The Max Headroom Incident | Hacker News Reader

The Max Headroom Incident

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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 hackers were caught (by standard police methods).

Some details: https://hackaday.com/2016/07/05/retrotechtacular-how-solidar...

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

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

The music...the camera bounce...the fuzz at the end. Marvelous work.

Wow the editing for that time was really well done. Looks almost completely real.

Brilliant.

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 that evening. Intoxicants may have been involved. There were some gifted organic chemists working out in the suburbs then.

> The assumption that the content of the video had something do do with why it was broadcast may not be reasonable

Well, the broadcasted video mentioned the name of one of the news anchors on one of the affected channels, and the first broadcast attempt even interrupted that channel's news show. So I think the video was made specifically for this hack. It's not like there was a YouTube for them to go to and search for weird shit on.

Just to contradict myself and add more fog to the thoroughly befuddled mass of theories on this incident, I will offer another.

Say some folks of mischievous "hacker" bent, having stumbled upon a forgotten "home video" grade tape containing moments of such transcendent perfection as these, decided they were obligated to share them with the world. (This theory shares the same "intoxicants may have been involved" bit as the previous one i posted)

The principle of "a clipboard and a confident manner will get you anywhere" might well have gotten someone into two different rooms on that evening where they might have had a moment to sit down with a VCR and some vulnerable interconnect cables, before packing their big duffel bag back up and leaving quietly.

> 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

It could have been put together in one of several schools in the area from consumer grade sources.

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 person, views it.

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 think at the time VHS recorders were still mostly analog and would have been recognisable from their artifacts the same way a typewriter can be identified once found.

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...

> At that time, printers already printed yellow dots with the serial ID.

No schools in 1987 had color laser printers with this technology (and I doubt many businesses did either). Any students trying to do something fishy would have had to make do with, at best, 24-pin dot matrix printers with color ribbons.

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

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

The guy just needed an outlet to talk about his piles. Hemorrhoids can be an embarrassing topic, so he wore a mask.

Another thing that seems dumb about the investigation is that they went to a warehouse district because the background looks like a warehouse door.

A warehouse door THAT SPINS AROUND? Really?

With crack investigators like this on the case, is it any wonder it was never solved?

"You're posting too fast. Please slow down. Thanks."

TWO HOURS AFTER MY LAST POST? Up yours, assholes.

Hey, you can't talk about Max Headroom without talking about The Art of Noise.

The Art of Noise (with Max Headroom) - Paranomia (1986): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6epzmRZk6UU

Since we are bringing up Max Headroom, I would like to put a word in for Blipverts. These were part of the fictional subject matter of the first Max Headroom TV Show. They were advertisements that make old people watching them explode. Bryce, the engineer behind these adverts, uses the wonderful line, "I only invent the bomb, I don't drop it." This was amazingly prescient back in the 80s given where we are now in adtech.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekg45ub8bsk

> "I only invent the bomb, I don't drop it."

"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That's not my department," says Wernher von Braun.[1]

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEJ9HrZq7Ro

All the networks were obsessed with real-time audience metrics, which is even more prescient.

Cool story! I didn't know this happened. I don't think we ever had such break ins in national TV in the Netherlands.

I know some of my friends in the 80s were able to "hack" into the cable network in my town, basically they just broadcast into the terrestrial receiver at the cable station after the real transmitter went down. In those days broadcast transmitters still switched off when programming was finished.

Because the air was clear then there was very little power needed and thus little chance of getting caught. I used to speak to them on the legal 27mc CB because I was too chicken and they'd speak back to me in glorious stereo FM. Full duplex of course. It was fun! Many pirate "radio" stations too.

I don't think the cable company ever bothered to catch them as it all happened after hours but eventually they added time locks so the uplinks just went down after programming. Still they were lazy so often it was possible to catch an unused uplink or an incorrect timer for years. What helped was that not many people actually used cable for radio. So it wasn't complained about much.

Eventually the internet happened and people just lost interest...

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.

People actually used to save stories that were interesting or cut them out of the paper, or go to the library and read a book on the subject. Fastforward to today, with the world at their fingertips, and who even saves anything anymore? It's all transient information on the web today. That interactive nyt article you might have bookmarked a few years ago has probably link rotted by now. If it wasn't for wikipedia cataloging information in a central, stable place, we'd be in a new dark age.

