machine coded
I love the inevitable technobabble on many television dramas, and tonight’s “24″ served up a few doozies. The CTU agent Chloë O’Brien had escaped from holding and was helping Jack Bauer by accessing the systems from a remote location. A Homeland Security operative assured the station chief he could find her saying, “I can trace her physical location by examining the binary.” I thought this was laugh-out-loud funny, since even my puny English-major brain knows nearly any binary code would be practically useless. Chloë is certainly accessing the system through some kind of VPN system (or as she called it “a subnet”) which would encrypt the data. Looking at the binary would hardly be a workaround for encrypted transmissions.
The operative’s technique apparently worked, however, since another civil servant later said, “Tell her he used a machine-coded matrix to find her.” Darn those machine-coded matrices, standing in the way of truth, justice, and the Jack Bauer way.
