I dove way deep into this and I’m fairly certain at least a few people discovered who it was… And then they decided not to release that info because of potential harm to “Max”, on numerous levels. And I’m OK with that, if that’s the case I don’t really want any of us to know.
I will not retrace the steps taken to arrive at that conclusion for anyone, either. First rule of fight club and all…
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.
This is ancillary but perhaps contributing to it due to a lack of shared context. (For example, if someone asks me about a funny commercial I won’t have seen it and can’t relate.)
I’m thinking more like the zeitgeist has fractured.
the zeitgeist has fractured
I’d argue it’s being diluted by noise. There have always been conflicting narratives. History is so hard to untangle (for me at least), because most of us come out a bit brainwashed from the system.
I think we are seeing the ends of the safeties this form of democracy has to provide. We are all in it together, everyone hallucinating to some extent. The big difference today is that you don’t talk about tv around the watercooler. You send cat pics and talk about Will Smith AI spaghetti videos, digitally or in meat space.
The problem usually isn’t lack of shared context, I believe, especially when we have so much in our pockets. It’s signal dilution with some plain old ill-intent under the hood (i.e. ‘advanced’ marketing).
I agree with a lot of what you said, and maybe “fractured” wasn’t the right word to use. It’s more like “shattered”
Take advertising, for example. Back in the days of broadcast media they had to make broadly appealing ads. Ads people would talk about around the water cooler.
Now we can target ads very specifically, so I may never see an ad that you see.
People are still talking about inane things because that’s how we do, but there’s more niches and communities than before, and they’re more siloed.
I especially agree with this part:
I think we are seeing the ends of the safeties this form of democracy has to provide
The printing press brought down hereditary monarchies. The Internet may bring down nationalist liberal democracy.
Let’s hope what replaces it is as much of an improvement.
Let’s hope what replaces it is as much of an improvement.
I say we’re doing one better than ‘just’ hoping it. Talking about it and articulating modern needs lets others learn new ideas and maybe find some social structure.
I think I understand what you mean about the shattered zeitgeist (or social cohesion maybe?). One of my friends is leaning heavy into one of my lesser favored narratives, and he sends me lots of jokes that boarder being edgy (like racist n such), but sometimes actually being quite funny. He’s a close friend who casually said he’d have no quarrel if the nazis took over. What can I do? Cut him off based on philosophy? Teach him his wrong ways? So far just asking questions helped me understand more about my view. And as far as his shitty racist jokes go, I don’t send a pity smiley. That’s the best I have for now.
Cut him off based on philosophy?
it’s not philosophy it’s ideology and personally my answer is yes. I spent my 20s hanging out with white people who openly though i was “one of the good ones” i’m so beyond over it. I’d rather have no friends than friends who I need to apologize for. Like what am i learning about my views? that I’ve surrounded myself racist assholes?
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.
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.
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?? 😳
Why don’t you send me a recording and I’ll let you know
Ok, but this better be for Science!
Shhhhhh…
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
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.
You have no idea how much of that goes into broadcast engineering
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.
Although, having to get a transmitter within line-of-sight makes the overall feat more 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.
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”.)
Yeah, growing up there were people with illegal high power CB radios that would bleed into the TV signals near me. And I don’t even know if they’re close to the same band.
Doesn’t need to be in the same band due to harmonics and power. If you keep splitting the 11m band (CB) into “fractional-frequencies”, you are going to get a cross-over somehow, especially if the fundamental is at super-high power.
Using a piano as an example, if you play a C2 at 62.41Hz it still expresses harmonics at C3 (130.81Hz), G3 (196.22Hz) and C4 (261.63Hz) and at least in theory, to infinity and beyond! Each harmonic away from the fundamental will be expressed in decreasing levels of power. (It’s like 1/3 power per, I think. The proper math is out there though.)
Didn’t they just overpower the radio link to the broadcast site, a much lower power signal than the broadcast signal itself?
(sorry to add even more; I just made another comment about this and I am familiar with most of these concepts.)
Actually, that would be much easier. TV stations back then mostly received shows via satellite dish. Pointing a low power directional antenna directly at the dish’s LNB would work great. Satellite transmissions weren’t strong and were rarely encrypted back then so that would theoretically be super easy if you knew your RF and deep RF knowledge was much more common place +30 years ago.
I am not sure if they used point-to-point microwave antennas back then for TV, but it would be the same concept. (Microwave antennas are typically the round, cylindrical looking, covered antennas we see all over the place today.)
FWIW, it mentions in the link that the method was via overpowering the analogue microwave link between the station and the broadcast transmitter
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That title makes less sense than the event itself, which is famously weird. I can’t imagine anything other than that being on purpose.
Are people usually identified by spankings?
Goatse was identified by his butthole picture
This is the owner of the famous asshole.
Kirk.
I kind of preferred not putting a face on goatse.
Kind of kept the humanity out of it. Now it’s real.
He looks exactly like what I thought he’d look like
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They actually found the guy? Impossible but prove me wrong plz
"Research has identified that the Goatse Man is in fact named Kirk Johnson, or at least goes by that name online. He is the same person who appears on Bottleguy and Detroit Hardcore, as confirmed by the mole at the top left corner of his anus- the chances of another practitioner of anal stretching having a mole in the same place is extraordinarily unlikely. It is this analysis that ties hello.jpg and the contents of gap.zip to the name of Kirk Johnson. It is also a supposed “fact” that Kirk is french, however this is likely to stem from a BME article about anal stretching featuring a french practitioner who is not Kirk Johnson, and therefore this rumour is likely to simply be xenophobia
You are a great dwarf, TIL.
Thank you.
Neither of the Wikipedia pages exist?
Its from the wikipedia Goatse list of edits
Even worse than that one nights deep dive into depravity and I found that it wasn’t just one picture. There were many pictures of that guy and his abyss.
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.
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.
That and parents don’t like to spill all their truly legendary escapades to their children. I mean, the apple doesn’t fall far from rhe tree and all that.
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
I’d heard a story years ago that it was an autistic brother of a hacker/phreak in the local Chicago scene actually in the footage; with the hack being carried out by said brother. Another station had their broadcast interrupted that same night, though only audio came through.
That would go a long way towards explaining why they’ve kept the secret. Involving your bro would be a bad look, or maybe it was a telecom engineer and they’re worried about their pension, or they died. Such a cool moment in time that can’t really happen again and only a handful of people can possibly know the truth.
Malicious life podcast episode on the subject https://malicious.life/episode/episode-78/
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.
I mean who hasn’t hijacked the signals of major news networks to fil themselves in a rubber mask being spanked with a flyswatter.
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.
I’ve watched it many times and I agree on the air and vibe. But it doesn’t preclude a prior filming.
I remember reading investigators on the case saying that it was indeed pre-recorded. Plus there’s the fact that this happened in two different TV networks within few hours where they showed the same video - only that in the first incident their engineers were around, understood what was happening and managed to overpower the pirate’s signal before the recording ended.
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.
Its like he didnt even have a script
I mean, they could have just winged it if recording too. Being recorded doesnt make it any more likely he was prepared
“Yeah one take is fine, it’s probably not going to work anyways.”
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!
Hack the planet (sorry for taking such a softball line, it’s been a long time since I’ve seen Hackers)
Sounds like the perfect excuse for a rewatch!
Mess with the best, die like the rest
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.
