Last weekend, I settled in to watch the final episodes of Super Pumped: The Battle For Uber on Netflix. After a week of intense work on course and event development, I was ready for some simple, relaxing entertainment.
As the daughter of a venture capitalist, I find the story of Uber's founding and funding fascinating. Would the VCs be depicted as angels or demons?
If you haven't watched it yet, I highly recommend it. There were a lot of cringe-worthy moments - watching Travis Kalanick build a company by stepping on decency and ethics along the way.
none compares to the moment in Episode 5, The Charm Offensive, where staff at Uber are examining Anthony Levandowski's laptop.
Suddenly - they toggle to a Wireshark screen! HOLD EVERYTHING! Pause, rewind, pause, rewind, move 2 feet from the screen, pause, rewind, pause, rewind. What?!
Yeah - they did a pretty lousy job of mocking up the Wireshark screen here - It starts with the humorous FTP Request: Automation Project (9.7 GB) - are those five UDP packets supposed to be the 9.7 GB file transfer (with a length of 256 bytes each)? What?
How about that Google search for "How to scrub a laptop"?
Interestingly, they portray Wireshark as running in the background while Levandowsky allegedly (1) downloads project files, (2) searches for details on scrubbing a laptop, and then (3) scrubbed that laptop by installing a new operating system. Oh my.
Over the years, filmmakers have given us lots of fascinating technical bloopers. I almost stopped watching Mr. Robot when the first episode showed a DDoS attack from impossible IP addresses. I'm so glad I kept watching and that the tech review improved.
Add Super Pumped: The Battle For Uber to the collection.