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Users Conned by Cable Con
RJ Mansfield writes "MSNBC is running a story on users attempting to con their cable companies being connned. The high-cost filter being sold on Ebay and through email Spam to bypass Pay-Per-View (PPV) digital cable systems is a readily available filter that only temporarily blocks the PPV charges. Users are getting shocked when the cable company then bills the cable user for all of the ordered PPV."
Sounds fair to me, but knowing the type of people who do this, their first reaction is going to be one of "What a second! We weren't told about this!! We were busy reaching around your jacket to get your wallet, we didn't know that you were grabbing ours in the process!"
Suckers; Look what happens when you try to 'Steal' without research.... hehehe
Users are getting shocked when the cable company then bills the cable user for all of the ordered PPV."
I imagine Nelson (from Simpsons fame) saying "Ha-ha!"
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
Wahhh!! That's so sad!! I need some tissue to dry away the tears!!
Not.
Anyone who is stupid enough to buy one of these devices is getting what they deserve. If you want the premium channels, then pay for them. If you think the cable company charges too much, then complain to them and rent DVDs. But that doesn't give you any right to steal the programming.
I want a new quote. One that won't spill. One that don't cost too much. Or come in a pill.
Morons for not downloading a divx movie on Kazaa instead =P
That's much more effective piracy.
You're right, I wouldn't steal a car. But if it were possible, I sure as hell would download one!
Otherwise /.ers everywhere would be either broke or divorced or both.
I just read the article, and the people are getting charged HUGE bills for watching TV that they didnt pay for, live, while it was being broadcast.
Hey they watched pay per veiw, a service that has been around a while and been accepted as being viable, and they are being told to pay for it. They dont even have ground to complain, it would be like getting robbed by a drug dealer who gave you bad drugs!
"well officer, I was trying to by some cocaine, and i found out that it was 50% sugar!"
I just find it funny some people are complaining about about being "cheated" by the product.
If you don't vote, you don't matter, so don't waste your time telling me your opinion
---- El diablo esta en mis pantalones! Mire, mire!
It seems fair to me that someone trying to cheat on PPV charges would get burned.
A more interresting question is who did more wrong... Is it worse to try and circumvent PPV charges, or are the people selling these devices the real bad guys?
Opinions?
.: Max Romantschuk
And two years from now, the RIAA charges everyone that's been using Napster/Kazaa/Morpheus/Gnutella/Etc for all the music they've "bought".
Sky in the UK have cottoned on this sort of thing as well. With SKY if you order PPV the box dials up sky to get authorisation. People realised this, unplugged the phone and found that they sky box would then grant them access as it gave them the benefit of doubt.
:) Fantastic
What they didn't realise that they box has a £50 credit limit so if you hit this then it stops. So people then plugged the box back in, it dial sky and they get a bill for £50
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
This is what we're talking about. A little crappy coax coupler. I saw this on ebay a couple days ago, and thought to myself 'This must be a scam -- such a little thing can't work, since real descrambler boxes are pretty large and complicated'. Guess I was right.
In reality, from experience these people tend to fall into two camps.... "I don't like digital", and "anything digital is good". And its for the exact same reason: how easy is it to pirate the material and how likely they are to accept change.
The acceptable use norm of material has been founded on the concept of being able to make a copy of whatever and whenever. Old analogue stuff was way too easy for anyone who had a vcr, digital stuff takes some work but once you have it you can ultimately do whatever you like. This is of course not what they owners/licensees want. And unfortunately this philosophy of anything intangible should ultimately be free as it cost them nothing to reproduce goes down deep in modern society.
What is needed is compromise on both parties, companies need to make things affordable instead of gouging consumers and the consumers have to realize that it cost somebody money and time to produce something so they should pay for it. I know this sounds a bit circular and communistic but the reality is that both camps can be happy if they both cooperate.
But this in the end is wishful thinking as the article clearly points out that there's plenty of people out there ready to cheat the system and complain when they get caught.
"Theft is like anything else, it requires a clue to complete successfully."
If only your statment could be applied to breeding...
