Where can you find the mask?
I’d buy that for a dollar.
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.”
aw. back when we could still be saved.
I mean who hasn’t hijacked the signals of major news networks to fil themselves in a rubber mask being spanked with a flyswatter.
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!
Mess with the best, die like the rest
Hack the planet (sorry for taking such a softball line, it’s been a long time since I’ve seen Hackers)
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.
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.
That would probably ruin the novelty of their onlyfans monetization strategy
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.
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.)
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.
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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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.
You have no idea how much of that goes into broadcast engineering
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.
What a headline!
Are people usually identified by spankings?
Goatse was identified by his butthole picture
This is the owner of the famous asshole.
Kirk.
He looks exactly like what I thought he’d look like
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I kind of preferred not putting a face on goatse.
Kind of kept the humanity out of it. Now it’s real.
To be fair, that was the only thing IN the picture.
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.
They’re usually traced through the fly swatter.
Usually
Hole lotta DNA on that flyswatter.
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.
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.
But after that they “were contacted by people who were investigating the case” or something like that and retracted.
Would having his bare ass spanked have made it easier to find him?
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
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!
Please report to your local precinct for spanking fingerprint video session.
Don’t worry, the video is stored in amazon using military grade aes 256 encryption. The encryption key is located in the same s3 bucket.
