I watched this one while doing some other things, but what caught my attention was the effort they went to in making the tech stuff at least close to plausible. They actually went overboard a bit explaining that right near the beginning.

The idea is that this serial killer uses a website to stream live video of captured people being slowly killed. The gimmick is that the more people who watch the video the faster the death. The site can't be traced because (and they go to great lengths to explain this) the stream is being relayed through a series of potentially tens of thousands of compromised servers. Shutting down one doesn't do any good. The DNS name is registered with a Russian top level domain, and the dns server uses an extremely low TTL so the actual IP is never cached. Take down a server and within seconds a new server is referenced.

Ok, so the Internet address untraceable part isn't bad. Off hand it sounds good.

Then it fails. Almost immediately every knows the originating site of the live stream is local to the city they're in. Even if you can't trace the net connection, there is at least one or two things you can do pretty quickly to both isolate the location of the setup and possibly stop the progress of the torture.

Rolling Blackout would be the first. The power company can, from their central office, dump the grid on large areas all at once. They don't like to do it, but when a life is at stake they will not hesitate. I've seen it done once at a car accident when power lines were down across gas pumps at a station while an occupant will still trapped in the car. A radio request to dispatch, a quick call to the power company, and a large area was immediately dropped off the grid. The methods used in the killings were very heavy on power consumption. A generator could suffice, but not just batteries. It would have to be an outside the building unit and would be fairly easy to spot from air with a thermal camera.

The second is slower but maybe simpler, and possibly more subtle. Simply use a low flying police helicopter to make noise as it crosses neighborhoods. The internet stream is live and includes audio.

Here's a link to the Movie Trailer


The movie wasn't terrible and I give it high marks for at least attempting to make a plausible technical scenario. They just failed on the municipal services side. Then of course, they gave in to the movie hacker-myth and they gave the bad guy too much super-kung-fu at hacking (her car, her Blackberry, etc. -- not likely).