DirecTV to Pursue Pirates 291
Trinity-Infinity writes "This story from CNNfn details DirecTV's & Hughes Electronics' plans to eliminate the piracy of their signals through a direct-mail campaign. Their source for creating their list of who to mail letters to? Searching bootlegging operations the feds have already busted. It is interesting that as many as 1 million people may be pirating, in comparison to DirecTV's 10 million paying customers." Ya know, I really want to pirate DirecTV, but not to get all the channels... just to get a damn FOX affiliate over my dish so I could use my DirecTivo for The Family Guy and That 70s Show. Is that to much to ask? I already pay for HBO and Sci-Fi channel. Anyway, there's definitely going to be a lot more cracking down on pirated dish stuff: they are getting crazy with the protective measures.
newbie question: sat systems in USA a'la Astra? (Score:2, Interesting)
Back at home, all I had to do was to buy a sat receiver, an 80cm dish, a small motor and the 'converter' (whatever that was called, which goes into the dish's focus point), and I was able to get hundreds [funet.fi] of channels [cnn.com]:
I don't want to start a flame-war: I just want a similar service here in the USA while I am here. How can I get it?
Or is it so that, in a similar fashion as for cellphones in the USA, I have to pay even for things which are (or should be) paid for already by someone else?
thanks for any detailed help.
PS: what I mean with the cellphone comparison is:
PPS: I don't want to mess with sat dishes larger than 1m for that, nor to spend more than $300 total for the whole rig (as I'd do in EU).
PC (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Family Guy (Score:2, Interesting)
The show is great. The problem is that Fox treats it like some kind of bastard step-child. The best way to kill a show is to move it around the schedule and make it disappear for months at a time. Rabid fans will follow it, but the bulk of the viewers, ones who settle into a routine viewing schedule, will give up on it, or assume it has been cancelled.
Choices (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:I'd do it too (Score:3, Interesting)
Oh, I have no problem with ECMs, better encryption, etc.
I say more power to 'em,
they have the right to drop any sort of signals
they like through their transmitters, and if the broadcasters can defeat the unsanctioned decoding, let them!
I just don't think it should be
C-X C-S
Cable (Score:4, Interesting)
More companies should offer this kind of piracy discount, I think it'd be a great sell
From what I understand... (Score:4, Interesting)
1. Cracked H card.
2. Emulator system.
A cracked H card is just that - back in the beginning of DTV, the smart cards used for access had an "H" designation or some such (am I showing my ignorance of the subject yet?) - these cards, when inserted into a legal DTV system, get programmed based on data in the video stream and data from the phone line. Due to various reasons, certain ones of these cards were never programmed, and as hacking them became more widespread, some were held back as blanks (as it was seen that they would soon be valuable). For the hacking scene, these "virgin" H-cards could be programmed to allow for all channels - so, buy or program a virgin card, pop it in, and get all the channels, for nothing.
Hughes et al. knew this, and developed ways to "destroy" these cards (ie, reprogram them - including the last "famous" Super Bowl hack of this past year) remotely. Sometimes the cards could be reprogrammed. But there is something about a "virgin" H card still - and they are tough or impossible to find cheap.
Now, there are emulators - but not a lot of people use them. Basically, an emulator is a piece of software running on a DOS PC (the software is well known - runs in DOS). Two serial ports are required on the PC - one is hooked up to a smart card reading device - and the other goes to a special "smart card" (actually, a custom PCB shaped like a smart card with pads and traces etched to put the pads in the same spots as an H card, and the traces come out to the edge to be hooked to the serial interface circuit, which is hooked to the serial port). Now, in the smart card reader is inserted the H card.
But what does this "emulator" software do? I have heard everything from it acting as some kind of "digital" filter - so that it doesn't all certain writes to occur (to blow away the H card functions), to that it does actual emulation of everything, and that the card handles the encryption, to other things as well...
This is a DMCA related issue - is the encryption being "cracked"? Or is the PC emulator system simply being used as a "go between" - and the smart card does the decryption?
