this post was submitted on 02 Apr 2025
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Today I Learned

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(page 2) 43 comments
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[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 week ago (5 children)

I wonder why they still haven't come forward, given that there would be no legal consequences for doing so in 2025.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago

What a headline!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago

Where can you find the mask?

[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 week ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 week ago

But after that they "were contacted by people who were investigating the case" or something like that and retracted.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 week ago (3 children)

Max headroom is my next fallout playthrough after sterling archer.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Like, there's fallout mods starring those characters?

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 week ago (1 children)

It was Zero Cool. Definitely Zero Cool.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (3 children)

“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!

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago

Mess with the best, die like the rest

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 week ago

I'd buy that for a dollar.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago
[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 170 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 60 points 1 week ago (6 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 33 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Didn't they just overpower the radio link to the broadcast site, a much lower power signal than the broadcast signal itself?

[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

(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.)

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 week ago

FWIW, it mentions in the link that the method was via overpowering the analogue microwave link between the station and the broadcast transmitter

[–] [email protected] 46 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

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".)

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Could have been filmed separately? Before hand. Then just hijacked and transmit.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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

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[–] [email protected] 31 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I've watched it many times and I agree on the air and vibe. But it doesn't preclude a prior filming.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 week ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 35 points 1 week ago

I mean who hasn't hijacked the signals of major news networks to fil themselves in a rubber mask being spanked with a flyswatter.

[–] [email protected] 82 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Are people usually identified by spankings?

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 week ago (2 children)

They're usually traced through the fly swatter.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago

Hole lotta DNA on that flyswatter.

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[–] [email protected] 46 points 1 week ago (3 children)

Goatse was identified by his butthole picture

[–] [email protected] 31 points 1 week ago (3 children)

This is the owner of the famous asshole.

Kirk.

[–] [email protected] 32 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

I kind of preferred not putting a face on goatse.

Kind of kept the humanity out of it. Now it’s real.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 week ago

To be fair, that was the only thing IN the picture.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 week ago (3 children)

They actually found the guy? Impossible but prove me wrong plz

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 47 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

"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

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Neither of the Wikipedia pages exist?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 week ago

Its from the wikipedia Goatse list of edits

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 week ago

You are a great dwarf, TIL.

Thank you.

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