stealing cable
 

It's annoying. Regardless of the monolith.

At the old apartment place I lived. I was one of two who actually PAID for cable. So every other month, myself or the girls in back were calling the cable company to have some illegal tap taken off our lines.

Their taps would degrade out signal quality. For me, both of my cable, and internet. However, those pieces of trash had no problems just walking out to the box. Literally ripping the door off it. Then wiring the cable again.

We are talking about a box on the front of the building, by the road, in broad daylight.

Fucking unbelievable.
:disgust

I really just wanted an excuse to post a funny clip from the simpsons....I do not advocate stealing cable.....I just loved that clip from the simpsons
:)

Get a signal booster from radioshack. :2 cents:

One word. Pansat.

I say no more...

LOL at Pansat, think I still have a 2300 laying around somewhere.

hmm free cable

How about free satellite? Know anyone who does this?

lot of ways to do this

i know a guy who used to sell access cards if a person had the dish and box they could get it, but i think those days are long gone...

Same thing has happened to me, numerous times. People don't seem to realize that by splicing into someone else's cable, you're not screwing the company as much as you're screwing the person who's paying for the cable. Some people are such self-entitled assholes that they simply don't care, though... THEY want free cable, so the neighbor who's paying $120 a month for business class internet/cable just has to deal with their connection going out every other day =P Even telling them that I required the internet to do my job and to pay my bills didn't seem to faze them... they spliced - or attempting to splice, they were pretty awful at it and a couple of times they just ended up shredding the cables - until they eventually got evicted (for nonpayment of rent, surprise surprise).

I'm bitter, can you tell?

Same end result at the place I lived. I was there for 9-10 years, and there must have been 30 tenants that came through the bottom apartments. I tried everything from talking to them nicely, to reporting them, to cutting their cable lines.

I always used the baseball bat approach to people that had spliced into my cable.

Know the apartment number well... Walk to their door at 3AM in boxers with a bat in hand and tell them your cable internet went out because of THEIR splice before you could finish jerkin it and ask them what they're going to do about it.

Setup some fake cables to electrocute them

:1orglaugh :1orglaugh

Most people into that scene use free to air receivers now. There are coders who release special bin files that you download and install to your receiver that enable them to output the signal from Dishnetwork in the US and bell expressvu in Canada.

They go down every so often due to changes in the signal sent out by the satellite companies, but the coders usually have an update released in less than 24 hours so essentially you are never without free TV.

However both companies are switching to Nagra3 encryption now. This cost them millions to send out new cards to all their legitimate subscribers. Bell has made the switch already and dishnet is going to follow soon, but the coders don't seem to be worried. I'm sure they will have this new encryption cracked within a month or so.

Can't believe they wouldn't have them prosecuted. Around here stealing cable is a $5000 fine.

The problem is, the satellite providers are always scrambling the signal, so by the time you got it working, by next week it's scrambled all over again and you need someone to reprogram your card again, which gets expensive, so much so that unscrambling the signal becomes more expensive than just paying the provider monthly.

Or so I've heard... :Oh crap

If you use a free to air satellite it is as simple as going to a forum on the internet, downloading a zip file, unzipping it and transferring it to your receiver via a USB thumbdrive.

If you had to pay someone to do it, it would definitely be a pain in the ass, but most people can figure it out once they are shown how.

Sometimes they will change the signal twice in one week, other times it will go more than 2 months without needing to be updated.

I don't know anybody that messes with the actual cards anymore.