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Comcast Apologizes For Super Bowl Porn Glitch
DrinkDr.Pepper writes "Just after the last touchdown by the Cardinals, with 3 minutes to go in the game, approximately 30 seconds of pornographic material was shown, seen by an unknown number of Comcast customers in Tucson, Arizona who were watching the game in standard definition. Comcast has apologized (they used the word 'mortified') and is issuing a $10 credit to any customer who claims to have been impacted. Various news accounts suggest that the incident was a malicious act, but no one knows how it was done or by whom."
With the Superbowl commercials being what they were this year, I'm surprised anyone noticed the difference. GoDaddy in particular is getting out of hand, though I was not impressed by the Doritos or NBC commercials either. (At least the Conan commercial was just amusing innuendo.) All around, it was a rather embarrassing year to be watching the Superbowl with the family.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Several years ago when my home team was in the Superbowl, my comcast cable went out for several hours during the game. Their response was tough luck. They weren't willing to give me any credit. So it is pretty ironic that people "exposed" to 30 seconds of porn are getting $10 back. The moral of the story is that corporations are only responsible when the news media shames them.
Laugh about the porn clip (I did, here in Tucson, I yelled "FTW!")
But depending on the origin of the video, Comcast may be on a very real hook for broadcasting copyrighted material without license, and could conceivably be exposed to distribution royalties for a much larger audience than the one that is supposed to be limited to a specific, accountable pay-per-view arrangement.
I would be very surprised if lawyers were not working this out in a damage control mode.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
I work for a CATV operator, and my desk is 200 feet from the headend. There is no way that could have been a glitch. The real question is was it a malicious or ignorant act of an employee. Regardless, the unemployment rate just went up in Tucson.
They claimed to have been hacked. As long as the investigation supports being hacked then no they will not get fined. The FCC is not some ridiculous organization that goes on witch-hunts. Even if it was not a hacker - it was a technical foul-up, not an intended viewing. The FCC are smart enough to realize that computers have glitches and shit happens.
I could see someone sueing them under the pretense "my baby got scarred from this".
I do not support "The Man". I also do not support your irrational stupidity
This has happened before. But it affected Cartoon Network at 3:00 PM for like two minutes in Vancouver WA. I was like 14 at the time and thought it awesome.
http://www.intotemptation.net/2009/02/03/super-bowl-porn-postmortem/
Unfortunately for him ... he had no plan to monetize the traffic at all.
How fast do you think traffic will drop off? My guess is ... down 80 percent in 30 days ...
Our brains are hard-wired for taboos because they helped primitive societies avoid disasters.
There is a lot of "noise" in the taboo "signal", for example: taboo words. But some taboos (against incest, or eating certain things) were socially useful. Even the common taboo against homosexual sex could have been beneficial to primitive societies because such practices were significantly more likely to spread disease through the population. Obviously, modern medicine makes this a non-issue, today.
I would say it is unrealistic to expect a society to have no useless taboos, because they are physically part of our brains. But if we stop using government to enforce useless taboos, we will have advanced.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
The homosexual taboo is a relatively recent development. Many ancient cultures practiced it openly and it was often seen to be as perfectly normal as a relationship between a man and a woman.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, watch it -- I'm huge!
What about Spaghetti Cat? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oMyHuCVaRaE
It would be massively more exciting if they didn't keep throwing adverts and extended half time breaks in. It's a great way to lose the tension and the moment - several minutes of drinks adverts.
PS - if you need Cheerleaders, you don't have an atmosphere.
If this were really happening, what would you think?
Although the tap to each home attenuates the signal quite a bit, it is possible for people to inject signals into the cable system. It won't go beyond the first amplifier unless its frequency is in the uplink band and that signal won't be redistributed. But it does mean people can distribute weak signals around their neighborhood. On frequencies the cable company isn't using, it won't take a lot of signal to communicate with your neighbors. For example you could run your own neighborhood LAN over the cable wires.
It would take a LOT of signal power to take over an existing signal. You'd have to boost it as much as the attenuator tap reduces it, plus the additional amount to take over the signal on that channel. But it would be possible. So what I'm curious about is just how widespread this porn was seen in Tuscon.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars