On 9/25/2011 12:26 AM, Phil Smith III wrote:
The new series Person of Interest revolves around a shadowy tech geek who recruits an ex-CIA,
ex-Army Ranger to solve crimes. See, the geek built "the machine" for the US government
to perform analytics against all the surveillance data being collected. Only problem is, the
machine *also* finds folks plotting non-terrorist crimes. So the machine doesn't report those,
because That Would Be Wrong.except he's built in a "back door" that sends him: SSNs! It
doesn't tell him whether the SSNs are of the plotters or the victims, and of course there's no
indication how he finds people's names from SSNs, but hey, he's got a zEnterprise Sysplex with
eight zBXes!
OK, no, the show actually ended with a camera rolling by racks of blade servers. And
while it was semi-fun, it was very predictable (even without analytics). And they never
actually used the word "analytics".
I guess this is progress?!
Supposably the 9-digit number out the backdoor was the safeguard against
discovering the backdoor. I'm just glad that the way he found the data
was real, and not Jacob whispering into Linus's ear. It is a cool use
of analytics, and a verification that just because I'm paranoid doesn't
mean they're not out to get me.
Regards,
Tom Conley
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