
The Cold Case of the Max Headroom Signal Intrusion - alex_young
http://www.realclearlife.com/crime/freaky-funny-story-max-headroom-signal-intrusion/
======
starmftronajoll
This is a perennial story, but the best treatment of it, in my opinion,
remains Chris Knittel's 2013 re-investigation of the case [1] for Vice
Motherboard.

[1]
[https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/pgay3n/headroom-h...](https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/pgay3n/headroom-
hacker)

~~~
bbctol
Unrelated, but it's fascinating to see an article from 2013 reference Andrew
Auernheimer as a benign hacker. That's turned into a hell of a story on its
own, huh.

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martinwww
That reminds me what happened in Czech TV in 2007 :

[https://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/24/arts/design/24abroad.html](https://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/24/arts/design/24abroad.html)

One Sunday early risers gazing at Czech Television’s CT2 channel saw
picturesque panoramas of the Czech countryside, broadcast to the wordless
accompaniment of elevator music. It was the usual narcoleptic morning weather
show. Then came the nuclear blast. Across the Krkonose Mountains, or so it
appeared, a white flash was followed by the spectacle of a rising mushroom
cloud

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emmelaich
In the movie "Ready Player One" I had a pleasant memory triggered by the
appearance of Matt Frewer, who played Max Headroom in the TV series later.

He's one of _many_ tech / 80s cameos in the movie. I wonder if someone has
counted them all.

~~~
emmelaich
Down voters please respond -- off topic? Something else?

Genuinely interested.

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ganzuul
RPO might be the newest victim of choice for the cool-to-hate crowd.

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KozmoNau7
Well, it _is_ bland and blatant 80s pop culture pandering with nothing real to
contribute on its own. I'm amazed that Spielberg was involved, because it's
way below him.

~~~
ctdonath
He's practically the only one who could do it, having enough influence to get
the plethora of intellectual property required to make the movie work. You
just can't make an 80s nostalgia trip work without a director everyone can
trust their franchise characters/content to - and I do mean _everyone_.

~~~
ganzuul
This feat is hailed as the major accomplishment of the movie. It's leagues
above the average Hollywood action movie in regard to breaking 'new' (old)
ground.

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egypturnash
I am glad that nobody has caught "Max" in all these years.

The British signal intrusion from "Vrillon of the Ashtar Galactic Council"
also mentioned in this article is pretty wild!

~~~
fossuser
I’m pretty sure the last time this came up somebody on HN talked about meeting
the people that did it (he knew them at the time it happened) along with some
other interesting unpublished details.

~~~
flatline
Sure enough:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9845038](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9845038)

~~~
alex_young
Looks like a person who claimed (4 years ago) to know the person who did it,
and has recently ruled them out per the linked Reddit thread.

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ggm
Mysteries die when somebody owns up. This story works better for everyone as a
bit of the past which will probably never come back, because swamping a local
analog microwave feed with another beam can't happen in a digital signal world
[1]

[1] for some value of can't, which includes maybe can

~~~
SwellJoe
I wonder if that's true. When the TV station I worked at in the 90s
transitioned to digital around about the time I quit, they continued to
transmit the signal from station to tower over a microwave link. I would think
that'd be true in a lot of cases.

It's probable, though, that the signal is now signed and encrypted and thus
not easy to hijack. Then again, satellites were also broadcasting syndicated
shows and news feeds in the clear back then, and probably now, for things that
aren't premium channels. It was assumed that if a signal was coming down from
the right satellite at the right time, it was the right content.

That said, even back then, it was non-trivial to hijack that signal. There's
only a few points of entry: In the station itself, inserting a microwave
signal that's closer to the tower or maybe more powerful than the one on top
of the station, or in the satellite feed (which has a couple of points of
entry, as well, but that would be interruptible by the station master control
operator). The microwave transmitter would have to have line of sight to the
tower, further complicating matters.

The article suggests that the station employees were able to "stop" the second
hijacking quickly...I'm not sure how that would happen if it was a microwave
hijacking. They maybe could have boosted the microwave transmitter output at
the station to push the imposter down into noise, but those are regulated, I
would think, and probably don't have much wiggle room.

