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Comment by havaloc | Hacker News Reader

I have an elderly client who sends me links of stuff to buy all the time. One day it's one of these streaming sticks, the next day it's half-price stamps, and I tell her every time, please don't buy this stuff. And yet she does anyway, as if I was almost being mean and saying no just to say no.

So yes, I do want to blame the purchasers of these things, sometimes. To prove her point that her stamps were legitimate, she mailed me a card using one of her half priced (but likely fake) stamps and it made it through!

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Perhaps they grew up in a time/environment where "if it was that bad they wouldn't be allowed to advertise it", and they're still using that old calibration?

My falther-in-law was less that and more, if I can get away with it, it's actually legal. Many know their fake, and do it because they can get away with it.

That was his justification for a satellite descrambler, they're sending me the signals, obviously I'm allowed to.

I can imagine many on HN having excited discussions about their satellite descramblers.

> do it because they can get away with it.

Lots of people on HN download and upload copyrighted materials. Is it really different?

They aren’t downloading that content from a company with a $2.5T market cap. They presumably aren’t making a living by selling that copyrighted material via a retail that claims to run a legitimate business.

I think that makes a big difference.

Imagine if Amazon Video, Audible, and Kindle will all just pirate stores, where uploaders of the pirated content made money on the downloads, people paid for those downloads, and Amazon took a cut of everything. How long would that go on before they were in court and that was shutdown?

Fine, you've nerd-sniped me.

I tinkered with Dish Network descrambling 20 years ago. Not because I wanted to just watch a bunch of free TV (I hardly watched any TV anyway, we mostly watched DVDs from the video store and Netflix). More because it felt like an interesting rabbit hole. And it was pretty interesting!

I picked a good (newer!) satellite dish and LNB from the trash and had a friend help with the installation and alignment because that was his previous job. Normal people use some kind of tool to find the satellites' geosynchronous orbital station in the sky, but he did it often enough that he could simply look up into the sky and point at them.

There were a handful of grey-market satellite receivers you could buy that were technically capable of descrambling a commercial signal. Of course, they did not advertise themselves as such. They were marketed as FTA (free-to-air) DVB-S receivers. These were not illegal as they were fairly popular in regions of the world that actually _had_ a fair amount of FTA (unscrambled) satellite channels. The only satellites visible from North America, however, tended to carry religious, shopping, or Mexican/Central American programming. Oh, and NASA TV.

The receiver I bought had DVR functionality if you hooked up a USB drive to it. I think I still have some recorded shows on it. It would have been a great way to harvest and release pirated TV shows to the Internet, if you didn't mind editing out all of the ads and whatever.

DVB-S was basically a raw MPEG-2 TS stream that could be optionally encrypted. To use these grey-market receivers as descramblers, you install some custom firmware containing the descrambling modifications and keys. I'm failing to remember the technical details, but the encryption they used was not very good. Dish Network would rotate the keys occasionally, and when they did, you had to update them on your receiver. I can't remember now if the keys were part of the firmware, but I remember it being a pain in the ass.

The firmware/keys part of this had a very "colorful" community. You had to sign up to a very specific and somewhat exclusive web bulletin board in order to download the firmware/keys. I don't remember how I gained an account, but I remember it being non-trivial. IIRC, it was like one guy maintaining the firmware/keys and sometimes it took weeks for him to adapt to whatever thing DN did to thwart piracy. The board was moderated by a complete power-tripping asshat who enjoyed banning people for fun and then gloating about it. (I was not banned, that I recall.) I think they started requiring "donations" in order to view certain threads (like firmware releases) after a while. But I could be misremembering that. I just remember the community was very toxic.

After a few months of this setup, DN figured out how to rotate their keys too often for the casual pirate to keep up. I disconnected mine around that time and moved onto other things. Partly because the experiment ran its course and partly because migrating to real-time key updates would have meant buying a newer receiver. For a while, I flirted with the idea of getting a DVB-T PCI receiver card and working on breaking the encryption myself, but it was quite a bit above my skill level at the time and there did not seem to be anyone else working on it out in the open, since the DMCA was still pretty new then.

Your experience describes lots of the kinds of communities you can use to access pirated media. You either pay for the legit service, pay for pirate streaming services, pay with your privacy with the free, dodgy pirate streaming services, or pay with your sanity in dealing with nutjobs.

I recall the “free to air” receivers being pretty easy to configure. My main pita was getting a cheap ftdi usb->serial adapter because that’s how old the underlying tech was. Still easier than jtagging an official receiver.

I migrated into it from the earlier days involving iso7816 card programming and mitm cards so I guess I didn’t have trouble finding which sites to get the fta files. I have good memories of those places being quite welcoming if you did your reading but sometimes ephemeral. Plenty of freeware (but sometimes delayed access). But part of the “payment model” was sevurity vendors trying to destroy their competitors or sell more countermeasures and card swaps to their satellite tv broadcast clients (!!!).

A card swap (and some prosecutions on the nudge nudge “free to air receiver” importers) put an end to most of it unless you went to internet-key-sharing systems where I guess the shared keys come from a handful of slave receivers somewhere. Given the 2-way nature of those key “subscriptions” and network connections required, I could (moreso) understand the paranoia of the operators.

