News 14 Carolina, weather forecast hacking.

.hacktivism



19.03.04 News 14 Carolina, weather forecast hacking.


Modifying the omnipotent TV signal and its programmed messages is one of the most ambitious challenges of the antagonistic communication, even if just for the massive presence of televisions. Injecting something into this channel means to temporarily have the same communication power of the big networks. ‘News 14 Carolina’, a channel dedicated to weather forecasts owned by Time Warner Cable, was the target of a recent and funny attempt. This channel used a web application to allow the users to describe the weather conditions they were experiencing, but this application could be hacked to show any text. Due to this, the channel showed announcements like: “next company threatened by the storm: h4x0r3d Computer Services, Inc.”, or “All Your Base Are Belong To Us”, or “Windows32 Exception Error”. The trick was that, once the message was approved, it could be modified again by its owner. The hole was discovered by an anonymous student of the University of North Carolina who published it on a forum.