Wikipedia says 5 years. It's really hard to believe there's anything on the books that would cover signal hijacking and has a statute of limitations longer than 34 years. IANAL.
A more likely explanation for the lack of attribution is that the pranksters grew up and are more than a little embarrassed about their adolescent exploits. I know that I would probably not fess up to some of the nonsense I got up to phreaking/hacking in junior high and high school despite the statue of limitations passing long, long ago.
> A more likely explanation for the lack of attribution is that the pranksters grew up and are more than a little embarrassed about their adolescent exploits.
There are still many professions where illegally broadcasting your ass being slapped by a flyswatter to the city of Chicago would be enough to cause real professional issues. Even if it was 30 years ago.
lawyer, doctor, educator or anything else that involves working with kids, pastor/priest, anything that requires clearance, some corporate IT sec orgs, volunteer school board member, the list goes on.
Very few well-paying professions are as informal and laissez faire as tech. In fact, lots of pretty poorly paying professions have strict conduct expectations.
Even just a spouse or friend group with a different sense of humor would be a deterrent.
Again, there are lots of social groups that don't think it's funny to illegally broadcast your ass being slapped by a flyswatter to the city of Chicago.
Awesome? Being a young law-breaking prankster almost universally means being an asshole, in my experience as a once-young once-lawbreaking asshole. To be unembarrassed by it as an adult is to bring into question one's maturity.
You're really reaching here. The prank was awesome, and you're generalizing pranks to being an asshole. If you're embarrassed by a prank like this as an adult that doesn't make you mature; it makes you boring. Nobody got hurt so how was anyone an asshole?
For one, the parent alluded to pranks they did in the past, of which we know nothing about and I expect many of which were more asshole than they were awesome.
The Headroom prank interrupted TV people (presumably) wanted to watch, made broadcast engineers scramble, and may have even gotten a few woken up in the middle of the night. I won't even speculate as to what kind of pains-in-the-ass it almost certainly caused throughout the network and at the FCC going forward.
You really cannot see the asshole quotient here?
Pranks should be between friends, not unsuspecting strangers.
I could not disagree more. The world needs more joy, not less of it. This type of prank is the sort of thing I think that uplifts humanity, whereas you see it as a scourge. I could not care less about people having their TV programming interrupted, and everybody has had shitty days at work. I feel like we're looking at art, and I'm admiring it and you're calling it scandalous. I think we're just two people that would hate each other in real life and leave it at that.
> I could not care less about people having their TV programming interrupted, and everybody has had shitty days at work
Yet you feel it is somehow contributing to the world to intentionally create shitty days at work and not give a shit about people trying to enjoy what they're watching?
> I think we're just two people that would hate each other in real life and leave it at that
Yeah, I generally don't like people who think it is ok to take their entertainment in the form of making others miserable.
And I don't like pearl clutchers who shit on others for having fun because they don't know how to have it themselves. Jesus dude, develop a sense of humor. You'll enjoy life more.
The part you're failing to understand is that from my perspective you are the person making the world a worse place. I understand why you don't like me, but you don't seem to understand why some people don't like you. Anyway, like I said before, we're not going to find common ground.
I could ask the same of you: develop some empathy and shame, but it would seem that you don't really care about others so long as you are entertained. More charitably, I imagine that you care at least a little bit, you just think the entertainment value to you outweighs any inconvenience it caused others to the extent that no one should feel at all embarrassed by having behaved that way. I disagree.
> you don't seem to understand why some people don't like you.
Dude, I don't even like me, so I get why people don't. Most of them I do not begrudge. My problem with you specifically is that what you don't like is that I refuse to say it is ok to mess with people you don't know for fun.
