Notes for season 1 episode 2 “Ghosts”
02:30 A hitman takes instruction via a public payphone. Person of Interest loves New York payphones, reflecting both older technology and shared public infrastructure (like abandoned libraries, subways). In reality New York had started pulling out payphones in 2015 before the series had finished. The final one was removed in May 2022, replaced by LinkNYC kiosks, those sensor-surveillance-advertising monoliths (known as “BT Street Hubs” in London).
17:00 Reese discovers the target is using underground card skimmer units and sadly not the cool Terminator 2 ATM jackpotting method.
22:14 Finch traces the IP address “258.133.87.980” – Person of Interest frequently uses the style of fake IP addresses by using numbers larger than 255, which is just painful for network people to catch. Ideally fiction should be using the RFC 5737 documentation blocks as equivalent to phone numbers starting “555”. Or, even better, the documentation blocks for IPv6.
(Fun fact: one of the IP addresses you see on-screen in Hackers (1995) is the Demon Internet dial-up static IP address used by a designer on the movie.)
30:00 Flashback to 2007 and Finch’s office is now full of server racks whirring away. This is another production design cliche I find painful. Each server in each rack has at least one fan running, and they’re not built to run silently. All those fans are pushing warm air out of the rack so, unless the room has serious air conditioning, it’ll be a sauna. Server rooms are generally very loud and quite cold. Not the ideal place to put a software engineer’s desk… but production designers on TV and movies keep doing it.