Internet archive is doing actual archival work. But at an even more basic level old methods to archive stuff are still in active use.

> Internet archive is doing actual archival work.

SPA-all-the-things takes care of that.

You can archive SPA’s, the vast majority aren’t worth the trouble.

A lot of people save clips nowadays. Especially since the ideology wars are visible in every phrasing, people keep it “as proof” and upload compilations to Youtube. It would be interesting to see if this behavior stopped if Youtube didn’t allow to “broadcast yourself” anymore. I’m sure Tiktok would take over but it is much more ephemeral.

A few of us (and probably a disproportionate number on this site as compared to the general public) undoubtedly download and archive interesting material for just that reason.

I wish there were a very good conversion utility to download sites and convert them to PDF, especially for Mac. If there is one, I don't know about it. I've resorted to either printing the "reader" version to PDF from Safari, or copying and pasting into a word processor.

Saving webpages to PDF is quite terrible, because it often breaks things into "pages" and you end up with blank headers and footers on each page breaking the flow. You also very often have things cut off from the right-hand side of the webpage.

You have these options:

- SiteSucker to preserve a perfect copy of the website, though I'd use a VPN, 1 or 2-sec delay, and spoof user agent

- Firefox with the SingleFile extension lets you save an HTML file that includes all resources, much better than the Save As option in Chrome/Firefox

Just a heads up, many (all?) of your comments (including this one) show as dead. I vouched for this one. Might want to contact a moderator or something.

Chrome/chromium has the best html to pdf utilty of alle browsers. Safari is not good at it.

I love that the Internet allows closure on pre-Internet mysteries that might not have been practically solvable before.

I recently managed to track down some people online and between us we solved a late 90s mystery that would have been very annoying to solve back then and had bugged me for over 20 years. Closure is such a beautiful thing.

what mystery? was it about time travel?

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.

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 Wikipedia article[1] about it all.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Gore_and_information_techno...

Of Gore's involvement in the then-developing Internet while in Congress, Internet pioneers Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn have also noted that,

> 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.

> 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 network.

"I took the initiative in creating the internet"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnFJ8cHAlco

Declan McCullagh, a now largely-forgotten libertarian opinion writer, seems generally responsible for the perception that Gore's claim was hyperbolic rather than the factual statement it actually is.

https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2011/0603/Political-m...

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.

I wasn't all that tech savvy but I was using the internet in 1985 when I was a university student. Oh, right, it wasn't called "the internet" and we used bang addresses for email and rcp instead of scp to copy files between hosts because security was physical locks on the room with the VAX in it, but it was continuous with what is today called the internet.

I was using internet email and Usenet in 1985. I wasn't "tech savvy" - I coded, but I didn't know much about the internet or email. I got access through a UK BBS system called CIX (Compulink Information eXchange).

I first came across Usenet through my employment with Olivetti. They were selling AT&T Unix minis at the time, so we had a Usenet feed via AT&Ts office on the other side of the city. Two updates daily, I think.

[Edit] For home access to CIX, I was using a 1400-baud acoustic coupler, which I had "liberated" from the basement of a former employer. Bandwidth mattered in those days - you could DoS someone by sending them ten pages of text.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_coupler

(Not one of those, but similar)

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.

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.

Out of curiosity, what kind of hardware/software was included in a CompuServe starter kit?

Hopefully someone else can answer this better than I can, but from what I remember, there was no hardware included. You had to buy an old style modem separately, like something out of Wargames.

Then you got software that allowed you to connect along with an hour of connection time.

University access.

My mom worked at a university when she bought me the C64 and the starter kit. Towards the end of this period, I was going to university. We did not have that type of access.

Some doubtless had access to the Internet in the late 70s/early 80s but random students generally did not even at universities that were connected to the Internet. When I was in school I remember someone at the AI Lab printing out a long Usenet thread related to Star Wars but I certainly didn’t have access. Indeed, outside of one class, I barely used a computer undergrad even as a non-CS engineering major.

