[HN Gopher] The Max Headroom Incident
___________________________________________________________________
The Max Headroom Incident
Author : sec400
Score : 210 points
Date : 2021-11-23 16:23 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (allthatsinteresting.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (allthatsinteresting.com)
| HoppedUpMenace wrote:
| I only see one version of this video on youtube, the first
| incident. I swear years ago when this was posted here, there was
| a different version I saw with more stuff going on and the audio
| was much more clear than the first. Am I missing something or is
| there more than one Max Headroom signal hijack video out there?
| sec400 wrote:
| 34th yr anniversary of it yesterday
| smithza wrote:
| Notice: The latter portion of the video is NSFW.
| dangle1 wrote:
| It's always fascinating seeing the internet catalog and
| consolidate knowledge, especially regarding events that occurred
| pre-internet.
|
| Back when these events happened, a blurb appeared on TV news and
| in papers, but there was no easy way to get the big picture as
| the investigations evolved.
| asdff wrote:
| People actually used to save stories that were interesting or
| cut them out of the paper, or go to the library and read a book
| on the subject. Fastforward to today, with the world at their
| fingertips, and who even saves anything anymore? It's all
| transient information on the web today. That interactive nyt
| article you might have bookmarked a few years ago has probably
| link rotted by now. If it wasn't for wikipedia cataloging
| information in a central, stable place, we'd be in a new dark
| age.
| Retric wrote:
| Internet archive is doing actual archival work. But at an
| even more basic level old methods to archive stuff are still
| in active use.
| laurent92 wrote:
| A lot of people save clips nowadays. Especially since the
| ideology wars are visible in every phrasing, people keep it
| "as proof" and upload compilations to Youtube. It would be
| interesting to see if this behavior stopped if Youtube didn't
| allow to "broadcast yourself" anymore. I'm sure Tiktok would
| take over but it is much more ephemeral.
| mattl wrote:
| This wasn't pre-Internet though. This happened in 1987.
|
| EDIT: "the Internet, as we know it today, was not deployed
| until 1983" -- people who know more about this than you.
| [deleted]
| setpatchaddress wrote:
| The internet effectively did not exist in 1987. Even the most
| tech savvy people didn't have access.
|
| That didn't start to change until the early 90's. Al Gore's
| contribution was actually important.
| mattl wrote:
| Public access starts in the late 80s with things like The
| World and Netcom, but people were posting on the Internet
| in the 1980s. There's http://olduse.net where you can go
| and read old USENET posts from the era.
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| Right. And I had access to it at my university in 1988.
| caymanjim wrote:
| The popular, misguided jokes about Gore "inventing the
| Internet" come from the work he did in Congress in the 70s
| and 80s, and into the very early 90s, when he was one of
| the first politicians to embrace and push legislation for
| it. He was definitely influential in its adoption and
| proliferation, insofar as politicians are important in
| funding all these things, and acting as evangelists.
| There's a pretty good Wikipedia article[1] about it all.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Gore_and_information_
| techno...
| cronix wrote:
| > The popular, misguided jokes about Gore "inventing the
| Internet" come from the work he did in Congress in the
| 70s and 80s
|
| I think most people got it from this interview he did
| with Wolf Blitzer on CNN. At least that's how I remember
| it. The jokes started flowing the next day. The number of
| people who knew of his work on internet related
| legislation pales in comparison to those who heard him
| say this on a major TV network.
|
| "I took the initiative in creating the internet"
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnFJ8cHAlco
| mattl wrote:
| Of Gore's involvement in the then-developing Internet
| while in Congress, Internet pioneers Vint Cerf and Bob
| Kahn have also noted that,
|
| > As far back as the 1970s Congressman Gore promoted the
| idea of high-speed telecommunications as an engine for
| both economic growth and the improvement of our
| educational system. He was the first elected official to
| grasp the potential of computer communications to have a
| broader impact than just improving the conduct of science
| and scholarship ... the Internet, as we know it today,
| was not deployed until 1983.
| h2odragon wrote:
| BBS was the thing then. Compuserve and such. Talker BBS chat
| boards run on "OMG WTF is that" stacks of C64 hardware (look
| up "commodore 64 1Megabyte RAM") or gronkulicious clusters of
| RBBS hosts.
