“There is nothing wrong with your television set. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are controlling transmission.”
Recently, some odd emergency messages were broadcast on television in California. Specifically, in the Orange County area, for Cox and Spectrum cable users.
The messages, of course, were fake. Likely some sort of prank, in the vein of the infamous Max Headroom pirating incident:
How do we know they’re fake? Well, aside from the fact that this would be a gross misuse of the Emergency Broadcast System, the hijackers used existing audio.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJF2EA-usMA
The former is from a segment on the Art Bell program, from a man who alleges that he worked for Area 51. The latter, as discovered by Reddit user smittenkitten77, comes from a segment from Christian radio program Insight for Living with Chuck Swindoll. It’s somewhat apparent that whoever is responsible is trying to go for a War of the Worlds sort of thing.
There’s no hard evidence as to how the hijackers pulled it off. That said, since television providers piggyback off of Radio emergency broadcast tests, that’s likely part of how they accomplished it. Still, it’ll be hard to put to rest until the person or persons responsible are caught.
Source: Gizmodo
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