Guarantee the PSU "hard drive" is because a director said "That's too small. I need something big and with cables so it looks like a computer part." Kinda like how a bomb needs to look like wires and a clock, not fertilizer and an arduino.
@@Lauren_C yeah, but would you show it to the explosive disposal team to let them know? You'd set a time for yourself to get to safety, but not make it easy for others to evacuate.
I agree with this hypothesis. Seems pretty likely for just a visual, especially in a time where less people would be readily aware of what those components look like.
@@aaronplays_ a displayed time can always be a red herring so it should always be treated as such, also if cutting a specific wire will diffuse a bomb then just cut them all at once, or just cut the battery, real ones are basically sealed shut really hard
You need to check out "Firewall" (2006). Harrison Ford as an IT security expert is the least believable thing in the world. Best scene of the movie: He connects the scan device of a fax machine to his daughter's MP3 player to store information from a display he attaches the scan unit to. My brain melted when I saw it in the theater.
To be fair to NCIS, I once read that the writers know how tech works but they intentionally write in bad tech to the show in order to make an inside joke for people who know anything about tech, while still being exciting for people who don't.
Also that PSU case being modded to a HD/SSD/NVME chassis would be quite smart. Looks like an old PSU laying around but inside it'd have the storage. No clue if that was it though, but very sleeper build style.
I heard (though it may be an urban myth) that in the first season of McGyver, all of the things the guy McGyvers actually work for real - and since the phrase "don't try this at home" wasn't ingrained in everyone's head yet (and I'd argue it still isn't to this day) they got a LOT of complaints of parents whose kids set the house on fire or similar, so from the second season onwards they consulted with experts and then very intentionally did it wrong on screen so that it wouldn't work in real life.. Maybe this is a similar situation?
I'm not gonna do any research and chose to 100% believe this so I can just laugh at the stupid shit they say while my girlfriend watches her crime shows (that I end up getting sucked into). Please nobody run this for me
You wouldn't steal a handbag. You wouldn't steal a car. You wouldn't steal a baby. You wouldn't shoot a policeman and then steal his helmet. You wouldn't go to the toilet in his helmet and then send it to the policeman's grieving widow. And then steal it again! Downloading films is stealing. If you do it, you will face the consequences.
Also shooting the control panel always makes it do the thing you want. Want the door open? Shoot the control panel. Want the door closed? Shoot the control panel.
I actually like the fact that the IT expert takes advice from the guy (her boss, probably) who only knows that they're looking at "blinky boxes". It do be like that in strictly hierarchical and authoritarian organizations! 😂
@@Stay_away_from_my_swamp_water Usually it's much healthier to say no when a couple asks you if you want to come back to their hotel room to film a video together. Especially if they plan on uploading it to the internet.
At my last job my supervisor legit thought the monitor was a computer. I had 2 screens and got a memory error that popped up on one and froze the pc. When I asked them to call IT, this person looked me dead in the face and said "the error is on this computer not THAT ONE" pointing at the empty screen that didn't have the error and asked me to keep working.
Should've had Die Hard 4 where they somehow overclock a PSU, via code injection, to have the potential explosive power of ~5 dynamites blowing up an entire room or house.
was it like that? i always assumed these systems were provided to them by the villian with the exploding box pre-installed.. though i haven't seen the movie in a while
A friend of mine blow up the caps in his PSU. Don´t know quite why the blow up. they just did randomly. It was a quite large explosion (The MB was fine)
@@sorcierx2604they could have had some sort of fuse tied to opening task manager or checking for a certain signal. Kind of how Samsung has the security fuse for the bootloader in their phones that if that’s blown some of the hardware stops working.
you missed the biggest flaw in the Space Force clip. none of those computers would be connected to the internet. they will probably be networked across their sites on their own network, but never the internet. any windows updates would have to go through testing before they would be added to an updated image of the workstation and then that would be installed onto the computers manually.
