From what I know of cable co's, they periodically check the settings on their modems (we know they can change them when you upgrade/downgrade service, it follows they can also check the current settings). I know that's how they used to catch uncappers in the past. Kind of a "trust but verify" approach.

You can attach a DOCSIS device of your own, but unless their equipment allows it onto their tubes (provisions it), you're not going to get any service. You could of course try to clone someone's MAC address, but then you've crossed over into illegal/stealing service territory. A cable company is not going to allow end user equipment onto their network that they have no control over since their whole ISP business model is based on charging for bandwidth.

I did RTFA. His biggest misstep that brought attention to his actions was running a company that sold uncapped and hardware modded modems. He sold a couple to undercover feds. That was a Bad Idea. Selling hacked equipment that is designed to overcome preset bandwidth limits or provide unauthorized (free) service by cloning mac addresses of other authorized modems seems like "aiding and abetting". Running uncapped modems on Comcast's network would also seem like wire fraud (fraudulent activity involving electronic equipemnt) to me.

Comcast owns their network and sells you access based on bandwidth. More bandwidth costs more. If you find a way to circumvent their bandwidth limits, you are breaking your agreement with them (as well as violating the DMCA). Modding your own cable modem and running it on your own cable network is ok. Running it on someone elses is not.

Hacking to gain knowledge/enlightenment is one thing. Using that knowledge to steal service is uncool.

There is one more point that I seem to remember - AOL owning a cable lines. For a while, they owned some small cable co in Virginia (or at least partly owned it). At the time I thought that they were going to build that out since it was The Future. However, after the merger they decided it didn't fit their business model and they sold it all off to concentrate on dialup. I'm sure they genius who did that got a great bonus after that completed (From resume "Generated XX millions for company by finding and selling off negative-profit assets").

Now their plan is to sell advertising on their content. But they're very late to the game. Will be interesting to see what value is left.

At their peak they had tens of millions of subscribers - I remember a "20 million members" sign in one of their hallways. I wonder how many are left today.

What amazes me is that some ISP's according to ESPN have drank the cool-aid and are paying the extortion fee. I suppose it's good to try new revenue models, but I sure hope this doesn't catch on.

Reminds me a project I was working on years ago where we had a device that processed video signals thought a pc. Someone engineer brought up the issue of macrovision (or product stripped out macrovision as a side-effect). So someone (engineer) checked it out and found out that we would have to pay the macro-folks many $ to *not* strip the encoding. "Well that's a no-brainer, we're done!" all the engineers thought... until the lawyers got wind of it, paid the extortion fee, we made sure to implement macro-vision on the video out, and the product quickly flopped. I wonder if the ISP's lawyers are also somehow involved in this...

To me it would appear that someone submitted entries with an bogus title and accompanying description. Hacked? Hardly. What surprises me is that no one submitted Viagra programs with accompanying links in the description.

These aren't the droids you're looking for. Move along.