Comment by reactordev
5 hours ago
There’s a scene in Battlestar Galactica (2004) where someone asks Captain Adama why the Galactica doesn’t have networked computers. So the cylons can’t hack the ship…
5 hours ago
There’s a scene in Battlestar Galactica (2004) where someone asks Captain Adama why the Galactica doesn’t have networked computers. So the cylons can’t hack the ship…
It's not just a scene; it's the whole premise of the setting. It's why the Galactica survived and the newer ships did not. It's why the new Vipers got wiped out and they had to pull the old ones out of mothballs.
In the pilot, the Galactica was literally being turned into a museum, and that's why they lived.
It was even worse: the Galatica was a museum ship, and it was being decommissioned!
No, GP is correct. In the pilot, the ship was in the process of being decommissioned from military use and converted to a museum. It wasn't already a museum prior to the events in the pilot (if that's what you meant -- maybe I'm not really sure what your comment was saying.)
"What do you hear, Starbuck?"
nothing but the rain
There's also a scene where they do network the computers and are hacked nearly instantly.
I loved the writers giving every firewall its own LED indicator, so we knew exactly how far the toasters had got.
Sometimes I wonder if filmmakers have the right of it. They need to show what's going on in the computer to a distracted audience in a heartbeat. When they pull that off on screen, I wonder if us software devs should be taking notes.
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And yet, in real life, we have our grafana dashboards :)
but thanks to Baltar's firewalls and code obfuscation, just barely are able to escape after calculating the jump and having to literally wipe and reinstall all code on all systems.
Hollywood IaC.
Which was always pretty stupid. At best it means the Cylons can't hack the whole ship, just whichever part they exploited to gain access remotely in the first place. But really the Cylons would've needed exploits for each individual system anyway, since simply connecting them with wires shouldn't just do that. And unless those other systems are completely air gapped with no wireless or other access, it would be trivial for them to still gain remote access, or have one of their infiltrators provide a local connection of some kind. AFAIR that was never a plot point, which was odd.
> And unless those other systems are completely air gapped with no wireless or other access
That is exactly the canon.
I think it's genius to use this element of computer security in narrative fiction. But I think they still had comms across the ship. The cylons could still clone the captain's voice and have random crew members perform arbitrary tasks by directing people to do so over the ship's radio.
1 reply →
> whichever part they exploited to gain access remotely
I think you missed the point of "no networking", you have to actually physically sit in front of the computer. There is no remote access.
Does this mean we'll see new startups in the sneaker-net space?
I think it's one of the first two special episodes right at the beginning of the series, and it's the sole reason why the fleet could sustain evading the cylons
this is the way
So say we all