In a year where just about every cheesy TV concept from the 1970s and 1980s seems to be the subject of a reboot, it’s high time we remember the one ’70s reboot that outshone them all — and managed the rare feat of surpassing the original in our imaginations.

I speak of course of Battlestar Galactica — which happens to be the subject of a fantastic oral history published this week. Titled So Say We All, it’s the latest outing for Mark Altman and Edward Gross, the pair who produced the mammoth and meticulous 50-Year Mission, the oral history of Star Trek. And for sci-fi geeks, it’s even more compulsively readable.

SEE ALSO: This ultimate ‘Star Trek’ history holds clues for the next show

In the voices of the showrunners, cast and crew, So Say We All tells the entire story of Battlestar Galactica. It’s the illuminating tale behind the tale of a rag-tag space fleet fleeing the massacre of 12 planets by the evil Cylons, searching for their lost colony, located on some planet named Earth. 

The book takes us through every creative decision from its first introduction to a sci-fi hungry TV audience in 1978 through its longer-lasting and much better 2004-2010 incarnation. Three lessons stand out:

1. It really wasn’t a Star Wars clone

The original series appeared in the wake of the original Star Wars; when ABC went begging for shows with “star” in the title, comparisons were inevitable no matter what. Battlestar creator Glen A. Larson was hit with a copyright lawsuit from 20th Century Fox on behalf of its moneyspinning filmmaker. George Lucas, who’d harbored dreams of making his own Star Wars TV show, saw too many similarities. 

Not only did Larson, a veteran TV writer, have form for copying the formats of other shows — writer Harlan Ellison called him “Glen Larceny” — he’d also used the same special effects guys Lucas had left unemployed after Star Wars wrapped. Apparently this meant war.

This first lawsuit was lost, and with hindsight the copycat charge has less merit. Larson first wrote up his network pitch in 1968; then called “Adam’s Ark” and featuring a migration away from Earth, it was more inspired by Star Trek than anything else. Larson layered on his own Mormon spirituality; the scattered tribes, the Council of Twelve and “Lords of Kobol” were familiar terms to the Church of Latter-Day Saints. The Force this was not. 

Altman and Gross show how much Larson bent over backwards to please Lucas regardless, for example taking out laser beam special effects that the Star Wars creator didn’t exactly originate. Still, 20th Century Fox persisted, launching a second lawsuit that lasted much longer than the one season of original-flavor Battlestar Galactica and its disastrous follow-up Galactica 1980. (Larson’s studio bosses eventually settled out of court for $225,000).  

The book doesn’t get into this, but there was vindication (or sweet revenge?) for Galactica fans years later. When Lucas finally decided to try to get a Star Wars TV show off the ground in the late 2000s, as I reported in How Star Wars Conquered the Universe, he not only hired second Galactica showrunner Ronald D. Moore to pen an episode starring Darth Vader, he also assigned his team of artists to figure out how Moore’s show had made sci-fi TV this damn good on less than $3 million an episode. 

Lucas’ live-action show, tentatively titled “Star Wars: Underworld,” never made it to screen — largely because the creator couldn’t resist the urge to pack it with speeder bikes and pod races that ballooned the budget.

Despite its assistance to Lucasfilm, Galactica’s TV reign at the top of sci-fi would not be troubled by its old spendthrift nemesis. 

2. Network suits were the real Cylons.

The fact that Battlestar Galactica made it to the screen in the first place was due to network suits chasing those Star Wars dollars. But from that point on, unintentionally and otherwise, those same TV bosses did their damnedest to destroy the show.

Galactica was originally supposed to be a seven-part miniseries, starting with a TV movie. Before the movie was done, the miniseries had morphed into a 24-part season. The pace required was crippling. The cast and crew were working almost literally around the clock. The budget bled. Larson’s writing suffered. The special effects couldn’t keep up (and were often reused). 

And the network censors kept sticking their noses in, making the show toothless by demanding that no character could be killed in the 8pm hour. The Cylons got away with murder sometimes, but only because of a swift last-minute change that made them robots. Apparently that was more acceptable to the suits than lizards, which is what the race of Cylons were in the TV movie’s shooting script. 

Larson himself told the story of “a lady from the network who was a coke addict” — hey, it was the late 1970s — who would “have these hyper ideas.” Her big idea for the show? “Let’s have Galactica  discover Earth” — in the third episode!

