Notes for season 4, episode 7, “Honor Among Thieves“
01:13 Shaw is assisting a group of robbers cosplaying as Eliot from Mr Robot.
10:58 Root runs a “BSSID WiFi crack” and the output shows “B4b!5e84st14n” as the “WEP” password. WEP keys were usually expressed as 10 base-16 hexadecimal characters – i.e. 0-9 and A-F. Also, the use of RC4 meant that WEP was obsolete by 2003, and probably shouldn’t be found in the house of a rich tech guy in 2014.
11:38 “one tablet per student” is a clear allusion to the “one laptop per child” which was famous for it’s white and green “XO” laptop designs between 2006 and 2012. The project still exists, but now distributes more conventional black laptops running Ubuntu.
13:32 “McCauley’s crew in LA” is a reference to Heat (1995), and a little more subtle than naming your Spanish Thomas Crown, “Tomas Koroa”.
18:48 Ah, the “Fast Five” solution to safe cracking.
21:33 The actual CDC Marburg page at the time of air looked different from the one shown. There have been a number of news reports on Marburg in the last year, with a media now primed to treat any outbreak of anything as a potential future pandemic.
24:00 More 3D printers. The tablet project is using the Stratasys Dimension 1200 (from 2006).
29:21 ISA operators transporting their Dell monitors in Pelican cases.
31:58 Samaritan identifies a “gait mismatch” between Root and the legal secretary she’s posing as.
32:50 “I got a text offering me $3000 if I can fix your internet in the next five minutes.” Samaritan is able to create an impromptu gig economy to be it’s hands in the physical world.
37:45 Reese is wearing Aiden Pierce cosplay with his mask and iconic cap.
40:00 Finch has successfully destroyed the “free tablets for kids” scheme. But at least those kids won’t be subjected to algorithmic surveillance. Google launched “Google Classroom” in 2014, and in 2015 the EFF submitted a complaint to the FCC regarding the data collection done with the settings on Chromebooks provided in education.