Yeaaaah. Windows management can be shitty, but they have alot more tools that the IT department can just deploy and use, Group Policy is definitely one of them and the other is WSUS. Nothing that was not in WSUS yet can be deployed. And nowadays, they give alot of leeway for ppl to shutdown and update (on default setting). But hey, I just imagine Space Force use public Intune instead lol
You wouldn't imagine how far Microsoft can get into forcing an update. I tried to disable updates on one of my PCs, I used 7 different ways of preventing updates (including the policy) and after a few weeks it still decided to update itself. I even locked that computer behind a firewall unlocking only 3 ports used by the application that was running on it, and windows still found a way to download updates.
@@TheRabidDeer tbf - I think they don't even use a server and have everything on the drive + who doesn't use a power strip honestly. On NCIS the things always had been so much on the nose that I'd not be surprised if they specifically made everything unrealistic but dramatic for the obvious purpose of entertainment and as a joke for everyone who does know.
'Mr. Robot' is probably about the gold standard for representing the overall process of hacking in a main plot line even if they don't get some of the finer details right. 'Hackers' actually represented real hacking well in most of it's side-plots and vignettes. For example, the scene where they call the security guard to get the phone number for the remote support modem was 100% how it was done back in the day.
Also the use of the magic USB key but they have to be there in person and the tension related to that, the way they hack into someone's security system just to make a party and all the issues linked to that too, it's all fun and games untill it's real. Such a masterpiece of of a show
They went so far and actually made all the websites and urls in the show real websites you could visit, unfortunately they're mostly gone at this point since the show ended a few years ago.
@@doublej42 They have to be careful to not show how to 100% do this completely illegal thing, which is why they'll either miss out a couple of steps or gloss over the process. For example, in 'Breaking Bad' they didn't show all the steps required to make meth. For me personally, I prefer "Yeah, that's pretty close to how it's done." to "No, that's not how any of it works at all."
Wendell is one of those people that knows alot, you just have to ask the right questions. Id love to just sit down and pick his brain about tech for hours.
Yeah but that is 100% intentional. Even the most braindead luddite in the real world knows the internet is not a shoebox with a red light. The fact that Jen didn't know that is what makes it a fictional comedy TV show.
Since I was 9, my favourite scene of this kind was the girl in Jurrasic Park confidently navigating the "UNIX" system GUI at about 8fps... Until I recently found out that it actually was an accurate depiction of the File System Navigator for IRIX on SGI workstations - same machines that were used to make the CGI for the movie.
I had that same experience. My smug 13 year old geek self knew “that isn’t Unix,” as I actually had a Unix station at home my dad got from work. Then recently watching vids on N64 history I learned the awful truth. Let’s keep it our secret 🤐 😅 🙊
I actually never had an idea in younger years, but since I knew computers, I was like "why the hell would a file system be that clunky?" and thought it was made up for the movie. I am kinda shocked this was real.
@@marcfuchs6938 Good point. I guess that was my main reaction too. “Unix isn’t a GUI, and that’s a bad GUI.” Turns out it was a bad GUI, but made to impress the suits who had to approve the purchase requests for expensive Silicon Graphics systems.
@@marcfuchs6938 look up how the first version of Windows GUI was supposed to be. Back then people had no idea how a computer GUI should be, so some whacky designs were made to make it "intuitive" for people to navigate.
Castle season 8 should just be ignored. It sucked. They changed the cast and the plot of the entire show, just to crash it miserably. Season 7 had a happy ending, just stop there. Seriously: If you're watching Castle (which you should) just stop at the end of season 7 and ignore that Netflix is telling you "there is more".
The tv show 'Scorpion' definitely needs to be in here. When living with my parents I'd usually get 10 minutes in, then have to leave the room because I'm so mad at all the inaccuracies.
@@garand70 sure because learning to hot wire a supercar in seconds, then proceeding to drive said supercar inorder to match speed an you know plug a ethernet cable into a plane to upload mission crucial software in seconds as a plane flew over the runway because a car speaker wiped a hard drive surrounded by cloth & the plastic door panel not likely near the magnet... 😂
@@mesiaskane And I thought using the laser from a laptop's optical drive and a broken rear view mirror from a tractor to simulate 2 laser sights was farfetched. I must not have made it to that episode.
@6:30 we still call it a Remote Access Tool in our SOC department, as a RAT can still be a legitimate tool (Remote Desktop, Teamviewer, Logmein, Bomgar are considered RAT's but are used for legit support purposes)
6:40 - "Tool" and "Trojan" are both considered acceptable. In fact, unless it was a "true trojan" where someone executed it manually after being tricked into running it thinking it was something else, "tool" is more common.
