Notes for season 5, episode 1, “BSOD“
Ok, final season. Samaritan has full access to the country’s digital infrastructure, has hundreds of human operatives, has wiped out most of the people who threaten to disrupts it, and can recognise (but not identify) Finch, Reese, and Root (as “enemy combatants”). The Machine only exists in a highly compressed form on experimental RAM chips installed in a bulletproof briefcase powered by a piezoelectric battery.
02:35 Reese hijacks a ride-share. “Dude, this is my Uber.” Uber went live in New York in 2011, the same year that Person of Interest debuted, but I think this is the first time it’s been name-checked, instead preferring iconic yellow cabs. Reese snatches the rider’s phone. “Five stars if you hit it.”
09:01 Finch laments the current state of the AI controlled city. “It’s everywhere. Pervasive. Surveillance, misinformation, propaganda. And they can activate almost anyone.”
09:45 “Damage to a single bit to the code of the machine in it’s currently compressed state would equal terra-bytes of lost data.” Ok, fine. Hyperbolic, maybe? Single-bit errors are expected to occur in memory and storage. If Caleb’s company is producing memory chips and compression algorithms that can be wiped out by stray photons, they’re doomed.
12:00 2006 Flashback-Finch is an AI doomer, and decides to constrain The Machine to a 24 hour period of learning before being reset.
13:52 The machine assesses the passengers on the subway car (by “news subscriptions”, “violent felonies”, “citizen’s arrests”) to tailor fake alert messages to be sent to their phones, in order to restrain Root. Some of this is reminiscent of how the AI manipulates people in the 2008 movie “Eagle Eye”.
25:10 In the electronics recycling facility, Root walks past a pile of 2006-2010 Mac Pros – seemingly the apex of the “large, heavy, metal” form of the personal computer. (Around 18kg, although the current Mac Pro is only about 1kg lighter.)
25:57 The Russian hacker has a team recovering data from recycled hard-drives for identity theft purposes. Hopefully not as large a potential issue, at least since the transition, in earnest, to full-disk encryption in Windows 8.1 (2013) and OS X 10.7 (2011). But I do remember tales of criminals buying second hand photocopiers in bulk, removing their disks, and pulling confidential documents from the persistent copy buffers.
26:10 The Russian hacker reveals that the devices they’re checking have updated firmware that introduce malware on every bootup. He immediately assumes it’s the NSA.
27:20 Man, Finch keeps yanking at cables and getting electrocuted. Maybe he needs to invest in some insulated gloves?
29:00 “I feel like I left the Parallax Corporation sand entered The Twilight Zone.”
37:15 Root says they’re going to need to find around 300 PlayStation 3 consoles in the electronics recycling facility. While they were indeed “last gen” (the PS4 had been released over two years previously) consoles tend to keep some of their secondhand value for the first few years of being superseded, rather than being dumped.
39:25 It’s not explicitly stated, but we assume that Detective Soriano is killed by Samaritan by way of some kind of hack of his pacemaker. Concerns about the security of implanted medical devices had been voiced for years. In 2013 Barnaby Jack was scheduled to give a presentation on how to remotely attack pacemakers, but was sadly found dead a week before.
39:42 “It would have been easier just to steal Watson.” IBM Watson would have been commonly recognised as a supercomputer name since its appearance on the Jeopardy! game show in 2011.
39:45 Building supercomputers out of PlayStation 3 consoles is a thing that happened in real life. In 2008 a Swiss university built a cluster of 200 PS3 consoles to work on cryptographic problems. Sony removed the ability to boot Linux, and therefore join a cluster, by a PSN-delivered firmware update in 2010 (I suspect to avoid some of the regulatory issues surrounding supercomputer exports) so it’s unlikely that many discarded machines could be used in this way in 2016.
40:01 Root picks up on Finch now using a female pronoun to refer to The Machine.
42:00 Wait, are there canisters of liquid nitrogen just sitting around on New York streets? Turns out, yes. But they’re used to pressurise and keep dry the phone cables, not to cool them down.