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Mr. Robot

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98 pointsdoppp68 comments

I just saw the pilot yesterday, and aside from having a really cool storyline, the tech/lingo is surprisingly accurate. I don't want to hype it too much based off 1 episode, but the whole show feels very Dexter-esque.

The trailer turned me off with the usual "BEEP BEEP COMPUTER THINGS ARE HAPPENING" foley work. Do they avoid that in the episode?

You would never know it from the trailer, but honestly aside from a short convo about Gnome/KDE it's spot on. They got tor, DDOS, networking, linux, file systems, etc all correct I couldn't believe what I was watching.

I don't know if they hired good consultants, or if the TV networks are finally beginning to quit watering down the tech in their shows.

On top of that, the guy they have playing the main character is a totally convincing (yet definitely dramatized) portrayal of a security engineer/hacktivist living in the Lower East Side.

I didn't get what the 'astu' command he used several times was for.

Also as was pointed out to me by another viewer - not sure how the main character expected to hide that .dat file by chmodding it to his user id. The file was held in root's HOME folder, so anything in there should be accessible only to root anyway, and root is going to be able to see any file from any user.

But I'm being a pedant and I thought it was an excellent pilot that I hope they continue. It should be compulsory viewing for the screenwriters of CSI: Cyber.

I have to confess that I did pause what I was watching and start googling what `astu` was, glad to see I'm not alone in that.

maybe the astu command was a wrapper over docker? or something like it.

Lol, here I am googling 'astu' as well after watching the show.

But @MarcScott - remember, you can read a file in a directory that you dont have +r on if you know the filename, as long as you have +x to change into that dir ;)

wrong -- they didnt get tor correct. when he states the exit node in tor would lead to discovering his hidden service for his CP -- access to hidden services does NOT require an exit node

check out anonymous' unmasking of CP hidden services. they had to deploy multiple relay nodes to find the service so that one would eventually become a guard node...

clarity-- Ron's CP hidden service/server

Honestly, the only reason I watched the episode (just now) was that I got linked this clip [0] earlier today. Didn't know it was this show back then, recognized it now. But I have to agree, the lingo is acceptable, although not really perfect or good. I.e. Tor is unsecure because apparently if you control the exit node you can track the origin, which is obviously not true. But hey, they talk about Tor and exit nodes in one sentence that almost makes sense, so that's pretty good, apart from me feeling that claiming Tor isn't secure in a TV show is kind of a campaign...

Between creating a GUI in visual basic to track an IP address [1] and reality I'd say it's kind of in the middle.

But it's not "BEEP BEEP COMPUTER THINGS ARE HAPPENING".

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQM5fU7V-MM

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkDD03yeLnU

Does it bother anyone else that he doesn't seem to be using gnome even when they talk about him using it?

yeah, they had me until he clicked on the search button with his mouse.....yeah, his mouse. who the hell does that? It's just not rhetorical, is there any one out here that clicks the search button on google instead of hitting enter right after they typed?

Also is it realistic to require programmers to wear business casual at a top notch cybersecurity firm? Is this an actual thing?

edit: typo

For the confused: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ug4fRXGyIak

Thanks! I had no idea what that was supposed to be.

Unfortunately I can't watch the full episode though, because "this content is currently unavailable", presumably because it's a non-US IP. Not sure when they'll learn, I don't want to wait for a crappy german synchronisation that kills 90% of the jokes and I especially don't want to wait 6 month for it.

Welp, torrent it is I guess. Just don't accuse me of stealing.

If torrenting is "stealing" then so is this:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/27/Mus%C3%A9...

Torrents very rarely contain "full quality" media anyway. If you're watching a film at 720p and it was filmed in 4k you're getting less than half the film.

While deployed I used VPN service to access Netflix and other US IP only sites.

Much better than a different trailer i watched where he basically walked up to a dude in a coffee shop and revealed the dude was running a server containing triple digit terabytes of child porn...

Irony isn't lost on those of us who are not USian (that's 95.5% of the world's population, last I checked), some of whom may feel compelled to take their first steps into the world of hacking (monkeying around with IP anonymizers, proxies, VPNs and all that, or going straight for the inevitable torrent) just to be able to watch that pilot episode. Way to go, dudes!

