Posted on 03/27/2014 11:11:36 PM PDT by Ray76
There have always been pranksters but this one sounds downright sick.
Its astonishing. Its spooky because there arent a lot of ways you can get into someones cable box, said Fred Cate, research director for the Indiana University Center for Applied Cybersecurity. The most common ways would be using a remote control, an infrared device, but thats line of sight. You usually have to be in the room or within a close distance and clear vision to the box youre changing the channel on or doing the typing on."Um, what? If the cable box is running software and on the network, the hacker doesn't need "line of sight."
Someone has cameras or has activated the cameras built into their computers and tv. Probably some bored 12 y/o boy who deserves to be fully prosecuted when discovered. Meanwhile stop using those tvs.
Aren’t a lot of these boxen running open source Linux? Linux is as hackproof as it is administered to be. If it is a box where everything merrily runs as root, expect issues.
Is the NSA into cable boxes now? ... :-) ...
Sick is right, but I have always heard that the technology exists, where people can peer at you through your TV set, and you would never know it. I wonder if there really is something to that?
The TV would need an image camera to do that. I doubt it unless one’s built into the cable box.
I wonder if they have an x-box Kinect
Back in the pioneer days of TV, it was done by shining a moving point light of constant intensity at the scene being televised and then picking up the reflected light with a stationary photo-eye. The image was reconstructed with a similar moving point light, except modulated by the signal from the photo-eye.
Except to the extent one could perform such a moving spot scan, there would not be any way to visualize what is standing in front of the CRT or flat-screen by means of using a stationary photo-eye. It might be able to pick up something shadowy and vague and infer whether a person is there or not. It couldn’t see the features of the person or determine how he is dressed, etc.
Pretty freaky stuff. I imagine the vulnerability that’s allowing access will be found out soon enough. Hopefully that will lead to an arrest. Whoever is doing this deserves to be prosecuted fully. Terrorizing that little girl is beyond contemptible.
I just googled some information on it, between posts. BTW, I am retired, so I can stay up late, and it is almost mid night here on the left coast, so what is your excuse for being up so late? :-)
A Kinect has a camera and some image recognition smarts in it.
No job right now, though I do interview tomorrow.
Good Luck.
That really is sick. Back when even pranksters were decent, they’d say they were a ghost or something like that.
Thanks. I’m heading to the sack in about 5 min.
Could be. IDK.
What I do know is that line-of-sight access likely isn’t required to do what is being claimed.
Probably. Someone who cut into the cable could launch a man in the middle attack on the signal. It isn’t told here exactly how the offensive text appears, whether it is superimposed on the video signal or what.
Well, praise Jesus and my prayers for your interview. Best to you and yours.
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