h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Egon.

aka

Just making sure no one misses post 60.

Jonathan, the issue of what THKC (Who let's hope, one day returns) says in that thread, which is also what's on the lips of other Researchers, whether you believe it or not, and the issue of access method of Telewest Digibox users are close, but only when you place them next to each other.

Please if you're going to talk in this thread, about what this thread is about, don't forget to focus on the matter in hand.

Egon:
"the TV licence is *only* required to watch broadcast television."
PRECISELY.

I wish people would stop moaning "But I pay my licence fee - If I can get to BBCi then there's nothing stopping me".

The TV Licence does NOT fund your telewest service.
The TV Licence does NOT fund BBCi (As I understand it)
Your Telewest Bill does NOT fund services which Telewest do not advertise on their Interactive service menu: ie: DNA, the Messageboards, Cult TV, Regional Information Sites, Etc.

"Your Telewest Bill does NOT fund services..."
I meant
"Your Telewest Bill does NOT cover services..."

With the likes of flimsy arguments as SEF and others I find it disapointing that more people are joining the ranks of trolling, members and other groups within H2G2, claiming it's all their fault and the world would just be a better place if 'them' would just prefer not to exist.

Pah,

-- DoctorMO --

AKA-

The television licence does provide funding for BBCi, although paying the TV licence isn't a prerequisite for using the site

The licence does not fund Telewest, but you must have a licence to watch telewest, as it is broadcast television.

All very confusing, I know.

I'm pretty sure that I am the only one proposing that DoctorMO. But the HouseRules don't cover that, and that's not what the issue is about. Read the thread.

Doctormo i totally agree

I agree, I believe the issue in *this* thread is the illegality of the digibox *hack*. The fact that it might be punitive to some of the txtspkrs IMHO is merely a serendipitous bonus?

Please if you're going to talk in this thread, about what this thread is about, don't forget to focus on the matter in hand.

funny I thought satunine used the other thread of one of her friends leaving hootoo as one of her many reasons for this action, so it is what the thread is about or isnt it , surely they are interlinked......

Egon:
Thanks for clearing that up - I wasn't sure if BBCi got any licence funding (although they don't advertise on-site)

Jonathan:
When the ability to access via the hack in theh digibox system is removed, (or if), or, the entire digibox community gets a PC and uses /that/ method of access, I believe the ones causing people like cl, myself, and others irritation and anger will find a chatsite to move to, and the digiboxers who have reasonable intelligence and are a value to the site, will stay.

And I wouldn't worry about money -- The PCs of yesteryear, which are still better equipment for surfing the net than the Telewest box, are cheaply available -- and even without one, the government expects to have everyone in the country able to access the Internet within the next year. But as has been pointed out, the 'dregs' as they will continue to label /themselves/, in a sort of anti-productive form of debate, are a different issue.

People who access this site via “magic email” do so because they originally come from a site called leisure-district.(a free chat site) This I believe was there first experience of an Internet site.
When that closed down they had the option of joining a new chat site that was a fee-paying alternative to leisure-district.

This is one reason that some people use it as a chat site, some people moved on and use h2g2 as it was intended, some people still use it as a chat site,
But so does everyone else who uses h2g2.

Just because some of you write guide entry’s and write for the post or what ever. On the whole you all in my humble opinion use part of it as a chat site.

I can assure you that telewest are aware of their customers accessing h2g2 via email links
A web-based address that is “illegal” to accesses via email links would be fire walled.

A loophole in any system, and the use of this loophole does not make it illegal,

You get morons on any site regardless of how those morons access the site.

Some digi box users are a pain the bum, some pc users are a pain in the bum, some people on pc look down there noses at people on digi-box.

If you’re on pc it doesn’t mean that you’re not going to abuse the site, if you’re on dig-box it doesn’t mean that you will abuse the site, it’s a people thing not a system thing,

As I said, loopholes that allow digi-box users to gain entry to this site or indeed any other site are not illegal.

People who access the site via library use are not stealing from any company either as the library is a free service.

Some one said in another thread that they shouldn’t use h2g2 as they hadn’t got a TV license as this was anther argument to clam tv licenses meant that people on digi box was in fact paying to use a free service provided by the BBC

You have a pc. You have no TV, you still need a TV license as your pc is capable of receiving pictures and sound from TV broadcasters.

