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Comment by TheRealDunkirk | Hacker News Reader

Is this the card "technology" that ran DirectTV tuners as well? I had a friend who was, at one point, running 7 hacked systems, and recording everything he could to burn to DVD, but I never got into that.

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All cable systems in the US are mandated to supply users with those "CableCards" if they request them to decrypt cable tv channels, so you can use your own tuners and not be forced to rent one forever from the cable company. So, it wasn't just Dish. TiVo also uses them. The first one was free and the second one was $1.50/mo. Each could decrypt 4 simultaneous channels. I used them for about 15 years until cancelling cable earlier in the year. $1.50 vs a $30 cable box saved quite a bit over the years.

Here's the page on xfinity for them. They're just PCMCIA cards, which used to be popular. My first laptop had a PCMCIA port which I used for a GPS device in the 90s before they were all-in-one chips. https://www.xfinity.com/support/articles/about-cablecards

A long, long time ago it was possible to decrypt the original VideoCrypt with a serial connection attached to a smart card that ran software like 'Voyager' that could decrypt or bypass the keys/locks necessary to decode. This was running on a 286 laptop. Seems like an absolute lifetime ago now.

And before CableCards some cable settop boxes had FireWire/IEEE1394 ports on them that provided the raw video stream. You still had to rent the cable box though.

They use C.A.M.s with smart cards that are embedded with a microcontroller.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conditional-access_module

>a friend

uh huh! :)

If I had hacked 7 units -- and hacked scores of cards for other people -- I wouldn't had to have asked that question.

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