Anybody remember descrambled cable boxes?

[GetInTheTruck]

yeah when I was young my moms was dating this italian dude and he brought one home. we was like but my moms is a law-abiding citizen so she wasn't having it, told him to get it out the house

I was mad as fukk.

 

[patscorpio]

staple of my childhood...the peak was actually having one in my dorm room that i bought off ebay...i was eating good off that..having nikkas come in and pay to watch wrestling/boxing/ufc...for the females it was watching playboy/spice while lying on my bed..damn them for going digital and ruining a good thing

 

[RJY33]

my dad had one connected to a tv in the basement. my mom's brother worked for the cable company so we weren't allowed to have it in plain sight

used to remember watching all the WWF ppv's down there on a small ass tv but it was back then to even be seeing them for free.

 

[daze23]

We never had that but one of my neighbors knew how to just straight up open the cable box that was in our front yard and connect/reconnect the wires so that we'd have every channel. Did this about 4 or 5 times, the cable company kept disconnecting, finally sent letters to like the whole block saying they'd be looking to find whoever was doing it and file criminal charges.

that was my maneuver. they really can't do shyt unless they physically see you in the box (and I still wonder what they could do)

that also where I discovered they actually put shyt on your line to scramble some channels. you could take those things off and get HBO and shyt

having the box that let you watch ppv was ill though. I remember watching Tyson bite dudes ear on one of those

 

[SuikodenII]

fukk Digital

 

[Ayo]

yeah when I was young my moms was dating this italian dude and he brought one home. we was like but my moms is a law-abiding citizen so she wasn't having it, told him to get it out the house

I was mad as fukk.

My Mom was on some shook shyt too. Wouldn't allow one inside the house and my Dad was just kind of like

So I had my boy Mike come through on some sneak shyt with the zapper. Had never seen anything like that before.

He basically hooked it up to my cable box. The COAX IN. Held a button for 30 seconds. Then I would have free cable for about 30 days then he'd have to come through and re-zap it. If the cable guy was coming. I could just unplug the box and it would go away.

Does anyone know what the official name of the product was?

What was this magic!?

 

[Danie84]

That 90s black box with the red button was gawdly

All the free pay-per view wrestling events, boxing matches, and movies galore

Discovering the Spice Channel for the first time

Remember, when they tried to get slick, and made your cable blue and scrambled if you had the box connected to the cable box

Then you realize all you had to do was press the red button and unplug it, and you was still able to get the free pay- per view

for like a month. And you just had to repeat the process until mom's finally got satellite dish.

The 90s

 

[Artificial Intelligence]

.......................

 

[R.E.N. Spells Ren]

Y'all know black boxes still exist, right?

 

[King Sun]

I knew it was coming to an end when they was selling the boxes in source magazine ads

 

[Ayo]

Y'all know black boxes still exist, right?

From everything I know it's impossible with digital cable channels. You can buy a filter that will kill PPV billing for awhile. But from what I've heard it will eventually catch up to you.

If you know anything different. Please enlighten us.

 

[R.E.N. Spells Ren]

From everything I know it's impossible with digital cable channels. You can buy a filter that will kill PPV billing for awhile. But from what I've heard it will eventually catch up to you.

If you know anything different. Please enlighten us.

I used to have one. Got everything, except there was no on demand and no guide.
Had a capacitor (at least it looked like a capacitor) that you connected between cable line and the box to prevent them from zapping you.

In the end, the convenience of on demand and knowing what was on was worth more than a bunch of free channels I rarely watched.

 

[Sypress]

I know its all about streaming now but the quality and the hassle to find a feed is status


My folks use to get that cable card hack on directv....itll be good for a few months. sexcetara was actually an interesting show

 

[Ayo]

The hacked routers are pretty much the equivalent of a black box nowaday.

I just saw someone get arrested with about 40 cloned Motorola modems to sell to Comcast customers, last year. So I'm assuming Comcast hasn't patched that hole yet.

Basically the modems just all have the same Mac address. Presumably of someone who had cable with Comcast. The only problem I can see with that is that Comcast might catch the high bandwidth usage.

 

[Won Won]

Used to eat real good off the black box

Then the channels went into the triple digits, and it was a wrap