That shit was legend. I mean, we were still using BBSs and phone phreaking. Here's this ubernerd that BROKE INTO the television signal. We bow before you, kinky ubernerd.
this post was submitted on 02 Apr 2025
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The power required to do it is impressive to say the least.
I guess the other option would be that the signal was created with very close proximity to the broadcast tower requiring much less power, but they probably had a limited area to search.
To me it almost reads like this was a "we technically can, let's test it out!" And it worked.
It would require as much, or more, power to drown out a TV broadcast signal at the source. I believe many of the old towers were 200kW-1000kW so it would have taken one hell of a pirate signal if interfering close to the main source. However, RF follows the same principle as light using the inverse square law so the further you get from the primary transmitter, the signal quickly becomes exponentially weaker for any receiver.
If you had a TV transmitter on a small hill that is a fair distance away from the target audience, like many were, splitting the distance with a directional antenna wouldn't require nearly as much power from the pirate signal to overtake the original transmission.
If I wanted, I could interfere with ham radio signals with as little as a watt of power (in my immediate local area) even though people might be communicating through a ham radio repeater that transmits at a couple of thousand watts that is many miles away. (It's actually a permitted emergency technique to "break into" active conversations. Actually, other ham radio operators are familiar with what interference sounds like, even for signals that can't fully overtake a transmission. It's customary to stop the conversation if detected and wait for the "break".)
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Didn't they just overpower the radio link to the broadcast site, a much lower power signal than the broadcast signal itself?
(sorry to add even more; I just made another comment about this and I am familiar with most of these concepts.)
Actually, that would be much easier. TV stations back then mostly received shows via satellite dish. Pointing a low power directional antenna directly at the dish's LNB would work great. Satellite transmissions weren't strong and were rarely encrypted back then so that would theoretically be super easy if you knew your RF and deep RF knowledge was much more common place +30 years ago.
I am not sure if they used point-to-point microwave antennas back then for TV, but it would be the same concept. (Microwave antennas are typically the round, cylindrical looking, covered antennas we see all over the place today.)
FWIW, it mentions in the link that the method was via overpowering the analogue microwave link between the station and the broadcast transmitter
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The power required to do it is impressive to say the least.
That's not how the attack worked. He didn't drown out the tower. He simply overrode the the studio-to-transmitter link signal. The studios used microwave line-of-sight transmitters to communicate a signal from the studio to the tower. All the attacker had to do was override that signal. That signal was 50W max. You could override it with maybe 200W as long as you were also in line-of-sight of the microwave receiver. Probably less since some microwave trasmitters were as weak as 1W. They don't need to be strong since they are line-of-sight directional transmitters. So, that's not particularly impressive.
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10/10 I love this shit
It's sad that something like it can never happen again because of how everything is streamed/torrented now.
One could argue that the lack of a shared, verifiable experience like radio or live TV has contributed to the breakdown of social cohesion. Everyone can see what they want, whenever they want, instead of seeing what everyone else sees.
I also liked Adam Conover's video about how we stopped referring to decades as time periods. further breakdown of social cohesion.
I'm not saying your wrong, or really trying to make an argument, but the book "bowling alone" came out in 2000 and it was describing the fall into social isolation and alienation before social media or the balkanization of news and entertainment. To go further back Marx was talking about the alienation of labor as far back as 1844. Like capitalism is killing us, the increased view/reach of technology is just making it obvious.
This is ancillary but perhaps contributing to it due to a lack of shared context. (For example, if someone asks me about a funny commercial I won't have seen it and can't relate.)
I'm thinking more like the zeitgeist has fractured.
the zeitgeist has fractured
I'd argue it's being diluted by noise. There have always been conflicting narratives. History is so hard to untangle (for me at least), because most of us come out a bit brainwashed from the system.
I think we are seeing the ends of the safeties this form of democracy has to provide. We are all in it together, everyone hallucinating to some extent. The big difference today is that you don't talk about tv around the watercooler. You send cat pics and talk about Will Smith AI spaghetti videos, digitally or in meat space.
The problem usually isn't lack of shared context, I believe, especially when we have so much in our pockets. It's signal dilution with some plain old ill-intent under the hood (i.e. 'advanced' marketing).
I agree with a lot of what you said, and maybe “fractured” wasn’t the right word to use. It’s more like “shattered”
Take advertising, for example. Back in the days of broadcast media they had to make broadly appealing ads. Ads people would talk about around the water cooler.
Now we can target ads very specifically, so I may never see an ad that you see.
People are still talking about inane things because that’s how we do, but there’s more niches and communities than before, and they’re more siloed.
I especially agree with this part:
I think we are seeing the ends of the safeties this form of democracy has to provide
The printing press brought down hereditary monarchies. The Internet may bring down nationalist liberal democracy.
