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."

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Re:Whiskey Tango Foxtrot...

[tlhIngan]

Component and composite outputs on the back of every descrambler out there will spit it out in standard definition. You can't record HD signals out of them -- many won't even downgrade the signal, it'll just be dead. Getting high definition on any of those requires an HDMI hookup, which is encrypted, and therefore "tunerless" VCRs and DVD burners can't be used. Even getting signals OTA (not scrambled) doesn't do you much good because the tuners are usually integrated into the television. I haven't tuners being sold separately with HD outputs that can be sent to any COTS recording equipment. This is intentional, purposeful, and frankly conspiratorial on the part of the manufacturers.

Piracy is the only way the market for HD video recordings will survive.

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.

Re:I agree with the feds on this one

[Hatta]

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.

Re:I disagree with the Feds on this one, 100%

[JesseMcDonald]

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.