Satellite Pirate 2001 - Tech TV Cybercrime Investigates - History of Hacking
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- čas přidán 9. 03. 2024
- Found a VHS tape with a classic episode of Tech TV's Cybercrime from 2001. The DirecTV Pirate epidemic is investigated, also covered is Cable TV Piracy. Interesting to watch especially when the dude running DirecTV's signal integrity unit speaks about how they failed to rescue the system with the HU card update, the HU was quickly hacked too! Be sure to also check out my other videos on Satellite Hacking.
Part #1: • Satellite Card Hacking...
Part #2: • DirecTV Black Sunday E...
Part #3: • FTA - Dish Network- Be...
Part #5: • nFusion IKS Private Se...
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Thanks to whoever said, "If purchasing isn't ownership, then piracy isn't theft."
Well you're purchasing the authorization to be able to use/access that item. If you don't purchase that authorization, then you are legally not allowed to use/access it.
@@Stjornaccess and ownership are 2 very different things tho that's what they need to understand
@@Stjornhis comment is clearly over your head, maybe don't chime in unless you understand the full context.
That would be Cory Doctorow that said it, I believe.
@@StjornYeah sure, hidden deep in the T&Cs. Never when making the purchase or after when it just shows up as “owned” or “you already own this content” etc.
I'm not stealing TV. It's their signal that's invading my property, I'm simply watching it
I remember that being most people's defense when it was so possible to do this. Correct me if I'm wrong, but you can no longer still TV right?
@@i_used_adblock_to_watch_this I dunno, I'm not american
🤣True true
It's not the receiving of the signal that's illegal, it's the decrypting of it that's illegal, or better yet, How you obtained the decryption key's needed to decrypt the signal in the first place. And more then likely, the source of those keys did not come from the signal itself.
😂...it all started with that damn buzzing noise in brain 🧠 😒 ~*
These were the days. Being able to receive the raw feeds from onsite film crews was something else. Watching when they thought nobody was watching. I miss it.
It's still possible if you know where to look :)
Wow, I never considered that one before, I bet it had its moments?!😂💚🐾
This episode was pirated off directv in Canada.
You got that right !
Lol
The most stealth cable piracy device I ever saw was in 2004. A friend brought over a little black box and hooked it up in line to the coax on my existing cable box. Turned in on for a few minutes, and then REMOVED IT. From that point on my regular cable box was authorized to unlock every pay channel and no physical modification was done to the box whatsoever. He could use his device to "charge" as many cable boxes as he wanted. The "charge" usually lasted at least a few months, and then he'd come back over and do it again.
Sounds like an analog cable system. Digital cable doesn't work anything like that. (if the network doesn't send your box a periodic key, it can't decode anything. And those keys rotate rather quickly - so one hacked, authorized box can't fed them to others... which is one of the ways DTV was hacked.)
@@jfbeam Yes it was the last analog box I'd ever have. About a year later I moved and got a digital system.
Hah man, just tell you didnt "black box" sattelite in the way 00s that just had to *be recharged every few months*
A few years prior you could indeed get sattelite with a large dish and steering controller.
Cable and sattelite by the 2000s you had to find an adapter that you plugged the smart card into and flashed for your provider.
Usually we had to pop em open and find the TX/RX serial pads and solder to said devices. When analog low Frenchy and laughable SoCs had PINS... Those were tbe cool days.
@@derrekvanee4567 No I had heard of systems like that but never had one. From about 2001 to 2003 I had a little blue card programmer for DirectTV but keeping the cards alive was almost more of a hassle than just paying for the content. There were weeks I'd have to reprogram the cards multiple times, and then there was the complication of the cards getting looped, and it just became more work than it was worth.
I got free tv permanently back in the 2000s as a kid this way. Idk why you had to "recharge it"
“You wouldn’t download a car would you?”
Yes. Yes I would. 😂
me too
They talk about "Lost Money", but what they failed to realize is majority of the people that bought those cards were not going to buy the service in a legit way. So their not losing a customer or any potential revenue.
Exactly. You see the same thing with streaming. I'm not going to sign up for one more streaming service to watch a show.
Everyone likes to say that. But if you watch it without paying for it, that's lost income. That's money they did not collect from a viewer. It does not matter that you were never going to pay for it anyway.
@@jfbeamHow is that a lost income if the person were not going to pay anyway, there's no way of losing something you wouldn't get
@@jfbeam It does matter, and they like to call it loss so they write it off in the tax filing, But to be fair, not all pirates are not potential customers, some may have to purchase the service if there were no way to receive it.
