A Critical Look At Walter "Scorpion" O'Brien

1729 (581437) writes Back in August, there was speculation that the "real life" Walter O'Brien (alleged inspiration for CBS's new drama Scorpion) might be a fraud. Mike Masnick from Techdirt follows up on the story: "The more you dig, the more of the same you find. Former co-workers of O'Brien's have shown up in comments or reached out to me and others directly — and they all say the same thing. Walter is a nice enough guy, works hard, does a decent job (though it didn't stop him from getting laid off from The Capital Group), but has a penchant for telling absolutely unbelievable stories about his life. It appears that in just repeating those stories enough, some gullible Hollywood folks took him at his word (and the press did too), and now there's a mediocre TV show about those made up stories." Masnick's article is a fascinating look at a man who appears to have conned both TV executives and journalists into believing his far-fetched Walter Mitty fantasies.

Comments

This show made my brain sad

[uvsc_wolverine]

I watched 10 minutes of it the other night (on accident I swear!) and had to spend another 10 minutes explaining to my wife why I was laughing so hard. They were tracking down some cyber-bad guy (ugh) through the internet and one of the characters stopped working to do the obligatory "I'm going to explain how the internet works to the seasoned tech-illiterate detective who fears technology" part of the episode. He then proceeded to explain how data flows through many points on the internet to get where it needs to go (okay so far). He told the cop that these points are called (I am NOT kidding) "Router-hubs". These router-hubs each keep a "shadow copy" of every document (shut up shut up SHUT UP!) that flows through them for months (what the hell?) and that they could find the document they needed by going to some random data center with one of these router-hubs (it hurts to type that) and getting the shadow copy.

Then they went to some random building start doing things on a computer next to a long row of what appeared to be rack-mounted LED lights. Oh, and there was a smokey haze in the DC for some reason. Probably some atmospheric bullcrap. Anyway this show does have entertainment value, but only if you look at it as a parody.