I am not a lawyer. But, if a program is not distributed in your part of the world officially, it's not supposed to be illegal to download from different source. After all, the company is not losing any business. So, why not torrent it?

The default settings on most bittorrent clients will cause you to seed the file you're downloading, so you're distributing unlicensed copies to people in USA or other places where the content is licensed and where piracy is against the law.

I am not aware of such a rule in any country's copyright law. If you don't own the rights, you may not make copies. Whether it's sold locally or not – unfortunately – doesn't factor into it. (However, in some countries purely downloading may generally be legal, but that rules out torrents.)

I'm not a lawyer either, but I'm pretty sure that copyright laws don't lose their effect just because something hasn't been released (yet) in your country.

If that were the case, then all pre-release bootleg copies would be legal.

There are copyright reciprocity agreements between specific sets of nations, but there is no universal copyright law.

Yes, that's why I referred to 'laws' (plural).

Have you come across any copyright law (in any country) where copyright does not apply just because the item has not been released in that country?

Well, there are 193 member nations in the UN, and 188 of them are members of the World Intellectual Property Organization, so I guess that means there are 5 countries that do not have any laws against violating intellectual property rights from other countries. Which ones? I don't know. I'm too lazy to compare the lists.

Bootleg copies are for advertisement only, that's why the put the warning signs everywhere on it. So, technically copying bootlegs wouldn't be legal.

Copyright is not an universal law and each country has its own definition of it. There are many countries where hollywood productions (movies or series) are not released, nor marketed at all. If not marketed, the product is not bound by the local copyright law. In that case why would the people of those countries be obliged to follow another foreign country's (US) law? Technically, people in those countries are not entitled to enjoy the hollywood productions at all?

TV producers attempt to instill fear in order to hook viewers into watching it.

So they are using a TV show to make money to try to climb the ladder to the 1% if they aren't already there themselves.

Seems to just be a viral marketing site, but I'm still hoping there's some kind of Alternate Reality Game that we just haven't discovered yet!

We're all <frauds>. The show has a realistic depiction of social anxiety but an unrealistic depiction of heroism. There's darkness in all of us.

"I see you're running GNOME" snippet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQM5fU7V-MM

No openbox? Scrubs.

This was the only "tech" part that I found cringe-worthy. I was able to watch the rest of the show without jumping out of my seat and shouting "That's not how this works, that's not how any of this works."

Why was it cringe-worthy?

It just didn't seem like a natural conversation. We all have out favourite desktop manager, but we wouldn't talk about it in that fashion.

Depending on who you're talking with, that might not be exactly true. Honestly, I've seem flamewars that were on the levels of emacs vs. vim. So I actually found this to be one of the more belivable scenes. Quite in constrast to the Tor scene at the beginning.

I think an emacs vs. vim convo between them would've been more believable.

Maybe the point was to make the scene awkward?

Yeah it felt like it was more about the guy trying to find some excuse to assert his dominance ('what you do is not magic to me'). Which I thought was clever because it's exactly what I imagine a 'geek' evil manager would do. Part of what makes management manageable to me is that what I do is voodoo to them, so it gives me some leverage.

It's kind of weird, because people I know would have opinions about KDE vs Gnome and they didn't say anything exactly wrong, but I've never heard anyone ever talk about it like that.

I agree, they should have done Distros, i.e. "Oh, you run Debian? I'm a SUSE guy myself". I have never once talked to anyone about the window manager nor would I comment on it.

Now that would be unrealistic.

You can't really guess which distro someone is using just by glancing over their screen for a second.

You can tell which DE they are using but not distro, except in the case of Unity and Pantheon, those are mostly used with their respective distros. People don't usually have output of cat /etc/os-release on the screen easily visible for people passing by to see.

There isn't that much visible difference between distros if you aren't working as root.

"Oh, you run Gnome, is that Debian? I'm a SUSE guy myself"

that would be something credible, but hey they are getting really close!

