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TV detector van

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Re: TV detector van

#181

Post by NeedMoreTea »

agurk wrote: post #7

I lived in a flat in England in the early 2000s which kept getting letters from the BBC saying we didn't have a TV licence. The letters were sometimes more threatening for a period, then sometimes more reconciliatory. They were also running TV adverts at the time claiming they had detector vans about, and if you didn't have a licence you'd be caught. I did some research at the time, and it seemed that evidence from a…

We cord cut and moved away from broadcast TV round about 2000, or a little earlier, yet retained a TV. It was far, far easier to get the BBC to see sense about licence status - either not needing one, or having one and they simply messed up details on moving or whatever, than it has been with Crapita. Since the BBC were forced to outsource it, in the early 00s, we found it simply wasn't worth bothering with. They were getting it wrong about our status over 50% of the time, despite following their "prove your innocence" hoops every year or two on the website, often the same day the letter or email was received.

Eventually we gave up and just let them inundate our paper recycling. They've been comically useless. I am certain after 15 years of their incompetence, Capita have been responsible for many an unsafe conviction.

Re: TV detector van

#182

Post by PhasmaFelis »

rolph wrote: post #167
PhasmaFelis wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brushing your teeth doesn't affect breathalyzer readings at all. Alcoholic mouthwash can give false positives for up to 20 minutes, and cops are supposed to wait and try again for that reason; you've got a good shot at getting it thrown out if they don't.

around my parts, it would be tampering with evidence even if there is no proof or indicator that evidence of a crime existed, before "tampering" the brushing teeth and mouthwash is simply part of a power commuters hygene routine. in NY for example people use the time spent at traffic lights to do all sorts of things.

That's fucked up, I'm sorry. In most places in the US, cops would ignore it, because it doesn't do anything. Breathalyzers detect metabolized alcohol vapor from your lungs; nothing you can put in your mouth will stop that as long as there's alcohol in your bloodstream and you're still breathing.

Re: TV detector van

#183

Post by hogFeast »

filoleg wrote: post #44
arprocter wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe when you buy a TV retailers are required to take down your address I bought one once and evidently they managed to typo the house number, so our neighbour down the street who didn't have a TV kept getting the 'we know you have a TV but no license threatening letters

>I believe when you buy a TV retailers are required to take down your address Is this for real? I remember thinking "dystopian as hell" when I heard about all the CCTVs in England, but this one takes the cake. I can at least see the points made by the other side of the CCTV argument, even though I very much disagree with them. Why cannot one just buy a TV in England without giving out their personal info?

It is actually worse than this. They send out the letters (it often seems randomly) AND they will send someone to come to your house who will "inspect" your TV/demand entry/make threats...

...this is one of these utterly bizarre public sector things where the govt will hire a private company to chase down people (usually immigrants, unemployed, etc.) and give them a cut of whatever is looted...unsurprisingly, this has proved to be controversial in practice.

I have actually heard of people who called the police because they were being harassed by these people. All so some chinless wonder from Oxbridge can get paid £200k/year commissioning dogshit documentaries about Ethiopian trance music (the BBC massively underpays for talent but employs an unfathomably large number of middle managers).

I would love to see how this kind of system would work in Texas.

Re: TV detector van

#184

Post by djsumdog »

sokoloff wrote: post #175
aidenn0 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember a satelite TV company put a message to call a particular number, and then filtered out the message in their official smart cards. Everyone who called the number was pirating their signal.

Satellite TV company arranges to "brick" pirate cards across the US days before the Superbowl: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-jan-27-mn-17728... https://blog.codinghorror.com/revisiting-the-black-sunday-ha...

huh .. but the Superbowl is always on a broadcast network too, so people could always just get out the ole rabbit ears (unless they had really bad signal from their local state)

Re: TV detector van

#185

Post by switch007 »

lordnacho wrote: post #65
excalibur wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The British government has a legal obligation to conduct all business in the least sensible manner available. It's in the Magna Carta.

