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What Free Cable?
suckass writes: "Apparently if you've got a cable broadband connection from AT&T you can get free basic cable just by splitting the line that goes into your cable modem. News.com has a story about it here."
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One way to kill a freebie: post it on /.
-- http://frobnosticate.com
RoadRunner (provided by Time Warner in Austin, TX) requires you to purchase basic cable in addition to your cable Internet service. I'm sure AT&T will soon follow suit.
bytesmythe
Hypocrisy is the resin that holds the plywood of society together.
-- Scott Meyer
This is probably why they wouldn't offer me a cable internet subscription without at least basic cable.
-- Adam
This is easy for the cable companies to catch.
First, they normally install a filter on such lines that blocks the analog signals, so in many cases, it won't work.
Second, they can detect the signal leakage and see that you're receiving the signal. Considering that it's simply a matter of pointing an antena at your house from a van, and they have a list of who are Internet-only subscribers, it's not hard for them to check.
Using unauthorized cable signals simply isn't worth the risk.
I was told that any split in the line running to my modem would cause connection and interferrence problems (the installation guy ran a whole new drop from the pole outside my house). Wonder if that's really true?
"Upon attaching the waterblock to my penis, I began to notice that I know nothing about computers." -- JRockway
I have ATT cablemodem at my house. Here's how they get their money back.
If you're not ordering cable, and only the cablemodem they charge you an extra 10 dollars.
So... my total comes out to about $55 a month for cablemmodem. Plus tax...
So... Total: $60+ a month for cablemodem
Same with Time Warner, same with probably every single cable company.
:)
If you don't need a cable box to descramble it, then since the cable is hooked up into your place of residence, you get cable in its full unscrabled glory.
Time Warner even gives you the splitter.
Though it seems Time Warner in NYC has different "basic" packages. In Queens many many channels come in scramble free (though in messed up ordering), while in NYC one basically only gets over the air, tnt, tbs and cable access (though in a somewhat normal ordering)
I read a copy of the article posted on MSNBC. This doesn't just affect AT&T broadband: Cox Communications and Comcast Cable also get mentions. The reason you haven't heard about it through the news before, though, is that cable providers are only now figuring out how to circumvent this sort of "freebie."
That said, I can't bring myself to feel sorry for all the people who will now have to pay for their cable TV service. In a word, wahh.
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
Apparently I'm the only one without cable that wanted cable Internet. The price for IP over cable is $10 more if you don't have basic cable. The cost of basic cable, here in S.E. New England, is $9.50. Voila!
Has nobody else ever actually looked at the bill? The real trick is to not only plug your coax cable into your tuner card, but to remove the little inline filter which they describe to you as "the thing that keeps you from getting all the extended cable channels" when they screw it into your cable line.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Basically, if the cable operators want to stop this, it's pretty easy, but the way they're organized makes it more difficult. The frequencies used for cable modem downstreams are typically interspersed with the digital video channels, in the 550-860Mhz range. Cable modem upstream (along with telephony upstream and digital set top box return path, is almost always in the 5-42Mhz range (US values here, int'l mileage can and will vary). To provide cable modem, but no video, all they need to do is place a filter that will block 42-550Mhz. Not hard, but it requires the tech to be aware of both the video and data services the customer is getting. In reality, however, the field techs who handle video, and the ones focused on data, are two different orgs, with different trouble ticketing systems, etc, so the right hand often doesn't know what the left is doing, so getting the right filters in place can be a real pain.
Isn't much of a surprise.
Put on your "think like a cable company" hat for a moment... as a straight up cable TV network without broadband, it only makes sense to install line equipment to filter premium channels. Regardless of whatever cable package the customer orders, its always going to contain basic channels as a minimum. Hence, cable companies don't normally have filters installed for basic channels.
Ok, so lets throw in broadband. With the advent of internet access via cable, people who were previously without cable lines are now ordering cable for broadband only. Ok well, the internet access is running over a pre-existing cable network which probably wasn't designed with broadband in mind. Cable lines are coming installed, but carry basic channels at the very minimum because those signals aren't filtered.
Some cable companies play 'hush-hush' about it, and others don't. The good companies will "throw in basic cable" at no extra charge... which isn't really of much value beyond a marketing gimmick, because they probably can't NOT deliver basic cable anyway.
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
And you can get a free newspaper by holding the door open after someone else buys one.
JET Program: see Japan, meet intere
it doesn't take a master hacker to figure that one out.
From page 5 of the Motorola/General Instruments SB3100D cable modem manual:
"If you have a TV set attached to the cable outlet, you may need a 5-900 MHz splitter to use both the TV and the SB3100D."
Thats about as plain and simple as it gets.
Moderation Totals: Flamebait=2, Troll=1, Redundant=1, Insightful=6, Overrated=1, Underrated=1, Total=12. (not mine)
After being a cable modem customer for six months, I got a letter from ATT saying that the free cable (TV) was simply part the offer. I called to confirm that I was not being charged for the cable TV and that it was free to use. They said yes, and I've been happily using ATT for cable modem access and cable TV signals for $45/month ever since.
I assumed that this was by design. Maybe this "free cable TV" that they gave me was simply an artifact of getting the interenet access and, rather than discourage people from using it, ATT might have decided to be proactive an make the cable TV a free offer to their appreciated customers.
-Derek
AT&T really wants me to get Digital Cable, but the problem is I don't have a lot of time to watch it. I rely on a home-brew PVR to catch the shows I want to watch. Until I can do this on Digital Cable, I can't put the money into it because I can't watch it.
However, this may provide an opportunity to have both digital and analog cable. As long as I can still capture the stuff off the analog cable, Digital Cable may become something worth experimenting with. Heck, I may even find a way to wire a remote up to my computer to use it.
Anybody think I'll have luck with having both analog and digital cable?
*thinks it'd be heaps easier if AT&T would just have a PVR built to use the Digital Signal.*
"Derp de derp."
