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Comment by beaner | Hacker News Reader

Of all the conspiracy theories out there, this one, to me, has the highest coverage-to-interestingness ratio. It just seems like a teen hacked an AV system and did a goofy presentation. I'm surprised that type of thing isn't more common, and I'm befuddled as to why this one gets so much attention.

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It's a fair question. I find it fascinating just because of how freaking weird the videos are. If it was just some boring "Joe Sucks" message, it wouldn't be interesting, but instead it's a bunch of dumb random stuff, with the surreal VO and swirling background (corrugated metal?!) and flyswatter and... what? I just want to know what they were /trying/ to do. What was their beef with WGN? There's quite a lot of intentional symbolism.

The rotating corrugated metal was a clever practical simulation of the CGI background the character from the TV show was composited on top of.

No, this would've been quite a bit more difficult than "hacked an AV system".

Hijacking small town public access channels was fairly easy. Taking over the feed for two different stations in Chicago is a whole different level. The basic hack is the same, but "just scale it up" isn't trivial in this case.

If you were pretty close to the receiving end on the microwave link, it wouldn't be that hard to overpower the signal from the studio.

Yeah and it doesn't have to work great or long before it burns out.

People used chained TV reception amplifiers to broadcast pirate TV :)

>I'm surprised that type of thing isn't more common

I'd guess that interfering with a digital TV signal today is considerably harder than an old analogue TV signal.

At some point in the chain it's probably still analog, but the question is where's the switch? I think the compression scheme is very dependent on comparing adjacent frames, so you couldn't have compression until the point where all inputs come together.

And you have to get into the cable network these days. Who still uses terrestrial TV?

Broadcasting DVB-T is pretty trivial and people have even done it with a raspberry pi and a piece of wire (in an awful distortion-creating way) but getting people to tune to it will be harder. Also the power amplifier bit would be tougher but doable.

In fact since the days of SDR you can broadcast almost anything. You can run your own 4G mobile base station with one of those.

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