|
| There were UUCP gateways to netnews an mail built out of
| ignorance and Qbasic by some insane hacker but that was bout
| as deep as "internet" penetrated. "Joliet One" had a 3b2 but
| they were pretty restrictive with their feeds.
| mattl wrote:
| I mean, some people were using BBS but there are academics
| and others using the internet.
| rufus_foreman wrote:
| I had a C64 and my mom bought me a CompuServe starter kit
| at some point in the 80's. I think it was something like $6
| an hour off-peak and over $20 an hour during peak hours,
| which might not even include long distance charges
| depending on where you were. That would be $20 an hour off-
| peak and over $60 peak in today's dollars. For 300 bits per
| second.
|
| For practical purposes, the internet did not exist for
| people like me until the mid-90's.
| mattl wrote:
| For practical purposes smartphones don't exist for a lot
| of people today, but we're not saying we're in the pre-
| smartphone era.
| rufus_foreman wrote:
| If a smartphone cost a dollar a minute to use, we would
| be saying we're in the pre-smartphone era.
|
| Edit: sorry, per minute, not per hour.
| mattl wrote:
| I'm sure there are places in the world where a smartphone
| basically costs way more than that.
|
| Just because your access was a dollar an hour, does not
| mean it didn't exist.
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| University access.
| rufus_foreman wrote:
| My mom worked at a university when she bought me the C64
| and the starter kit. Towards the end of this period, I
| was going to university. We did not have that type of
| access.
| ghaff wrote:
| Some doubtless had access to the Internet in the late
| 70s/early 80s but random students generally did not even
| at universities that were connected to the Internet. When
| I was in school I remember someone at the AI Lab printing
| out a long Usenet thread related to Star Wars but I
| certainly didn't have access. Indeed, outside of one
| class, I barely used a computer undergrad even as a non-
| CS engineering major.
| post-it wrote:
| Sure, but pre-"everyone is online always". Even things that
| happened in 2005, at the start of Reddit and Digg and well
| into the reign of MySpace, weren't summarized and
| consolidated as efficiently as they are today.
| mattl wrote:
| Sure. But we don't describe pre-smartphone as pre-
| telephone.
| steviedotboston wrote:
| yeah i dont see whats so hard about speaking accurately.
| notreallyserio wrote:
| This is funnier than it should be.
| FredPret wrote:
| I think the internet era is generally taken to be from 1995
| on
| mattl wrote:
| That's the rise of the web though. 1995 is when operating
| systems for PC and Mac start shipping with browsers
| preinstalled.
| xsmasher wrote:
| 1994-95 is when operating systems for PC and Mac start
| shipping with a TCP/IP stack preinstalled.
| FredPret wrote:
| It's not much of an internet without mass participation
| though
| notakio wrote:
| As someone who was online in 1987, I've found the
| internet significantly less enjoyable as it has become
| filled with "regular people", hoping to share the
| knowledge they don't have with people who didn't ask for
| it in the first place.
|
| While I get what you're saying, there was also a time and
| place where you could wonder aloud how to do
| $technical_thing_x on $platform_y and get a knowledgable,
| competent response from a skilled professional who had
| done that thing. Now, we sift through thousands of pages
| of sloppy copy pasta, of unknown pedigree and unknown
| efficacy. Was that for the best?
| FredPret wrote:
| The bulk of humanity have been endowed with sci-fi
| superpowers thanks to Wikipedia, Google, Google Maps,
| remote work, shopping from home, etc.
|
| As for the nerds who lost their online paradise? They are
| now in insane demand, earning eye-watering salaries and
| company valuations, and rising to the top of the social
| ladder.
|
| It's not perfect, but it is bloody good.
| pomian wrote:
| or go to HN, and ask.
| ohyes wrote:
| don't ask, simply answer the question you have wrong.
| laumars wrote:
| That wasn't even the start of the web era, let alone
| internet era.
|
| For context, GeoCities went live in 1994.
| kingcharles wrote:
| I love that the Internet allows closure on pre-Internet
| mysteries that might not have been practically solvable before.
|
| I recently managed to track down some people online and between
| us we solved a late 90s mystery that would have been very
| annoying to solve back then and had bugged me for over 20
| years. Closure is such a beautiful thing.