This pressure to “front load” stuff the audience wants to see was common in network TV, and eventually coked-up network lady got her wish. After cancelling the show and then having a sudden, jittery change of heart, ABC suits gave us Galactica 1980, where the ship does find Earth. It then sends a bunch of super-powered teenage ambassadors to meet our teens and have wild adventures, all because the suits wanted a younger audience. 

It’s a testament to the kernel of the idea of Battlestar Galactica that it survived these stabs in the back. In the 2000s it was revived by a much more story-savvy Hollywood exec, David Eick, who brought on wunderkind Star Trek writer Ronald D. Moore to pen a TV movie that they immediately sold to what was then the correctly-spelled Sci-Fi Channel. 

But Sci-Fi suits were almost as nerve-wracked as their ABC ancestors. Moore and Eick settled into the roles of co-showrunners and had to fend off all kinds of interference over their four-season run, largely attempts to tone down the violence. 

The pair had three things going for them: the fact that Moore was churning out brilliant scripts with crazy concepts (human-like Cylons that worship God!) at a rate of knots; the fact that the show was a critical darling, widely seen as expressing and exploring America’s post-9/11 moral crisis; and sheer bullheadedness about making exactly the kind of science fiction they wanted to see.

Against all odds, and over the protests of highly skeptical, downright hostile fans of the original series — who were especially annoyed that Starbuck was recast as a woman! — it worked.

3. The 2004 series caught lightning in a bottle like no other sci-fi show before or since.

Sure, go ahead and make your argument for Star Trek: the Next Generation or Deep Space Nine or Babylon 5 or The Expanse as the best space show in the history of TV. They’re all good candidates. 

But nobody can doubt, especially not after reading this account, that Galactica perfected three elements that were not always present in those other shows: casting, chemistry, and consistently kick-ass writing. 

The three blended together in fascinating ways, with the cast contributing more to the direction of the show than you might think. For example, that rousing phrase “so say we all,” which is now so indelibly associated with the show that there was really only one thing this book could be called? It was ad-libbed by Edward James Olmos (Adama). 

This scene in the TV movie, aboard the Galactica after the Cylons destroy everything, was supposed to end before Olmos’ addendum. It is to Eick’s credit that he stopped the director yelling “cut” before this happened. It’s the first and only take. 

The cast is so in love with each other, even now, that the pages of So Say We All are sticky with tributes. But it’s all sincere: they still hang out in ones and twos a lot and have regular full-scale reunions. Galactica was a trial by fire on its Vancouver set; the many young, mostly Canadian actors found mentor figures in established figures like Olmos and Michael Hogan (Colonel Tigh). 

Olmos returned the feelings a thousand-fold. Incensed by the showrunners’ insistence that Katee Sackhoff (Starbuck) was being permanently killed off in season 3, he was so relieved when he found out the truth (they were saving her return for a season finale surprise) that he blabbed the spoiler to the entire world. 

Moore and Eick now freely admit that twist didn’t really work (although Moore still defends the final Starbuck twist a season later, in which she is presented as some kind of guardian angel.) But so much else did, and it was the result of a hot-house writer’s room that paid attention to the actors, wasn’t afraid to experiment and grabbed ideas from everywhere. 

For my money, the best example is the sudden  intrusion of the Bob Dylan song “All Along the Watchtower” at the end of Season 3. Broadcast from some mysterious beacon, the song awakens the final human-like Cylons in the crew to their true identities. All this was based on a script concept Moore had for an old song that would awaken aliens in the short-lived TV show he ran briefly, Roswell. The suits canceled that show, but the idea lived on.

The show never explained why that song was chosen as the signal. On paper, it looked like a ludicrous choice. But in the show, invested with a menacing mythical style by musician Bear McCreary, it worked like crazy. The plot twist came during the trial of traitor president Gaius Baltar (and what other TV show can give us the traitor president trial we crave?), barreling at high speed into what seemed to be a perfectly set-up courtroom finale. 

SEE ALSO: ‘Battlestar Galactica’ reboot would have ‘crazy unqualified captain,’ say showrunners

Years before the so-called Golden Age of TV, here was a show that excelled at upending expectations. It was comfortable asking really big questions, and not afraid to admit that — like that rag-tag fleet — it had no idea where it was going or how it was going to end until it happened. 

That’s what gives it the edge over its Syfy Channel successor The Expanse, or Netflix’s Altered Carbon, both of which are running on the rails of the novels they’re based on. The novels are enjoyable enough, but the shows based on them have no inherent spark, no real desire to go off in their own direction on a musical whim. 

If Battlestar Galactica is ever going to be surpassed, then both the suits and creatives are going to have to take a lot more risks in telling original science fiction stories — especially ones that reflect the kinds of dilemma America and the world faces today.