I even found a slashdot reference to the story. That site is down though.... Buy a Cable modem, Go to Jail
I've known this for a long time now, didn't know it was hush-hush. If you live in Western Canada you can get the first Tier basic cable package by splitting off the cable line. Shaw doesn't have any remedies for this at all in the foreseeable future due to technical regions. So, once again, if you live in Western Canada with Shaw broadband access (80% of us) you can get free cable as well.
To make a pun demonstrates the highest understanding of a language
I have Comcast cable internet, and they throw in free extremely-basic cable tv service with it. I guess they do this in hopes that you will upgrade your cable tv service, which could turn into a nice $100+ Comcast bill for them. I'll stick with my directv, thank you.
This is why they install video traps on cable modem-only customers' lines. Sounds like somebody got lazy.
DNA just wants to be free...
I recently moved, and had to get my cable modem activated at the new place. What they do now, is put on a filter to block "tv" access. It's this cigar looking filter that sits on the poll. So it looks like it's slowly getting phased out.
One bad thing about this filter is that it really degrades your signal strength, and can cause your cable modem to desync sometimes. Hell, they even unfilter it if you are having alot of problems.
...at least for Cox subscribers; basically, basic cable costs $10-month. 'net costs $40-month. BUT if you subscribe to basic cable, they give you a $10 discount, so 'net costs $30 + $10 for basic TV = $40.
In this case, you would gain nothing by splitting the cable and canceling the TV contract, because you would just pay the difference for the 'net connection. I now understand why they chose this price arrangement in the first place. Now, with a descrambler box, things change...
When I was using a cable modem, they specifically said "You will get basic service with this whether you want it or not." I thought that is how everybody probably did it. I didn't realize some places tried to hide it from you...
Posted from the wireless couch.
AT&T's previous increase (about 1 year ago) from ~$30 to ~$38 basically said "Now, for this price increase you get basic cable".
I think they realised this after seeing that they couldn't put a video trap on the same line as your cable modem. This happened to me when I discontinued their free-digital TV trial back in Jan 2000. I had to have them come out and remove the trap to get my internet to work again.
So, I have cable going to both my cable modem and my TV-tuner card, and haven't felt like it was "free" at all, especially since I've been paying for it.
I thought that the parent post made an interesting point. Now that it's extremely public how to do this, the cable companies will be forced to crack down on it.
Thanks a lot to news.com for posting this story. Give AT&T more reason to tighten their grips!
"Derp de derp."
Everyone I know gets charged about $40/month for basic cable (except in CT, where it's a reasonable $10). Why is it so high? Are they still recouping costs from laying the actual cables? I dunno, they've been around for years, sometimes decades. And don't they make enough money from advertisers? Anyone else remember when cable first came out, they said your monthly fee was so you didn't have to watch commercials? So much for that. I wouldn't mind forking over $40/month if they gave me a good reason why it needed to be that high. Unfortunately, it seems like they're overcharging just because they can, and that's one of the best ways to promote piracy.
c-hack.com |
Here in Quebec they've found a way to avoid charging for basic cable directly when you sign up for high-speed cable internet.
Basically, if you are not a cable television subscriber but want cable internet service, they charge you an additional 10$ (well they claim that you get 10$ off if you are a cable subscriber) and thus they basically offset the cost of also providing basic cable television service to those who will splice the line and route it to their tvs as well. They've been doing this for years.
Basic cable is prevented from being stolen by a device called a "trap". Trapping basically blocks the RF on the line to prevent it from traveling to a house. Most cable these days are based on addressable or digital services but the FCC still requires the basic channels (NBC,CBS,FOX,etc) to be trapped and analog. In order for the modem to work in needs RF in the range of -15db to +15db on the forward signal and reverse signals of 35db to 55db with a signal to noise of 30db or more. If you trap off a house then your not going to get cable service period (unless you know how to safely remove it from the drop). Now what prevents you from just purchasing a cable modem and hooking it up and having it work is a method of authentication known as provisioning which enables the modem or cabledevice with that Mac id to work on the system in which case the modem is delivered a CM file that governs the modem to work at a specific speed. If you can fool the modem to downloading the CM file from some other source then you can change the speed it runs at. But don't be stupid and do this as bandwidth graphs are well monitored and you can bet that when someone is pulling 30mbit your cable network engineer is gonna notice the nice huge spike compared to everyone else on the node. But to make this short and sweet, its pretty hard to find out and prevent someone from stealing basic cable, which is why most cable companies charge a cable access fee around $10.00 if you don't have any cable service besides a modem.
Okay, let's figure this one out.
First off, what's the difference in equipment necessary to "steal" basic cable from a cable modem connection? A splitter and some extra coax. Who pays for these? The consumer. What's the cost to the cable company? Zero.
Second, who's losing out when someone "steals" basic cable? Is it the cable company? I suppose, if a significant percentage of people hooking into that service would otherwise choose to pay for basic cable. I personally feel that wouldn't be a large number; when you've got broadband, TV is less entertaining, at least to me.
Are the networks losing money when people do this? A little, maybe. These people aren't being counted in ratings shares, so it means less ad revenue. These companies might be getting a small share of the revenue from the cable company if those connections were legitimate, but I believe they mostly get their money from the advertising.
So what's the solution? How 'bout requiring people with cable modems to buy basic cable service, but at a price they won't object to? Say, an extra $10-15 per month? That's enough for the cable company to pay off any rebroadcast royalties, with no additional investment in equipment needed for them. Even people with satellite dishes might find the cable TV useful, as it would carry local channels their dishes wouldn't supply.
I have had to deal with AT&T Broadband in Plano Texas for 2 years now. Twice they have done this bait and switch on me, and this time I figured it out.
