Thats fantastic. I mean, I loved the way the heist was planned. Out of the box and bold thinking.

Okey fbi-4heads. Its a movie, there is a lot of things that are put in to places that would have boken the script in real life. Like the film crew, in real life they would have called the cop's at once. Now in the movie they are just hiding behind the cameras and out of picture DOING NOTHING. That plan would have been doomed to fail.

wait what? The FBI investigated the writer and not the federal reserve????

Sounds more like an interview than interrogation. They wanted to know how he knew what he knew and consulted with him as a subject matter expert since his information was accurate. They were looking for feedback to increase security measures.

It all seemed a little far fetched until they got to the part where Bruce Willis used a dump truck full of gold bricks to surf a gigantic wave through an aqueduct and then the authorities couldn't deny how likely this was to actually happen and began their investigation.

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‘Murica. Gotta protect the capital.

Real life "Three Days of the Condor"?

It might seem absurd but the FBI has to look into these things just in case.

Adam Savage, from Mythbusters, has an amusing tale when the FBI called him after he left an answerphone message on a wrong number talking about a 'thermal detonator' he was making

Investigated is a misleading word. You can communicate with the FBI without being under investigation.

Sounds like the reserve first, then the writer.

The title does say investigation, not interrogation. Unless I'm missing something.

Yeah, but it says they investigated the writer, not the situation.

They almost certainly didn’t “investigate.” This would have been closer to a “chat.” Not everyone at the FBI is an idiot and if someone has an interesting idea relevant to their interests, they’ll say what’s up to see if they can learn anything to revise this approach to a problem.

Investigation implies wrongdoing or that a crime was committed when a law enforcement agency is mentioned. The title is stretching what occurred.

Answer phone message? How young are you?

They spoke to him as part of their investigation of how to increase security.

Otherwise known as voicemail

It's the British term for answering machine.

> they’ll say what’s up to see if they can learn anything to revise this approach to a problem.

That’s called an investigation lol. Just because it was the FBI doing it doesn’t mean that there’s needs to be a crime involved. If argue that they’re not idiots because they investigated this. The real idiots wouldn’t have investigated and waited until someone actually tried it.

You should look into Leverage. There was an episode in Season 1 where the team are in a plane that is crashing due to a virus loaded in via the black box. One of the family of the execs enjoyed the show but pointed out that the plane shown doesn't make the flight. Nothing about the virus not working in that way.

Some of the villains in that show, based on real-world events are actually harrowing.

Investigation does not imply wrong doing. Title is accurate. The FBI did their job

I suppose that might be somewhat true if it isn’t especially clear why you have that information/interest. Much of the time it’s just a professional discussion akin to one researcher reaching out to another.

Asking questions to find out if something is possible is literally the most basic definition of investigating. Which is what happened. It doesn’t mean that someone’s suspected of a crime.

FBI agent: (spinning in chair)

“…hey Johnson, I’ve got an idea, you want to meet Bruce Willis?”

He already showed them how to stop it though

Yeah but they stopped returning my calls.

I’m starting to think they really don’t care about my neighbor’s suspiciously clean gardening tools.

Was one of the last big movies that captured authentic, gritty NYC - complete with horrible traffic, abundant litter, and surprising kind, helpful, and weird residents. A ton of real locations used and you can tell.

This was before studios tried to either pass off Toronto or Atlanta as NYC - or just CGI in a bunch of landmarks.

Some heist movies never get finished because the crew realizes it's more lucrative to irl that shit

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No other country has security at banks

I still remember the story about how they got bullied out of doing an RFID myth segment because 1) the security was actually atrocious on the damn things and 2) Visa, Mastercard, Discover, and their lawyers got on Discovery and were like "You will not do this episode."

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/Mythbuster-RFID-HOPE,6313.html

Johnson (raising a brow): "no, but I want to meet Samuel L Jackson.

Why the downvotes? I also had a confusing chuckle over the word.

Right.

No relation.

Because the British think they invented English.

I also feel like stealing 13 dump trucks in the city isn't the easiest thing to do either. Plus the bad guys impersonated the city Engineers which is how they got access to these areas. But what happened to the real City Engineers they would have eventually shown up and the game would have been up

Every single alien planet looks like the forests outside Vancouver

I'm surrounded by Johnsons

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The screenwriter for “Simon Says” which was retro-fit to become a Die Hard movie

I want to say the same thing happened to the author of Red October.

The English inventing English. Fucking wild notion.

They already have the crew together after all.

Technically it was a cooperative effort with the French. Or maybe coercive is more apt

/s?

