
'Mr. Robot' may be fiction, but its hacking plots are all too real - gvb
http://www.recode.net/2016/9/20/12983780/mr-robot-may-be-fiction-but-its-hacking-plots-are-all-too-real
======
scrollaway
If you like Mr. Robot, you should watch Person of Interest.

POI is a pre-snowden series about a world "in which the NSA has a system which
spies on every american citizen in order to fight terrorism" (sounds
familiar?).

The show begins with the weak premise of "help us fight crimes we predict will
happen", but don't be fooled by its appearance of a run-of-the-mill CBS show.
Without spoiling it too much, I do want to say that by the end of Season 1, it
transitions from "monster of the week" to an extremely high quality science
fiction show, nearly invisibly.

I don't want to oversell it, but if you're reading HN it's very likely to be a
show that you will appreciate. And like Mr. Robot, it's one of the very rare
shows that has a lot of respect for tech and doesn't vomit gibberish on their
audience.

~~~
agentgt
My wife and I watched POI and as the show progressed the plot ideas got better
but the acting and dialogue took a nose dive.

At times the show with its dialogue became very CSI, NCSI, aka other CBS cop
crime crap. Reese and Ebbg's (Rot 13 name per spoiler avoidance request) one
liners became fairly irritating.

It also didn't help: <rot13> gurl ryvzvangrq bar bs gur orggre npgbef naq
punenpgref va gur fubj (Pnegre... V'z nyy nobhg xvyyvat znwbe punenpgref ohg
gurl unq orggre bcgvbaf) </rot13> (spoiler avoidance).

~~~
scrollaway
Could you edit out the name of that character, seeing as this is a watch
recommendation?

Edit: Thank you :)

~~~
agentgt
Thanks for the heads up. I Rot13 the spoiler material. which I felt was apropo
given the thread.

------
Demoneeri
I've watched S01 but I'm not sure I'll watch S02. The cliché about
dysfunctional people in IT is too much for me. I'm a normal person and I don't
have difficulties in dealing with other human beings.

Also the part about vilifying companies and loving big government is not my
cup of tea. At least in Person of Interest both were bad.

Last part, vilifying money as a medium of exchange is just absurd. Are they
expecting to exchange their computer services for eggs at the supermarket?

~~~
jonknee
> The cliché about dysfunctional people in IT is too much for me. I'm a normal
> person and I don't have difficulties in dealing with other human beings.

TV shows centered around normal people are really boring.

~~~
Unklejoe
Except Seinfeld, of course.

~~~
dikaiosune
Are normal people actually that mean and uncaring? It's not been my personal
experience.

~~~
Unklejoe
Well, I think the answer to that is going to vary a lot based on the personal
experiences of the person answering, so here's my take:

I can’t speak for everyone, but it’s been my personal experience that many
groups of friends partake in “shit talking” or “gossiping” when no one is
around.

This leads me to believe that many people can be uncaring behind closed doors
(which is what I think Seinfeld was meant to show, and which is why many
people could relate to the show).

------
agentgt
I'm going to play fan boy here. After almost finishing the second season I
have to say Mr. Robot is the best TV show I think I have ever watched. Even
better than Homeland.

The funny thing is if it didn't even involve hacking I would still consider my
favorite show. The psychodrama existentialism of the show is so good. The plot
is so damn good. The acting is so damn good.

Th music, the timing of title screen and the font used. I love it all.

~~~
romanovcode
I don't agree, before even reaching the middle of S01 it was pretty obvious
that what "twist" will be in the end. (Obv. hiding for spoilers)

~~~
enraged_camel
Yeah, not only that but it was also very unoriginal. Straight up lifted from
two particular movies in fact.

