DirecTV gets back at non-paying customers....HAHA

[blurredvision]

<< Satellite television provider DirecTV sent a signal Sunday night that destroyed smart cards hacked by signal pirates to get the company's programming without paying for it. An estimated 200,000 illicitly reprogrammed DirecTV cards, worth several hundred dollars apiece only last week, were destroyed Sunday night.

The pirated smart cards, actually microcomputers complete with embedded software and memory, were made read-only by hackers to prevent just such an attack by the satellite company. The company, however, put the program that eventually destroyed the cards into them a few bytes at a time over months as part of routine updating of the H cards. Users were forced to regularly modify their cards, inadvertently programming them to be destroyed when DirecTV finally gave the command to inject an endless loop into a &quot;write once&quot; section of the memory. >>



HAHA....that should teach some of you guys. You know what they say, it's illegal how some people watch television.:Q

 

[IBhacknU]

got the link for this article?

 

[ThundercatHO]

illigal TV rules though.....they are still getting rich....from all the honest saps that wanna pay

 

[Passions]

wow neat.

 

[amnesiac]

I think that article was on slashdot.org

That had to be the coolest article I've read for a while. Kudos to DTV for coming up with such an awesome scheme.

You have to read the whole article to really appreciate what they did - usually DTV sent an &quot;update&quot; to the cards once or twice a month, after which hax0rs would have to update their hacked cards.

But suddenly DTV started updating the cards up to 4-5 times per DAY with completely random fragments of code that made no sense - the card hackers thought it was just to inconvenience them.

Eventually it became clear that all these fragments were part of one bigger program that destroyed all the cards before anyone caught on to what was happening..

Viva technology!