Ah yes, R.L. Stine

The Italian Job switched from "Fiction" to "Documentary" about a third of the way in.

The Pacific Northwest: Epicenter of all sci fi universes since 1993. (Or earlier.)

Writer to FBI: Holy shit, you mean this would really work?!? Damn, wish I'd kept it to myself....

Stargate fan?

X-Files.CA

Yup!

Best franchise ever

Indeed. And the X-Files.

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And X-Files and The Travelers

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See something. Say something.

HOT TOWN SUMMER IN THE CITY...... BOOOOM

Look around! You could steal City Hawl!

Scotch Broom, scourge of two galaxies- my roommate's commentary on Stargate Atlantis

But wasn’t the plan to take over the Federal Reserve posing as civil engineers to repair damage? The initial subway bomb was to render the alarms unusable so that the FR turned them off.

I'm really tired of us making public really good plans on screwing over the government, even if it is artistic.

Perfect

Pssh, shows what you know. The forest moon of Endor looks lie northern CA redwood forests, WHICH ARE TOTALLY DIFFERENT.

We’re gonna need a couple more FBI guys.

Yup. I live in northernish VA, and it was always funny seeing mulder and scully roll through my hometown with trees in the background I’ve never seen in my life

Same! And all the places in DC they get to WAY too fast.

The X-Files cracks me up. Ah yes, mountains covered with coniferous trees in the background, this is clearly rural Iowa.

Also the best place to learn how to climb trees like a red tailed lemur, apparently

Thanks and fuck you. Now my brain can't be unwired to catch details like that for the rest of my life.

Though in a strange twist, I know have a greater understanding why Cleveland is always used by marvel since Ohio doesn't exist.

You can tell the show is unrealistic because if it was realistic, half of the scenes would be them sitting in traffic on 66/495

The hell you got to Georgetown in 15 minutes during daylight!

You are one of those people that get used as examples of how dense Americans are

Lol, you think quite highly.of city engineers

Dgggh

It is really interesting though, I just did some VERY SHALLOW research into RFID security because I'm about to be traveling internationally. It turns out that paying anything extra for an RFID blocking wallet or passport holder is essentially a waste of money.

Short list of reasons is

1. For most credit cards, you can't make a transaction with only the RFID info which could be potentially skimmed and copied. Even when you don't have to enter a PIN number or anything, there is a verification process going on that can't be saved and used again later.
2. While security experts and "white-hat/grey-hat hackers" at the DEF-CON "hacker convention" proved it is possible to skim RFID data at long range, it appears no criminals have found a way to use this technology to steal information. At least there aren't any known cases of it being done to steal credit card data for nefarious reasons successfully.
3. In the case of Passports, the information transmitted is encrypted, for it to be useful to skim a passport you'd also need access to an encrypted and secured government database.
4. For large purchases and withdrawals, you should be required to enter a pin number.

​

I won't pretend to be an expert on this, I don't fully grasp how various public-key encryption technology works (tried to learn a few times, always seems like magic or math only a genius can understand). But here is an article I found.

https://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-tech/are-rfid-blocking-products-worth-your-money-we-asked-an-expert/

TL;DR: RFID isn't even that insecure, at least not anymore, I'm not sure what the credit card companies were freaking out about. If you are really worried about it, RFID wallets aren't too expensive, and just check for close-range skimmers by pulling on card readers to make sure they are real.

Or because you were making an insult that was uncalled for, jackass.

Plus all the news anchors are from Vancouver too.

Chris Gailus is in Sonic the Hedgehog. Tony Parsons was in The Pledge and Saving Silverman (and Masterminds, which has parallels to DHWAV plus Patrick Stewart in a mustache!) Tamara Taggart was in a ton of movies in the early 2000s.

Thanks for explaining it. I thought it was an app. My friends make fun if me for still calling voicemail the answering machine.

Ah true, forgot about The X-Files. Haven't seen The Travelers.

Youd be shocked how many deserts in movies have joshua trees in them despite only existing in this range

Do they have to?
Like, the plan is to rob something by busting down the walls. Does it really require some special dangerous knowledge to come up with that?

You would like High Maintenance on HBO for all of these reasons.

Security on paywave/ rfid transactions is the spend limit ($100), transaction analytics and insurance. I had some teenagers pinch my card and go on a short shopping spree. The bank reversed the 20 odd transactions that I couldn’t identify without a second question.

Sure, but the writer’s real gem was how to get 4 gallons of water.

Then why do they bitch about the word "soccer"?

