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Comment by ta1243 | Hacker News Reader

For those living in London, one of the Mayoral Candidates is promising to bring back ceefax. Not sure how he'll do it, technically I believe DTT can carry teletext data, although I'm not sure if modern TVs will process it.

Back in the day I believe ceefax used to be generated out of a couple of beige tower PCs in a BBC office somewhere.

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The candidate in question is Count Binface - who is part of a long British political tradition of joke candidates.

Safe to say I think the implementation details of this policy probably aren't needed.

https://www.countbinface.com/2024-manifesto

Sometimes joke candidates get elected. 2008 for example.

> Safe to say I think the implementation details of this policy probably aren't needed.

UKIP never got into government, but their policy did get enacted.

Modern TVs support "HbbTV", and it's enabled by default in many locales. It's essentially HTML-over-DVB (including javascript), which is absolutely terrifying when you realize that there's no encryption or authentication, and that it's something you can broadcast for yourself with a cheap SDR, and that TVs run outdated browser engines with root-equivalent privileges.

Hbbtv only embed the URL into the stream. The rest of the JS part came from internet still.

Maybe it first worked like that, but it's certainly no longer the case in newer versions. I've personally compromised a not-network-connected TV using only broadcast signals.

HTML+JS can be pushed via the "DSM-CC object carousel"

Funnily enough my memory of trying to implement the DSM-CC specs is that they are broadly equivalent to a denial-of-service attack on your brain

> one of the Mayoral Candidates

Count Binface

> although I'm not sure if modern TVs will process it.

Continental Europe still runs teletext-over-DVB so probably "just works".

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