Hacking a weird TV censoring device
So, um... I saw this recent video by Technology Connections about a bizarre device from the 90s that attempts to censor bad language on TV. For some reason, I was compelled to learn more, found one cheap on eBay, and took it apart. Perhaps you'll enjoy the journey as much as I did?
As always, thanks for your support and let me know if you see any issues or confusing bits in the video.
Thanks!
Comments (28)
that is cool
I love the way how you strategicly disassable things,.. how long did you mess around with excel until it made what you wanted it to do? for me its always try and error for hours,.. I recently programmed my first eprom programmer for an arduino - so basically the same what you just did - and I missused it to steal all data out of the SRAM of a computer to get its data - included some hardware hacking also because you cant read SRAM when a CPU tries to use it,.. but I got no usable data out of it,.. sadly!
to it looks like the scammers found out to mimic handles. there is someone with the handle @beneater. with a period(.) at the end of the handle spamming the comments.
This is awesome. Reminds me of the first season of Halt and Catch Fire where they decoded the BIOS of an IBM PC in order to make a clone. One concern I have is if the video violates YouTube's policies on explicit content. Although Ben isn't speaking the words, you can clearly see there are R-rated ones in there.
But these words are replaced. :-)
nice video and analysis of the data. now it would be interesting to see how manipulating the dictionary would work. like reversing and make clean words dirty or have it make close captions into a sort of mad libs.
This is absolute genius and will go viral. I can’t stop laughing! So glad you are back Ben!
Pause, watch and like everything he has ever published ^^ Absolutely. He covers a muich wider range of technology, but it´s always so very interesting and entertaining!
The C column seems to be used to protect proper names like "DICK" or "WOODY", so that's why "A" "AN" "THE" "THESE" or "THAT", and possessives like "HIS" and "YOURS" are in the dictionary, because the Guardian knows that if a definite or indefinite article or possessive precede a word like "DICK" or "WOODY" it's being used as a slur or an epithet, and if not, then it's probably just a person's name and should not be replaced. That's also why they had to go to the heroic length of whitelisting "DICK VAN" because the full title of his show is "THE DICK VAN DYKE SHOW", which would otherwise be identified as a slur.
In addition, I think, the last bit being a 1 in column G for some allowed words is a flag for allowed words that should be dropped from output when they they occur just before a word that is filtered. In TC's video, in Goodfellas 'what the f*** is that' gets filtered to 'what is that'. Since 'the' has a 1 in the low-order bit and immediately preceeds a word to be filtered, it also gets filtered to try and improve the grammar of the resulting caption?
Wait - the thumbnail shows a logic analyzer hooked up, but that’s not in the video.
I wonder if you just stumbled on to a future video
Fun! Not only does this video bring me back to the 90's, it reminded me of my pre-Arduino days of playing with the PICAXE chips based on this family of PIC's. (The 16C62x used in the TV Guardian is close to the PICAXE 18). Anyway; keep up the good work!
My first thought after watching that Technology Connections video was “I bet if Ben Eater got a hold of this thing he could extract those words - that’d be cool to see!”
Nice video.
Really nice explanation of all the steps, from finding the ROM, removing it, hooking it up on the breadboard and programming the Arduino, even the Excel analysis. Thanks!
So excited for this! I immediately thought of you when he mentioned that in his video.
I thought it was excellent as usual, the only thing that I missed was why there was no timing issue between the Arduino and the eeprom?
It's because the EEPROM has no internal clock; Ben's Arduino program was supplying the clock "pulses". While CS was set the EEPROM simply responded with the next bit on each CLK transition.
If this device used closed captioning to identify the words then they would have ran into situations where the word was spoken and not spelled out. I have a hearing loss and I always found it kind of amusing that they had no problem with saying the word but were a little squeamish about spelling it out. Usually they would have the leading characters and then some asterisks.
Indeed, Alec (Technology Connections) pointed out this quirk in his video.
I would have expected a list of only 7 words. - Ed.
I see what you did there :)
I quite enjoyed this video. I had seen TC's video on this, but this very much fit with your approach, thank you for breaking down the steps of board analysis as much as the steps of actually accessing and decoding the data.
"sex -> hugs, fuck -> wow" .. hilarious! .. now I get the video title! .. "What the Wow, better ignore those Hugs Bots"
This is some good crud. Please give us more like this.
Very cool. I grew up around these so very interesting to see how you went through all the data in the spreadsheet and set up the Arduino.
Haha, the point where he said "there's a whole dictionary of words in here, but I couldn't find it" I immediately thought of your debugging videos. Thanks for doing this teardown!