[criddell]

Is there a statute of limitations for a crime like this?

I'd love to find out who did it, how they did it, and why they did it and have no interest in seeing anybody punished for something so harmless that happened a long time ago...

Same goes for other famous unsolved crimes like the D.B. Cooper case.

[throwawaygh]

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.

Could also be that they revel in the mystery.

[OnlineGladiator]

> 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.

Why would you be embarrassed of being awesome?

> Could also be that they revel in the mystery.

This makes more sense.

[throwawaygh]

> Why would you be embarrassed of being awesome?

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.

[usrusr]

In a movie, this would be the point where we strike out every suspect who doesn't have a career inside the FCC.

[throwawaygh]

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.

[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

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.

[OnlineGladiator]

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?

[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

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.

[OnlineGladiator]

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.

[jaywalk]

Well, it didn't happen in the middle of the night, so nobody got woken up in the middle of the night.

You need more joy in your life if you see this as an asshole move.

[nsxwolf]

I fear that I will reach retirement never having had a day at work that will be as memorable or interesting as the one some of these TV people had.

[jccalhoun]

I'm always amazed that people can keep a secret like this. I don't know if I could resist telling everyone I knew that I did it.

[zikduruqe]

Myself and a group of friends were RF hackers back in the early 90's. It was really easy to do and honestly back then, people didn't overshare like they do today. It was (and is) not hard to keep things in our past a secret.

[Mountain_Skies]

Especially since multiple people were involved.