DirecTV's Secret War On Hackers (2001) | Hacker News Reader

DirecTV's Secret War On Hackers (2001)

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77 pointsjsnell13 comments

Years later, the person responsible for the "Black Sunday" kill came forward:

http://archive.wired.com/politics/security/news/2008/05/tarn...

I didn't read the whole thing, but, it seems highly related to what happened in England where Sky Digital basically hacked Ondigital making it a non viable platform and it eventually went bankrupt :/

Tarnovsky has given several really great talks at Defcon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kh238PUqz3I

He goes into a lot of technical detail which is great. I'm a big fan of his work.

I can neither confirm not deny being directly affected by his work at the time :) Needless to say once the story came out it was amazing to read about it from the "other" side. The scene got so complicated it could only be described as an arms race. It quickly moved from having modified cards and custom devices to live intercept rigs where a computer sat between the card and receiver. What, you don't have an unlooper in your drawer?

Fun fact: DirecTV HD DVR's contain GPL code. (Maybe Linux, but I can't remember, really.) It was amusing coming across the phrase "Ty Coon, President of Vice" in my parent's printed owner's manual a couple years ago.

Not so fun fact: When I saw that, I checked online to see what sources DirecTV is offering, and I came across claims that DirecTV is yet another corporation shirking their responsibility wrt their use of GPL code.

Please send a copy of the manual and specific details of what you tried to receive source code from DirecTV to <compliance@sfconservancy.org>.

Note that GPL doesn't require "putting the source online" necessarily, but they are required to make a valid offer for source code to you and fulfill that offer when exercised. We'll need to investigate whether or not they've properly done that before anyone should claim that DirecTV has violated GPL.

(BTW, I'm Bradley M. Kuhn, who, through my role at Conservancy, started the GPL Compliance Project for Linux Developers: https://sfconservancy.org/linux-compliance/

I'd just like to point out that vulnerabilities in satellite TV are surfacing once more, but this time, on a much more irreparable scale.

[1]: http://colibri.bplaced.net/powervu.htm

PowerVu is pretty old, and (at least in the USA) it's not really used for home viewing, so I think this isn't very interesting unless you have a giant C / Ku band antenna.

Right. But if you do have a big ugly dish (or are willing to find one on the free section on craigslist and put it in your backyard) you can theoretically view nearly everything.

PowerVu isn't used by DirectTV or Dish for their home viewing. But it is still used by the major networks. Nearly everything from sports to entertainment is on PowerVu at some point, and then received and retransmitted by individual carriers.

Check out lyngsat.com.

My experience working in cable headends are that most programs that we watch on cable are delivered using DigiCipher (motorola's) CAS. There are always one or two PowerVu receivers tho: Viacom (MTV, A&E) is one notable feed. Also there are usually a small number of tandberg-style receivers with Irdeto or something.

Nevertheless I was glad to see that someone is figuring out PowerVu :) I would like to see the same for DigiCipher, as the 4DTV scheme uses it.

Both PowerVu and DigiCipher have similarities to the CAS schemes from their respective manufacturers for cable settops, too.

I remember it well, last time it came up: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6387545. Ingenious, with a little dig at the hackers.

Not loading for me - did we just Slashdot Slashdot?

DirectH was my fav app. I remember when DirecTV took control of hackhu.com. Forgot about this scene.

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