@@elisa_5445it’s lost income because if someone wants to watch something that’s locked behind a paywall they are forced to pay but with the free alternative why even pay at all if I know I can get it for free it’s the same situation with movie site people can still pay to watch a movie but why pay when you can watch it on a website for free…
I love decoding a signal that is send your way is somehow illegal.
still a signal of a paid service though
@@vgamonitorwhat you are paying for is the decryption keys and the hardware to use the service. In most countries around the world, broadcasters accept responsibility for the fact that transmitting freely-available signals incurs a risk; they can choose to mitigate this via the use of DRM, however circumventing it isn’t illegal. It’s in-fact completely legal to do what you wish with freely-transmitted signals.
That was a golden era. Thanks for posting this.
My pleasure!
@peterfairlie2296
Will you share some info on the encoder you used to convert the vhs signal?
Tech TV is very nostalgic. I remember The Screensavers show with Patrick Norton and Leo Laporte. Fresh Gear was cool too. Thank you for sharing this.
Glad you enjoyed it
Martin "what's his name" was kinda funny. Sargent , that's it.
One of the biggest motivators for Cable TV piracy that doesn't get much attention, was the fact that the networks that were on basic cable had advertising on them. I my self have never had a problem with the idea of pay TV it's self. But expecting people to pay for a TV service that has advertising in it. HELL NO. You want me to pay for it, Then lose the ad's.
Good point. I still remember those 2000s commercials from when AI was a kid
A person could argue that they are double dipping.
They are charging a service that is already bought and paid for by the advertisers who are running ads on the service.
I knew several people with this setup around 2000-2003. Got every channel on dtv. They had a card reader that plugged in between the receiver to prevent their card from being nuked.
Everyone I know had cabletv descramblers in the 90s and 00s until digital cable took over. It is how I watched Stargate sg-1 as a kid.
It is sad the government acted as private security for cable an sat companies.
And now, government wastes time entrapping people into governor kidnapping plots and other assorted nonsense.
More on satellite piracy! I love this dude! Awesome job again Peter!
I grew up in the 90s and early 2000s ( born in 89 ) and vividly remember this stuff , my dad had a connection to a guy who would give him the hacked cards and I remember having access to all the paid access , ppv , porn , sports it was all just enabled lol. What a time to be alive - I now do " cybersecurity "
Gotta love how they say that paying subscribers are paying for the pirates too, good way to get people on your side.
So, the pirates are paid for after all! So no money is lost.
what I find strange is the misuse of the word steaking, stealing is defined as "the action or offence of taking another person's property without permission or legal right and without intending to return it"
now the thing with "stealing it in Canada" is a bit of a misnomer, you see what they mean by "stealing" is not paying the license fee, but there isn't a license fee to pay in Canada as it isn't licensed to broadcast there so there isn't a license fee to steal.
Damn the quality on that old VHS is good!
That's because I always bought high quality tape and recoded on the top speed ST which gave 2 hours per tape. Most people bought cheap tapes and used EP which ran the tape at 1/3 the speed and gave you 6 hours of poor quality recording.
@@peterfairlie2296Could you possibly also upload this documentary in 60FPS? That’s how VHS really was you know
The tracking on the VCR is garbage tho, unless sunspots were bad that day or something
@peterfairlie2296
Will you share some info on the encoder you used to convert the vhs signal?
look at the NASA apollo photos and film. what was it like 72mm?
there are folks nowadays who are like my 4K is better when in reality the old film had higher quality than many digital sensors now.
when working with nuclear stuff many if not all digital devices die, so analog is still valid.
be like "I'd like a rad hardened 4K gopro please?" slim chances of that existing. lol
That lost revenue number doesn't make any sense. That's assuming that everybody pirating would be a potential customer.
thanks for posting this Peter; I think I remember watching this back in the day when we had cable!
you gotta love the "revenue lost" when it assumes that people who pirate would 100% pay monthly fees if pirating wasnt possible
the good ol "we own your money, you just dont know it"
it actually does have an effect tho not as bad as they would have you believe. The data comes in after every ECM in the form of new subs.
@@kakd1870 It really doesn't tho, every time I've lost access its always been easier to wait for the next one, rather than throw money at the problem.
