7 ms·
Discret 11, the French TV encryption of the 80s (2020)
- mytailorisrich 4y agoPrevious discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23455033 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23455033
- sverhagen 4y ago> What about the audio signal? > 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 :-]
- hyakosm 4y agoOn analog satellite, Canal+ had analog stereo (not NICAM) not scrambled audio, much better than the AM distorded signal on terrestrial tv.
- rob74 4y agoCan you actually call this encryption? I think the term which is still in use today for (cryptographically) encrypted TV channels, at least in the UK, "scrambling", is the most appropriate here - in that you could still mostly see what was going on on the screen. 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...
- TedDoesntTalk 4y agoHBO did the same thing early 80s in the USA. My father removed or added some filter device from a cable box OUTSIDE OUR HOUSE (big green box on the lawn) and we had HBO free.
- phire 4y agoThat was something different and much, much simpler. 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.
- iso1631 4y ago> 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
- 13of40 4y agoWhen I bought my first house, I got Comcast cable internet and they guy had to put a filter on to block the TV and just let the internet signal through. Or at least he would have, but he couldn't find one in his truck. Years later, I got around to plugging my TV into it and found that I had full access to all of the non-paid channels, and I'd missed out on half an adult lifetime of free television. Can't say I missed it, though.
- ok123456 4y agoWhen I first got a cable modem around 2000, the tech installed another line where it terminated and didn't bother to put any of the line filters on. So on that drop I got all the premium channels.
- nonrandomstring 4y ago> Can you actually call this encryption? 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.
- daniel-cussen 4y agoJust stop watching video altogether.
- nonrandomstring 4y agoI don't hear many people say that. But you know what, I did do that many years ago. After coming back from travelling to living in an apartment with no TV (before video on computers was really a thing). Result was: I slept like a baby. Pure speculation based on n=1 anecdata, but I reckon video screws with our sleep - it's so rich and gives us too much to process later.
- egypturnash 4y agoThere are other factors that affect your sleep; I watch very little TV and currently lay awake trying to get to sleep for a good while most nights. 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.
- cycloton3k 4y agoEven without any idea of how the "encryption" works - looks like it would be trivial to just align the rows heuristically.
- vardump 4y agoTrivially so, I think, maybe even with simple discrete logic and delay lines.
- nraynaud 4y agoyes, in the later years, when TV decoders could be inserted into PCs, they would just do that, align things with the vertical lines in the pictures. 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.
- ajb 4y agoA while back (probably 10+ years) I read a cool article on the cat and mouse game between cable TV hackers and the security team at one of the big US cable TV companies. At a certain point, the hackers had the upper hand and had broken the security of the smart cards which were in use. But the security team turned it round by delivering a sequence of small, seemingly innocuous OTA updates to the card software, locking hackers out of the population of valid cards. Or something like that. Does anyone remember this article/event?
- mcwhy 4y agoThose games are still going on, and according to various sat-tv forums recently movistar is fairly successful at it.
- ayende 4y agoThat was DirectTV, I think. See: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/01/01/25/1343218/directvs-secret-war-on-hackers https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/01/01/25/1343218/directv...
- FreezingKeeper 4y agoHow about the time when one pay TV company (Sky, owned by News Corp at the time) was said to have hacked a rival and released the hack on the internet for pirates to use? https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-17522112 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-17522112
- ajb 4y agoThat was amusing as well
- gouggoug 4y agoA few comments mention how trivial this must have been to bypass; yes with today's internet, youtube videos, online tutorial, open-source hardware and the ubiquitousness of technology in general, of course this seems trivial. 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?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- pvg 4y agoReally makes you wonder how they built the internet without googling a tutorial. One possibility is that they just faked it.
- Banana699 4y agoWhat did the poor Stackoverflow devs do when they encountered an exception :( ?
- Thervicarl 4y agoMy high school had an electronics training course that was building decoders as a practical work. 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.
- nicolas314 4y agoAt my electronics engineering school we had access to everything we needed to mass-produce those decoders and did so at a reasonable scale to pay for our studies. That was a lifeline. Knowledge of TV signals gave me my first job, during which I got to work with the guy who designed the scrambling system and had a chance to thank him in person. Small world.
