Notes for season 2 episode 9, “C.O.D.“
02:30 Finch carries a credit card that puts the taxi’s information terminal into admin mode, giving him access to the onboard camera. A reminder that every cab conversation is in the presence of the police.
03:59 Even in the context of the show, the intensive surveillance of random cab passengers seems a bit much.
05:09 I think it’s a production error, but Carter’s Inbox has has a “forwarded joke” email from Rhonda – Fusco’s date who she met for a minute in a previous episode. Maybe she just get’s Cc’d on Fusco’s non-work stuff? (We see the same email in Fusco’s inbox later in the episode.)
05:09 You’d think location logs for taxis would be harder to obtain? (“The TLC” is the New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission, not the RnB group.) But then again, 10 months later someone just got them via a FoIA request.
05:37 Carter looks at a different newspaper than the end of “Bury the Lede”, but the other stories match that issue (with the same “Font Wars” filler text).
06:03 We fly through the Machine’s internal organograms of violent criminal groups. One is marked “The Council”, which I assume is a fictional crime group rather than a municipal government.
11:28 tampaenquirer.com currently unregistered
14:56 Carter drives around with the previous day of crime reports (marked as CompStat) attempting to correlate it against the taxi GPS log. Something that you’d imagine would have be done previously at a desk.
15:08 “I was ten six.” Carter is using the NYPD radio code for “on standby”. (Ten-codes weren’t standardised, and can have different meanings in different cities.)
15:43 Agent Vickers is played by Reiko Aylesworth – Michelle from 24.
17:08 Billionaire engineer genius Finch still has to spend some percentage of every episode attending to the needs of his employee’s dog.
17:19 The dead Russian hacker, Pushkov, was apparently suspected of performing DDoS attacks.
18:10 The Estonian agent gives a series of protracted instructions to the cab driver. Which, honestly, is something I ended up doing myself to prevent cabbies from logging my home address in their sat-nav.
23:00 The computer in the computer shop’s backroom is a 2004 Dell OptiPlex GX280 MT (with the USB ports at the bottom) which seemed ubiquitous in the offices of new internet companies in the mid-late 2000s. By 2012 they’ll usually have had Linux installed on them to run as ersatz servers.
23:40 The idea of locating a missing laptop via a beacon wasn’t outlandish in 2012, “Find My Mac” was already a thing in Oct 2011.
23:58 “He’d probably go to the darknet. Try to sell it on Silk Road or one of those black market forums.” By the time this episode aired in the UK, Silk Road had already been shut down.
28:00 Yet again the government compilation of personal data becomes the threat itself. This time, a leaked version of the (semi-fictional) “Homeland Security Automated Identification Database”.
28:39 Finch finds d3mn8 on “Darknet IRC”, or as we used to call it “IRC”.
29:13 The IP camera in d3mn8’s decoy location is a Sony SNC-RZ25N.
30:25 Despite Fusco greasing up the cctv lenses in the actual episode, he can clearly be seen on surveillance footage of the event?
31:10 Looks like they accidentally used a valid IP address for the Pool Hall, although 182.19.236.217 is currently located in Singapore.
33:49 Pushkov’s laptop is a 2011 Alienware M14x. Beyond the aesthetics, there is a plausible reason for hackers using Alienware – GPUs (in this case a GeForce GT 555M). The laptops are built for gaming, but the GPUs have another use for hackers – hash cracking.
40:00 Ordonez is reunited with his family from Cuba. It’s not people-trafficking when the US government clandestinely does it.
41:17 Subtitles read “[speaks German dog command]” somehow missing the multiple times it’s referred to as Dutch.