| LaserDiscMan wrote:
| A compilation of news reports at the time:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBOhFGmbSIs
|
| "Captain Midnight" jammed HBO for almost 5 minutes in 86:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_Midnight_broadcast_sig...
| beaner wrote:
| Of all the conspiracy theories out there, this one, to me, has
| the highest coverage-to-interestingness ratio. It just seems like
| a teen hacked an AV system and did a goofy presentation. I'm
| surprised that type of thing isn't more common, and I'm befuddled
| as to why this one gets so much attention.
| BoxOfRain wrote:
| >I'm surprised that type of thing isn't more common
|
| I'd guess that interfering with a digital TV signal today is
| considerably harder than an old analogue TV signal.
| throwawaygh wrote:
| No, this would've been quite a bit more difficult than "hacked
| an AV system".
|
| Hijacking small town public access channels was fairly easy.
| Taking over the feed for two different stations in Chicago is a
| whole different level. The basic hack is the same, but "just
| scale it up" isn't trivial in this case.
| coldpie wrote:
| It's a fair question. I find it fascinating just because of how
| freaking weird the videos are. If it was just some boring "Joe
| Sucks" message, it wouldn't be interesting, but instead it's a
| bunch of dumb random stuff, with the surreal VO and swirling
| background (corrugated metal?!) and flyswatter and... what? I
| just want to know what they were /trying/ to do. What was their
| beef with WGN? There's quite a lot of intentional symbolism.
| nsxwolf wrote:
| The rotating corrugated metal was a clever practical
| simulation of the CGI background the character from the TV
| show was composited on top of.
| cronix wrote:
| Hey, you can't talk about Max Headroom without talking about The
| Art of Noise.
|
| The Art of Noise (with Max Headroom) - Paranomia (1986):
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6epzmRZk6UU
| narrator wrote:
| Since we are bringing up Max Headroom, I would like to put a
| word in for Blipverts. These were part of the fictional subject
| matter of the first Max Headroom TV Show. They were
| advertisements that make old people watching them explode.
| Bryce, the engineer behind these adverts, uses the wonderful
| line, "I only invent the bomb, I don't drop it." This was
| amazingly prescient back in the 80s given where we are now in
| adtech.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekg45ub8bsk
| joezydeco wrote:
| All the networks were obsessed with real-time audience
| metrics, which is even more prescient.
| [deleted]
| midasuni wrote:
| If you know what to do you can certainly hijack many TV
| broadcasts even today, and thanks to destaffing and automation
| they won't be noticed or blocked for a long time.
| paulpauper wrote:
| _"I would like to inform anybody involved in this kinda thing,
| that there's a maximum penalty of $100,000, one year in jail, or
| both," Phil Bradford, an FCC spokesman, told a reporter the
| following day._
|
| does anyone ever pay maximum penalty for these cases?
| seibelj wrote:
| Classic Reddit post on a theory of who did it
| https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/eeb6e/i_believe_i_kno...
|
| An update said it was disproven but still an interesting read
| 0des wrote:
| For anyone wondering, I recently re-watched the Max Headroom
| series & movie, and it still holds. I recommend you check it out,
| even if you hadn't seen it before.
| Lio wrote:
| Seems like the original TV movie is available on YouTube for
| anyone interested:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZY-yQYVf38
| nabla9 wrote:
| I watched the series and movie again few years back and I
| concur.
|
| Amazing cypherpunk scifi. It has aquired some 80s patina that
| makes it only better.
| joezydeco wrote:
| The movie is an excellent piece of early cyberpunk. They were
| doing the "operator get me out of here" two decades before The
| Matrix.
|
| The British TV interview show is meh. The American/ABC remake
| even more meh.
| 0des wrote:
| I celebrate the guy's entire catalog, anyway, let's get down
| to business - If you like Max Headroom, another great classic
| that you may or may not remember from that era is Alien
| Nation (which also stood the test of time)
| bluedevil2k wrote:
| That's screaming for a remake. The original movie and TV
| series have been lost to time but the story is compelling
| and could easily be part of some procedrual drama with
| added flair today. Or even a 10 episode season on HBO with
| a grittier feel to it (more sour milk in other words).
| 0des wrote:
| > sour milk
|
| Just trying to catch a buzz man :) Cheers!
