Max Headroom Wannabes?

This was a rather surprising story that will make you think twice about leaving your laptop on at night while you sleep the deep sleep night away. Lately it has been hacker pirates that have been making transmission pranks on major TV networks, and it doesn’t seem like this might not go away no time soon.

So Sunday night on WTTW-11 is the night that my favorite show comes on when I was a kid called “Dr. Who”, now if you don’t know him then you must obviously come from another world plain and simple LOL.

That show has been coming on WTTW for years and it doesn’t seem that it will not be going away not time soon, but something weird took place on night during the channel’s transmission of that particular program that had everyone at the station in “total ah”.

(Matt Frewer star of “Max Headroom” pictured)

While the program was running it’s normal time-slot course transmission, it was interrupted by an adjacent signal transmission. Simply put someone hacked into the station’s transmission frequency, and from the looks of it some of the viewers that were lucky to see what was being broadcast that particular night turn out to be none other than an icon semi-animated / surreal character that some know from the show back in the 80’s called “Max Headroom”.

The show’s character in this short-run series was a model after a journalist that worked at a TV news station, Headroom was created by accident in a strange way of sorts and was the doppelgänger of Edison Carter (played by Matt Frewer) who was the actual human counterpart of the electronic eyes & ears of the Artificial Intelligence icon “Max”.

The show eventually lost it’s ratings only to be replaced by the hit TV series “Miami Vice”.

But someone decided to pull a fast one on both WTTW & WGN TV stations which was all too real, and I think whoever had the power to pull off this interruption signal broadcast segment of Max Headroom on the two TV station giants had to have had some help from the inside.

It’s called the “Intrusion Broadcast” which left many baffled after it took place, it happened nearly 30 years ago at both stations that took place two hours apart from each other.

WGN experienced it first during a program telecast, before the plug could be pulled on the pirated transmission it just ceased at a moment’s notice,. and was untraceable because of the fact that whoever did it was using a VCR (Video Cassette Recorder / player) to pull the prank off.

Two hours from that incident another Max Headroom telecast made itself known during the broadcast of Dr. Who, and again before the signal could be located it just vanished like before without a trace in sight.

LOL I have to say whoever did this was very fast in moving around, and another weird thing about the whole prank was that it happened within a short-range distance of both stations.

Also he, she, or they because it was never confirmed exactly who did all of this got lucky, if they would have been caught they would have been facing fines up to $100,000 plus one-year behind the cold bars of a jail cell.

And the thing is you must have some type of connection to be able to pull this off not to mention the broadcasting equipment that would be needed to carry the signal over the station’s signal, it would just cost a fortune to do what these dinosaur hackers set out to do back then LOL.

All in all a very embarrassing incident for both stations while millions of viewers were watching their regular scheduled programs only to have a out-of-nowhere broadcast just pop up on their TV screen all of a sudden, the WGN & WTTW stations were not happy to say the least.

But this was the basic start of hacking which has now evolved way beyond in technology, equipment now is more affordable and just about any device can be hacked. So what happened back then was a subliminal message in a way tell the public then that the internet will be making it’s presence known in the very near future, but let’s face it back then who could have seen this coming… Well there was a guy named Max that probably saw. LOL.

http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/headroom-hacker