Quote:Verizon has filed a patent for targeting ads that collect information from infrared cameras and microphones that can detect the amount of people and types of conversations happening in customers’ living rooms.

...

FierceCable first publicized the Verizon patent that gives examples of the DVR’s acute sensitivity in customers’ living rooms: argument sounds prompt ads for marriage counseling, and sounds of “cuddling” prompt ads for contraceptives.

http://washington.cbslocal.com/2012/12/0...customers/

Hmm, I hope they need approval to put a cable box with those features in your house and do not just sneak it into a regular cable box.

What happens if the arguing is the 'cuddling'? What kind of adds would pop up then?

(12-06-2012 05:20 PM)dcCid Wrote:  Hmm, I hope they need approval to put a cable box with those features in your house and do not just sneak it into a regular cable box.

You do know that I work for a cable company and saw everything you did last night.

(12-06-2012 05:55 PM)smn1256 Wrote:  

(12-06-2012 05:20 PM)dcCid Wrote:  Hmm, I hope they need approval to put a cable box with those features in your house and do not just sneak it into a regular cable box.

You do know that I work for a cable company and saw everything you did last night.

I hope you enjoyed the show. Your mom sure did. BOOYAH!!!!

You know, what will make this even better is recording conversations that can be used at a later time against you. Thank you Big Brother.

(12-06-2012 06:37 PM)chess Wrote:  You know, what will make this even better is recording conversations that can be used at a later time against you. Thank you Big Brother.

This is literally out of 1984...seriously. The government in 1984 watches the citizens through "telescreens" aka TVs.

Actually, from a technical standpoint, while this may look good on the drawing board, the amount of data the box collects and sends back would be limited by the available return path bandwidth. This means AT THIS TIME the recording of conversations or video would have to kept within the box itself until called upon, and even then youre limited to the storage capacity of the box. In a system with many tens or hundreds of thousands of boxes the return path simply would not be capable of carrying all this data - at this time. But all this is valid only for traditional cable companies. Any company that has fiber to the home could do this depending on how they are ultimately combined once they get to where they're going.

On a side note, I remember seeing more than just one customer, maybe 10 or so, that covered the remote control infrared receiver on the box with aluminum foil because they thought it was an all seeing eye.....and this was 20 years ago.

(12-06-2012 07:57 PM)Jugnaut Wrote:  

(12-06-2012 06:37 PM)chess Wrote:  You know, what will make this even better is recording conversations that can be used at a later time against you. Thank you Big Brother.

This is literally out of 1984...seriously. The government in 1984 watches the citizens through "telescreens" aka TVs.

This is private enterprise, not the government driving this.

Unless they want to increase profits by also blackmailing you.

(12-06-2012 09:00 PM)smn1256 Wrote:  Actually, from a technical standpoint, while this may look good on the drawing board, the amount of data the box collects and sends back would be limited by the available return path bandwidth. This means AT THIS TIME the recording of conversations or video would have to kept within the box itself until called upon, and even then youre limited to the storage capacity of the box. In a system with many tens or hundreds of thousands of boxes the return path simply would not be capable of carrying all this data - at this time. But all this is valid only for traditional cable companies. Any company that has fiber to the home could do this depending on how they are ultimately combined once they get to where they're going.

On a side note, I remember seeing more than just one customer, maybe 10 or so, that covered the remote control infrared receiver on the box with aluminum foil because they thought it was an all seeing eye.....and this was 20 years ago.

Thanks for the analysis. They do not have fiber on my block yet.

Your side note is funny - but then "just because you are paranoid, does not mean they are not watching you".

(12-07-2012 08:56 AM)dcCid Wrote:  

(12-06-2012 07:57 PM)Jugnaut Wrote:  

(12-06-2012 06:37 PM)chess Wrote:  You know, what will make this even better is recording conversations that can be used at a later time against you. Thank you Big Brother.

This is literally out of 1984...seriously. The government in 1984 watches the citizens through "telescreens" aka TVs.

This is private enterprise, not the government driving this.

Unless they want to increase profits by also blackmailing you.

So are telephones and email.

But this is ok, since it's a private enterprise and not the government, they have nothing but our best interests in mind. Right?

Some of you freedom-minded people need to be just as concerned about big corporations as you are big government. If you only have one or two choices for phone or cable service, for example, you can't use the "free market" excuse to get out of something like this if they all do it.

