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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."
...he's only watching what they're watching...
It doesn't take a techie. Heck, a suggestion like "just plug the cable in" in a world of proprietary cable boxes, encryption, DRM, a half-dozen compression and modulation schemes, cablecards, various incompatible resolutions, framerates, and interlacing schemes along with all of their associated digital and analog audio and video interconnection formats... is at best a long shot.
Unless you have one of the LCDs with an undocumented QAM tuner and a cable company broadcasting PPV on unencrypted QAM channels, what are the odds that plugging the cable in would get you anything beyond analog channels in the first place?
Heck, it surprised me. I get HD cable with no box, including my neighbors' PPV and some bizarre channels that appear to be fragments and scaled images for use on the menu system of some sort of cable box.
Watching what other people watch can be fun.
It's even more entertaining to hear these TV peeping tom's tell stories at the water cooler on how they watched the TV shows of their neighbours.
Talk about making the phrase "get a life" have serious meaning.
It's not exactly the same thing, but close enough. All it would take is a prick DA and an idiot judge. Neither are in short supply.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
We you got something good, keep your yap shut.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Actually playboy is great, if it werent for the naked pictures. If i want nudity i will get nudity, not airbrushed women that practically look like cartoons.
The phrase "more better" is acceptable English. suck it grammar Nazis
For watching unencrypted digital cable on a PC, take a look at the HDHomeRun:n
t -hdhomerun-qam-tuner-review.html 2 47
http://www.silicondust.com/wiki/products/hdhomeru
Two tuners, works with MCE (2005, Vista, x86, x64), BeyondTV, SageTV, etc.
Linux - works with MythTV and VLC.
Mac support is rumored to be soon.
http://brentevans.blogspot.com/2007/03/silicondus
http://www.linux.com/article.pl?sid=07/04/18/1531
it's a damn tired and old joke.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
My local cable system's video on demand does not go over the wire in the clear. (Time Warner)
I'm not sure if it's just encrypted or if it's done over a packet-switched channel (DOCSIS) instead, although there is mention of VOD IP addresses in the diagnostic menus.
Funny how the comcast spokesperson lies:
Cable encryption is done per channel, not per title. The problem is that Comcast's infrastructure is built on SeaChange, which is running Windows NT 4 (if I remember correctly). They just can't handle the load.
The other architectures (non-SeaChange) can handle encrypted VOD streams, but tend not to because the operator hasn't thought about it.
And lastly, encryption of VOD content is done by fiat from corporate - that's how the cable industry works. And that's exactly the kind of thing that corporate is for - to set systemwide policies like that.
Think about things like slash and yaoi, which have been getting increasingly popular for women. They range from soft- to hard-core, and while a lot of them go for the emotional side of sex and relationships, there's no shortage of just straight sex. Ok, so "straight" is probably the wrong word. Or 'Queer as Folk' - huge female audience, and that's not because they identify with the single pair of lesbians. It's not guys writing all that Sparrow/Norrington or Aragorn/Faramir fiction out there.
Frankly, as a woman my issue with actual porn in general is the same issue I have with movies in general. They're poorly made, the good ones are few and far-between. And frankly, if you're talking about limiting the misery, hardcore films at least have sex to break up the bad acting/lighting/costuming/etc. I'd have to disagree that hardcore sex is inherently violent - it's simply graphic. Maybe you're watching the wrong ones? =) Try looking for hardcore that is marketed to women... it tends to be better, all around. Especially if what you're wanting is something your wife/girlfriend/fling will watch with you.
I suppose the point I really want to make is that women are very much like men in that they're individuals. If you think you're going to "understand" women like they are some sort of weird single organism, it's just not going to happen. Interest yourself in the individual and you're more than half there.
~ Leilah
If you add back in the rest of the ingredients that women need, and remove the violent aspect of most hard-core porn, then you have soft-core porn.
