Discret 11, the French TV encryption of the 80s (2020)
fabiensanglard.net
fabiensanglard.net
"so on." means porn :)
I fondly remember HBO's first attempt at "encryption" in Romania in the nineties, which was a simple and cheap analog filter. Needless to say that it was pirated almost instantly...
The pay-tv channels would be broadcast unscrabled, unencrypted to the whole cable network. But they would install notch filters at every subscriber's house to prevent the frequencies of the paid channels from actually entering their house.
When you actually paid for HBO, they would send a tech around to your house to remove the corresponding notch filter.
Or just paid the cable guy $50 cash
It uses encryption to achieve a goal.
The word 'encryption' gets used loosely, as both a purpose and a technique.
More strictly, the early and main use of communication encryption is confidentiality, to communicate between two endpoints so an eavesdropper can't listen.
Pay-per-view, DRM schemes and other content 'protection' systems are about controlling the behaviour of the recipient. That's a fundamentally different trust and psychology model.
One of the aims is to give something without giving it, to create a rental system out of a distribution system, and so be able to resell the same content over and over to the same customer.
However I noticed that the content creators have devised a foolproof and cunning new method of doing this.
A friend gave me a USB stick with a bunch of box-sets to watch. I was very excited, and when Saturday night came around I inserted the memory stick and sat down to enjoy my pirated entertainment...
About halfway through the second episode the new DRM kicked in.
I realised that I'd already watched this entire box set, and then remembered how shit it was. By making it such low quality dystopian Hollywood grist they'd created something so utterly bloody forgettable that my overloaded, aging brain was tricked into watching it again, thus bypassing the need for any DRM.
The biggest factor in “getting to sleep easily”, in my experience, is “did you actually exert yourself today”. When I was taking pole dance classes it was super easy to get to sleep. Other things could and did make it harder but in the absence of anything unusual going on, sleep came very easily.
https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/01/01/25/1343218/directv...
Love it. This scrambling came around in the 80s, around the time 1337speak on BBSs (and minicom?) was becoming a thing, can't be a coincidence.
We're all nerds and geeks and hackers, just standing on different sides. :-)
I don't remember TF1 being more boring than the other two, but Antenne 2 definitely had a block of Japanese cartoons in the afternoon. I'm pretty sure all three channels had state funding to some extent or another. They all ran commercials between programs. They would never interrupt a program with commercials. If you watched a movie, or even a TV program, you could expect to watch it all the way through without bathroom breaks. Popular contemporary American films were dubbed into French, but films that were considered more culturally significant (say, directed by John Ford or Akira Kurosawa) were shown in the original language and subtitled if necessary.
I was about twelve or thirteen when Canal+ came along. The content was scrambled so you couldn't really watch it without a subscription, but that's where the porn was, and you could tell what was happening on screen if you squinted right.
Then came La Cinq, the first completely private TV channel. Here, movies and TV programs were interrupted with commercial breaks. There was a lot of American programming and it was always dubbed, never subtitled. They played stuff like Knight Rider and Airwolf in the afternoon, so I put up with the commercial breaks which were still far shorter and less frequent than on American television.
1. Get a new car from the dealership with a 90 day trial.
2. Leave it parked for a year without turning it on.
3. Free Sirius.
They broadcast signals like "Radio 15846374477 - Deactivate" when your trial runs out and if you miss them your radio won't know you aren't paying for it. It appears after a while they just give up and you can keep using it indefinitely.
Old radios will therefore be left with a key that doesn't work.
However, in the context of the 80s, this was far from being trivial; there was no internet, no google. It probably didn't even occur to most people they could try to bypass this, and even if it did, who would they have asked?
It was good training for supply chain management and manufacturing. And they were selling them (illegally, obviously) and sharing the revenue between students and teachers.
Over the years and hundreds of decoders sold, they probably contributed to a significant loss of revenue for Canal+ in my hometown.
Ironic given that it is now the other way.
From the mid 90s to the mid 2000s, that main channel were open and free in some time ranges, but outside those ranges, there was some kind of encryption based on band transposing both the audio and the video channels. That easy method made some clever people people used TV capture cards inn PCs to pick that channel and do the required process to being able to watch footballs (and other sports), really recent movies, and porn.
I don't know if somebody used a DSP to do the same but one the TV, but AFAIK DSPs at that time were pretty expensive. On the other hand, I know people who used some modified satellite receivers with special menus to enter the Nagravision codes obtained from the internet in that era.
Old "decodeur pirates" wouldn't work past 1995. They were standalone and didn't require a PC.
After that, you had to use a tv card (mine was PCI) with a "compatible" chip like BT848 if memory serves. Some plugins for tv applications existed to bruteforce the key every month (deschtroumpfer used to be a keyword to find such plugin).
Is it because the encrypted audio sounded like smurfs (schtroumpfs in English) talking?
After that, I watched sattelite TV for free (Digi) because Nagra2 encryption was broken and I could change the firmware of the STB to simulate an encryption card.
I did that because I was dirt poor. Now I don't watch TV anymore.
Some guys I've heard of, were using some Linux powered, Internet connected STB and the actual decryption happened on another STB who had the actual card on. That way, they could watch any sattelite network, provided they also share their paid for card.
That doesn't seem right. Audio is transmitted continuously by a sub carrier.
But working that fast remained complicated for most of the 80 and 90's.
edit: hum I'm wrong, this encoding scheme was retired way earlier than that, sorry. the PC things worked against another system.
> Probably because it was much less of an issue if it was cracked, the audio signal received significantly less polish than the video
I don't know, I might watch something with weird visual artifacts for a bit, but crackling, static audio drives me crazy :-]