When I first moved here, I got the cable modem, and when I hooked my TV up to the outlet... it worked. I have extended basic channels. About a month after they put in my cable modem, a door-to-door guy came and offered a 30-day trial of the premium basic (as many channels as you can get without going digital). We tried the cable for about 20 days, and then I called them to cut it off (cause I'm a cheep ass). They can't and turned it ALL off. It took to weeks to get my cable modem back on, but they never turned back on the basic cable. I called to argue with them, because I thought that basic cable was included. They said that it wasn't included with the modem, and that I was lucky they didn't seek for me to pay them for the months that I was "stealing" cable.
I ended up paying them to turn basic cable back on (which is what they want).
I ended up moving to another apartment, and to do so I basically had to set up new service. Then again, they put the cable modem in and Boom! I had extended basic again. Like clockwork, a month after they put in the cable modem, they sent a door-to-door guy around to offer extended basic. To test my theory (I knew I wasn't going to be there long anyway) I signed up for the 30-day trial. The rest went as expected. 20 days later I called to have the free trial turned off. Off went the cable modem and the TV. Again I paid to have basic service turned back on.
Once again, I moved to yet another apartment. Once again, the cable modem was installed, and magically, the extended basic was as well. 30 days later, I told the door-to-door day 'No Thanks', and I've had extended cable to this day.
Word to the wise... the cable company wants you to get used to the cable, and then rip you for it later.
The ONLY way to stop this is to install a filter between the Trunk, actually, the spigot(sp) (that's what your cable line plugs into) and the point of entry to your home...
Doing this to ALL cable modem subscribers would be a pretty big task... I think you have time...
Either way though... who want's "Basic" cable... I don't know about the U.S., but here in Canada, it is often reffered to as Trailer Vision... 22 channels... Yuck!
I am become Troll, destroyer of threads
About 13 million Americans get a free ride as a result, compared with the more than 64.5 million paying cable subscribers, according to research firm The Carmel Group.
You have to really wonder how did they come up with this number. Seriously. 13 million people are getting free cable? wtf....
Back home (central CA), if you had basic cable, you could just go buy a cable modem and hook it up, and bam, you had internet access. I don't know how or why they didnt have some kind of access control, but they didnt, and I took full advantage. :)
(Recently, they figured it out, and now you do in fact have to pay for cable modem access.)
python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
Here's the google mirror of that geocities site.
When I'm pinging 300ms to my GATEWAY on their internet service, I somehow don't feel bad for AT&T. If and when they start providing quality braodband, I'll care that people are stealing their TV service. After all, the internet people are paying them $50/mo for near-56k-like pings and constant speed problems in many areas.
"I drank what?" -Socrates
Drawing on old-school methods to splice cable TV lines for unauthorized use
What are the "new school" methods of doing this? This is the same way the cable monkeys from $CABLE_MONKEY_CENTRAL (Comcast for me) do it. Is there a new, better way to do this instead of getting a coax splitter, and connecting it to the cable?
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
I just tried it - wired it into my vcr (and switched it from antenna to cable mode) - I get a few scrambled channels around channel 72 - on channel 86 I get this nice spectrum analyzer display.
But other then that no free tv. And I pay the extra 10$ for the cable modem.
It's scary to look at the reactions cable companies have to folks who are even SUSPECTED of stealing service in the manner the above article suggests.
Slashdot Story: Get a Cable Modem...Go to Jail
Google cached link to subject's web page
Same story, different folks...
Anyone know what happened to that woman?
BTW Amazon has Cable Modems from $49.99!
Work for Change & GET PAID!
This has been an industry practice for quite some time. Many companies don't install a filter. And frankly, when they do, I know people that just go out to the neighborhood junction box and take them off. They are installed consistantly enough for the local cable company to ever know, if they come back to do additional work. Hell, when cable modems first came out around here, the cable company ran out of filers, so most cable-modem only users got a full cable feed, if they thought enough to try a TV on the line.
-Pete
Soccer Goal Plans
free ingredients for blood sausages.
You can break the law, and do all kinds of stupid things that seem fun for a second. But then you realize, or someone else makes you realize, that there was a reason why it is not wanted behaviour. Stealing is stealing, even if you steal bytes or a free porn channel.
The double standards on Slashdot are amazing. What's next? An article on how easy it is to shoplift at convenience stores while they take deliveries?
This is not news. I always assumed that I'd be able to steal basic cable from my provider (Cox Communications) by simply hooking into the splitter on my outside wall. But I don't pay for basic cable so I did not do it.
To people in the software industry who are stealing cable: don't get mad if you find out that the cable guy is pirating the software that your company sells.
They might have insisted on the splitter because the signal was too strong without it. It happens sometimes.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
RoadRunner (provided by Time Warner in Austin, TX) requires you to purchase basic cable in addition to your cable Internet service.
Windows (provided by Microsoft in Redmond, WA) requires you to purchase a basic media player in addition to your operating system.
I wonder why nobody has yet investigated local cable monopolies for illegal tying under the antitrust laws, especially in areas where the telephone monopoly does not offer DSL. Zathrus agrees with me.
Will I retire or break 10K?
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
I was going to post something really witty about cable piracy costing the brodband industry billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of jobs a year, but I realized that there's a serious language phenomenon happening today centered on the word "piracy."
I don't have a problem with the word itself, but the word has been raised recently to the lofty status of "buzzword." I'm waiting for the day when politicians start saying things like, "We MUST pass the CBDTPA or the pirates will have won," or "If we don't buy 50 more B-2 bombers than the pirates will have won."
It is interesting to note two additional things: (1) The term "pirate" has not been used much. Mostly it's "consumers engaged in piracy" or "hackers." (2) The bad-guy noun being thrown around constantly is "terrorists."
The coincidence of imagery is undeniable: technically, hijacking an airplane is an act of piracy. Pirates have the image coincident with that of a terrorist--marauding, violent, destructive, counter-culture and counter-establishment, lurking out there somewhere and vaguely unidentifiable until it's too late.