So say we all.

Everyone wants to stay safe when they’re taking a dip in the water — even crocodiles, it seems.

After a photo of the world’s most anxious (I’m assuming) crocodile using a pool noodle in the Florida Keys was posted on Instagram, local news outlets have been marveling at this unusual sight.

SEE ALSO: New dolphin-whale hybrid sea creature is the spawn of an unholy union

“Crock on a float,” reads Victor F. Perez’s concise Instagram caption.

Perez reportedly snapped a photo of the crocodile in Key Largo earlier this month, when he spotted it near the 105.5 mile marker in Bayside, according to Perez’s comments on his Instagram post.

“We see crocs from time to time in our canal but never ever one on a noodle…” Perez told FOX 13. 

In a comment on his Instagram post, Perez said that he only ever sees crocodiles in canals, never in the bays of Key Largo.

Crocodiles can be found in north and south Florida and can on occasion be found further inland on the southeast coast — where the Keys are located — thanks to Florida’s canal systems, according to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.

There’s no news of what became of the pool noodle riding crocodile, but I sincerely hope it seeks out some useful resources like meditation apps, or coloring books to temper its anxiety.  

Even Instagram’s strongest security settings may not be enough to protect your account from determined hackers.

As the company scrambles to manage a wave of hacks that have hit hundreds of users since the beginning of August, many of these users have described a troubling pattern that raises serious questions about the app’s security settings.

SEE ALSO: Instagram users are reporting the same bizarre hack

Instagram lets users secure their accounts with two-factor authentication (PSA: here’s how to turn on 2FA if you haven’t already), but it currently relies on text messages, which aren’t as secure as app-based authentication methods.

The company said in a statement last week in response to Mashable’s reporting on the growing number of Instagram hacks that it’s working to improve its 2FA security, but it didn’t specify how. (Developer Jane Manchun Wong previously found evidence the company is testing a feature that would let people use a dedicated authenticator app, such as Google Authenticator.)

But until that update becomes available, the only option for users is the SMS-based method. And while SMS-based 2FA is better than none at all, it may not be enough to protect your Instagram account from determined cyber criminals.

Weak 2FA Security

Of the more than 275 people who have contacted Mashable about hacked Instagram accounts in the last week, most of the people we’ve heard from have said they were not using 2FA at the time. 

But Mashable has confirmed that at least four people were hacked despite having 2FA enabled. At least six others who contacted Mashable have made similar claims, but were unable to provide evidence they had 2FA enabled on their accounts when they were hacked.

In some of these cases, there was no sign that someone was trying to hack their account — until the users were suddenly locked out with no warning. In other cases, they were aware hackers were targeting them, but Instagram’s tightest security settings weren’t able to protect their accounts.

“It’s not an exaggeration to say that Instagram is my number one security problem that I deal with as an IT professional”

One IT professional who spoke with Mashable on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak on behalf of his organization, said the Instagram account he manages for his company has been hacked three times in the span of a month, despite strict security settings. The account has two-factor authentication enabled, uses a 20-character password, and the email address linked to the account is a jumble of random characters, He has even given special instructions to his carrier to prevent unauthorized ports of his SIM. 

Yet despite all this, the account, which has become a frequent hacking target, has been broken into three times in the last month. He often receives dozens of unauthorized 2FA prompts a day. (Mashable has seen screenshots confirming these attempts.) But oddly, he says that by the time he receives the prompt, the hackers have already managed to gain access to the account.

“Everything that Instagram has available is being done on our account and yet, every single time I get that SMS [the 2FA prompt], they have already changed the password,” he told Mashable. “I cannot as an IT professional tell you how they are doing this. They must have some sort of flaw in Instagram fundamentally that they are exploiting to do this.”

He has been able to regain access to the account each time because he has a contact at Instagram, but the constant hack attempts still take a toll. Fending them off has become a near-constant struggle — he says he’s typically able to reset his password and head them off if he catches them within the first few minutes — which takes time away from other duties. 

“It’s not an exaggeration to say that Instagram is my number one security problem that I deal with as an IT professional,” he says.

Small businesses upended

It’s still unclear how these attacks are occurring. In the past, hackers have hijacked Instagram users’ SIMs in order to gain entry into 2FA-protected accounts. But that doesn’t appear to be what’s happening in these cases, in which users describe their 2FA settings being bypassed, changed, or disabled without their knowledge. 

