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Comment by rudolfwinestock | Hacker News Reader

Janie Crane: “An off switch?”

Metrocop: “She'll get years for that. Off switches are illegal!”

—Max Headroom, season 1, episode 6, “The Blanks” https://www.maxheadroom.com/index.php?title=Episode_ABC.1.6:...

“Winston turned a switch and the voice sank somewhat, though the words were still distinguishable. The instrument (the telescreen, it was called) could be dimmed, but there was no way of shutting it off completely. [...] Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it.” - George Orwell, 1984

Stupid sexy Chromecast. It's good there is no microphone in it like the Nest... or is there?

How were they finding the cast in the same room again?

Doesn't it emit the tone through the TV while your phone listens?

IIRC it was creating it's own wifi access point your phone scanned for and connected to to configure it. I haven't set one up in a while though so maybe it changed.

I think there is. For authenticating “near” devices via ultrasound.

a real life blank reg here. I live in an RV operate a MESHNET and do everthing i can to foster a common persons free decentralized infrastructure.

As mentioned elsewhere ive been taping cameras and stabbing microphones for years now.

Thank you for your service.

“Computers know too much.”

— Blank Reg

Tell me more about how I can get involved

Explore and evaluate meshnet projects, find one that you like, and educate others about them.

Set up the hardware, link up with existing mesh if you're in a dense enough area.

Push federated services like Matrix and ActivityPub based services like Mastadon, so when it's time to go mesh, people don't laugh when you say "It doesn't reach Facebook/Insta".

Thank you. Would you be so kind to write a blog post about this?

Or just a longer form comment.

and check out the Project-Byzantium.

https://github.com/Byzantium/Byzantium

https://project-byzantium.org/

https://hackaday.com/2015/04/28/meshing-pis-with-project-byz...

Uses kernel 3.x and latest commit is dated 2014 though. I believe there are more actively maintained mesh networking options in OpenWrt.

The important part is the configs, other than that is just another distro. a very small niche group serviced this distro, and it seems to be derelict. The useful part of BZ mesh is USB bootup. so any machine can become and unbecome a node. sometimes something is finished and nothing further is done then a new way pops up. the advantage to porteus is its pared down for rapid boot up, to reestablish a node while walking about on the fly.

" Major changes include: Kernel 4.16.3 Core is based on Slackware current 7 desktop options to choose from! http://www.mirrorservice.org/sites/dl.porteus.org/"

i believe its OLSR you may like.https://wiki.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Mesh_Networking_with_...

ill put something up in show HN for now dont let any wifi stuff get trashed and wasted, even "broken things" have components vital to home brewing your own infrastructure.

Thank you. Depending on how things go, more of us than we think will join you.

Solidarity

Max Headroom was an extremely subversive program and I continue to be amazed it was actually greenlit, produced and broadcast on mainstream television - in the United States for primetime broadcast, even!

It was canceled rather abruptly – the last recorded episode was never aired, and there was still one whole fully scripted episode which was never produced.

I will provide some speculation, but first some back story, as I recall it: Max Headroom was, to start with, a collection of special effects to make a British talk-show host seemingly generated by computer, but still able to interact live with guests, etc. (A little bit of the same niche which the early muppets occupied, actually. See the early appearances of Rowlf the Dog on American talk show TV, for instance.) Anyway, the effect proved so captivating and convincing that the show became hugely popular, and a TV Movie was made (still in England) which provided a sci-fi style origin story for the (ostensibly computer generated) Max Headroom character. The character’s popularity was still rising, also in the USA (Coca-Cola famously used Max Headroom for their campaign for the now infamous New Coke), so an American TV series was proposed and made, with most of the same cast reused in the same roles, and the story of the TV movie was used (IIRC) as the two first episodes, except for a slightly happier ending to set it up as an ongoing TV series.

The problem, I guess, was that probably none of the U.S. people greenlighting the TV series had actually watched the original British TV movie; they probably only thought about getting such a popular character. They probably did not know that things like 1984, Judge Dredd and V for Vendetta are all very distinctly British things. The Max Headroom TV movie, as well as the TV series, are both essentially very dark cyberpunk; acerbically critical of prevailing trends in technology and also scarily prescient for 1987. It was also very critical of television itself as a phenomenon, which was probably what ultimately killed it, and by that time the huge fad for the character had passed.

Or they just saw huge amounts of advertiser’s money and didn’t think about the content as long as advertisers didn’t object.

There was a great article some time back about the hisstory behind it. A lot of the episodes satirized the show's own network and specific network executives - some of which flew under the radar and some of which probably hastened the show's demise, etc.

Fake edit: I think this is it:

https://www.theverge.com/2015/4/2/8285139/max-headroom-oral-...

Just read the whole thing, thanks for sharing.

Interesting story in many ways, particularly the wrestling for ownership of the show, and how they recreated it as a carbon copy for the American market. I remember hearing years ago that he wasn’t actually CG, which made a lot of sense — but as a kid I definitely thought he was.

The subversiveness of the show is great; but it’s particularly amazing how accurately they saterized the future.

“Doctor Duncan’s Video Symptom Show!” — Not just subversive, but completely “punk” in outlook.

"Blank is Beautiful!" - same episode

Ahead of its time apparently...

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