Before Hollywood Hacking
Dec. 21st, 2016 07:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tanithryudoSay what you will about TOS, but they sure had their data security down pat. I was watching a review of The Menagerie, and in order for Spock to hijack the Enterprise, he had to:
1. Falsify orders for the ship to visit a nearby Starbase
2. Ninja the starbase records officer and create false orders to be transmitted to the Enterprise
3. Pop back over the Enterprise and lock the computer into the new orders
Step 1 would've failed if anyone had called ahead to the starbase to verify orders. Step 2 would've failed if the records guy he jumped thought to call out an alarm rather than get into a fistfight with a vulcan. Also, the whole thing would've fallen apart if Kirk had believed the starbase Commodore's insistence that no orders were sent and thus Spock must've lied.
Now compare to how the Enterprise D was:
1. Hijacked by Data from the bridge by mimicking Picard's voice. (Seriously, the computer doesn't even check the location of Picard's combadge, much less biometrics?)
2. Hijacked by Ferengi, the comedic relief of the universe
3. The Binars...well ok, they had admin access for repairs, so we'll give them a bye.
4. Moriarty...who lived in the computer core, so I guess he can have half a bye.
5. Hijacked by Wesley's magic nanites, because nanites are the other Hollywood all-doing macguffin
And then in Star Trek Beyond, the villain was able to reverse hack Starbase Yorktown from light-years away with some stolen probes, and then proxy-hack the Enterprise via the connection to Yorktown. Ah, the double edged dagger of networked computers and cloud computing, how I loathe thee.
1. Falsify orders for the ship to visit a nearby Starbase
2. Ninja the starbase records officer and create false orders to be transmitted to the Enterprise
3. Pop back over the Enterprise and lock the computer into the new orders
Step 1 would've failed if anyone had called ahead to the starbase to verify orders. Step 2 would've failed if the records guy he jumped thought to call out an alarm rather than get into a fistfight with a vulcan. Also, the whole thing would've fallen apart if Kirk had believed the starbase Commodore's insistence that no orders were sent and thus Spock must've lied.
Now compare to how the Enterprise D was:
1. Hijacked by Data from the bridge by mimicking Picard's voice. (Seriously, the computer doesn't even check the location of Picard's combadge, much less biometrics?)
2. Hijacked by Ferengi, the comedic relief of the universe
3. The Binars...well ok, they had admin access for repairs, so we'll give them a bye.
4. Moriarty...who lived in the computer core, so I guess he can have half a bye.
5. Hijacked by Wesley's magic nanites, because nanites are the other Hollywood all-doing macguffin
And then in Star Trek Beyond, the villain was able to reverse hack Starbase Yorktown from light-years away with some stolen probes, and then proxy-hack the Enterprise via the connection to Yorktown. Ah, the double edged dagger of networked computers and cloud computing, how I loathe thee.
