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.
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.
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
Funny how people know actors for different things. I googled "Matt Frewer" and my first thought was "Oh, that guy from that one episode of The Next Generation."
That's the point. It's an 80s nostalgia fest for the narrow audience who grew up & wallowed in the media of the time, presenting the grand fantasy pulled together by the then-promise of VR (tragically lacking the hardware needed).
This is a story needing a Spielberg to present in cinema, someone with enough pull to include the vast array of intellectual property & cameos required.
He played Max Headroom in the Chrysalis/Channel 4 film as well as the UK and US TV shows. The UK show format was more news/political satire, where the US TV was retconning the film and moving on with character development. The TV show wasn't horrid as I had expected.
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.
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.
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.
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HN talked about meeting the people that did it (he knew them at the time it happened) along with some other interesting unpublished details.
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
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.
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...
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).
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...
> 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.
I don't know too much about the tech, but live sport has been encrypted for several years now.
Here's an anecdote about one sport in particular - UK horse racing. There's a pay TV channel (Racing UK) that broadcasts races live. They would bring their broadcasting equipment to each track, and upload the live raw video over a satellite link. This stream was then downloaded at their head office, where it was mixed and graphics were added, before it was re-uploaded to (another? the same?) satellite as the 'official' TV channel.
With the right equipment, you could view the raw video feeds yourself, rather than watch the re-transmitted official channel. This gave just over a second or so of improved latency, which, for some serious in-running gamblers, was a crucial advantage. But about five years ago, Racing UK started encrypting their live feeds. Nowadays, only a few people with insider information can obtain the 'faster' video...
> 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
The version I read said they changed link frequencies. Presumably they have a secondary link on a different frequency for when a transmitter is down or they need to broadcast two feeds.
In the old days you'd need someone at both ends to make the change, though, and towers are normally unmanned. Which may explain why it lasted so long with the first transmission and was short in the second...maybe the station had someone standing by at the tower to make the change when/if Max returned. I dunno. Our tower was a good 30 minute drive from the station (which is common, I think...stations are usually centrally located, but the towers are out in the boonies a bit because of the need for cheap land and freedom to stand up a heckin' big tower).
Near my house, there is an unencrypted studio FM aural link at ~918 MHz. I tracked it down to a religious radio station a few blocks away. Beams over my house to the transmitter site at the other end of the city. With SDR, hacking that link is trivial.
When I was working as an air control monkey at a local television station, on the overnight shift, it was common (and absolutely forbidden under any circumstances) to route the cable box or an unused satellite feed into the preset bus of the production switcher and watch it (this was before the transition to digital, so somebody had to manually switch some things and there were still tapes involved.)
Nevertheless, I heard someone who was definitely not me once routed something which shall not be described up and it somehow ended up on the air.
So yes, accidents definitely happen, and they don't even always require technical savvy.
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.
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.
I'm not sure they were implying that the crime itself was committed across borders.
My interpretation was that they are emphasising that the act of interfering with a TV broadcast is actually a crime around the world - something that may be overlooked because of how ridiculous (and potentially humorous) this event was, especially upon reflection.
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.
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?
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.
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.
[1] https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/pgay3n/headroom-h...