What Free Cable? 585
suckass writes: "Apparently if you've got a cable broadband connection from AT&T you can get free basic cable just by splitting the line that goes into your cable modem. News.com has a story about it here."
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What Free Cable?
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Yes yes... (Score:1, Interesting)
The Cable guy offered this... (Score:0, Interesting)
Not for long... (Score:2, Interesting)
That explains it (Score:2, Interesting)
Grr! (Score:2, Interesting)
Free Cable (Score:2, Interesting)
They Get Money Anyway (Score:5, Interesting)
If you're not ordering cable, and only the cablemodem they charge you an extra 10 dollars.
So... my total comes out to about $55 a month for cablemmodem. Plus tax...
So... Total: $60+ a month for cablemodem
Re:Yes yes... (Score:2, Interesting)
1) You can get cable modem service for $45 a month if you already have basic cable service.
2) If you don't wish to subscribe to basic cable service your cost is going to be $55 a month for cable Internet connection.
Where does all the $$ go? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Easy to catch (Score:4, Interesting)
The also have handheld units for checking apartment buildings too.
Re:Easy to catch (Score:3, Interesting)
Nonsense.
You don't have any signal amplifiers, and what "unshielded cables" you are talking about? Coax cable is shielded.
What one could possibly do is to use a reflectometer to measure where the signal reflects off of irregularities in the line. Unterminated coax connector would reflect everything; a connected TV would absorb everything and reflect nothing. However this is far from being reliable, and is very laborous, and depends on who installed the cable and when and how, and so on... It is much cheaper to just go on with your life and sell more cable packages to someone who pays, rather than chasing ghosts of people who don't want to pay and are skilled enough to get away with that.
On a different note, there is nothing to watch on cable anyway. Why would anyone want one?
Re:They Get Money Anyway (Score:3, Interesting)
Basic cable modem for cable customers is $39.95/mo.
Basic cable modem for non-cable customers is $54.95/mo
Basic cable is $12.95/mo
Thus, for me, it's actually cheaper to pay for cable, than to steal it.
definitely worth the risk (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Easy to catch (Score:5, Interesting)
What's kinda interesting though is that the area around 500 Mhz shows some leakage, maybe the filter is not perfect, or maybe they need to leave that area open because somehow internet hookup requires it -- but in any case that leakage leaves a few channels through. Didn't bother to drop the filter though since nothing interesting was ever on anyway
(BTW this is all with UPC in Europe)
Re-broadcasting the signal (Score:4, Interesting)
In 1981 we got our first VCR and a camera (dad's business needed a major writeoff). Since I was in 8th grade, I was in charge of hooking it up. According to the documentation, you were absolutely not to hook up the RF Out of the VCR to your rooftop antenna -- it'd make you into your own TV station and the FCC would take away your bike, your baseball glove and make you eat unsweetened cereal for the rest of your life.
Naturally the idea of a video camera and the chance to be our own TV station was too tempting. However, it didn't really work. We had the highest house in our neighborhood and a big antenna on the roof, but we couldn't get our home TV channel (playing lip-sync videos and slow-motion Lego crashes) to come in on any of the neighborhood TVs, all of which were broadcast based since we didn't have cable in Minneapolis.
I guess its a good thing that I didn't know about amplifiers then...
Re:Crappy moderation... (Score:3, Interesting)
Uh, crack down on what exactly? They know damn well you're going to watch the basic cable that comes along with it. That's why the friggin service costs $50.
Check with all the other posts in this article: most of their cable companies make you subscribe to basic service and then add like $20 on top of that for broadband. Either way, it works out to around $50. I subscribe to Comcast, and the only difference here is that they charge $50 for the boardband and then imply that basic cable service comes free with the deal.
To wit: There's nothing sneaky going on, there's nothing the cable companies don't already know. You can't pirate that which is offered for free. It seems clear that C|net has written a very troll that the slashbots latched onto right away.
Re:Not for long. (Score:2, Interesting)
When Noah A., an AT with an illegal converter or set-top, hackers say they have access to premium channels such as HBO and Showtime.
[...]
In this environment, piracy is just one more headache for cable providers. The advent of digital cable and broadband Internet access is seen as a mixed blessing for operators, bringing advancements to both deter theft and increase it.
: End Excerpt
It seems clear to me that this is not a case of theft. The tv signal is being piped into his home, willingly, by the cable company. He is forcing them to do nothing. They have, in effect, engineered a system where the customer can pay either of two rates, at his discretion... at least if he figures it out. Then they call it theft if he takes advantage of their design.
And they are losing nothing because of his splitter. It's important to realise that. It doesn't affect their bottom line one bit when he splits the signal. This is a classic victimless crime - he's doing something "we" would rather he not do, so it's been declared illegal, but in actuality he's not actually harming *anyone* - not even the cable company.
The worst that we can say here is he is not being perfectly honest with the cable company - if he were, he would call them up and tell them to charge him more. So we may say that he is not being a nice person. But then again, he may not think the cable company is a nice collective either. Being not-nice does not constitute theft. The cable company claims it as a loss on the unproven theory that he *would* pay more and get two channels if he couldn't do what he's doing - but there is no reason to believe that is true, and even if it is it doesn't seem to be truly relevant.
The cable companies have two options - they can charge every customer for both services, assuming they will access both afterwards anyway, or it can simply charge them for what they install, and what they see when they come back to do work, and trust that most people will pay for what they use, and accept that some of the few people who actually know how to do stuff like this can and will effectively get a half price discount without affecting their bottom line. The latter is obviously the rational choice, this doesn't take a lot of brainpower to figure out it will result in more gross without affecting costs, thus more net - and isn't that what business is about?
Well, those would be the sensible options at least. But instead, the cable companies are choosing to spend vast amounts of money buying public opinion and politicians to get such activities punished as 'theft' or 'piracy' that must be somehow enforced, meaning rights must be 'bent'. As a (surely unintended?) side affect, however, what they have accomplished is to publicise methods of such 'theft' and even to romanticise (by promulgating the term 'piracy' in relation to it) in many quarters. Who, outside of a small technical crowd, would even *know* about this sort of thing if it weren't for all the headlines about 'digital piracy' and so on... obviously the cable companies aren't the only ones involved, the record companies, Disney, etc. are all in on the same basic ride.
If the cable companies weren't raising a stink about it, there would be fewer articles like this, and less people would read articles like this and realise that they too can easily get a 50% discount on their cable service with a $5 investment at radioshack.
It's sort of nice to watch people that lobby against freedom shoot themselves in the foot.