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Former Anti-Piracy 'Bag Man' Turns On DirecTV
Cowards Anonymous writes "SecurityFocus has this story: 'A one-time enforcer in DirecTV's anti-piracy campaign is suing his ex-employer for wrongful discharge, after he allegedly resigned rather than continue to prosecute the company's controversial war against buyers of hacker-friendly smart card equipment.' John Fisher claims that he was hired by DirecTV as a senior investigator to track down satellite signal pirates. Instead, he claims, he was no better than a 'bag man for the mob'; coercing people into paying money for stealing services when he had no proof whether they had really done so."
DirecTV is known to tolerate a "social hack" that allows access to a service you're geographically prohibited from getting. Simply call them and tell them that you want to change your "service address" but not your "billing address"... they don't bother to verify the service address you submit, and then all of your equipment will have access to the programming somebody at that location would have gotten, including major network and regional sports network programs.
It wouldn't be possible for them to verify it. Are they supposed to send someone out to the address of EVERY customer every time someone reports a change of service address?
When I worked for Echostar I used to hint to people to do this without actually saying it.
For example, the rules for network qualification are based upon 50 year old maps. They don't take into consideration things like new buildings that can block signal in urban areas or new powerlines that interfere with broadcast signals.
So someone would call in and want to order network programming and their address wouldn't qualify, I'd apologize to them and tell them that I couldn't do it. Often I'd hear things like "My brother lives 3 blocks away and he can get these." I'd check the brother's address and he in fact did qualify for networks. I'd then tell the customer "Yes sir, that address does qualify for networks. If your service address were in that area, you'd be able to get these too." The smart people would pick up on the inflection in my voice and ask if they could have separate service and billing addresses. The obvious answer is Yes they could. They would then proceed to give me a service address that was the same as the "brother's" address and add an "A" or "1/2" to the house number. Boom, they'd qualify for networks. My company was blameless because we can't be held responsible if someone lies to us about their address. And I got the credit for another upsell.
Echostar has made it harder for people to do this though. They've switched most of their local programming to their "spot beam" satellites. 3 years ago, all of their local networks were broadcast all over the continental US. The only thing that prevented you from getting Pittsburgh's local channels while you were in Las Vegas was the setting on Echostar's computer system. In 2002 they started spotbeaming their locals so for example the Pittsburgh local channels could only be received while IN the Pittsburgh area. If you had a mobile home and you drove from Pittsburgh to Washington DC you can't pick up the signal for Pittsburgh locals anymore. They didn't do this just to comply with SHVIA regulations. They did it so they could pack more channels into the part of the spectrum that they were granted. By restricting the signals in this way, they made it possible to spotbeam the channels for 5 cities in the portion of the spectrum that was originally taken up by 1 city's local channels.
They've done nothing to stop it because they get sales they otherwise wouldn't have gotten, and it's really the content suppliers who are losing out of money they'd otherwise be entitled to.
Local content providers don't lose out on anything. Most of the people who do this are living in the "shadow" of some structure that is preventing them from picking up broadcast signals anyway. If you can't watch a channel, you can't see the commercials. The local channel never had you in the first place, they aren't losing anything when you get the channels from another city. Cable companies lobbied congress HARD to get those rules into place. It was about forcing the hand of consumers, and protecting their business model.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Where you bought your ISO programmer has no bearing on how you are going to use it. Even if a developer bought an ISO programmer from a site that clearly was targetting DTV pirates, the developer may have just found them to have the best price or the fastest service and purchased the programmer there. That definitely doesn't mean they planned on pirating DTV any more than buying a car at a dealership known to sell lots of cars to drug dealers mean you plan on engaging in the drug trade.