Chipped boxes

[Escapee]

Originally Posted by zoombini

Well, apart from having the "you have won a prize, ring this number" channel

It was possible to put a message on an individual box using the onscreen graphics with the old Jerrold analogue 2100 series boxes..

if it can be done with the digital boxes I guess they could use this facility!

perhaps they do and wont like us discussing that here.

[zoombini]

There is the "messages" facility on the digital ones too.
Never seen it used though.

[Ignition]

I *nearly* typed a reply to this then realised I'd be giving away a recipe to make boxes muchly harder to detect.
In fact I think this thread is getting towards TMI state. While I appreciate freedom of information and everything else please people be careful, enough numpties with chipped boxes without giving extra info away *cough Escapee cough*

Actually there are other ways to detect chipped boxes that just dissing each drop individually but that's another thing to get into.

Ta

[Escapee]

Originally Posted by Ignition

I *nearly* typed a reply to this then realised I'd be giving away a recipe to make boxes muchly harder to detect.
In fact I think this thread is getting towards TMI state. While I appreciate freedom of information and everything else please people be careful, enough numpties with chipped boxes without giving extra info away *cough Escapee cough*

Actually there are other ways to detect chipped boxes that just dissing each drop individually but that's another thing to get into.

Ta

I am certainly not trying to get you to give more information away, it just gives me a wry smile on occassions where posters who work for ntl have used scaremongering statements to try and frighten would be customers of the "Box Chipping Brigade".

Yes I am aware of some measures that can be taken to narrow down potential users of chipped boxes, but no matter what cable network operator we are talking about the only solution is to 100% police the return of disconnected boxes. We all know that it is impossible and some customers will claim the box has been returned when it has not, I would expect it to be very difficult to charge a customer £1000 for a lost box as a deterent because the first genuine customer who takes it to court would not be asked to pay anymore than the box actually costs the cable operator.

There is unfortunately no method of locating a box to a house located on the network if it's illegal, MAC addresses are easily changable for those with the equipment and knowledge. I change MAC addresses on equipment daily, and I'm sure someone with more knowledge than myself in that are could take product XYZ and reverse engineer it.

I never heard anymore about the problems encountered on a certain operators network shortly after they launched digital services, we recovered a box from a customer due to "certain" technical issues and on returning to the headend with the box under our arm, we were still able to ping a box with the same MAC address and IP address on the network fed from the same hubsite.

That was all hushed up and we never actually found out if it was a vendor problem ie: 2 boxes with the same MAC address, or a cloned box. It would be one hell of a coincidence to have a vendor mistake and both boxes being located on the same hubsite. What was really funny as customer care arguing with customers who claimed they were being charged for movies they had not watched around the same time, the company denied that this was possible and would not remove the charges for the films from these couple of customers. The multiple address problem was never followed up and I know the box we recovered was from a genuine paying subscriber, so it was the Real McCoy!

There will always be people out there who want to get something for nothing, and companies will always make amazing claims about their facilities for pinpointing these people.

I remember how much difficulty we had finding a babbling box one day, and that was on constant transmit whilst we were searching for it. It ended up located in the Set-Top clean and screen facility, and we got there just as the batch were about to be packed up and sent out for customer use.
I have no intention of giving away what I know would help the rogues, but still dont agree with BS to put people off.

[kobuskint]

If the cable providers wanted to erradicate the problem, why not just cut off the supply to boxes with a non bonafide return path. If their return path does not check out, then the box either is cloned, chipped or filtered. Cut it off.

The problem is that this would catch customers with a basic package getting top package channels. Stopping these guys means stopping a cable customer. As Sky are paid for the high value channels and ntl/TW are paid on the lower channels, then until Sky demand action, there is no incentive for cable cos IMHO.

Thoughts?

[Ignition]

Escapee you used to work for ntl and now don't. There are ways to improve detection and I'm not BSing anyone.

kobuskint - no chance of working at all, for obvious (if you know what you are looking for) reasons. Not going to elaborate any more than that.

[Escapee]

Originally Posted by Ignition

Escapee you used to work for ntl and now don't. There are ways to improve detection and I'm not BSing anyone.

kobuskint - no chance of working at all, for obvious (if you know what you are looking for) reasons. Not going to elaborate any more than that.

I am not saying that ntl have not got smarter in detecting illegal boxes on the network, I am however saying that Langley headend areas would be restricted to the amount of nodes that are combined to an individual Intersect card.