For practical purposes smartphones don't exist for a lot of people today, but we're not saying we're in the pre-smartphone era.

If a smartphone cost a dollar a minute to use, we would be saying we're in the pre-smartphone era.

Edit: sorry, per minute, not per hour.

I'm sure there are places in the world where a smartphone basically costs way more than that.

Just because your access was a dollar an hour, does not mean it didn't exist.

I mean, some people were using BBS but there are academics and others using the internet.

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.

yeah i dont see whats so hard about speaking accurately.

This is funnier than it should be.

Wikipedia:

> Access to the ARPANET was expanded in 1981 when the National Science Foundation (NSF) funded the Computer Science Network (CSNET). In 1982, the Internet Protocol Suite (TCP/IP) was standardized, which permitted worldwide proliferation of interconnected networks.

I think the internet era is generally taken to be from 1995 on

That wasn’t even the start of the web era, let alone internet era.

For context, GeoCities went live in 1994.

That’s the rise of the web though. 1995 is when operating systems for PC and Mac start shipping with browsers preinstalled.

1994-95 is when operating systems for PC and Mac start shipping with a TCP/IP stack preinstalled.

Isn't 1995 when the <img> tag was introduced to HTML, and when commercial use of the internet (read: advertising) was first permitted?

I can't find any substantiation for the Gates quote "The internet is just a passing fad", which is often dated to 1995, but apparently never cited.

No. Commercial use was 89.

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 a skilled professional who had done that thing. Now, we sift through thousands of pages of sloppy copy pasta, of unknown pedigree and unknown efficacy. Was that for the best?

The bulk of humanity have been endowed with sci-fi superpowers thanks to Wikipedia, Google, Google Maps, remote work, shopping from home, etc.

As for the nerds who lost their online paradise? They are now in insane demand, earning eye-watering salaries and company valuations, and rising to the top of the social ladder.

It’s not perfect, but it is bloody good.

True and we can still find our niche places to chat with peers like some forums and IRC servers. The communities are still there.

What bothers me a lot more though is that the mainstream internet has become a massive dystopian surveillance machine.

or go to HN, and ask.

don't ask, simply answer the question you have wrong.

A few years ago I saw this documentary on the incident, including technical details on how the video was produced and examining and then debunking a number of theories about the incident: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bgbci2Zf7ms

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://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16816663 - April 2018 (53 comments)

The Max Headroom TV Hack - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9845038 - July 2015 (81 comments)

27 Years Later the Max Headroom Hackers Still Remain a Mystery - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8889388 - Jan 2015 (1 comment)

The Mystery of the Creepiest Television Hack - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6824715 - Nov 2013 (11 comments)

The 1987 Max Headroom Pirating Incident - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1207937 - March 2010 (5 comments)

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.

Anything new here from the hundred other posts?

Some previous discussions:

2 years ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21611551

6 years ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9845038

4 years ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16816663

New thing here may be the community members reading it.

Definitely my first time seeing it and it was just the kind of mischief I needed!

Mine too. Once every 2 years is not bad. Some stuff gets reposted daily and that gets annoying if you watch new.

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”?

Sibling comment explains the idea, but I also think a lot of articles about this tend to present the theory of someone positioned between the two sites overriding the microwave signal as more definite than it is. It is perhaps the most likely explanation, but no real evidence was ever found to support it, and I think the possibility of another means (such as an insider, as in other prominent incidents) still exists. It's tricky to know much about this incident with much confidence, because it's been rehashed so many times by so many writers and ultimately the original sources tend to be contemporaneous newspapers quoting unnamed FCC sources, the FCC never published the findings of their investigation. The specific fact that the FCC concluded it was done by overriding the STL link is very hard to source but has been repeated for a long time, perhaps later I will spend more time in the newspaper archives to see if I can figure out where it first came from. I would guess "someone from the FCC said."

