They somehow detected the download before the girl pushed the button, which means it was downloaded in the background. If I were an ubervillain and wanted to play a movie to a victim, I’d download it realtime in such a way that none of it would hit the HDD.

It’s funny how Peter asks what the hand looked like, when normally he should have asked what she did before the hand appeared or something like that.

Incidentally, does anyone else get the impression that someone on the staff of this show is a Cronenberg fan? First we had the Shivers-like (well, until the moronic “common cold” explanation) slug parasite, and now an episode rips off one of the most famous effects shots from Videodrome. And come to think of it, the psychosomatic injuries from the Dreamscape episode are a bit like the Psychoplasmics stuff in The Brood, though that’s a stretch.

To say that this show will die based on its scientific merit would be shortsighted since Star Trek, Star Gate or any other long running television franchise also has characters working with fictional science. I suggest Nova or your local space and science museum if your are looking for actual science facts and stop expecting every writer to carry Degrees in every subject they write about. Its like a chef telling bill cosby that he knows nothing about pudding and shouldn’t talk about it, something Bill knows but still sells because people like it for what it is fake stuff in a box pretending to be food. I suspect that is why the show is called Fringe and not Walters fact finding hour.

Sort of to reconstruct my brain to some degree after I’ve melted it watching bad tv.

Which tangentially relates to this episode! :D

As a CS major, I *always* cringe a lot when sci-fi writers play computer forensics crime writer, but frankly, this show was more realistic than most major motion pictures. Medically speaking, the melting brain thing may have been bunk, but that’s not my department. Playing lots of wierd images, patterns, and high-pitched noises it certainly nothing technologically unrealistic. As far as the computer stuff goes, these seem to be the biggest complaints:

* It is practically impossible for software to cause physical hardware damage to the computer it runs on (old-timers may have had fun making MFM drives hop off the table and smash themselves to bits, but that was back in the stone age). Even if somehow this malware managed to cook the drive, it would have shut the PC down from overheating long before the metal in the drives melted.

* Astrid couldn’t possibly know that the platters were “fused” without opening up the drive — a drive that damaged wouldn’t even register as present on the PC it was attached to. Of course, the simplest explanation is that she was just wrong, since there’s no way *anyone* could get data off “fused” platters, yet all Peter’s buddy had to do was plug the drive into a normal controller and boot up.

* The idea that the evil file downloaded itself in the background in millions of pieces is completely plausible, and is actually how most ad-ware works these days.

* The idea that the hacker could somehow “detect” another download of the file is wrong mainly on scale. Someone with enough CPU power and access to the right access points (basically the phone companies) could monitor traffic to/from a known set of addresses and pick up patterns. AT&T was caught doing exactly this with *voice* traffic for the NSA, and that’s significantly more complex than just monitoring endpoint address.

* The idea that some guy could do it in a matter of minutes from his basement PC is just silly.

* And lastly, for Scott — your speakers can probably play tones well above and below the range of human hearing. Again, it’s the scale — volume — that’s the problem, not the frequency.
–Kutulu

All Fringe stories are extreme and implausible. Some remind me of certain episodes of X-Files. Trying to “make sense” of the medicine or the science is a wasted effort, in my opinion, and of course in the end that leads to frustration and one doesn’t really enjoy the show.

I keep watching Fringe because, to me, it’s entertaining enough. The cast is good and the episodes are well shot. It’s not realistic enough? Who cares, in the end.