Discussion on:

Microsoft Surface RT: The ultimate mobile hacking tool for NCIS

What do you think about the way technology is depicted in television and movies?

I've been a fan of NCIS and NCIS:Los Angeles for some time. The latter has been placing Microsoft products since season one. NCIS was placing a lot of Cisco products, which I never understood because they weren't easy (or even really available at all) for consumers....

I actually think the MS product placement great. One of the biggest problems with getting a product to market is getting the user to be able to visualize how it might work.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjGbvpr_dB8

Can anyone take technology placement in Hollywood serious? Though I will address the Angry Birds situation on Surface: I've been playing AB Space for the last couple of weeks and it doesn't strike me as a bad port. Also, I've been playing around with it and it might not actually be that bad: supports the command prompt (nslookup, ping, tracert, nslookup, etc), supports native vpn, supports mapped drives, includes Office 2013, supports RDP client, etc. I'm not saying it's a hacking tool but it definitely does more than I expected.

It's about as accurate and realistic as a lot of the stuff posing as "news" that's pushed through this site and most of the others like it

I think the advertising is well done. I'd rather see that than a commercial. Do you ever wonder why Gibbs on NCIS is still using a big CRT?

I have wondered about that often!!! Love Gibbs and the show, I only watch NCIS, Las Vegas.

Am I the only one who saw a very early Bill Gates whipping out the new Surface here?

Or is everyone else too young to remember - - -

For a refreshing lack of modern technology, take a look at the Canadian series, "Murdoch Mysteries" http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1091909/ where early radical mystery solving is a nice change from the magic technology shown in "modern" shows.

I wonder who paid for the product placement for the tricorder on Star Trek? These things are all props. They help tell a story, and Surface is the latest cutting edge cool looking techno prop. Something most folks haven't yet seen. Helps the teens watching the show want to buy one of them. Most computers screens shown on high tech shows are CGI based anyway. Just read a story about the production of ARGO, and most of the scenes in it are amazingly enough, CGI, which fooled me. Spending time on a high budget production set like NCIS you'll find most things don't work. Just for show. Two years ago they used iPads. Now Surface. Good for MSFT for getting it in there.

Is it possible that the was just used to interface the computer at the office remotely? I think that Is a more plausible.

If I only had a dollar for every apple logo in movies and TV... every laptop or phone you've seen in the past 10 years is an apple logo, sometimes the occasional Dell log creeps in... Yes this tablet is obvious marketing, but a tech guy like him WOULD have that tablet as soon as it came out, for personal use at least (thus pulling it out of his coat). It is cutting edge technology. The pro version which looks the sameas the RT can run all your hacking tools...

I manage the video surveillance system at my company. Every once in a while someone will ask to review a recording and at some point will ask me to "enhance" the video. Some people think that if techie on TV can use a tool to zoom in on a person's tattoo 500 feet away to positively identify him as the killer, it must be real. Video "enhancement" is a mostly a myth. You can zoom in but you can't capture images beyond the camera's ability and any algorithm that can clear up an image makes guesses at what the image should look like.
I don't mind product placement as long as they show a product doing what it is truly capable of doing.
Like someone already said, the NCIS techie is probably using the RT to remote into more powerful systems. It can do that. - but it won't be able to enhance video.

...while you can't enhance the VIDEO, you can create and enhanced STILL from the video. The is software out there now that will use frame interpolation and video jitter to build a compostite still from multiple frames of video to produce an image with more resolution then the original frames. I wish I could remember the name - but can't.

When/if such "enhancement" would be useful as more than guidence in an investigation is a different story.

I would worry about interpolation. - and so would a clever lawyer
For example a "B" on a license plate could easily get enhanced to an "8".

Amateur astronomers use this. You shoot a video of the area of interest and the software then stacks the frames after correcting for star movement and you end up with a much higher resolution result. The software uses a database to figure out what direction the camera is looking and uses that to work out how the view moves. It's been around for a while now. It's not traditional interpolation and doesn't "guess" at anything.

Similar is focus-stacking where you take a bunch of stills changing the point of focus (closer/further away) and the software finds the sharpest parts of each image and combines them into a single image with perfect focus across the whole depth of field. This is great for macro work where you generally have a very thin depth of focus.

could accurately distinguish an "8" from a "B" or an "O" from a "D" on a license plate that's half of a mile away.
My guess is that star fields are less variable and thus more predictable. Presumably their software has access to a database of what you should see in the night sky given your location and time. So it is fair to enhance those images.
Regardless, most companies do not have the tools to enhance images captured on their video cameras and it is annoying when users come to my office expecting me to be able to do what they do on TV shows.
Just like most crime scene investigators don't drive Hummers (as seen on CSI) and most medical examiners don't have access to holographic projection screens (as seen on Bones).
Imagine what the tax-paying public would say if a state or federal agency had those unnecessary toys!

I opened Photoshop and placed a lovely border around it. They soon got the message about a low resolution image being a low resolution image, no matter what you wanted.

nt

it's fiction! You know, not true, like movies and novels and ....

The problem is people that seem to think television programs are somehow a representation of the real world.

Of course the exception is news, but that's just about as unreal as the rest in many cases.

Seems every TV crime show has someone who can access every security camera in the country in spite of most security systems being a closed circuit and not accessible online. There is just no internet connection to the security system. Prosecutors now have a problem with the "CSI effect." Juries expect the cops to have all the minute evidence that the CSI teams always seems to come up with.

I think it was a well done product placement.....they were definitely told to stretch out the moment and make sure it was obvious! But hey, why not! My daughter came running to me yesterday with the Surface as her number 1 on her Xmas list telling me it would be perfect for College so she doesn't have to lug her brand new 17" laptop to class!! I can lock my laptop to my desk in my room and just carry the Microsoft thingy (she didn't know it was called Surface) to class with me. It has a cool keyboard that clicks on and off..... I said "you don't want an Ipad?" she said "no because it doesn't have flash and besides the microsoft one will connect to my laptop." I have an Ipad 3-- she still wants "the microsoft one". Flash is King among teens !!

Perhaps, just perhaps, Eric was using the Remote Desktop application to access the hacking power of his network back at the office!?

Remote desktop works great on my Surface RT (using it right now for this post)!