Like I said - I am ignorant of most of this stuff (though no doubt I obviously know enough that with a little work I could set up a cracked system - problem is getting that damn H card) - does anyone know the answers to my questions?
Re:My question is... (Score:2, Interesting)
There are many issues. The first and easiest one for me is that I don't believe in copyright law. I don't believe in crimes without direct victims, and in my opinion copying something does not involve a direct victim. Perhaps copying and distributing to kill a competitor could be illegal under anti-monopolistic laws, but other than that I just don't see it.
Second. DirectTV is using public airwaves. They are sending signals into my home, onto my property. I should have the right to do anything I want with those signals. Actually I thought the supreme court had ruled that to be the case, but I guess I was mistaken.
Third. I don't believe in laws which are blatently ignored by most of the country. That leads to a situation where the government has the power to arrest anyone, for any reason, because everyone is breaking some law. If you're going to make a law, it has to be enforced. For this reason, I'm all for the 1 million people "pirating" DirecTV being arrested. Hopefully a few will be members of congress, a few will be great lawyers, a few will be rich, and a few will be mobsters. Hopefully we'll get a relative of each member of the Supreme Court. We'll see how quickly the laws get changed and/or overruled then.
Re:From what I understand... (Score:2, Interesting)
1 is a uniq identifier and bank of "tiers" or switches that the reciever can check against to see if it's ok for it to show you any given channel. DTV regularly sends a "tier update" targeted to your card's uniq ID, telling it to disable any range of channels you're not subscribed to.
2 The card tracks Pay Per View usage and stores that information in memory for periodic uploading via the phone connection.
3 The card provides decryption keys to the reciever so it can actually decode the MPEG video stream. The card and card interface doesn't have the bandwidth or processing power to do it itself. From watching the numbers roll by on my emulator, it appears that the system uses some kind of changing key encryption algorythm based on hardware in the cards themselves.
The first method for card manipulation is simply to rewrite the software and memory on the card. i.e. the card just authorizes everything and don't track PPV usage. This is known as a 3M (all for one and one for all!) Decryption keys are still coming off the card as usual. Because DTV can test and write to the cards directly through the reciever this is prone to ECMs. DTV can and has "blown fuses" in hacked cards and rendered them inoperable. (looped..)
The emulation method involves putting an emulator board in yor reciever's card slot. You connect this card to a PC via a serial port, then connect the PC to the card itself in a special card reader/writer (programmer) via the other serial port. The PC runs software that emulates a smart card and answers all authorization requests from the reciever. Because the encryption scheme is based on that card's hardware the emulation software passes through any encryption information to the card itself to get the correct key responses. Because DTV cannot write to the cards directly, this keeps the cards safe from being damaged by an ECM.
DTV has been ECMing for as long as there have been hacked cards out there, but now that so many people have begun using emulators, those ECMs are not effective countermeasures against many people. The newest generation of cards has again, been broken, and many still just hack the cards directly.
PS. Yes I DO use the tools to get all the channels, but I also subscribe to thier service. I pay them every month. I wonder if I'll get a letter...
But how... (Score:3, Interesting)
...and places that talk about it? (Score:3, Interesting)
I can see DirecTV 'going through the motions' trying to scare subscribers. I can also see them actually prosecuting a handful of little people just to put up a good front. But I really don't see them nailing the end user. Just scaring the bejezus out of most of them into, 'Gee. Should I subscribe to this site that has the latest emulator code? DirecTV might get my subscription information and go after me!'
Dudes, get over the "seriousness" of piracy. (Score:1, Interesting)
The laws are fucked. And there's lots worse a person can do than pirate. Go jail the real dangers to society here.
The ultimate slap in the face are CATV commercials that imply that stealing cable will get you condemned to hell.
It's just not much of a crime and ranks right up there with people photocopying magazine articles in the library.
Re:Will Canada be targetted? (Score:2, Interesting)
On the other hand, the sat. feed is intended for Americans only, and if we can pick it up, I wonder if this is some sort of violation of a CRTC law, because does DTV not OWN that feed?