WSJ Does First Article on DSS Piracy

The Friday January 12 issue of the Wall Street Journal contains the first media coverage of the DSS paddleboard fix. In the days of Videocipher II piracy it took the major media several years to cover the story. Their rationale at that time was that they did not want to encourage satellite piracy by informing the public that they could steal satellite delivered programming. The first public acknowledgement that Videocipher signal security had had been compromised was by HBO which ran the first anti-piracy ads. Before that time the decoder manufacturer (General Instrument) denied that their system had been compromised. While publicly denying they had a problem they were actively ECM'ing (electronic countermeasures) each new fix which came out. The ECM's were only ever a temporary setback for the pirates.

At this time DirecTV is not publicly admitting that it's signal security has been compromised. The net effect of this article and ones which will surely follow is to independently verify that the DSS system has been compromised and force DirecTV to react. Scrambling News had a request last week from a national magazine for a photo of a working fix. It is entirely possible that someone will demonstrate a working pirate fix for the DSS system on a national news or tabloid style show.

Public displays of this nature will inevitably force DirecTV to issue new smartcards to their subscribers. In the WSJ article, the spokesman for DirecTV states that instead of issuing new smartcards they can also electronically change their security codes over-air. We know that this is not possible in this series of cards because they do not have enough ROM space. If a new series of cards is issued, the pirate fix will be shut off. Gray market subscribers will be sent new cards to non-existent U.S. addresses. Developers of the pirate fix will have to start over.

In the days of Videocipher II piracy, the pirates monitored G.I.'s testing of ECM's on various channels. This intelligence helped them develop new hardware/software which would be ready before the ECM was actually used. They often knew up to six months in advance what GI was going to do. [I will continue this tomorrow with a commentary on the accuracy of the WSJ article. ]