The Final Details

 This will be the final bit of information I will explain in these blogs, as this one will cover all the illegal things that have happened and explain why the main characters never contacted the police. Now there are multiple instances where Physanto kidnaps someone and nothing with the government is done, no police phone call, no complaints are ever filed. Well, it is to be assumed that Physanto has bought out any government offices that they would have problems with and were probably assassinated by one of their associates. They get away with it so easily as also no one tried to go to court with them as in a legal battle the side with the most money and influence can sway the entire court on jurors and judges. Most likely this scenario has happened all over the world, though those cases become very hush-hush and are not publicly announced, unlike other court cases. 

Another very obvious illegal thing that happened casually was a Trojan horse virus, though there are multitudes of viruses out there like browser hijackers, and file infectors. Trojan horses are just exactly what you hear, but when you click a link, email, file, or even photographs. In the show, the group of protagonists sends a Trojan horse virus to the director of communications which they start stealing his files. Sending a virus to someone can be considered destruction of property, though this is in Australia the U.S has the Patriot Act (section 814) that makes it illegal to spread computer viruses but not create them. Though they have laws against many hacking like DDosing, electronic theft, and phishing. All are illegal and punishable in Australian law and are what the protagonists do to ruin the director of communications in Australia. 

The Difference of Destruction

 

Previously I have used the term WMD, in other posts not giving a generalization of why that's inheritable bad. The abbreviation W.M.D is short for Weapons of Mass Destruction and rightfully named so. Few weapons exist in this damage the get that title but it's enough to warrant international attention. There are three types of W.M.Ds in the world: Chemical, Biological, and Nuclear. Each will be explained and will show how the toxic gas in the show is considered a WMD. 

First, biological WMDs, the first instance of those were the smallpox blankets back in the 1700s given to the natives. They are generally easy to create which is their biggest threat, they attack via contact of skin, gastrointestinal, and pulmonary. These attacks are made from bacterial agents, anthrax, or Q fever. People who make these are usually alone and not aligned with a group in a particular way.

Chemical weapons have been around since the old Chinese Dynasties, with things like arsenic gas being used. Other gases like in both World Wars are considered WMDs too considering the amount of damage and casualties they caused. Though not as efficient as biological weapons, the gas in The Code is more close to a chemical weapon than a biological one. 

Last is Nuclear weapons, those are the ones that everyone is scared of and have sirens at the ready to try and leave the area. The gas in The Code is between Nuclear (as it came from Nuclear waste) and chemical as it was in the form of an easy-to-move gas. That's types of weapons are what makes areas, homes, and cities uninhabitable for a long time, just like Chernobyl.

A Look Into Hacktivism

 Earlier in one of the previous posts, I mentioned one of the characters was a hacktivist, and didn’t go into further detail on how that is how it can be a good or bad thing to be on the internet. A hacktivist in text book definition is an Internet activist or an activist using their hacking skills to cause civil disobedience to promote a political agenda. These people are usually portrayed in a variety of ways, like the hacktivist group Anonymous, Chaos Computer Club, or even the Homebrew Computer Club. Hacktivism is usually targeted against corporate and government officials, though these are not their only targets. They also target terrorists, religious organizations, drug dealers, and pedophiles, though this seems like they are two faces of the same coin; it only depends on what they do with the information they gain. For example if they reveal a big scandal of a government official they may be charged with hacking and leaking of personal information (the hacktivist) while the government official is charged with multiple things that may put them in for life and get them removed from office. Hacktivists are to not be confused with hackers, as hackers are notorious for stealing information that’s valuable like bank account information, credit card info, social media accounts, scamming, and stealing files left unsecured.

    Though what hacktivists do in TV shows, movies, and video games is different from what they do in reality. Most if not all hacktivists fight for making the world a better place, and are not some evil mastermind who hides weapons of mass destruction. An example of hacktivist doing good in the world is an operation that happened in 2011 dubbed Operation DarkNet in which the hacktivist group, Anonymous, shut down up to 40 child pornography sites and leaked names of over 1500 names of the users who frequented those sites. Though every good has some bad, though bad for companies, in 2012 the CIA tried to block many payment services like PayPal and Amazon to prevent people from fundraising the political whistleblower WikiLeaks. Again Anonymous stepped in shut down all websites to those payment services to make those companies allow many transactions to happen. 

Episode 5 & 6: Physanto's Ruin

     The fifth episode of the series, foreshadow's someone being tortured in a warehouse, and leaves that as a cliffhanger till the near end of that show. After Ned and Jesse's fiasco in the outback, where the last episode Jesse was framed for assault and battery, they're both in hiding since Jesse cracked the encryption on the files he stole. However, Andy King, a character who has been essentially been hunting the case files from Hani and Jesse, gets information about Hani's family and where they're staying from the Iranian Embassy. He enters their home and waits for someone to come home, unfortunately, Hani comes home and is ambushed by King and briefly water-boarded to get the information of where the files are. While she is being water-boarded her parents come home and witness King torturing Hani; King then makes them all hostages but leaves Hani with an associate of his, Niko Gaelle, to finish his black market deal. King succumbs to his wounds from being stabbed and harpooned and perishes, while Hani is tortured and gets a message out to Jesse who after a video of Hani being tortured goes ballistic and wants to save Hani out of his love for her. After many hours of planning, they get information on where Hani is located after a failed trade between Ned and the black market dealers. 

