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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."
Watching what other people watch can be fun.
I use stumble video and will often check out what my friends have watched recently, but the real interesting videos are to be found within the logs of random users.
People find and like the strangest things.
Read my Very Short "Stories"
I have the same thing going on with my TV. At first you think, "Wow! Free VOD!" but then you realize you have no clue when a show starts, no way to unpause if the real viewer gets a phone call or goes to the bathroom, and well... it's pointless. You end up flipping through a good 50 channels for hours having literally no clue what shows are on and no clue if that person will finish them.
It sounds neat but it's rather boring and partially stinks since you have to manually program those channels out. I mentioned this happening when the cable guy stopped buy and he seemed pretty "meh" about it.
It's probably just as legal as using a randomly available wifi signal...
Privacy is terrorism.
My parents in Annapolis (writer mentions DC-Baltimore) have a similar occurrence. They also pay for basic cable and are able to plug the line straight in to their tv's digital/hd tuner to grab the digital signal. They also receive channels that I chalked up to being PPV, and some of them show smut too. The odd thing is that sometimes they can watch a movie all the way through, and other times they will loose the signal in the middle, almost as if some one realized they were watching a movie they weren't supposed to get and flipped a switch to turn it off. Sometimes they can change the channel then come back to watch it again, other times they can have the signal then change the channel and come back to find that the program is gone. It's very strange and only happens on one of the two tvs (different brand, model, and year) that they have hooked up this way. I guess this article explains what is really going on.
I double checked, and no, Josh Levin is not a pen-name that my dad uses, so it looks like this is pretty common.
No, the people who write articles for Playboy are serious, big-name writers. (Having "real" journalism, essays, and fiction takes the sting out of being a softcore porn mag.) Whereas the dialog in porn movies is always excruciatingly bad, and the plot — well, the truth is, I've never had the patience to find out if a porn film actually had one.
I guess your neighbor gets off on bad dialog, or he's seriously disturbed. Or maybe he's scripting a porn movie himself and sees no problem in stealing the dialog from an existing porn movie, since nobody listens to it anyway!
I learned how to make martinis, tie a bow-tie, and properly wear a suit.
They have had some great interviews. I highly recommend PLayboys articles.
I also look at the naked ladies.
My wife even bought me a subscription. Which I let lapse when we had children.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Unfortunately for the O.P. the DMCA will rule his watching of unencrypted video feeds a violation, because he is circumventing a protection mechanism.
The DMCA and it's supporters have shown time and time again that it does not matter how lame and technically incompetent a protection measure is, it merely has to be 'broken' to incur the wrath of the law. Publishing the technical details is probably instant guilt in terms of 'trafficking in circumvention technology' or whatever the legalese is.
The early analogue cable TV transmission systems in the UK used to transmit premium channels unencrypted (and then moved to using some fairly trivial to counter sync-mangling) which simply required a tuner that could see outside of the usual UHF 21-68 band to view. While the frequencies used on the actual cable networks were sufficiently out-of-range of normal 'terrestrial' channels, the company actually supplied an add-on box clamped to the back of the cable receiver which would downshift all of the cable channels so that the normal 'terrestrial' channels carried on the cable service were tunable by 'normal' TV's. If the TV had a tuner which could see outside the usual UK 21-68 band (Channel 21 is 471.25MHz, 68 is 847.25MHz) then the channels are there for your viewing pleasure regardless of what the cable receiver thinks you are entitled to see.
All the article does is move this into the digital realm with QAM.
Minus several million points out of ten to comcast for not encrypting traffic here.
otherwise, it's old news.
When I first moved to my apartment building, I plugged in my Sony LCD TV and got to watch other people's on-demand shows until I got my own cable service. I was able to watch about 3 movies this way. It was kinda funny, they ended up pausing the movie at the exact same time I needed to get up for a health break. Also watched some porn and it's fun/creepy watching other people's porn habits and how much porn they "need". Haha.
HDHomeRun
Nothing else really comes close. Yeah, you can get HD tuner cards for a little less money, but they're a pain in the ass to work with and generally are less functional. An HDHomeRun is not just a tuner (actually, it's two tuners), but it's networked, so you can do everything with it that you can with a PCI tuner, but you can do it from any computer in the house.
It's a pretty brilliant little box.
Oh, and it works well with Linux, MythTV in particular. Once you start using that, you'll never go back to watching realtime TV.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
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Softcore porn is terrible. The people who make softcore porn are exactly as artful and sophisticated as the people who make hardcore porn. Softcore porn is just hardcore porn with various things subtracted and nothing else added in. Softcore porn is:
Bill O'Reilly without the incivility....
Taco Bell without the industrial additives....
Macrobrew beer without the intoxication....
A Hummer without the egocentrism....
Taking a fat chick out and not getting laid....
In other words, a waste of time. That's what softcore porn is, as well as most of the stuff sold under the label "erotica." When I hear that women like softcore porn, I think, yeah, right, some guy pressures his overly compliant wife/girlfriend into watching porn with him, and she chooses softcore as a way of limiting the misery. It's true that much of the really vile stuff in hardcore porn simply can't be done in softcore. There's no softcore version of Back Door Sluts 9. But there's no reason you have to put up with any vileness when you choose porn.
(Sigh, except for the cumshot, which is obligatory. I can't figure out why there isn't a larger market for cumshot-free porn. There are probably more geriatric midget granny pee DVDs at your local porn store than DVDs with no cumshots. But if you overlook the cumshot, some porn is actually okay, so decent in fact that when the cumshot happens it's a complete WHAT THE....? WHAT JUST HAPPENED? kind of moment, exactly as shocking and out of place as if you tried it in real life after having normal boring sex with a normal straightlaced girl on your third date. Which I know some guys do, and they deserve to be strung up by their balls along with 98% of the porn producers on the planet... but I digress.)
When I hear that women like softcore porn, I think, yeah, right, some guy pressures his overly compliant wife/girlfriend into watching porn with him, and she chooses softcore as a way of limiting the misery.
Here's a clue. Walk into a bookshop one day and head to the 'romance' section. I know you've never been there before, but look for the women with guilty looks on their faces standing close to shelves reading small paperbacks with intense concentration. Pick up a few of those books and flick through the pages to find the juicy bits, and then come back here and tell me that women are not interested in soft-core porn.
But there's no reason you have to put up with any vileness when you choose porn.
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).
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.
What is 'Sex in the City' if it is not soft-core porn? And women watch that show voluntarily in their millions.
Long and short, you would really benefit if you took some time to understand what women want.
- Nothing to see hear.
We had this happen too with our cable connection. Back when we had high speed internet set up, comcast had to pull a filter from our line because it was interfering with our signal, I thought that this was the reason, not QAM...but I never bothered looking up if anyone else could do this too. Now years later, the old tv went out so upgraded to an HDTV, it was surprising when it detected 300 channels when we previously had 20.
The problem is when trying to watch what the neighbors are on-demanding, the channels are registering on a channel.other number, so you will get channel 25, 25.1, 25.3, etc... but when on demand users on the lower numbered dot channels turn off their signal, the channels collectively drop down. So one second you could be watching a Disney movie, the next could be a Debbie Does... movie, so it is certainly something to use at your own risk if there are kids around.
I don't see anything wrong with watching these channels either. If the cable company screwed up and didn't configure my connection correctly is it my fault that they made a mistake that let me do this? I'm not going to go out of my way to let them know so they can fix it, it has saved on movie rental over the last few months. I usually stick to conventional programming that I can predict what is on and play in the "naughty channels" only when there isn't anything else worth watching on.