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...
IIRC the panorama cam was connected to the Internet and had been hacked, so no microwave magic there. Good execution nonetheless...
There was a mini-montage back in the day of them pulling this off.
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.
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.
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.
"May have" seems weak. Nothing about the second intrusion screams sobriety.
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.
The Art of Noise (with Max Headroom) - Paranomia (1986): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6epzmRZk6UU
"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That's not my department," says Wernher von Braun.[1]
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...
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.
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.
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.
EDIT: "the Internet, as we know it today, was not deployed until 1983" -- people who know more about this than you.
That didn’t start to change until the early 90’s. Al Gore’s contribution was actually important.
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.
> 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.
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)
But its also the first time I noticed it. So, I guess that from my pov, its great.
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
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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).
May have to rewatch my VHS copy. Hack the planet.
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.
The British TV interview show is meh. The American/ABC remake even more meh.
Amazing cypherpunk scifi. It has aquired some 80s patina that makes it only better.
"Captain Midnight" jammed HBO for almost 5 minutes in 86: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_Midnight_broadcast_sig...
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
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...
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.
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.
Why would you be embarrassed of being awesome?
> Could also be that they revel in the mystery.
This makes more sense.
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...
- 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.
Is that possible?
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...
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.
An update said it was disproven but still an interesting read
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'd guess that interfering with a digital TV signal today is considerably harder than an old analogue TV signal.
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.
does anyone ever pay maximum penalty for these cases?
I don't think it would have happened for this though.
I'm looking at you, Madden 21.
