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Three Arrested For Conspiring To Violate the DMCA
jtcm writes "Three men have been charged with conspiring to violate the Digital Millennium Copyright Act after federal investigators found that they allegedly offered a cracker more than $250,000 to assist with breaking Dish Network's satellite TV encryption scheme: '[Jung] Kwak had two co-conspirators secure the services of a cracker and allegedly reimbursed the unidentified person about $8,500 to buy a specialized and expensive microscope used for reverse engineering smart cards.
He also allegedly offered the cracker more than $250,000 if he successfully secured a Nagra card's EPROM (eraseable programmable read-only memory), the guts of the chip that is needed to reverse-engineer Dish Network's encryption.' Kwak owns a company known as Viewtech, which imports and sells Viewsat satellite receiver boxes. Dish Network's latest encryption scheme, dubbed Nagra 3, has not yet been cracked by satellite TV pirates."
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Funny thing is, you can record high-def quite easily, you just need to purchase two legal products.
First, you buy a Hauppage HD-PVR, about the only consumer-level high-def recording box that handles up to 1080i via component inputs. Hey look, Myth supports it!
Now, for pesky HDMI... you buy a HD Fury 2, which takes HDMI (including HDCP!) and converts it to either RGB or Component outputs, and while it handles 1080p, the HD-PVR only has 1080i.
Now you have a high-def PVR solution, MythTV compatible.
Alternate methods is if your cablebox supports Firewire, and can output the high-def content over it (I've seen 'em where the SD content is output over Firewire, but the HD content isn't), but most satellite boxes don't have this, unfortunately.
If businesses then go and market that way in the form of hacked decoder boxes... still 'tough tits' for the satellite company? In your legal frame of mind, I mean; it's obviously 'tough tits' for them in practice anyway and they have to introduce the next generation of encoding (or a different key.. whatever).
It took me a while to understand how the whole business works, but that's basically the way things work now.
Essentially the way you buy a 3rd party satellite receiver out of the box, it can only receive unencrypted satellite streams. But the decoder box manufacturers pay groups of coders to surreptitiously create and release software which allows the box to decrypt encrypted streams. For the last couple years, DirecTV has been on the as of yet uncracked N3, while Dish and Bellvue (Canada's main provider, with a signal that you can get throughout the US) have been on the cracked N2. A few months ago Bellvue switched to N3, and a week or so ago Dish completed its switch to N3.
In the meantime, a couple companies have implemented something they're calling Internet Key Sharing for their receivers - a system that shares decryption information from a paid subscription with that company's unauthorized receivers. I'm not sure of the technical details, but apparently this doesn't work as well as a true crack - and of course requires an internet connection to receive the frequently chancing keys.
Viewsat, who Kwak represents, doesn't currently have an Internet Key Sharing program, so, unless they can get someone to crack N3 - nobody's going to be buying their receivers.
Mod my comments down. It'll be fun.
What's your idea? Other than to let all delivery of TV signals slip into an unsustainable business model of "free for all" ideology, of course.
The right to do math is much more important than the privilege of watching TV. If preserving that right means the death of satellite TV, oh well.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
The free market had nothing to do with 1929. You're ignoring the massive government intervention in multiple areas of the market which built and extended an unsustainable boom period leading (inevitably) to the crash, not to mention the continuation of those same policies after the crash, on a grander scale, which ultimately made the correction as long and difficult as it was.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
Wait wait wait...can someone please explain how the first post to the article was modded redundant? That just doesn't make sense to me...
Redundant means "information was already there", not "post has already been made".
I'm not saying I agree with the moderation, I'm just answering your question as to how a first post can be 'redundant'.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Wait a minute here. You just gave a pretty good argument for why anyone is justified in decoding satellite signals. Then you go and say something completely inconsistent, "I agree that they should be punished, what they were attempting to do was wrong". If you know that a person decrypting a satellite signal is not at fault because the signal is in his house, on what basis do you call that action "wrong"? These are two mutually exclusive positions.