~~~
danso
But it's a sideshow, the show even plays the same music as a homage. To me
what makes it tolerable is that it accepts the twist as a matter of course and
jumps right into other interesting plots, including whatever the fuck is going
to happen tonight.

~~~
enraged_camel
I understand it was a homage. It just didn't make sense to do it as the main
twist.

I mean, if you're making a movie about an island zoo of dinosaurs, it's OK to
pay homage to Jurassic Park using dialogue or the composition of a specific
scene. But if the main plot of your movie turns out to be about dinosaurs
escaping their zoo... well, that becomes a bit too much, in my opinion.

~~~
danso
We'll have to see after tonight's episode, in which the episode seems likely
to break in such a way that makes the first season twist look weak in
comparison. I'm eager to see how the writing goes, but I'm afraid I'm going to
be disappointed as I was with how BSG went off the rails.

------
wcummings
They're at least self-aware, in one scene the fsociety crew is watching
"Hackers" and one of them comments "I wonder what will ruin the next
generations perception of hacker culture" or something like that.

Not my favorite rendition (full disclosure: "Hackers" is my favorite), but
they do really drive home the "otherness", which is the core of any "hacker
culture" story.

~~~
pawadu
I find the Australian mini series "The Code" much more realistic.

~~~
binarymax
That looks really interesting, thanks for the recommendation. Do you know off
hand if it is available on Netflix or Amazon?

~~~
lost_name
[https://www.justwatch.com](https://www.justwatch.com)

(not my site, just a handy tool)

~~~
pawadu
wow, that _was_ a handy tool!

------
danso
I love this show. Haven't been excited about a show like this since The Wire.
Not because it is "real" in the same way that The Wire is, but because it is
so fresh and challenging. There are points where things go wildly left-field,
but it's not predictable. Even the first season twist, which is fairly
predictable depending on what movies you've seen, is preceded and followed by
other twists.

The second season has veered quite dramatically from the first season, and
part of me misses the hacking-focused plots (particularly the realistic
handling of social engineering). But I can't fault the creator for avoiding
expectations, even if the show's pace feels slower (apparently he had both
seasons planned out before he started).

~~~
zbisch
(I tried to be vague to avoid spoilers but now fear my post makes no sense)

One of my favorite things about the twists though is that I feel like they
actually lay a lot of groundwork and foreshadow them very well. For example, I
think the twist before the main "first season twist" that you mention was
foreshadowed beautifully at the beginning of the episode. By the end of the
pre-opening credits scenes, I knew something was up.

Similar story this season. There were so many scenes that felt weird to me
(things weren't "matching") that I knew something was up. And as soon as that
twist was revealed, they had laid the background/groundwork for it so well
enough in season 1 that I immediately knew _why_ it was that way.

Edit: My point was that I've heard some people complain about the twist in
season 1 being predictable, but I don't think a "twist" being unpredictable is
always a good thing, sometimes it's shitty writing. Almost every time I'm
surprised by something in Mr. Robot, I had suspected something was up and
thought, "I should have seen that coming". It's almost like watching a really
good magic show: I know how a lot of tricks are done, I know they're going to
try to trick me, and I'm still surprised when they pull it off.

~~~
dvtv75
I had the first twist in the pilot. As soon as Elliot entered the ... club
rooms, I figured it out. I'm very good with patterns, and one thing that
annoys me is knowing how TV shows are going to end before they do. I had BSG
early on, Sixth Sense ("I'll bet he dies and we see a ghost. No, that's just
too obvious."), watched three episodes of the Mentalist and had the culprit in
the first five minutes of each episode - even within the first minute of the
first episode I saw. I'm almost at the point where I can quote some more
ordinary movies while I'm watching them. (That's not as odd as it sounds, it's
the patterns that are used to build each scene and the overall film that are
the giveaway, but it's more subconscious than deliberate.)

So where is Mr. Robot going?

