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Originally Posted by Ignition
I *nearly* typed a reply to this then realised I'd be giving away a recipe to make boxes muchly harder to detect.
In fact I think this thread is getting towards TMI state. While I appreciate freedom of information and everything else please people be careful, enough numpties with chipped boxes without giving extra info away *cough Escapee cough* 
Actually there are other ways to detect chipped boxes that just dissing each drop individually but that's another thing to get into.
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I am certainly not trying to get you to give more information away, it just gives me a wry smile on occassions where posters who work for ntl have used scaremongering statements to try and frighten would be customers of the "Box Chipping Brigade".
Yes I am aware of some measures that can be taken to narrow down potential users of chipped boxes, but no matter what cable network operator we are talking about the only solution is to 100% police the return of disconnected boxes. We all know that it is impossible and some customers will claim the box has been returned when it has not, I would expect it to be very difficult to charge a customer £1000 for a lost box as a deterent because the first genuine customer who takes it to court would not be asked to pay anymore than the box actually costs the cable operator.
There is unfortunately no method of locating a box to a house located on the network if it's illegal, MAC addresses are easily changable for those with the equipment and knowledge. I change MAC addresses on equipment daily, and I'm sure someone with more knowledge than myself in that are could take product XYZ and reverse engineer it.
I never heard anymore about the problems encountered on a certain operators network shortly after they launched digital services, we recovered a box from a customer due to "certain" technical issues and on returning to the headend with the box under our arm, we were still able to ping a box with the same MAC address and IP address on the network fed from the same hubsite.
That was all hushed up and we never actually found out if it was a vendor problem ie: 2 boxes with the same MAC address, or a cloned box. It would be one hell of a coincidence to have a vendor mistake and both boxes being located on the same hubsite. What was really funny as customer care arguing with customers who claimed they were being charged for movies they had not watched around the same time, the company denied that this was possible and would not remove the charges for the films from these couple of customers. The multiple address problem was never followed up and I know the box we recovered was from a genuine paying subscriber, so it was the Real McCoy!
There will always be people out there who want to get something for nothing, and companies will always make amazing claims about their facilities for pinpointing these people.
I remember how much difficulty we had finding a babbling box one day, and that was on constant transmit whilst we were searching for it. It ended up located in the Set-Top clean and screen facility, and we got there just as the batch were about to be packed up and sent out for customer use.
I have no intention of giving away what I know would help the rogues, but still dont agree with BS to put people off.