I was going to suggest Swordfish. The whole hacking scene where he spins around in his chair whilst on a computer with about 17 screens made my cringe gland go into overdrive!
Mr. Robot, at least the first season, is as close as it gets to 'quite plausible' without becoming too boring. Nothing too drastic to pick apart there, except maybe some... questionable performances.
The first CSI:Cyber example actually was valid. The red code was briefly overlaid on the green code before being plucked out and re-displayed. That kind of obfuscation is a real thing: another method elsewhere in the script would scan that block of code and pull those chunks out to create a new, malicious script that can then be executed after the original code is scanned by online virus scanning tools. Admittedly the virus scanner would have to only be scanning on initial page load and not monitoring memory or script execution as most modern AV toolkits do, but attacks such as that one are why code execution monitoring was added in the first place.
In The Amazing World of Gumball S03E32 ("The Safety"), Gumball's sister Anais explaining how she hacked the security systems was surprisingly realistic. The most accurate hacking scene in television history may just be from a kids' cartoon. There should be a clip of it if you search up "Gumball's Sister Anais Knows Hacking"
The most accurate hacking in a series I've seen is Mr. Robot. They've clearly consulted with professional security experts/(ethical) hackers, cause that show was on point in most things.
@@chrissametrinequartz9389Na Rami Malek is just a good actor. I believe he's said in interviews he didn't know what some of the technical stuff in the script was or even meant. But they had good direction for that show so he played it well.
7:08 Sorry, Linus, *"synched"* *IS* the traditional spelling for abbreviating "synchronized." The shorter "synced" is another spelling, but "synched" is not wrong.
The Bones episode thing reminds me of an experiment done where a strand of synthetic DNA was created that had code in it that used a buffer overflow exploit to take over a DNA sequencer computer. The name of the paper is: "Computer Security, Privacy, and DNA Sequencing: Compromising Computers with Synthesized DNA, Privacy Leaks, and More"
Hollywood tends to glamorize tech in movies, leading to unrealistic representations. It's refreshing to see an in-depth analysis to counter such portrayals.
Glamorize tech?! More like having the trope that electricity is magic, it'll arc hundreds of yards, vaporize steel vaults, convert matter to energy, cook a hotdog and basically do everything that real electricity doesn't and can't do.
Yeah, there are not many franchises that can sustain quality. F&F3 Tokyo Drift was a rare one, and it's sad to see how low subsequent ones have been. That they are still somewhat fun for me, is just down to my 'tune in, drop out' mode for most movies.
@@lozodidit Tbf, their intent to show was that it was a foregone conclusion that would win, and even by the second movie they were heavily using cgi for the races. I still liked second one, but that was already less about the racing.
@@lozodidit it was for a police station raid but why would they need the Porsche in the first place as the car they raced against it had to be faster in the Brazil street race anyway making it all redundant.
Mr. Robot was really great, they actually have shown a bash and pretty realistic hacks! Unfortunate that the later season focused on his mental disorder...
They had several tech enthusiasts, network engineers and hackers on staff to help make sure they got it as real as possible without making it too technical for the general audience. I think they found the perfect level of both in that show. Even the episode with the hard drive data recovery was mostly sound.
RAT can also be abbreviated as a Remote Access Tool, since the stub or the infected (and supposedly FUD or fully undetectable) file that is being executed is the trojan itself, hence why they called it Remote Access Tool. I mean surely we can describe it as a Remote Access Trojan but nothing that he said was wrong.
Tfw you don't follow the entire saga @@richardbently7236. They made up pretty quick after that lol, they have a video on why they shoot on Reds with corridor explaining the motion tracking benefits.
@@richardbently7236 Like when they did a crossover video where Linus fixed up a computer for them to use and then Corridor made a video out of it or when Wren was doing a video about data storage so they asked Linus to record a segment for it? If you are talking about the Red camera thing then I think you are reading far too much stuff in to it, lol. If there is something else though then it's honestly not something I've ever personally seen made public.
