White Hat / Black Hat is the eighth episode in Season 2 of the HBO series Silicon Valley.
Plot[]
When Richard takes pity on a competitor, he accidentally sparks a feud that finds him paranoid about security. Jared exaggerates Pied Piper’s size to get results. Facing pressure from board members, Gavin looks to place responsibility elsewhere.
Synopsis[]
The Pied Piper team returns to the Hacker Hostel to start the bake-off, but Russ is there with an over-sized bottle of tequila. "Shots, baby!" he says. "We are going to drink to re-billionizing." Richard asks Russ to leave a check, but Russ tells him, "Giving you money right now is the worst thing I could do for you. Look what just happened. I threatened to walk, and you turned lean and hungry and you clawed your way into a $15 million deal."
At a meeting with executives, Gavin suggests the company shroud Nucleus in mystery until its official rollout the following January. The board asks whether they should be worried, but Gavin assures them Nucleus is "on track" and someone will be held responsible if it fails. Gavin begs Dr. Bannerchek to come back to Hooli. "We need you, now, guiding critical components of our core business," he says. "Components like Nucleus." Bannerchek likes the idea of being in charge of Nucleus. "There's a chance," Gavin tells Bannerchek, "no one will know I had anything to do with it at all."
Richard thanks the Pied Piper team for forgoing their salaries that week and reminds them that if they win -- when they win, he corrects himself -- there will be bonuses all around. Richard tells Gilfoyle and Dinesh that Seth, Endframe's network security guy, changed his LinkedIn status to "unemployed." The guys think it's amazing that they got him fired, but Richard feels bad and sends Seth a message. "Can we meet?" Seth asks Richard.
Seth tells Richard that he's been tearing his hair out and asks how Gilfoyle hacked the Endframe system. Richard tells him about Gilfoyle finding the login information on the Post-It. Seth calls Gilfoyle, telling him, "You just f**ked with the wrong hacker." He runs off, screaming, "F**k all of you Pied Piper f**ks!" Gilfoyle and Dinesh are mad Richard talked to Seth. "He's not going to do shit," Gilfoyle says of Seth. "He's a coder." Adds Dinesh: "By definition, we're all pussies." Richard remains worried that Seth will "skull f**k" Pied Piper, as he threatened.
Arriving at Raviga to pitch an app, Erlich and Jian-Yang find Monica outside smoking a cigarette. Later she calls and "thanks" Erlich for outing her habit and tells him that his app idea -- a way for parents to find the least-crowded playground -- won't work because it will mostly appeal to pedophiles. She finally agrees to ask Laurie for five minutes to present the app.
After looking at the mobile beta for Nucleus, Bannerchek quits Hooli without even telling Gavin. "Now the world will know you were responsible for Nucleus," one of the execs excitedly tells a bereft Gavin. "You, and you alone."
Richard is still paranoid that Seth is going to attack their system, while Gilfoyle and Dinesh could care less. Richard again meets with Seth, who says he was just blowing off steam with the threats until he realizes that Gilfoyle didn't think he could attack the system. He calls Gilfoyle again and renews his threats.
Erlich and Jian-Yang pitch the app to Laurie, but they give it a new twist: Erlich says the app is a real-time, crowd-sourced map locating smokers. "With our app users can locate and, thus, avoid these self-indulgent, self-destructive, negligent monsters," Erlich says, as Monica glares and Laurie smiles. "We call it Smokation." Afterward Monica tells Erlich there's promise for the app, and Jian-Yang lights up a cigarette in the office.
Gilfoyle and Dinesh continue to assure Richard that their system is safe during the transfer of Intersite videos. Russ shows up and insists on more shots of his tequila, but Richard calls Russ an "asshole" because he's stopped giving them their money. "We're gonna win this bake-off and pay you enough money to go away forever," Richard tells Russ. "So take your shitty tequila and your shitty jeans with f**king metal chunks on them and get the f**k outta here." Russ is hurt. "Wow, that's harsh," he says, "I guess, with you, it was all about the money, wasn't it, Richard?" Before he goes, Russ shows Richard the gift he bought for himself: a McLaren.
Richard gets a call from the frantic CTO of Intersite; Pied Piper is deleting all their data. The team runs inside and is baffled at what's happening. "You guys are killing me," the CTO tells Richard. "I'm losing hundreds of hours of content." Neither side can shut it down. "How the f**k did Seth do this?" Gilfoyle asks. Russ notices that his tequila bottle is sitting on the backspace key of a laptop; he lifts it up, and the content stops being deleted. "The Tres Comas bottle was on the delete key," he sheepishly tells the team. "That's not great, but...we're good now. I gotta go." The Pied Piper group is stunned.
Richard explains to Intersite CEO Molly Kendall that they deleted over 9,000 hours of the company's premium content. "Our compression is so incredibly powerful that we were able to delete all those files at a rate that, until now, was unthinkable, if we're considering just raw speed," he says, trying to spin what happened. Molly doesn't find any of Richard's explanation amusing. "Get out," she tells him. "Now. All of you."[1]
Memorable Quotes[]
- "Now the world will know you were responsible for Nucleus, you and you alone"
- ―one of Hooli's execs to Gavin
Notes[]
There's plenty of blame to go around for the deletion of so much Intersite content besides just Richard and Russ Hanneman. The Intersite dev ops team failed to observe the principle of least access.
The principle of least access means giving each user the lowest level access they need for the proper and authorized use of the system. For example, one Intersite customer can view his billing record, but not other customers' billing records.
So for the "bake-off", EndFrame and Pied Piper needed read access to the Intersite library but not delete access. Pretty much all operating systems in use today have at least rudimentary controls for read/write access.
Presumably, there's at least one backup of Intersite content somewhere, and they can restore that content to the main server. But if they had bothered to set read-only access for EndFrame and Pied Piper, they wouldn't need to restore anything from backups.
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