This discussion where people are talking about seeing things in black and white does raise a smile for me. It's OK to side up with ntl as a company as being in the right and the users of chipped boxes being in the wrong.
ntl used to use scramblers for their analogue service on some networks that were built in-house as a direct rip-off of the BDSE scrambler by Jerrold. I was involved in some of the latter design of this "Illegal" practice, where a Jerrold BDSE had parts of it's circuit copied so we could manufacture our own scramblers to work with the ACC2000/4000 and the 7000 series set-top box. I was involved in some of the design, but mainly came into the project late to upgrade the program tagging/identity to enable the unit to be used for PPV events. I have a full circuit diagram of these units, and if the original manufacturer had found out that ntl were using copies made in-house, I'm sure legal action would of followed.
Much of the Microwave link loss and path pfofile calculations for the WHAM trial were conducted with illegal software that I supplied to the ntl department running the project.
I'm just trying to say that ntl employees shouldn't get on their high horse about this, when the company uses illegal software and rips off other peoples products themselves.