We may be working from different definitions of soft-core porn. By soft-core porn I mean the kind of stuff you see on Skinemax -- a split second of boobs, followed by two or three seconds of rear nudity, followed by lots of soft-focus closeups of faces or vague motion under the bedcovers in a dark room. When I say hard-core porn I mean anything where you can clearly see that people are having sex. I don't mean rape and donkeys. Perhaps that's the basis of our disagreement.
What is 'Sex in the City' if it is not soft-core porn? And women watch that show voluntarily in their millions.
'Sex and the City' has very little sex in it. I say that having borrowed fast-forwarded through my roommates' Season 1 and 2 DVD sets looking for the juicy bits. When the characters have sex, the act itself is represented by a few seconds of film that segues into narration that talks about the sex and quickly moves past it to the aftereffects. I think the appeal of 'Sex and the City' is based on its treatment of sex through characters, relationships (in the general sense), plot, and occasionally witty writing. Although the portrayal of sex is graphic by American TV standards, the sex is basically summed up by a few little snippets, in contrast to the pre- and post-coital bedroom scenes, which are given lengthy treatment and are often key to plot and character development.
You see, for women, sex is a package deal, and hard-core porn leaves out 90% of what needs to be in the package. Added to which hard-core porn is basically violence, not sex, and generally women aren't turned on by violence (although they do respond to aggression, which is different).
Soft-core porn adds nothing at all -- no plot, no characterization, no suspense, no context. Romance novels at least put sex into the context of a female fantasy. Porn, both hard-core and soft-core, puts sex into the context of no context. This IS the male fantasy -- people getting it on for absolutely no reason at all. Ja, I fix your Kabel. Ich bin Expert. Waka-chika waka-chika waka-chika. (Granted, there are also many pornos that create a context of exploitation, where women are forced or blackmailed into sex, but there are no pornos where a man and a woman have totally nasty sex because she's acting out feelings of shame stemming from the fact that she lied to her husband about her previous sexual experience when she met him.)
Basically, soft-core porn CAN'T contain any meaningful characterization, because if you suggest to a male consumer of porn that a woman's desire is sensitive to the social or emotional context (beyond the context of a guy having a really, really, really big dick) then his pecker shrivels up and he runs away because he knows in real life this is where he gets confused and screws up. A romance novel provides emotional and social context because that's what gives women social permission to be sexual. Establish the right contex, and bam, suddenly something shameful becomes permissible. If a romance novelist wrote soft-core porn, it would go something like this: "Hello, I am a rich Hungarian count. Ever since my wife died, I am lonely and afraid to be truly intimate with a woman. You, however, are different. I find you beautiful and intriguing." Waka-chika-waka-chika-waka-chika oh no! conflict erupts and the characters must leave behind their emotional baggage and grow personally before they can do the nasty again! Yay, they managed it! Waka-chika-waka-chika-waka-chika.... Instead, you get stuff that's just as silly as hardcore porn.
hard-core porn is basically violence, not sex
Much hard-core porn is violent, but 90% of anything is crap. Most fictional entertainment is based around violence or threats of violence, so I don't think hard-core porn is special in this way. Men have a hard time vividly connecting with an
Given all this, I understand why the cumshot is a staple device, rather than a fetish, but I am still surprised that there is no market for porn that is specifically guaranteed to be free of cumshots. I imagine it would be free of other things, too, but I'm not sure.
Complicating this is the fact that many women who enjoy porn have adapted to the porn model of sex, which skews the market. Some chicks, especially ones who grew up in repressive environments, have a lot of affection for pornography and associate it with their sexual emancipation. They interpret any criticism of mainstream pornography as a step down a slippery slope that ends in repression of female sexuality. They try hard to like cumshots and feel bad about not being able to "take it like a pro" through the back door. (They're also paranoid about people looking down on their sexuality. The smallest suspicion of judgment turns them into neurotic, inhibited wrecks. So no, just because I know this stuff does not mean I'm not the luckiest guy in the world.)