| jimmyvalmer wrote:
| For my money, it doesn't get any better than when he sings
| "A Man Loves a Woman."
| technothrasher wrote:
| I remember really enjoying the (American dramatic) TV show
| when I was a kid. I recently re-watched it, and I pretty much
| agree with this assessment. The original movie was dated but
| still enjoyable for what it was. The follow on series falls
| apart pretty quickly into uninteresting drivel.
| mindcrime wrote:
| Huh. Interesting. I re-watched the American series a couple
| of years ago and thought it held up incredibly well.
| "Different strokes" and all that, I guess.
| technothrasher wrote:
| I'm glad to hear it, actually. I do have a great fondness
| for Max Headroom, probably because I was so young when he
| first showed up and he hit all my "nerd" buttons. I was
| sad to see I couldn't even finish all the episodes of the
| show when I tried.
| MR4D wrote:
| Why is it that Max Headroom, now 35 years old, has more realistic
| eyes than most video games today?
|
| I'm looking at you, Madden 21.
| JeremyReimer wrote:
| The original Max Headroom was played by Matt Frewer in heavy
| makeup. So his eyes are Matt Frewer's eyes.
| h2odragon wrote:
| The assumption that the content of the video had something do do
| with why it was broadcast may not be reasonable. Someone wanting
| to play the technical prank might well find some of the most
| random shit available to broadcast, hoping (perhaps mistakenly)
| that the point would be clear anyway.
|
| I think its also possible that the the technically equipped
| people who did this were perhaps not thinking as clearly as usual
| that evening. Intoxicants may have been involved. There were some
| gifted organic chemists working out in the suburbs then.
| coldpie wrote:
| > The assumption that the content of the video had something do
| do with why it was broadcast may not be reasonable
|
| Well, the broadcasted video mentioned the name of one of the
| news anchors on one of the affected channels, and the first
| broadcast attempt even interrupted that channel's news show. So
| I think the video was made specifically for this hack. It's not
| like there was a YouTube for them to go to and search for weird
| shit on.
| h2odragon wrote:
| Just to contradict myself and add more fog to the thoroughly
| befuddled mass of theories on this incident, I will offer
| another.
|
| Say some folks of mischievous "hacker" bent, having stumbled
| upon a forgotten "home video" grade tape containing moments of
| such transcendent perfection as these, decided they were
| obligated to share them with the world. (This theory shares the
| same "intoxicants may have been involved" bit as the previous
| one i posted)
|
| The principle of "a clipboard and a confident manner will get
| you anywhere" might well have gotten someone into two different
| rooms on that evening where they might have had a moment to sit
| down with a VCR and some vulnerable interconnect cables, before
| packing their big duffel bag back up and leaving quietly.
| Igelau wrote:
| The guy just needed an outlet to talk about his piles.
| Hemorrhoids can be an embarrassing topic, so he wore a mask.
| throwawaygh wrote:
| _> Intoxicants may have been involved._
|
| "May have" seems weak. Nothing about the second intrusion
| screams sobriety.
| flatiron wrote:
| i believe there were cuts in the video so it was prerecorded.
| cuts that apparently were so clean it was another piece of
| evidence they had some access to some professional equipment
| as consumer grade equipment of the time wasn't up to the task
| h2odragon wrote:
| It could have been put together in one of several schools
| in the area from consumer grade sources.
| laurent92 wrote:
| At that time, printers already printed yellow dots with
| the serial ID. I'm most surprised VHS wasn't watermarked.
| It could have helped a lot in terrorist investigations
| (ransom videos).
|
| I'm always afraid when I hear someone copypasting Apple
| memos. Obviously they must have watermark, if not text
| glyphs (rn = m, and further UTF-8 incantations), at least
| subtly different phrasing depending on which department,
| or person, views it.
| dymk wrote:
| Facebook has caught leakers in the past, by modifying the
| whitespace in internal memos shown to employees
| trackofalljades wrote:
| obligatory podcast episode: https://www.omnibusproject.com/216
| Tho85 wrote:
| This always reminds me of the 2007 incident on Czech TV, where
| someone hijacked a weather panorama broadcast:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ea4eft_3p-I
|
| IIRC the panorama cam was connected to the Internet and had been
| hacked, so no microwave magic there. Good execution
| nonetheless...
