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Slashback: Palace, Perl, Coastalism
007 would prefer not to be required to go reinstall Linux. You may recall that in addition to various other pieces of head-adornment, the members of Britain's Royal Family rely on Red Hat, by way of their webmaster, Mick Morgan.
Brian writes: "Looks to me as if the Queen's webmaster is pulling out. See the letter at http://www.open.gov.uk/services/letter201200.htm. Let's hope the new owners keep Linux eh?"
Yet another yet another. Pittsburgher Kevin Lenzo wants you to know that June 13-15 in Montreal marks yet another Yet Another Perl Conference. They're also looking for sponsors worthy enough to fund their deeds of derring-do. Suggested reading includes parent organization the Yet Another Society and YAPC Europe (which will be terrorizing Amsterdam sometime in early August, CFP soon), and darn-near required reading includes the (and I quote) "kick-ass" Damien diary going at the Joy of YAS.
Do you ever suspect that some people code Perl strictly for the interesting conferences?
Hey, is there good barbeque in Oakland? In a clever move which might have caused Sherman some consternation, one of the coolest things about the city of Atlanta will shortly be appearing in Oakland, CA. A notice sent out by Usenix announces that November 6-10th of this year will be the next manifestation of ALS. Maddog Hall is sure to be there, so play hookey from work or school to go visit. The announcement reads, in part:
The ALS 2001 Program Committee invites you to contribute your ideas, proposals, and papers for tutorials, invited talks program, refereed papers track, workshops, work-in-progress reports, and symposia tracks. We welcome submissions that address any and all issues relating to Linux and the Open Source world.The Call for Papers with submission guidelines and suggested topics is now available at http://www.linuxshowcase.org.
Submissions are due June 5, 2001
Revenge of the -- oh, I won't say it. A coward who failed to sign his name writes: "DirecTV stuck on Sunday a week before the Superbowl and wiped out 98% of hacked DSS cards. Supposedly DirecTV wrote to an area that is write once thereby making the cards go into an infinite loop. Now the hackers have found a way to bypass that sequence in the ROM in the form of a DPBB (Dead Processor Blocker Board). The board has a simple Atmel ROM that glitches pass the looped part of the ASIC on the DSS cards. DSS hacking is back."
There's also Flint's Bar-B-Q. Also in a seedy part of town (there are lots of those in Oakland).
There's also Everett and Jones.
If you want excellent Korean wood-charcoal BBQ, try Koryo.
> Hey, is there good barbeque in Oakland?
flint's barbecue
Hey, is there good barbeque in Oakland? In a clever move which might have caused Sherman some consternation, one of the coolest things about the city of Atlanta will shortly be appearing in Oakland, CA. A notice sent out by Usenix announces that November 6-10th of this year will be the next manifestation of ALS.
Yeah, and those of us on the east coast are jumping for joy that there are now 141 Linux shows on the other side of the continent instead of 140; we can rest easy knowing California finally has a Linux expo, at the expense of Georgia. I felt bad they were being left out. Now I can rest easy.
1st Law Of Networking: Loose ends are bad, termination is good.
WWJD? JWRTFM!!!
Unfortunately, by the tenets of the DMCA, decrypting the DirecTV signal is illegal, at least for now.
- A.P.
--
* CmdrTaco is an idiot.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
Info on the move
Here is some info on why ALS moved, directly from Marc Torres himself.
"Oh...Oh...we've had a good conference in Atlanta for 4 years - lets say screw you to all the locals that helped us out and supported us and run it to California to kiss up."
Just a we bit bitter that ALS is moving and it's no longer just a 1.5hr drive.
Why not? If you can go to any Best Buy (or whatever), plunk down a few hundred bucks, and walk out without signing any kind of contract, what is wrong with it?
And I personally question the fine print on the cards. If you don't sign any contracts at the time of purchase, and there is nothing on the outer box indicating otherwise, then I then OWN the contents of the box. Doesn't mean I can redistribute the IP in it, but it is then my physical property, I can hack (either with an axe or a computer) it, spin, fold, mutilate, or remove tags all I want.
#include <stddisclaimers.h>
"'Tis great confidence in a friend to tell him your faults, greater to tell him his." --Poor Richard's Almanac
It's not Joe 6-Pack who is behind all this.
It's Pierre Litre in Canada who cannot possibly
get the service any other way.
