Mr Robot has driven a stake through the Hollywood hacker, and not a moment too soon

Mr Robot is the most successful example of a small but fast-growing genre of “techno-realist” media, where the focus is on realistic portrayals of hackers, information security, surveillance and privacy, and it represents a huge reversal on the usual portrayal of hackers and computers as convenient plot elements whose details can be finessed to meet the story’s demands, without regard to reality.

There’s a problem with this: information security really matters, and practically no one unde...