Now I'm confused, if Telewest is aware of the *hack* or *loophole* or whatever you want to call it, why are we having this conversation?

Sorry, aka, I know this is in danger of labouring a point, but I think it's important we all get our facts straight. In post 52, Saturnine said:
"You cannot track a Telewest user down via ISP. They do not have them. Therefore, if they keep breaking the rules, keep getting banned via email address, they can keep coming back."

In post 55, I pointed out that this wasn't technically true, and in post 60, you say:

"I believe Blueyonder sets aside a few IPs for its Telewest digibox users"

Which entirely backs up my statement that digibox users, like anyone else, can be traced *to a certain extent* - i.e. it may say little more than "this is a Telewest digibox user, in the UK", perhaps "in region X" if you're lucky, but it does not make them *completely anonymous* as Saturnine implied. And, crucially, this is *not* a distinguishing factor of digibox users; in fact, until the recent surge in broadband over cable and ADSL, most individuals connecting to the Internet would have a different IP address every time they switched on their computer - seeming to all the world like a different user each time.

This is, in large part, because the world is rapidly running out of unique addresses, and a solution is (hopefully) in the works to deal with that, called IPv6. So, digibox users are simply part of a gradually shrinking majority of net-users who cannot be reliably traced based on their connection.

Every set top box has a unique id number. Within there systems it holds all he information of your activities within the interactive services. Even from web links such as h2g2 *magic emails* so although all the information is gathered on one data base this can be traced to individual set top boxes via the unique id number, each smart card within the set top box keeps all this information separated on one database

"A web-based address that is ?illegal? to accesses via email links would be fire walled."

They already are, but however since h2g2 resides on the bbc.co.uk TLD, the firewall allows it, due to some BBC pages being re-written for digibox users and published on that TLD.

"People who access the site via library use are not stealing from any company either as the library is a free service."

I have noted this already, further down the thread. Telewest's TVE-mail does not equal Telewest Free For All Unmetred Unmonitored Care Free Internet Access; And although the majority of the Wider Web is blocked out, h2g2, not qualifying as a Telewest Digibox Site, therefore qualifies as part of the Wider Web, thus there is a flaw in the system, and users of the 'magic e-mail' are exploiting that flaw.

Whether you believe it illegal or not, it is sure I believe something Telewest would wish to put a stop to, once they are actually aware of how much of a problem this is on their systems.

"Some one said in another thread that they shouldn?t use h2g2 as they hadn?t got a TV license as this was anther argument to clam tv licenses meant that people on digi box was in fact paying to use a free service provided by the BBC"

h2g2 is a free site provided by BBCi. As I understand it, h2g2 receives no funding from the TV licence fee at all, and before the BBCi Takeover, it was a free site back then, also. An internet site cannot stop people from using it, if the user doesn't pay for a TV licence. The TV licence is exactly that; A licence to receive TV in your home. Whether you pay your TV licence or not, 'people on digi box was in fact paying to use a free service' is false. They are not paying (I assume you mean via their Telewest bill) to use BBCi. The licence fee, if anything, pays for global free access to BBCi. Having a Telewest box for which you pay monthly fees does not qualify you to have access through your Telewest system to the whole scope of BBCi. It does however grant you free usage of the parts of BBCi designed for digiboxes, and those that Telewest want you to use. (By placing a link in their menu system, they want you to use such a site)


"You have a pc. You have no TV, you still need a TV license as your pc is capable of receiving pictures and sound from TV broadcasters."

Not /quite/ true. If you install a TV card, or any other means to receive TV pictures on your computer in the United Kingdom, as the last version of the TV Licensing agreement that I read, stated, you have to have TV licence -- But if you just have a PC that does not receive TV pictures, you are fine(and fine-free!) to live without one.

cl zoomer -has Spring,

beats me, Ask the author of the thread.
As far as I can tell though the Author of this thread has had problems with telewest users. She now wants to inform telewest of this loophole. Maybe she/he wasn’t aware that telewest already know about it. If they wanted to stop the email accesses they could, I guess it would cost them more than they think its worth, so allow it to remain open.