Last weekend my brother and I headed along to Scone Palace to witness the finish of this year’s Rally of Scotland, the penultimate round of this year’s Intercontinental Rally Challenge. Scone Palace is only about half an hour from where I live, and five minutes from where my brother lives. So it seemed silly not to go.
I have a bit of an on–off relationship with rallying. I used to enjoy watching the World Rally Championship a decade ago, when Channel 4 had some excellent coverage. But even then, it was never as satisfying a television spectacle as watching circuit racing.
Often there is no footage of the major incidents in a rally, and you just have to take people’s word for what happened. Sometimes there is footage, but taken by a spectator at the quality of a You’ve Been Framed camcorder calamity.
This sketchy experience must be amplified if you are standing in the middle of a stage, somewhere remote, in the freezing cold, Thermos in hand, bobblehat on head. A car whizzes past, then you wait for a minute or so until the next one comes. All part of the experience I guess, and something I want to do in the future.
Another slight issue is the fact that the stage you attend is only a small fraction of the overall rally. If you attend a later stage, chances are that the rally has pretty much already been decided. Prior to Scone Palace, Andreas Mikkelsen had a 30 second lead. That is difficult to overcome in a couple of two minute long stages!
But Mikkelsen, driving for the Škoda UK team, was the chosen man for the win. So much was this the case that when we entered the area around Scone Palace we were approached by a girl handing out Škoda flags that said “Go Andreas!” She said that the flags were “for when he wins”.
I raised my eyebrows as there were still two stages to go, and anything can happen in rallying! But it must be said that as a PR exercise it worked out pretty well. Most people had these Skoda flags and were planting them in the grass. Couple this with the several representatives from Škoda staff, and you would be forgiven for thinking that Scone Palace is in the Czech Republic. Škoda had conquered Scone.
Having said that, the Thierry Neuville Supporters’ Club were also there to show their support for the Belgian Peugeot driver.
Škoda’s nice flags could have backfired. Guy Wilks was the perfect demonstration of the fact that anything can happen in rallying. He has had a pretty rotten season, and a pretty rotten Rally of Scotland. He hit a gatepost on the final stage and failed to finish.
As rally stages go, Scone Palace is compact and spectator-friendly. This stage was just two minutes long, and was repeated in quick succession. It also doubled up as the finish. So there was a reasonably large crowd, and commentary from Rally Radio on the loudspeakers.
Aside from the relatively sanitised main spectator area, there was a bit of scope to wander around and see further along the stage from a neighbouring field.
Overall, I really enjoyed my trip to the rally. It was quite a different experience to the World Series by Renault, which I attended a couple of months ago.
The really striking thing was the sound of the cars, which is totally different to the TV. Something else, that I didn’t get so much at World Series by Renault, was the smell of the fuel wafting slowly up after a car has gone by. Worryingly, I felt myself starting to crave it!
After the rally had finished as the front-running drivers were preparing for the podium ceremony, the access was amazing. Top-class international rally drivers were just standing around chatting, and their cars were right there for all to see up close.
It is the first rally we have ever been to, and we certainly enjoyed ourselves. We plan on attending next year, perhaps even going to a stage further afield if we can plan ahead.
And congratulations to Andreas Mikkelsen. It may not have been clear from what I wrote above, but you cannot begrudge him this victory. He has come so close twice this year, only to be denied his first IRC victory. Then he came to Scotland and this time it was his rally.
A couple of times in the past I have blogged about numbers stations, a slightly creepy phenomenon where coded messages are broadcast over shortwave radio frequencies.
But more recently I have become interested in a similar phenomenon which is almost the reverse of numbers stations. Whereas numbers stations are seemingly utilised by the state for spying activities, broadcast signal intrusion is usually the opposite — members of the public hijacking television and radio broadcasts.
Perhaps the most well known is a pirate who posed as Max Headroom, hijacking two broadcasts in Chicago in 1987. The perplexing thing about it is that the broadcast was so cryptic — if it had a meaning at all, that is — that most people just scratch their heads wondering about the imposter’s motive.
The first successful hijack was short lived. It interrupted the evening news bulletin on WGN. However, only the images came through, and no audio was broadcast. An engineer at the transmitter site was able to re-gain control within 30 seconds.
