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February 8, 2001 |
From: Mike Traffanstead <traff@roadrash.org> To: "'lwn@lwn.net'" <lwn@lwn.net> Subject: DirectTV and "Black Sunday" Date: Thu, 1 Feb 2001 14:20:11 -0600 In your article you state that DirecTV programmed the receivers to destroy themselves. This not quite the case. DirecTV programmed the access cards to go into an infinite loop, thereby denying access to ill-gotten services. The cards can easily be replaced by setting up a proper account with DirecTV and no damage is done to the actual receiver. The best analogy I can think of is if someone "acquired" an account on the lwn server and you went through and removed it. You didn't actually damage anything, you just correct something that should not have been in the first place. Mike Traffanstead (No relation to DirecTV) | ||
Date: Mon, 05 Feb 2001 22:09:03 -0700 To: lwn@lwn.net From: Maurice Hilarius <maurice@harddata.com> Subject: DirecTV war Hi Liz and friends. Like many Canadians I am a "pirate Satellite Dish" enthusiast. Why? Because it is free? not really. Because our fine government up here imposes Canadian content, so to see the programming from the US we have to go this way. Anyway, back on topic: "Black Sunday" was not that big a deal. really. Why? They managed to destroy the boot portion of the ROM code on the programming cards. Already we have new interfaces that take the programming cards, and have programmable logic on them. Now we can hack the signal even better, and we can now "firewall" our hardware from their signal feed. So, onwards up upwards, better equipped than ever. A buddy in the satellite wars builds the card wedges, and has sold or taken orders for over 8,000 in the last month already. On top of that quite a few people have abandoned the program card route entirely now, and are using pure emulators for their interface/translators. An old PC, some code and 2 serial ports, and that is it! So, as you can see, the game is not over. As a matter of fact it is just getting going.. With our best regards, Maurice W. Hilarius Telephone: 01-780-456-9771 Hard Data Ltd. FAX: 01-780-456-9772 11060 - 166 Avenue mailto:maurice@harddata.com Edmonton, AB, Canada http://www.harddata.com/ T5X 1Y3 | ||
Date: Thu, 01 Feb 2001 16:43:36 +0100 From: Laurent Szyster <l.szyster@ibm.net> To: letters@lwn.net Subject: BIND vulnerablility > Bind vulnerabilities have, in the past, been widely > exploited. It would be nice if it were different this > time. The information and the updates are all available; > the exploits do not yet exist. People who move quickly > need not worry about this problem. People who replaced BIND by djbdns don't have to worry at all about BIND's apparently infinite number or buffer overflow ;-) See: http://cr.yp.to/djbdns.html Laurent Szyster | ||
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