In Canada, we had “Bleu Nuit”. It was on at 2am, Saturday night, and played racy French movies. The only problem was the movies ran the gamut from 1.5 hour long naked lesbian makeout to a single scene with boobies somewhere in the middle. You took your chances. I swear there was one that didn’t even show anything (but probably talked about sex. Dunno, I don’t speak much French.)
This is what I was trying to get off too. A few years later, I found out the art channel would sometimes play dirty movies on Saturday late at night but they usually involved incest(?). Then I switched to music channels when they started showing provocative music video so that was nice. I had one of those little tvs with the vcr integrated. Good times.
Should have bought a subscription to Radio and Electronics. I built a descrambler using their schematics.
Holy crap some of it still exists. https://schematicsforfree.com/files/Video/Circuits/Descrambling/1984-02 Analog Cable TV Descramblng .pdf
You think circuits are your friend? By the time I was old enough to convince my parents to buy me a soldering iron I was already a man.
Ha, knowing about this would have probably changed my life in more ways then one. I would have started my career as a hobby and saved a lot more time.
And God knows I would have been serious about learning this stuff as a teen if there was free porn at the end of it.
Its amazing I didn’t end up in jail. I built a few of the descramblers and worst of all ended up with a 300 baud modem when the local chevrolet place Threw out a bunch of ‘junk’. It was a non hayes bell modem and a pain in the ass to use but I would have taken a bullet for it. I built a blue box and later a black box. Then I got busy with free phone calls. Phreaking BBS’s all over with great plans on taking control of the world around you. I still remember the date that they replaced the old analog switch in my town.
I hear phreaking stories and I’m sad I was born a decade too late :(
I was kinda sad I was an adult when the hacking PBX’s were a thing in the 90’s. I kept up with that culture and those kids were having a great time taking over corporate phone systems and night and socializing. I still have a habit every now and then of picking up a random courtesy phone and finding the paging extension. I know it marks me as a huge nerd but I had a small handheld dtmf tone generator in my pocket everywhere I went up until I got married. I know a lot of default passwords used by systems. Most library PC’s and hotel business centers are depressingly easy to get into to. All due to a fear many tiny techs have of changing a default password.
Taking over corporate phone systems… what? Care to elaborate?
For a period of time in the 90’s you could get access to phone systems remotely. Kids and some adults were using them as hangouts of a sort and there was a lot of them that were used to jump into the net for free. I read about it more than experiencing it. Like I said I had grown up and it was no longer the draw it once was.
Had C-band satellite as a teen. All the good channels locked. But if the satellite Spacenet 1 transponder 18 was locked, you could “fine tune” the reception from say, Galaxy 3 transponder 18 by holding the step up or down button, and manually swing the dish halfway across the sky to the same position where Spacenet 1 is. As the descrambler thinks you are watching a different satellite altogether, there is no more lock. And since you never actually visited a bad channel, no way to tell with history or last buttons.
How did you even find this out?
We knew that if you pressed the satellite button and channel up/down, it let you manually move the dish, and it didn’t care how long you did it. There were also numbers to indicate the position of the dish. The rest was just sheer determination.
Desperation
Respect.
Incredible.
Cinemax taught me how to work a VCR
Eurotrash was an option in the UK for those without any satellite.
We had Sky, it was British Sex for me.
Told my mom we should keep Cinemax because they had good movies coming up.
My dad got these black market cable boxes from one of his less than reputable friends way back when. We got literally everything, including full porn channels that weren’t scrambled. They were technically blocked by my parents, but the family pincode was well known.
I used to watch the porn channels and never could figure out why they were so… Meh for me. Turns out, very gay. Lol
Once my parents split up we didn’t have those boxes anymore, and I used to watch Cat House and went through the same “why is this so frustratingly close to being good” experience lol
Quick question…was straight porn like ew gross or just not interesting? I find your porn story really funny and hope I don’t offend by saying so.
No, not gross. Before I knew I was gay it more frustrating than anything. Like, I knew this was sexual, I knew I wanted to enjoy it, and I knew it made me horny. But it wasn’t enough to cross than line into, like, getting me there and being enjoyable. It wasn’t until I found my brother’s porn magazines that I really enjoyed porn, and that was because of the guys in it, and a few erotic stories in them written from women’s POV. I still didn’t realize I was gay or that it was the guys getting me there until one day, when I was like 13/14 and I had a blackberry. I found a site that had nude pictures of celebrities (some blog, not like a dedicated site), and there were (I’m assuming fake) nudes or Kirk Cameron on a boat. OMG, I got off so hard, and then went into full panic when I realized what that meant. Spent the next few years trying to figure out how to undo it. Lol.
That’s a really interesting story but …
Kirk Cameron?
Mike Seaver from Growing Pains?
The famous right wing Christian extremist? Nude?
Yeah that sounds about right
I do believe it was a 4001 Diode soldered between pins 5 and 7; got everything but HBO…
Used to have all my friends over for the WWF pay-per-views.
I always set the last button to the TV guide channel. It made it less suspicious if they saw the channel change. Or at least that’s what I reasoned.
…and the mirror on the bedroom door set so that I could see who’s coming down the hall.
But if you could see them, they could see you …
But you were in the dark, camouflaged in your bedding. Anyone coming down the hall was a silhouette against the white walls of the hallway.
I remember having to crack the PIN code to access the locked channels (which would just give me access to things like skinemax late at night). I faked sick one day to stay home and set to work. I think there was a short timeout after a few failed attempts, so you could only go so fast. It only took 852 tries but I got it! It was 0852, which was just a straight line up the keypad 😑
That’s way more dedication to a nut then I’ve ever had
Assuming there even was a nut…
Bruh, I remember trying to watch dirty skinemax through cable snow when your (friend’s) parents didn’t pay for the channel and somehow didn’t require a descrambler to get a partial signal.
The lengths we used to have to go for a nut…
This makes me realize if I pick a code it had to start with a 9
Hearing this let’s me realize how lucky I was in this regard. I got a PSP when I was young and either my parents didn’t know it had an internet browser or they didn’t know it was a fully fleshed out browser.
I grew up on AOL, and the day I figured out internet explorer allowed me to access the Internet outside of their locked down kids mode was glorious.
I did the Wipeout Pure exploit in the days before the PSP had a real browser, it was AMAZING.
I thought I was the only one smart enough to devise this plan!
y’all remember that vcr trick that you could unscramble all the PPV channels… golden times… golden times.
Wait. what black magic is this? 12 year old me desperately wants to know.
Dunno how replies notify… but I replied to a reply on your reply.
<_<’
I have no idea. If you recorded something on vhs it didn’t play it back unscrambled did it?
so what you did was set your vcr to the ppv channel you wanted. and then kept flipping between channel 3 and 4 on the TV until it just unscrambled it. It apparently had to do with the vcr’s ability to like fix when old vhs tapes would get wonky and like have mess and like lines. the color wasn’t always right… but for free WWF (i’m that old) ppv and… well pron… it was great.
the real hero is in the comments, 25 years later…
I had a similar trick. If I set the VCR to channel 4 and the TV to channel 3, it would shift all the cable channels down one. So Cinemax which was channel 14 and blocked would come in as channel 13 completely clear.
Brilliant maneuvering
Red shoe diaries
Ah, a man of culture, I see. This was my choice.
On showcase haha.
Red Shoe Diaries, backed by Much Music (I’m Canadian)
I think you meant Emmanuelle.
Make sure to hit last, channel up, last. Foolish proof. I’ll never get caught.
Here I thought I was the only one this clever.
This guy faps.