I dunno. Even as someone that has worked in TV I don't know exactly how they
did it, which makes it all the more fascinating that they did. The simplest
thing I can think of is getting into the station and faking all the noise to
make it look like it's "merely" a microwave hijacking. Then again, microwave
is not terribly advanced technology, it is available on the surplus market,
and if you can get closer to the tower with your transmitter, you don't need a
whole lot of power. So, that's probably how it was done.

~~~
bigiain
Satellites are a _long_ way up. A drone with a few hundred mW of transmitter
hovering directly in the ground station dish beam - would quite likely
completely swamp the signal from space...

~~~
SwellJoe
That's a good point. And, it's easy to get access to the dishes with a drone.
They're either on top of the station or merely behind a fence (we had both).
You would need some insider information, though, or to spend a lot of time
observing and experimenting. Most stations have multiple dishes and at any
given time the station may be playing recordings from tape rather than showing
satellite feeds directly. At the station I worked at, we rolled morning kids
shows, prime time network shows, Rockets games, and later some news segments,
from satellite directly. Everything else, about 85% of our programming, came
from tape. That's probably evolved since then.

I wonder how much of satellite transmissions have gone digital (and thus,
likely to be something you could only jam and not replace) in the ~20 years
since I was working in the industry. It wasn't even really on the radar when I
left the business; even stuff that had a major digital component, like
automated advertising feeds, were still being transmitted analog for the video
and just the metadata was digital and sent via another mechanism (internet, I
think).

~~~
bigiain
Live sport.

Nobody's running the F1 race from tape...

I'd be curious to know if there's much digital and/or crypto in those signals
too - part of me suspect the satellites themselves are mostly "too old" to be
doing anything except analog - although I do sometimes notice the resolution
on MotoGP races drop significantly, I think that's last mile cable bandwidth
problems when the Sunday night movie starts pumping full HD into all my
neighbours houses, rather than the signal from space...

~~~
phire
_> I'd be curious to know if there's much digital and/or crypto in those
signals too - part of me suspect the satellites themselves are mostly "too
old" to be doing anything except analog_

Most satilites operate as a really dumb "bent pipe".

You transmit a signal on one frequency, and it amplifies and re-transmits that
signal exact same signal on another frequency.

There is no decoding and re-encoding of the signal. The satilites is
completely agnostic to the formatting, and encoding of the signal. All you
need to do is replace the equipment at each ground station and you can
transmit encrypted digital.

On the flipside, I don't think satilites do any authentication of the signal
they are retransmitting. If someone transmits a stronger signal, the satilites
will lock onto that and retransmit that instead.

However, the receiving equipment probably does authenticate and won't accept
the hijacked signal, so all you get is a jamming effect. But the satilite
itself is hijackable.

~~~
bigiain
Right - that makes sense. Thanks!

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lostgame
I absolutely love that this is still an unsolved mystery. Fantastical story.

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Bizarro
I remember being over at my dad's house and watching the HBO signal intrusion
happen.

But how times have changed. These guys would be doing some serious prison time
these days.

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Deimorz
I'm confused why the subtitle on the article is "This was actually an
international crime" when it just goes on to say that it was probably a local,
but they still don't know.

~~~
alex_young
I had the same reaction. I wanted it to be some Canadian attack on Chicago or
something, but I think the editor was trying to point out that the same thing
happened in the UK too.

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drharby
I love the maxheadroom sig. Intrusion. The whole 4chan rumor mill about it was
the stuff of urban legends. A couple brothers obsessed with electronics and
signal jamming.

I didnt realize it was truly a cold case

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marksomnian
For people more in the know than me: how do the broadcast engineers stop a
signal jacking? If it's with sufficiently powerful microwave equipment,
doesn't it drown out the real signal, and thus it wouldn't be possible to
drown it out? Or am I missing something here?

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paxys
I figure even if the perpetrator comes clean at this point, there will be no
way to actually verify it. Maybe it actually is one of many people claiming so
online.

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cyberferret
If nothing else, this may bring a new legion of younger fans to the old "Max
Headroom" British TV show. I enjoyed the show in my younger days.

~~~
peterclary
The only way of getting the TV show or the movie in the UK seems to be Region
1 DVDs.

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dopamean
An inspiration.

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b6
To me the most disturbing thing about this incident is the way people talk
about it as if it's a serious crime. It was funny and interesting, and kindled
wonder and curiosity, and that's enough of a reason to do it.

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joezydeco
Ah, it must be spring. This pops up about once a quarter either here or on
/r/chicago.

I still think Doc Ripco knows who did it.

