Things TV always gets wrong about tech

What's your number one pet peeve in a TV show? The thing that completely takes you out of the story and makes you say "wha? That's not how it works, at all"? Clearly empty coffee cups that actors swing about wildly? Drivers who spend more time looking at their passenger than at the road? Lead characters who drive halfway across a city to deliver a line in person that could have been an email or a phone call?

When you work in IT, you tend to notice the technology that makes no sense; the digital plot devices that allow things to progress at breakneck speed by avoiding such tedious concerns as reality or facts.

Magically accurate IP addresses

A staple of crime and thriller genres, the IP address of a miscreant's computer is a fast-track to kicking in their door and yelling "step away from the computer!". In TV world, an IP address uniquely identifies an individual device and can be effortlessly linked to a street address in the physical world. If the TV good guys are really lucky it will also be linked to a named individual and will instantly pull up an image of their driving license too.

An IP address is does bear some similarities to a real address. It's a big number that tells other computers on the internet where to send each packed of data. At one point in time, several decades ago, it may have been true that an IP address could be linked almost to an individual. That was when things were much less dynamic and an address might be assigned to a particular person's desktop computer in an office or university. With the explosion in popularity of the internet, such manual configuration became impossible. For one thing, the sheer number of devices came to overwhelm the number of IP addresses available. Techniques were introduced to allow multiple devices to share one IP address. Private IP ranges can be used within a home or an organisation to allow data to move within the private network and then forward all internet traffic out through one device that is connected to the rest of the world and has a public IP address. So one IP address can end up representing an entire company and could, in theory, spread across multiple physical sites.

To make matters more complicated, this arrangement of private/public addresses (a technique known as NAT or network address translation) is also sometimes used by large internet service providers too. Particularly when it comes to mobile internet on your phone, you might be behind a carrier-grade NAT where thousands of people, spread all over a geographic area, could appear to be using the same IP address.

Facial recognition

After magically pulling up a driver's licence photo and address from an IP address, the TV cops find themselves with a problem : the suspect isn't home. They'll have to find him somewhere amongst the millions in the city. But worry not! They have the power of video surveillance and facial recognition. Simply feed in the (possibly ten years out of date) photo and a fancy graphical interface will flick through all the city's CCTV feeds one by one, picking out each individual's face and comparing it to the photo. And despite the millions to one odds, they'll locate their suspect in about five seconds.

Anyone who has tried to use the e-gates at an airport will know that facial recognition frequently fails to work even in the ideal situations of national borders with good light and a willing participant facing directly at the camera. CCTV is going to be catching people at all sorts of weird angles, making it much harder to match them with a front-facing portrait. If you've ever seen real-life police appeals to identify suspects in a CCTV capture, you'll have noticed that the images tend to be of pretty poor quality.

Live facial recognition does exist in reality and has been, controversially, trialled in London and other UK cities. However these use dedicated, specialised cameras and still require police officers to manually verify the match.

The tech expert

Strongly related to the previous category, TV and movies like to assume that the police / FBI / CIA etc can access any electronic system on the planet. Satellites, CCTV (whether publicly or privately owned), mobile phone networks. You name it, the "tech guy or girl" is able to access it (and there's only one "tech guy or girl" who's an expert in IT, forensics, anatomy, literature and anything else that is helpful to progressing the storyline). If they don't have legitimate access, they can "hack" their way in faster than you can say "erm, I don't think that's how it works".

And when they're hacking, we get to look at some important and complicated-looking code whizzing up their screen. I'm a coder at heart so I like to pause the show at this point and see what it is they're passing off as working code. I've seen fragments of HTML webpages, random bits of Python that have been copied off a Stack Overflow answer, weird mismatches of several different languages in the one file, chunks of hexadecimal code. It doesn't matter what it is though because the tech expert can understand it, hack it and bend it to their will in mere seconds.

If encrypted data arrives in their tech lab it'll only be a few minutes before they have it cracked. I know they have to move the plot forward and that no TV viewer is going to sit there for hours or days as a computer slowly tries to brute force an encryption key, but why even bother mentioning the encryption if you can overcome it so quickly. It's a bit like Chekov's Gun, if you introduce some encrypted data early on, that encryption should pose some kind of problem for the protagonists.

And more

There are millions of other examples: DNA matching that can find a genetic needle in a planet-sized haystack; video footage that can be zoomed and enhanced enough to read the notebook in a character's pocket; audio that can be filtered and amplified enough to hear someone coughing on the other side of the street. What's your favourite pet peeve? Let me know in the comments below.