NewsCorp/NDS Sets Up Operation To Expose Canadian Pirates; What Could Go Wrong? 95
Presto Vivace writes "Murdoch's Pirates is a business book that reads like a thriller. The chapter excerpted in the Sydney Morning Herald explains how Operation Duck, an effort to discover the identify Canadian pay TV pirates, went horribly wrong. 'By October 25 Oliver had been in Toronto four days and had programmed a swag of pirate cards, using a program he had ripped off another pirate hack. And he had been paid a lot of money. That evening, he met with two piracy dealers in a car and programmed a few cards for them with his portable programmer box, to demonstrate that it worked. The following night Oliver received a call from a friend in London, a partner in his old piracy ring, who was sleeping with a woman who worked for Federal Express. 'He told me, these guys [from the previous night] sent a parcel to Larry Rissler,' Oliver recalls. Rissler was a former FBI agent who headed the Office of Signal Integrity—the operational security division—of DirecTV, and he had been hunting Oliver for some time. One of the dealers Oliver had met was a Rissler informant and he had despatched a re-programmed smartcard by FedEx to his boss. The parcel would be with Rissler early the next morning—if it wasn't already there.'
The story reads like some perverse blend of James Bond and the Pink Panther. It is just amazing."
What went wrong? (Score:5, Informative)
I read the summary twice, and skimmed the (long) article it links to, but couldn't figure out what went so horribly wrong. Did 007 capture the SPECTRE bad guys?
Re:Reading TFS (Score:5, Informative)
Don't mod the parent down! Now on to my real point...
Interesting headline there, timmyboy. Another misleading title for a slashvertisement. Once I read the article, I discovered that this is an account of events from FIFTEEN YEARS AGO. 1997, dude. That was the era of the F cards and H cards. The era before the emulators and even before the unloopers. SERIOUSLY? How does this count as news? You have NO date in the summary, and you are deliberately misleading the reader to think that this is something recent.
It's nothing really engaging. It's just a historical account which might be a little entertaining to those of us who used to program DirecTV cards for the fun of it and resell receivers with Hu cards (unprogrammed) for hundreds of dollars on ebay.
Re:LMAO (Score:4, Informative)
That this exists at all is a result of Mr. Al Gore who sponsored and shepherded through the Satellite Home Viewer Act. What this did was made it a Federal offence to decrypt an encrypted signal that was broadcast. Until this was law it was perfectly legal to receive and decode any signal that happened to come into your home.
This was done, ostensibly, to stop people with a C-band dish from receiving HBO for free. The real effect of it was to create DirecTV and Dish Network - before this law was passed these services could not have existed because anyone could simply receive their signal and decode it. With the power of the Federal Government behind them, however, it became a viable business model.
Just something else we have to thank Al Gore for, in addition to the Internet.