True. I cloned a friends gold card and connected it to a DVB card on my computer for recording, a lot of fun was had learning how to do it, but I wouldn't pay 1 cent for the garbage they broadcast.
Growing up in the 80s and 90s, my family had a cable descrambler. The people who lived in our house before us had the cable connected for free. Therefore, my parents paid nothing for cable and never got caught!
The price is going to increase weather or not you pirate the signal and often at the same rate. There are reasons tho even with all the warnings and threats, the consumers have little sympathy when they find a loophole to save money.
As for the 'lost revenue,' it actually does have an effect tho not as bad as they would have you believe. The data comes in after every ECM in the form of new subs.
imagine a band suing you because you could hear them playing a concert from your house
The great days of satellite "testing". We were always a step ahead of them. They never fried hardware. It was always easily fixable. The old DTV H and HU cards. Dishnetwork was where it was at though if you were more of a hands on nerd. Battery cards, AVR cards, N1, N2 cards, emulation, etc... What a glorious time. Its all a thing of the past now though. Thanks for this bit of nostalgia!
Wanna buy a Litronic 210 card reader writer? Boot board? Unlooper? How about some Oatmeal chips? Blank boards? I have boxes of stuff still laying around.
@@fauxque5057 That's stiff is pretty much obsolete now days. Not worth noting.
The irony of watching a VHS Recording ripped to CZcams is just amazing considering the subject being discussed.
❤❤❤❤
😂😂😂😂
2:05 "If you walk into an electronics store and walk out with a television without paying for it, that's stealing." I miss the 90's. 😆
Today jt's called Black lives Matter
You wouldn't download a car
@@troywhite6039Alex Jones, I thought you were banned from CZcams.
Good thing you owe about 1 billion dollars to the Sandyhook victims.
Cuck
@@troywhite6039What do you mean by this?
It happened in other countries too during that time. In Europe HBO and Canal+ over cable was pirated so much that TV had to change technology often.
This is a great throwback! Thanks for uploading this.
Glad you enjoyed it!
I miss tech tv! Thanks Fer sharing.
You and me both!
I still have my card readers, gold cards etc.
I remember when I had frontier TV here in CT after att sold to frontier. The ppv channel was working for free for like 4 years.
I'm not surprised, as back in the early 90's my area had a small cable company called Palmetto Cable, and for like 4 months one summer all the PPV channels, including the adult ones where turned on before anyone at the company noticed it, so my friends who did not have cable where over at my house anytime they could when my parents where at work with their mouths hung open lol!
I remember a friends uncle had a descrambler cable box back in the 90's. It was mind blowing stuff to me back then.
I use to modify the Zenith SSAVI ST1000 cable boxes. The boxes used 8 bit addresses for remote addressing. You could capture a valid ID from the data stream into a shift register and then use that ID as your own in place of the static ID in the PROM. The box would stay on all of the time and decode everything.
Well that was an interesting watch. I LOVED that channel. I have some videos of one of their shows the screen savers.
Nice easy to understand report from Jennifer - What's she doing these days ? Did the $105/month back in 2000 get you totally ad free programming ?
Jenifer London, She lives in Mexico now !
www.linkedin.com/in/jennifer-london-londonography/
The male host Alex went to work for CNN for a while, along with some other ex-TechTV News people.
thanks for the upload what an interesting little nugget of history :)
I had a corrupt digital version of this one that Ive hung onto for at least 21 to 22 years. I am glad a good copy was finally found!
That argument of it costing the company's money was kind of crazy. They did lose money but they lost it fighting it. Not to mention how bell got rid of the ability for you to pick your own channel groups right after they killed the pirates. Driving costs way up for consumers.
how much money did they spend lobbying and getting the fbi to work for them? the federal government works for corporations, not the regular tax paying voter
These days it is not worth it to pirate live TV
shit kerel ik zie jou ook echt overal :P
ja ik ben overal en nergens tegelihjke @@Wasmachineman
Now that piracy is very low the companies are charging upwards of 400+ a month for sports and box office channels. So if your not stealing from them they are stealing from you! LOL.
That's a very nice encoding of a VHS video.
23 years later, it's still happening but now with firesticks
*pulls out an F card*
have tons of old and modern dtv/dishnet cards, its a 1980 technology (iso7816), and they arent worth much today but worth more to me as sentimental value today. There was a day when H cards and/or HU cards (different times) were selling for over 400 bucks a piece. at one point walmart sold directv kits with hu cards that were cheap and easily hackable
@peterfairlie2296
Will you share some info on the encoder you used to convert the vhs signal?
