A group of hackers was able to take control of a decommissioned satellite and use it to stream a hacking conference's talks and hacker movies. 

On Saturday, at the DEF CON hacking conference in Las Vegas, Karl Koscher, one of the members of a hacking enthusiasts group called Shadytel, explained how he and his friends were able to legally stream from a satellite in geostationary orbit—35,786 km or 22,236 miles from the surface of the planet. 

During his talk, Koscher explained that they were able to access an unused uplink facility—a small shed with the hardware required to connect to a satellite—which allowed them to broadcast signals to the decommissioned satellite. He said that they also had a license to use the uplink, and a lease on the satellite's transponder, which is a unit that opens a channel between the receiving and the transmitting antennas.

"What do you do with a satellite? What does a hacker do with a satellite? You have some fun with it," Koscher told Motherboard in an interview after the talk. "We had an opportunity to use a satellite that was being decommissioned [...] We also had the ability to put our own content on there."

They used that ability to stream the talks at the San Diego hacking conference ToorCon last year, and during the night they streamed classic hacker movies like WarGames. Because they had extra bandwidth, they were not only able to stream but also have a channel tied to a phone conference bridge.