| laulis wrote:
| It was not connected to the internet, they actually went to the
| place, and I believe they have switched out the coax cable
| which was coming from the camera with their own input.
|
| There was a mini-montage back in the day of them pulling this
| off.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mCNHJrQzB1g
| flenserboy wrote:
| The music...the camera bounce...the fuzz at the end. Marvelous
| work.
| leephillips wrote:
| I was interested in finding out how the intrusion was
| accomplished, but the article devotes only a few words to
| explaining that, in a sentence that makes no grammatical sense.
| What does it mean to place a dish antenna "between the
| transmitter tower"?
| h2odragon wrote:
| The TV stations used a big transmitter up on the Sears tower
| for their real signal. That got fed by a little microwave dish
| antenna pointed out to a relay "in the city". So if you could
| get an angle on the dish with a transmitter of sufficient
| power, you could feed your own signal into whatever channel.
|
| "Hauling equipment up to the roof without getting caught" and
| "having haul-able equipment" are the technical challenges. IIRC
| they used a ~900Mhz system for that and even today _I_ would
| have to spend some money to put a video signal out in that
| range, and another chunk to do it at any power.
|
| In 1987 someone had to creatively borrow some very high priced
| kit to do that.
| leephillips wrote:
| Thanks for the details! (But would you need to haul equipment
| up to the roof? Couldn't you insert your transmitter anywhere
| in the line of sight?)
| mark-r wrote:
| The frequencies involved would be blocked by buildings, so
| the "line of sight" would necessarily be above them. Thus,
| rooftop.
| h2odragon wrote:
| Yeah, I just assume "roof" cuz that's where antennas will
| be. That kind of thing is as close to "tight beam" as can
| be managed with antennas, usually; and that can be quite
| small.
| jessaustin wrote:
| Not an expert, but some lines of sight stretch from the top
| of one building to the top of another. Chicago doesn't have
| any mountains nearby, so those lines would just extend out
| into space and never touch the ground.
| jcrawfordor wrote:
| Sibling comment explains the idea, but I also think a lot of
| articles about this tend to present the theory of someone
| positioned between the two sites overriding the microwave
| signal as more definite than it is. It is perhaps the most
| likely explanation, but no real evidence was ever found to
| support it, and I think the possibility of another means (such
| as an insider, as in other prominent incidents) still exists.
| It's tricky to know much about this incident with much
| confidence, because it's been rehashed so many times by so many
| writers and ultimately the original sources tend to be
| contemporaneous newspapers quoting unnamed FCC sources, the FCC
| never published the findings of their investigation. The
| specific fact that the FCC concluded it was done by overriding
| the STL link is very hard to source but has been repeated for a
| long time, perhaps later I will spend more time in the
| newspaper archives to see if I can figure out where it first
| came from. I would guess "someone from the FCC said."
|
| The antennae used to receive this kind of "STL" (studio-
| transmitter link) are directional, like horns or parabolic, and
| tend to be _very_ directional both by design and due to
| practical considerations around microwave frequencies. But the
| TX power used on STL links is actually not very high at all,
| 0.5W is reasonably common for mid-range microwave links (up to
| ~30 miles) but in the city it may have been at more like 10W
| due to high noise floor. That said in 1987 microwave power
| electronics were not as advanced as they are today and more
| than being large (picture like a 4U rackmount unit and pretty
| heavy) they were very expensive. I don 't think it's at all
| crazy that someone got the equipment in place, but it probably
| would have been someone in the broadcast industry or who spent
| a pretty good amount of time finding a deal on used equipment,
| just to have access to a suitable transmitter.
|
| But in general, directional antennas are not magic and have
| substantial imperfections. Their receive pattern consists of
| "lobes" in directions in which they are sensitive. A typical
| microwave antenna will have a very substantial front lobe,
| smaller lobes in off-axis directions that are just an
| undesirable effect that's hard to eliminate, and near zero
| sensitivity outside of those lobes. That strongly suggests that
| the person originating the signal was on-axis with the receive
| antenna because if they weren't the transmit power required
| would become far higher, probably out of the range of the
| equipment that was used in the broadcast industry at the time.
