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Comment by reactordev | Hacker News Reader

There’s a scene in Battlestar Galactica (2004) where someone asks Captain Adama why the Galactica doesn’t have networked computers. So the cylons can’t hack the ship…

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It's not just a scene; it's the whole premise of the setting. It's why the Galactica survived and the newer ships did not. It's why the new Vipers got wiped out and they had to pull the old ones out of mothballs.

In the pilot, the Galactica was literally being turned into a museum, and that's why they lived.

It was even worse: the Galatica was a museum ship, and it was being decommissioned!

No, GP is correct. In the pilot, the ship was in the process of being decommissioned from military use and converted to a museum. It wasn't already a museum prior to the events in the pilot (if that's what you meant -- maybe I'm not really sure what your comment was saying.)

I believe they were nearing completion and already had the ceremony when the Cylons attacked. It's been a while since I watched my favorite tv series.

I miss these kinds of shows. BSG, StarGate, Star Treks, FireFly. I'm sad that they went out of fashion and the genre has moved on to other concepts.

Only Expanse and The Orville compares in the past decade I guess.

Stargate is just one of those rare shows that (apart from, uh, certain episodes) aged incredibly well. I really miss optimistic television where people are competent at their jobs.

Even the whole "science person solves the problem under pressure after getting an insight" thing suddenly seems a lot more realistic now that LLMs have actually become good.

Firefly especially, for me.

Firefly…didn’t age well. A buddy said that to me and I scoffed. Rewatched a few years ago and kind of regret it.

Some individual moments/episodes are still great but most of it is very cringe inducing and/or didn’t age well as a “joke.” Knowing what we know about Adam Baldwin (and Whedon frankly but Baldwin is a special kind of gross) doesn’t help either.

The anti-hero shtick also really aged poorly. Mal overall just comes across as a narcissistic asshole who cosplays a thief with the heart of gold occasionally. The confederado angle also didn’t register to me back then because I was younger but now I don’t care for it.

I watched it recently for the first time and found it to be very good. I'd say it holds up well to todays shows.

I don't know why, but in my head Firefly as a whole occupies roughly the same spot as a boring Farscape episode.

It’s overhyped but for a lot of people like me it was pretty fresh and different. Strong banter dialogue too, got a lot of praise for people “talking like people.”

I somehow just recently discovered the whole series - and I did enjoy it, but yes, not because, but despite the main character being a "narcissistic asshole" most of the time. But it probably also helped that I did not took it too serious, nor do I know anything about Baldwin.

I get not taking things seriously but the show does ultimately take itself pretty seriously. Whedon just can’t let emotional beats breathe and breaks them up with wisecracks lol

Baldwin…well, he was one of the reasons gamergate became a thing, which is by itself bad enough but also hardly his only offense. He’s pretty awful. So knowing his “manosphere” proximity makes his act a little too real, like Spacey with American Beauty.

Shame too. Hero of canton (is that the episode name?) was pretty memorable and has a beautiful ending.

"the show does ultimately take itself pretty seriously"

Yeah it does, which is why I was not too sad, that there was not much more (and I did regret watching Serenity the movie), but that Baldwin is awful, well, fit's his character?

Apart from that, judging movies with my own set of ethical standards - there is not much I can watch, if taking things serious and be able to identify with the main characters.

Yeah, one of the Viper docks was a gift shop.

They even had to essentially recommission a Viper that was being used as an exhibit.

"What do you hear, Starbuck?"

nothing but the rain

Then get the cat in and grab your gun

There's also a scene where they do network the computers and are hacked nearly instantly.

I loved the writers giving every firewall its own LED indicator, so we knew exactly how far the toasters had got.

Sometimes I wonder if filmmakers have the right of it. They need to show what's going on in the computer to a distracted audience in a heartbeat. When they pull that off on screen, I wonder if us software devs should be taking notes.

Isn't that what dashboards are for? They may not look like simplistic LEDs, but being able to "see" what the automation is doing is something everyone that's ever made automation wants to do. It starts with making logs before migrating to live dashboards.

Its basically that staring at the log patterns in graph form or system stats you get a pretty good idea of what 'normal' looks like and anomalies stick out pretty quickly.