Reports say that the pirate attempted to hijack several other broadcasts in Chicago, but none of them were successful. But two hours later the imposter successfully interrupted an episode of Doctor Who that was being broadcast on WTTW. No engineer was present at the transmitter, so the pirate broadcast carried on until its end. It lasted only 90 seconds, but it could have been much longer.
If numbers stations didn’t send shivers up your spine, surely this would. Imagine sitting there watching television as normal, only to be faced with this creepy transmission.
The video fascinates me. First of all, as I have mentioned, the motives are unclear. There is a cryptic message about “the greatest world newspaper nerds”. WGN, the first station to be hijacked, stands for World’s Greatest Newspaper. This suggests that WGN was the real target, but with the attempt having misfired the imposter went on to find any old place to broadcast his odd — at points disturbing — message. Even if you reach the conclusion that the message was aimed at WGN, what that message actually was is a complete mystery.
Some speculate that whoever was behind the video was simply drunk or high. I doubt this is the case. The broadcast was clearly pre-meditated. It is obvious that the message was pre-recorded because it went out twice, and there are continuity errors when the shot changes towards the end of the broadcast.
There are also probably at least three people involved in the making of the broadcast. There are at least two actors, and two people would probably be required to rotate the sheet of corrugated metal that’s used as the backdrop (the rotation is not CGI or mechanical because it is inconsistent).
A lot of technical equipment may be involved as well. Immediately after the hijacking, authorities claimed that a transmitter powerful enough to hijack a television broadcast would cost as much as $600,000 to buy, or several thousand dollars to rent. However, it seems as though this was misinformation designed to dissuade copycats.
Nevertheless, it is clearly at least a semi-professional job. Even putting aside the equipment needed to overpower a television broadcast signal, the quality of the recording looks really good for 1987 standards and the distortion in the vocals suggests at least a modicum of expertise. It obviously wasn’t amateur stuff.
Yet, the message and motive is difficult to decipher. YouTube contains another video containing subtitles with a likely transcript of what the imposter dressed as Max Headroom was saying. If you’re interested enough, I’d also skim through the comments which have interesting additional suggestions. (The subtitles in the YouTube video are definitely wrong in parts.)
Over twenty years on, people are still unclear about the intentions behind the pirate broadcast. It was clearly designed to be ambiguous. But it clearly took considerable time and effort to pull it off. No-one has ever come forward to admit to the pirate broadcasts.
Perhaps the person did it just for fun — a precursor to the hacker culture that became more prevalent in the 1990s. Perhaps it was social commentary. After all, the original Max Headroom programmes were set in a future dystopia where the world was run by giant television corporations and freedom fighters utilised exactly this trick of interrupting regular broadcasts.
The theory I favour holds that the person was a former employee of WGN who had been fired — not by his boss, but by an underling (hence the line “be a man”). This was his form of revenge.
The fake Max Headroom remains at large, but another (less sophisticated) hijack broadcaster was caught. This simple broadcast is less intriguing than the Max Headroom incident in terms of its message, but is interesting because it is a successful hijacking of a satellite transmission.
A person calling himself Captain Midnight hijacked an HBO broadcast with a simple caption complaining about the channel’s price. The caption also contained an ominous threat, seemingly implying that broadcasts on two other channels would also be hijacked.
It transpired that Captain Midnight was John MacDougall, a satellite television dealer who felt that HBO’s then new fangled subscription model was hurting his sales. He was caught when a member of the public overheard him bragging about it.
Less well-known, but perhaps the scariest hijack broadcast of them all, happened in the UK way back in 1977. This seems to be among the very first examples of hijacking a broadcast, and is perhaps the most impressive. Unlike the Max Headroom incident, the motive here was clear, the message was relatively unambiguous and the broadcast was a complete success.
During an ITN news bulletin broadcast on Southern Television, the audio started crackling and the newsreader’s voice was replaced by that of “Vrillon of the Ashtar Galactic Command”. The pictures of the news broadcast continued uninterrupted. But the sound of the news was replaced by an ‘alien’ warning of an imminent global disaster unless humans became peaceful and dismantled their weapons.
Here is a great video — the audio is genuine but the pictures are not. Carry on until the end to hear follow-up news reports on the incident.
An impressive feat. The audio is very crackly in moments, but this is a successful hijacking of a broadcast to disseminate a clear message. Like the Max Headroom incident, a lot of planning appeared to go into it, with a series of electronic effects designed to make it sound like an alien broadcast, and samples of Looney Tunes cartoons.