The antennae used to receive this kind of "STL" (studio-transmitter link) are directional, like horns or parabolic, and tend to be very directional both by design and due to practical considerations around microwave frequencies. But the TX power used on STL links is actually not very high at all, 0.5W is reasonably common for mid-range microwave links (up to ~30 miles) but in the city it may have been at more like 10W due to high noise floor. That said in 1987 microwave power electronics were not as advanced as they are today and more than being large (picture like a 4U rackmount unit and pretty heavy) they were very expensive. I don't think it's at all crazy that someone got the equipment in place, but it probably would have been someone in the broadcast industry or who spent a pretty good amount of time finding a deal on used equipment, just to have access to a suitable transmitter.

But in general, directional antennas are not magic and have substantial imperfections. Their receive pattern consists of "lobes" in directions in which they are sensitive. A typical microwave antenna will have a very substantial front lobe, smaller lobes in off-axis directions that are just an undesirable effect that's hard to eliminate, and near zero sensitivity outside of those lobes. That strongly suggests that the person originating the signal was on-axis with the receive antenna because if they weren't the transmit power required would become far higher, probably out of the range of the equipment that was used in the broadcast industry at the time. "On-axis" in this case would depend on the specific antenna but could be as wide as maybe 30 degrees and as small as a few degrees. Bigger antennas tend to have a narrower beam width and smaller off-axis lobes, but STL links usually smaller antennas because they don't need a huge range. I'd wager 15 degrees, horizontal and vertical, as a best guess, with side lobes that are probably not usable. Parabolic antennas as a rule of thumb tend to have almost no "back lobe" (which is the most common off-axis sensitive area for other antenna types like log periodic) but a bit of a "side lobe" at about 90 degrees each way. A common spec sheet metric for parabolic antennas is "front to back ratio" and it's usually like 30dB or more, the reflector is really good at blocking anything from behind. So if you want to get a little wilder it is somewhat possible that the transmitter was perpendicular to the beam if they were very close, but hard to believe that it was behind.

There's no real reason for the attacker to be within LOS from the transmit antenna, other than that given downtown Chicago most places that were in beam for the RX antenna would be in beam of both. The attacker could have been behind the transmitter but that would have made the power level required much higher, to get the receiver to lock onto their carrier. And even today, typical STL transmitters aren't really sold over a very wide range of power levels, so it's not very practical to just get a transmitter that's say 10x more powerful than the "legitimate" one.

The point of this long ramble is that "on a roof top close to the vector between the two antennas" is a most likely guess but not the only possibility. It's not clear that the investigation ever even clearly established that someone hadn't broken into (or had access to) the transmitter site. I'm sure they tried to run that possibility down but I can't find any conclusion. There are reasons to believe that it was a signal override based on the transmission, but that would have been a lot easier if the attacker was just on the roof with the RX antenna.

Given that the intrusion happened on two different TV stations within a few minutes (and the video being played was meant for the first station, WGN), I don't think it's an insider or anyone who had physical access.

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 challenges. IIRC they used a ~900Mhz system for that and even today I would have to spend some money to put a video signal out in that range, and another chunk to do it at any power.

In 1987 someone had to creatively borrow some very high priced kit to do that.

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?)

Not an expert, but some lines of sight stretch from the top of one building to the top of another. Chicago doesn't have any mountains nearby, so those lines would just extend out into space and never touch the ground.

The frequencies involved would be blocked by buildings, so the "line of sight" would necessarily be above them. Thus, rooftop.

Yeah, I just assume "roof" cuz that's where antennas will be. That kind of thing is as close to "tight beam" as can be managed with antennas, usually; and that can be quite small.

Borrow, or build! 900Mhz was pretty high for the era but it was already in the realm of home building. The power amps for such frequencies would be hard to get but it wouldn't have to be perfect so using a part out of spec would have been feasible.

Haven’t heard about this before but it reminds me of a scene from the 1995 movie “Hackers”.

Scene in question: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mdha_OV5saI

IMDb page for said movie: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113243/

I wonder if the scene in Hackers was inspired by the real world hacks that the OP article talks about.

Hackers is still one of my favorite movies. Forgetting the Hollywood exaggerations, that is pretty much how the culture was in the late 80s and throughout the 90s. It was entirely nerdy, a little punk, there were a lot of arcades and pizza deliveries and dumpsters involved, and there were some incredibly douchey self-described villains suffering from megalomania.

The wild west hacker days were pretty amazing, and that movie portrays all of the insanity pretty well, if cheesily.

