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Still More on News Corp. Hacking Charges
Spike and others wrote in about this ongoing saga: subsidiary of Vivendi claims that a subsidiary of News Corporation cracked their satellite TV smart cards and posted for public download. (See our previous stories.) Two new stories from the Associated Press and Yahoo note that although the two companies are apparently dropping the original lawsuit (since News Corp. is making a large investment in Vivendi), Echostar is now claiming they were hacked too and the U.S. Justice Department is investigating possible criminal charges.
DirecTV (aka "Dave") is NOT currently swapping access cards. They finished swapping Period 3 (aka "HU") smartcards for their Period 2 (aka "H") smartcards.
Dave's H cards were completely exploited by hackers (aka "testers") and were completely protected from any electronic countermeasures (aka "ECM") by a method of testing called emulation. Dave had no choice but to instigate a card swap.
The problem now is that Dave's HU cards are almost completely exploited also. About the only thing most testers can't do with Dave's HU cards is truly emulate. There is a form of pseudo-emulation out called C-Master and Kryptonite, but those don't truly protect the card from a ASIC-killing ECM.
Dave's latest card out is called a P4. This card is immune to all forms of public testing at this point. There is currently a small group of elite testers who are attempting to perfect a method of bypassing the P4's security measures via a method called "glitching". It involves varying the voltage supplied to the card in a certain way in order to gain entry. Read/write entry via glitching the P4 has be perfected at this point. Bypassing the P4's security measures and reading/writing to the card can be done at will now. The last thing left to do is to finish up something called "unlooping". A smartcard can get looped if the voltages during glitching aren't applied correctly. Basically, the card gets stuck in an endless loop. Unlooping a P4 card is still difficult and can take 15-30 minutes currently. The testers are hoping to speed the time up it takes to do this.
At some point, Dave may perform a HU to P4 swap. For the testers sake, let's hope that P4 unlooping gets perfected before that point.
Hope that clears things up a bit.
Now all this business is all pretty sleazy, vivendi claiming that their systems are invulnerable and could have only been destroyed by their competitor spending millions of dollars.
And the dodgy business that news corp has done.
These corporations are both pretty evil.
However, Noone is really paying much notice to what vivendi has been doing is the last decade.
You go to the vivendi site and they own everything. Here in australia they own monopolies on bus routes own a majority of the films that we watch and own almost all of the water sources that are here.
I recently was on a train in sydney next to a farmer. It turned out he was heading to the city to consult with his solicitor. We're in the middle of the worst drought that has been here for a long while, And he was telling me that he had just recently been approached by legal representatives of vivendi water who were claiming that he has no rights to dams on his own land and that he had to pay them money for his own water. He was in sydney seeking legal advice on this matter.
Whoever controls the water of the world controls the world and can basically hold the world for ransom and charge whatever prices they want.
Vivendi seems to solely be a corporation bent on world domination.