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The Max Headroom Incident

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Re: The Max Headroom Incident

#171

Post by throwawaylinux »

cronix wrote: post #112
caymanjim wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Wikiped…

> 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 n…

Yeah the joke/meme is clearly mocking that weird comment.

The narrative that OP has fallen for is so pervasive that I think it's probably misinformation created for damage control.

It's not that it's even a particularly bad lie as far as politicians go, but it is easy to prove it wrong and easy to makes jokes about it. So I think it could easily be considered damaging enough to warrant a specific PR effort.

Re: The Max Headroom Incident

#172

Post by PostThisTooFast »

flatiron wrote: post #109
throwawaygh wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Intoxicants may have been involved. "May have" seems weak. Nothing about the second intrusion screams sobriety.

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

That's not true. Numerous home video recorders by that time had flying erase heads that could make clean cuts.

Re: The Max Headroom Incident

#173

Post by dang »

jonnycomputer wrote: post #168
dang wrote: post #164

Past related threads: Max Headroom Signal Hijacking (2020) [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25923243 - Jan 2021 (1 comment) Max Headroom broadcast signal intrusion - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21611551 - Nov 2019 (54 comments) Max Headroom broadcast signal intrusion - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18167508 - Oct 2018 (1 comment) The Cold Case of the Max Headroom Signal Intrusion - https…

Thanks. But its also the first time I noticed it. So, I guess that from my pov, its great.

Sure, reposts are fine after a year or so (see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html). The purpose of listing links like that is just to point to other possibly-interesting discussions on the topic.

Re: The Max Headroom Incident

#174

Post by anigbrowl »

They were also able to pinpoint a location where the video might have been shot. Based on the background of the videos, agents from the FCC determined it was most likely the roll-down door of a warehouse and tracked it to a district that had warehouses with doors like it.

Truly incredible detective work, the kind of insight that is limited to adults of normal intelligence and observational ability. I guess when you don't have any ideas you need to fill up the silence somehow.

Re: The Max Headroom Incident

#176

Post by LordDragonfang »

GekkePrutser wrote: post #152
laurent92 wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

A VCR isn't like most other forms of visual recording media where it takes an image and records it in some other format to be converted back to an image later, it's actually a 1-to-1 analogue recording of the broadcast signal (minus any degradation from being an analogue copy). So by design it includes any tricks they used to include metadata in the normal broadcast signal.

The mechanics of how they worked are actually pretty interesting, I highly recommend Technology Connections' video on the subject [1], as well as the one on closed-captioning [2] (and his series on analogue TV in general [3])

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KfuARMCyTvg

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6SL6zs2bDks

[3] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLv0jwu7G_DFUGEfwEl0uW...

Re: The Max Headroom Incident

#177

Post by pomian »

robryk wrote: post #140

Similar incident: in 1985, political opposition in People's Republic of Poland "hijacked" TV by broadcasting in sync with the actual TV signal. This allowed them to superimpose things on top of the image (within some range around their transmitter), which they used to broadcast political messages. Differences: not complete replacement, but superposition; "attacked" signal was the final signal to consumers; the hacker…

That was brilliant! Great that they made the write up on hackaday, for posterity.

Re: The Max Headroom Incident

#178

Post by BLKNSLVR »

paulpauper wrote: post #49

“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?

Tragically, Aaron Swartz.

Re: The Max Headroom Incident

#179

Post by jack_pp »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #129
dymk wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook has caught leakers in the past, by modifying the whitespace in internal memos shown to employees

Hmm. "Command-A shift-J in macvim if you ever need to leak a memo" is now a piece of advice. How strange.

If you really want to be safe translate to another language then translate back

Re: The Max Headroom Incident

#180

Post by phist_mcgee »

anigbrowl wrote: post #174

They were also able to pinpoint a location where the video might have been shot. Based on the background of the videos, agents from the FCC determined it was most likely the roll-down door of a warehouse and tracked it to a district that had warehouses with doors like it. Truly incredible detective work, the kind of insight that is limited to adults of normal intelligence and observational ability. I guess when you d…

Im sure you could have solved it much faster than those detectives!
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