chris@proper.UUCP (Chris Hayes ) (09/13/84)
<Reading this line is illegal.....> It's quite interesting that this subject should come up. As has been said, (here) in the bay area they have been poking around for "funny" antennas, and harassing owners of said equiptment. I know a couple whom this has happened to. They , apparently , are aiming to scare people into paying HBO for doing something that they have every right to do (have a VHF antenna). It's really not too funny the kind of things they're trying to pull. Ok, *SUPPOSEDLY* they can tell if a person is actually using HBO by analyzing his / her antenna. It is my guess that they would (theoretically) use a directional antenna, and look at the reflected signal from said antenna..... Doesn't that seem like a bit of a double standard? Sending people to poke around people's backyards, and possibly "monitoring" the signals from a person's antenna??? *THAT*'s what I call unauthorized butting in to signals / privacy. All that is nothing new, but as an sidenote, look into the cordless fone issue that has been recently discussed in fa.telecom. I think a decision was made... "If a reasonable expection of signal privacy was intended and implemented...... monitoring is a no-no..." Well, then note this fact: near where I live there's a transmitter link / repeater for it of some kind. This link isn't "scrambled". The signal from this thing (around 87Mhz...) actually cuts *into* the bandwidth that is on low-end FM, and such. In fact, I know of a person (I have witnessed this) who can , with *NO* special antenna, tune his tv to ch#6, and receive decent chroma + sound from it with very little tweaking of any kind! (No antenna now..). Surely, this isn't "Reasonable expection of privacy...."?! Can anybody tell me what type of "scrambling", and what freq. the main vid + sound carriers are "supposed" to occupy? Is it usually this bad? I mean, even el-cheapo sine-wave scrambling techniques would seem to work better..... As I said, I don't know how HBO actually funkys up the signal, but would be interested to hear. I'm sure, whatever they do, they can't be justified is this type of "antenna search". (That they do it at all, would indicate their expection of privacy isn't high. Do you see SHOWTIME doing that?) Please send any & all comments you might have either to the net, or: ...ucbvax!dual!proper!chris ...intelca!proper!chris (mail here is a bit flakey, but if I get a mesg I will respond.)