Ceefax from an old Raspberry Pi | Hacker News Reader

Ceefax from an old Raspberry Pi

suppertime.co.uk

77 pointsrbanffy26 comments

The online archive of Ceefax and Teletext is incredible[0].

Unfortunately a lot of it seems to be corrupted (e.g. random page from 1981[1]) . Presumably the tapes have degraded. Seems like the type of thing that ML could potentially recover (obviously the linked example was the Racing results).

[0] https://archive.teletextarchaeologist.org/

[1] https://archive.teletextarchaeologist.org/Pages/Details/9717...

I remember the Ceefax games. As a child, I got hooked on this quiz, 'Bamboozle!'.

There were other quizes that had competitions with prizes. At the end, you had to call a premium rate phone line to guess a random number and win the prize...

The expression on my parents faces receiving the phone bill is probably the same as those today, after a kid has been playing with lootboxes on their iPads.

Bamboozle was pretty fun but Digitiser [1] (a teletext based gaming magazine) was magnificent!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digitiser

Amazing. It has a Wikipedia entry. Digitiser was my life when I was a kid. I would come home from school and read it before watching Neighbours.

Trivia: teletext was really popular in Italy, and a large fraction of small TV broadcaster ran teletext equipment based on Erlang (R14B, FreeBSD 8.something, custom ISA board for the signal). If anything bad happened to the software you'd see the teletext page counter "restart" as the gen_servers came back up \o/

It still is popular, even if only RAI has it this days. My dad still uses it, and you can access teletext even on new televisions/decoders.

RAI has a tangled mess of stuff, including a content manager written in Python 2 and running on FreeBSD 10, and a ton of Windows things. Some clients are based on wxPython (!)

It used to run on VAX hardware long, long ago... now it's all VMware on the servers.

In the '90s they had 'interactive teletext' services, like a few banks did, where you would phone in, get assigned a teletext page, and use it as your screen while interacting with DTMF: teletext 'apps'.

Those where the Red Hat 5 days and there was a system that would fax error reports to the other room :D

PS: some of the live captioning you can see around runs on Erlang too.

I'm grateful to have grown up in a time where Teletext was a thing. I used to watch BBC with Teletext subtitles and it basically taught me how to read, write and speak English.

What about the Ceefax music, for when the filled in broadcast time with “Pages from Ceefax”.

I particularly remember the barking dog track.

Sure just pull them from youtube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6uzHdk4Xmk

And play as described

>booking holidays

I had completely forgotten about this, but remember seeing it within Teletext as a child. I wonder if people actually sent credit card and passport numbers over unencrypted VHF bands, open for anyone within a fifty miles radius to sniff

Wasn't it unidirectional? I think you'd have to call them for the actual booking part.

that would make sense!

It was perfectly normal to spell them out over unencrypted wireless phone connections that could be picked up by consumer devices. And it’s not like we’re better today, we still use connections where the encryption is optional (DECT) or where an attacker can downgrade the encryption (GSM).

Don't forget physical handover, snail mail and email.

A few years ago, it was normal for Panasonic DECT handsets to use the AES-based DSC2 cipher. Though a downgrade attack is likely possible; I think under normal circumstances with weak reception, they'll stop encrypting traffic.

The VTech/AT&T ones (same thing) on the other hand, I still don't think will encrypt call content.

It’s negotiated so if the base station, or the attacker pretending to be the base station, tells the handset to not use encryption, it won’t.

That's super cool.

I have noticed on some older cable STB have one or two lines at the top of the screen that look like they are sending data using those lines, only on certain channels. I theorize they are updating the STB or something. Does anyone know what that is ?

Subtitles perhaps?

or 'cue dots', signalling impending commercial break?

When I was in television, that area was used for time code and closed captioning data. I think also for transmitting the current local time. There were VCRs that could auto-set their clocks from the local PBS station.

Reminds me of the loud DTMF tones that used to play on certain cable channels, like Nickelodeon, back in the 80s. Turns out these were a form of in-band signalling to the local cable operator that it's time to play local commercials.

I cheated, and installed Basic on a Pi. It comes with a Ceefax emulator. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_gMlq_IShPo

teletext themed 404 page:

https://www.empirasign.com/404

This is really cool, thanks!

fwiw your TLS is misconfigured.

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