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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."
Serves them right, while I'm against the DMCA trying to profit off of someone else's work is not right. They deserve what they get.
Is there a reason that Dish Network can't use an open algorithm and some open, established encryption 'scheme'? Wouldn't that actually be more secure? And cheaper to develop?
I'm not a lawyer, so this confuses me. This isn't a civil case? it's a criminal case?
Why aren't downloaders put in jail then?
Belief? Hope? Preference?The Existential Vortex
So am I supposed to be outraged just because the DMCA was involved?
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
what a racist article...
weinersmith
I mean, really... That's like awarding a Nobel Prize for *Attempted* Chemistry!
...that (a) this is a good thing (commercial operation) but that (b) the DMCA wasn't necessary at all. Aren't there theft of service laws already on the books for receiving private/pay TV services without paying for them? And, since this isn't actually a DMCA violation case, but rather a conspiracy to violate the DMCA, wouldn't it be just as much a conspiracy to illegally receive service?
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
<Sideshow_Bob>Conspiring to violate the Digital Millennium Copyright Act... Now honestly, what is that? Do they give a Nobel Prize for conspiracy chemistry?</Sideshow_Bob>
I'd rather have someone respond than be modded up.
I had a friend who claimed that he had found a way to pirate DirecTV's service. He only stopped doing so when he realized there was still nothing worth watching. Eventually he opened his own business. He named the company after a component that was essential to the process. I remember when I helped out we'd get about one call a week from people trying to ask not in so-many words if we could help them with their "DirecTV stuff". (It was my first call on it that caused me to mention it to my friend, who then told me what the company name actually meant.)
He pirated the service for about two years. Funny thing was, about a year after he stopped he got hit with a lawsuit. He transferred as much stuff as he could out of his own name and braced for the inevitable. He only got away because he had a friend who knew some influential people. Incidentally, my friend his now his friend's personal no-cost 24/7 concierge tech support.
Anyway, he'd get these calls from people and he'd try to deny that he knew what to do. If someone pressed the issue (usually it was his friends or old co-workers telling others who could help) he tried to do the "scared straight" thing. Funny thing is, some of them would get mad at him for not helping. So many people are willing to throw away financial security just so they don't have to pay for the NFL Channel.
Those who believe the Internet is private,
find their privates are on the Internet.
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I'm (very) rarely a fan of the DMCA but, in my opinion, this is a good example of why it was set up - to stop commercial abuse of IP. These guys were knowingly circumventing copyright protection methods in an effort to make a profit. These exact situations are what needs to be stopped, not the teenager posting a mashup on youtube...
At least they didn't walk across the Menominee River Bridge with an empty soft drink can and try to get 10 cents from the State of Michigan for it at Angeli's. According to the sign, that can get you 5 at the Big House in Pontiac.
It's fun to violate the DMCA
It's fun to violate the DMCA
I consider the DMCA to be one of the most unjust and cruel laws the USA has. I sympathize with the people doing this to the following limited extent: If you are a subscriber to a service, you should be able to use any compatible QAM enabled equipment you wish.
This is a little different because people who violate the DMCA like this usually are doing so to secure their fair use rights. These people just wanted to outright steal the service. So thats bad. However, two things.
Why are police involved in this sort of thing? Well, really, although in theory, violating the DMCA is a civil action, but around 2003, the government decided that all copyright infringement was criminal. Because the Intellectual property 'scam' is all that the US has against the Chinese, the US has decided to criminalize copyright infringement to create laws to fight the Chinese with.
The DMCA needs to be repealed, but I don't see that happening unless there are large demonstrations. People are generally too stupid to care. (I really would like to see anti-DMCA slogans with people marching by the millions.)
Although it was eliminated by dubious judicial means shortly after becoming law, the DMCA allows for reverse-engineering for the purposes of interoperability. The entire market for these devices is based on non-interoperability. Because if the CAM became truly portable and emulated fully in software, it's a tiny step to a digital video recorder that is completely under user control receiving HDTV. Which is actually the main selling point here. They took our VCRs away, and now we're attacking people who want to get them back the only way possible; At this point it doesn't matter whether his intent was to sell descrambler boxes or not, or anyone's, because that's the only way you're getting that functionality. An irony, really, that you could be paying the same fees as someone with an "approved" box, accessing the same content, and yet wind up in jail because your equipment wasn't up to the provider's specifications... Namely, that you wanted to "time shift" the content.
Damn criminals, flaunting their freedoms in front of us... They get what they deserve, eh?
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
I don't remember in my lifetime watching a video tape that didn't include the FBI copyright warning about this
Clearly you got your video tapes out of the trunk of a car on a different corner than my parents did.
Never let a mediocre career stand in the way of a good time
At first I read Viagra card instead of Nagra card.
I don't even want to consider a future where our DVRs come with ED pills...but hey, maybe you fo, and who am I to judge? ;-P
Sent from your iPad.
These days, the model is very much based on some really funky group keying and key revocation, which allows the sattelite provider to revoke individual keys because each receiver has a unique key rather than a group sharing a common key.
Among other things, this makes piracy MUCH harder, because the sattelite providers can buy pirated receivers, take them to the lab, find out the key used, and revoke it, disabling that entire batch of pirated receivers without affecting normal customers.
Test your net with Netalyzr
I'm thinking that if a security researcher had done the same thing, he would not be in jail. Nor would a large corporation.
But a set top box importer does it, and suddenly it's a federal crime.
The most troublesome part about this is that engineers routinely reverse engineer the work of others for the sake of creating compatible products - an exemption the DMCA explicitly allows. Perhaps the company wanted to offer a cheaper STB to Dish, and undercut the competition. Or perhaps they planned to sell directly to the black market, engaging in fraud. The act of reverse engineering a component tells us nothing about the company's intentions.
I mention this because this very thing was done to Lexmark printers a few years ago. Instead of getting arrested, the manufacturer of competing cartridges was sued under the DMCA; the case went all the way to the SCOTUS, and Lexmark lost. It would appear this would set precedent regarding the legality of reverse engineering for the sake of creating interoperable products, but strangely, the FBI seems not to follow precedent. I find it odd that an activity which was legal and sanctioned by the DMCA - and even supported by the Supreme Court, is now interpreted as being illegal according to the very same law.
If anything, this shows the illegality of an action depends more upon who you are than what you do. Best not to offend our corporate overlords, lest they have the FBI arrest you.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
I know they are generally poor countries and the military advantage of nukes must seem appealing, but they could create WAY, WAY more nuisance for Americans if they would devote those resources to basically Pirate Bay-ing everything copy protected. It'd be hilarious if within hours of a new you-can't-copy-it scheme came out if pirated versions were available along with free tools and FAQs for making your own copies or subversion devices.
IIRC, this idea was also (better?) expressed in some science fiction novel I can't remember -- although it was China that basically ruined IP protections.
The sole purpose of the DMCA Act and its friends was to protect certain particular corporate interests. While you may say that copyright infringers "deserve what they get", the fact is that there are perfeclty legal uses for a device that unscrambles encrypted signals... like time-shifting, for example. Why should you be forced to buy or lease a "DirecTV-approved" DVR, for example, when they would be cheaper on a competitive market?
When you have competitive markets, you see lower costs, and improved technology. Sure, it leads to companies having their encryption broken, and being forced to re-invent the wheel... which they should be doing anyway. In the long run, it drives improvements in the market and technology.
The DMCA is detrimental to the economy. The DMCA works to stifle innovation, in AMERICAN markets and for AMERICAN products.
Protectionist policies, like this one, are seldom a good idea. The free market always did better.
I am not blaming enforcement for enforcing the law, but it's a bad law. A very bad law.
Dish Network's latest encryption scheme, dubbed Nagra 3, has not yet been cracked by satellite TV pirates." Not true, N3 is partially cracked.
The guy imports satellite boxes - if his goal was to reverse engineer the cards so that his boxes could work on Dish with a legally obtained card then the DCMA safe harbor for "interoperability" kicks in and he's legally OK. On the other hand if he's trying to obtain satellite service without paying Dish for the service they should throw the book at him.
Think of it from the O/S world - should people be allowed to reverse engineer the cards to allow MythTV to work with a paid for Dish card?
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...
Do not argue with an idiot. He will drag you down to his level and beat you with experience.
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Must be because he was actually stealing satellite?
BTW - Agree. WTF Mods?
There are rumors out there that Nagra3 has already been hacked, though not confirmed to my knowledge. Back in the Nagra2 days, N2 had been hacked for years and it was a boon for pirates. Dish recently switched all it's channels to Nagra3 and pretty much overnight, all the pirates TV's went blank. Currently, the only 'solution' that exists for the pirates is via card sharing schemes where an actual subscriber(s) shares their card keys via an Internet Key Sharing (IKS) service. Though not technically a hack, IKS allows for the same capability. And so the cat and mouse continues.... Don't ask me how I know all this.
Then we really would bomb them...
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
JCTM,
Thanks for using the correct word of cracker instead of hacker.
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
To make the first PC clones, Compaq publicly hired 30 systems engineers to reverse engineer the IBM BIOS chip... so what was that, high treason compared to this?
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Sorry, I don't see anything in the article summary saying that at all. They were simply attempting to reverse-engineer a way to receive and decrypt DishTV's signals, and presumably to sell equipment to do this to other people.