“Two-factor authentication obviously does help, but it’s not foolproof”

“Two-factor authentication obviously does help, but it’s not foolproof,” says Stuart Madnick, an information technology professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, who notes that clever hackers are often able to find loopholes that allow them to bypass 2FA.

One such loophole is particularly well known. A flaw in a routing protocol used by telecom companies, known as the Signaling System 7 (SS7) protocol, essentially allows hackers to redirect 2FA text messages from their intended recipients. This flaw has been exploited to great effect in the past. In January 2017, a group hackers exploited the SS7 flaw in order to empty their victims’ bank accounts, ArsTechnica reported. And researchers at Positive Technologies demonstrated just how easy it can be to exploit this particular flaw when they used it to hack into a Coinbase account last year. Two Democratic Congressmen publicly asked the FCC to work with carriers to address SS7 vulnerabilities last year, but they have not yet been patched.

Whether or not this is what’s happening to Instagram is impossible to say for sure without the company weighing in directly. Instagram has declined multiple requests to comment on the record. But the wave of recent hacks, which have caused hundreds to lose access to their accounts, highlight the fact that security is a growing concern for the service, which now has more than one billion users. 

SEE ALSO: Instagram is investigating hacked accounts, promises new 2FA features

For small business owners who rely on Instagram for customers, these hacks can be especially devastating.

Robert Jordan who uses Instagram to communicate with clients for his soundtrack design company, reports a similar experience. On the night of Aug. 12, he was unable to log into his Instagram account, which had about 5,000 followers and was protected with 2FA. He soon realized the username had been changed, as well as the password and email for the account. His bio was deleted and his profile image changed to a partial image of a horse, which appeared to be a still from the DreamWorks film Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron.

“For business profiles like mine that deal with multiple clients day to day through Instagram and other social media, it puts a huge dent in customer satisfaction”

He says he never received any indication from Instagram that something was wrong — no 2FA prompts and no emails alerting that his account info had been changed. Like dozens of others who have spoken with Mashable, he’s had no luck navigating Instagram’s support system.

“It’s extremely disappointing that, with such sensitive information like credit cards, addresses, phone numbers, and private messages linked to accounts, their support is less than subpar,” Jordan says. “Since a lot of people are ditching Facebook over the data privacy issues, and LinkedIn isn’t extremely popular, Instagram has been my biggest connection. For business profiles like mine that deal with multiple clients day to day through Instagram and other social media, it puts a huge dent in customer satisfaction.”

These types of small business accounts are significant not just to the people who run them. Small businesses are an increasingly important demographic for Facebook. There are 25 million business profiles on Instagram, according to the company’s own statistics. And while not all of these businesses pay for advertising, the company is increasingly trying to encourage them to do so — Instagram lets businesses target users with shoppable ads in its feed and recently began experimenting with in-app shopping in Stories, in addition to traditional ads.

But unlike Facebook, which has fairly robust security settings (like the ability to use physical security keys as well as secondary authenticator apps), Instagram’s security settings are fairly rudimentary. Businesses and other accounts with large followings have the same limited settings available to them as everyone else.

These settings don’t go far enough to protect accounts that have large followings or whose handles are short or unique enough to make them prime hacking targets, users say. For example, though 2FA is offered, users are only prompted for additional codes when logging in from an unrecognized device. Instagram also doesn’t require a password or other authentication method in order to change account information or to disable 2FA altogether. 

Keeping users informed

Instagram, may also not being doing all it can to educate people about the risk of potential hacks, says Madnick, the MIT professor. “It’s not clear to Instagram’s best interest to tell people that they’re under threat. It’s a conflict of interest of sorts.” He notes that many people never enable 2FA because they don’t know it exists or assume they won’t be targeted.

Complicating the hacks is Instagram’s support system, which appears to be poorly equipped to handle the influx of requests to recover hacked accounts. Instagram said last week that users’ whose accounts are improperly accessed and have account information changed should follow emailed instructions to revert the changes on their accounts. But many report that these links are dead by the time they see them. Others say they never receive any email at all, or that their attempts to reset their passwords are in vain because all of the contact information associated with account has already been changed. Instagram says it has other ways of letting its users recover accounts, but declined to comment on specifics beyond pointing to its previous blog post.

For users who have been hacked, this process adds insult to injury. People who are already desperate to regain control of their accounts — whether it’s to support their business, recover photos of loved ones, or protect their privacy — end up feeling they’re moving in circles, receiving automated email after automated email, with no resolution.

So while the rest of Instagram’s 1 billion users wait for the security update the company promises is in the works, some of its most dedicated users are still waiting on a solution that may never come.