Damned if I know. That's what I like about it. As you say, some of the scenes
were so odd that it was clear something was up - why is he watching the game
from the bench? Why were they so angry with Elliot, and why was the friend
such an influence on them? I didn't pick that one, although perhaps I should
have re-watched season 1 before starting 2. I don't think that was the big
twist, though, that came later - Juvgrebfr'f fhecevfr gung Ryyvbg qbrfa'g xabj
jung Cunfr 2 vf tvira gung vg'f uvf cebwrpg, naq nyy gur cbgragvny snyybhg
sebz gung. Vf Juvgrebfr hfvat Ryyvbg sbe uvf bja raqf? I think the other shoe
has yet to drop on that one.

I think that people who write it off as "just Fight Club" are hugely missing
the point - the narrator in that is just too reliable after we learn the
twist, and after all, Fight Club was just a backlash against the overall
commercial exploitation of the world at the time. Mr. Robot is about n
qryhfvbany cnenabvq fpuvmbcueravp jvgu n fbpvny nakvrgl qvfbeqre, jub unf n
zhygv-ynlrerq cyna. Jr'ir bayl frra gur Svtug Pyho cneg bs vg pbzcyrgrq, jung
ryfr vf pbzvat?

Really hanging out for the finale tonight.

------
3chelon
I would be interested to see if the downloads of Kali Linux have shown any
significant spike since Season 2.0 was released.

~~~
stuxnet79
One of the developers hosting Kali posted about it here once. Basically he
remembers one morning waking and seeing that traffic had spiked and he was
really puzzled about it. Up until he clued in to the fact that a certain
episode of Mr Robot (where Kali Linux figured prominently and was advertised
quite profusely) had been aired the previous night. So yes, there has
definitely been a spike in Kali Linux downloads over the course of the show.

~~~
3chelon
Excellent. I kind of thought it must be true. Suddenly everyone's a script
kiddie running aircrack-ng and no-one's home wifi is safe anymore!

------
atombath
Ignoring everything else, Mr. Robot builds a spectacular atmosphere, which is
an almost impossible task in television. This show is wonderful. I'd say it
competes with Game of Thrones on quality and it's my favorite show right now.

They get the technical details right enough to earn respect. Sometimes you
need to give artistic freedom to the writing as long as it doesn't devolve
into a graphic of Pacman eating data. Gives you some meaningless pride when
you see a protagonist empty a can of Pringles into the trash, knowing exactly
what they are doing.

If someone has a problem with the series, my natural reaction at this point is
that they're pretentious... it's not fair but imo really that's what all the
criticism has boiled down to:

You noticed the heavily telegraphed twist? Good job! Gold star for you!

You're going to criticize a show with such wonderful atmosphere building for
having long episodes? Wow, your time must be really important!

He uses the wrong text editor or Linux flavor? You must be a master, could you
please fix my iPad?

The characters are flawed or mercurial? Could you please elaborate on the
strengths of two-dimensional characters?

------
meira
I didn't watch second season yet, but first season isn't "too real" for me.
But it is still a good highly fictional show.

~~~
cmdrfred
I only watched a few episodes, but the whole "She needs to learn to hack in 24
hours" bullshit was a little too much for me. Everything she was doing could
have been a script. There was 0 reason to have her punching in commands like
that, and either way that's simply using Linux.

'python hack-it.py' would have sufficed. If you haven't seen it, it wasn't
much better than this:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bmz67ErIRa4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bmz67ErIRa4)
and at least that was entertaining.

~~~
Retr0spectrum
[SPOILERS]

Except the basic CLI knowledge prepared her for when she needed to run some
emergency commands e.g. to restore the network connection. I'll allow them a
tiny bit of artistic license here, it certainly added to the tension.

~~~
cmdrfred
If bouncing a network interface is hacking, I'm Captain Crunch. Maybe the
other episodes are better, but that ruined it for me.

~~~
mdrzn
I think he wrote "emergency commands" not "hacking commands". Because she's
inside the same network, she can send those commands from her cubicle, so she
needed to know how to do it.

~~~
cmdrfred
The show emphasized many times that "she is learning to hack" to the point of
ad nauseam. Nobody who has a clue would ever call it that. In reality, she was
learning to use Linux.

Side note: Why is everyone using Kali Linux all the time? Does anyone (who
isn't 14) really run that as a daily driver? They use it to surf the web and
check their email. It makes no sense.