Is this one of the reasons that "piracy" of digital music, video, and software has seemed to capture the imagination of mass media (and held it hostage, I might add)? It's just a word, but a word with imagery associated that plays conveniently to the current fears of the uneducated masses, who look to The Government for guidance and security.
I predict that more and more mostly harmless activities that go against someone's agenda will be marked with the term "piracy." I can't wait until the day when Critical Mass is referred to as being engaged in "traffic piracy," or environmental groups are refferred to as being engaged in "land piracy" by (for example) forcing certain areas not to be drilled for oil.
Of course, this term can cut both ways. Senator Hollings is engaged in "freedom piracy" and Aschroft and the FBI are engaged in "privacy piracy" (say that three times fast). Wondrous will be the day when we can label large campaign contributors as "vote pirates" engaged in "election piracy."
He looked at me and said, "Kid, we don't like your kind, and we're gonna send your fingerprints off to Washington."
So what is the point in publishing this story now? I can't believe that the media just found out. It's something most of us have known about for years. We need to figure out what their purpose is in letting more people know about this. Is it just another attempt to point out how many people are stealing? Is it to encourage more people to do it and pull one over on At&T since they're raising prices? Was it a slow news day and they were grasping for content? There's got to be a reason this story was published now. Any ideas?
Most people would die sooner than think; in fact, they do.
For $0 cash you could have waited until he left and took it off yourself :P.
Tim
Omnia vestra castrorum habetur nobis.
The following link:
Get a cable modem, go to jail
details what can happen when you do something like this.
This is a GeoCities site, and looks like it is already being hammered, so you may not be able to get to it directly, so go here
for the Google cache.
Basically, this poor schmoe got a cable modem, without cable TV. Due to a snafu of military proportions, the cable company didn't block his TV, and the cable TV company brought charges against him.
www.eFax.com are spammers
This is not really news (at least not new news). It has been like this for years. Sometimes they will go out to the box and put some sort of filter on the line so you cannot get free cable TV. All you have to do is go out and remove it and Boom, free cable.
Ignoring for the moment that you entirely missed the point of my post...
Are you sure it's illegal? I'm pretty sure you can't go to jail for it, and I'm not even convinced it's breach of contract.
Consider this hypothetical situation: I pay for daily newspaper delivery to my house. My neighbor pays for the newspaper and a banana to be delivered every day to his house. The delivery people give me the newspaper and the banana too, even though I'm not paying for the banana.
If I eat the banana, is that illegal? I am simply using what was delivered to me unrequested.
Now, it is possible that the newspaper agreement I signed specifically said I did not want any bananas to be delivered. But if they're going to deliver them even when I specifically decline the service, then I am going to keep and eat them as I see fit.
I don't see the difference with delivery of a signal--I may have declined the service, but if they're delivering it to my home in the cables already, then they are delivering an unrequested service for free.
PS: Just for the record, I pay for all my signals from a single provider.
He looked at me and said, "Kid, we don't like your kind, and we're gonna send your fingerprints off to Washington."
What perturbs me about this article comes later, when they talk about the notion of converting so that you need a digital cable box to watch anything. Digital cable is truly loathesome:
Yup, you got it....cable companies can install filters on the pole that feeds your house to block out any channels they want....and yes, they can block all but the channel that your data rides on if you aren't paying for basic cable.
Oh well, another freebee bites the dust.
-ted
About a month ago, a rep from Comcast showed up at my door, offering free, basic cable, no strings attached, to go with my cable modem. She removed the trap in the wiring closet, programmed my TV, and left. There was no contract to sign, just a little paper to sign saying that she had been there and hooked it up. All this happened on a Sunday afternoon, so I was already at home and didn't have to miss work for the install.
I feel sorry for Cox/AT&T customers, because all I ever hear about your cable systems is negative. Ever since Comcast went solo (No @home BS) my cablemodem experience continues to improve, with not a single bad experience.
For one thing, anyone I ever knew who stole cable would never have bought it in the first place, usually because they couldn't afford it. So calling this a "loss" is bullshit.
Second, if there really are 13 million cable thieves in this country, that's 13 million extra pairs of eyeballs adding value to the cable company's advertising/infomercial bundles. And that's *really* what drives the cable business, especially now that it's all owned by the big media conglomerates.
I have mediacom cable, and the installer actually had the wrong filter; as such I get channels 2-25 or so. Not really very useful.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
That's what I had to do, even though I *don't* watch tv, and didn't want cable, before switching to DSL.
Did you know that you can get free satellite TV too!?!? Those satellites they use for TV actually beam their signals at every house! No lie! All you need is a little dish (steal someone's--people actually leave those things outside at night!) and a computer!!!
Got friends?
People do unwittingly broadcast cable TV, by hooking up thier rooftop antenna to the same coax system in some way.
In 1981 we got our first VCR and a camera (dad's business needed a major writeoff). Since I was in 8th grade, I was in charge of hooking it up. According to the documentation, you were absolutely not to hook up the RF Out of the VCR to your rooftop antenna -- it'd make you into your own TV station and the FCC would take away your bike, your baseball glove and make you eat unsweetened cereal for the rest of your life.
Naturally the idea of a video camera and the chance to be our own TV station was too tempting. However, it didn't really work. We had the highest house in our neighborhood and a big antenna on the roof, but we couldn't get our home TV channel (playing lip-sync videos and slow-motion Lego crashes) to come in on any of the neighborhood TVs, all of which were broadcast based since we didn't have cable in Minneapolis.
I guess its a good thing that I didn't know about amplifiers then...
My philosophy, which is probaly legally wrong, is that if they give me cable, I am going to hook it up. This happened at the last place I lived: I ordered cable modem but not cable, and they gave me both. I just hooked up my TV and it worked. When I moved, they remembered to install the filter on my incomming line, and even though I could remove it in about 5 minutes, I am going to leave it there. I ordered a satelite system instead -- it is much cheaper and I get the sci-fi channel.
