Wednesday, June 3, 2009

Converts are the worst bigots.

Being a Chicago transplant, I'd never heard of this before: the Max Headroom broadcast signal intrusion incident!

On November 22, 1987, during The 9 O'Clock News sportscast, WGN-TV's Chicago area signal was hijacked for approximately 25 seconds by an unknown person wearing a Max Headroom mask. This was only the first incident of that night involving the interruption of a television station's broadcast signal. Approximately two hours later, Chicago PBS station WTTW (channel 11) had its broadcast interrupted by the same person. WGN-TV's analog transmitter is atop the John Hancock Center and engineers were almost immediately able to thwart the video hacker by changing the studio-to-transmitter frequency, thus cutting the hacker off. Unfortunately for WTTW, its transmitter is atop Sears Tower and it was unable to stop the hacker before enduring almost two minutes of the hacker's interruption. These two stations are two of only six existing victims of what is called "broadcast signal intrusion". Subscription television network HBO, WJLA-TV, Playboy TV and the Comcast cable system in Tucson, Arizona are the other victims.


And the person or persons has never been caught! Clearly, no oone's been bragging about this for 20 years or they would've been caught. how do you not brag about this? This is one of those things you tell your kid when they're 18...show'em you were a bad-azz once!

And here's a link to the real Max Headroom getting his costume on. I thought it was computer generated too. Clearly, I was not a smart kid in 1987.

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