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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.
Can I have some of Rupert's cash now? I've no evidence, or anything, but that doesn't seem a problem.
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
But I can't see any reference to a shred of proof in these articles.
So why did I read them?
-S
We Apprentice Developers and Designers
I am sure there are copyright issues here. So how come a large corporation is able to get away but Dmitri Skylarov is still in jail? It always seems to be one rule for corporations and another rule for everyone else and yet another rule for the government.
It's interesting to note that DirecTV is in the process of sending out new smart cards for all of their satellite receivers nationwide. The letter announcing that fact cites "security", but it doesn't say whose security they are worried about. Unsophisticated DirecTV users will, of course, assume it's the user's security that's at stake.
...phil
"For a list of the ways which technology has failed to improve our quality of life, press 3."
Yeah yeah... You got the point anyway. However this brings up an interesting point... Even if they only posted only how the technology works, they are still breaking the DMCA and can go directly to jail w/o their $200. This is why it is so dangerous.
Okay so my grammar isn't the best this early either - "Even if they only posted how the technology works..."
Happy?
Pirates are gruff men on ships who say ARRR and steal your boat. People who illegally decode a signal being broadcast through their private air space are just people who illegally decode a publicly broadcast signal. The news corps is doing a disservice to the public by using slang terms and being unclear in their communication of a story.
Frankly, I don't care if companies hack each other...so long as I benefit.
It was only yesterday (*not kidding*) that one of the bigger Vivendi owned satellite TV (Canalsat) upgraded it's encryption system to "Seca2".
But I'm afraid the Seca2 system is DOA as it has already been cracked by Italian Crackers.
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
Ultimately no security scheme based on commodity hardware is secure against a determined attack. Even the clipper chip was broken. If the adversary has a scanning electron microscope available they are going to be able to reverse engineer the chip. Ross Andersson did a paper on this a while back.
The strategy the satellite companies use today is economic rather than purely technical. What they do is to design smart cards which are subject to progressive security flaws. They then send out different variations on the smart card to different customers.
The trick is that the pirate does not know which of the flaws matter and which do not. So if the pirate clones a particular card perfectly the satellite company can respond cheaply and effectively by just replacing the small number of cards that have been compromised.
If the pirate makes a more general attack the satelite co looks for any small difference between the cloned card and the genuine cards and programs a deactivation code to take advantage.
Most cloned cards are not perfect since the pirates are in competition with each other. It is better to get a cloned card out in 3 weeks than to wait a n extra couple of months and allow a competitor to steal the market.
The satelite cos generally wait until the pirates have sold a significant number of cards before sending out the deactivation codes. This discredits the pirates with more customers. If the customers learn that using a pirate card ends up costing them more than being honest in addition to being inconvenient they are more likely to turn honest. Another trick is to disable the cards right before big events.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
That's because the English language is defined by usage. That means:
1. People who say it's right to call copyright infringers "pirates" are correct
2. People who say it's wrong to call copyright infringers "pirates" are also correct - as long as they're arguing that it's morally, not definitively wrong; if they persuade enough people to adopt their viewpoint they'll eventually be definitively right too!
delight: The text of the article gets the term right, saying that their smart cards were "cracked".
dismay: The text then misuses the term again, saying Echostar was hacked.
Come on folks, if a site that supposedly is "news for nerds" can't get the term right, how is anyone else expected to?
(and don't give me the BS that hacking and cracking are the same thing)
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
So, Congress is full of pirates. Arrr, avast, ye mateys!
Good judgment comes from experience.
Experience comes from bad judgment.
Homer:Well I just bought some shares of News Corp.
Lisa: Dad that's fox!
Homer: Sell! Sell!
You are responding to a troll. A real honest-to-goodness "troll" that is just writing nonsense to "troll" for a reaction. Not someone (often mis-moderated as a "troll") who really believes the nonsense they write.
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.