| "On-axis" in this case would depend on the specific antenna but
| could be as wide as maybe 30 degrees and as small as a few
| degrees. Bigger antennas tend to have a narrower beam width and
| smaller off-axis lobes, but STL links usually smaller antennas
| because they don't need a huge range. I'd wager 15 degrees,
| horizontal and vertical, as a best guess, with side lobes that
| are probably not usable. Parabolic antennas as a rule of thumb
| tend to have almost no "back lobe" (which is the most common
| off-axis sensitive area for other antenna types like log
| periodic) but a bit of a "side lobe" at about 90 degrees each
| way. A common spec sheet metric for parabolic antennas is
| "front to back ratio" and it's usually like 30dB or more, the
| reflector is really good at blocking anything from behind. So
| if you want to get a little wilder it is somewhat possible that
| the transmitter was perpendicular to the beam if they were very
| close, but hard to believe that it was behind.
|
| There's no real reason for the attacker to be within LOS from
| the transmit antenna, other than that given downtown Chicago
| most places that were in beam for the RX antenna would be in
| beam of both. The attacker could have been _behind_ the
| transmitter but that would have made the power level required
| much higher, to get the receiver to lock onto their carrier.
| And even today, typical STL transmitters aren 't really sold
| over a very wide range of power levels, so it's not very
| practical to just get a transmitter that's say 10x more
| powerful than the "legitimate" one.
|
| The point of this long ramble is that "on a roof top close to
| the vector between the two antennas" is a most likely guess but
| not the only possibility. It's not clear that the investigation
| ever even clearly established that someone hadn't broken into
| (or had access to) the transmitter site. I'm sure they tried to
| run that possibility down but I can't find any conclusion.
| There are reasons to believe that it was a signal override
| based on the transmission, but that would have been a lot
| easier if the attacker was just on the roof with the RX
| antenna.
| sergiotapia wrote:
| Someone on Reddit had a lot of insider knowledge about the max
| headroom incident and he claimed he was 90% sure he knew who they
| were. Two brothers if I recall - let me try to find it.
|
| Edit: Seems over the years he determined it was not them! Still
| an interesting read.
| https://old.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/eeb6e/i_believe_i_kno...
| [deleted]
| criddell wrote:
| Is there a statute of limitations for a crime like this?
|
| I'd love to find out who did it, how they did it, and why they
| did it and have no interest in seeing anybody punished for
| something so harmless that happened a long time ago...
|
| Same goes for other famous unsolved crimes like the D.B. Cooper
| case.
| throwawaygh wrote:
| Wikipedia says 5 years. It's really hard to believe there's
| anything on the books that would cover signal hijacking and has
| a statute of limitations longer than 34 years. IANAL.
|
| A more likely explanation for the lack of attribution is that
| the pranksters grew up and are more than a little embarrassed
| about their adolescent exploits. I know that I would probably
| not fess up to some of the nonsense I got up to
| phreaking/hacking in junior high and high school despite the
| statue of limitations passing long, long ago.
|
| Could also be that they revel in the mystery.
| OnlineGladiator wrote:
| > A more likely explanation for the lack of attribution is
| that the pranksters grew up and are more than a little
| embarrassed about their adolescent exploits.
|
| Why would you be embarrassed of being awesome?
|
| > Could also be that they revel in the mystery.
|
| This makes more sense.
| throwawaygh wrote:
| _> Why would you be embarrassed of being awesome?_
|
| There are still many professions where illegally
| broadcasting your ass being slapped by a flyswatter to the
| city of Chicago would be enough to cause real professional
| issues. Even if it was 30 years ago.
| usrusr wrote:
| In a movie, this would be the point where we strike out
| every suspect who doesn't have a career inside the FCC.
| throwawaygh wrote:
| lawyer, doctor, educator or anything else that involves
| working with kids, pastor/priest, anything that requires
| clearance, some corporate IT sec orgs, volunteer school
| board member, the list goes on.
|
| Very few well-paying professions are as informal and
| laissez faire as tech. In fact, lots of pretty poorly
| paying professions have strict conduct expectations.
|
| Even just a spouse or friend group with a different sense
| of humor would be a deterrent.
|
| Again, there are lots of social groups that don't think
| it's funny to illegally broadcast your ass being slapped
| by a flyswatter to the city of Chicago.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| Awesome? Being a young law-breaking prankster almost
| universally means being an asshole, in my experience as a
| once-young once-lawbreaking asshole. To be unembarrassed by
| it as an adult is to bring into question one's maturity.
| OnlineGladiator wrote:
| You're really reaching here. The prank was awesome, and
| you're generalizing pranks to being an asshole. If you're
| embarrassed by a prank like this as an adult that doesn't
| make you mature; it makes you boring. Nobody got hurt so
| how was anyone an asshole?
