Wait, what?

How did the data center hack work, exactly? The more I think about it the less sense it makes.

The plan was hijacking the climate control to fry the magnetic tapes. They put their little board in the system, ok. But how exactly did this allow them to encrypt the data itself? Did I miss some part where they completely changed the plan? How the fuck could they even encrypt a bunch of airgapped magnetic tapes?

I suspect the writers started out with one idea but then got a different one, and didn't bother to make it all consistent. Which is sad because this show probably has the most realistic portrayal of computers I've seen on tv.

Oh, and are they building a time machine or some shit?

I think it's some energy plant (possibly a fusion reactor) because they want to attack the grid next. And being the only reliable source of electricity would give them absolute power over society.

But why does Angela think it will bring her mum back from the dead?

And that still doesn't explain how the fucking data center hack worked. The show goes to great efforts to have semi-believable hacking and then just completely jumps the shark with the big hack.

I think Angela has been compromised psychologically. Probably some kind of forced suggestion or hypnosis during his time with WR. Also WR saying that she hacks time is probably meaning that she is the most efficient human being coming to time management. Also hypnosis can be worked to erase/block parts of memory.

As for the hack. SteelMountain was hacked by hijacking the temperature-control. They didn't encrypt it, at certain temperature the magnetic tape loses its magnetization and data is corrupted. It's like scratching a CD, you didn't encrypt you destroyed the material that stored it. If you have magnetic tape in music-cassettes for example - and you don't want them - you can do it by leaving them on a heater for a few hour and listen to the tape again.

OP I don't understand your question at all. They fried the tapes. At what point did the show talk about encrypting them?

There was a particle accelerator shown no? Or something like that. It's heavily implying some kind of multiverse parallel world timeline altering shit. White rose dropped a few hints like imagine some other version of yourself where none of this happened etc. Hopefully just a red herring because then it becomes a whole different shoe.

>I think Angela has been compromised psychologically. Probably some kind of forced suggestion or hypnosis during his time with WR. Also WR saying that she hacks time is probably meaning that she is the most efficient human being coming to time management. Also hypnosis can be worked to erase/block parts of memory.
They clearly showed Whiterose looking at a particle accelerator of some sort, and talking about some philosophical crap.
>As for the hack. SteelMountain was hacked by hijacking the temperature-control. They didn't encrypt it, at certain temperature the magnetic tape loses its magnetization and data is corrupted. It's like scratching a CD, you didn't encrypt you destroyed the material that stored it. If you have magnetic tape in music-cassettes for example - and you don't want them - you can do it by leaving them on a heater for a few hour and listen to the tape again.
Yeah I get how that works. Now that I'm thinking it over again, I think they meant that they encrypted the data on the hard drives and shit, and weren't talking about the tape backups.
My hungover brain confused itself. They must have been talking about the data on computers, not the backups.

I get that it's an accelerator. I am just still holding out hope they wont turn this into a multiverse shit. That would be so many kinds of dumb.

Well, they already went from a hacker anarchist story to a jeckill&hyde schizophrenic psychological thriller so consistency is not necessarily their strong suit. All the obsession with time, the subversion of Angela, the particle accelerator, the hints of being able to fix the past - all lead me to think this is gonna be a fucking time machine. Season 4 will be pic related but with more linux.

I dropped this show after season 2, episode 5. The prison thing was obvious and it wasn't even revealed yet.

Should I give it another chance?

>Sliders with more Linux
Then when is the point we stop watching it? I seriously don't know. It had the potential to be a really grounded series in the beginning, but the more episodes I see the more I am convinced that the showrunners really have no idea what to do. Which is sad. But when UnikSliders comes out they might reboot the series on some VM so they can watch themselves in a tv show. That would be epic.

I noticed the distinct prison vibes too, but never imagined they'd take the unreliable narrator meme that far. As for whether it gets better, right nkw it seems like they're drawing it out with either some crazy multidimensional shit or simply no clear ending in sight.

I think shows with overarching plotlines (aka not sitcoms) are only really good if the story has a clear ending from the start. Otherwise the quality quickly fizzles out and the show drowns in inconsistencies and filler.

>I see the more I am convinced that the showrunners really have no idea what to do.
Well, they clearly took their time to insert a plotline about Trump being a whiterose plant so I suspect their vision doesn't have much integrity. If it's just tidbits, whatever, but if they go all out in the flavour of the week butthurt the show will turn to shit real fast.