       Ned then tells Alex about the chemical that could have infected the water sources in the nearby area and tells her that they may have haphazardly cleaned it. When Lucy sees the effect of it on wildlife she gets everyone away from the water and says it's poisoned. Thus ends episode 5 with poisoned water, Hani being tracked down, and the nuclear files on the loose and unaccounted for. 

    The climax and the final payback happens in episode 6, Hani is rescued and taken to a hospital. Jesse really wants to end all loose ends, he goes to the hospital with a disposable phone and asks a nurse to take it to her hidden in a dinner bowl, they call each other and they after the conversation get back together. Jesse also heads back to the outback to make amends with the man that framed him for assault and battery and find out what the true reason was behind it. It turns out his kids were threatened by Physanto and he had to do it so they wouldn't harm them. They eventually make amends and become allies towards the end, towards their master plan. Ned's love interest, Sophie Walsh, has started a coup with her boss Randall Keats. Hani's kidnapper and torturer, Niko Gaelle, is killed by North Korean agents as they want the files for Physanto's nuclear deals.

    As the files are basically gone away from anyone's hands Hani, Ned, Jesse, and Walsh plan a massive framing of Ian Bradley, the Minister of Foreign Affairs. They being the communicators of the framing and they must all work together and hope Bradley is curious to look at an image. Though human curiosity takes the better of him and the image he clicks is a trojan horse virus. It looked like it was nothing, but as soon as he clicked it, his computer started recording him and was shown a picture of the two kids that were harmed at the beginning of the show.  Upon seeing the pictures, Bradley says "Who the fuck are these kids?" and that clip of him saying that is saved. Hani and Jesse start working on the files Bradley starts trashing files about Physanto,  which they start copying over to their server. Also with that clip saved they start uploading all the files, he is trashing and upload them all over any broadcast media for everyone in Australia to see. Though broadcast media consists of TV, film, social media, or radio they only sent it to all TVs or anything with a screen. This was the end of a great show called The Code where everyone that deserved a happy ending got one.  

    

Physanto's Travesty

    Starting off with episode 3, it starts with Ned Banks coming home to his brother, Jesse Banks, missing once again. Though this time leaving an obvious clue it being a crude drawing of his recent love interest for the past two episodes. After Jesse's misuse of technological practice, Ned has been trying to keep a closer eye on him after he hacked the antagonist group Phycanto and they retaliated by torturing him. However, aside antagonist is also chasing Jesse, Andy King. King was head of security of Physanto, but he went rogue and tried to sell Physanto's IP address to an Arms Dealer named Adam Guille. King's and Guilles's deal backfires as King only delivered half of what he said he would and scolded King to get the rest before he gets his payment.     

    In the meantime, while the "hidden deals" are taking place Jesse and his love interest Hani Pandare are running away to an old cabin the Bank's family used to visit when they were all together. Ned decides to snoop on who Hani truly is and is stumped by her social media page seemingly harmless until one of his co-workers finds out her password and shows Ned who she really is. Hani is a hacktivist, whose father works for Physanto as a bio-engineer, but she is also working for Phycanto as an Intel source or else her family would get deported back to their country whereas Hani stated "They would die if they were deported back!". Overall though blackmail and extortion Hani was giving the wrong representation of what a hacktivist truly was. 

    Moving onto episode four everything starts to come together starting from what Hani’s parents did to have the Department of Immigration to be investigated multiple times. During this episode, we also learn that Physanto area camera fiends, they constantly are looking through city cameras that they have access to and snooping in on conversations on their operatives and the two people they are hunting, Jesse and Ned Banks. This is the episode where Jesse cracks the encryption on the Physanto files. The files included laser-enrichment which was told by another character being Ned's source of main information was "A project every nation hasn't been able to crack in the past 50 years." .The clue he needed? Was the time when a lady took a photo of her working at certain times. Though he is caught yet again by Physanto, he is not tortured like he was last time as Physanto is not the one who caught them exactly it was the local police. Before that Jesse was framed for aggravated assault against someone that was working with Physanto. The last bit of the episode had Ned Banks being offered a deal by the head of the local major news outlet to drop the whole story he’s been digging for and they’ll help Jesse go with only community service and not years in jail. That was the last cliffhanger dropped from the episode, many questions have yet to be answered and many more appear by the hour.    

The Code: From the Top

     The Australian show The Code made by Shelley Birse, for the first two episodes, drew me in pretty hard. From what I can pick up during the episodes I watched it starts with two teens in love driving down a dirt road in the Aussie outback when they're suddenly driven off the road by someone and with editing effects made to look like they were snuffed out. But to my surprise, one of them survived and was able to find where his lover died. Unfortunately, that's where that story stops as it then jumps to two guys sitting in the car driving to someone's job. As they establish they're both brothers Ned and Jesse Banks, however, Jesse has autism and his brother has helped his brother and assumably grown to help him and calm his brother during the growth. Ned Banks works for a small online news reporter. Jesse, his brother, is a very intelligent hacker I would classify him of being an encoder and decoder. He decoded a video and made it easier for everyone to see, and he encoded some files for him and his brother’s use for his online news team. Everything started to go downhill from there, with cover-ups, sexual scandals, hackers taking down an entire online news website.