(This article is from The Lowell Sun - May 5th, 1991) CABLE COMPANIES GETTING READY TO "ZAP" VIDEO PIRATES !!! BOSTON (AP) - Attention, cable television pirates: The Jig could soon be up! Cable operations around New England are cracking down on people stealing cable television, some with the help of "electronic bullets" - computer programs instructing converters atop TV sets to malfunction if they have been altered by "black boxes" or computer chips. The chips descramble so-called premium channels such as NESN, Sports Channel, HBO and Pay-Per-View. The bullets, fired from cable company offices, have no affect on legitimate customers. "We will be instituting new security stratigies to disable illegally used cable eguipment and prosecute cable theft," Continental Cablevision announced in recent newspaper ads. Continental, based in Portsmouth, N.H. serves about 550,000 subscribers, mainly north and south of Boston. On March 13, American Cablevision in New York City fired a bullet at people stealing its service and pressed and pressed civil charges against 317 people who brought their their damaged boxes in for repair. Calls from those people effectively became evidence that could be used against them. "That's the beauty of the bullet," said Tom Steel, general counsel at the New England Cable Television Association in Braintree, told the Boston Herald. "It's great for court," Steel said. "There's the evidence. In essence, your case is made." Continental and New England Sports Network won a $35,000 settlement out of court in 1989 against three Quincy bars accused of stealing signals with a satellite dish. But the theft by residential cable customers is a tougher matter. Theft by residential customers cost cable companies about $3 billion a year, according to a national cable trade group. "Many people think of cable theft as a cocktail crime. It's not," said Charles Schueller at Cablevision of Boston. It's stealing and it costs regular subscribers money." He said Cablevision which serves about 115,000 customers in Boston and Brookline , plans to step up its pursuit of residential cable pirating. "We have been very successful in our efforts to stem theft in the commercial universe," Schueller said, "and we expect to be as successful in the residential universe." The cable bullet has also been used in Philadelphia. In Worcester and western Massachusetts, General Media fired bullets, but spokesman Richard Kirsche would not provide us with details. "It's a hard problem," said Kirsche, director of engineering at General Media. "You're dealing with kind of a Robin Hood factor here. It doesn't really work out that way. It costs people who are paying for the service legitimately." A black box or computer chip used to unscramble cable signals, which could cost between $200 and $400 , is ruined once the bullet is fired. <*><*><*><*><*><*><*><*><*><*><*><*><*><*><*><*><*><*><*><*><*> ( A CABLE TV PIRATES POINT OF VIEW ) "BULLSHIT and BALDERDASH!" July 16, 1991 I have had a "Pirate Cable Box" for over two years and I want to set the record straight on what I feel is happening in the cable TV world. The fact is that cable companies are out to fleece every cent out of every subscriber that the law will allow. Seven years ago when I first got cable television, my monthly bill was about $8.00, including HBO. Today my basic cable bill is about $17.00, and I no longer pay for or subscribe to HBO. If a person decides to subscribe to HBO, Cinemax, Showtime and The Movie Channel, his bill will easily run $45 - $50 a month. If a person is also addicted to sports, then he MUST have The New England Sports Network (NESN) and The Sports Channel. He is now going to pay about $65 a month. Wait! This subscriber also has children. He needs The Disney Channel for those kids and must now pay about another $6 a month! He will now be dishing out approximately $75 a month to the cable company. In order for the cable subscriber to keep track of what he is watching the cable company will sell him "Cable Guide" for one dollar more each month. The book is actually worth its weight in gold to a cable pirate because it lists every program on every premium channel and on Pay-Per- View for an entire month. The irony of the book is that the publisher of Cable Guide kicks back 50% of that $1.00 monthly charge to the cable company. The first and largest misconception of the above article is that "it cost the cable companies about $3 billion a year." That is bull-shit! The truth is that cable companies DO have about $3 billion in premium programs stolen a year, BUT if people had to pay for premium channels and Pay-Per-View programs and movies, they would NOT get them. It is that simple. A good example of this fact is that I watched the James Brown Special last month for free. If the only way that I could have seen that show was to pay $19.95 for it, I would have gone to bed very early. The Razor Rudduck Vs. Mike Tyson rematch was on Pay-Per-View last week, BUT again if I had to pay $30 - $40 fto view it, I would have been playing with my computer that evening. My local cable company has had no monetary loss because of what I have seen and what I will see. Cable companies ALWAYS exagerate their losses in order to get the law enforcement agencies involved in their never ending battle to increase corporate revenues. Here is an interesting little note in dollars & cents about how much a cable TV subscriber is worth. If a cable company wants to sell part or all of its subscribers to another cable company, for each cable running to a single television, the selling price is between $1500 - $2000 per subscriber. That means if you live on a street with 100 other houses, the selling price of your street would be between $150,000.00 