Notes for season 3 episode 6, “More Praematura“
01:09 A mysterious US-specific organisation is using SVoIP for a conference, and the Tor network for voting on resolutions. The Machine can hear the decoded SVoIP and precisely geo-locate all of the voters using Tor… which is a bit “you had one job” for both? So I guess this is the revolutionary privacy group again?
(Although having said that, while most crypto in the show is broken in real-time by plot-necessity-driven attacks, there’s no reason to assume the “Machine Point of View” is always based on real-time information. The Machine seems to experience the past and present without distinction, so the glimpses we see may be based on information received at a later point.)
01:56 The spartan accommodation of Shaw, juxtaposed the hoarder den we see Harold in, are both situations I have familiarity with – the first being a reaction to the second.
02:01 I mostly recognise Kirk Acevedo as Charlie from Fringe
04:00 “Taser confetti” are tiny paper disks called AFIDs that contain the serial number of the cartridge, and will fluoresce under certain lights. There’s about 30-40 per cartridge, too many to quickly remove after firing. Reese knows what they are, but doesn’t bother to keep one to aid the investigation, though?
09:56 Finch tries to retrieve data from the flash drive destroyed in the microwave, and managed to get an email fragment. This tells me that the drive wasn’t using an encrypted filesystem, bad Opsec for that hacker.
13:39 I don’t usually read all of the fake names that get put on-screen, but I did notice that one of the other self-storage (Store-it-4ever) customers is Drew Goddard, a writer on Lost and Alias.
14:22 Finch uses in-world Wikipedia, Knowtionary (previously seen in season 2), to look up John Glover and Samuel Miles.
15:10 It’s hard for me to tell how much of Root and Shaw’s barbed banter is actually weird flirting.
15:13 A thermal lance made out of spaghetti definitely seems like something the writers had seen on YouTube.
18:19 Ok, sure the guy carries a UV floodlight for his work. But how often has that proven useful in identifying next-of-kin?
20:00 I note the Darknet hacker forum/chan uses OCR-A, because of course it does.
24:31 The black site CIA agent offers up a little exposition that they can indefinitely interrogate prisoners on US soil provided they move them between locations every 72 hours. The encrypted radio prop he has on his belt isn’t a transmitter, it’s a Uniden Bearcat scanner UBC125 – what’s known as a Nascar scanner, for fans listening to crew communications.
26:28 One point of having a running key cipher based on public material is that it doesn’t need to be hidden – so hiding the book can potentially draw attention it. The book used in the running key cipher is an actual book: The American Revolution: A Concise History, by Robert Allison.
28:36 “I’ve located a copy online.” Did Finch buy an ebook, or just engage in some casual book piracy?
29:37 We get some backstory to “Vigilance”, the American Revolution-themed privacy group. Apparently it wasn’t originally a violent group, until Collier influenced people toward more direct action.
28:16 Laskey hands Carter an Anthora.
42:23 Root is locked in a “Faraday Cage” – i.e. there’s something like a chain-link fence around the room. I blame that scene in Enemy of the State for this. The Enemy of the State script refers to a “copper wire mesh”, which useful for a room-sized Faraday Cage since it would be oxygen-permeable. But, for artistic or practical reasons, they used widely-spaced links (ie holes larger than 4cm). The blocking effectiveness of Faraday Cages is dependent on the size of its holes compared to the wavelengths it needs to block. If you can see holes with a diameter of more than, eg, 2cm it’s not going to block the communications frequencies that Root might use.
And now we’re, more-or-less, halfway through the series.