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Remember DirecTV's war on smart card hackers? http://www.securityfocus.com/news/143 http://www.securityfocus.com/news/143 -------- But DirecTV reacted to tha
by minikites 14y ago
Remember DirecTV's war on smart card hackers?
http://www.securityfocus.com/news/143 http://www.securityfocus.com/news/143
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But DirecTV reacted to that wrinkle over a year ago, by taking advantage of their ability to remotely reprogram the set top satellite receivers, as well as the cards. The company sent a few specific bytes of data to all the H cards, while simultaneously reprogramming the satellite receivers to reject cards that didn't reflect the change. This forced hackers to update the cards manually with the new data, or to make the cards writable again.
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- xtracto 14y agoI think DirecTV is an example of a DRM win (for the company) scenario. With a combination of technology (latest generation smart cards and cryptography) and litigation (going really strongly against infringers) has made DirecTV uncrackable in practice. The fact that here in Mexico I cannot find someone selling a fully unlocked US smartcard shows that in a way DirecTV has won. It used to be the case that for US$300 you could buy this fully unlocked DirecTV card to watch all USA channels here in Mexico. This was about 10 years ago when I was in college (and my flatmate used to buy that stuff).
- minikites 14y agoReplying to myself, here's the much more exciting retelling of the story: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2008/05/revisiting-the-black-sunday-hack.html http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2008/05/revisiting-the-blac...