And the "free cable" described here isn't really piracy, as other posters have pointed out. The broadband customers are paying a bit more than those who just want basic cable, and the "free" cable is part of the deal. In fact, this is another reason why the basic bill is so much: The company wants the incremental cost of extra services (Net access, premium channels, etc.) to be so low compared to the $40 you're already paying that you will choose to buy them.
Don't be ridiculous. This is like producing one CD for all of your products, shipping it off whenever one of your customers buys an application you made, and not even saying "You're not supposed to use any of the others, just the one you bought". Anyone who did that would (rightly, IMO) be "stolen" or "pirated" from, 'cause the customers would be just say "ooh, freebies" and use it all. Heck, if you read the article, you'd see that even the techs installing the hookup said "yeah, you'll get the premium channels for a while".
Whatever else this is, it has nothing to do with the morality of the people who asked and paid for only their broadband connection.
Technically they work just fine, but in a lot of buildings they have to put the trap really close to your window, since the feader is inaccessible or very accesible (like on your roof in an apartment building.) This means you can take it off and get antenna cable.
Of course I don't think they care much, when I had RoadRunner, antenna cable cost maybe $10, RoadRunner without cable cost $50, or $40 if you got basic cable ($40) or better. It looked to me like they already factored it in. Of course cable is just horrible when you are sitting less than a mile from the transmitter with direct line of sight, just gives you ghosting when you plug in the cable.
So, you have a cable modem hooked up to your cable. This doesn't mean that you are allowed to splice that cable and run it to another device.
Don't be ridiculous. This is like producing one CD for all of your products etc etc
This just in: analogies make shitty arguments. You can write analogies until the cows come and it doesn't make you any more correct. I wish slashbots would learn this...
OK, since you asked, I used to work overseas and we shared a building with the cable folks. I got to know the techs. There is three very popular ways to detect theft of service. The most common is when checking the system for integrety, they find leakage of the signal. Some cable channels share the commercial airline communications frequencies. Picking up cable channels here is interference in violation of FCC rules (USA). Cable companies usualy use 100% shielded RG-6 cable drops to the house. A pirate drop added to a cable system is typicaly done with braided RG-59 which is only 95% shielded. The leakage usualy isn't enought to get a picture outside the home. The cable company does not even try to receive a picture. They use a sensitive narrow band receiver with a yagi antenna and look for leakage of the video, sound or cable FM radio carrier. Video carriers in the aircraft band is the most common leakage detection as they are picked up as part of FCC compliance checks. Midband cable channels A-I are typicaly channels 14-22 and are just above the FM radio band in the aircraft band. 121.5 MHZ is the aircraft emergency frequency. Leakage on that frequency is a big no-no.
The second method used are using a TDR and measuring the distance to the end of the cable. A splitter tries to keep the impedance to the source to 75 ohm, but it isn't perfect and show up well on a TDR (Time Domain Reflectometry a type of in cable radar checking distance to splitters connections, ends, breaks etc.) A teltale sign of theft of service is the presence of a splitter in the TDR return and two or more diffrent distances to the terminations (6ft to cable modem and 35 foot to TV for instance).
The Third method used is the least reliable. At the head end they run one of the channels through a time base corrector with a set drift (slightly off spec horizontal frequency). During a popular program (superbowl, HBO) the van sniffs for TV's exactly matching this offset sweep speed. The catch here a TV with a noisy sweep circuit from a subscriber can swamp a bootleg reciever's signature as it gets buried in the background noise level. Getting a match in sweep frequency from a TV in a house not subscribing to ESPN or HBO in suburbia can result in enough evedince for a search warrant for the illegal decoder. This is very hard to do in apartments, but not too difficult in surburban areas. They only catch those who happen to be tuned in at the time of the sweep. Those who time shift tape are not detected. The head end stuff is very expensive for this so this is a tool of larger cable companies and cable companies that hire the survey from a 3rd party.
Leakage tests are the most common theft detection when done in conjunction with tap sweeps. TDR's are used in apartments because the temptation to run a wire to the next apartment is high. With the high density, the time to do a TDR audit has high payback results. Changes in cable response can be tied to duration of a tenant stay to make good cases of theft. The arguement of that was the way it was when I moved in doesn't work if they get two recorded TDR records that show the change after you moved in.
As you can see, two of the 3 common detection methods do use an antenna on a van pointed at your house. They look for leakage of the raw cable signal and check the sweep frequency of your TV. TDR sweeps require a tempory outage of the signal and are not done with an antenna on a van.
I hope this helps explain it.
The truth shall set you free!
"The drops are not designed to be split," she said. "The Internet product needs a dedicated feed so that it runs as efficiently as it's supposed to."
I've seen it installed by Comcast this way SEVERAL time for people with Cable Modems and analog or digital cable.
A Comcast Cable representative said Comcast also performs tap audits to identify customers using unauthorized video hookups.
Right....the tech checking if some moron terminated an extra connection with a screw-on F from RadioShack while he's setting up a neighbor's connection in the same box is not what I'd call an "audit."
The tap audit lets the operator evaluate services piped into the home to see if any are not being paid for.
I'd really like to know how many people actually believe that there is some magic box they can hook up to a cable line and know what you're stealing/what kind of box you have on youe TV/how many splitters you have/etc.
Do not fold, spindle or mutilate.
I have comcast cable, and my next-door neighbor doesnt have "cable", but the cable internet. He can get the channels.... just not all of them... say... not 20-65.
well... you get what you pay for...
I had assumed, all along, that this requirement remained. But now that I think about it, that was TCI back then, and of course now it's AT&T.
The notion that I'd have to pay for basic cable whether I used it or not, had contributed to my decision not to buy DirecTV. But honestly, I also am reluctant to order DirecTV since nobody can assure me that I will actually be able to get a signal at my location due to trees, and I'm not interested in paying a professional installer several hundred dollars just to confirm that I can't get DirecTV.