~~~
dylanfw
> They use it to surf the web and check their email. It makes no sense.

There's a scene where we can see Elliot running CentOS on his personal laptop.
Not that lends any realism (CentOS is more common on servers, not PCs) but it
does show their awareness of Linux beyond Kali.

------
psyc
I'd probably think this was one of the best shows ever written, even without a
lot of the hacker stuff. The fact that they obviously use consultants who know
their stuff, and depict hacking better than 97% of other fiction, is a great
bonus.

~~~
xufi
I agree 100 percent. The second I heard (and the fact that I watched the last
documentary like episode of the show of Season 1 that talked with the
cybersecurity experts). That made me love it even more

------
ersii
Considering that Edward Albee was mentioned in the article with a quote, I
find it worth while to mention that he has unfortunately passed away at the
age of 88 - just now.

Edward is/was known for works such as The Zoo Story (1958), The Sandbox
(1959), Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962) and A Delicate Balance (1966).

[http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-
way/2016/09/16/462191417/...](http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-
way/2016/09/16/462191417/playwright-edward-albee-who-changed-and-challenged-
audiences-dies-at-88)

------
Philipp__
Halt and Catch Fire is my favourite at the moment. Although it had some hmm
not so great moments, third season is beyond amazing. Probably my favourite
show of the year!

------
rm_-rf_slash
I think the lesson non-hackers need to take away from Mr Robot is that hacking
is as psychological as it is technological. You could have the greatest
firewall known to man and just one stupid or disgruntled employee with too
much admin access and it may as well be the Great Wall which Genghis Khan
simply walked around.

Otherwise society at large is poised to think of hacking in the laziest
Hollywood depictions:

\--

-sofprosjgpwiguwpgegepvueifuvu

-"I'm in."

~~~
touristtam
Ye I would recommend reading The Art of Deception from Mitnick for those non
techies. :)

------
roninb
I find it really interesting that they do so much research to try to make sure
they're not ruining cyberpunk culture like so many other artistic entities
have[0].

[0] [http://variety.com/2016/tv/news/mr-robot-halt-and-catch-
fire...](http://variety.com/2016/tv/news/mr-robot-halt-and-catch-fire-
hacking-1201859371/)

------
instakill
I usually avoid most of the comments on here because of the negativity. I'm
loving the declarations of endless love for the show on here though. I've been
convinced this season that Mr Robot is my favorite show of all time and these
reaffirmations make me confident in my position.

Amazing monologues, realism, extreme tension, brilliant writing and acting,
Mac Quayle, Sam's directing work, an attractive cast, the unreliable narrator,
good story arcs and wonderful narrative styles. This show is pure art.

------
heisenbit
This show would not have been possible in the old world where networks all
were targeting the general audience. This is a show for a narrow audience. The
programming middleman managing the limited resource - prime time - is leaving.
I hope this is the beginning of an age of increased content diversity.

------
touristtam
I wished the Bureau (original title: le bureau des legendes) would have had
the same solid technical background.

------
adrianlmm
Show had so much potential, all when down the drain in season 2.

~~~
Crespyl
Care to elaborate on what you didn't like about S2?

I enjoyed most of season 1, but started to get turned off by the
philosophy/politics towards the end and kind of stopped paying attention.

Now I'm seeing people say S2 is more critical of the characters and explores
the ideas in some more interesting ways, which has pretty much convinced me to
start watching again.

You're the first I've seen who specifically didn't like S2.

~~~
adrianlmm
Season 1 had a clear goal, to hack E Corp to collapse banks, every chapter was
about hacking E Corp, it was a little more simple.