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| For one, the parent alluded to pranks _they_ did in the
| past, of which we know nothing about and I expect many of
| which were more asshole than they were awesome.
|
| The Headroom prank interrupted TV people (presumably)
| wanted to watch, made broadcast engineers scramble, and
| may have even gotten a few woken up in the middle of the
| night. I won't even speculate as to what kind of pains-
| in-the-ass it almost certainly caused throughout the
| network and at the FCC going forward.
|
| You really cannot see the asshole quotient here?
|
| Pranks should be between _friends_ , not unsuspecting
| strangers.
| OnlineGladiator wrote:
| I could not disagree more. The world needs more joy, not
| less of it. This type of prank is the sort of thing I
| think that uplifts humanity, whereas you see it as a
| scourge. I could not care less about people having their
| TV programming interrupted, and everybody has had shitty
| days at work. I feel like we're looking at art, and I'm
| admiring it and you're calling it scandalous. I think
| we're just two people that would hate each other in real
| life and leave it at that.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| > I could not care less about people having their TV
| programming interrupted, and everybody has had shitty
| days at work
|
| Yet you feel it is somehow contributing to the world to
| intentionally _create_ shitty days at work and not give a
| shit about people trying to enjoy what they 're watching?
|
| > I think we're just two people that would hate each
| other in real life and leave it at that
|
| Yeah, I generally don't like people who think it is ok to
| take their entertainment in the form of making others
| miserable.
| OnlineGladiator wrote:
| And I don't like pearl clutchers who shit on others for
| having fun because they don't know how to have it
| themselves. Jesus dude, develop a sense of humor. You'll
| enjoy life more.
|
| The part you're failing to understand is that from my
| perspective you are the person making the world a worse
| place. I understand why you don't like me, but you don't
| seem to understand why some people don't like you.
| Anyway, like I said before, we're not going to find
| common ground.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| I could ask the same of you: develop some empathy and
| shame, but it would seem that you don't really care about
| others so long as you are entertained. More charitably, I
| imagine that you care at least a little bit, you just
| think the entertainment value to you outweighs any
| inconvenience it caused others to the extent that no one
| should feel at all embarrassed by having behaved that
| way. I disagree.
|
| > you don't seem to understand why some people don't like
| you.
|
| Dude, I don't even like me, so I get why people don't.
| Most of them I do not begrudge. My problem with you
| specifically is that what you don't like is that I refuse
| to say it is ok to mess with people you don't know for
| fun.
| OnlineGladiator wrote:
| Nobody is unaware of the externalities of the prank, you
| are just the only one who cares. The reason you make the
| world a worse place is by lecturing people about things
| nobody cares about but you, insisting it's the only thing
| that matters and the world is going to shit because
| nobody shares your values - meanwhile the world is
| carrying on just fine by ignoring you. You don't
| recognize you're actually taking an incredibly arrogant
| stance by more or less trying to force your values on
| others, even if you think you're sticking up for people.
| You also reek of needing to express your moral
| superiority to others, not recognizing that other people
| have different morals than you. The reason I don't like
| you is because you insist you're right even when everyone
| is telling you you're wrong, and then have the gall to
| act superior to everyone who you haven't even understood.
| You want to suck the joy out of something just because
| you don't like it, even if everyone else does.
|
| You can have the last word if you want. I'm done.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| My values? You mean having empathy for people you don't
| know? Yes, I'd say that people not sharing that is indeed
| why the world is going to shit.
|
| Though of course most people do share it, probably even
| you. It is a mystery to me why you seem to be saying that
| no one should care at all about the people negatively
| affected by this. An argument for the funnieness of it,
| or the art of it, outweighing that would be
| understandable, but you don't even go there, it's just
| apparently not even worth consideration and I'm a bad
| person for considering it.