(I'm one of those folks who believes it's wrong to steal, even from an incompetent, unethical corporation, so the question isn't whether I'd do so, it's simply whether I can have AT&T Broadband Cable Modem service while getting my TV signal somewhere else -- and an antenna isn't an option, all I can get with an antenna is one TV station.)
-- http://www.MarkWelch.com/ Pleasanton California
Well, somehow AT&T has managed to shut off my cable TV, but left my cable modem (mostly) up. So I try to call their customer service line and it's busy.
That's right, I'm getting a busy signal from AT&T, one of the largest telcos in the world. This is progress!
Well, either that or a cable subscription is built into the rent and you just don't realise it.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
I don't know if it's still the case now, but Time Warner's Roadrunner services were subject to the same thing....we scored free cable off a splice from our cable modem, basic cable anyway. This was around two years ago, (I moved out of the area) so it may or may not still be that way.
This message brought to you by the Council of People Who Are Sick of Seeing More People.
Don't be ridiculous.
I'm being perfectly logical. If you did not pay for cable television and you installed additional cable and/or hardware to get it to your TV, it's theft.
My philosophy, which is probaly legally wrong, is that if they give me cable, I am going to hook it up.
It is illegal. Sorry.
But I think that you'll like satellite better. I could add basic cable to my broadband connection for $3 more. I am not going to waste $36 per year for substandard picture, sound, and reliability.
THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN THERE IS NO COPMETITION. Baton Rouge granted Cox an exclusive franchise years ago. BellSouth, far from being punished for not living up to it's mandated DSL requirements, was granted the ability to put long distance competitors out of business as well. If that joker Lieberman wants to promot broadband he can start by enforcing the law and it's intent.
Additionally, the folks thinking they can squeeze $40/month out of all those "thieves" are out of their minds. People who plug a wire in their house to the back of their TV are NOT THIEVES. Most of them, like me, would never, ever, pay an additional $40 a month for better reception of public broadcasts. Yet that's what they estimate they are "losing" every month. Do the math and see what I mean. They think they can get you hooked to that shit. Nope, it's just not worth it. $40/month goes a long way at the video store and, gasp, the movie theater itself.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
does this really deserve a /. story? Its been pretty obvious for the last few years to anyone with cable internet that its exactly the same cable you already had in your house with a cable modem attached to the end of it. Only prob with splitting it off is that it kills your bandwidth something fierce when you start watching tv while you are online
i dunno.. i think if its in your house you could probably justify doing whatever you want with it. Kinda like how you can splice your phone line and add extra wall plugs even tho the phone co would be happy to send a tech out to wire a simple plug for $50+
do you realize that microsoft actually does send out books of cds containing every single microsoft product, including betas, to technet plus subscribers. That's right, for less than $1000 they'll send you a bigass wallet of CDs or DVDs, and yes, it's illegal and immoral to use them in place of real media.
Kinda like how you can splice your phone line and add extra wall plugs even tho the phone co would be happy to send a tech out to wire a simple plug for $50+
But you aren't really gaining new services by doing this. An extra phone jack will allow you use a phone in another room, but it will not allow you to use phones in separate rooms for separate calls. Therefore, you aren't stealing from the phone company if you add a phone jack to your house.
In case of fire, do not use elevator. Use water!
They think Slashdot discussed it in April 1999" and cached that too.
Apparently, Maryland's Cable TV Service Theft Laws are designed with guilty-until-proven-innocent built in, and "Comcast The TV Company" and "Comcast the Cable Modem Company" didn't talk to each other very well about who was buying what services, so the author got a Kafka-esque runaround because she wasn't a TV-watching couch potato.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
But you aren't really gaining new services by doing this. An extra phone jack will allow you use a phone in another room, but it will not allow you to use phones in separate rooms for separate calls. Therefore, you aren't stealing from the phone company if you add a phone jack to your house.
splitting your cable also allows you to watch tv in different rooms, why should you only be able to watch tv in your living room? Adding extra phones allows multiple people in one house to join in on one conversation using multiple phones, by your reasoning, that would be bad as well. if they didn't want you to split the cable, they would make it so its not possible to split it. in my area its perfectly legal to split the cable once it enters your house, i doubt some many people would be willing to pay $40 a month if it wasn't, perhaps in some areas your sign a contract not allowing to split your cable, but here its just fine and its common practice, the cable installer will even split it for you if you want.
Heck, cable co's have been making public this knowledge for, err, lets see;
AGES now.
Before even cable modems existed you could run down to your local Radioshack and buy a splitter and get basic cable on any other cable ready TV just by running the split line to it from the main feed.
Yeesh.
Now repeat after me the advertising lines used for Cable Modems:
"Internet over the Cable TV lines you already have."
Say it again.
"Internet over the Cable TV lines you already have."
Hmm, same lines, same connection, err, DUH.
Yeesh.
Talk about the obvious.
Doesn't cost the cable companies a penny, and a few of them have even advertised it as a freebie (doesn't cost them jack, RF transmission is already sent, beh).
I myself watch TV on my computer thanks to a $20 TV in card (you people paying in the hundreds are getting horribly ripped off. Once again, repeat after me "Generic BT chipset, Generic BT chipset." ) and a cheapo line splitter I found in one of the multitudes of drawers around the house.
Nothing to see here, move along.
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
Depending on your cable provider, you'll get all sorts of nutty cable channels, including hte "Windows 95 desktop" channel, the "insert the AMiga Kickstart disk" channel,and a classic chnanel from the '80s, the "Commodore 64 screen spitting out random numbers" channel, a personal favorite.
Anoyne remember those cheesy "childeren's stories" channels that were basically computer-rendered screens with text and graphics for various tales? I was addicted to it as a kid. I also remmeber the computer-screen AP news plus channel. Every 3 months or so,all the graphics came up scrambled, as if it were done in Logo and a wrong turn on the vectors were made. Hilarious to watch when you're 10.