Curious to see more about the PC you use to convert analog video to digital; Specs, what OS/software you run etc...
I actually remember during my youth in the late 80's-90's the option to buy these small satellite dishes at swap meets which would allow one to get HBO for free. I also recall HBO having some kind of initiative where one could turn in your mini satellite dish in some kind of amnesty. Just wish I could remember more about this as I was a kid at the time.
To think all of that would've been prevented if they had just sold satellite tv to Canada
But Canada is not DirecTV's target contury so I'd say it's kinda understandable why they didn't do it
Wasn't really up to them. They didn't have a license to operate in Canada. And none of the channels they broadcast were licensed for broadcast into Canada.
So it's ok for them to illegally broadcast without a licence into Canada and not pay for it?
@@troywhite6039 but the hackers got directv working with a special unauthorized method, so technically directv isn't in the wrong here
I live in Southwestern Ontario, but growing up never heard of stealing satellite tv.
That all changed in 2005 when I had a co-op work term in Windsor for University and everyone there did it. I found it fascinating.
Great quality considering how old that VHS was. Who remembers watching this on there authorized subscription back in the day? 😂📺📼
you can do this with any IP gateway, though I'd imagine the redundancy requires it to connect through to either the same junction box, or same data center first
thats cool thanks for shareing this info.
I, & some other family members, went to Blaine, WA, back in 2004, & walked through the Peace Arch.
The crime of stealing 1's and 0's that get delivered to your satellite dish (or cable connection) whether you like it or not.
Now we use a website and avoid subscription fees for streaming. how things change yet stay the same.
great find!
I miss TechTV. Anyone remember "The Screen Savers"?
Yeah, Leo and the other dude!
Hell ya .
3:11 donor boards for a repair shop would've been a far better excuse
Imagine paying for TV and then having to sit through 10-15 minutes of ads an hour
I had so many of these cards. The Direct TV football card was the best!
It's wild how people were able to steal the signal like that. You'd think merely decrypting it without authorization wouldn't take it away from its owner. But if it's theft, it must be getting taken, not merely decoded or copied... I wonder how that works?
Seeing the other half about cable theft. We still have that here in 2024 😂 We still have about 40 channels of analog with a mix of around 20 QAM channels in the open. About 2 years ago someone just down the road from me was caught, only caught because they where causing noise in the upstream from there twist on connectors lol.
Back in the day, what was wrong with putting an antenna on your TV and watching free to air?? Anyhow I use Kodi these days.. Good video thank you.
My Freesat box has something resembling a CableCard slot, but I've never seen a card for it. I do know that Sky analogue had hacked cards that Sky would send a kill signal to several times a day (and that was over satellite)
My EETV box which uses a combination of digital terrestrial (Freeview) and IPTV, doesn't use a card, it's controlled entirely by my ISP, who also happens to be BT/EE!
Man, I remember techTV. Use to watch the hell out of it. I also remember black boxes and bootleg cards. My neighbor had this elaborate set up where his satellite box was hooked to a computer tower next to his tv. That way if they zap the card it could immediately be reprogrammed. And this guy was not a computer geek, hell he about couldn’t use word 😂.
yes. we need to stop tv before it's too late. SHUT IT DOWN! SHUT CABLE DOWN IN 2025!
What happened to your IKS video?
I forgot about techtv is that who rebranded into G4?
they merged with g4 to form g4techtv, then they dropped the techtv name a few months later. so yeah, pretty much
the good old days
I miss the days of setting up dishes and finding the signal, I remember here in the PNW we could aim at the Canadian dishes as well as the ones over America.
The HU cards took a while to become publicly available, DirectTV had about six months between the end of the H card and the HU card being completely broken. Either way, you needed new equipment (unlooper) and programs took a while to trickle out from the scene to the IRC channels. Most people stayed on the H card until they were canceled in 2002, at which point the tools for HU were widely available. Fortunately, I wasn't having to modify the cards for my mom's husband by that point.
Not entirely true. The HU was hacked before Black Sunday. Once they killed the boot sector on the H card we were quickly able to mass produce the boot boards to get the H card back up and running. Also emulators became big business using the H card in the emulator. Eventually they shut down the stream leaving only the HU cards up and running.