- iso1631 4y ago> the 7th level audience uses always this 11 bit key : 1337 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.
- severino 4y agoThe article says "In the 80s, there were three channels available. Two of them, Antenne 2 and FR3, were state funded and boring while TF1 was privatized and offered plenty of Japanese cartoons" and later, he says that everything changed when a fourth channel (Canal Plus) was launched in 1984. However, TF1's privatization was made later, in 1987.
- hyakosm 4y agoCanal+ was the first private and pay-per-view channel, using the VHF bands empty after the shutdown (in 1983) of the 819 lines black and white signal of TF1.
- littlestymaar 4y agoAnd Japanese anime where first introduced by the Récré A2[1] program, created in 1978 and whose team moved to TF1 after the privatization where became the Club Dorothée[2] which is probably the program the author has in mind. [1]: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%C3%A9cr%C3%A9_A2 https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%C3%A9cr%C3%A9_A2 [2]: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Club_Doroth%C3%A9e https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Club_Doroth%C3%A9e
- loudmax 4y agoThis was my childhood in the 80's! 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.
- LeoPanthera 4y agoI’ve always wondered if anyone has broken the Sirius XM encryption, in the USA. Since it is available nationwide, and is a unidirectional broadcast system (the radios have no return channel), surely someone out there has figured something out.
- willcipriano 4y agoI have it for free. 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.
- LeoPanthera 4y agoIt's my understanding that this is no longer true. The current system works by periodically rotating the master key, and then sending out that key to all subscribed radios by encrypting it with the radio ID. Old radios will therefore be left with a key that doesn't work.
- nicoco 4y agoIf my memory does not fail me, this was still being used in the late 90s/early 2000s. I remember buying a TV tuner (PCI?ISA?) card especially for the purpose of unscrambling Canal+ using tools downloaded online (I didn't have the first clue about cryptography back then).
- _notreallyme_ 4y agoThis was the nagravision encryption mentionned at the end of the article. 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).
- nicoco 4y agoBT848 does ring a bell ^^
- ornornor 4y ago> deschtroumpfer Is it because the encrypted audio sounded like smurfs (schtroumpfs in English) talking?
- _notreallyme_ 4y agoAhah, I think it was to avoid the takedown of websites talking about it. The term is still in use to advertise CCcam and the like.
- 10729287 4y agoThe famous Miro pctv card, it was pci and the best way (probably the only one) to uncrypt Canal plus in the computer days.
- nraynaud 4y ago"The eight digits entered by the user actually results in not one but six keys. That is because the system had a (never used) audience feature made of levels. That was to allow subdividing memberships into Cinema, Sports, Documentaries and so on." "so on." means porn :)
- geomark 4y agoAnyone remember On TV? Their audio was modulated on a subcarrier that was easily demodulated with a single chip PLL. And the video was just mixed with a sine wave at, I think, the vertical scanning rate - super easy to mix in a 180 degree out of phase sine wave with a crude manual potentiometer adjustment for amplitude. I built one of those decoders and although it was a bit unstable and would lose sync now and then it worked well enough.
- gugagore 4y ago> Each frame is made of 625 blocks (hence one block is allocated 64µs). The audio stream is interleaved at the end of the blocks. That doesn't seem right. Audio is transmitted continuously by a sub carrier.
- Gordonjcp 4y agoCould be Sound-in-Sync NICAM, where two-channel compressed audio was sent in the sync period.
- jmrm 4y agoAll Canal+ channels were also present in Spain as satellite TV, but the main channel was available for all via terrestrial broadcasting. 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.
- DeathArrow 4y agoI watched HBO for free because the decoder was very simple, just an capacitor and a coil. 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.
- t_akosuke 4y agoWhen canal+ reached Spain sometime in the 90s the scrambled signal was in black and white and much more distorted... That didn't stop all the kids in my class from secretly taping the porn they played on Friday nights and trying to follow what was going on - it was like making out shapes in the clouds. I wonder how much more advanced that system was.