Notes for season 5 episode 7, “QSO“
04:38 Root used to be in cyber, but now she has retrained as a ballerina? I’ve never been backstage at a ballet, but do they usually have surveillance cameras in the changing rooms? Also, Root’s alias (Petrina Durov) is probably another gender-swapped tech reference – this time to Peter Durov, the Russian tech entrepreneur who, when this season was filmed, had been pushed out of his Russian social site VK and had launched the Telegram messaging platform.
06:58 The EMF reader prop is based on a TECPEL EMF-701 Electromagnetic Field Tester.
09:25 The 1960’s wall-mounted radio intercom glimpsed in Shaw’s room is a rare NuTone Model 2067 in eggshell white.
10:00 The DJ is sitting at a “Radio Systems RS-12D” broadcast mixing console. The DJ gives the station frequency as “AM 520”, when this episode aired in 2016 it seemed AM radio was at the beginning of a decline when electric cars removed AM from their radios due to interference from the car’s own engine.
11:46 The DJ mentions a technological singularity as a reason for a lack of evidence of advanced non-terrestrial life. The “technological singularity” is often believed to be triggered when an Artificial General Intelligence is capable of self-improvement, meaning technological advancement would no longer be constrained to a human timescale.
18:30 A monitor on the producer’s desk is, unsurprisingly, a Dell 2009W.
19:55 “I spent some time working at the phone company, let’s see if my login credentials still work.” Of course they do.
22:00 Samaritan is able to fake the voices of both parties being broadcast, which presumably is aided by the fact that radio presenters (and regular callers) provide a lot of samples from which concatenative synthesis can be used.
23:00 Obviously the MacGyver trick involving pulling rare-earth magnets out of computer hard drives is from an era when computer storage used moving parts. I don’t think I’ve bought a “spinning rust” drive since before 2018.
27:00 Root refers to “the Funtenna Hack”, which refers to information exfiltration by covert signals. The term comes from a talk given in 2012, but Samaritan is using a technique closer to a 2015 demonstration.