Bad Computing
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Programming
Phil Plait has an excellent site called Bad Astronomy. In that vein, I’d like to point out some bad computing on TV.
Last night I watched “Without a Trace” on CBS. The episode was about a Paris Hilton-like girl who was kidnapped and was to live or die based on a Web poll.
There were several examples of bad computing in the show some of which were:
An agent asked if they could “trace” where the site was being hosted. The FBI computer guy answered that it was a “roving host” that couldn’t be traced. Now, after a few years in Web design, you’d think I’d have heard of “roving hosts” before, but that was a new one to me. I guess they never heard of whois and dig.
The rich girl’s publicist asked if there wasn’t something that the FBI could do to sway the vote to “live”. An agent said “we’re working on it”. Call me simplistic, but wouldn’t a 3-4 line shell script using wget be a good solution? Heck, even Windows can do that.
They left the site up. I’d think that they would want to take the site down rather than publize the poor girls fate (she was shown on a live video stream during the voting). But that wouldn’t make very good TV, so maybe it’s not really bad computing.
The bad guy was connecting through a web cafe’s wireless router. When they found him, he was nearly a block away in an old warehouse. Now, that’s one good wireless access point. I have a Airport extreme that I can get maybe 100 feet from in my yard. This guy connected through two buildings and a block of open space.
That said, the show was entertaining, and some of the bad computing examples were plot devices. I’d rather see realistic examples of computing on TV though.
This entry was posted on Friday, February 18th, 2005 at 8:24 am and is filed under Programming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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