Once again, the imposters have never come forward. However, given the message that put out and the irreverent set-up, it seems likely that it was a group of students who had some technical know-how and access to decent equipment.
It was rather naughty though, and clearly very distressing for some viewers. I suppose I would be too. What I would do is switch the channel to make sure I wasn’t going mad or that aliens actually were talking to me. However, these imposters successfully hijacked five major terrestrial transmitters. This is concerning, because it means that these people could feasibly have hijacked every television channel in one area and then some.
These successful hijacks are really disturbing. Apparently it is easy to hijack an analogue television signal. The only reason we haven’t seen more of it is simply because people haven’t found out about it.
Although there are only a few well-known instances of broadcast intrusion in the western world, they are much more common in less free countries. Falun Gong use the technique in China. And according to Wikipedia they were a regular feature of television in the Soviet Union.
In the mid-1980s one of Poland’s leading astronomers, Jan Hanasz, managed to superimpose captions on top of state television broadcasts. Using basic equipment, he and three others managed to display the logo of the Solidarność labour movement and implored viewers to boycott elections. Some say this action was one of the first cracks in the Iron Curtain.
That is an example of using this technique for good. But imagine if there was a genuine major national emergency. Any rogue elements with enough know-how and resources could easily hijack the emergency transmissions to spread misinformation or generally wreak havoc and cause panic.
A part of me wonders if this is the real reason why governments around the world are in the process of switching off analogue transmissions and engaging in a digital switchover process. Digital broadcast signals are encrypted, making them much more difficult to hijack.
But pranksters are using different methods to hijack digital broadcasts. Some Czech artists are currently standing trial after they tampered with on-site camera equipment to make a computer-generated mushroom cloud appear in a panorama shot during a weather forecast.
As technology improves, more and more broadcasts will be automated. It will be a ripe environment for future pirates.
Still being a cheeky youngster, it often annoys me when people use old names of things that changed ages ago. You know the sort of thing I mean — people who still say West Germany instead of Germany and the European Cup instead of the Champions League.
Loads of people still say Czechoslovakia, which particularly annoys me because I can actually remember Czechoslovakia existing but I still manage to remember that it is now two separate countries: the Czech Republic and Slovakia. It seems to me as ridiculous as still saying Austria-Hungary, or saying Yugoslavia instead of Croatia.
But as I get older, I guess I’m realising that old habits die hard. The other day I walked in to a room with football on the television and I said, “Is that the Charity Shield?” even though I know it’s now called the Community Shield.
Place names are always changing, and often it is difficult to keep up. I’ve just about got to grips with Peking changing to Beijing. That seems to be official, done and dusted, and everybody accepts it.
But sometimes a place changes its name, yet it doesn’t seem to quite be official. Or worse still, it has two different names, both of which are acceptable! I saw in a recent issue of The Economist, “Timor-Leste, formerly East Timor…”
“Right,” I thought to myself, “I’ll have to remember that from now on. I might even write a blog post about that and everything. Mind you, that would probably be dreadfully dull.”
But has East Timor actually changed its name? Wikipedia redirects Timor-Leste to East Timor. The article introduces the topic as “East Timor, officially the Democratic Republic of Timor-Leste…” Later on it says:
The Portuguese name Timor-Leste and the Tetum name Timor Lorosa’e are sometimes used in English.
Well now I just don’t have a clue what this place is called any more. It has an official name but it doesn’t really seem to be widely recognised. And to further confuse matters the native language calls it something different again. The CIA World Factbook doesn’t really help matters.
One caller to the BBC complained that in the coverage of the bombs in India, the name Mumbai was used without an explanation that it was formerly known as Bombay.
There is no BBC rule about using Mumbai, just guidelines. It is up to each individual programme to decide what to say. Most use ‘Mumbai’ and nothing else; a few use ‘Mumbai, formerly known as Bombay’. The thinking is the city has changed its name (some time ago) and Mumbai is now well known to most, if not all, the audience.
The post has an interesting discussion in the comments about the matter. That is, until the inevitable nutjob wades in with a completely unrelated and bonkers point about the Taleban. And then we have the inevitable Biased-BBCers claiming that the BBC referring to ‘Mumbai’ is to do with political correctness (!!). That is what I like to call political correctness gone mad gone mad. As Ally said,
It WAS called Bombay. It is NOW called Mumbai. This is not a question of political correctness. Many Indians may still call the city Bombay, just as I sometimes call a Snickers a Marathon, but it has changed.
