🚀 go-pugleaf

Deborah@finetouch.silver-springs.nv.us writes:
>>Cable TV Descrambler 160 stations $20.00
>>hiwest@ix.netcom.com
>
>This is highly illegal and anyone who is caught buying or selling a
>descrambler box could be prosecuted by the local cable tv company. I
>know because I am a cable television auditor!!!!

Sorry - modification of a freely transmitted signal in any manner to 
satisfy ones intellectual curiosity is perfectly legal as far as I'm 
concerned.  Most pay TV signals are scrambled by jiggling the amplitude 
of the horizontal and vertical sync signals - this is why it is possible 
to use an old TV and playing around with the fine tuning to get a 
"scrambled" program of better quality than I'm normally used to getting 
with my BW TV in Vancouvers west end.  It's rather trivial 
to design a number of circuits which would serve as TV descramblers, or 
perhaps I should say TV picture enhancers.  These also have numerous 
other uses for anyone who does any playing around with video signals so 
the law as written is obviously assinine and should be ignored by anyone 
who has any respect for freedom.  I consider any laws against building a 
descrambler just as ridiculous as the fine print on a software contract 
that tells me I can't disassemble a program.  I've bought it, so I can 
read it, burn the disks, or toss them off my balconey to see how far they 
go at 03:00.

That said, it is perfectly acceptable for cable companies to scramble a 
digital video signal using strong encryption so that hacking it becomes 
non-trivial.  Only problem is that the US government considers such 
algorithms to be military technology and thus non-exportable.  With 
increasing processor power, likely any legal encryption method will soon 
succumb to cracking so perhaps the cable companies should direct their 
efforts at the US government rather than at practitioners of the obvious.

Of course, decoding a scrambled signal presupposes that there is actually 
something on TV one would want to watch.  I don't have cable, don't miss 
it, and whenever I'm at a friends place rotating through dozens of cable 
channels I marvel at how much bandwith can be devoted to utter shit.  I 
suppose the people that don't read have to do something with their time
aside from looking at the pictures in National Enquirer.  To give a 
trivial scrambling scheme legal protection boggles the imagination.  
Perhaps it's an indication of how low the average intellect of Americans 
has fallen.

Boris Gimbarzevsky