The Max Headroom Incident • Hacker News Board

Re: The Max Headroom Incident

#151

Post by jazzyjackson » Wed, Nov 24, 2021, 1:22 AM UTC

rufus_foreman wrote: post #76

h2odragon wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

Out of curiosity, what kind of hardware/software was included in a CompuServe starter kit?

Re: The Max Headroom Incident

#152

Post by GekkePrutser » Wed, Nov 24, 2021, 1:25 AM UTC

laurent92 wrote: post #121

h2odragon wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It could have been put together in one of several schools in the area from consumer grade sources.

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 perso…

VHS was pretty mediocre. Any watermarking inside the signal would have been noticeable or destroyed in transmission.

However it's true that the top invisible scanlines normally used for Teletext could have been used for this. My VCR did record them, I was surprised to be able to view Teletext pages at the time of recording, though they were full of distortion.

It would have been possible to filter that out though.

I think at the time VHS recorders were still mostly analog and would have been recognisable from their artifacts the same way a typewriter can be identified once found.

Re: The Max Headroom Incident

#153

Post by GekkePrutser » Wed, Nov 24, 2021, 1:31 AM UTC

Cool story! I didn't know this happened. I don't think we ever had such break ins in national TV in the Netherlands.

I know some of my friends in the 80s were able to "hack" into the cable network in my town, basically they just broadcast into the terrestrial receiver at the cable station after the real transmitter went down. In those days broadcast transmitters still switched off when programming was finished.

Because the air was clear then there was very little power needed and thus little chance of getting caught. I used to speak to them on the legal 27mc CB because I was too chicken and they'd speak back to me in glorious stereo FM. Full duplex of course. It was fun! Many pirate "radio" stations too.

I don't think the cable company ever bothered to catch them as it all happened after hours but eventually they added time locks so the uplinks just went down after programming. Still they were lazy so often it was possible to catch an unused uplink or an incorrect timer for years. What helped was that not many people actually used cable for radio. So it wasn't complained about much.

Eventually the internet happened and people just lost interest...

Re: The Max Headroom Incident

#154

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Nov 24, 2021, 1:32 AM UTC

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #105

OnlineGladiator wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 incr…

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 unders…

[deleted]

Re: The Max Headroom Incident

#155

Post by galaxyLogic » Wed, Nov 24, 2021, 1:32 AM UTC

hereforphone wrote: post #111

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.

> ... three+ can't keep a secret.

Just this week we saw the news that 2 men convicted in the murder of Malcolm-X were actually innocent. How is it possible that TWO innocent men were convicted as guilty of the same murder in the same trial?

I think that is only possible if there truly was a conspiracy to convict them, rather than investigate further to find out the real killers.

I think more than three people must have known that these people were innocent, since there really was no evidence against them was there?

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/2-men-wrongly-convicted...

Re: The Max Headroom Incident

#156

Post by Terry_Roll » Wed, Nov 24, 2021, 1:37 AM UTC

As a number of TV's have an OTA update facility using terrestrial broadcasts, its possible to not only use this as an attack vector into people's home & office networks using HDMI, but you could also pull off a local max headroom stunt on individuals if you were so motivated and had suitable SDR equipment.

Re: The Max Headroom Incident

#157

Post by irjustin » Wed, Nov 24, 2021, 1:42 AM UTC

galaxyLogic wrote: post #155

hereforphone wrote: post #111

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.

> ... three+ can't keep a secret. Just this week we saw the news that 2 men convicted in the murder of Malcolm-X were actually innocent. How is it possible that TWO innocent men were convicted as guilty of the same murder in the same trial? I think that is only possible if there truly was a conspiracy to convict them, rather than investigate further to find out the real killers. I think more than three people must ha…

Seems pretty unrelated but I'll bite.

Juries are terrible accurately deciding the truth. Everyone has their own agenda. Prosecutors are measured against won trials. Defenders typically aren't paid enough.

People of color's conviction rates are significantly higher historically speaking. It's so easy to say "well black people commit more crimes and are worse people". If you dig beneath the surface this clearly isn't true. We're just beginning to grapple with systemic racism (like in the case of Malcolm X's murders).

And I get it, there's so much wrong with the system but there needs to be some sort of system. No matter what system you put in place, it will be wrong. It won't be able to cover 100% of the cases accurately.

This is all to say - if at all possible, don't get in front of a jury.

Re: The Max Headroom Incident

#158

Post by GekkePrutser » Wed, Nov 24, 2021, 1:45 AM UTC

FredPret wrote: post #81

notakio wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

True and we can still find our niche places to chat with peers like some forums and IRC servers. The communities are still there.

What bothers me a lot more though is that the mainstream internet has become a massive dystopian surveillance machine.

Re: The Max Headroom Incident

#159

Post by GekkePrutser » Wed, Nov 24, 2021, 1:48 AM UTC

kaycebasques wrote: post #145

gregorymichael wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

New thing here may be the community members reading it.

Definitely my first time seeing it and it was just the kind of mischief I needed!

Mine too. Once every 2 years is not bad. Some stuff gets reposted daily and that gets annoying if you watch new.

Re: The Max Headroom Incident

#160

Post by GekkePrutser » Wed, Nov 24, 2021, 1:50 AM UTC

h2odragon wrote: post #18

leephillips wrote: post #12

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”?

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 challe…

Borrow, or build! 900Mhz was pretty high for the era but it was already in the realm of home building. The power amps for such frequencies would be hard to get but it wouldn't have to be perfect so using a part out of spec would have been feasible.