The run regular TDRs down cable segments which lets them know when something has changed (like you removed/added filters to get a service you didn't pay for)
They also have sniffers on their cable trucks - but not for the reason you think - they use frequencies on the cable that are used by other people in broadcast - if they radiate too much the FCC comes a knocking - a few years back they tried to shut down a TX cable plant that was interfering with air traffic control
Way back in the dark ages, cable TV providers demanded that you pay a separate charge for *each* TV or VCR hooked to the cable (frex, via a splitter). Some providers claimed they could tell if you had more than on TV hooked up by the feedback they got from their signal (dunno if that was for real or just a scare tactic).
30-some years ago there was a lawsuit (it affected Montana, tho I don't know if it had any impact in other states) that established that the cable company had no right to dictate how you could use the signal they provided -- if they sent a TV signal into your house, you could split it to however many TVs/VCRs you cared to. (However, you still could not steal the signal by hooking directly to the box on the pole, or splicing into your neighbour's cable, or using a decoder to view scrambled channels you hadn't paid for, etc.) In short, the court said you'd paid for the *signal*, not a fixed number of hookups.
ISTM that per this ancient lawsuit, if the cable brings signal into your house, and you merely split it after it's in your house (past all the various control devices) then they've already lost the right to control your use of said signal, and what devices you hook it to is your business.
I don't know how this would be perceived in the current legal climate, tho. Probably as theft, even tho no overtly illegal activity (descrambling etc.) takes place.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
It's not MORE expensive for me (optonline), but it's something like a couple bucks a month more for actual cable TV service. The idea is that if you have cable service you're more likely to sign up for Skinemax and Hoetime, which is where they make much of their TV money.
nahhh. let them do it....
they'll get nailed by a sniffer truck, their service shut off, dragged into court for theft of service and fined heavily and get a criminal record.
I love it when idiots steal cable, as you WILL get caught quite quickly. the technology on the sniffer trucks is really advanced now, and the cable companies are making huge profits from nailing the cable thieves..
I've seen an offer that they wont drag you through court if you pay for every option ($150.00 a month) for a year's time (you dont get anything, you're paying for the previous year.) but then that was 3 years ago when the guy that lived below an Ex-girlfriend of mine got nabbed for splitting off her cable TV.
the sniffer trucks can detect from the street the number of sets and devices attached, as well as location (every TV,VCR,etc leaks a bit of rf energy)
please let them steal cable... they need to get nailed.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
We had RoadRunner in central New York back in 1999. I had a splitter lying around, so we plugged it in to my video capture card, and lo and behold, basic cable. My roommate even found some special drivers for his ATi All-in-Wonder to unbefunge some of the less-heavily "encrypted" pay channels.
:P
We paid the price for it, though... they ran a James Bond marathon during exam week. Bastards...
Personally, I think it's totally ridiculous that we have special laws about cable theft. It's moronic. If you send signal at me, it's my option to do something with that signal (note: this doesn't mean physically splicing into someone elses line. Thats a different can of worms). Canda has a much more enlightened approach, at least about satellite which is the same concept. The cable companies, like everyone, like to soak you for as much as they can (I have a cable tuner in my TV. It doesn't work, so I need to rent a cable box (remote is seperate) from Cablevision. Every little bit adds up, you know? Like the phone companies of old, they want total control over the line, the content, and the devices. They want you to pay an extra fee for extra TVs in the same house. Why? It doesn't cost them anything more. There's no extra work involved. It's just me splitting a signal that they feed me. But they like money. And since there's practically no competition, they can do whatever they like.
People don't want to hear about how they are morally or ethically wrong about something. As far as they are concerned, that's your opinion and not based on fact or reality.
I made a similar point regarding Napster yesterday. Someone went as far as comparing music theft on Napster to the life of Jesus Christ.
Knocking...my...head...into...the...wall...
Yesterday taught me one thing. If people can find a way in their brain to justify an act, they will change their perception from it being "wrong" to "well, why shouldn't I? Who am I REALLY hurting?"
What about me? I pay almost $100 a month (was ~$200 but cut some stuff back), I feel perfectly justified splitting the line and getting another expanded basic line feed.
I didn't say that you would not feel justified in doing it. I simply said it was illegal.
I might feel justified pirating Windows XP because the copy of Windows 95 I purchased did not perform as advertised, but my feeling justified would not make it legal.
The article was about paying for cable modem service and splitting off basic cable television service that you never paid for.
I wonder if a TDR or leakage sweep would find the unburied and ripped cable feed in my garden after I roto-tilled this spring? As a non-cable subscriber I could care less if my cable works. But I would hate for them to come and try to sue me for the cost of fixing the cable. :-)
Splicing cable costs the cable company nothing. The reports claiming that the industry loses $6.2 billion per year assume that every single casual pirate would've been a full, $500-per-year customer had he not stumbled across the free signal coming into his house. Fat chance.
I agree that the numbers are grossly inflated, but to pretend that none of these people would have become customers is equally fallacious reasoning. Some people are stealing basic cable in lieu of paying for it. So it is costing the cable industry something. Is it costing them $6.2 billion per year in lost sales? Probably not. But neither is it costing them nothing.
I'm usually critical of people who pirate software, steal cable, etc, but I'm less critical of this particular variety of "stealing" cable. And yes, I did this myself last night, so I'm not a disinterested observer.
I guess my take on it is that while I know they don't *want* me "stealing" cable, I see no reason to assume that it *is* stealing. I'm paying $50/month for a piece of co-ax that can send and recieve data to and from the outside world. It so happens that one type of data I recieve is basic cable. I see no principled reason why I'm allowed to make use of one type of data coming off that piece of co-ax, and not another.
