Why isn’t anyone hacking television?
boingboing.net recently posted about a pirate TV signal hijacking an episode of Dr. Who airing in Chicago in 1987. Here’s the vid:
Fascinating. Hollywood had tricked me into believing that this wasn’t all that rare of an incident, but lo and behold this pirate transmission happened 20 YEARS AGO and was the last of its kind. In fact it was really only the second of its kind. Max Headroom, by the way, was never caught.
The other was a more simplistic hijacking by some guy under the moniker of Captain Midnight a year earlier. He basically hijacked HBO only to complain about their prices:
Wikipedia mentions a few other non-detailed accounts. One of which also occurred in 1987 when the CHRISTIAN BROADCASTING NETWORK paid a man to hijack the PLAYBOY CHANNEL.
This kind of thing needs to happen more often today. I might actually turn on my television once in a while if I thought there was a chance that the lackadaisical local news or an idiotic sitcom rerun could be interrupted by a pantomime Jesus Christ corn-holing Big Bird. There are tens of thousands of people hacking the Internet left and right all for the sake of fun, yet no one is attacking terrestrial signals.
Come on, nerds. Show us some magic.
Methinks I feel a story idea coming on.