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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
- 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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 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?
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.
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.
robryk|4 years ago
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...
pomian|4 years ago
unknown|4 years ago
[deleted]
Tho85|4 years ago
IIRC the panorama cam was connected to the Internet and had been hacked, so no microwave magic there. Good execution nonetheless...
laulis|4 years ago
There was a mini-montage back in the day of them pulling this off.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mCNHJrQzB1g
flenserboy|4 years ago
junon|4 years ago
lqet|4 years ago
h2odragon|4 years ago
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.
coldpie|4 years ago
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.
h2odragon|4 years ago
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.
throwawaygh|4 years ago
"May have" seems weak. Nothing about the second intrusion screams sobriety.
Igelau|4 years ago
PostThisTooFast|4 years ago
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.
cronix|4 years ago
The Art of Noise (with Max Headroom) - Paranomia (1986): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6epzmRZk6UU
narrator|4 years ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekg45ub8bsk
unknown|4 years ago
[deleted]
GekkePrutser|4 years ago
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...
dangle1|4 years ago
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.
asdff|4 years ago
kingcharles|4 years ago
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.
mattl|4 years ago
EDIT: "the Internet, as we know it today, was not deployed until 1983" -- people who know more about this than you.
MrRadar|4 years ago
dang|4 years ago
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)
jonnycomputer|4 years ago
But its also the first time I noticed it. So, I guess that from my pov, its great.
ChrisArchitect|4 years ago
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
gregorymichael|4 years ago
hellbannedguy|4 years ago
[deleted]
leephillips|4 years ago
jcrawfordor|4 years ago
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.
h2odragon|4 years ago
"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.
codetrotter|4 years ago
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.
bryans|4 years ago
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.
doublerabbit|4 years ago
May have to rewatch my VHS copy. Hack the planet.
Kye|4 years ago
anigbrowl|4 years ago
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.
phist_mcgee|4 years ago
0des|4 years ago
joezydeco|4 years ago
The British TV interview show is meh. The American/ABC remake even more meh.
Lio|4 years ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZY-yQYVf38
nabla9|4 years ago
Amazing cypherpunk scifi. It has aquired some 80s patina that makes it only better.
LaserDiscMan|4 years ago
"Captain Midnight" jammed HBO for almost 5 minutes in 86: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_Midnight_broadcast_sig...
fortran77|4 years ago
DonHopkins|4 years ago
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
sergiotapia|4 years ago
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...
unknown|4 years ago
[deleted]
criddell|4 years ago
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.
throwawaygh|4 years ago
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.
jccalhoun|4 years ago
natded|4 years ago
mike_d|4 years ago
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...
liketochill|4 years ago
detaro|4 years ago
hereforphone|4 years ago
- 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.
redleggedfrog|4 years ago
Reason077|4 years ago
danachow|4 years ago
galaxyLogic|4 years ago
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...
seibelj|4 years ago
An update said it was disproven but still an interesting read
beaner|4 years ago
coldpie|4 years ago
throwawaygh|4 years ago
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.
BoxOfRain|4 years ago
I'd guess that interfering with a digital TV signal today is considerably harder than an old analogue TV signal.
kaycebasques|4 years ago
unknown|4 years ago
[deleted]
Terry_Roll|4 years ago
HoppedUpMenace|4 years ago
pram|4 years ago
paulpauper|4 years ago
does anyone ever pay maximum penalty for these cases?
GekkePrutser|4 years ago
I don't think it would have happened for this though.
BLKNSLVR|4 years ago
guerrilla|4 years ago
1. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11151336/
midasuni|4 years ago
MR4D|4 years ago
I'm looking at you, Madden 21.
JeremyReimer|4 years ago
pram|4 years ago
kaycebasques|4 years ago
sec400|4 years ago
smithza|4 years ago
trackofalljades|4 years ago
eggy|4 years ago