Notes for season 2 episode 13, “Dead Reckoning“
02:07 Finch pulls a bunch of fake books to construct the social security number, among them “Debugging the Mind: A Guide to Information Ethics”
09:39 I believe the game being played in the disk-seller’s place is 2012’s “Far Cry 3”.
09:41 The disk is plugged into what looks like a USB-SATA interface, probably an Icy Box IB-110. The disk looks like a 3.5in unit consisting of a smaller 2.5in laptop HDD mounted on to a big heat sink. It looks fictional, but this was an actual product – the Western Digital VelociRaptor HLFS – something that could only exist in the brief window where disk temperature was a pressing issue but SSDs were still too expensive in high capacities.
The seller places the drive in a black Pelican case (Peli 1120) similar to the one I used to carry off-site LTOs in. Sometimes I find myself considering making lifestyle changes such that would justify having a number of Pelican cases.
13:30 Uncle Decima shows a different “Ordos laptop” than the Toughbook seen in an earlier episode, but even within the reality of the scene, it’s just a prop.
18:43 The building’s domain 780mercer.org is currently unregistered.
18:50 The shell company’s corporate report is dated Jan 2013, and this episode aired in Jan 2013. But since the last few episodes (with Reese in prison) need to have taken place over a short number of days, it’s still late 2012.
28:42 The DoD memo indicated the development of a malware, like Stuxnet or Flame, called Cygnus, that can be delivered via mp3 players.
29:35 Based on a brief shot, I think the servers hosting the cyberweapon are based on a Supermicro 1U chasis.
30:24 The government is investing millions in a project wholly located at the top of a large New York building with no backups? Was there a meeting where someone pointed out a very obvious failure state for this plan?
31:16 Obligatory NMAP screenshot.
37:22 “All phones have a universal unlock code based on their model and the unique IMEI number.” This is sort of true, but an unlock code that’s derived from the IMEI is used to unlock the phone from a specific network, not the code used to unlock the phone’s interface.
39:48 If I were developing a user interface for a suicide vest, I’d avoided making. the touch target for “Cancel” right next to “Trigger”. Touch targets are unreliable enough as it is, but this is designed to be for a device strapped to a non-stationary object. I hope someone left an issue on the suicide bomb software’s GitHub project.
42:15 Apparently the next-gen malware is coded in Visual C++. The visual map of the drive is seemingly taken using Daisy Disk.