FWIW I've basically had the conversation seen in the show, albeit with a friend, not a stranger. He was running XFCE because it was the default in Debian, and I was running KDE (have been for twelve years). So I found the exchange at least plausible. I think it boils down to the fact that, some people find DE quite uninteresting (unlike editors), while others have strong feelings about them.

Very cool storyline but the excessive voice-over can be a little grating. Fight club meets Hackers meets Men in Black

Here is the full episode (without the hoops) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JpxvvnWvffM

Fight Club is spot on. If the Mr Robot doesn't turn out to be a facet of the protagonists mind, I'll be very surprised.

interestingly, when the psuedo 'irc' connection is created, the user's ip address looks to be intended to be the source address..but because someone forgot that there's an akamai proxy in the middle (and didn't adjust for X-Forwarded-For or whatever), the ip you actually get is the akamai ip (its also in the source)

   <script>
    var USER_IP = '23.62.236.92';

Was curious since the ip appeared real, but wasn't mine.

I like that the kind of text used in this... marketing website (?) could easily fall under the new definitions of terror proposed by e.g. US and UK governments...

And a fun little easter egg; the undocumented "420" command.

I found the IP addresses shown in that episode during the DDoS attack on evil corp. somewhat entertaining - 155.334.31.97, 155.264.991.875, 155.644.22.673,......

For a split second, I thought, I learned them wrong...

Hollywood and the like early on learned to not put real phone numbers into movies etc. Putting in non-functional ip addresses are just as sensible, especially when some teen can point a DDOS at it in a second.

RFC 5737 - IPv4 Address Blocks Reserved for Documentation [1] would be a good fit for use in TV series and movies.

[1]: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5737

The anarchy stuff is tiring though. Again with the whole evil corp stuff and framing the top guy. Why?

Just because the girl was removed from the meeting isn't reason enough to start attacking a company.

I bet you are fun to watch movies with.

Yes, I am.

I also like capitalism and free enterprise and find it frustrating that the show went from somewhat qualified vigilantism of actual bad guys to a downright idiotic "free the world" scenario by taking down a corporation employing lots of innocent people because a women was bad in a meeting.

I doubt you really think our protagonist decided to frame the CTO of Evil Corp because his girl friend was "bad in a meeting." That was the CTO's supposed reason for getting her removed from the meeting. Our hacker was on the edge anyway and made the decision to fight Evil Corp because he saw what an a-hole the CTO really was. The Evil Corp CTO was rude, clearly sexist and thew his weight around as a way to demonstrate his dominance. These were the decision factors for this anti-social hacker. Besides, just because a corporation employs lots of people does not mean they shouldn't be punished for doing great wrong, even to the point of dissolving said company. This is a TV show anyway.

How as he clearly sexist? The girl didn't know anything and was speaking out of her ass and wasting everybody's time.

So main guy frames CTO because he's an asshole? Nice. Main guy is also asshole to lots of people, in addition to the crazy drug-addict vigilante thing messing with other people's lives. Also no details that corporation is actually doing great wrong, seems like they're just doing what normal companies do, which is to grow and be profitable.

Enjoy the show. I know it's fiction. However, I don't think it's very good, mostly because this whole anarchy angle is just crap to begin with.

Best line from the pilot, "I'm an executive. I mean why am I even running Linux?"

Full pilot episode for those interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JpxvvnWvffM

Correction: for a small minority of those potentially interested, see my previous comment. For everyone else: welcome to the world of the hacking underdogs :)

"Current Balance 197,455.64 Last Statement Balance 196,955.64 Minimum Payment Due 500"

I think they have it backwards, plus it looks like she lucked out with a zero interest loan.

So... did anyone else try to rm -fr /?

Cool site, but I'd rather be informed on how to join the 1%, instead of being grouped with the 99% yet again.

From a probability standpoint, there is more to gain for you as an individual when you improve the lives of the 99% then to find ways to join the 1%.

Mr. Robot still using init...

Like me, he is probably playing cautious before jumping on the systemd train. #butidontwannaupgradetorhel7!!!!

I registered as "doyouthinkimfuckingstupid@mailinator.com".

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