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The difference is this: The machine that makes DirectTV work lives in another city, in an air-conditioned building behind a barbed-wire fence.
by CamperBob 16y ago
The difference is this: The machine that makes DirectTV work lives in another city, in an air-conditioned building behind a barbed-wire fence.
- tptacek 16y agoIf I understand this comment correctly, that's pretty much not at all the way DirecTV works. The people who "broke" DirecTV in the '90s didn't do it by hacking into DirecTV's servers.
- CamperBob 16y agoIt just means that the usual arms race between defenders and attackers isn't as clear-cut as it is when both the peripheral and the host are sitting in your living room or lab.
- tptacek 16y agoNo, I'm serious: the arms race we're talking about in DirecTV's case happened entirely in the living room. They did something with consumer hardware that made tampering with it economically infeasible. The exact same technique they use is available to Microsoft, should they be willing to pay to integrate and (more painfully) license it. What Pay TV providers did to stop Pay TV hackers is an open secret, but I don't work in Pay TV and don't know exactly how "open" the secret is, which is why I'm dancing around this argument rather than just killing it with facts.