You were able to pick just a single episode of CSI Cyber? That's impressive, as every single episode I spent more time looking at my palm than the TV screen.
The pilot episode with the 60s carnival ride having and using an ethernet serial port and providing a 3D overlay and diagnostic was it for me. I turned it off after that episode, canceled my series recording on my DirecTV and never looked back. I'm glad it got marginally better, but I'm not sorry I didn't watch that series.
@@CareBear-Killer it only lasted 2 season even tho Ratings were decent for CSI show but considering at the time Original CSI and i think CSI : Miami and NY were still on it did not hold a candle to the OGs and now it is a shame CBS canceled CSI: Vegas Revival after 3 seasons as it went back to old formula and was good and had a good Seasons Plot for both seasons like they used to do.
On the car thing, not just self driving cars but lots of recent cars and especially semis have wifi hotspots blasting out their AP name and mac. I live near an interstate and my Unifi system records hundreds of “nearby networks” every day from this.
All the cars from Ford, Jeep, Toyota, and VW had the same internal code for their freaking autonomous driving systems, and these individuals possessed the script to instantly hack into and redirect them-truly believable
tesla and ford and audi have all had claimed bug bounties that allow remote control of a car companies like audi use two ecus now as a protection where the top layer is mainly reporting data and the 2nd is your control system and mapping wont work unless a rotating key is checked. I actually has exp with a bounty for Bluelink NDA issue alllowed me to start my own car just by knowing the vin with no auth needed CVE-2017-6052
It somehow overrides your hydraulic brakes too. That being said, my car had its ABS go nuts, and the effectively made it unable to stop. So I guess if this hacker messed with that, they could effectively disable your ability to hit the brake.
var brand = getBrand(); if (brand == "ford") execute("ford.script"); if (brand == "jeep") execute("jeep.script"); .... I don't see the problem of making a script for targeting many hardware platforms.
I worked as a teenager at a PC shop when someone came in, part of a film crew, they asked for the cheapest mouse, it was wired, they need a wireless mouse for the movie. So they asked for scissors, did what you are guessing, paid and left.
So, as someone who has consulted on one of the projects, yes transport departments are using boxes similar to that that monitor traffic by watching for nearby Bluetooth and Wi-Fi devices and counting them up. Before the bluetooth randomisation stuff, you could get an estimate of traffic speed/flow by watching the same mac address traverse a city. Now its more just about aggregate data, how long each mac is seen for, how many macs at any point, etc, to get an idea of peak and minimum traffic levels and how much a road is used.
In the TV series "Limitless", there was one scene where the main character was on an international phone call, speaking either Mandarin or Cantonese, while the person on the other end of the line was speaking in Vietnamese and earlier in the episode it was mentioned that he was calling someone in Thailand.
In NUMB3RS, two 'brothers' who supposedly grew up together in California, had a telephone conversation where they each pronounce the city "San Pedro" *differently*. 😅
To be a bit fair, if any of them are multilingual, having a cross-language conversation isn't all that hard, and many will mix vocabulary whenever they feel like it.
I would love to also see the reverse of this video's premise: good examples of tech in media. Itd be really interesting to see LTT and friends react to how accurate is a show like Mr.Robot or Person of Interest, where the show is at least trying to be accurate to real IT systems.
The NCIS scene where she says "I'm being hacked" is so bad, but the emotion it captures is very accurate to how I felt when I realized my email and GBoard were hacked. The chaos was all internal, but it was a fight.
The space force one is legendary Can't tell you how many times I was doing an assignment, playing a game or just doing shit on my computer before getting abruptly shut down by a magnificent windows update which if (according to microsoft) isnt installed within 3 femtoseconds of its release, my current non-updated windows install will release gonorrhoea into every orifice of my apartment block and my small hometown within a matter of minutes
@@RECURSIVE_MEMORY_LOGIC Lucily my company doesn't have a policy that stops you from erasing your system but still I feel your pain. There is no mallware for windows worse than windows
5:50 Shit like that happens because producers or directors say "that doesn't look 'techy' enough, where's the wires? Get something with wires hanging out of it!"
