Ok, I absolutely do NOT want any discussion of A) how to commit satellite TV piracy, or B) even if it’s possible. Let’s leave this with the following hypothetical.
Let’s imagine one had a magic box that receives and decodes satellite TV signals (I repeat: I don’t care if it’s possible or not). The box plugs into a power outlet and the TV, but not a phone line or anything.
I’ve been arguing with a friend: he claims that the company would somehow know that you’re doing so.
I claim that there’s no way to tell that you’re doing so, any more than individual radio stations know if you’re listening. It’s not like there’s a drain on the signal.
There is no way for them to know. There is no additional drain on the system merely because you are decoding signals that would otherwise strike the ground.
They would never know unless they came to your house and witnessed it themselves. It is the same concept as the cable descrambler boxes that can give you free cable today. They aren’t detectable unless the cable company comes to your home and sees the box for themselves. On that note, they are also not illegal to have, but they are illegal to steal cable if your not paying for it. They are merely for you to be able to choose to have your own box rather then rent the one the cable company provides. (Yeah, like that is what people really do with them)
I wouldn’t bet my life that modified cable boxes aren’t detectable. These are physically connected by wire to the cable system.
But with satellite, no, there is absolutely, positively no way what-so-ever to detect them. Without the phone line connected they are totally ‘receive only’.
SOme of the newer digital boxes can be detected by the cable company’s home office.
I have seen tons of “modified” smart cards on Ebay. I once called my satellite provider (DISH) to let them know and they didn’t seem to give a flaming rat’s ass.
So are TV’s, but Great Britain apparently has little trucks to drive by the homes of people who haven’t paid the TV tax to see if they’re watching. Is it possible that the local oscillator of a TV is powerful enough to be picked up by the right equipment from the street? Would a Sat-TV receiver have something similar?
In my Intro to Electronics Class, when we got to using resistors to match the resistance of a load, like telephones and such, he told this story.
The cable company has a device that measures the load on the other end of a line. So, from the pole, a cable guy and ‘see’ every splitter, cable box, and TV that is connected to the line. They couldn’t see what you were watching, but they could detect devices and interruptions in the line.
He worked on TV’s and currently runs his own electronic consulting business. I tend to believe him.
As for Satillite, there is no way for them to know that you are using their signal.
However, if you have Tivo, or some other system that makes a weekly call to download programming information, there is a catch. Turns out that programming information goes both ways. Tivo knows what you are watching and that information goes back to Tivo so they can sell ratings information to the Broadcasters. As of now, the information for an individual viewer is all lumped together. Howevere, the data is there and if the satillite version of the RIAA get John Ashcroft to investigate, they can run a match between what shows you watch and who is paying for Satillite TV. If you come up watching Satillite TV shows and you aren’t on the Satillite TV list, you are busted.
Of course they could do the same thing with Cable.
But just because they can do it, doesn’t mean they will, or that it is legal for them to do it based on the privacy agreements that exist between Tivo and their customers.
You can remotely determine which radio stations are listened to by passing motorists with a similar technique: “Smart” billboards.
From the description of satellite dishes at howstuffworks, it sounds as if the dish’s “low noise block down converter” might put out a detectable signal.
If you are willing to take enough time and use a narrow-bandwith detector you can probably detect the local oscillator signal from quite a distance. It would be hard, though, to determine that the particular receiver was tuned to a satellite TV signal unless you know the receiver intermediate frequency.
One thing to watch out for is the “bullet”. If you have a magic box to decode the satellite signal, you won’t have to worry about it, but I believe there are ways for the satellite company to remotely disable hacked smart cards.
Of course, they still don’t know whether you had a hacked card in the first place, or whether the bullet worked.
This is absolutely false. I have a very close friend who, after retiring from Milwaukee Police Dept. after 25 years as a Lt. went to work as an investigator for Time Warner Cable. He’s told me all about this. The boxes can be detected, right from the comfort of their HQ. We’re here to fight ignorance HighSoci, not promote it!
Mr2001 brought up the more practical way to defeat pirates. You give every legitimate customer an electronic key. Every now and then you send out a signal from the satellite that tells the receiver to check the key. If someone has the key, nothing happens. If they don’t have a legitimate key, however, the receiver is programmed to stop working, erase the information, explode, etc.
While it’s still possible to get around it at least temporarily using a stolen or forged key, there are further improvements that make it difficult to continue pirating; this is the basic idea, though.
Cite, nothing! He showed me the equipment!
It’s hooked up to the same equpiment they use to reprogram the cable box when your having a problem of some sorts. They do it all from the main office. I personally wittnessed all this.
They can even tell, at any given moment, exactly what programs your watching, for how long, when you started serfing, etc. It’s spooky.
The main thing is, the boxes they (Time Warner Milwaukee) are handing out have a special chip inside them. Because of that 1) any box bought elsewhere, like Ebay, has a high probability of not working here, and 2) it makes it easier to detect a “foreign” box.
Whether other cable companies use this technology I know not. But it can’t just be Milwaukee using it, can it?
This is pretty much exactly what satellite television services already do to hinder piracy. Satellite receiver boxes have a programmed card (like a credit card) in them - hence an electronic ‘key.’ Every so often, the satellite service sends out signals in their broadcast (the ‘bullet’ someone else mentioned) that scrambles or blocks the picture of any receiver using an unauthorized card. The problem is that the hackers keep coming up with new programs/codes and all they have to do is reprogram the card and they’re back in business. Apparently, it’s a pretty constant ‘battle’ between the sat companies scrambling the bad cards and the hackers reprogramming them. So it’s not that the companies don’t “give a flaming rat’s ass.” They are already WELL aware of the situation and are doing what they can to combat it.
I have a question about legality here. I realize that stealing satellite service in this way is ethically wrong, but is it illegal? It seems to me that stealing cable service by splicing into one of their cables is clear-cut because you are physically tampering with ‘their’ property–the cable line. However, with satellite receivers, you are simply picking up a signal that they are broadcasting through the air and unscrambling the signal. I am not doing this myself, but I wouldn’t think there could be a law against simply unscrambling a signal that is there for anyone with the right equipment to pick up.
Tangent, I suspect that something in the part of the DMCA about circuventing encryption to break copyright might end up applying here as well. One of the facets of copyright is controlling how a creative work is distributed.
And back to pkbites: Time Warner Milwaukee, and any cable system that uses the same type of cable boxes would be able to do what you describe, but it’s a far cry from saying every cable company has that capability. It’s probably a case of some do and some don’t.
About 8 or 9 years ago my neighbors and I would get together on Saturday nights at midnight to watch a show that was being placed on the air by a guy in a garage or something. He was stealing air time. He did his show live. He would hold up a piece of cardboard with a phone number on it. My neighbor called in and was on the air. He was sometimes funny. Most of the stuff was kind of stupid. He had a panel… regular folks on the show each time. One night he and a friend had sex with a woman on the air. The show disappeared after that. His set looked different almost each Saturday / Sunday. We though he was moving around to avoid being discovered. After the porn thing I guess the FCC got pretty serious and caught him. One of his regulars looked very very very much like an assistant DA here in town. I was watching the 6:00 news and this DA was being interviewed. I kept thinking… where do I know this guy from? Then I remembered. Called my neighbor so she could get a look and she agreed. Things that make you go hmm…
Wait, jacksen9, you mean the show was actually being broadcast? An actual unlicensed broadcast, receivable by anyone with a regular TV?
If so, that’s not the same as ‘stealing air time’; there was no licensed free-to-air broadcast to be pre-empted, or licensed scrambled broadcast to be decoded without permission.
