But it's the reviews and comments that are the most disturbing. I worked 30 years as a software engineer and for a bit of that I worked for a 3 letter agency and unequivocally, unarguably, the tech in this series is gibberish. First off, hacking, coding, whatever is an incredibly esoteric and boring material for most people. "the social network" was also gibberish by the way with re to the tech. Those who disagree, describe to me why facebook succeeded where myspace failed. A well known but not acknowledged fact is that google was successful not because it was a better search engine but that they did a lot better job selling user data, and advertising directly to you than altavista or all the other search engines before google. It was never about gleaning info better. And now, nobody even remembers google wasn't the first search engine any more than they remember netscape (which once sold for 4 billion dollars). It's interesting the way they use dream like scenes to represent code walkthroughs but it's gibberish. Walking thru code is not like that, for anyone except the insane. But, how else can they tell the story? Watching somebody do something boring, is also boring. Also, the hacking capabilities are wildly exaggerated but no drama means no viewers. Isn't my first rodeo. If you like this stuff, then I recommend 'wargames' the 1984 movie where a computer at norad starts world war iii. Um, no. If you actually knew anything about hacking in the 80s and norad operations it was all fantasyland. Or, how about 'enemy of the state' with will smith, a 1998 movie about how every video camera in america has been hacked so the nsa or third state could find and watch your every move. Don't believe me, see interviews with michael hayden former head of the nsa at the time. Many times he's pointed out how fantastical the movie was, and lamented the number of times he's had to explain to congress that, no, the nsa does not have that capability. Nobody does. I wouldn't put this show up against either of those movies but it is entertaining and somewhat believable. But, I sure wish we had all that equipment like that when I worked in gov though the whole bullpen, lets throw everybody in one room without partitions is a silicon valley gimmick, not one in gov. Still, I could be out of date and wrong. I still claim that a hermit kingdom north of seoul can't be as good as the media makes them out to be re hacking. By it's nature, hacking is antithetical to the whole nature of a tightly controlled dictatorship. I strongly believe they are buying the tech from somewhere else, as they have in other areas. But, making a movie about buying hackers from around the world to do their dirty work is not as interesting to hollywood as actually making fat boy sing. Making documentaries doesn't pay as much.
Review of The Undeclared War
