and not some alternative where they can't get you for "illegal distribution".
Saw the movie 20 years ago and remember enjoying it. Was better than I expected. We were “saving the world from communism”. We lost and communism didn’t take over the world.
Watching the Americans today reminds me of how we fought to save Afghanistan from the Russians. Now we’re there in our longest war.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Americans_(2013_TV_series)
Iraq ... we saved the Iraqi’s from Saddam. Libya from Gaddafi...
Personally, I think the Green Berets should be required watching with an additional history lesson to help us better reflect on our past and future choices.
Maybe someday we’ll stop trying to save the world, and quit repeating past mistakes.
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?
Consumers are not going to like a la carte TV. They think they want it, but they don't. People like Netflix because it's one huge all you can eat buffet.
They are going to recoil from "You want to watch the Americans? Just 3.99 for FX Networks package." "Better Call Saul? 4.99 for the AMC package (5.49 during Walking Dead months)."
More tiers is probably the right way forward. Segregating sports, movie channels, prestige cable networks into packages might work.
> This shows that no agency is immune from leaks
That's well known for a long time. During cold war a lot of Russian weapons were based on the US designs. There is a TV series, Americans, which shows how to manipulate people and steal secrets. Even atomic bomb secrets were stolen (by Klaus Fuchs and others).
So I guess a lot of people in military complex make a lot of money on these exploits, PRISM and other projects. And they just don't care about whole society.
The state of legal TV and film content in the UK is abysmal.
I think it's really important that we consider that just because there's no legal way for me to watch say "The Americans" season 5 legally in the UK[0], I'm not entitled to pirate it. That is the content distributors mistake.
Saying that me downloading it doesn't hurt them doesn't track either because I'll be seeding a file to others who might have legal alternatives.
I've had to adjust how important watching stuff can be to me. Is it really that important that I get to watch some TV? Worth breaking the law for?
[0]https://www.justwatch.com/uk/tv-series/the-americans
I'm amazed how many people on HN complain about the content on Netflix. Especially compared to any other streaming service, such as Amazon or Hulu, they continue to provide much higher-end content for my dollar, as well as a (far) superior UI experience.
For me, the stand-up specials like Dave Chapelle and Louis CK alone are huge and welcome additions, never mind the many, very good lesser known comedy specials on there.
Their agreement with Dreamworks has only helped, allowing me to enjoy surprisingly good films like Zootopia.
Even great cable channels like FX (The Americans, Legion) and AMC (Mad Men, Better Call Saul) are not available for any reasonable price as standalone cable packages, so I'm not sure what the comparison is in terms of quality. HBO at 15/month?
But even HBO shows are hit-or-miss. And while their movie selection is generally pretty great, I still find myself not watching it all that much.
It seems to me that Netflix provides a pretty high level of content at their price point.
A fair number of sleeper agents like this have been outed over the years. Another example that comes to mind is the KGB agent couple on which the TV show "The Americans" was based: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/may/07/discovered-our-parents-were-russian-spies-tim-alex-foley
FBI Operation Ghost Stories arrested 11 people back in 2010. https://vault.fbi.gov/ghost-stories-russian-foreign-intelligence-service-illegals/images
What I'm wondering is: how many other agents are out there and haven't been caught yet? Or were here and left without being caught?
I wonder if this type of agent is still in active use, in the sense of seeding more of them. Given the arrests just 7 years ago, I'd guess so. But perhaps not, since hacking and electronic surveillance can be so effective. You don't necessarily need an agent within a country's borders to penetrate a lot of their networks, email, and other communications.
But you never know ... what lengths would Russia go to to get an agent TS/SCI clearance and access to a SCIF?
I have two use cases, one is that I want to watch a specific movie or I'm watching through a show like The Americans in a deliberate, serial way. Plex does everything I need in that area.
The other use case is, I want to work or browse the web for several hours, or work on a puzzle, or clean, or whatever, and have something on in the background. There's some media I'll only watch deliberately with full attention, (The Americans) and other media I can rewatch repeatedly in background mode. (Sitcoms, or certain types of movies.)
