Interesting Dream About Cable Boxes

[Skeetersaurus]

Last night, I dreamt I was having a rather-trivial conversation with another programmer in his home-office (as many of us have), it was general 'day-to-day' chatter, and I started talking about his preferred operating system for Raspberry Pi's and coding related to hardware.

Suddenly, the conversation changed from 'daily flippant' to serious and he says matter-of-factly, 'well, you know since the NSA started mandating observation systems into the regular FELD BOX, they are making sure they are watching everyone just like in that movie about 'pre-emptive police actions'. If you have one of the newer boxes, they are watching and that's why they are changing systems to force more FELD BOXES into general population use.'

As I often have to do, I had to wake up (and strain to remember the dream) until I could get my eyes open, wash my face, and do a search on what 'a FELD BOX' was, though I felt I already knew somehow. I couldn't find the word in my preliminary searches, so I opened a translator page that auto-identifies a language and it indicated that it was GERMAN for 'field'. Instantly, I remembered we were talking about TV shows, and that he was referencing CABLE BOXES.  Then I remembered a small part of our conversation that I had already let slip away - that the reason they had set up the FELD BOXES to spy was that not enough people had 'smart TVs' that had built-in audio-video recording abilities (too many were still holding onto older hardware TVs), and that their way to get around this was to force Cable encoding via digital TV and then even on old TVs, the user would HAVE TO have the boxes on each TV in the house.

I promise I am not such a paranoid in conscious thought, but many of my dreams of late have to do with such 'conspiracy theories', and knowing you can PCB a microphone and camera on a circuit board for $10 is quite unnerving to know that this would easily be hidden in a $400 cable box for the tiny size and price involved.

[ThePaladin]

I operate under the thinking that just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you.

[Skeetersaurus]

I operate under the thinking that just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you.

Not sure if you meant 'just because you're NOT paranoid...', but in that case, it appears that way.

In truth, I very-seldom have dreams about technology or computers or other such 'conspiracy items'. Again, this was such an 'out of character' dream for me, I felt it worthy of posting, due to the nature of society right now.

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By the way...last night was spent dreaming of a really nice 1970 Chevy Impala (4-dr), as if I owned it. Some night's dreams are better than others (it had cold AC and a big block...brought back those youthful memories).

[Goldengirl]

Wouldn't surprise me one bit. The technology is there, but we still pretend they won't use it on us. Sigh.

[ThePaladin]

Nope, it's an old joke but one I find carries a grain of truth. LOL.

Interesting that you dreamed of driving a classic car. I dreamed of driving a '53 Buick, my son buying a '57 Chevy wagon-something he would never do-and classic cars parked in driveways. It was so odd I even commented on it in the dream.

[Skeetersaurus]

Wouldn't surprise me one bit. The technology is there, but we still pretend they won't use it on us. Sigh.

Goldengirl, I couldn't agree with you more. I have worked in various technology fields for 30 years, and have done and seen things that most people couldn't fathom (as to how we got there, how it was designed, or in a lot of situations, why it didn't become a mainstream product but instead we let the technology die).

If you try to explain to people that we can and do intentionally manipulate weather with ionosphere energy bursts, they label you a conspiracy nut, but in the same breath they tell you that they need to heat something up in the microwave, not realizing that it is the same technology principle (particles used to induce molecular vibration to make the target's particles vibrate faster to produce heat) as ionosphere energy beams. You tell them that the government is violating 5 Constitutional Amendments to 'beat terrorism' and they don't have a problem giving up their rights, when they never even stop to ask 'if you are doing it to fight terrorism, why are you primarily deploying it in our own nation first instead of overseas where the terrorists are?' And my favorite one, is that you have a 2,000 mile border to the south that you politically don't want to consider defending, but you are body-cavity searching children at airports via the TSA - can you explain that reasoning to me in some sense of logic I can understand?

Anyone with a brain can see the real answer. Our government has recognized the enemy, and has now targeted the enemy with everything they can justify throwing at it. They just didn't care to tell any of us, that the enemy they have identified is us, the citizen.