@@fauxque5057 Yeah, they were hacked before, but my searches back then turned up commercial options, only. It took a while for those HU hacks to be widespread such that you could just DCC it from public IRC channels. Never had an emulator, but I remember them being discussed as the potential next step for ECM handling.
16:00
The franchise fee's part, do cable companies actually give money to local communities? I highly doubt any corpo would share their revenue like that.
Oh wow those were days tech tv was so good back in the day .they keep me watching what was newest tech back in the day .i tember this pretty well .
The real OGs remember the "Football cards" Easy to reprogram, took Direct TV over 2 years to sort out. Pirating Direct TV was an art. You had to dodge their code calls all the time that could potentially brick your card or worse your receiver.
I dont undestand the Satalite model in the us, do you need to pay for every station on sat or what? i never paid or had a package so that i can watch tv thats just hooked up at a dish.
It’s like satellite in most other countries. There are FTA/in the clear and then there are pay satellite services like Dish and Directv. With the latter two, there are tiers and each tier has a certain set of channels
@@RB-xm3edAh ok so direct tv is like Sky and HD+, the latter one is just the free tv in HD
It's funny how one of their reasons is the fee which goes towards local business and services... completely ignoring the fact that taxes are a thing
This reminds me of that show; Beyond 2000
Thanks 👍
Good video sir
I wish i wasn't like 7 at the time things like this were happening, would have totally gotten in this.
wow, that was expensive back then.
That's some good gravy.
They wrote alleged pirate tv losses off on their taxes, they and Dish Network had no feedback as to who was decrypting signals in the first place. Oh the days of the Hu Card! 😂
Good times. I recently found some of my old H cards.
And another thing you might not know Canada, as well as Mexico did not have a license for DIRECTV at the time they were actually getting programming for free because of what you would call the splash over which means the satellite signal would splash over into Canadian province, and then into the Mexican province which gave them access
Ironically enough, if Canadians had the option to pay for Direct TV, a sizeable amount would happily pay.
I wonder how many people bought hacked cards/descramblers after watching this. Had I been a bit older I would have absolutely bought a descrambler.
You can do this now but is it worth it?.
No
Watch CZcams instead
you can't really do it though because directv dish and the cable providers have very much tightened their security up
I remember those days, when all the sudden our bill went up to subsidize the pirating. After DTV disabled all the cards on Black Sunday, the very next month, our bill went down. 😊
BTW, why did the US Treasury get the money after the sting? I would assume the money would have went to DTV to help offset their losses🤔
The whole video sound like a waste of public money to protect big corporation.
I love this. Absolutely would have used it if i wasn't a child back then. Who actually cares if directv loses money?
Oh NDS. Towards the end of 2000s we just download a DLL plugin and load it with DVB Dream and all the encrypted channels were just as clear as clear stream channels.
Had a buddy who had an HU loader. He wouldn't buy cards he would just recode your existing card of you receiver.
I would pay for the bare minimum for dtv service it was rare that my card would get zapped since i was a paying customer
We had these cards in every box in the house.
Did you know in Canada? They were selling those hacked access cards and that the FBI actually had a website to catch people in the United States who were purchasing those hacked cards.
Ahh the memories....
Satellite tv providers are in on it! The cards had to come from somewhere, and the number was far more than in this episode. Pirate satellite tv wouldn't have been a big deal if the monthly subscription wasn't so extremely high. $140 a month to watch advertising?
Ah yes. The good ole unencrypted wild wild West. Tech TV was in it's prime in this 99-2002 era. Why do i feel like DirecTV owned tech tv at this time after watching this? Whoops i meant direct television
TechTV in that era was owned by Vulcan Ventures, Paul Allen's company. He had bought it from Ziff-Davis and later sold it to Comcast. TechTV had a satellite transponder and wide system carriage, while Comcast's G4 struggled to find carriage. It ended up being cheaper buy TechTV for the transponder space and carriage than keep trying to get G4 carried.
@@LatitudeSky makes perfect sense . The logic behind the buy
I just aquired a Viewsat VS2000 Extreme with a hologram sticker & `Made in Korea` on the back, for the low price of free. Any tips on getting started?
It powers up, no dish to test since I didn't know I'd get it today. Insides are suprisingly clean.
You can use it to get free FTA. See my video here on just how to do that: czcams.com/video/cf383xhPv3w/video.html
Wth's this?
Man I miss techtv, we had a hacked card back in the day. Themis the days
Homer: So you're stealing cable...
Let me get my Mikobu loader, now when is someone going to get the P4 done?