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This guide was written to educate interested parties on Cable Television
descrambling, descramblers and some of the various methods used to defeat scrambling methods on
premium cable or pay cable television stations. The author of this guide is simply exercising
every Americans First Amendment right, Freedom of Speech. The intent of
this writing is not to defraud or promote the theft of cable services.
This guide should not be interpreted as legal advice, if you have legal
questions contact a lawyer or your local authorities. Be warned that
stealing cable services is illegal, and there are severe penalties for
anyone caught doing so. With that said and done let’s move on to the
interesting stuff.
Cable TV has been around about as long as television itself. Original
television signals were transmitted through the airwaves and were
received through clunky antennas, located on almost every roof in
America. This usually allowed for poor reception and a limited number of
channels at best. With the invention of Satellite dishes came the
concept of Cable television. Basically a company sets up a serious of
satellite dishes and connects a community to the dishes via a coaxial
cable. The average person, not having the funds or resources to buy
their own satellite dish, rents the cable service from the local
company. Originally, this was the best idea...until people started
realizing the monopolies that were created. You, are now paying that
same company whatever they want to charge, with little or no competition
and limited regulation from the FCC. In the future, the new DSS
satellites should provide some serious competition among cable
companies, until then most of us are stuck paying the local cable
company.
With the idea of Cable Television also came the thought of pay
television. Instead of being bombarded with commercials the customer
could pay a premium charge to receive commercial free television. This
idea was not new, there were a few such pay stations around before
cable, like Preview. The BIG pay stations are HBO, Cinemax, Showtime,
The Movie Channel, etc. Access to these channels is controlled by
scrambling the stations that they are transmitted on. There are numerous
methods of scrambling channels, which will be discussed later in the
guide. The next thought in pay television was Pay-Per-View (P.P.V.).
This is also controlled by scrambling the various channels. Instead of
renting the service on a monthly basis, consumers can call in and pay a
one time fee to rent a specific movie. The fee is usually around $4 for
a relatively new release that would be available in the video store, and
up to $40 for events such as boxing and concerts. To access and control
an on-demand service such as P.P.V., addressable converters are issued
to cable consumers by the cable company (for a rental fee of course).
This guide also describes the most popular brands of converters, as well
as options available for testing these boxes, and/or replacing them.
Obviously, the cable company does not want you to know this, however
most cable systems are vulnerable to unauthorized access. The chapters
that follow will describe the types of security measures the cable
companies use to prevent theft of service and the means by which hackers
break the law and defeat these security measures.
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