Clips of scrambled cable TV erotica from the 1990s

[enkidoodler]

We used to call it “Picasso Porn”
and yeah you could get a frame or so of clear signal if you flipped back and forth between channels
good times

[DCTM]

Back then, a frame was all I needed baby

[GoatCheezInfrno]

@knoxblox

Our cable company had set-top boxes with a literal lock and key. It took us all of 15 minutes to find that key.

I could just imagine the budding LockPickingLawyer having a field day with that lock.

[anon81034786]

@Hyphen

I had some friend figure out back int he analog scramble days that if you poured salt water on outside cable box, it would bypass the filter for a moment and you would get a clear picture.

On the digital scrambled Youtube videos, is that enough info to unscramble the picture, or since it was “leaked” from the cable box, was part of the info discarded? And I assume it needed some sort of key to decrypt?

Back when Cable TV was analog, blocking channels was done by putting various filters onto the line that interrupted specific channel frequencies. If you had access to the outside cable box, you could easily remove the filters and suddenly every channel was made available.

Most cable companies also used universal locks so if you just happened to know a friend with such a key, it was a simple matter of unscrewing the right filter. It was a cat and mouse game though as whenever a tech came by they would re-install the filters.

Until digital came online and you needed a set top box with decode card…

[RickMycroft]

Don’t worry, it’s cool now. They have Minecraft porn.

[bobrichmondhill]

Rule 34.

[Robertor]

We didn’t have cable, but when I visitied grandma’s house, I always found an excuse to stay up late watching TV alone.

[westcarleton]

@stephen_schenck

I know suppressed sync and video inversion when I see it.

I spent a month making a descambler for that back in ~'83. My own design after reverse-engineering how they did it. IIR the 12th line was a flag for whether or not the following frame was inverted. Worked beautifully for a few months until they changed the scrambling method.

[Howiemoticon]

NSF pixels!
Don;t get me started 2 4 pull down!

[Hyphen]

So, we would told in 80’s is don’t pirate cable because the cable company had some-such-scanner they could use to see who in the neighborhood was getting free porn. Was that legit or just a scary story they told suburbanites?

[FGD135]

TV detector van

[anon81034786]

@Hyphen

So, we would told in 80’s is don’t pirate cable because the cable company had some-such-scanner they could use to see who in the neighborhood was getting free porn. Was that legit or just a scary story they told suburbanites?

No, that’s not BS - they do have scanners that can detect RF frequencies and they would drive around looking for leaking signals. Didn’t you ever see the movie Pump Up the Volume?

Pump Up the Volume (1990) ⭐ 7.2 | Comedy, Drama, Music

In the analog days this was easy enough to circumvent but with digital signals it’s now all controlled back in the home office.

There are ways to spoof and hack digital encryption but it’s much, much harder. Everything is packet based networks now so the actual cable TV portion of traffic is just part of the larger stream of data.

[Stripes]

@Hyphen

So, we would told in 80’s is don’t pirate cable because the cable company had some-such-scanner they could use to see who in the neighborhood was getting free porn. Was that legit

Not really, but what they did do on any station that had advertisements or even a good place to insert them is drop in advertisements for something free if you were one of the first N callers (free TV shirt if you are one of the first 100 callers, or a free month of HBO to the first 10 callers or whatever). Anyone that called had their phone number matched with an account, and if they were not a subscriber then they were “busted”.

Busted for my cableco mostly was dispatching a cable tech to reinstall the filter back on the line and fix the lock on the outside box or whatever. Other places sent threatening letters. Some called and told them they were busted, but this one time only they would let them add the channel for a discount. I have no idea what methods were the most successful.