![]() If he was given the opportunity to address the hackers, Mr Swirsky said he would decline. It’s not like I’m out there pontificating politically.” Even though I’m a sportscaster, I keep a very low profile. “I still to this day don’t understand why my name was used. “I was just baffled, stunned, flabbergasted,” he said. Maybe not quite so much on me.”Īs for Chuck Swirsky - a journalist mentioned in the second hack - he doesn’t understand why his name was mentioned in the hack. “So it certainly had an impact on somebody. “To be perfectly honest, I would probably never give a second thought, beyond the fact that people email me or call me probably four, five times a year,” he said. Mr Roan added that he doesn’t hold any grudges, rather he and his co-workers found the whole thing hilarious. The Federal Communications Commission was not playing around back then.” “My guess was it was a couple of tech nerds that made it happen a couple times and then went underground as fast as they could. “I’ll tell you what, if some spurned applicants or disgruntled employees figured out a way to do that, they should’ve been working here in the first place,” he told Motherboard. ![]() But the second signal slipped through because, at that time of night, no engineers were on duty to perform the switch.Mr Roan believes it wasn’t an inside job, although he has no idea who was behind the hack. The first pirated broadcast had been stopped by resourceful engineers simply switching to another studio frequency for the feed, cutting off the pirate’s signal. After that, the screen went black again and Doctor Who popped back up, like nothing had ever happened. The screen abruptly shifted and an unseen woman commenced smacking the masked figure’s bare butt with a flyswatter while he screamed “Do it!” at her. The masked character let out a howl, then proclaimed his “piles” to be a “masterpiece for world’s greatest newspaper nerds”. THE INSPIRATION Then came the scatological humor, and a bizarre and darker turn. ![]() Then the character jumped between different pop culture references, from Coke to Pepsi, to the theme of the cartoon ‘Clutch Cargo’, all the while moaning, laughing and gyrating against the rotating backdrop. It revealed a tangled mess of insults and slogans, starting with an insult to Chuck Swirsky, a popular regional sports announcer. At the time, viewers could barely discern what the masked figure was saying, but experts soon translated the bad audio. Later that same evening, during a PBS broadcast of Doctor Who, the screen went to black once again and the masked Max Headroom returned, along with poorly-rendered audio. Then the image disappeared, the screen went black, then popped right back to the Channel 9 news, where a perplexed sportscaster admitted he had no idea what had just happened, quickly blaming it on a computer glitch.Had it ended there, the intrusion would have probably slipped into obscurity. There was no sounds, save a few pops and buzzes off-screen. Then this image popped up… For twenty seconds, a person wearing a Max Headroom mask (a familiar pop culture figure in the 1980s) swayed and bobbed on camera, accompanied by a rotating sheet of steel to mimic the CGI background of the Headroom character. During the newscast’s recap of a Chicago win over the Detroit Lions, the screen went dark for a few seconds. On a chilly Sunday evening across Chicagoland, thousands sat watching Channel 9’s evening news broadcast.
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