Satellite Pirates (1994) | Hacker News Reader

Satellite Pirates (1994)

wired.com

27 pointsLammy27 comments

Right, for a minute I forgot this was written in 1994.

"The DES algorithm is mathematically impregnable and has never been broken, even now, by any of the pirates."

I wonder how much use those large dishes have now; I still see them every now and then.

I have one I use for FTA. They can be cheap/free if you are willing to get it off the property of someone who doesn't want it.

In North America big dish (C-band) is the way to go for FTA, you don't get that much interesting stuff on a small dish (Ku-band).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-to-air ?

This happened also in Italy in the late 90s/ early 00s. Everyone could buy for a few lire (there was no euro at that time) a smart card to watch every program on satellite pay TV. Periodically you had to check on some pirate website the crypto codes and reprogram the smart card. It was a very simple process that every person with little computer skills can do. After some years these codes start changing so fast (more than one time for day) and it was impossible to continue decoding. Everyone suspect that it was a clever politics by satellite broadcasting to make people used to premium satellite broadcasting

Related to the article... It sounds like Ron MacDonald was probably Scotsman (with some connections to Canada) Marty Mullen. He was sentenced to 7 years in prison in 2007, so probably a free man now.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/satellite-pirat...

I'm just putting together the facts though.

Um, no. "Fred Martin" was my brother. Deceased (died in 2000 in a car accident; Used my name for that business, giving me a small claim to faim).

Ron MacDonald was also Canadian (lives in the Toronto area).

You can put together the rest on your own.

Thanks for your comment. This is what I like about HN, on virtually any technical topic, obscure or not, someone more authoritative will add real facts to the story.

If anyone has any issues of Satellite Watch News, Scrambling News, or American hacker, I am interested in digitizing them to PDF to share on archive.org whether you do the scan or I buy them from you to scan. Please let me know!

there are similar stories from the other various satellite and cable systems in the US and Europe. The best of course are around NDS

GI eventually was bought by Motorola and the cable divison is now owned by Arris.

The sat system described became GI/Moto ran HiTS (head end in the sky) that provided down links to 1000s of small town cable companies. These days it's owned by Comcast which is the cable company that coalesced around Gi/Motos crypto/head ends

"Here's the thing about ad blockers...We get it, ads aren't what you are here for"

That continues to amaze me from wired...I know they of all outlets are probably seeing a higher rate of ad blockers, but my use of adblocker is driven far less by what information your website transmits, and far more by what it collects.

If you just showed me ads I would grumpily accept...If you show me ads for flights to Australia because I have conversation near my cellphone yesterday about wanting to visit someday and the day before that looked at hipmunk then you can go screw yourself.

Edit to add: ublock blocked 45% of the page and ghostery blocked another 21 trackers and other assorted items including this wonderful piece of software called 'Yieldbot'

"Relevance is our business. Yieldbot is the first technology that directly connects the intent of Publisher visitors to Search advertisers in realtime. We dramatically increases publisher understanding of their visitors and connect them to massive new advertising budgets."

ublock has a anti-ublock list that removes nonsense like that.

ublock all scripts, including inline ones.

I don't mind being showed ads. It's being packed up and sold as the product I have a problem with.

Thankfully I think I read this article back in '94. I seem to recall a picture of a guy holding a shotgun and the satellite dish behind him. I don't remember any of the ads...

>If you show me ads for flights to Australia because I have conversation near my cellphone yesterday about wanting to visit someday and the day before that looked at hipmunk then you can go screw yourself.

Does this actually happen?

The first part? Probably not (yet)

The second part? Most definitely. I've implemented something similar last year

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-35639549

This is a solved problem. If you're using an adblocker, now-a-days you need an anti-anti-adblocker like https://github.com/reek/anti-adblock-killer

I've had to install this onto my family's machines even so they don't turn off their adblocker and malware themselves... repeatedly. Until the ad industry is free of malware and privacy violations (ie: a massive switch to first party only ads) I'm not going to feel a shred of guilt about blocking them.

Or, for a quick fix you can turn off Javascript on wired's domain.

I understand your technical critique but stand on my hill :)

Its the principle of the thing not the execution or response

Having another weapon in your arsenal during an arms race does not sound like having solved a problem.

This is the end weapon, you can always beat it by replacing js on a site specific basis and that's what this does.

In the words of the Stanley parable,

The end is never The end is never The end is never The end is never....

For instance, it's trivial to fingerprint most browser add-ons. What if organizations refused service to people with anti-anti-adblockers entirely? What if they kept a database of browser fingerprints they even suspected were using such tools? What if they opened up a new front, winning some sort of legal battle?

Hopefully the conflict is resolved with micropayments or something.

> For instance, it's trivial to fingerprint most browser add-ons. What if organizations refused service to people with anti-anti-adblockers entirely?

You can bypass such a fingerprint by replacing JS using that very same extension.

Keeping a database of browser fingerprints does no good when performing those fingerprints relies on JS running unmodified. You can just patch the algorithm to always return a known good fingerprint, or one from a set.

A legal response would be the only possibility, but due to the technical means still being possible... well, on the internet legality doesn't really get in the way of technical possibility, now does it?

The fingerprinting could be done server side. Their legal team could force browser vendors not to carry ABP or uBlock in the add-on stores, and GitHub to take down the repositories, meaning you and I could still find the source but not Average Joe. Your response to my comment about profiling ad blockers was entirely unconvincing.

You are placing more trust in this technology than it deserves, and I just think you should be aware; there are no silver bullets.

Edit: The browser fingerprinting could be done server-side. The add-on fingerprint looks something like, "were we able to load include this asset the add-on uses in an img tag?", so obviously requires interaction w/ the browser.

as explained in the wonderful tome of war strategy...The Butter Battle, By the eminent conflict schoolar Dr. Seuss

Do we really need this pointless bitching about ad blocking every time people view a article?

I don't go to the comments to view off topic points.

Wired have been doing this for months and you could still read it for sake with ad block running.

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