(12-07-2012 12:08 PM)mixduptransistor Wrote:  But this is ok, since it's a private enterprise and not the government, they have nothing but our best interests in mind. Right?

No one in this room has said such a thing.

Quote:Some of you freedom-minded people need to be just as concerned about big corporations as you are big government. If you only have one or two choices for phone or cable service, for example, you can't use the "free market" excuse to get out of something like this if they all do it.

You're scolding the wrong group. Most here are miles ahead of you on this topic. (And every other one, but that's beside the point.)

I, for one, welcome our new corporate overlords.

(12-06-2012 03:51 PM)georgia_tech_swagger Wrote:  

Quote:Verizon has filed a patent for targeting ads that collect information from infrared cameras and microphones that can detect the amount of people and types of conversations happening in customers’ living rooms.

...

FierceCable first publicized the Verizon patent that gives examples of the DVR’s acute sensitivity in customers’ living rooms: argument sounds prompt ads for marriage counseling, and sounds of “cuddling” prompt ads for contraceptives.

http://washington.cbslocal.com/2012/12/0...customers/

Will verizon share this info with our "Dear Leader"?

(12-07-2012 09:06 AM)dcCid Wrote:  

(12-06-2012 09:00 PM)smn1256 Wrote:  Actually, from a technical standpoint, while this may look good on the drawing board, the amount of data the box collects and sends back would be limited by the available return path bandwidth. This means AT THIS TIME the recording of conversations or video would have to kept within the box itself until called upon, and even then youre limited to the storage capacity of the box. In a system with many tens or hundreds of thousands of boxes the return path simply would not be capable of carrying all this data - at this time. But all this is valid only for traditional cable companies. Any company that has fiber to the home could do this depending on how they are ultimately combined once they get to where they're going.

On a side note, I remember seeing more than just one customer, maybe 10 or so, that covered the remote control infrared receiver on the box with aluminum foil because they thought it was an all seeing eye.....and this was 20 years ago.

Thanks for the analysis. They do not have fiber on my block yet.

Your side note is funny - but then "just because you are paranoid, does not mean they are not watching you".

Even if they eventually get fiber, the technology for getting all this info back to whoever wants it is still a daunting task. If you look at a typical cable channel line up, they squeeze in all their channels in the bandwidth from 50 to 750MHZ. Those same channels go out to everyone. But the return bandwidth (the signals going from your modem, cable telephone, or impulse PPV's and Switched Digital Video - channels that aren't on the system until someone's box is literally tuned to the channel and this could be just about any channel in the line up) goes from 0 to 50MHZ. Now pretty much everything below 15mhz is not usable because there is too much off-air garbage leaking into the system at these frequencies. And at the present time, the cble companies are gearing up to use around 30MHz of the rest of that bandwidth to provide faster upload speeds for modems plus other survailence (system monitoring, not spying)

So now if you want to spy on people you would have to treat every single box as it's own cable channel, and if 700MHz can only give us a few hundred channels, then how would we manage to get thousands and thousands of channels all back to a single location? No matter how much you compress the data, there is still too much of it going back to the cable company even if you had fiber directly to your house. I'm not saying this can't be done, but the costs of upgrading a system to do this would be enormous and for what benefit?

But if a box can pick up a few key words in a house and direct specific advertising to that house then that's almost the same as what GTS is doing here with his cookies and directing ads relative to the content on the page being viewed.

GTS, stay out of my living room!!!!! :irate:

(12-07-2012 09:06 AM)smn1256 Wrote:  

(12-07-2012 08:56 AM)dcCid Wrote:  

(12-06-2012 07:57 PM)Jugnaut Wrote:  

(12-06-2012 06:37 PM)chess Wrote:  You know, what will make this even better is recording conversations that can be used at a later time against you. Thank you Big Brother.

This is literally out of 1984...seriously. The government in 1984 watches the citizens through "telescreens" aka TVs.

This is private enterprise, not the government driving this.

Unless they want to increase profits by also blackmailing you.

So are telephones and email.

The government already makes phone and email companies record information and then looks at the information without warrants. Scary times. How long before the governments require these records to be kept and provided to the government at it's whim? They don't get warrants anymore even though the constitution requires it.

I understand that the government is an evil piece of **** in these matters, but how long until we, as a freedom loving people, actually hold the companies accountable for their culpability in these matters?

The Feds might be Batman, but corporations are willingly becoming Robin.