iOpener Update

From: John Wilson <wilson_at_dbit.dbit.com>
Date: Thu Apr 6 12:42:32 2000

On Thu, Apr 06, 2000 at 12:08:43PM -0400, CLASSICCMP_at_trailing-edge.com wrote:
> Yeah, but there are many places in the US where it is essentially illegal
> to hook your own cable descrambler to the cable line, not too much different
> than the old Bell System limits on third-party equipment hooked to phone
> lines.

It hurts my head trying to understand this. How the cable companies get
their little whims written into law is beyond me. I mean anything's silly
if you look close enough -- suppose my TV happens to be switchable to accept
a video signal of either polarity (or whatever it is), how is it that that
makes me a *criminal*? When the real issue is that the cable companies were
looking for a cheapskate way to segment their customers w/o having per-customer
wiring, so instead of giving me what I actually pay for, they give everyone
*everything* and then get laws pushed through to stop us from using it. So
they get to decide exactly what equipment I may use to measure the voltage
on the wire I'm paying for...

> It's bad enough
> with some ISP's threatening that they only support Microsoft Windows
> and that if you've got trouble accessing their service from any other
> OS you're out of luck.

The ISP that I use at home (Time Warner) is one of those, and of course
the funny thing is that their service in fact works fine with Linux, but
when used with Windows NT (where it's guaranteed to work, between crashes
anyway), it has general day-to-day flakiness plus occasionally it entirely
stops working for weeks at a time.

These same folks keep trying to convince me to buy/rent a digital cable box,
which if I understand right, gives them the ability to log what channels
I'm watching. And they expect me to get excited about this!

John Wilson
D Bit
Received on Thu Apr 06 2000 - 12:42:32 BST