Edit: Got caught up in the nostalgia and forgot to mention that the hacking moments, however cheesy, are all based on real hacks. The TV station take over, Kevin Mitnick's social engineering, John Draper's (Captain Crunch) phone phreaking and others. Not to say that those people are the originators of those methods, just the most infamous ones at the time the movie was made.

Not really the same vibe as what you're describing but I need to go back and watch Enemy Of The State.

Another one that seems similar to the vibe you describe is Sneakers. Hell, even Wayne's World is kinda the same vibe (in terms of their TV show).

I end up watching Enemy Of The State once every couple years. Still holds up, and it's still extremely relevant given recent events.

OT: I've never noticed that before, but top right on Zero's monitor there's small prompt of "Message from beast on dev/tty1". Has that always been there?

May have to rewatch my VHS copy. Hack the planet.

They reference at least one setting up the backstory of the main character, so it's likely.

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.

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

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 celebrate the guy's entire catalog, anyway, let's get down to business - If you like Max Headroom, another great classic that you may or may not remember from that era is Alien Nation (which also stood the test of time)

That’s screaming for a remake. The original movie and TV series have been lost to time but the story is compelling and could easily be part of some procedrual drama with added flair today. Or even a 10 episode season on HBO with a grittier feel to it (more sour milk in other words).

> sour milk

Just trying to catch a buzz man :) Cheers!

District 9 borrows the backstory so that has to age out first.

For my money, it doesn't get any better than when he sings "A Man Loves a Woman."

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.

Seems like the original TV movie is available on YouTube for anyone interested:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZY-yQYVf38

I watched the series and movie again few years back and I concur.

Amazing cypherpunk scifi. It has aquired some 80s patina that makes it only better.

A compilation of news reports at the time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBOhFGmbSIs

"Captain Midnight" jammed HBO for almost 5 minutes in 86: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_Midnight_broadcast_sig...

IN fact, this article also talks about Captain Midnight.

The Art of Noise with Max Headroom - Paranoimia (Official Video)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6epzmRZk6UU

Coca-Cola Max Headroom | Max Headroom Coke commercials

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sUMX6y2glJ8

Max Headroom on Sesame Street

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_KlfcpUfQCk

The Headroom Collection on Letterman, 1986-1990

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pd2DztHiSiY

Terry Wogan interviews Max Headroom

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qq8jOBe5E5A

On Max Headroom: The Most Misunderstood Joke on TV

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GsDrXc94NGU

Back To The Future - Cafe 80`s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAEU-Lf60LA

Altered Carbon Carnage: Who is Carnage? Who is Matt Frewer who plays Carnage?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4aM0SiNiB8

Star Trek the Next Generation: A Matter Of Time

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EgqP5E0Mjxs

Matt Frewer Interview: Doctor Doctor, Max Headroom, Altered Carbon: Carnage, Orphan Black, Eureka

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v85tZhiO8Zo

Someone on Reddit had a lot of insider knowledge about the max headroom incident and he claimed he was 90% sure he knew who they were. Two brothers if I recall - let me try to find it.

Edit: Seems over the years he determined it was not them! Still an interesting read. https://old.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/eeb6e/i_believe_i_kno...

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 phreaking/hacking in junior high and high school despite the statue of limitations passing long, long ago.

Could also be that they revel in the mystery.

> 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.

In a movie, this would be the point where we strike out every suspect who doesn't have a career inside the FCC.

lawyer, doctor, educator or anything else that involves working with kids, pastor/priest, anything that requires clearance, some corporate IT sec orgs, volunteer school board member, the list goes on.

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.

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.

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.

> I could not care less about people having their TV programming interrupted, and everybody has had shitty days at work

Yet you feel it is somehow contributing to the world to intentionally create shitty days at work and not give a shit about people trying to enjoy what they're watching?

> I think we're just two people that would hate each other in real life and leave it at that

Yeah, I generally don't like people who think it is ok to take their entertainment in the form of making others miserable.

And I don't like pearl clutchers who shit on others for having fun because they don't know how to have it themselves. Jesus dude, develop a sense of humor. You'll enjoy life more.

