illegal or legal boxes??

andie

is it illegal in ny state to buy an additional box?
i see theyre sold, but dont know if its legal.
i have cablevision and currently only one converter box.

deadhead68

If you see cable boxes for sale on ebay, they are most likely stolen. Tivo and Moxi are the only cable boxes that can be purchased by individuals. And those boxes need cable cards from your provider to receive encrypted channels.

DeadHead68

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Loves2Watch

Unless you purchase the box directly from Cablevision (with the above exception)(I highly doubt they would sell you one) they are illegal.

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Sykotic

They are property of the MSO at all times. If the box is not in inventory, they will not program it. The boxes must be programed to work by the MSO. MSOs use different programing codes for different systems. Unless you or someone you know knows how to change the code and knows the code will it even work.
This prevents people who have bad intentions from being able to counter engineer the coding, preventing theft of service.

bicker

I don't believe service providers would be allowed to sell these boxes. They're sold to the service providers by electronics manufacturers (Motorola, Scientific Atlanta/Cisco, Pace, Samsung, etc.) for use as rental devices. These manufacturers (with those two exceptions) have indicated absolutely no interest in supporting mass-market consumers; they refuse to sell to the public and almost surely prohibit the service providers who buy from them from reselling the boxes.

JB Antennaman

Smart Card Technology has been around since at least the 60's.

A mentor of mine worked for the military in the Korean war / Vietnam conflict era and said that they used them while he was in the military.

The problem with any technology is as long as you expose large amounts of the public to the technology, sooner or later the technology becomes commonplace and people are bound to hack the system.

When the military was through using the smart card technology they sold off the technology and the card burners to anyone that wished to purchase it. Unfortunately, it did not all go to the Sat Dish / Cable providers and the end result was that it did not work well for Sat Dish communications - due to the fact that all you had to do was burn a new card and you could watch what ever you wanted and they could not stop you.

A new generation of cards came out which has a different type of encryption which changes the codes which allows the receiver to receive the programming as many as 4 times a day.

If a card burner charges $30 for a card, that would cost you $120 a day to watch television. Sooner or later, no matter how many cards and how many receivers you buy, the cost of trying to bootleg the system becomes greater than just paying the cable / sat dish bill.

Yes you can buy the receivers, but you would still need a source of good cards and a card burner to bypass the system. That my friends would be looked upon as theft of service and would get you three things.

A picture that your family would not cherish.

A matching set of bracelets.

And a set of numbers across your chest!

ajwees41

cox in certain areas sold the Motorola HD boxes at retail, but stopped after a few months.

bicker

Sounds ominous.