Nobody is unaware of the externalities of the prank, you are just the only one who cares. The reason you make the world a worse place is by lecturing people about things nobody cares about but you, insisting it's the only thing that matters and the world is going to shit because nobody shares your values - meanwhile the world is carrying on just fine by ignoring you. You don't recognize you're actually taking an incredibly arrogant stance by more or less trying to force your values on others, even if you think you're sticking up for people. You also reek of needing to express your moral superiority to others, not recognizing that other people have different morals than you. The reason I don't like you is because you insist you're right even when everyone is telling you you're wrong, and then have the gall to act superior to everyone who you haven't even understood. You want to suck the joy out of something just because you don't like it, even if everyone else does.
My values? You mean having empathy for people you don't know? Yes, I'd say that people not sharing that is indeed why the world is going to shit.
Though of course most people do share it, probably even you. It is a mystery to me why you seem to be saying that no one should care at all about the people negatively affected by this. An argument for the funnieness of it, or the art of it, outweighing that would be understandable, but you don't even go there, it's just apparently not even worth consideration and I'm a bad person for considering it.
I am not trying to force my values on anyone. I am making no call to action whatsoever. The things these people did were already illegal. All I'm doing is defending the idea that yes, indeed, the people who did this have cause to be embarrassed by it. It would seem that you do not agree and do not think anyone should feel embarrassed. Why this disagreement between us is a source of so much vitriol from you I do not understand if, as you say, you truly do not care.
You are actually the one who strikes me as cold and lacking empathy here, because you don't understand that no one got hurt in any serious manner. You also talk about things that are obvious (why they aren't said), like the sheer joy of the prank.
The reason I continue to argue this point is that I can't seem to grasp the mindset of people who think there's no shame in fucking with people they don't know. Like, how do you square that? Do you like getting fucked with by people you don't know? Is it made better if they thought it was funny?
Does any of that change if you stop thinking about it as a prank and instead consider it as performance art? With art, provocation isn't shameful, it's often a goal.
Typically art is not directed at unsuspecting bystanders and rarely breaks laws that carry potential prison sentences[0]. Even so, I would say that artist understand that they are fucking with people, but they believe that the value of their expression outweighs it. Weather I agree or not would be irrelevant, because they would either explain it as such (artists usually take credit for their work, unlike the Headroom prankster), or decide they were wrong and be embarrassed by it. The latter is offered as an explanation for why no one has come forward and I defend that possibility against naysayers who, for some reason, seem to believe there is no possibility of embarrassment.
[0] notable Banksy works come to mind as counter examples, and I would not not say that they were being a bit of an asshole. Sometimes you may need to be an asshole to make your point though.
You are just arguing to "win" the agument. It make no sense. No one was actually harmed by the incident. I bet if you asked the people who got pranked today, they would remember it fondly.
You're defining 'harm' in a very literal fashion. I'm arguing regardless that no one was injured or, from what we can tell, fired or anything, they still caused a lot of inconvenience for some people. Yeah, the hack is kind of funny, and it is likely pretty much everyone remembers it fondly[0], and none of this is really a huge deal in the end, but what I'm saying is that it is perfectly understandable to be embarrassed by having behaved this way in the past, I believe it is a sign of maturity.
[0] However, it is not unknown for soldiers, even one's with PTSD, to have an overall fond recollection of their time in the war either, so it's not clear that means anything.
11:15PM is not the middle of the night? I know I'm old and all, but that's not exactly the middle of the work day either.
> You need more joy in your life if you see this as an asshole move.
Everybody seems to think I'm joyless because I think people need to be more considerate of the negative externalities of fucking pranks. No wonder the world is going to shit.
If I were called at 11:15pm to investigate this I'd be pretty excited. Even if I was asleep. In fact I would be at any time. This is the kind of workplace thing you still talk about 30 years later.
A more likely explanation for the lack of attribution is that the pranksters grew up and are more than a little embarrassed about their adolescent exploits. I know that I would probably not fess up to some of the nonsense I got up to phreaking/hacking in junior high and high school despite the statue of limitations passing long, long ago.
Could also be that they revel in the mystery.