The part you're failing to understand is that from my perspective you are the person making the world a worse place. I understand why you don't like me, but you don't seem to understand why some people don't like you. Anyway, like I said before, we're not going to find common ground.

I could ask the same of you: develop some empathy and shame, but it would seem that you don't really care about others so long as you are entertained. More charitably, I imagine that you care at least a little bit, you just think the entertainment value to you outweighs any inconvenience it caused others to the extent that no one should feel at all embarrassed by having behaved that way. I disagree.

> you don't seem to understand why some people don't like you.

Dude, I don't even like me, so I get why people don't. Most of them I do not begrudge. My problem with you specifically is that what you don't like is that I refuse to say it is ok to mess with people you don't know for fun.

Nobody is unaware of the externalities of the prank, you are just the only one who cares. The reason you make the world a worse place is by lecturing people about things nobody cares about but you, insisting it's the only thing that matters and the world is going to shit because nobody shares your values - meanwhile the world is carrying on just fine by ignoring you. You don't recognize you're actually taking an incredibly arrogant stance by more or less trying to force your values on others, even if you think you're sticking up for people. You also reek of needing to express your moral superiority to others, not recognizing that other people have different morals than you. The reason I don't like you is because you insist you're right even when everyone is telling you you're wrong, and then have the gall to act superior to everyone who you haven't even understood. You want to suck the joy out of something just because you don't like it, even if everyone else does.

You can have the last word if you want. I'm done.

My values? You mean having empathy for people you don't know? Yes, I'd say that people not sharing that is indeed why the world is going to shit.

Though of course most people do share it, probably even you. It is a mystery to me why you seem to be saying that no one should care at all about the people negatively affected by this. An argument for the funnieness of it, or the art of it, outweighing that would be understandable, but you don't even go there, it's just apparently not even worth consideration and I'm a bad person for considering it.

I am not trying to force my values on anyone. I am making no call to action whatsoever. The things these people did were already illegal. All I'm doing is defending the idea that yes, indeed, the people who did this have cause to be embarrassed by it. It would seem that you do not agree and do not think anyone should feel embarrassed. Why this disagreement between us is a source of so much vitriol from you I do not understand if, as you say, you truly do not care.

You are actually the one who strikes me as cold and lacking empathy here, because you don't understand that no one got hurt in any serious manner. You also talk about things that are obvious (why they aren't said), like the sheer joy of the prank.

The reason I continue to argue this point is that I can't seem to grasp the mindset of people who think there's no shame in fucking with people they don't know. Like, how do you square that? Do you like getting fucked with by people you don't know? Is it made better if they thought it was funny?

Does any of that change if you stop thinking about it as a prank and instead consider it as performance art? With art, provocation isn't shameful, it's often a goal.

Typically art is not directed at unsuspecting bystanders and rarely breaks laws that carry potential prison sentences[0]. Even so, I would say that artist understand that they are fucking with people, but they believe that the value of their expression outweighs it. Weather I agree or not would be irrelevant, because they would either explain it as such (artists usually take credit for their work, unlike the Headroom prankster), or decide they were wrong and be embarrassed by it. The latter is offered as an explanation for why no one has come forward and I defend that possibility against naysayers who, for some reason, seem to believe there is no possibility of embarrassment.

[0] notable Banksy works come to mind as counter examples, and I would not not say that they were being a bit of an asshole. Sometimes you may need to be an asshole to make your point though.

You are just arguing to "win" the agument. It make no sense. No one was actually harmed by the incident. I bet if you asked the people who got pranked today, they would remember it fondly.

You're defining 'harm' in a very literal fashion. I'm arguing regardless that no one was injured or, from what we can tell, fired or anything, they still caused a lot of inconvenience for some people. Yeah, the hack is kind of funny, and it is likely pretty much everyone remembers it fondly[0], and none of this is really a huge deal in the end, but what I'm saying is that it is perfectly understandable to be embarrassed by having behaved this way in the past, I believe it is a sign of maturity.

[0] However, it is not unknown for soldiers, even one's with PTSD, to have an overall fond recollection of their time in the war either, so it's not clear that means anything.

