About halfway through the film, Eron attempts to shut down STEM remotely, due to him discovering Grey was not keeping STEM top-secret. Because this would risk Grey becoming completely paralyzed again, STEM guides Grey towards a hacker that can disable Eron's "input guard", which would completely free STEM from Eron's control. Grey barely makes it in time, and STEM becomes free to do whatever it pleases for the rest of the film.

Pictured above is the screen from the hacker's monitor as they disable STEM's input guard. Upon closer examination, the sequence of characters used appears to be legitimate Python, but with no indentation. If this were a language such as C, any of its variants or Java, the fact that the hacker's code is not indented is somewhat eyebrow-raising since proper spacing and indentation is intended to improve code readability but will still run fine as is. However, the spacing and indentation (or lack thereof) is only egregious since Python is the language of focus here, a language that depends on indents in code to figure out what instructions to execute next in a program, and will outright refuse to run if the indentation is not up to Python's standards. Since all of the hacker's code is not indented whatsoever, this is definitely not the case.

On the other hand, when Eron attempts to shut down STEM remotely, he uses the perfectly valid Unix command "sudo shutdown -h now", where:

• "sudo" is the command required for system-level operations,

• "shutdown" is the command that shuts down the system in question,

• "-h" is a shutdown-specific flag that requests that the system be either halted or powered off after it has been brought down, with the choice as to which left up to the system [1], and

• "now" tells the system when to shut down, in this case as soon as the command is run.

As many liberties as Upgrade takes with its portrayal of technology helping people recover from paralysis, the threat of modern prosthetic limbs potentially able to be hacked is unfortunately not as fictitious. In 2019, at Barcelona's Mobile World Congress researchers found that a prosthetic hand's crucial internet connection to the cloud could be compromised, risking the misuse of private data that are used to operate the prosthetic, including registration numbers, login credentials and passwords [2]. Upgrade takes a fair amount of liberties with its portrayal of "darknet hacking", but balances this out with the very real risk of remotely compromisable computerized prosthetics.

1. shutdown(8) (linux.die.net, n.p., n.d.), https://linux.die.net/man/8/shutdown

2. Charlie Osborne, "MWC 2019: Your Bionic Hand is Now at Risk from Hackers" (CBS Interactive, 2019), https://www.zdnet.com/article/your-bionic-hand-is-now-at-risk-from-hackers/