to $200,000.00 Continental Cable Company has 550,000 subscribers. That adds up to $1,100,000,000.00. Thats over a billion bucks if you have a problem with big numbers. Pay-Per-View is the BIGGEST rip off. They charge $5.00 so you can watch one movie one time. If you fall asleep during the movie, tough luck. Pay another $5.00 the next day to see what you missed. The biggest rip offs that Pay-Per-View has to offer are live sports events such as WWF Wrestling. You get to see the likes of Hulk Hogan, Jake The Sake, Brutus The Barber Beefcake, and a multitude of others pretend that they are wrestling for a mere $35 to $40. The guy that really makes me sick is Rick "Nature Boy" Flair!" He looks like a God damn over the hill faggot. Can you imagine Mike Tyson being paid $40 million for fighting any other human being? Mike Tyson would gladly fight for $1 million if that was all he could get. Pay-Per-View has accelerated the overpaid athlete syndrome far beyond what closed circuit broadcasts had ever dreamed of. Since the conception of Pay-Per-View, a cable subscriber now has the opportunity to send $100 to $150 every month to his cable company. Those type of monthly bills are insane. Morons and millionaires are the only ones who would pay that much. The only sane alternative to battle these absurd monthly charges is cable TV piracy. If you decide that you are sick and tired of being gouged by your local cable company each month, then get your own pirate cable TV box. There are companies that sell "altered" cable TV boxes, and they work perfectly. They will descramble ALL the channels that your cable company offers. These companies are easily located by looking at advertisements in the back section of Popular Electronics and Popular Science. These companies are usually out of state, but they do have toll free 800 numbers. You can tell that they are not 100% legitimate because they will not sell a box to anyone in their own state. This is to avoid local prosecution and other legal ramifications. The people who work at these companies are a bunch of crooks so don't feel silly or embarrassed about calling and talking to them. Without going into a long technical discourse of addressable cable boxes, you should understand the following two paragraphs. It is true that cable TV companies do send out signals that tell a normal cable box what to do. This is called an "addressable system." The cable TV box atop of your television will respond to several commands that the cable company sends in a signal to your box. It can turn on or off any particular channel. It can also turn the entire box off if you do not pay your cable bill. There are several other commands that the boxes receives such as the time, but an altered cable box ignores the "scramble" and the "shut off" commands. A special chip is added to the altered boxes that you buy. This special chip keeps a "gate" open so all of the channels will be unscrambled. This extra chip also eliminates the addressable option so the cable company can not turn off any channels - they also can not shut off the box for non-payment of the cable TV bill. THE ELECTRONIC BULLET: As the above article explained, some cable tv companies are shooting "electronic bullets" at pirates in an attempt to burn out their pirate cable boxes. Gathering information on these bullets seems almost impossible because the cable TV companies want to keep their little weapon a deep dark secret. Unfortunately, the people who are selling the altered cable boxes do not understand or care about the bullet. They are very much like the cable companies in the respect that all they want to do is grab all the money they can, and they do not give a shit about you, or any future problems that you may encounter with their box. I called several of the toll-free numbers from my list of altered cable TV box companies in an attempt to gather some information about how to combat the bullet, but I received little or no help. One person told me to buy two FM Traps from Radio Shack and put them in line between the "in" cable and the altered cable box. This was a waste of time and money because it blocked the information signals the cable box needs to perform other functions. Every company denied that the bullet would affect their pirate box. They all said that their boxes were immune to the bullet. I was told that the bullet would only affect boxes that were owned by the cable TV companies that had been tampered with. This will not be proven to me until I read another article in the newspaper that my cable company has been sending out bullets and I see that my box did or did not burn out as the article said it would. The 317 people who had charges pressed against them in New York got exactly what they deserved. Imagine 317 people calling their cable company to complain that their illegal and stolen cable boxes had stopped working. It never ceases to amaze me about how utterly stupid people can be! This is a very unsettling situation because the cable company who brought charges against these 317 people did so in a Federal court. If you do not already realize it, the Federal Government is wants to have as much control over American citizens in every manner and way possible. Once again a Federal Magistrate and a Federal Judge have given themselves more power over its citizens by agreeing to hear this case. Each time the Feds get involved in such matters, a little bit more of our constitutional freedom is lost. To sum this article up in one sentence; "Knowing what I now know about cable companies, pirate cable TV boxes, the Feds involvement in enforcing cable company rights, and the possibility of what the bullet might do, if I did not already own an altered box, I would buy another one today!"