He tried to kill me with a forklift!
As the saying goes.
Though I have to say I'm slightly puzzled by the consensus here that it is wrong not to pay for content and the 'victims' deserved all they get, but elsewhere on Slashdot there is outrage when action is taken against filesharers. When is copyright material not copyright material?
A couple of years ago, when i was addicted to quake, lived at home and only had access to dialup i got hold of some strolen accounts. These were not ordinary "free" dialup accounts that looks like just another phonenumber on your phonebill, but a toll-free number that billed the owner of the account.
:)
:)
Yeah, i know, it was a really low thing to do on my part.. but i knew i was not the only one using the account, and the real person that owned the account would never end up having to pay the bill. So i felt i only screwed over a "big company".
I was young and dumb
Anyways, a couple of months later, my ordinary phonebill dropped down in the mailbox. It was a *little* bit bigger than usual. There were no additional notes on the bill and there was no warning about legal actions from the company, so i payed the bill and kept my mouth shut.
I got what i deserved and i learned my lesson
I'm not sure what the difference is between the large boxes and the coax filter, but I do know that it takes more than a simple coax filter to do descrambling. (There has to be filter tuning, which involves user control, which makes it so you can't just do "Plug-n-Play" of descramblers)
It's my guess that you need a -real- cable descrambler (as in, one from the official cable company) to use the coax filter, and that cable box needs to send data to the cable company to work, so the coax filter blocks one half of the transaction or something. This puzzles me, though, because I think getting the legitimate descrambler box would cost more than it would to get a "pirate" cable box anyways.
Anybody know more than I do about this?
(P.S. NO I DON'T STEAL CABLE. Why would I anyways, all they ever do is play shitty movies that involve naked women and exploding cars and crap.)
... how people here are pointing out the balantly obvious fact that the people who are getting the bills are getting exactly what they deserve, since they have enjoyed a service that they have agreed to pay for, and therefore is only fair if they, well, pay for it...
While a couple of articles back these same people were defending the virtues of file "sharing" networks, where users are comfortably ignoring the fact that they have agreed *not* to redistribute the copyrighted material without permission from the copyright holders.
Really, make up your minds: either file sharing a la KaZaa is ok and the people who bought these devices shouldn't pay for the content they "downloaded" for free or file sharing a la KaZaa is *not* ok and the people who bought these devices should pay for the content they downloaded.
It's very simple: you want content X? You pay for it. Why? Because the content provider says so and we have given them the power to be like that.
>"well officer, I was trying to by some cocaine, and i found out that it was 50% sugar!"
How about I was buying coke and half of it was cut with cyanide and a few friends died? Do we laugh them? If the nanny state says, "No drugs for you" that doesn't mean con artists get a free ride to do whatever they please.
I see no reason why the users of these devices shouldn't sue the retailers and manufacterers for false advertising. Just because something is contra-band doesnt give you the right to do what you please.
Its illegal to make lethal booby traps for criminals and for a good reason too. Not just to protect the police who might stumble on them (or kids or whomever) but because criminals actually have rights! Due process and all. Look it up sometime in the Constitution, its a fading fad thanks to post 9/11 hysteria but its still a good idea.
Is there any possibilty that it is someone from a cable company posting these things on eBay?
Consider....
I think a lot of /.ers suffer from hypocrisy.
it is ok to con the PPV channel.
it is ok to con the music industry
it is ok to con Microsoft by copying all their software (for those of you who use it)
but when someone else (other article some time ago) violates the GPL by not opening their code, you rant and rave about 'theft'.
seriously, it is all the same.
the only difference is POV.
Int.
Satellite TV in Spain (cable didn't catch on) relied on a smart card that contains all the information about what the subscriber has paid for. This meant that if you reprogrammed the card to contain the most recent user codes, you could access all the PPV channels for free. If you have a legit card, it recieves the new codes from the satellite signal itself.
There was a huge underground industry around - it got to the point were people where actually selling cards with PICs on them which would reprogram themselves automatically, getting the info from the satellite signal.