Season 2 is slow, not as exciting, and who knows what the goal is, maybe to
survive after the hack, maybe something that will be revelead in the last
season episode that only Mr. Robot knows, still, it is more slow paced, and
tries to over analise the complicated behavior of the characters.
IMHO,Elliot's double personallity should have ended in season 1. Another thing
is that despise the collapse of the banks, the series doesn't show an
apocalyptic world, everything is just like season 1, like if nobody cares
about the collapse.

And

Every character is overcomplicated, Elliot with his double personallity,
Angela with her ackwardness, Darlene a control freak, White Rose a time freak,
and so on, and every damn character always has a monologue, it gets boring, it
tries to hard and there is little substance in the story.

~~~
dvtv75
The first chapters of a book seldom give you the resolution at the end, here
you are complaining that the first chapters of season 2 don't.

If you have such a short attention span that you need something to shock you
into continuing the show, perhaps television like this isn't for you.

------
JustUhThought
Sorry, rip-off from _Fight Club_ is just too obvious and sustained. No can do.

~~~
scrollaway
How does a TV series rip off Fight Club?

~~~
JustUhThought
Good god man. You asked that question? Movies rip-off books, books rip off
real life, tv rips off movies. Format doesn't stop one from appropriating
material.

Just google Fight Club and Mr. Robot. There are plenty of interviews with the
creator of Mr. Robot where he explicitly discusses the Fight Club connection.
Straight from the horses mouth.

I don't have a problem with referencing other works, but it's got to the point
of a simple rewrite.

Fight Club: A prototypical, disillusioned male worker with daddy problems has
a psychotic break causing him to make an imaginary friend, and this immaginary
person pushes him to destroy all debt records to set everyone free to have a
fresh start. In order to do this they start an undetground club that collects
members who band together to accomplish this task, who are not totally in the
know regarding the immaginary friend. In the process one of the main members
of thr club is shot in the head and dies. There is a woman who has a very
close relationship to the main character, who is central to plot development,
who is portrayed as being very antisocial and rowdy.

I could go on. Sound familiar?

~~~
scrollaway
The word you're looking for is "inspiration".

Watching Fight Club is absolutely not the same experience as watching Mr
Robot.

~~~
JustUhThought
You responded way to fast to have actually googled that, brw. There is no way
you fully considered what I put forth.

~~~
scrollaway
You need to watch the condescendence here, Fight Club is a well known movie
and I've watched it, so have a lot of people who, like me, appreciate Mr Robot
and a lot of them, like me, appreciate Fight Club.

Of _course_ I can see the parallels. But, like I said, watching the two shows
is a completely different experience. I work in the games industry, I'm quite
familiar with what a "rip-off" looks like. Mr Robot is not a rip-off.
Inspiration is not a rip-off.

~~~
JustUhThought
Are you aware Fight Club was first and foremost a book? If you've had the
opporto read the author's other books you'd likely distinguish a vein of an
original artistic contribution that run through his material, straight through
to Mr Robot. I'm speaking specifically of the philosophy here. So to also
adopt the plot and style so heavily, I just can't.

So for someone to dismiss out of hand with so little consideration, as you
did, the artistic licence which was taken with the material in this instance,
and then to follow-up without considering my follow-up comment, that is
condescending in its own right. To right off the other's thoughts so glibly.

And sorry, but working in the gaming industry does not give someone
authoritative rights on being able to call out a rip-off. It's possible you
missed something here. In which case it might not be the worst thing in the
world to fully consider the other person's arguments prior to responding to
the comment by simply stating you hadn't changed your position. A very
dismissive response.

------
red_blobs
I watched the first couple of episodes and had to stop. The 'I'm special and
nobody understands me' theme was incredibly derivative.

Being an uber liberal-minded hacker in the US today is mainsteam and trendy,
not rebellious..which is exactly the antithesis of the hacker credo.

I just wish there was more original thought and less pandering to the Reddit
community.

Truly great shows make us think, not just tell us something it thinks we want
to hear.

The hacking scenes are accurate, but I would rather open up a terminal and do
it than watch a poor representation of it on television.