Though having a person interpretingthe degradation progress and relaying it to the rest of the team could be a usable scene.

This is what Grafana was made for...

A guy I went to high school with used to do that for a living. I have no idea what they call it, but it's basically theatrical UI, where the screen has to act and usually deliver a bunch of exposition.

SCADA? Like simplified GUI animations of the actual physical processes going on in a plant instead of just toggle switches, progress bars, etc?

e.g.

https://ubidots.com/blog/content/images/2024/10/siemens-sima...

I've always called it "tvOS" or "MovieOS". Like, "oh, a lot of flashing lights on tvos today!"

It would be a fun exercise trying to recreate a lot of the screens from movies and tv shows. "This is unix! I know this!"

I can't recall where I saw it, there's at least one company working on this issue specifically for nursing staff. Everything beeps in hospitals, but there's no rhyme or reason to it, so room call responses are delayed, serious alarms can be missed, etc.

IIRC, the company's idea is to create a harmonious sound bed when everything's fine, and make different kinds of "out of the norm" alerts use a variety of sounds so that nursing staff get more info about what's wrong before finding the thing thats sounding an alert and looking at its screen.

This company's goal is to ... change an aspect of hundreds of different million-dollar highly regulated machines made by dozens of different multi-billion-dollar worldwide companies? And somehow make money doing this? Good luck, I guess.

In real life, malware turns the MacBook camera on and off so fast that the user doesn't even see the LED light up.

Could this be resolved with a capacitor? LED can stay on for at least a second or two once the camera is off? Not sure on exact components but this feels solvable and only problem may be slim design of their laptops.

The LED doesn't prevent the privacy invasion, it just notifies you of the privacy invasion… and only if you were looking at it.

The physical shutter that other manufacturers offer, is the superior solution.

I'd prefer if they just gave us a physical shutter that we could open and close with our thumbs.

And yet, in real life, we have our grafana dashboards :)

but thanks to Baltar's firewalls and code obfuscation, just barely are able to escape after calculating the jump and having to literally wipe and reinstall all code on all systems.

Hollywood IaC.

Which was always pretty stupid. At best it means the Cylons can't hack the whole ship, just whichever part they exploited to gain access remotely in the first place. But really the Cylons would've needed exploits for each individual system anyway, since simply connecting them with wires shouldn't just do that. And unless those other systems are completely air gapped with no wireless or other access, it would be trivial for them to still gain remote access, or have one of their infiltrators provide a local connection of some kind. AFAIR that was never a plot point, which was odd.

> And unless those other systems are completely air gapped with no wireless or other access

That is exactly the canon.

I think it's genius to use this element of computer security in narrative fiction. But I think they still had comms across the ship. The cylons could still clone the captain's voice and have random crew members perform arbitrary tasks by directing people to do so over the ship's radio.

Most of the in-ship comms were 'old school' (in our terms) analogue devices. They actually had to pick up speakers. Internal speakers were wired, not radio.

> whichever part they exploited to gain access remotely

I think you missed the point of "no networking", you have to actually physically sit in front of the computer. There is no remote access.

I didn’t follow the whole thread. Just want to point out that over the last 10 years hacking air-gapped systems has been a primary objective. Hard drive clicks, keyboard clicks, CPU squeaks, speaker-to-speaker. Exactly what advanced adversarial AI would be specifically good at.

All those require cooperating machines and are at best very slow data exfiltration mechanisms.

Those do technically cross an air gap but don't they still require being really close to work?

“Close” in relative terms. It’s been a while and don’t remember, but I think one study concluded it could be done from across the street or through an office window, etc.

It may not sound very exciting, but if you’re the NSA or CIA and you want access to a HVT, then all of these options are on the table if the routine approaches haven’t been successful.

Have you watched the show because a lot of your assumptions are incorrect.

They are in space, so they're air gapped by definition. Oh... you mean "air gapped", not "air gapped". Sorry.

Does this mean we'll see new startups in the sneaker-net space?

Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurling down the highway. - Andrew Tanenbaum

I think it's one of the first two special episodes right at the beginning of the series, and it's the sole reason why the fleet could sustain evading the cylons

Great plot decice

this is the way

So say we all

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