The DSS broadcasters are not allowed to do business in Canada. The signal reaches them
just fine. So there is a *huge* motivation
to unscramble the signal. I believe if it hits
your house, you own it, whether it's an orange from the neighbor's tree, or a tv signal from
another country.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
The Security Focus article at http://www.securityfocus.com/templates/article.htm l?id=143 and slashdot article at http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/01/25/134321 8&mode=thread tell about what happened fairly well.
NYC
I'd agree that a lot of people are turned off by NYC. My personal opinion is that it is a noisy, crowded, filth ridden cesspool with an overabundance of rude and/or dangerous people.
My favorite city for big shows is Las Vegas. San Francisco is also most excellent. Other places that have had a pretty good track record include Chicago and Atlanta. Other places I'd rather visit than NYC... just about any other large US City... San Diego, Orlando, Dallas, Denver... Heck I think even Los Angeles would rank higher in my view than NYC.
I'm not advocating theft in any way, but I found this to be amazing, that rogue codewarriors had enough diligence to be able to figure a way around what everyone (Hughes included) thought was permanent.
That's not amazing. If anything, it's extremely sad. Would these same people expend as much effort getting and retaining a job as they do stealing DSS, they'd have more than enough money to be able to PAY for DSS. People like this make me sick.
I agree. In fact, in this new digital age we're in, I think companies should have to make a choice when it comes to protecting their "intellectual property," or, more accurately, their recently produced IP. They should either broadcast their stuff in the clear, and rely on the law to protect them, or they should rely on technology, and have no copyright apply to their work. They shouldn't be able to have both, especially not when the law portion is as draconian as the DMCA.
Silly signature limit . . .
Sorry, I should have expanded earlier. Digital property is a different beast than physical property; me "stealing" something doesn't deprive the original buyer of anything, though it does deprive the content producer of revenue (assuming I would have bought the property had I not "stolen" it).
In order to address this problem, we, as a society, have made a deal with content producers: we created a concept of ownership for imaginary things, like novels, and movies, and songs, and so on, that allow the content producers to profit from their creation. In return, though, the content producer agrees that society retains certain rights, like the rule of first sale (after someone buys a book, they can do what they will with it), various sorts of fair use, and the idea that copyrights expire.
Until now, the content producers had to agree to the deal, as they really couldn't effectively limit any of the rights society kept for itself, and they had to take what they were given from a legal point of view. Now, though, they want the protection of copyright without upholding their side of the deal; in fact, they want to set things up so that there's no way for society to make them agree to the deal we had before. I think they should be forced to choose: make the deal, and we'll protect your works under law (and remember that anything digital can be copied; CSS doesn't stop copying, just viewing), or protect your works with technology, and you don't have to accept the fair use provisions you would otherwise, but if your technology is broken, well, we're sorry, but you chose not to accept the deal. Content producers shouldn't be able to have it both ways.
In fact, we already have such a distinction when it comes to ideas. There's patents, where a company agrees to reveal the invention to the world, and for some period of time, no other company can use said invention, even if they come up with the idea on their own, and then there's trade secrets, where they can keep something secret for as long as they wish, and competitors can't do unfair things to learn about the invention, but if a competitor discovers the idea independantly, well, too bad. A company isn't allowed to claim exclusive use of ideas they won't reveal to everyone else.
My apologies for the quotes, incidentally. Words in quotes usually annoy me, but words like property, theft, steal, and so on don't mean the same thing when used in reference to IP as opposed to physical property, but we have no substitutes, so I use the quotes to emphasize that they need to be looked at differently.
Silly signature limit . . .
Goat. Gaaaahhhhhh. I grew up eating goat, and so I've always had an aversion to it, although Doug's was edible. The turkey was excellent, I'd forgotten their menu since its been quite a while since I was there. I don't even know what E&J is, but Flints was great until it got sold off a few years ago. La plus ca change....
:-)
OnTopicPost: Is anyone going to this linux conference? Here in europe, we've just had a couple back to back, in Paris and Brussels. Good stuff, but no late night barbeque
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
Your analogy is braindead. Since when does receiving radio signals the "pollute" or "divert" or "dam up" the signal?? You are not harming *anybody* in *any* manner by merely decrypting signals you are already receiving. Talk about pollution and diversion are rubbish.
Just saying "descrambling dss signals is illegal" doesn't *explain* anything. We know it's illegal. But why?? These signals are already passing through our very bodies. It's ridiculous.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Someone that helps with ALS said they could not get a spot in Atlanta this year. Everything is just full. I'd be happy to see them bring it to Raleigh, but we don't have enough room.