In fact the system of government is derived from strange ladies lying in lakes distributing swords.

If I went around saying I was an emperor just because some moistened bint had lobbed a scimitar at me, they'd put me away!

Re: TV detector van

#186

Post by ryacko »

hogFeast wrote: post #183
filoleg wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I believe when you buy a TV retailers are required to take down your address Is this for real? I remember thinking "dystopian as hell" when I heard about all the CCTVs in England, but this one takes the cake. I can at least see the points made by the other side of the CCTV argument, even though I very much disagree with them. Why cannot one just buy a TV in England without giving out their personal info?

It is actually worse than this. They send out the letters (it often seems randomly) AND they will send someone to come to your house who will "inspect" your TV/demand entry/make threats... ...this is one of these utterly bizarre public sector things where the govt will hire a private company to chase down people (usually immigrants, unemployed, etc.) and give them a cut of whatever is looted...unsurprisingly, this ha…

As a foreigner, I could one-up your complaint with this:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/help/outsideuk

  I live outside the UK. Can I use BBC iPlayer?
  BBC iPlayer is funded by the UK TV Licence
   and its use is restricted to UK residents only.

Re: TV detector van

#187

Post by m0xte »

dewey wrote: post #116

I just spend some time trying to dig up the old TV ads for the licensing fee we had in Austria where they also had some kind of detector van with antennas. Unfortunately I wasn't able to find it. I was always curious how that might work.

AFAIK they detected the emissions from the IF strip on old televisions with a directional yagi antenna mounted on top of the van. This possibility disappeared when the IC based IF sets were developed in the 70s and 80s.

Re: TV detector van

#188

Post by a1369209993 »

jrjarrett wrote: post #132
monkeynotes wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ads were hugely dystopian: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8NmdUcmLFkw I am an ex-pat and as an adult I am have become quite disillusioned with the UK and glad to have gotten out a decade ago. I miss nothing about England except my friends, and I'd feel sorry for them, but they all seem mostly happy with life. Paying a license to have a TV (and it's assumed you must watch TV), opt in porn on the internet, CCTV ev…

I don't know where you moved to, but is the US anything admirable lately? Guess I should cross the UK off the list of places to flee to.

> is the US anything admirable lately?

Nope, the US is firmly in the Wants a Prize for Basic Decency[0] category. Which is better than most other places, but that says more about other places than the US.

0: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WantsAPrizeForBa...

Re: TV detector van

#189

Post by stordoff »

filoleg wrote: post #44
arprocter wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe when you buy a TV retailers are required to take down your address I bought one once and evidently they managed to typo the house number, so our neighbour down the street who didn't have a TV kept getting the 'we know you have a TV but no license threatening letters

>I believe when you buy a TV retailers are required to take down your address Is this for real? I remember thinking "dystopian as hell" when I heard about all the CCTVs in England, but this one takes the cake. I can at least see the points made by the other side of the CCTV argument, even though I very much disagree with them. Why cannot one just buy a TV in England without giving out their personal info?

The law was abolished in 2013. You were also free to give false information - I know a couple of people who gave their postcode as SW1A 2AA (they had a TV licence, they just didn't want to give their address to the retailer).

> The Wireless Telegraphy Act of 1967 (as amended) has been repealed, meaning that from 25 June 2013 onwards you no longer need to send us customer name and address details when you sell or rent out TV equipment. This also means your business no longer has to keep sales records to comply with the law on TV Licensing. If you don’t need these records for anything else you can destroy them from 25 June.

https://www.tvlicensing.co.uk/check-if-you-need-one/business...

Re: TV detector van

#190

Post by [deleted] »

ben_w wrote: post #150
joezydeco wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a bit too much confusion as to what era the BBC vans might have been using optical means instead of RF means. In the 1950s there wasn't much else on British television sets other than the BBC, right?

It doesn’t matter, the offence is “watch TV without a license” (and previously was, I think, “possess a device capable of watching TV”), not specifically the BBC. (iPlayer is not important to this discussion but complicates things a bit).

[deleted]
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