On Salvation (TV series)

Here it is, a post just to begin this new year saying this blog is dead, but it isn't really!

I've just finished the second season of Salvation.

According to Wikipedia Salvation is an “American suspense drama television series”. One thing is undoubtful: it's American, and by “American” I don't mean Canada, Estados Unidos Mexicanos, or any of the South American (the continent) countries. I mean just this:

In fact it is full of all the classical USA rhetoric, stereotypes, characters, and so forth. Almost everything's already seen; abuse of (cheap) suspense and engaging techniques — like when a character acts in a so dumb way just to cause a problem to be fixed…¹

Nonetheless everything is also well packaged (as often it happens with this kind of show) and they keep a good pace; indeed I had to skip over filler moments or scenes, among which I include scenes that supposedly should give psychological complexity to the characters or spice conflicts up a bit, but to me they were boring commonplaces or annoying overloaded ideological speeches/“ruminations”.

Beware: there's a big SPOILER ALERT here… but in between there are other spoiler alerts (with details you can choose to reveal).

All begins in season 1 when Liam Cole — the character of the very smart, but also somewhat naive and silly, young scientist — discovers an asteroid which will hit the Earth.

Spoiler alert!

In the last episode the truth is revealed. It was a Darius Tanz's epiphany based only on an observation: the slug launched from the railgun missed the target, despite the fact that they did all the calculation correct. The object isn't an asteroid but an alien ship or being (it isn't clear); thus they didn't miss the target: the target dodged the slug, thereafter setting itself on the same trajectory again to continue its journey to Earth like if it were “undisturbed”.

In the second season they need to shut down the internet, and in a second moment they need to reboot it.

They needed to shut it down because Monroe Bennett was using it to coordinate a raid of his supporters to the hospital where judge (whatever) Chen was. Bennett brought his case of being the legitimate POTUS to the Supreme Court, then using a suicide bomber to kill Chen and avoid he could tell his vote, which was of course for Mackenzie. Grace Borrows went to the hospital to try to take a statement from Chen, but in the meantime someone was sent to kill Chen, and the situation was getting worse outside the hospital, with Bennett's supporter trying to enter. In the attempt to avoid further problems at the hospital, Tanz had the idea to shut down the internet, and Mackenzie agreed (better than sending soldiers against the Bennett's supporters). But this made impossible for Grace to send the video of Chen's statement which she eventually succeeded recording.

The shutdown of the Internet had another bad consequence. The group RE/SYST had control over nuclear warheads that they were using to force cooperation among nations to solve the asteroid's problem. The problem, as explained by Alycia — who is part of RE/SYST, knew Tanz and is the second love interest of Liam — is this:

The satellite dish which controls the ICBM signal, the one carrying those 13 warheads, it's run remotely. Somewhere in Alaska. When the internet went down, so did the satellite. The ICBM sends a ping to the sat dish every four hours. If the missile gets a response, it continues on course in low earth orbit. But just now it didn't get a response. It's gonna try again in another four hours. If there's still no answer, failsafe protocol will be triggered.

The failsafe protocol is this: drop the warheads on all the 13 preprogrammed targets. Hence, they need to reboot the internet.

During the shutdown Bennett attacks the White House, also jamming the signals to avoid communications: the White House is cut off: no landlines, no signals for mobile phones, and moreover internet's down.

But Jillian and Nate, who are inside the White House, need to send a message to Dr. Stendahl, the railgun project supervisor, to warn him: there's an order to withdraw the troops protecting the railgun.

Spoiler alert!

Nate is part of a cult, COPE, lead by Bass Shepherd, the son of one of the founders of the Q-17 group. The cult's members are exploited, weak people unaware of the real reason of the existence of COPE. The Q-17 group doesn't want any project saving the Earth to succeed: they want the human race to be (almost) destroyed, while they — the best and richest, or just the richest, hence the best — escape using the Tanz's Salvation ship and settle a new society on another planet. Another member of this Q-17 is the uncle of Darius, Nicholas Tanz. He reveals to Darius that they killed Mackenzie so that he could become the POTUS (because Tanz was appointed as vice president).

It will be Nate to make the railgun explode, so that it couldn't launch more slugs against the asteroid. And it was possible with the help of Jillian who provided the schematics of the railgun to Bass Shepherd. Why? Because Jillian became a very silly, fragile, irrational character — for the sake of adding problems.

Our sense of justice is releaved when we ask ourselves how a bunch of rich (and many old, too) idiots can colonize and survive on any planet they can reach in their lifespan.

How can she warn Dr. Stendahl without Internet and with landlines cut and signals jammed?

There may be another way.

It's a dark web gateway Darius set up.

But the internet isn't working, says Nate.

Yeah, so, the way Darius explained it, is, the internet is the highway, the dark web is the sewer that runs underneath. Shutting down the DNS servers brought street traffic to a halt above ground

But the sewers tunnels are still navigable?

Yeah, if you know the exact address […]

Therefore shutting down the Internet means to shut down the DNS servers. And this would make all the (internet) traffic to halt. Wouldn't it?

First, what's the darkweb? The term is used in a vague way, just to trigger some fascination of obscure, unknown, hackerish thing. Anyway, the actual darkweb isn't something that runs underneath. On the contrary, it is something that runs on top of a working network like the internet: it's an overlay network. The authors of the show could have checked dark web on Wikipedia, if they cared enough and respected the spectators.