I have to say, I think you must have been living in a cave if you had never heard ‘Mumbai’ before last month’s train bombs. But I can kind of sympathise. I never really noticed the Indian place names changing. It was only a few years ago when I saw the placename ‘Kolkata’ for the first time. Nevertheless, it was hardly difficult to work out what city it was referring to.
But who decides when a place name actually changes? Is it technically correct to say ‘Pa-ree’ instead of ‘Pa-riss’ even though it will make you sound like a pretentious bumhole? Is it technically correct to write ‘Köln’ instead of ‘Cologne’ even though it means going to the hassle of finding the ‘ö’ character on the keyboard?
Who decides this? Does the media do it unilaterally? I doubt it. Does the Foreign Office release a list of places that the British government officially recognises as having changed its name? Or is it just down to local bureaucrats? If some bored paper-pusher at Fife Council decided to re-name Kirkcaldy ‘Winky Bum Poo Jizz’, would BBC journalists suddenly find themselves reporting from ouside Winky Bum Poo Jizz Sheriff Court?
Use English forms when they are in common use: Cologne [etc]… But follow local practice when a country expressly changes its name, or the names of rivers, towns, etc, within it. Thus… Mumbai not Bombay…
I don’t know why some people get so upset about the fact that some Scottish people don’t like to support England. I find it funny how it has become such a big political issue. Some like to pretend that it shows that the United Kingdom is illegitimate and should be split up into separate nations. What a load of shite.
This football kerfuffle is a sorry measure of the health of the Union
…The argument that Scotland is a different country from England and, therefore, there is no reason why Scots. should support an English team is a reasonable one taken in isolation of the British Union. Supporters of the British Union are, in my opinion, on less solid ground. I see it as the duty of British Unionists to support any British team in any sporting competition with their own country naturally taking preference.
That approach is just wrong, as David Farrer pointed out a couple of weeks ago. Scottish, Welsh and (increasingly) English nationalists seem to believe that the rivalry between Scotland and England on the football pitch is a sign that the United Kingdom could not possibly be a single country, and therefore should be scrapped.
So I take it that the rivalry between Rangers and Celtic is evidence that Glasgow is a failed experiment? And a Spurs fan’s resentment of Arsenal means that London should be split up? Nonsense. And if anybody called for the UK to pull out of the EU because of England’s rivalry with Germany, they ought to be laughed out of the planet. There may be legitimate reasons to call for the end of the British Union, but a football match is rather stretching it.
The London-based media probably has a lot to do with the rise of Scottish nationalism in the second half of the 20th century. That maybe shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. This letter in The Economist illustrates the reason:
Before devolution, the impression was that the English did not really notice Scotland, regarding it at best as a kilted extension of the Lake District.
Last week I suggested that England is shoved down your throat in Scotland. Since then I have seen BBC News 24 (a news channel for crying out loud!) insert various ‘Come on En-ger-land’ messages in its countdown sequences. And now that the World Cup itself has come we have had to endure commentators shoehorning England into everything, every which way they can. For instance, here is what ITV’s commentator said during the Argentina–Ivory Coast game:
Well, Argentina have had 20 years of hurt — they’ve only had half of it.
WHAAAAT? Every single thing has to relate to England, doesn’t it?
I once even heard a commentator — I think it was John Motson — say, at the start of a World Cup final, “Of course, this is the final that England could have been in…” That was very perceptive of him. Of course, it was also the final that every single other team in the world could have been in.
It shouldn’t be a surprise that the media likes to concentrate on England, given that at least 80% of the potential audience will be living in England. But by the same token I don’t think anybody should be too shocked if Scots decide to support whoever is playing England just as a reaction against smug commentators. And it is possible to have a strong Scottish identity and still be in favour of the UK — infact, I am sure that the majority of my friends are like this.
FIFA and whoever else ever proposes a British football team ought to remember this aswell. Football has nothing to do with the Union.
[In the World Cup today] I will be supporting the Americans without any hesitation. Yet when the Ryder Cup is played later in the year I will be shouting for the Europeans, partly I suppose because there will be British golfers on the European team. But it’s still a total inconsistency on my part. But isn’t that the beauty of sport? There’s no logic to sporting affinity at all.
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