You likely already know this, but EMPIST is a technology company, which means we are filled with people that have a special interest in many facets of the technology world, from traditional IT to social media, websites, and so on. To varying extents, we are geeks. And one of geekdom’s favorite shows on television is HBO’s Silicon Valley, which follows a young man on his quest to turn an algorithm into a startup and into a brand new internet.
If you don’t watch the show, there is an opening sequence near the beginning of each episode that features both real-world technology companies logos along with those of the fictional companies that populate the show in something of a stylized Sim City 2000 theme. For those of a certain generation, it’s pretty great. The producers of the show switched things up for the latest season’s opener, however. See if you can spot the easter egg.
If you missed it, the signage for Facebook shifts from plain English to something resembling Cyrillic, a variant of which is used for Russian script. Don’t bother tabbing over to Google translator, as the Cyrillic variant doesn’t spell anything out. It’s gibberish, but the poke at the social media giant over the well-publicized issues the company has faced in recent months is both timely and effective.
Facebook finds itself in a precarious position at the moment, with many in both government and media lining up to tee-off on it with reported leaks of user data, cooperation with government agencies that give many pauses, and the revelation that its mobile app was logging call and text information from Android phones. To be fair to Facebook, much of this has to do with a misunderstanding of just how much culpability the users of Facebook have in swiping past permissions requests and allowing third-parties to access their data, but the wider world isn’t showing much care over that distinction.
And now it’s leaking into the pop entertainment world, serving as a gag on a television show about the technology world.
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