|
| I am not trying to force my values on anyone. I am making
| no call to action whatsoever. The things these people did
| were already illegal. All I'm doing is defending the idea
| that yes, indeed, the people who did this have cause to
| be embarrassed by it. It would seem that you do not agree
| and do not think anyone should feel embarrassed. Why this
| disagreement between us is a source of so much vitriol
| from you I do not understand if, as you say, you truly do
| not care.
| [deleted]
| jaywalk wrote:
| Well, it didn't happen in the middle of the night, so
| nobody got woken up in the middle of the night.
|
| You need more joy in your life if you see this as an
| asshole move.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| 11:15PM is not the middle of the night? I know I'm old
| and all, but that's not exactly the middle of the work
| day either.
|
| > You need more joy in your life if you see this as an
| asshole move.
|
| Everybody seems to think I'm joyless because I think
| people need to be more considerate of the negative
| externalities of fucking pranks. No wonder the world is
| going to shit.
| jaywalk wrote:
| The time that immediately comes to my mind when I think
| "middle of the night" is 3am.
| nsxwolf wrote:
| I fear that I will reach retirement never having had a
| day at work that will be as memorable or interesting as
| the one some of these TV people had.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| Trust me, after a few "interesting" days at work you will
| think differently.
| nsxwolf wrote:
| Well, with less than 20 years of my working life left,
| I'd like to have _one_
| jccalhoun wrote:
| I'm always amazed that people can keep a secret like this. I
| don't know if I could resist telling everyone I knew that I did
| it.
| zikduruqe wrote:
| Myself and a group of friends were RF hackers back in the
| early 90's. It was really easy to do and honestly back then,
| people didn't overshare like they do today. It was (and is)
| not hard to keep things in our past a secret.
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| Especially since multiple people were involved.
| MrRadar wrote:
| A few years ago I saw this documentary on the incident, including
| technical details on how the video was produced and examining and
| then debunking a number of theories about the incident:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bgbci2Zf7ms
| codetrotter wrote:
| Haven't heard about this before but it reminds me of a scene from
| the 1995 movie "Hackers".
|
| Scene in question: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mdha_OV5saI
|
| IMDb page for said movie: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113243/
|
| I wonder if the scene in Hackers was inspired by the real world
| hacks that the OP article talks about.
| Kye wrote:
| They reference at least one setting up the backstory of the
| main character, so it's likely.
| bryans wrote:
| Hackers is still one of my favorite movies. Forgetting the
| Hollywood exaggerations, that is pretty much how the culture
| was in the late 80s and throughout the 90s. It was entirely
| nerdy, a little punk, there were a lot of arcades and pizza
| deliveries and dumpsters involved, and there were some
| incredibly douchey self-described villains suffering from
| megalomania.
|
| The wild west hacker days were pretty amazing, and that movie
| portrays all of the insanity pretty well, if cheesily.
| doublerabbit wrote:
| OT: I've never noticed that before, but top right on Zero's
| monitor there's small prompt of "Message from beast on
| dev/tty1". Has that always been there?
|
| May have to rewatch my VHS copy. Hack the planet.
| hereforphone wrote:
| Couple of comments:
|
| - This is posted and discussed frequently
|
| - This was a pretty impressive feat of engineering
|
| - The most unusual thing is that this remained secret. Because
| there were a few people involved and three+ can't keep a secret.
| They don't even have a reason to anymore. I've often wondered
| whether this group of folks died shortly after this.
| danachow wrote:
| I admit my memory may be spotty - but was there any reason to
| believe this could not easily have been pulled off by 2 people
| - ie a married couple? Sure relationships break up but I've
| seen plenty of secrets go to a married pair's grave.
| a1pulley wrote:
| > I've seen plenty of secrets go to a married pair's grave.
|
| Is that possible?
| storyinmemo wrote:
| "I don't know how yous done it, but I know yous done it!"
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Anything new here from the hundred other posts?
|
| Some previous discussions:
|
| _2 years ago_ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21611551
|
| _6 years ago_ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9845038
|
| _4 years ago_ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16816663
| gregorymichael wrote:
| New thing here may be the community members reading it.
| hellbannedguy wrote:
| It's almost like we running out of stuff to talk about?
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-11-23 23:00 UTC)