If there were a contract of some sort promising that we would only use the services we paid for, or if they put at least some kind of scrambling or blocking on it, I would be reluctant to circumvent security measures to get cable. But when all I have to do is take the cable they gave me and plug it into the back of the TV, I find it quite a stretch to say that that counts as theft. If they don't want me using the service, they should make at least a token effort to prevent it.
Everybody I know displays disrespect for at least one or two laws (or did in the past) - speeding, cheating on taxes and smoking weed being probably the most common and I'll say this: I find it quite doubtful that "pirating" cable kills anyone, while there's absolutely no question whatsoever that speeding does. So lighten up, buddy
I'm not your "buddy" so don't tell me to "lighten up."
It wouldn't "kill" you if someone stole your car, but that doesn't mean that we should all just turn a blind eye to it. On the other hand, maybe we should...
Legally and ethically, you have no obligation to not hook up your tv if you subscribe only to cable modem service. (Note that none of this applies to digital services.)
If a con man sends me an unsolicited product i am not required to pay for it or give it back. This is the same thing.
You asked for cable modem service and got cable tv service delivered on top of it. The signal is already coming to your house, so it is essentially wasted if it does not go to your tv. If you are paying for everything you asked for and are not depriving anyone else of service, or quality of service, where's the ethical problem? (If they say your splitter affects others' service, then they're lying.)
If they weant the $2 (my local cost) that they charge for basic cable on top of modem service then they can block out the tv channel at the tap until you subscribe. If they choose not to, that's their problem.
IUTBACG (i used to be a cable guy) so believe me when i tell you that all the crap in the article about tap audits(1) and degrading your service through splitters(2) is crap.
(1) A tap audit looks at the place where your individual line is connected to the main feed and maybe at the place where the line enters the house. If some joker pried open the box or climbed the pole and spliced-in his own line, removed some channel-blocking traps, or added some black-market channel-adding traps they can tell. They cannot (legally) tell how many splitters you have in your basement, nor is it any of their business. After the signal is in your house, you can do whatever you want with it (copyright restriction, etc. taken into account) - hook it up to one and only one tv, split it a milion ways, or leave it dangling unconnected if you want to! That's been decided in court and that's why they can charge you for installing new outlets, but not for service to multiple TV sets.
Oh, and BTW tap audits are pretty rare unless they've previosuly caught you or one of your neighbors being naughty, but YMMV.
(2)If a two-way splitter would degrade your service to an unacceptable level then it was probably already intermittantly shitty. (But don't get me started on morons who want to have crystal-clear reception on 6 TVs with a $2 splitter from Radio Shack - there is a limit to how much you can split a signal. The cable company is not responsible for fixing your mess - just their own.)
It is unlikely that your modem would work fine before you put the splitter in and not work afterwards, but if that's the case then that's your problem. Still, there's no harm nor foul in testing it out.
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.
If you didn't pay for it, they shouldn't give it to you for free.
They didn't "give it to you for free." They may have underestimated your willingness to steal the signal, but they did not "give" you the signal. Did they run a cable to your TV? Did they say "feel free to hook up a cable and enjoy basic cable channels for free"? If not, they didn't give you anything.
They can easily stop people from receiving the free channels by filtering it out.
So now they are supposed to buy filters, pay someone to install them all over your service area, and reduce the overall system reliability by adding these filters and increasing the number of connections(all of which are potential failure points), and pass the costs on to all of their honest customers who are paying for the service. Otherwise, you're going to steal it.
Face facts: If you pay for cable modem service and start adding splitters and/or cables to run to your TV, you are stealing the service. You physically added something to their cable system so that you could get a service that you did not pay for. End of story.
Face facts: If you pay for cable modem service and start adding splitters and/or cables to run to your TV, you are stealing the service. You physically added something to their cable system so that you could get a service that you did not pay for.
By this logic, if I had cable and wanted to connect multiple TV's to it, I would be stealing service. Some cable companies actually believe this and charge you for every outlet. I just don't happen to buy into it.
Legally and ethically, you have no obligation to not hook up your tv if you subscribe only to cable modem service.
It's their cable system and you don't have a legal right to add splitters and cables to it so that you can get TV signals that you don't pay for.
If a con man sends me an unsolicited product i am not required to pay for it or give it back. This is the same thing.
No it is not. The cable company did not send you an unsolicited product. You tapped into their cable and stole it.
You asked for cable modem service and got cable tv service delivered on top of it.
When the cable guy left after installing your cable modem, did you magically have basic cable on your TV? No. You hooked up additional splitters and/or cables in order to steal the signal.
The signal is already coming to your house, so it is essentially wasted if it does not go to your tv. If you are paying for everything you asked for and are not depriving anyone else of service, or quality of service, where's the ethical problem?
Ethical and legal problems are different. Legally, it is theft. Ask any competent attorney and he'll verify that. Ethically, you have to ask yourself a question: If you could not get basic cable that way, would you:
a. pay for it.
b. pay for satellite.
c. buy an antenna.
If you answered yes to any of the above, your theft of the cable service is depriving someone of income. To me, that's an ethical problem.
It's their service. They get to decide how it is priced. If they decide on a per-TV price and you don't like it, get out the rabbit-ears or subscribe to satellite.
Let's change "cable TV" to "computer software" and see how your summary works:
So how is that analogy flawed?
there is no competition because YOUR local government gladly handed the cable company a monoply in your town city. they made laws to make it ILLEGAL to be a cable company that is not the one that is currently giving kickbacks to the city (called a franchise fee... go look it up at the city.. you'll see that this is one shining beacon of the corruption that is in your city government)
you want competition? start a campain to oust the thieves in the city council and repeal ANY silly calbe laws or monopoly's. your localc cable company will complain and threaten to leave (yeah right, go ahead and rip up your headends and fiber optic plant... that's pure bullshit that they will leave)
it's YOU that can change these things... and only YOU.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.