Obviously the satellite company knew about it, as did everybody else. I cannot think of anyone that didn't have one of these cards (if they had satellite obviously). The TV company didn't do anything about it for a couple of years. Why? Market share. The more people that signed up for their service and got a box, at a higher price than it would be with the compentition, the better in the long run for the company. People were signing up left right and center with the expectation of being able to unlock all the channels.
And then all of a sudden - clamp down! The company started verifying the user info in a different way an bingo - millions of subscribers that are addicted to 24/7 PPV.
The people buying these filters are clearly :
1) Trying to break the law by stealing cable content
2) Complete morons
Why is anyone spending time and money taking out adverts on Ebay to warn them?
This is the device (http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&ite m=3013536743). Aside from the name, the write up only says you can get PPV, etc. when the coupler is connected to the appropriate box. Which is true since it is just a coupler. The buyer is inferring from the _name_ that the device will make the viewing free. A court case would revolve around whether it is reasonable to assume a descrambling ability when no such ability was mentioned in the description. The description would be argued as being the seller's definition of the name. Their definition does _not_ mention descrambling. Which makes the scam a rather tidy one.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
While a 1-{800 | 888 | 877 | 866} number is free to the calling party, except for some nefarious call redirection scams, it is NOT free to the receiving party. They pay for the call. They can receive ANI information detailing which phone number is calling them.
Unlike Caller-ID information which is transmitted in-band (on the same line) between the first and second telephone ring and can be blocked by the dialing party, the ANI service is transmitted off-band and CANNOT be blocked when you call an 800 number. It's always there.
P2P != copying music
In a cable service, you have channels that are eligible for and ineligible for when you pay a certain rate. This is the agreement that you have with your cable company. Obtaining more channels (or PPV features) without paying for them in illegal.
P2P is simply a concept - technology if you will - that allows machines to share files. No matter how you look at peer-to-peer transfers, I look at it in its basic parts: machines (peers) sending data to other machines (peers). P2P's concept has existed since we were able to transfer a file from one system to another. P2P's preferred modern implementations make it extraordinarily easy to transfer data - OF ANY TYPE - without having to use the old methods (of which I'll name a few):
1) "sneaker-net", in which case one person would place data on a tape, disk, or other medium to be transferred to another machine.
2) a computer (peer) connecting via sounds-signals to another computer (peer) via modem (or other like devices).
3) a computer (peer) connecting to a web server (peer) via TCP/IP.
The third example brings up a unique point since modern P2P clients generally transmit their data based off HTTP transactions - each client that runs such a client are acting as HTTP servers and HTTP clients.
RIAA is targetting the concept of P2P - the concept which they themselves use to hand out press releases and data to their customer base via http://www.riaa.org.
In the cable example, there are no legitimate (legal) reasons for obtaining channels outside the scope of your contract plan. As we have known since HTML was invented and widely deployed, there are plenty of fully LEGAL and GOOD reasons to have P2P - it's the basic function of the Internet. One peer connected to many different peers transmitting data (irregardless of content). Making P2P illegal is stupid. Punishing companies would provide a technologically innovative application to consumers is also just as stupid.
Let's view a parallel example:
Four people use a 1996 Chevy Impala SS as a fast getaway car that cost a bank a tens of thousands of dollars and injured a couple members of society. If it were up to the RIAA, not only would the perpetrators be locked up, but General Motors would have an injunction placed against them by a ruling judge for providing a vehicle to carry out illegal activites (referencing Napster). This abuse of the judicial system is sickening. It's also disappointing that the people we elect are not properly versed in the differentiate between technology and abuse of available technologies.
There is no computer that inherently attempts to commit illegal acts. Just like a 1996 Chevy Impala SS does not in itself attempt to commit an illegal act. I will even go so far as to say that the Napster, Gnutella clients, Kazaa!, and *Donkey P2P applications also themselves do not inherently commit illegal acts. The problem exists between the chair and the keyboard - if people choose to be dishonest and misuse a product in a which for which it was not intended, the liability is upon them. This applies to the people who wish to obtain cable service above and beyond the scope of their contract.
Ayup