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Watching My Neighbors Watch On-Demand TV

Josh Levin, Slate Magazine writes "I have a magical box that allows me to watch other people watch TV — their movies, their sports, their cartoons, and their hour-long procedural dramas. And sometimes, usually around 11:30 on Friday nights, their soft-core pornography... I solved the mystery by consulting online message boards. At techie sites like AVS Forum, other voyeurs described their adventures in freeloading. I was intercepting video-on-demand channels through the power of my Samsung's QAM tuner."

6 of 214 comments (clear)

  1. Rabbit Ears? by Jimithing+DMB · · Score: 4, Informative

    I wonder if the author realizes that all of the over the air HDTV stations are broadcast on UHF frequencies so you need only a standard UHF attenna. Those are the loop kind or occasionally they enclose the loop in a rectangular thing. You can fold the rabbit ears down because you don't need them at all.

    Still, this is interesting. I might think about running a cable feed to the tuner and see what happens. I went with OTA in the first place because the cable company wasn't carrying the local NBC and FOX stations in HD but now they are. Never even dreamed I'd get the occasional free VOD stuff.

  2. Re:He's not watching his neighbors watch TV... by WilliamSChips · · Score: 3, Informative

    Actually the one Molly can't see she called "worse than the boogieman". The boogieman was Sylar, whom she could see, and in fact did

    --
    Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
  3. Some TVs are equipped with a QAM tuner by Stavr0 · · Score: 2, Informative
    The model I have has a tri-band NTSC/ATSC/QAM tuner and a slot for a CableCard interface. It took me approximately 10 seconds to find the VOD channels beyond the analog range.

    Now I would be really pleased if my cable provider could sell/rent me a CableCard, but I'm stuck with using their dreaded SciAtlanta decoder.

  4. Re:Plyboy has great articles by UserChrisCanter4 · · Score: 2, Informative

    Fun Fact: There is actually a nudity-free version of Playboy that universities and major libraries often subscribe to and keep in their periodical archives. Although you're obviously making a commentary on the artificial models, you really can read it "just for the articles."

  5. Re:Rabbit Ears? - don't worry by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    I worked a CATV salesperson/auditor.

    If I caught you with receiving unauthorized signal, my job was to sell you the service and to physically cut cable as the last resort. We were not there to sue our customers unlike certain entities that end in AA. If you invited the police to waste my time, I would make your life hell since you'd be wasting 40 minutes of my time. I was still nice about it "Officer, now that you are here and you've verified my authority, I'd like to give this gentleman 2 minutes to make his decision to discontinue service. Sir, we can sign paperwork for service at the highest level and still extend your special offer to you, use my wirecutters to terminate the signal, or we can deal with this matter according to the law. You have 1 minute and 55 seconds remaining in your grace period. Which will it be?".

    Now, I was a contractor getting highly paid. My effective rate was over $200/hr for working about 3 hours per day. It paid me a lot more to convert you than it was to cut your service.

    Running into various insects (bees, wasps, spiders, scorpions...) and into large dogs at cable junction points is not worth the risk of doing a full signal audit. :-) Their in-house employees are paid a lot less and have even less incentive to do a full signal audit, which is how you get caught.

    So, the chances of you getting caught and prosecuted are astronomical. Only one guy pissed me off enough that I had him arrested. He apparently thought I was bluffing. We are talking about blatant theft of services with a 50' line of cable and causing signal distortion to his neighbor.

    If you live in a high turnover apartment building, you can say "it was on when I moved in". We'll either persuade you to keep it, or cut it off. If it's a single family home, it costs a lot of money to audit these due to abovementioned hazards. I usually simply cut the cable at my 3rd walk-through and left them notes to call me if they were interested in subscribing to our services. While we are far more likely to audit an apartment building, the turnover gives you plausible deniability. Besides, it's probably the truth. Not many people have the technical skill to remove a filter on their cable line.

    There are very few audit/sales outfits in the US. I worked for two of the largest of these for 1.5 years, so if anyone knocks on your doors, it's probably going to be someone who is a contractor wearing one of the shirts that I still have in my closet.

    Enjoy the show... and take the special if you get caught. It's the best deal you'll see from anyone.

  6. Re:Softcore porn.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative
    but I am still surprised that there is no market for porn that is specifically guaranteed to be free of cumshots.

    There is. It's called Internal Cumshots or Creampies. They are specifically geared towards ejaculations that occur inside the woman.