Let’s hope what replaces it is as much of an improvement.
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I love how Brian Brushwood described it. It was either an inside job from someone at the station, or a very impressive feat of radio hacking, and they had to plan out the costume and the corrugated sheet on a pivot behind him to simulate the "CG" backgrounds, "But it's as if zero thought went into what he was actually going to say." He hums the Clutch Cargo theme tune, makes fun of Max Headroom as spokesman of New Coke by holding up a Pepsi can, and throws a little bit of shade at WGN and Chuck Swirsky.
The halcyon days of the 1980's when a broadcast intrusion like this was basically a harmless juvenile prank.
Look at how phone phreaking was treated in the 70s, or codes for getting long distance on BBS. The modern justice system would have wanted to make someone like Joybubbles an example.
iirc terrorism charges were levied against an activist that threw glitter at police during a demo for climate activists some years ago
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I dove way deep into this and I'm fairly certain at least a few people discovered who it was... And then they decided not to release that info because of potential harm to "Max", on numerous levels. And I'm OK with that, if that's the case I don't really want any of us to know.
I will not retrace the steps taken to arrive at that conclusion for anyone, either. First rule of fight club and all...
The more I think about it, it'd ruin the magic of the story if "Max" got outed. If "Max" goes public and takes credit and maybe talks through how it worked (especially understanding that you could not pull off the same trick today) that would be cool but ... even ignoring any sort of potential harm it just ruins the spirit of the thing.
Would having his bare ass spanked have made it easier to find him?
Human ass cheek resonance is unique, like fingerprints. There was no database at the time though.
There's one now?? 😳
Why don't you send me a recording and I'll let you know
Ok, but this better be for Science!
Shhhhhh...
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They could do an ass line up to actually identify him if they has a suspect.
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Are people usually identified by spankings?
Goatse was identified by his butthole picture
This is the owner of the famous asshole.
Kirk.
I kind of preferred not putting a face on goatse.
Kind of kept the humanity out of it. Now it’s real.
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They actually found the guy? Impossible but prove me wrong plz
"Research has identified that the Goatse Man is in fact named Kirk Johnson, or at least goes by that name online. He is the same person who appears on Bottleguy and Detroit Hardcore, as confirmed by the mole at the top left corner of his anus- the chances of another practitioner of anal stretching having a mole in the same place is extraordinarily unlikely. It is this analysis that ties hello.jpg and the contents of gap.zip to the name of Kirk Johnson. It is also a supposed "fact" that Kirk is french, however this is likely to stem from a BME article about anal stretching featuring a french practitioner who is not Kirk Johnson, and therefore this rumour is likely to simply be xenophobia
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Crazy. Today at work I accidentally pressed the intercom button on my phone and approximately 600 people unexpectedly heard a really loud "BOOP" with no message or followup whatsoever, all at the same time, and it made me think of this.
That title makes less sense than the event itself, which is famously weird. I can't imagine anything other than that being on purpose.
I mean who hasn't hijacked the signals of major news networks to fil themselves in a rubber mask being spanked with a flyswatter.
I wonder why they still haven't come forward, given that there would be no legal consequences for doing so in 2025.
My guess is that they died before the statute of limitations expired. This happened in the 80’s, and there’s plenty of time between then and now for something to have happened to them.
Maybe. But if I had to guess, it's also not really easy to prove, if you didn't also record some evidence back then.
"It was Bob and me" isn't really a good story, if you can't really show for it. Also, remembering the details on how it was done will also be spotty at best
I'd heard a story years ago that it was an autistic brother of a hacker/phreak in the local Chicago scene actually in the footage; with the hack being carried out by said brother. Another station had their broadcast interrupted that same night, though only audio came through.
That would go a long way towards explaining why they've kept the secret. Involving your bro would be a bad look, or maybe it was a telecom engineer and they're worried about their pension, or they died. Such a cool moment in time that can't really happen again and only a handful of people can possibly know the truth.
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Some. Use on Reddit thinks he knows who did it but he couldn’t get him to admit it. It was a long detailed story about an autistic guy that was a brother of a friend.
But after that they "were contacted by people who were investigating the case" or something like that and retracted.
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Perpetrators, definitely a whole gang of people did that hijacking. At the least 3 if you count the guy on screen, the girl spanking him with a flyswatter, and likely whoever was intercepting the radio signal with their own broadcast. Doubt it was the same guy on the footage.
Could have been filmed separately? Before hand. Then just hijacked and transmit.
If you watch it, there's an air of excitement and surprise given off by the person on screen that comes across even though their voice is heavily masked. Makes me think the dude was jacked to the tits when they finally saw it working.
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