Well, it didn't happen in the middle of the night, so nobody got woken up in the middle of the night.

You need more joy in your life if you see this as an asshole move.

11:15PM is not the middle of the night? I know I'm old and all, but that's not exactly the middle of the work day either.

> You need more joy in your life if you see this as an asshole move.

Everybody seems to think I'm joyless because I think people need to be more considerate of the negative externalities of fucking pranks. No wonder the world is going to shit.

If I were called at 11:15pm to investigate this I'd be pretty excited. Even if I was asleep. In fact I would be at any time. This is the kind of workplace thing you still talk about 30 years later.

The time that immediately comes to my mind when I think "middle of the night" is 3am.

I fear that I will reach retirement never having had a day at work that will be as memorable or interesting as the one some of these TV people had.

Trust me, after a few "interesting" days at work you will think differently.

Well, with less than 20 years of my working life left, I'd like to have one

I'm always amazed that people can keep a secret like this. I don't know if I could resist telling everyone I knew that I did it.

Myself and a group of friends were RF hackers back in the early 90's. It was really easy to do and honestly back then, people didn't overshare like they do today. It was (and is) not hard to keep things in our past a secret.

Especially since multiple people were involved.

I give you one better: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalf_sniper_attack

I think you mean in the sense of unsolved mysteries?

The Metcalf attack was most likely done by CWA union employees, who were in a labor dispute with AT&T at the time. Two fiber vaults had AT&T fibers cut, and the Metcalf station was the primary source of power for the SNJSCA02 central office.

Two years later DHS indicated during an energy conference they had not identified the exact attacker but believed it was an insider. https://money.cnn.com/2015/10/16/technology/sniper-power-gri...

There is nothing better about that? destruction of property causing hundreds of millions of dollars in damage is not hacking. Destroying stuff with guns is not hacking. - electrical engineer that has to organize shutdowns to replace insulators on transmission lines that are damaged from people shooting them

In what way is that "better"? People can go shoot things, big whoop.

A mystery incident of course.

Hm, I feel like that there is no challenge to "how did they do that" hurts in that regard.

Couple of comments:

- This is posted and discussed frequently

- This was a pretty impressive feat of engineering

- The most unusual thing is that this remained secret. Because there were a few people involved and three+ can't keep a secret. They don't even have a reason to anymore. I've often wondered whether this group of folks died shortly after this.

While it was most certainly a feat of engineering, I feel that it assays a work of performance art. It is strangely disturbing, and at the same time fascinating.

Also true. It was great.

I'm pretty sure that's the current UK prime minister, Boris Johnson, in the bowler hat at the start of the video. Obviously he was a lot younger back then but it's him, right?

I admit my memory may be spotty - but was there any reason to believe this could not easily have been pulled off by 2 people - ie a married couple? Sure relationships break up but I’ve seen plenty of secrets go to a married pair’s grave.

> I’ve seen plenty of secrets go to a married pair’s grave.

Is that possible?

Yes - the commenter murdered their spouse.

With the fly swatter, naturally.

One can infer that a secret exists, without knowing its contents.

Well, if you know your grandparents have a family recipe for something, say, and they never reveal it, then sure, it's a knowable thing. But I like the cheek.

"I don't know how yous done it, but I know yous done it!"

> ... three+ can't keep a secret.

Just this week we saw the news that 2 men convicted in the murder of Malcolm-X were actually innocent. How is it possible that TWO innocent men were convicted as guilty of the same murder in the same trial?

I think that is only possible if there truly was a conspiracy to convict them, rather than investigate further to find out the real killers.

I think more than three people must have known that these people were innocent, since there really was no evidence against them was there?

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/2-men-wrongly-convicted...

Seems pretty unrelated but I'll bite.

Juries are terrible accurately deciding the truth. Everyone has their own agenda. Prosecutors are measured against won trials. Defenders typically aren't paid enough.

People of color's conviction rates are significantly higher historically speaking. It's so easy to say "well black people commit more crimes and are worse people". If you dig beneath the surface this clearly isn't true. We're just beginning to grapple with systemic racism (like in the case of Malcolm X's murders).