>But why does Angela think it will bring her mum back from the dead?

When did she said that? She wants revenge.

>what if we could make it so none of this happened? Not just this hack, but everything, my mom and your dad
>blah blah blah multiverse theory blah

>SteelMountain was hacked by hijacking the temperature-control. They didn't encrypt it, at certain temperature the magnetic tape loses its magnetization and data is corrupted. It's like scratching a CD, you didn't encrypt you destroyed the material that stored it. If you have magnetic tape in music-cassettes for example - and you don't want them - you can do it by leaving them on a heater for a few hour and listen to the tape again.
That's pretty stupid t b h, no climate control system could turn a huge vault into an oven.

>Watching soy boy entertaining
lmao

That is true. But hey, at least it is grounded in reality. Which is a great deal more than the shit other show pull regarding hacking/cyber-security/IT in general.

Well yeah, for all its flaws their depiction of hacking is at least comparable to what it is in real life. But they do make it easy for them.

>into an oven
you don't need to, data tape degrades above 113 fahrenheir

That's one of the main problems with the show. In the beginning they did the footwork, the planning, network infiltration etc semi-correctly. They had obstacles to overcome.
But ever since Remi realized he is schizo it's like he turned into a turbo-autist who could hack into the FBI using an abacus. Best example of this is the hackathlon-type competition they showed a few weeks ago. It's borderline insulting that some niemand comes in from the street and solves the puzzle in minutes having no prior knowledge of what it is. It's taking the piss.

>45 degrees celsius
It would take hours to reach that kind of temperature even if their heating system doesn't reach thermal equilibrium before that. And even then, what does this thermal rating mean exactly? Just because the temperature in the room went that high doesn't mean all the data instantly evaporates. Is it the nominal safe maximum? How are the data cartridges stored? How long does it take them to reach the room temperature? Are we expected to believe there wouldn't be a million alarms going off and that no one would check?

>opens browser to reddit.com
>makes new post asking how to own evilcorp really hard
>downloads hacking tools.exe
>cool music plays as i own those wall street noobs using leet powers

>downloads hacking tools.exe
Honestly, what could go wrong?

It is above the nominal safe maximum. 45˙C is where the material starts to change chemically and thus loses its ability to be magnetized. Hence in a room where the temperature is at or above 45˙C the material starts to degrade basically everywhere. Information doesnt evaporate it becomes unreadable. And without knowing the structure of the data it becomes impossible to recover. Or you can recover only parts of it.
It's not about destroying all data. It's about destroying enough credit information -for example - that the bank has to legally declare all outstanding debt void. It's about destroying enough that the rest becomes worthless.

She wants both.

She wants to destroy E-Corp but after the events of season two and her off-camera conversation with White Rose, she's come to the conclusion that the only true way to avenge what was done to her mother and Elliot's dad and everyone else that was killed/harmed by E-Corp, is to not just fuck their shit up like Elliot was doing. But wholesale ERASE them from existence via time travel/manipulating the timeline to attack E-Corp in the past and do something that destroys the company in the past so they never become all powerful.

This would fit with Angela's Back to the Future fangirlism (one of the main plotlines for BTTF is the plot point that Marty's dad was Biff Tannen's bitch boy until Marty changed the past so that it was actually the other way around and Biff was Marty's dad's bitch, which made Biff engage in the events of the second film, to "fix" the timeline and get revenge on the McFly family).

But the chief issue is whether or not time travel/timeline alteration IS the endgame or not, or if White Rose simply told Angela (who is pretty gullible given how she desires power over internal consistency towards her desire for revenge) what she wanted to hear to ensure she would swear loyalty to the Dark Army and betray Elliot

>It is above the nominal safe maximum
So if you've ever done any engineering work, you know that's mostly legal ass covering and you can bet you've gotta go at least 1.5 times that to get shit REALLY going. It's not an on-off switch. The rate at which the damage is being done is never gonna be instantaneous. So if you want a high probability of actually corrupting most of the data beyond recovery within a reasonable time frame, you'll have to go way above nominal margins. The higher you go, the more quickly and completely you destroy it.

The problem is the power output and maximum temperature of your heating system as well as the thermal isolation of the storage facility. It's unlikely to sustain temperatures that high without being specifically designed for that purpose.