So the new CBS show Scorpion is a cute concept: A team of geniuses that help the FBI and have become surrogate family to a woman with a "mentally enabled" son. Great. Fine. Except that in every episode so far, they have flubbed the technology details so horrifically that the shows make no sense if you have any clue about how computers and the internet work. Not deep knowledge, just basics, like the idea that if you can access a data center remotely, you don't need to have your team physically drive to said data center to grab the drive. (Nevermind the knowledge that your backup cannot possibly be overwriting itself every few hours or that in a "cloud storage" data center, there isn't one specific drive with your shit on it.) (That episode was particularly difficult to watch)
This week's was at least a little subtle: The badguys have a plot to game the stock market system by making trades on prices that have changed but haven't been posted publicly yet. This sounds like a great badguy plot, right? Sneaking information, using it to make money, like that ticker tape delay ploy they use in "The Sting"!
Except that this is the underlying strategy in something called High Frequency Trading, and it's completely legal. (Skeevy as hell, perhaps, but totally legal) There are folks out there doing this now, constantly trading, making minute gains on each transaction billions of times. Making millions of dollars fractions of a penny at a time.
I admit that this one is not nearly as terrible as the others technologically speaking. The thing they are talking about is, in fact, a real thing that can be (and is) done by real people with real computer skills. It's just totally not illegal at all.
No comments:
Post a Comment