The 255 bit joke was fantastic; for anyone who doesn't understand it, it is based on how numbers are stored in programs, 255 is the highest an 8 bit number can go as it has a maximum number of values (256). A lot of times you can run into limitations and bugs based on how numbers are stored in computers, for example in lighting DMX is an 8 bit number so on one channel you can only have 256 brightness steps before running into limitations - this can be solved by combining 2 8 bit numbers together or in programming just building it with a higher limit.
THIS. I was quite disappointed the editors didn't get that, just learn some binary and you'll start seeing 16, 128, 256, 512 and 1024 way more often...
@@arianamirgholami9555I want to say we've seen them do a sub zero cooler and windows did report a negative. If you take an 8 bit number and treat it as signed you get -128 to +127
The editors are not anyways the most tech savvy of people. Knowing how to use Premiere effectively and understand why we have "unusual" numerical limits on some fields are not always important to the same person.
"look at that spread" I mean that be one argument that FF is set in an alternative universe, where a minigun with 1 meter long barrel on a mount got more spread than a saw off shotgun
Also lets say props to you guys, there been so many groups who have tried to copy this format without any shout out back to Corridor Crew for the inspiration. Thank you for doing it right!
More please, this was great! I'd enjoy your takes on Mr. Robot, Silicon Valley, Halt and Catch Fire, Sneakers, Hackers, Swordfish. It would also be interesting to revisit old productions and see how well they've aged - The Net comes to mind here, I remember thinking how fake it was to order pizza online when it came out, but now that stuff seems trivially common, it was almost prophetic.
Silicon Valley is so accurate, I still find myself thinking of some scenes from it when I see certain pieces of tech news. Perhaps the biggest thing I'm reminded of though isn't actually a scene in the show, but how Mike Judge had had lunch with some of these fuckawful tech execs, and they're like, "Yeah, you did a really good job tearing apart [insert opposition here]. They really deserved it!" Not knowing or maybe even ignoring the fact that Mike was putting ALL of them on the firing line. EDIT: Found the 2019 interview. The full quote from these tech companies (as quoted back by Mike) is, "That’s great how you make fun of people who claim they’re making the world a better place. But let us show you how we’re really making the world a better place."
@@matsv201 I don’t think so, even with a .38 the temporary cavity is pretty significant and at such close range I think it could easily break a bone. Obviously there’s many other factors, but for the sake of argument it’s definitely possible.
You could do a whole episode like this JUST covering films and TV shows using "Zoom and enhance" in detective/investigative context. Yes with AI you can technically now improve the quality and resolution of a low quality picture, but that is only educated guess work and isn't going to just create evidence out of nowhere. You could then wrap it up with the zoom and enhance scene from Red Dward, which is a very funny parady specifically on this.
Creating evidence out of nowhere would open some legal shenanigans. Some lawyer tried a different kind of computer trick to help out a case he was taking but it got him into trouble. Basically he asked ChatGPT to find some legal cases that would be relevant to his clients, but the program gave him cases were completely made up on the spot. He didn't know they were made up at the time, and tried to use those fake cases for his clients defense in court.
There actually is ammunition specifically designed to disable vehicles. They're usually shotgun rounds and they're designed to cause major damage to coolant hoses, air intake tubing, and vacuum hoses, which would reduce the vehicle's power and cause it to overheat. This isn't an instantaneous process, though, it'll still take at least a minute or two to disable the vehicle.
@@ElectroDFW An EMP might stop newer car that relies heavily on the computer, but most cars just default to stock air/fuel ratios if various electronics quit working. And since the 12V power for the car is generated mechanically via alternator, it'd probably be fine. You might get a misfire in the two or three cylinders that were supposed to fire when the EMP went off, but that wouldn't kill the engine.
Check out Devs. They had the most realistic "techy" scene I've ever seen. A dude just removes the wifi chip from a laptop, super simple but what impressed me was the fact that it was actually a smart thing for the character to do in that moment.
On that regard, I'd like to bring attention to Person of Interest. They didn't do the most realistic, but they did a good job showing something that's possible and correct. For example, the commands that they used in the terminals to "hack" the things were actual real commands that you'd run if you already have physical access to the devices.
@@aaronplays_ The Matrix had legit uses of the tools nmap, sshnuke and ssh when hacking the power grid. While 'sshnuke' doesn't actually exist, there was an exploit in SSH around CRC32 that was used in the real world to compromise systems.