As for NYC...I was at LWE and it was *DEAD*. People don't like to go there for shows..maybe it's better in the summer but it was about 1/3 as busy as LWE in San Jose.
They're transmitting bits. You're interpreting them. Get used to it. If you don't like the bits they're sending, because they're too confusing for your bootleg-hacked not-smart-enough-card, :-) or find some better reverse engineers.
buy the real thing (ok, smuggle it from your US Mailboxes Etc. box
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
When I first saw this, my mind translated it into this:
For all the time and effort spent into developing Linux, they could buy a thousand copies of Windows.
Aw, come on. Even presuming that all the people that were using hacked cards were doing so in the US, where it is illegal, as opposed to some/most being in Canada, where it's (according to previous comments) perfectly legal, your argument is still flawed.
Why do you climb a mountain? Because it's there. Half of the purpose of hacking like this [and it is hacking, not cracking, when you actually develop a new workaround like this] is the fun. Sure, these people are probably spending more in development than they'd spend on a full subscription, but that's like driving around the mountain.
"Evil company X is threatening to restrict our rights! Let's all get together to stop--OOOH! SHINEY!!!" -- AC
Why is this column called Slashback anyway? Wouldn't "Backslash" or "Backslashdot" be a bit more appropriate?
There is one huge return: they get to keep broadcasting high demand content.
The contracts that they sign with their content providers no doubt stipulate that DirecTV has to make every effort to keep the signal from being viewed by anyone who is not paying the subscription fee.
If they don't try to stop the hackers (and succeded every once in a while), one of two things will happen - CNN won't license the feed to them anymore (reducing the quality of the service they offer, losing them subscribers and reducing their profits) or CNN will charge them more to make up for the extra viewers who aren't paying the fee, (reducing their profits outright, or losing them future subscribers who go to a cheaper system).
Should you have the right to decode radio waves that come through your property? IMO, yes. But there's nothing that says that they have to make it easy.
Nothing to see here. Move along.
The local cable company here (Las Vegas, NV) alludes to that danger in its anti-cable theft ads.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
For one thing, canadians can't buy the service at all, it's more illegal there then it is to 'steal' it. And in the US, the amout of channels you get by 'stealing' the signal is far greater then any of the packages, especialy when you figure in pay per view movies and porn
Amber Yuan 2k A.D
"and dear god does this website suck now." -- CmdrTaco
Here's a Related Link For "learning" about watching illegal Cable TV on your linux box. Haven't tried it yet mostly because My TV tuner card sucks.
Also, I could be wrong, but suppose a guy (not me I swear!) wanted to steal cable signals. If they wanted to go with the DSS method, they wouldn't have to pay ANY monthly service fee. The guy stealing Signals from his local cable company would likely have to pay for the "basic" package while his little black box would be considered the "upgrade".
For all the time and effort spent into developing a hack for DSS, they could buy a thousand subscriptions to the service...that said, I always find the disclaimers on these sites amusing:
/.s they've been getting recently. I'm a bit surprised they don't make enough in advertising to have to ask for PayPal donations (or maybe they really don't need them, and are just looking to feed themselves).
You understand that www.HackHu.com does not promote nor condone signal theft of any kind and you do not hold www.HackHu.com responsible for the actions of any of their users as it is the users' responsibility to comply with all local and State laws of their territory and country.
This site is for educational and informational purposes ONLY. It is not our intention to assist you in committing fraud or performing any illegal acts
The news page mentions how much traffic the site will be getting this month. I'm sure everyone who's downloading these programs are using them completely lawfully. Yeah, right. Ah well, I bet the site just loves these
"The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent." --Carl Sagan
Well, it's easy to point at corruption and wag your finger, but you have to understand in the case of the DMCA the general opinion was that it was the right thing to do. This wasn't your average porkbarrel project or individualized tax loophole - the bill passed unanomiously or nearly so.
You could just imagine the conversation at some Washington bar:
Entertainment Type: Senator, let me ask you a hypothetical question. If we were to offer some service, that people were supposed to pay for, and someone invented a device that allowed them to recieve the service for free, should that be illegal in someway?
Senator: Well, of course.
ET: Well, let me tell you something. It isn't under current law.
Senator: [Should be asking why, but isn't, and ET wouldn't exactly want to explain Fair Use law anyway] Well, we could do something about that, what do you have in mind.
ET: In the new "Digital Millenium", our goal is to protect content with access devices blah blah blah blah.
Senator: Huh? OK. I need another drink.
(Some time later) Senator 2: But wouldn't this bill abridge people's fair use rights? My constituants like to record things of the TeeVee with the VeeCeeArr. Those things are really a wonder.
