So last weekend I went back to Mich to visit the pops for the weekend. I'm hardly 10 seconds in the door before he starts draggin' me into the other room to show off his new TV. It's a 37" LCD job, blah, blah, blah, with a built-in HD tuner. The built-in tuner's key because my Dad's too cheap to pay the extra 6 bucks a month for a cable box so he wouldn't be able to get any HD stations without it.

Anyways, by around 1:00 AM I'm bored out of my skull and start flipping around on the TV. Since my dad doesn't pay for digital cable, he only gets stations up to like 90, plus the HD tuner let's him get the HD versions of the locals (channel 4, for example, is "4" but channel 4 HD is "4.1").

Un-quenched by what basic cable has to offer, I start randomly flipping around in the higher stations to see if he's getting anything by "accident". I'm just about to give up when -- BAM!, 108 has Scarface on, complete with swearing and violence. Must be a movie channel!

Now in this range of channels (107-110) every decimal channel is used, ie 107.1, 107.2, 107.3.............107.10, 108.1, etc. By flipping through all of these, I find 4-5 random stations all with assorted premium content on them. Happy about how excited my Dad's going to be when I tell him in the morning, I settle in and watch the end of Scarface.

Scarface ends and I wait through the credits so I can see what's coming "NEXT, on HBO!" Just as I'm about to find out....SLAM!, the screen fades to black. Confused as hell, I check the other four channels that just an hour earlier had movies on them and sure enough, two of them are black screens as well.

Disappointed, I frantically start going back through the range of channels to see if there's anything I missed, and I'll be damned if there aren't 3 new channels coming through now. One of them features a film by one of my favorite actresses, Miss Jenna Jameson, so I settle in to get into the story when all of a sudden the picture starts fast-forwarding. I look on dumbfounded and then it suddenly stops fast-forwarding, just in time for an artistic scene where Ms. J demonstrates here love for a gentleman friend by stripping naked and fucking the shit out of him.

It takes a few minutes for me to get over my outrage at missing so much of the plot, but once I calm down, I figure out what's going on. You and your neighbors all share the same main cable wire, and somehow my dad's tv was allowing me to voyeuristically watch what my neighbors were watching "ON Demand". The Jameson flick was apparently some horny neighbor jacking off to soft-core porn.

For the most part, the trick is useless if you get the On Demand stuff anyways, but I did find out that you can piggyback payperview if your neighbors are watching it. This is great if something good's on but be forewarned: If you're not careful you may find yourself watching Dane Cook's "Employee of the Month" in it's entirety just because it's free.

Now that I've successfully wasted 5-10 minutes of anyone who's made it this far's life, let me implore you all to try it for yourselves. I'm curious if it works with all tuners and on all cable systems. My Dad has a Magnavox 37" LCD and Brighthouse cable.

If your neighbors have a typical consumer-grade Internet connection, you can sniff for far-more interesting things than their TV viewing habits. :)

If your neighbors have a typical consumer-grade Internet connection, you can sniff for far-more interesting things than their TV viewing habits. :)

That's fucked up dude.

Activity: Sniifing at my neighbor's internet connection
Result: Right now he's on e-bay putting bids on old "classic" copies of Reader's Digest.
Wow.

At least I have roomates I can say, "yo, whats up man?" to instead of needing to stalk my neighbor.

For real, some people need a pet or something. I recomend a dog.

I don't do such things. Heck, I had a neighbor with a wide-open wireless access point until I told him how to fix (and he still didn't do it right, but WEP is a little better than nothing). My point is that between cable modems, various flavors of wireless intercept, etc., it's easier to passively snoop on neighbors with your computer than to mess with a TV clicker and "on demand" quirkiness. That's all.