4 ms·

Ok, so it's kind of like burning a line in a forest fire - the fire is still fire, but it's controlled and used in such a way that it should stop the bigger bla

• ggm 8y ago
  Nah.. I don't like that metaphor. I think I like this one better. Back in the day, cable TV was crypted, and people had to have cable TV decoder cards with a key to fit a slot in the receiver. So, in the UK, somebody worked out how to decode the keypair, and you could buy a keycard in the pub for like GBP50, instead of paying the cable company GBP100/mo. But the cards, they have a fixed life. They don't last forever, you have to keep coming back for more. The real fix is obviously to fix the crypto, but there are a million receivers out there. Nobody has time to go round each one. So what the cops did, is find where the faked out keycards are being printed and shut down the print house, so imagine... if you then get the city electric company to power cycle every house, when its receiver reboots, it needs a new keycard, but they can't get one any more, 'cept from the cable company. Fixed? No, but you cut the problem off at the knees. Oh wait: we all wanted those sweet stolen keycards. I gotta think of a better metaphor :-)