In Canada, the limit is up to the store and/or the card holder. I have mine set to $25.00

Yeah, like they would appear within few hours of the explosion...

And in the 90s without the internet, its easy to believe that city engineer A showed uo before C.Engineer B, and no way of know that C.Eng A is actually a bank robber

I was being facetious.

Seriously? Couldn’t they find something better to do? Like, actually making sure victims of various crimes get justice instead. Since the cops are so fucking useless.

WATCH IT.

Tonight watch the first episode. No excuses just do it

"It's Christmas. You could steal city hall!"

God that's low. Mines lower than $200 for sure. I've been pretty lucky in that the only time I lost a credit card at the bus stop, a nice older gentleman found it. Called all the people with the same last name in my area, and I think got in contact with my Grandpa at the time. I don't think I had noticed yet that I had lost it. I also didn't even know about Tap and pay at the time, somehow. So after he ID me when I came to pick it up and said well it's a good thing they don't have my pin, he explained that CCs have Tap on them.

Nowadays, I use Tap on my watch when I can.

This is not true. For #1, 2 and 4 cloning is sufficient and does nit rely on breaking encryption (well, actually it does, kinda, but not in a way that is relevant to cloning).

Also, check this:

https://youtu.be/M0LBpFA0OuE

Leverage was pretty fake.

Mr. Robot on the other hand: every hack was based on real world exploits.

There was a vulnerability for a while where some researchers found that they could exceed the transaction value limit for "tap to pay" (RFID) by changing the currency on the app to a different currency (they changed it from US dollars to yen or something, for example). Typically you can only charge like $35 that way without any kind of pin or anything. They showed you could just tap your phone to someone's wallet in passing and charge thousands of dollars to their card. Imagine walking through the subway with an amplifier antenna on your phone and zapping thousands of dollars per person from every card you pass. I believe they notified the offending banks before publishing this research but still, just goes to show that sometimes these things slip though the cracks. It's probably pretty safe now but idk, better safe than sorry.

I was just going to say, I use tap on my phone.

Oh man, I used to love watching Masterminds.

I never bothered with the phone tap and pay b/ I was gunna pull something out, might as well be the card. That and some terminals being not compatible, while a card always is.

Though part of the reason for using the watch these days is it's basically always out and to help justify to myself how much I spent on it.(and now watch straps) Though when a terminal either doesn't have tap or the spot is in a weird spot I look kinda dumb, or at least in my head i do.

Surprisingly good supporting cast. Patrick Stewart, Matt Craven, and Callum Keith Rennie as I recall (though the fake accent on the latter...)

I have forgotten/left my wallet at home/work several times before where the phone payment was clutch. I don’t use it often, but it’s great to have it as an option.

My tap is at $200. Very convenient for smaller purchases. It’s nice that Canada has allowed modifications for the card taps.

That's how the Ghostbusters got busted. And they were professional busters.

Yea but Bruce and Samuel are not going to live forever. They need a back up plan.

It's also possible they maybe wanted to know if someone gave them the idea for the story. Like a city worker with a bunch of stolen blueprints their brother knows or something.

Good point

You would need a ridiculous team of badasses to try it.

Pretty sure cops would swarm once it's been breached. Can't spend money if you're dead.

Loved that show. Full of nonsense. One character always beats up several henchman. Always.

It was just multicultural A-Team but that's okay.

That’s how I always remember it too, as one of the last blockbusters before GCI, every shot being filmed with grey and blue filters, etc.

It’s like we rewatched Band of Brothers over the Christmas period and I immediately noticed how they could portray night and capture all the essence of it being night whilst I could still see all the actors and set, but most shows and movies made in the last decade show darkness by being so dark and underexposed you can’t see anything on the screen at all u less you whack up the brightness and barricade the windows

With 4 you can't just clone the card though, you also need the PIN which you cannot get via skimming. And I didn't see them explaining what method they used to skim the card.

Like I said, DEF-CON proved it was possible forever ago, but there haven't been large scale operations doing long range skimming. When it does happen it is done almost like a pick pocket or via a nefarious skimmer attached to a genuine POS.

It’s more along the lines of “what’s the most efficient way of stealing credit cards without getting caught, equipment used on-site or a remote hack and downloading thousands at a time?”

If you’re specifically targeted, it’s a different deal…but then you have to ask yourself why you were being specifically targeted…

Yes they did you bloody doorknob

Soccer comes from the words Association Football. Americans take it too seriously when we rib you about it.

I wasn't referring to the cons of the tricks the team used, but some of their villains or stories were taken from the headlines. One of the showrunners had a blog about it

"I hate chiggers" 😆