Some News as of March 1, 1996
The battery cards were ECM'd (Electronic CounterMeasures) three times on February 29, 1996 at 2 PM, 4 PM and 6 PM. There were two previous ECM's which occurred on New Years Eve and Superbowl Sunday. Those ECM's involved hiccups. All services were shut off and then turned on less than one second later. The first time it was done, the ECM was effective in shutting off the pirate battery cards. These cards are used to obtain all DirecTV and USSB services including all Pay-Per-View programming. Less than 3 days later, the developers had written new software to prevent that ECM from working again. That file is main01.enc. When the ECM was repeated on Superbowl Sunday it was not successful in shutting off those battery cards which were loaded with the new software. Customers of some dealers who had not received the updated software were shut off. It appears that a small number of paying subscribers were also shut off by the ECM. Most did not even notice it unless they were changing channels when the ECM was being executed.
It appears that the ECM which occurred yesterday was not a general attack on all battery cards, but was intended to shut off specific clone IRD numbers. Part of the strategy in marketing the pirate cards was to keep the clone/master ratio very low in order to make it harder for DirecTV to shut off specific unit ID's. In spite of this, certain ID's have become widely used. Those are the ones which have been attacked. Back in the days of VideoCipher II piracy, satellite dealers were able to pull seed keys (like an electronic serial number) from decoder modules themselves. Then they would clone hundreds or even thousands boxes to the same ID. If the decoder manufacturer (General Instrument) was able to get those ID's they would be shut off.
When competition in the satellite piracy business became intense around 1989 dealers would try to steal customers from other dealers. If they could get access to decoders modified by a competing dealer they could pull the seed keys. Then they could turn those ID's into General Instrument to be turned off. Suddenly a dealer would find that hundreds of his customers had been shut off. Some would unwittingly become the new customers of dealers who had been responsible for them being shut off.
We will post an update on this new situation as soon as we can. We will discuss it further in American Hacker V 1.7.