Digital Woes

(*This is last week's blog. I accidentally posted it somewhere else...)

When I moved into my very first apartment, I was twenty-one years old and in college. I lived with four other guys my age. One of my roommates was pretty tech-savy and hooked up a “black box” to the internet. Every movie channel, every pay-per-view event, and lots of adult entertainment were at our disposal free as the air. Those were the days.

Now that cable is broadcast digitally, the old “black box” days are gone. When I graduated college and moved into another apartment, I was now working a full-time job and drinking slightly less beer. But I still didn’t want to pay for cable. So I called up my old roomate and asked him where he got his box. He gave me a website (http://www.24-7descramblers.com/). When I called the company, a man on the other end asked me what company I got my cable from. I said Comcast. This guy was nice enough to explain to me that a black box would do me no good; my cable was broadcast digitally. While I was fortunate enough to deal with an honest black box dealer, many like me who are technologically illiterate aren’t so lucky, as documented by MSNBC (http://www.digital-cable-filter-scam.com/index11.html). These people pray on others like myself who didn’t understand how digital cable works. Now that the signal is contantly communicating back and forth with the reciever, it is virtually impossible to steal it.

At least I can still steal my neighbor’s wireless internet signal.