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Silicon Valley, episode 8: Larping, mogging and losing its way

White Hat/Black Hat, where have the writers gone?

FTP, WTF

But that wasn't the most offensive piece of tech gibberish. The key denouement is when Cuban Hannemann accidentally deletes terabytes of porn on an external third-party server by placing his tequila bottle on the delete key of a laptop. The networks were connected by FTP and Pied Paper was downloading the files to compress them and, presumably, re-upload to show how efficient and effective its algorithms are.

Richard makes the key argument when hauled into the CEO office to explain the deleted data that the speed with which the data was deleted demonstrates the incredible speed of their compression technology. Their competitor would have taken much longer to delete so much data.

We can see one scenario in which this approach may actually happen: for each worker thread, a file is downloaded and has to be compressed before the next file is taken. As such, the speed with which the compression works would lead to the rate of deletion: faster compression, faster deletion. But why would anyone implement such an approach if you were connecting by FTP? You would simply download everything and run compression on it and re-upload.

The deletion rate would be determined more by the speed of your connection than the compression rate. And that's not even considering the fact that a company would have to be insane to give a third-party deletion rights on their server when all they are doing is downloading files.

The show's tech advisers should have nipped this plot line in the bud or at least come up with a more plausible way for Pied Piper to screw up their potential client's systems. And let's be honest, there are many.

Don't despair Richard! I'll take the Tequila bottle away and this tortured episode will end.

Onward and upward

So, a bad episode with a few good gags. The season's low point. But with just two episodes left, it's time to ramp things up and there's every reason to believe the show can pull it off.

The preview for the penultimate episode shows Belsonioff going full-legal in an effort to kill Pied Piper. Hopefully they will draw some inspiration from the many unintentionally hilarious litigation efforts that have been fired off in the real Silicon Valley.

And that leaves the season's finale where the awkward, amateurish, underfunded and clunky Pied Piper has the opportunity to rise like a phoenix from the ashes and show that the nerds, the dreamers, the good guys can win with some self-belief, mad coding skills and raw, poorly paid determination.

If Silicon Valley manages to live up to its reputation, it will take this movie moment, chew it up and spit it out onto our compostable fiber plates. ®

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