Senator 1: Well we'll just put a provision in there saying this bill doesn't do that (possibly never aware that that was the entire point of the bill to begin with...)
When I hear the word 'innovation', I reach for my pistol.
IANAL (as usual) but as far as I know, the law states that receiving airwaves is legal, but receiving encrypted airwaves then decrypting them isn't.
For the last time, PIN Number and ATM Machine are redundancies!
I've got 2 futons and 120 ft of CAT-5 waiting for anyone coming to my home town of Montreal for the YAPC!
Click here to become buddies with a budding perl lover up north! (yes Cam, you can come too!)
I'm a writer, a poet, a genius, I know it. I don't buy software, I grow it.
nor a natural right
Sure, Locke interpreted intellectual property as a subset of royal monopolies, but plenty of other natural rights theorists instead argue it's more properly interpreted in the light of his theories on physical property.
Locke's theory was that someone becomes the owner of an unowned resource by applying his labor to it. Which arguably applies even more firmly to intellectual property, because it is a pure product of work, instead of the transformation by work of a limited physical resource to which no one has an inherent right.
There's a reason most advocates of eliminating intellectual property use Hobbes-authoritarian (government has all power), Burke-conservative (common law tradition is right), Marx-socialist (property is theft), or FDR-progressive (property is merely necessary to society) theories to bolster their claims, instead of natural rights (classical) liberal theories.
There's no "we" in team, only "me"
You're receiving encrypted signals, you've got to go through an extra step to decrypt them. This should be legal (and probably isn't, but I don't write laws). In my opinion its also in the companies rights (and good judgement) to try to use technology to prevent this. That's what DirectTV did. They could've easily done a sting operation but they didn't. Wait till the dumb SOB's call in and complain they can't see the SuperBowl, give them a choice, a five year fully loaded DirectTV contract or a visit from the police. This has been done before.
Was it cost effective? Probably, most of the people with affected boxes probably weren't 'hackers', they just bought hacked boxes. A lot of them would gladly purchase a DirecTV to get their football fix.
I still think the DirectTV hack was beautiful, even if I would've been pissed off (sort of, but laughing) had I been one of the ones affected by it.
Chris Kuivenhoven is a thief, beware
www.theregister.co.uk/content/archive/16377.html
Interestingly, DirecTV's method of defeating the hackers seems at least as ingenious as the hacker's methods of circumvention.
So nice to be reminded that his royal highness, Linus, selected his subjects, the Queen and her family, to use his OS. It's good to know that someone of such great stature as Linus was gracious enough to let his lesser rival, the Queen use his system. Maybe he'll knight her, one day.
Huh? My DSS system never went anywhere.
Oh wait, I *pay* for mine. When exactly did Slashdot become "Elite Script Kiddie Central"?
I think that the DSS people knew that the ECM wouldn't work forever, but, a lot of people would subscribe legitimately to watch the superbowl in frustration.
Here, in Calgary, AB, Canada, dealers offered credits for turning in your grey market system (dish, receiver, AND smart card) towards a locally sold system.
Doug's, Flint's and Everett & Jones are all good, but if you're willing to go up San Pablo to Richmond, Bobby's Backdoor Cajun BBQ is unparalleled. Another local Southern highlight is Roscoe's Chicken & Waffles (only 2 things on the menu!) near Lake Merritt. (Roscoe's was better before they moved, but still first rate.)
anticypher didn't mention the BBQ goat and turkey at Doug's, both of which are excellent.
-Tom Duff
Hey, is there good barbeque in Oakland?
I couldn't have made it through school without Doug's Barbeque, open until 3:00 AM most nights, 3600 San Pablo Blvd, Oakland. Not recommended for pasty white solitary geeks at 3:00 AM, due to its location under the freeway on the north edge of the seedier part of Oaktown. But worth it for the best ribs, fried chicken, roast lamb and slabs o'beef around.
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
You analogy is seriously flawed. You can look at the river all you like. Within certain boundaries, you can do whatever you want with a river flowing through your property. What you cannot do is dump polution in the river that travles downstream, or divert the river, or dam it up. Likewise, my braodcast of radio waves is regulated by the FCC. But as far as I know, there is no government regulation on radio receivers.
The DMCA makes it illegal to make devices to decrypt these transmissions. So yes, dss cards are illegal under the DMCA.