When I want background programming I'd like less friction. Traditional TV works best in this area, in the sense that I tune to a channel and the programming is already set up. I don't want to stop every 22 minutes and pick a new episode, or choose one movie out of dozens. I'd spend too much time trying to decide. Pretending my library is made up of channels lets me choose one to tune in to, and I'll be happy with what happens to come up on that channel. There's a freedom in offloading the decision. (As long as I also retain the freedom to choose what to watch when I have a specific preference.)
What I can't control with cable TV is the content, I can only hope there's a channel with programming I want to leave on for a while. Sometimes there isn't. But I've got a lot of media and would do the work to set up my own channels.
"The Americans" [1] had an eponymous episode (S04E09 "The Day After") [2] about the broadcast of "The Day After" [3] on November 20, 1983.
As portrayed in that episode, everybody watched it, everybody talked about it, and it changed how everybody thought about nuclear war.
I don't remember a thing about the TV event in the title of the previouis episode of "The Americans" (S04E08 "The Magic of David Copperfield V: The Statue of Liberty Disappears" [4]), but I sure remember seeing "The Day After" in 1983.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Americans_(2013_TV_series)
[2] http://www.avclub.com/tvclub/theres-got-be-day-after-americans-236632
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_After
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Statue_of_Liberty_vanishing_trick
The obvious example is The Americans, and... nothing else comes to mind. Everything else worth watching is created by Netflix or HBO (or maybe Amazon).
I agree. The only way such a casual reaction is plausible is if they are also KGB agents.
The problem I'm having is that it doesn't really invoke any Cold War aspect any more.
They basically just are Americans, meeting with other "Americans", watching American movies or David Copperfield, visiting EPCOT or EST, alongside some rather tedious non-political espionage. They (very suddenly) don't seem to have any solid association with the Soviet Union or "the cause" any more.
The now sadly all too rare Rezidentura scenes (with some of the most interesting aspects and characters of the show IMO) and Reagan clips just seem like tacked-on lip-service to the original concept.
There isn't enough TV for Netflix because Netflix sells TV to binge watchers who always want the next show.
FX wants to sell high end content at a premium. They don't want so much TV that anyone can find great rerun content on Netflix. FX wants you to watch a new episode of the Americans. They don't want you to binge watch 8 seasons of X-Files.
Netflix actually benefits if content is cheap. FX benefits if content is expensive.
Not that it has a direct relationship with the article, but I'm watching The Americans (the TV show), it's made by an ex CIA officer, and I have to tell, the intelligence world is pretty scary. I can't comprehend how those couples could live such lives. I can't see any other work that is so mind sucking.
Although I have no idea how really accurate that show is, and I really have to look for clues about it.
You have to live your cover just like in the Americans TV series and in real life one uk based KGB agent ran a very successful fruit machine company - he apparently joked he was the only millionaire KGB officer.
It is standard practice in classified material communities to have carefully controlled variants of documents and a log of where and when the subtle variations go in order to detect and source leaks of information. When any particular area is detected as suspect, misinformation dressed up to look more valuable is then carefully spread in that direction to see who takes the bait. They are then either used to send misinformation or, if they have served their purpose or have nothing to offer, removed (fired/imprisoned or whatever is appropriate).
The Americans (TV Series) had a couple of themes based around this - it's not exactly a secret strategy and receivers of information know to verify what they get before getting too excited.
Since we're talking about government actors here, nowadays they would not be easily fooled and would have skilled engineers checking stuff no matter what, so that is not going to add any 'cost' to the operation. People in the espionage game learn pretty quickly or they don't get to play for very long.
Meh. Taking opportunity costs into account, a SINGLE visit to a local retail store that I can bill to a client instead more than covers the yearly expense. Add to that my experience with their customer service and returns (simply stellar[1]) and I would have gladly paid $149/yr which was hinted at previously.
I've saved myself countless hours and shipping charges as a long-time prime member. Watched a whole season of The Americans and five streaming movies for free last week. I'd say I get more than my money's worth...
[1] one more reason to avoid other online retailers or brick and mortars
PS I never buy anything from third party sellers where Amazon doesn't handle the fulfillment. Too many scammers. Yes, I'm looking at you AntOnline on Amazon. Crooks.