Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Max Headroom Incident

allthatsinteresting.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 208 posts

Re: The Max Headroom Incident

#21

Post by technothrasher »

joezydeco wrote: post #15
0des wrote: post #9

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.

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.

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.

Re: The Max Headroom Incident

#22

Post by OnlineGladiator »

throwawaygh wrote: post #17
criddell wrote: post #13

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.

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 phreakin…

> 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.

Re: The Max Headroom Incident

#23

Post by throwawaygh »

beaner wrote: post #6

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.

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.

Re: The Max Headroom Incident

#24

Post by h2odragon »

mattl wrote: post #8
dangle1 wrote: post #2

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.

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.

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.

Re: The Max Headroom Incident

#25

Post by leephillips »

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…

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?)

Re: The Max Headroom Incident

#26

Post by throwawaygh »

OnlineGladiator wrote: post #22
throwawaygh wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 phreakin…

> 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.

> 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.

Re: The Max Headroom Incident

#27

Post by mindcrime »

technothrasher wrote: post #21
joezydeco wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

Re: The Max Headroom Incident

#28

Post by technothrasher »

mindcrime wrote: post #27
technothrasher wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

Re: The Max Headroom Incident

#29

Post by throwawaygh »

h2odragon wrote: post #3

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 t…

> Intoxicants may have been involved.

"May have" seems weak. Nothing about the second intrusion screams sobriety.

Re: The Max Headroom Incident

#30

Post by mattl »

post-it wrote: post #10
mattl wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Sure. But we don't describe pre-smartphone as pre-telephone.
Post reply on HN