Second, what's a DNS server? It's a Domain Name System server, a service which “maps” a human readable name, like whitehouse.gov or mycomputer.local, to an IP address — clearly the first example is a public name on the internet and a public IP address will be given, and the second example is an imaginary name of a private computer inside a “private” network, and the DNS server knowing that mapping isn't reachable from outside (it wouldn't make sense to let people know that in my local network the computer named mycomputer.local has 192.168.1.77 as IPv4).

If you shut down just the DNS servers, all you stop is the ability to write whitehouse.gov instead of the IP address, but if you know the IP address, you can input it directly and everything should be fine!²

This is a property attributed by Jillian (and Tanz) to the dark web: if you know the exact address.

Then we see Jillian trying to remember the exact address to contact the railgun server.

An IPv4 address is made of four “parts” separated by a dot, and each of these “parts” are a number from 0 to 255.³ Easier to remember than many TOR addresses, except for the suffix of course; an onion address looks like 3g2upl4pq6kufc4m.onion, and what Jillian is typing is diowlkd8923jlk5jlsd1379, which to me seems an attempt to look like a TOR address (length apart).

Of course those who browse such a darkweb use an interesting invention called bookmarks. They don't type the addresses by heart. Since the computer Jillian is using must be clearly set up to use the “Dark web client”, I wonder why the address of the railgun isn't bookmarked somewhere…

At last Jillian succeeded sending Dr. Stendahl the message:

troops withdrawn, railgun project vulnerable.

The message is progressively crypted in a visually funny way on the screen:

Have you ever actually seen a message being crypted on you screen? Here it is an example… Ok, maybe you aren't familiar with the concept, but you have to know that textual data are made of bytes (which can be interpreted as symbols) and encryption trasforms those bytes (whatever they can be interpreted) into other bytes. You can try to interpret these encrypted bytes as symbols again, but it makes no sense, and very likely many of them won't be printable, i.e., won't be letters, numbers, or symbols like those we see on the screen.

Here an example of encryption of the short text with gpg using my public key:

The encrypted data are sent to the terminal, which tries to interpret them as UTF-8, and the results is what you see because some can be interpreted as symbols (few of which can't be mapped to a glyph in the current font), but others are likely corrupted UTF-8, others can be interpreted as control sequences. Said otherwise, it makes no sense to try to print on the screen the encrypted message as it is, unless you “filter” it someway. For example, we can read the bytes as hexadecimal.

Notice the | hexdump -C addition to the command line: it means, feed the input of the program hexdump with the output of the previous program (gpg), and -C is an option which tells hexdump to use the canonical hex+ASCII display. That is, each byte is shown as a number in base 16, and on the right part, if that byte is a printable ASCII byte, its symbol is shown, otherwise a dot is shown (then the program arranges the bytes 16 per line, prefixed with the offset, and the ASCII part is delimited by |…)

Anyhow, a client which allows you to write a message and to deliver it encrypted, unlikely will show you the crypted message: the client just sends it to its destination, and that's all. The destination won't see the crypted message neither: the client will decrypt it, provided a password or a private key or whatever, and Dr. Stendahl will see the original message, as expected.

By the way, where are Jillian and Nate? They are inside the White House which is under attack by Bennett, hence it is in lock-down mode, and it should be cut off (Mackenzie, the POTUS, can't communicate with the Pentagon, how could she reboot the internet?). But it seems that there are cables — or other physical means — which still makes possible to communicate outside the White House… If the Internet weren't down, would the White House be really cut off?

Also, that jamming of signals must work half the time: when Liam tries to contact Darius (who's in the White House) using the phone, he can't — sorry, no signals.

But then Darius' phone rings. Harris is surprised and asks Darius if the net is back. “No”, answers Darius. How is it possible that someone is reaching him then? The caller is Liam. How did he…?

he's got my dark web address from the railgun project.

Thus, Darius has a dark web address associated to its phone? Or maybe to its dark web gateway, the same used by Jillian to send the message to Dr. Stendahl, and we already know this gateway can exit the White House — because you know, it's darkweb…

Ok. It means Darius' phone is connected to that server someway. How? It can't be with a cable, nor through the phone network, otherwise it would have been possible to make calls. The last option we can think of is a wifi network, meaning that the wifi network inside the White House works, it isn't jammed, and the signal is rather strong also in the tunnels where Darius and Harry are now.

So, all the communications needed to let the show go on, could happen.

Luckly, our heroes manage to save the situation by surrending to Bennett, who then turns the internet back on in order to announce his victory. This allows the broadcasting of Chen's video⁴ and the stop of the launch of the warheads: now RE/SYST is back in control of them.

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1. It seems that the threat of an extinction-level event can justify anything. One can be like “I want to see you in that situation”. I'd like to, just to prove them wrong. Of course these are only devices to raise the tension.↩

2. Also, this would make new connections harder (impossible if you don't know the IP address), but connections already established will be maintained. Then, there's also a caching mechanism of DNS responses, so that even with all the DNS servers down, you could still resolve a name for a while.↩

3. Each “part” is a byte, hence the value between 0 and 255. Altogether these 4 bytes can be read as a number (from 0 to 2³² - 1), but not all possible numbers can be used to address a server on the internet.↩

4. One among may ridiculous scenes: Bennett's soldiers take the White House, and while Bennett's get ready to announce his victory, all the mobile phones of the soldiers ring, and they check them to see what's up: the Chen's video. All social media addicts who get distracted from their duty because of mobile notifications…↩