Angry in the Great White North

From my Sitemeter referal list:

This site was listed because the words "Cogeco" and "steal" show up in this blog, though not in the same post.

My advice to you, pal, is pay for cable, or get some rabbit ears. The only discussion of theft at Angry in the Great White North is the government stealing from the taxpayer.

And for the record, I have no clue how to steal cable.

But there's a funny story here. A few years back, I was assigned the job of designing a portion of a smartcard-based parking meter system for parking authority in Hong Kong. People would have smartcards, charge with cash, and then swipe the card in the meter to purchase time.

This was to combat rampat theft, where local gangs would saw parking meters off of their posts, drive away with them, then later crack them open for the change.

Coin collectors would stop rolling this heavy coin canister up and down the streets, and instead would use a handheld computer with a card interface on a ribbon cable to download the "money". That "coin collector" was what I had to design.

I had never programmed for a smartcard system, so I started with the specs on how the cards were supposed to work.

The specs were as clear as mud for someone who had no idea where to start.

So I went to the internet to see if anyone had written a how-to about smartcards. Turns out in Europe, these smartcards are used in a lot of TV-top cable decoder boxes. A popular pasttime was to program your own card, insert it, and decode channels you weren't paying for.

Which channels? Porn channels, of course.

So there I was, with porn sites up on my computer, hunched over and engrossed in reading the detailed specs provided by technically adept perverts. After several people walked by my cube, someone talked, and I got a visit from the IT manager, as well as my boss.

After several attempts, I managed to both convince them that it was work related, and that I should not lose my job.

Subsequent attempts to convince them of the need for more in-depth research were rebuffed, and I was told to figure out the proper specs.