@@scott2100 IIRC, the line was "it's overclocking", so I interpreted it as the Machine trying to OC the hardware. If the Machine was capable to start transferring itself from the briefcase on its own, then it's certainly capable of doing that
The stupid thing about the "Bone Virus" is that while it's possible for "accidental" vulnerabilities to happen (though pretty much any of that data should be properly contained and sterilized to prevent it, accidents can happen) they sort of imply in the episode that the virus was "planted" in the bones which is just wildly impossible. Stuff like ">start counterstrike" is dumb, but more forgivable since it's a reference, but this is a good example of "forced pandering" and its pitfalls. Frankly the best "counterstrike" is to literally cut the connection off, the fact is they shouldn't really need to do a full shut down of the server to prevent access... but instead "nuke it" is pretty easy for americans to understand I guess. Code written on top of another code is a relatively safe way to explain it to people without too much jargon so I'd give them the pass on that, the IP's being fake is totally fair, the fact is if they had a single "real" IP in it, ARG detectives would basically DDOS it trying to get details about the next season or something. Bluetooth is a pretty easy short hand for wireless signals, most people that don't understand that it's a branded technology think that ALL wireless connections are either Wifi or Bluetooth, so I understand people making that mistake... (I've seen people call wireless charging "Bluetooth charging") but it's the kind of mistake that doesn't really have value, it's not "easier" to explain a wireless connection as Bluetooth when you can just say "wireless" and be more accurate while getting the same point across... unless you're getting paid to say Bluetooth. I have no comment on the "meme" scene really, honestly the trope about hackers typing at mach 6 is probably one of the most boring things people get wrong. The only thing about that scene that still bothers me is that... he definitely unplugs the monitor, MAYBE he pulls the plug on the entire power strip, but even then... the information being stolen isn't being kept on a server somewhere? I do like how this show trends towards the intention of making REALLY dumb "mistakes" (like 2 people 1 keyboard) but is doing it on purpose (much like they do when they step into other "professional" territories) and the fact that the old guy pulls the plug on it is kind of the obvious answer to "i'm being hacked" which shows they DO actually know SOMETHING when they wrote this. Dell probably paid top dollar to be on that desk to be the "god's eye" btw, this is the things I notice. There's a decent chance they have to be very careful how much they get accurate with this stuff because of that sponsorship, something to keep in mind when you DO see some of these mistakes, it's very likely stipulations or directions for branded content. Space force is a comedy, I can forgive the inaccuracy of group policy protection or the fact that he's probably got 10 computers he's logged into CURRENTLY to go and do the calculations on if he actually needed to because the point of the scene is F*Micro$oft. Yeah, the Federal Department of Incessant Federal Redundancy's is crazy. I mean yeah, I can forgive not knowing where a motorcade is in a big city, information on it might not have been shared about it properly and I get that. Otherwise their universe is so ridiculous that it's hard to believe that they don't have magic powers, rendering all of our understanding of their technology completely useless.
I recommend checking Person of Interest, the whole show is centered about computers, and I think they did a good job accurately representing them, but maybe I'm remembering wrong.
they did fairly good job but honestly outside the SciFi AI bits i cant say there are some overly bad or good bits it is pretty neutral honestly but bringing more attention to POI is always good.
@@bigpod the show had its focus spread across doing everything plausibly, i.e.: the crime-drama and forensic parts look plausible too, so overall they did a good job.
Well this is convenient news, that's one less component you have to buy and make room for in a ITX. Do they mention what the wattage and capacity of the new "power drives" are, I can use one that's 1200 and 4TBs.
Fun fact: The transport traffic monitoring systems actually DO sniff out Bluetooth MAC addresses as most cars have it broadcasting. They then compare the same MAC address for next time it's detected to figure out the average travel time over that distance.
Correct. There used to be a writeup over at Houston Transtar that describes how this technology works. It will first try to detect electronic tolling tags and use the broadcast serial number as the tracker. If that wasn't available, it will look for all bluetooth MAC addresses and compares them to a database to see if that one has been active on the network within a certain amount of time. The cycle repeats for the next transponder.
