24: Season 5: Episodes 3-4 (9:00am - 11:00am)

[SuperNelson]

@StarvingButStrong

Okay, besides the timing aspects, what bothers me about Palmer’s hiding that name in the text of chapter one is that he encrypted it.

See, either you go for the ‘hide in plain sight’ method OR you encrypt. Doing both is self-defeating, as Jack proved:

“Let’s look at this file.”

“Why that one?”

“It’s the only one encrypted.”
And if you are going to encrypt, don’t include a whole bunch of ordinary text – all that does is make it easier to decrypt. Put the one one line in a file by itself and mush that. Or encrypt the ordinary version of the text, open it with a text editor, scroll down to page 8, say, type in your name and address, then close and re-encrypt. Anyone trying to decrypt the file won’t realize they’ve broken it if what results is encrypted crap.

I figured Palmer encrypted the file to make sure that if something happened to him, the right people (Jack) would look at that file, and soon. He used flank-2 encryption.

[Marley23]

@Finagle

My theory is that Allstate is behind the whole “Let’s frame Jack Bauer conspiracy”. Last season’s terrorist organization had a group plan with Allstate, and thanks to Jack, they had to pay out on about a bazillion policies. Jack, quite frankly, is an actuarial nightmare.

Are you saying he’s a humanoid typhoon?

[Shadowfyre]

I got this one

@Marley23

…humanoid typhoon?

Band name!

[Merijeek]

@Marley23

Are you saying he’s a humanoid typhoon?

Sure. One that recently passed through a munitions factory.

-Joe

[Marley23]

@Shadowfyre

Band name!

Not to burst your bubble, but I was making a reference to an anime show called Trigun. If I’d coined that phrase, I might be rich right now.

[spiralscratch]

@carnivorousplant

Someone’s going to come along and explain that soon, right?

Oblongs

[Monstre]

@StarvingButStrong

And if you are going to encrypt, don’t include a whole bunch of ordinary text – all that does is make it easier to decrypt.

Also, when you encrypt it with a Simple Cipher, it makes it pretty easy to break open in… say… the 10 minutes or less that it took Jack. Wouldn’t want to bother with that 128-bit key. No no… 16 bits should be enough…

[Monstre]

Another random thought:

At one point, Jack told Diane (trying to explain why he lied about who he was), “First, I never thought something like this could ever happen”.

Um, Jack…? It’s happened to you at least 4 times now. What were you thinking?

[HPL]

@Monstre

Another random thought:

At one point, Jack told Diane (trying to explain why he lied about who he was), “First, I never thought something like this could ever happen”.

Um, Jack…? It’s happened to you at least 4 times now. What were you thinking?

What would be interesting would be if in season 6, at the end, we find out that Jack has secretly been setting all these plots into motion just so he’ll have something to do.

Or he wakes up and realizes that it’s all been one really intense dream and that he really owns an inn in vermont and writes books like “How to build a barbeque” for a living.

[Larry_Mudd]

@HPL

Or he wakes up and realizes that it’s all been one really intense dream and that he really owns an inn in vermont and writes books like “How to build a barbeque” for a living.

…and then Suzanne Pleshette leans over from her side of the bed and slashes his throat with a wickedly-sharpened laminate business card.