DirecTV to Pursue Pirates

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.

Comments

Cable

[telbij]

Heh, the other day a cable sales guy came to our house and was like "We know you're stealing cable, would you like to subscribe now at reduced rates?"

More companies should offer this kind of piracy discount, I think it'd be a great sell :)

From what I understand...

[cr0sh]

There are two main methods used for gaining "illegal" DTV access:

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?