TIL about the max headroom signal hijacking in 1987. Despite having his bare ass spanked by a woman with a fly swatter, the perpetrator was never caught.

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.
- 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".)
  
  Didn't they just overpower the radio link to the broadcast site, a much lower power signal than the broadcast signal itself?
  
  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.
  
  The latter is essentially how they did it.
  Basically, the TV station didn’t run the high powered broadcast towers directly. They simply beamed the signal over to the tower (using directional antennas) to get amplified. All the hacker did was overpower that (relatively low power) directional antenna signal. It would require being in closer proximity to the tower, but it would at least allow you to get the signal amplified using existing infrastructure, instead of building your own amplifier.
  
  You have no idea how much of that goes into broadcast engineering

Are people usually identified by spankings?
- Goatse was identified by his butthole picture
  
  This is the owner of the famous asshole.
  Kirk.
  
  They actually found the guy? Impossible but prove me wrong plz
  
  To be fair, that was the only thing IN the picture.
- They're usually traced through the fly swatter.
  
  Hole lotta DNA on that flyswatter.
  
  Usually

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
  
  My buddy Julian was linked up with our city's biggest phreakers. Dude disappeared and word is he did 10 years. This was in the 80's

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?? 😳
- They could do an ass line up to actually identify him if they has a suspect.
- That’s how the the dj for kneecap got unmasked, not the spanking but his bare ass

I mean who hasn't hijacked the signals of major news networks to fil themselves in a rubber mask being spanked with a flyswatter.

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'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.

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.
  
  Something about that footage has always appeared live to me. Its like he didnt even have a script. Just told a friend to spin this metal sheet behind him and have a chick he knows spank him while he attempts some crazy exploit he found himself able to do. But yeah, theres no reason at all it couldn't have been recorded beforehand, you're right on that.

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.
- The Reddit story was very convincing at the time. They later did walk it back, something like they believed the brother when they denied doing it.
  I don’t know how conspiratorial we should be, because while the FCC doesn’t play around I think at this point everyone would be more amused and curious if the perpetrator came forward.

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 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
- That would probably ruin the novelty of their onlyfans monetization strategy

It was Zero Cool. Definitely Zero Cool.
- “Dade? What are you doing?”
  Edit: the prompt was for “I’m… taking over a tv station."
  C’mon people let’s start a Hackers quote marathon for crying out loud!
  
  Mess with the best, die like the rest
  
  Hack the planet (sorry for taking such a softball line, it's been a long time since I've seen Hackers)

Max headroom is my next fallout playthrough after sterling archer.
- Dont forget DB Cooper
  
  That's gonna require high charisma, intelligence and luck.
- Like, there's fallout mods starring those characters?
  
  No, I make the face look like em and then dress them that way.

I'd buy that for a dollar.

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.