[mhurron]

My falther-in-law was less that and more, if I can get away with it, it's actually legal. Many know their fake, and do it because they can get away with it.

That was his justification for a satellite descrambler, they're sending me the signals, obviously I'm allowed to.

[brewdad]

There's an old Carlin joke about "If a cop didn't see it, I didn't do it."

[mmooss]

I can imagine many on HN having excited discussions about their satellite descramblers.

> do it because they can get away with it.

Lots of people on HN download and upload copyrighted materials. Is it really different?

[bityard]

Fine, you've nerd-sniped me.

I tinkered with Dish Network descrambling 20 years ago. Not because I wanted to just watch a bunch of free TV (I hardly watched any TV anyway, we mostly watched DVDs from the video store and Netflix). More because it felt like an interesting rabbit hole. And it was pretty interesting!

I picked a good (newer!) satellite dish and LNB from the trash and had a friend help with the installation and alignment because that was his previous job. Normal people use some kind of tool to find the satellites' geosynchronous orbital station in the sky, but he did it often enough that he could simply look up into the sky and point at them.

There were a handful of grey-market satellite receivers you could buy that were technically capable of descrambling a commercial signal. Of course, they did not advertise themselves as such. They were marketed as FTA (free-to-air) DVB-S receivers. These were not illegal as they were fairly popular in regions of the world that actually _had_ a fair amount of FTA (unscrambled) satellite channels. The only satellites visible from North America, however, tended to carry religious, shopping, or Mexican/Central American programming. Oh, and NASA TV.

The receiver I bought had DVR functionality if you hooked up a USB drive to it. I think I still have some recorded shows on it. It would have been a great way to harvest and release pirated TV shows to the Internet, if you didn't mind editing out all of the ads and whatever.

DVB-S was basically a raw MPEG-2 TS stream that could be optionally encrypted. To use these grey-market receivers as descramblers, you install some custom firmware containing the descrambling modifications and keys. I'm failing to remember the technical details, but the encryption they used was not very good. Dish Network would rotate the keys occasionally, and when they did, you had to update them on your receiver. I can't remember now if the keys were part of the firmware, but I remember it being a pain in the ass.

The firmware/keys part of this had a very "colorful" community. You had to sign up to a very specific and somewhat exclusive web bulletin board in order to download the firmware/keys. I don't remember how I gained an account, but I remember it being non-trivial. IIRC, it was like one guy maintaining the firmware/keys and sometimes it took weeks for him to adapt to whatever thing DN did to thwart piracy. The board was moderated by a complete power-tripping asshat who enjoyed banning people for fun and then gloating about it. (I was not banned, that I recall.) I think they started requiring "donations" in order to view certain threads (like firmware releases) after a while. But I could be misremembering that. I just remember the community was very toxic.

After a few months of this setup, DN figured out how to rotate their keys too often for the casual pirate to keep up. I disconnected mine around that time and moved onto other things. Partly because the experiment ran its course and partly because migrating to real-time key updates would have meant buying a newer receiver. For a while, I flirted with the idea of getting a DVB-T PCI receiver card and working on breaking the encryption myself, but it was quite a bit above my skill level at the time and there did not seem to be anyone else working on it out in the open, since the DMCA was still pretty new then.

[wildzzz]

Your experience describes lots of the kinds of communities you can use to access pirated media. You either pay for the legit service, pay for pirate streaming services, pay with your privacy with the free, dodgy pirate streaming services, or pay with your sanity in dealing with nutjobs.

[Scoundreller]

I recall the “free to air” receivers being pretty easy to configure. My main pita was getting a cheap ftdi usb->serial adapter because that’s how old the underlying tech was. Still easier than jtagging an official receiver.

I migrated into it from the earlier days involving iso7816 card programming and mitm cards so I guess I didn’t have trouble finding which sites to get the fta files. I have good memories of those places being quite welcoming if you did your reading but sometimes ephemeral. Plenty of freeware (but sometimes delayed access). But part of the “payment model” was sevurity vendors trying to destroy their competitors or sell more countermeasures and card swaps to their satellite tv broadcast clients (!!!).

A card swap (and some prosecutions on the nudge nudge “free to air receiver” importers) put an end to most of it unless you went to internet-key-sharing systems where I guess the shared keys come from a handful of slave receivers somewhere. Given the 2-way nature of those key “subscriptions” and network connections required, I could (moreso) understand the paranoia of the operators.

Broadband penetration ultimately killed sat cracking, Netflix et al too. Oh, and what people usually call “iptv”.

[kotaKat]

Yep. Gone are the days of running out for a "119 IKS" or hunting for Bev and Charlie, now everyone just grabs some pooched RTSP feeds and calls it a day.

Feels fitting recently to discover the Dish Network "Pirate TV" recordings. I should run my own in-home IPTV station and use the Pirate TV bug as the logo...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zVXSxJ357pw

You're watching Dish Network's Pirate TV channel!... ... if you're watching me, you're a SATELLITE PIRATE!

[Scoundreller]

Dunno if admitting defeat like that is a sign of strength or weakness.

[al_borland]

They aren’t downloading that content from a company with a $2.5T market cap. They presumably aren’t making a living by selling that copyrighted material via a retail that claims to run a legitimate business.

I think that makes a big difference.

Imagine if Amazon Video, Audible, and Kindle will all just pirate stores, where uploaders of the pirated content made money on the downloads, people paid for those downloads, and Amazon took a cut of everything. How long would that go on before they were in court and that was shutdown?