So first, no one is "stealing" anything, as stealing means to deprive someone of something by theft. People watching DishTV aren't stealing anything, though they are violating the DMCA law.
And second, there's no proof these men were going to watch unpaid-for programming themselves; they were going to sell the means of doing so to other people.
So your BS headline is much like saying radar detector companies are conspiring to exceed speed limits. It really doesn't make much sense.
I've only read the Slashdot header. I don't read American legalizees.
But I get the feeling that things are all 'just not right' here.
Why would anyone pay a 'cracker' $250,000 to read an EPROM? If someone had this kind of money, then they would be part of a serious criminal organization. If so, then they wouldn't be fooling around with a 'cracker'. They would have their own people to do this or they would bring the EPROM to someone in China or Malaysia to reverse-engineer it. $250K buys a lot more than a 'cracker' outside of the OCED countries.
This case sounds like a 'agent provacateur' type of deal. It 'smells' like that case in Miami where three drunken crackheads were arrested as the cadre of a major terrorist cell when in reality it was just a government undercover schmuck buying everyone endless 40 oz bottles and talking non-stop about 'offing da pig'. Typical late 1960s horseshit. Great for headlines and 40oz sales, but totally meaningless for anyone's realistic concept of national security.
The poster above is right. Who gives a hoot about the mediocre entertainment that's on network or cable television? Anything that is actually good in this medium is going to be in the torrents within days. And not a lot of good programming actually comes out of this medium.
I'll stick with the traditional legal concept of assuming innocent before proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt in 'smelly' DMCA cases like this. ennee, meenee, mainee, moe DCMA justice in this crock.
I am confused. This looks like basic Corporate Espionage, not DMCA. This isn't about somebody trying to unscramble the signal, in my opinion. Reverse engineering somebody else's hardware/software based on knowledge of the original source (this isn't Pheonix BIOS here), for which reasonable protections have been provided, is and should remain a gross violation of various laws. Isn't there anything better than DMCA (which is a bad law) to charge the guy with? Setting aside how I feel about the whole unscrambling issue, I don't think this is about that, per se. This is purely about corporate bottom lines and corporate espionage. Anyone who engages in that deserves whatever they get.
BrokenCodes, who claims he's been working on Windows GPU acceleration for XBMC, has claimed that he's one of the three people.
http://www.xbmc.org/forum/showpost.php?p=369624&postcount=210
There have been a lot of doubt as to whether BrokenCodes actually does have GPU acceleration on Windows working for XBMC (no code has been shown yet), although he's been talking the right talk in my limited DirectX/DxVA experience.
I think we can assume he's either telling the truth on both counts, or lying on both counts. If he's lying, status quo. If he's telling the truth, there's a small (IMO) chance of him releasing what he's done so far, but probably status quo.
A co-conspirator is almost as redundant as a co-ward.
"In the absence of the ability to establish the attribute of truth they tried to establish the noble attributes."
This sounds like an attempted crime. How can you conspire to break the DMCA if you don't actually succeed. That's like planning a bank robbery that never happens. Is this for real?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
$250,000 goes a long way to actually paying for sat TV service. There must be a better and less expensive way to conspire to violate the DMCA? Is the N3 hack market so lucrative? Can't you do better elsewhere with that kind of money, like launching your own legitimate sat. TV service?
6.8SPC TR of 550, l xwind at 6, drift rt at 26" drops 77". AT has 503 ft-lbs at 1403 fps. FT 0.86
Breaking encryption should never be a crime.
This argument is bogus.
Actions which advance a criminal conspiracy don't have to be criminal in themselves.
Never have been.
You aren't being prosecuted for cracking an algorithm.
You are being prosecuted because you broke into protected systems and files - for your own amusement and profit.
The satellite companies have a very weak business model
I have come to two firm conclusions:
That the geek believes that his technical skills are a universal "Get Out Of Jail Free" card.
That the geek's definition of a failed business model is any model which expects him to cough up some cash every thirty days or so.
If consumers find another way to view the data in their house, then tough tits for the satellite company.
Its also tough tits for the subscriber whose service goes belly up because the geek thinks he is entitled to everything that isn't nailed down. Tough tits for the geek whose viewing options have shrunk to the Snuggies commercials on channel 47 and the tractor pull on 35.
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)
The implications of this arrest on the numerical system as it applies to mathematics, physics, and other scientific and engineering disciplines cannot be overstated - especially in light of the recent arrest of seven, for the murder and subsequent cannibalization of nine...
For instance, even prior to this arrest, the speed of light (as measured in meters per second) couldn't be represented comfortably in decimal, but it could be rounded up with relatively little precision loss... That is now not possible... The gravitational constant was already problematic due to the arrest of seven - now with the arrest of three, the use of cubic meters is no longer viable, so the gravitational constant is at best represented as 6.66 (rounding down, here) * 10^-8 L / (kg * s^2).
