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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.
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.
Amazing cypherpunk scifi. It has aquired some 80s patina that makes it only better.
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.
IIRC the panorama cam was connected to the Internet and had been hacked, so no microwave magic there. Good execution nonetheless...
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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.
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I think the internet era is generally taken to be from 1995 on
That’s the rise of the web though. 1995 is when operating systems for PC and Mac start shipping with browsers preinstalled.
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> 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.
In a movie, this would be the point where we strike out every suspect who doesn't have a career inside the FCC.
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.
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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.
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…
> 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.
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...