"Steel Mountain" is probably a reference to the "Iron Mountain" data center. "More than 2,700 employees work in this underground city spread across 145 acres. The facility has its own restaurant, fire trucks, water treatment plant and a week's worth of back-up power."
Origin of the Title:
- In computing, an exploit is a piece of software, sequence of commands or bug that will take advantage of a weakness in a computer system. In this case, fsociety attempts to implant an exploit it can use to take down Steel Mountain
- For the show's characters, exploits are personal weaknesses that others can use against them, such as Tyrell (Martin Wallström)'s hubris, Mr. Robot (Christian Slater)'s ego, and Angela (Portia Doubleday)'s need to be respected.
- The extension: .wmv is an audio/video file format generally used by the Windows operating system. Among the earliest file compression formats, it was designed to compete with Real Video and Quicktime.
The movie The Imitation Game (2014) is mentioned by Fernando Vera (Elliot Villar)'s lawyer referring to the fact that their twitter based code system wasn't so complex and hard to crack as they seemed to think.
Elliot (Rami Malek) installs a Raspberry Pi, a small, affordable computer board that can be programmed for many functions, into Steel Mountain's AC system.
Towards the end of the episode, when Elliot (Rami Malek) and Darlene (Carly Chaikin) are riding the subway, "Love on a Real Train" by Tangerine Dream plays. This is the same song played on the train in Risky Business (1983).