Now, I personally believe that the DMCA is *wrong* (never confuse the law with what is right), and possibly unconstitutional (which would mean it was not merely unjust, but illegal as well). But until it is demonstrated unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, or otherwise repealed, descrambling
dss signals is illegal.
Someone mentioned wireless LANs. This falls into the same category. It is NOT illegal to intercept wireless LAN traffic on your own property. However, what you do with the information gained may or may not be illegal.
What happened is DirecTV basically destroyed the smartcards that people were using to pirate cable by destroying some bits in the PROM. If a certain bit isn't 1, then the card is unable to boot up.
:-)
Some hackers then created a boot-strap-loader, which mimics the normal boot process of a normal card, then once the boot-up process gets past the point where it checks for that 1 in the PROM, it then hands over the remainder of the boot-up sequence to the DirecTV smartcard, and it can be used again to steal signals.
Note: This is very watered down version of what happend, so don't flame me
Doh!
There would be huge risks if DirecTV accidentally destoryed several subscribers cards an hour before the Superbowl. With it happening a week beforehand, it's soon enough so that the pirate community didn't get free Superbowl coverage, and long enough to replace accidentally destoryed cards. Also, the goal was to get those people that were pirating to subscribe, and a week allows DTV to send a new card to those people.
Doh!
If DirecTV wanted to be bastards they would have done the infinite loop thing an hour before Super Bowl. A few people would have been pissed of and hacking faster than you can believe :)
--- I used to moderate, then I read the -1 articles and decided having to filter through them was not worth it.
Actually, another advancement has been made that some view better than DPBB boards. By flashing a card unlooper device with some new code, it can be turned into a card programmer that can bypass said area on the card.
I'm not advocating theft in any way, but I found this to be amazing, that rogue codewarriors had enough diligence to be able to figure a way around what everyone (Hughes included) thought was permanent.
If you ask me, the main goal of wiping out the H cards was because it simply became too easy to pirate the service - my estimate is at least 100,000+ people were pirating DirecTV this way. It is still impossible to use these cards as they were before, but they can now be used in emulation set-ups. Most people don't want to be bothered to do that though, and the population of people who will do that is a small enough number for Hughes to be able to call their H card strike a success, because at most there will be 5,000-10,000 people using said emulation setups.
For the last time, PIN Number and ATM Machine are redundancies!
I assume that's British Civil Service Speak for "You're Out of the Loop, Sucker!" One of my favorite TV characters is Sir Humpherey Applebee, who once said:
Why can't American bureaucrats be that entertaining?__________________
The whole DirecTV thing, I say more power to the hackers out there. The broadcast monopoly in Canada is ridiculous, and anyone who circumvents the absolute garbage CRTC regulations deserves a pat on the back, a hearty handshake, and a nice beer.
BTW, the signals that are broadcast are penetrating my body and passing through me with no permission. Why should it be illegal to decrypt something that is physically passing through me as I write this? I never asked them to broadcast their signal through me. Same with cellphones and all that. If the signal is passing through my body, then IMO I have every right to do what I want with that signal.
Synchronized cocks!
I consider myself fairly literate when it comes to technical matters, but the sheer volume of information on the subject of DSS hacking makes me wonder how Joe 6-pack could ever commit $300-$400 to purchase something that could become unusable literally overnight, unless he is willing to keep on top of updates and patches and unloopers and reprogrammers.
Compare that to cable theft...you buy a box and it works and it always works. Cable companies can't change encryption schemes overnight. In truth, in the five years I've been in my home location we are still using the same Jerrold/GE boxes. A one time fee of $200 for five years of unlimited cable seems like a worthy temptation.
I am honestly surprised that there isn't a bigger market for these digital cable black boxes. Almost as many channels as DSS plus the local stuff plus many people feel they can rationalize it by paying for the basic cable connection.
So I think that part of the effort that goes into the DSS hacking scene must truly be the hacking spirit, the doing something difficult to see if it can be done. I can see that modivation but at best that could only be a couple thousand dedicated souls. Where the other 98,000 customers are coming from I just can't understand.
-JoeShmoe
-- I wonder which will go down in history as the bigger failure: the War on Drugs or the War on Filesharing
You know, it's things like this that make me question what exactly we own. The airwaves are public property, at least, they were the last time I checked. Yet, I think a company has a right to reclaim its investment in some satellites. Launching those things isn't cheap.
A question, though. If the airwaves are public, what's illegal about using a signal that you didn't permit someone to send onto your property? I think that DirecTV is spending far too much money trying to stop the fraction of a percent of their viewers from stealing service. Is it really cost effective?