Prior to the arrest of three, pi could still be represented to six digits (in decimal) - but now decimal representations of pi, pi/2, and pi/4 are all compromised... The natural exponent (e), of course, has suffered greatly from the loss of seven - and other numbers such as the Elementary Electric Charge (in Coulombs) and Avogadro's Constant have had to be changed to unconventional representations in scientific notation...
All of this has really made mathematics of any sort a real problem. The scientific community is trying to address this by advocating the use of different numerical bases and a new system of units: but adoption has been slow and difficult. So far, a clear solution has not yet emerged.
Bow-ties are cool.
When I was arrested as a juvenile and got charged with 2 moderately serious charges, I had 2 counts of conspiracy, which were also felonies, added for "thinking" about doing it before I actually did it.
You did more than just think about it.
There was evidence introduced to show that you planned - you organized - you acted in ways that helped push the thing forward.
There is no such thing as a "moderately" serious felony charge.
I would hardly call using the signals they are beaming into my house theft of service because I had to break their encryption. What's next, getting sued because you understood some people talking in pig-latin on the radio?
Great Intellect...
"If you broadcast something into my home uninvited, and I find a way to make use of that broadcast, that's tough tits for you."
No - by living where you do you accept the law - if you don't you can get out of the country, or they'll throw the book at you - and then its tough tits for you in jail.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
The point is that criminal enforcement of a copyright law is not a new thing. The DMCA is, by the way, so unrelated to copyright law that only 25% of its letters stand for the word "copyright."
If you want to steal satellite, you find a way to completely decrypt all channels being broadcast. If you simply want to access channels you have already paid for, you do something like the R5000 guys do that taps the unencrypted stream coming out of the CAM.
Instead they should have held a "Contest" to "test" the security with a prize of $250,000 if it's broken.
A poor, white, rural American FINALLY gets a job in this terrible economy, and we lock him up. A word of warning to all your crackers out there, give up hope now.
Mozy, free online backup service
--
If you want to steal satellite, you'll have to build a spaceship first.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
easier to just hack in to the up link center
cable can't beat direct tv $5 /m rent for any box with box 1 free and where I live it is much better deal then comcast Chicago land that is bad rip off next to other comcast areas that have speed and sci-fi is lower levels.
with comcast you pay just about the same for as the direct tv HD DVR pack to get sell with comcast then you have add the sports pack (that has a few non sports channels in it) to get the same that you get on direct tv then you need to add boxes AT $6 per sd box, $7 - $8 per HD box and $15-$20 per HD DVR. Comcast only gives 1 sd box for free.
Could it be because maybe, just maybe, and in spite of everything MSM tells you, Iran and North Korea have better things to do than annoy USA?
I don't have a sig.
If you want to steal satellite, you find a way to completely decrypt all channels being broadcast. If you simply want to access channels you have already paid for, you do something like the R5000 guys do that taps the unencrypted stream coming out of the CAM.
i just wish they'd crack Nag3 already, basic cable TV is such a bore
Satellites that broadcast to the US don't also broadcast to the other side of the planet, so they'd have little incentive to work on hacking those signals. (Not to mention issues regarding western porn.)
Also, China is dependent on foreign trade, and those darn foreigners keep bringing those IP issues back to the trade table.
And even if they pirated everything piratable, that's still only a small dent in western economies.
Uh, they do use hardware crypto modules. That's what the guy was being paid to crack.
The whole point is that the decryption is carried out by the smartcard - or at least the session key is generated by it (which is good enough - a session key is only going to be good for decrypting a small portion of the video stream).
Since none of us are going to do that in the next twelve hours, could you apply what you know on the matter to the case at hand?
From the little I've read here, it looks like the actions taken were indistinguishable from what a grant-based academic security researcher might do. Further actions may have been much different, but I'm not at all convinced this guy would have been successful, the odds are far from certain, trending towards 'highly unlikely'. Sure, their intent was to negatively affect the profits of a large corporation, but intent isn't enough to prosecute, AIUT.
For instance, it's a high crime to try to harm the chief executive, but if I hired a bunch of self-described psychics to sit around a bong and concentrate on harming George W. Bush, could I be prosecuted for conspiracy to kill the president? Even if I bought them some patchouli?
Regardless, I would like to buy a *legal* Nagra3 decoder for my MythTV box. The Dish Family plan is a good value but analog is just silly.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Now the question would be: How does this put food on their tables? And bombs off of them?
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
I'm waiting for someone to make enough money off unscrambling signals to be able to buy political influence and have the relevant law changed.