The original config combined 2 rings of nodes to a Intercect card, that means an illegal box could of been in one of 800 homes in the 2 ring area. (that assumes the original 500 homes per node build not the later 1000+)
Even upgrading to one Intersect card per node (Cant see why they would in its currect application) would only place the illegal box in one of the 500 possible homes fed from that node, we can be fair and say that could be further reduced to about 200-300 customers to allow for a reasonable penetration in the area.

200-300 drops plus all the ones that have not been disconnected are a lot of leg work and time to check, things can be broken down further by using the RF directional coupler test points firstly at the hubsite, possibly using Cheetah to identify the node, and then at the node usiing test points to identify which Distribution amplifier, exactly the same can then be carried out there and then on to the Distribution Point or points depending how many are fed off that amplifier port. That would probably break things down to a minimum of 50 drops to test. Perhaps they can then run a report to find out how many of those 50 drops are paying customers and how many are on the basic package, as they are more likely to contain the offending box.

As the casual observer will of probably guessed by now, travelling around all these cabinets and eventually removing all those drop cables to identify a single house containing the offending set-top box is very time consuming indeed. It's far easier to scaremonger the casual person who may be offered the chipped box down the pub than it is to catch offenders.

None of that info is company specific to ntl, its all general HFC architecture related and would apply to most operators with HFC systems around the world. The only differences would be homes passed per node and segmentation of Intersect/ubr.

If it was easy for Cable operators to detect a box to a house they wouldn't have so much of a fraud problem.

PS: If anyone from ntl is concerned that I am giving away company specific info it's not the case, most of the fundamental design is based on industry standard designs supplied by the equipment vendors and is freely available.
I actually raised a concern over an issue with an old boss of mine at ntl over some freely available information that CS, Tech support people and senior engineering people who should of known better were making available back in the .com days.

The information they were innocently giving out could potentially cause ntl a lot of nightmares, especially in the current situation where they are very thinm on the ground with people actually out at the sharp end getting their sleeves rolled up!

[Ignition]

*Shrug* as I said this is a conversation best had in private, I'm not scare mongering anyone, nor am I going to give much away but I'd rather not give away hints as to how to avoid detection.

[JOHNNYW25]

hi i recently bought a box from the uk its not chipped just tried to switch it on with cable feed in it goes throught process says error 2 on it then cannont find a signal please check signal goes to channel 0 and displays that message could any 1 tell me wat is up with this box and is it of any use to any 1 else?

[Stuart]

Originally Posted by JOHNNYW25

hi i recently bought a box from the uk its not chipped just tried to switch it on with cable feed in it goes throught process says error 2 on it then cannont find a signal please check signal goes to channel 0 and displays that message could any 1 tell me wat is up with this box and is it of any use to any 1 else?

Assuming you are using it on an NTL or Telewest network, I don't think you'll be able to. As I understand it, the boxes on each network are restricted to working on that network. You may be in the same area as the person who sold the box, but bear in mind that NTL's network areas do not necessarily line up with the physical area (one network may service two or three areas).


One final thing.. It is illegal to sell both NTL and Telewest boxes. They are rented out to each subscriber, but they remain the property of the cable company.

[Atomic22]

ntl should reclaim all the boxes from ex customers and make any of them who havent got the box still pay for them....
no one seems to have mentioned the fact that everyone with a chipped box is a paying ntl customer because they all pay the for the minimum channel package and get a new box , switch it for the chipped box ,and then get every other chan including pay-per-view and porn for free.......thats why they go uncaught
so ntl only need to do a swift update zap of all there base package customers and the ones with chipped boxes will not work until they are rechipped to the new signal.......im sure this could be done on a regular basis.
doing nothing makes a mockery of people like me that pay nearly a hundred quid a month for everything.

[Escapee]

Originally Posted by Atomic22

ntl should reclaim all the boxes from ex customers and make any of them who havent got the box still pay for them....
no one seems to have mentioned the fact that everyone with a chipped box is a paying ntl customer because they all pay the for the minimum channel package and get a new box , switch it for the chipped box ,and then get every other chan including pay-per-view and porn for free.......thats why they go uncaught
so ntl only need to do a swift update zap of all there base package customers and the ones with chipped boxes will not work until they are rechipped to the new signal.......im sure this could be done on a regular basis.
doing nothing makes a mockery of people like me that pay nearly a hundred quid a month for everything.

Back in the old days though, the cable company I originally worked for would make more from a basic customer than one with a full package. It was all to do with the way Sky was pricing to cable operators, and meant there was more profit margin on a basic package customer than full package. Hard to believe but true!

I accept that the pricing plan today may be different, but it was just not worth the effort of chasing a customer who was robbing service. The end result would be Sky making more money and the cable operator would get less. The company always made the minimum effort required for Sky to think the cheats were being sought.