Re: What Did You Watch? 2025-02-20 (Thursday)

On Fri, 21 Feb 2025 21:44:54 -0000 (UTC), BTR1701 <atropos@mac.com>
wrote:

On Feb 21, 2025 at 1:34:12 PM PST, "shawn" <nanoflower@notforg.m.a.i.l.com>
wrote:
>

On Fri, 21 Feb 2025 20:48:22 -0000 (UTC), BTR1701 <atropos@mac.com>
wrote:
 

On Feb 21, 2025 at 10:46:31 AM PST, "shawn" <nanoflower@notforg.m.a.i.l.com>
wrote:
 

 On Fri, 21 Feb 2025 05:34:21 -0800, "Ian J. Ball" <ijball@mac.invalid>
 wrote:
 

 What did you watch?

 
 I watched the first couple of episodes of ZERO DAY. This is a new show
 just released on the Netflix. The premise is it is a modern day and we
 are watching the day of an ex President. He is having a meeting with a
 representative of a publisher who has paid the ex-President for a
 book. She's supposed to help the book come together but the President
 isn't interested in the help so she leaves. Then we see her car get
 rammed by a train as it turns out the nation is under attack.
 
 Someone has managed to initiate a cyber attack that has shut down
 every electronic device across the nation for one minute and then they
 turned them all back on. The attackers then put a message on every
 phone that the attack will return.
 
 So with people freaking out the President forms a commission to find
 the people responsible.  The ex-President is called on to head up the
 commission which has been given far reaching abilities to find the
 guilty parties. Which it turns out looks to be the Russians but isn't.
 
 What did you watch?

 
Episode 4 of PRIME TARGET on the Apples. This is turning out to be a really
good show.

 
I've been enjoying it too.
 

About a Cambridge post-doc math student whose life starts unraveling when he
turns in his proposed thesis about some revolutionary new math concept
involving prime numbers, and his mentor immediately freaks out and burns the
student's work before (supposedly) going home and killing himself. Then
people
start following the student and he learns another Cambridge student proposed
the same theory back in the 90s and she died under mysterious circumstances
and her work was scrubbed from the archives. Meanwhile, the NSA has prominent
mathematicians all over the world under surveillance so they can be alerted
if
any of them come up with something that could affect national security and
the
analyst who's assigned to the student and his mentor starts asking questions
which ends up getting her whole team slaughtered and her on the run.

 
The idea behind the student's research is that there is a fundamental
relationship between prime numbers that will make it easy to figure
out any prime number. That would allow any modern encryption to be
easily broken because prime numbers form the basis for the encryption.
Also about the surveillance it's not simply keeping track of what they
are doing. They have live feeds from their homes so that the agents
can keep track of their research long before they publish a paper or
even discuss their ideas with others.

>
I couldn't figure out if the Governor knew he was under surveillance or if he
was totally clueless about it. A few times he acted like he knew the cameras
were there and other times it was like he didn't.
>
If the subjects don't know they're under surveillance, I wonder what the NSA
does when someone inevitably finds one of their cameras.
>
And when is out main character going to learn that when he has possession of
valuable research-- whether it's his own or someone else's-- he needs to make
copies of it! I couldn't believe that the first notebook with his entire
theory in it was burned, that was all he had, especially considering how
autistically important it was to him. Maybe stop by the university library and
make a copy.

I could see his decision to only keep the one copy of his work given
how secretive he was. That much I can see, but, as you say, once he
knew people were after the work and willing to do anything to get it
why wouldn't he make a copy just in case. There's more than enough
random places he could have hidden a copy in the city where no one
would look. Imagine finding a random tree in a park and planting a USB
stick in a plastic bag in the ground. Sure it might not be good years
later but we aren't talking about hiding the information for years. A
few weeks or months at most is what is needed.

And after the hardcopy was burned and it became obvious that nefarious people
were skulking about, make more copies of your backup and put one in a safe
deposit box or something. Give the others to your friends. Or photograph each
page and combine the JPGs into a single PDF of the whole book, copy it onto
several thumb drives and carry one around in your pocket and hide the others
in places where no one could ever find them.
>

Agreed. The only reason to not do something like that is to keep the
story going. After all we know from tales of various crypto banks
getting lost. I know of one from 2018 of a guy who had his bitcoins
stored on a USB key who passed away. His wife has the USB but can't
get at the coins because it is password protected, she doesn't have
the password, and it has security where only so many guesses can be
made of the password before it locks permanently. If that was
available in 2018 I have to imagine such tech is even more widely
available now.