Broadband penetration ultimately killed sat cracking, Netflix et al too. Oh, and what people usually call “iptv”.

Yep. Gone are the days of running out for a "119 IKS" or hunting for Bev and Charlie, now everyone just grabs some pooched RTSP feeds and calls it a day.

Feels fitting recently to discover the Dish Network "Pirate TV" recordings. I should run my own in-home IPTV station and use the Pirate TV bug as the logo...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zVXSxJ357pw

You're watching Dish Network's Pirate TV channel!... ... if you're watching me, you're a SATELLITE PIRATE!

Dunno if admitting defeat like that is a sign of strength or weakness.

There's an old Carlin joke about "If a cop didn't see it, I didn't do it."

Of course, what they're missing is that laws are for poor people.

Amazon will be notified they sold something illegal and will take it down and ban the seller who will immediately launch a new store under a new name.

The purchaser, on the other hand, will be fully liable for whatever horrible thing they bought.

I think that's a default for a lot of the older (and some of the younger!) generation, same goes for news and media. They grew up in a time where there was a practical barrier to publishing and (largely) laws behind you doing it.

So they trust literally everything they read. I still don't think my folks can fathom you can spin up a very real looking newspaper website with fake articles in about 10 minutes.

I find younger people are more likely to trust whatever they read - social media rumors, LLM output, Reddit threads - and older people looking for credible sources.

When my kid was young I set up a basic web server and taught him how to make a VERY basic web page. I let him write whatever nonsense he wanted to and then we made it live.

It was both a gateway into learning how the web works but also that literally anyone can post anything to the internet and it doesn't make it true. I like to think he's more savvy than many of his peers but we all have our blind spots.

was the url for the website you set up for him www.creedthoughts.gov.www\creedthoughts

Honestly, my experience is that it's less age specific and more like 80-90% of the general public. A lot of people just can't recognise the difference between a credible source and a dubious/fake one, and will just share any old random page or social media post they come across online. Heck, the number of people I know that see things like ChatGPT as some magic encyclopedia/sage that knows everything is depressingly high...

> time/environment where "if it was that bad they wouldn't be allowed to advertise it"

like cigarettes?

Or heroin[1]?

[1]: https://museum.dea.gov/museum-collection/collection-spotligh...

I doubt there ever was a time/environment. Snake oil has been around consistently for a very long time.

> half-price stamps

Who is selling half-price stamps?

#1 How big is your potential market? It's people still mailing things from home, who haven't figured out how to do postage on their computer.

#2 Of the population in #1, it's those who find real stamps so expensive that it's worth bothering with discounts.

#3 Of the population in #2, it's those who would want to buy something fraudulant (or not know better) and who would want to risk using it.

#4 Considering the size of the #3 population, how many stamps do they use in a month?

#5 What is your margin on a half-price stamp? You have to pay for advertising, printing (we're talking a profit margin under $1), packaging, and your own time, but at least shipping is free!

Its the grandmas still sending you a $5 check in the mail for your birthday

How can those few people - and again narrowed down to the population mailing letters AND needing stamps AND seeking discounts AND willing or ignorant enough to do/risk fraud - with that little revenue per item, make a half-price stamp operation worthwhile?

The Venn diagram of old people with limited mobility (can't just drive to the post office or grocery store) and on a fixed income (they crave those discounts) is nearly a perfect circle of the people that fall for internet scams (fails to understand that literally anyone can make a shopify store and accept card payments).

Discounted stamps do exist.

Stamp collectors end up stuck with sheets and sheets of unpopular designs, and since the hobby (like many hobbies) has imploded, the dealers will pay less than face value for it; they in turn will sell it for a smaller discount for people who are willing to futz with wallpapering their envelope in 3-cent stamps and Fat Elvis.

What is the world view (aka context) of this little old lady?

Watch the news and see CEO's with golden handshakes after the company is nailed for something. Wall street failures. Companies getting government bailouts. The current US president. It is all about getting away with what you can.

The news - being the news - doesn't show process as per normal. People doing the right thing most of the time.

In this context, fake stamps for the "little person" doesn't even rate a mention. Who the hell is going to raise a moral panic about an old lady with fake stamps...

And so the "little people" will keep buying fake whatevers as long as it stretches their dollar further.

Then again I used to torrent everything under the sun and it actually rocks to have every tv show, movie, game ever released for free forever.

So is it greed? Yes, but I did it too so now that its more accessible I cannot really blame people.

Half priced stamps work though, and nobody is going to prosecute grandma for counterfeiting postage stamps.

Yes they do. USPIS does not f around

Oddly they don't ever seem to prosecute the sites that profit from selling them. Funny, that.

Makes sense to me, the only place I've ever seen them personally advertised are overseas websites.

It doesn't seem too weird to me: Selling someone fake stamps is a general act of fraud, between buyer and seller, and would be pursued by state/federal attorneys general.

The USPS becomes directly involved only later, when someone tries to defraud them by using a fake stamp.

They are unable to do much. Look, their systems cannot distinguish them - not since the crooks figured out the phosphor tags. They aren’t detecting any during the course of business. There are no prosecutions of “duped cobsumers” buying cheap stamps claiming to be real online as far as I can find.

What is your line of work, if I may ask?

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