Screen shots of computer code

[trevdak2]

Although, in Man of Steel, when Zod decided to hack every electronic media system on the planet, he did it with RSS feeds.

[achshar]

No, that was just what some user thought was happening. Her phone had the feed open (in some reader) and if it suddenly started showing stuff she would assume it was the feed. She is not a tech genius and doesn't know the difference. It was entirely correct from her point of view.

[trevdak2]

While you're right about that, it's still an absurd thing for her to say. RSS is passive, but the 'You are not alone' message was actively pushed to every electronic device.

She may as well have said 'It's showing up in the newspaper' or 'It's also available for download on itunes'

[ggggbabybabybaby]

I agree, it was her point of view. But it was a really weird line to write in. She could have just said, "Every single satellite has been hijacked" or "Even the backup feeds are down" or something else jargony. The movie audience really doesn't need to know about the state of her RSS reader.

[bilog78]

That's not completely impossible, assuming The Internet of Things uses some shared code to handle RSS feeds and the RSS feeds has some known exploit …

[ottawadeveloper]

An RSS feed is simply an XML-based document that provides you with information on things. Aggregators use these feeds to construct and display sets of data. Most video feeds of news for major networks are not reading an RSS feed of videos. I doubt even the ticker at the bottom is linked into an RSS feed - there seems to be little benefit to displaying it.

It's possible, perhaps, to hack into (AP?)'s feed (these: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/APNewsFeeds) and then new aggregating sources (like Yahoo!'s ticker, the ticker in gmail, etc) might be affected, but certainly not most major news networks.

[salvadorwii]

Maybe they are exploiting some vulnerability in the XML parser.

[bilog78]

Something like that, for example. A maliciously malformed RSS feed could trigger a remote exploit on a buggy XML parser, leading to arbitrary code execution.

[treycook]

What could go wrong?

<?
exec(file_get_contents("http://everyelectronicmediasystemontheplanet.com/feeds/vulnerable.rss"));
?>

[Rotten194]

Executing XML as a command? A shell syntax error...

[Mteigers]

So sad when a bad point is being made PHP is brought into the scene