and here we go again...

its much harder to trace a cable connection than a bt land line, a landline is basically hardwired from end to end, whereas the cable network is more like sky, the cable split to more cables split to more cables and the card in your box decides what you get to see (and in the case of the modems everything your modem sends and recieves is visible to everything else in your area but the "docsis encryption" keeps it private

have a search on google for ntl engineers manual, their training manual leaked out years ago, those little green cabinets are little more than glorified aerial amplifiers: 1 main cable goes in X number of feeds go out to peoples houses, hence it will be VERY difficult to trace the fraudulent modem by following the cable as some suggest, even more so if your in a block of flats etc where the lazy sods tend to just further split off one incoming feed into as many flats as needed (optical cable (that seems to be made of solid copper) must be THAT expensive that they need to save as much cost as possible... now wheres advertising standards when you need them...)

one has to wonder why were pretty much the only country in the western world where dodgy cable is available if not the norm, pretty much everywhere else has their network securely set up so the clones and carded boxed arent possible (maybe VM should have a talk with sky's tech department to learn how to set things up right)

the thing thats never been picked up on:

sky gets pissed off at the dodgy cable boxes, takes the sky channels off vm

virgin does a sweep and kills most the boxes, gets sky channels back

dodgy boxes gradually reappear so how long you reckon they sky channels are going to stay?

then we have the headlines about sky wanting access to the virgin cable modem network

a few days later virgin are waging war on the modems, surely its only got to be a matter of time before we see it all becoming sky media or something else? (doubt it would be sky virgin cos that sounds like a star in one of the films wacky jakies hubby seems to like getting us to pay for...)

another point about virgins crappy security...

apparently from having a bit of a google it seems that the modem hackers use a bit of software that simply ASKS VIRGINS SERVERS for alist of all valid mac addresses along with the subscribed speeds, now im no expert but if any other company was found to be giving away that kind of information theye'd be shut down pretty quickly...

now how a company with that kind of flaw in their basic setup can claim to be activley persuing the hackers....