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The Max Headroom Incident

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Re: The Max Headroom Incident

#71

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

OnlineGladiator wrote: post #68
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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?

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.

Re: The Max Headroom Incident

#74

Post by OnlineGladiator »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #71
OnlineGladiator wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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…

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.

Re: The Max Headroom Incident

#75

Post by [deleted] »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #71
OnlineGladiator wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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…

[deleted]

Re: The Max Headroom Incident

#76

Post by rufus_foreman »

h2odragon wrote: post #24
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.

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 me until the mid-90's.

Re: The Max Headroom Incident

#77

Post by pomian »

notakio wrote: post #66
FredPret wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not much of an internet without mass participation though

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…

or go to HN, and ask.

Re: The Max Headroom Incident

#78

Post by laulis »

Tho85 wrote: post #55

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...

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

Re: The Max Headroom Incident

#79

Post by TedDoesntTalk »

mattl wrote: post #40
setpatchaddress wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Right. And I had access to it at my university in 1988.

Re: The Max Headroom Incident

#80

Post by TedDoesntTalk »

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…

University access.
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