And I get it, there's so much wrong with the system but there needs to be some sort of system. No matter what system you put in place, it will be wrong. It won't be able to cover 100% of the cases accurately.

This is all to say - if at all possible, don't get in front of a jury.

Classic Reddit post on a theory of who did it https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/eeb6e/i_believe_i_kno...

An update said it was disproven but still an interesting read

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.

It's a fair question. I find it fascinating just because of how freaking weird the videos are. If it was just some boring "Joe Sucks" message, it wouldn't be interesting, but instead it's a bunch of dumb random stuff, with the surreal VO and swirling background (corrugated metal?!) and flyswatter and... what? I just want to know what they were /trying/ to do. What was their beef with WGN? There's quite a lot of intentional symbolism.

The rotating corrugated metal was a clever practical simulation of the CGI background the character from the TV show was composited on top of.

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.

If you were pretty close to the receiving end on the microwave link, it wouldn't be that hard to overpower the signal from the studio.

Yeah and it doesn't have to work great or long before it burns out.

People used chained TV reception amplifiers to broadcast pirate TV :)

>I'm surprised that type of thing isn't more common

I'd guess that interfering with a digital TV signal today is considerably harder than an old analogue TV signal.

And you have to get into the cable network these days. Who still uses terrestrial TV?

Broadcasting DVB-T is pretty trivial and people have even done it with a raspberry pi and a piece of wire (in an awful distortion-creating way) but getting people to tune to it will be harder. Also the power amplifier bit would be tougher but doable.

In fact since the days of SDR you can broadcast almost anything. You can run your own 4G mobile base station with one of those.

At some point in the chain it's probably still analog, but the question is where's the switch? I think the compression scheme is very dependent on comparing adjacent frames, so you couldn't have compression until the point where all inputs come together.

I've always wondered what the original character's name was, and now I finally know: Max Headroom! I remember being very creeped out by it when I was a kid in the 90s. It's one of those things that lots of other shows referenced but I never thought to go find the source.

As a number of TV's have an OTA update facility using terrestrial broadcasts, its possible to not only use this as an attack vector into people's home & office networks using HDMI, but you could also pull off a local max headroom stunt on individuals if you were so motivated and had suitable SDR equipment.

I only see one version of this video on youtube, the first incident. I swear years ago when this was posted here, there was a different version I saw with more stuff going on and the audio was much more clear than the first. Am I missing something or is there more than one Max Headroom signal hijack video out there?

I’ve seen this discussed for like 20 years and that is the only version I’ve ever seen fwiw

“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?

Yes when they want to make an example of you it does happen.

I don't think it would have happened for this though.

Tragically, Aaron Swartz.

Funny coincidence, I just started watching Broadcast Signal Intrusion[1]

1. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11151336/

If you know what to do you can certainly hijack many TV broadcasts even today, and thanks to destaffing and automation they won’t be noticed or blocked for a long time.

Why is it that Max Headroom, now 35 years old, has more realistic eyes than most video games today?

I'm looking at you, Madden 21.

The original Max Headroom was played by Matt Frewer in heavy makeup. So his eyes are Matt Frewer's eyes.

It’s a guy in makeup lol

Has anyone tried re-working the audio to cancel out whatever filters/distortions they used?

34th yr anniversary of it yesterday

Notice: The latter portion of the video is NSFW.

obligatory podcast episode: https://www.omnibusproject.com/216

Hacking was different then. I attended a few 2600 meetings in the Citigroup Center building in NYC back in the late 80s/early 90s, and HOPE in 1994. Sad to see they are pushing for the vaccine to attend without mention of natural immunity, or lack of long-term studies coupled with yet another $40 to $60bn of booster sales for big pharma. but hey, times change. Yesterday's subversive group has been incorporated into the pablum purveyors. Kind of ironic for the group to tow the line without question. I had already done analog red boxing with a microcassette player/recorder and a homemade pickup coil at payphones in the early/mid 80s. I was working on video tape encryption and satellites where I could then too. No real internet, just BBSs. I loved ECHO founded by Stacy Horn in NYC after coming off of GEnie BBS. I miss those days! I liked the US TV show for what it's worth. Very cool for the time and a bit subversive compared to the drivel on TV now.

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