Clampdown on TV 'Dodgy Boxes'

i dont either. They haven't a clue about the technology. They appeal to the simple masses regarding technology.

The dont dig deep for example into how a phishing attack works or anything like that.

I assume you have read all the report you linked to?

D-Company (India): one of India’s mostnotorious organised criminal groups,D-Comany is involved in counterfeiting,audiovisual piracy, and the financing ofterrorism, all while controlling the blackmarket for films/DVDs

Retro!

The UK channels were selling their programmes to Irish cable operations. Some of the cable TV operators were putting pressure on the government as they thought that some of the rebeam operations were costing them subscribers.The politicians realised that voters were depending on rebeam operators for UK TV and any moves against them would impact their chances of election. At least one of the rebeam operations use beam shaping to effectively block their signals from areas with cable TV operations.

They did it with Steam last year.

We also had lads down markets and going around pubs selling bootleg video, cassettes and CD's.

It was only with the advent of broadband that "Piracy as a Service"(PaaS), i.e. offering a turnkey virtual solution for digital content piracy, became a 'thing'.  (You do the selling, we'll do the rest.) It requires an investment by the "Service Providers" of many millions.

The deflector systems were community based and charged a small subscription for those who choose to pay (many didn't). The legality of these systems was hotly disputed and they were eventually licensed, following intense political pressure.

The cable tv descramblers were simple devices that exploited the weaknesses in the various protection methods used. It took only a limited knowledge of broadcast technology to build them, and many did. They were widely available at low cost and their legality was disputed.

It was only when broadcasters started to encrypt their services that complexity increased substantially. Even then, unauthorised decryption required technical expertise rather than any large investment, the objective was to decrypt the broadcast stream. Access to the unauthorised decryption methods, using the various means outlined in your post, was low cost, or even free. 

The first usage of the term "Piracy as a Service"(PaaS) that I found was in the "2024 annual Special Report 301 by the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR)". 

In assessing the actual situation of copyright infringement in Vietnam, 2embed.tois described as a PaaS because it provides a large library of movies and TV shows to numerous illicit streaming sites, thus acting as a backbone for widespread digital piracy.

• Various drugs and weapons seized

Any examples of human trafficking, extortion or arms trading?

The article doesn't even mention guns btw.

I’ve always wondered how that worked. There was a shop in Carlow in the 80s called cable vision. They sold aerials that got a signal from up on a hill near Bagenalstown. As far as I know the shop paid to have the equipment erected. This could be wrong but how it was relayed to me by my father in law. Talk about flying under the radar. Because it was free to air I assume no one cared? I’m not sure if anyone considered it a crime back in the 80s before the arrival of Sky etc. innocent times compared to today with organised crime and state sponsored Chinese malware in our living rooms.

The "piracy as a service" thing sounds like an attempt by someone trying to fit it into all the other "as a service" phrases and acronyms. The reality is that previous forms of piracy were quite organised and smartcard piracy was very heirarchical in structure.

It generally started with a few key players reverse-engineering an official smartcard, removing some of the conditional access and tiering routines and emulating the smartcard with a different microcontroller (processor). Sky lost a very important application for an injunction in the Dublin High Court because it overlooked that critical difference between pirate smartcards and official smartcards. The pirate smartcards generally used different microcontrollers (processors) to the official smartcard. That was probably before most of the journalists in the Irish media discovered dodyboxes and piracy. The loss of that case effectively made Ireland the piracy capital of Europe for a while.

Your comments on cable TV piracy read like very simple AI summaries. They miss some very important aspects and are wrong in others.

Early scrambling systems on cable TV used filtering and some of the more advanced ones interfered with the synchronisation singals or pseudo-randomly inverted the video or pseudo-randomly delayed the video on each line. The expense of the official descramblers meant that some operators (like Cablelink in Dublin, Waterford and Galway) only used their system to scramble the premium channels like Sky Movies and Sky Sports.

The majority of Cablelink's channels were not scrambled. Cablelink's largest piracy problem was from what used to be called "self-connectors". These were people who connected their TVs to the cable network.

Cork had a different system which required an official descrambler. One of the main reasons why there wasn't serious piracy on these scrambling systems was because of the complexity of wiring up a pirate descrambler. SCART commectors were only coming into widespread use and many TVs did not have them. This meant that a pirate descrambler would have required a tuner and a UHF modulator. That made a pirate descrambler more expensive and limited piracy on these cable TV systems. The Frenchj system used by Cablelink had been hacked back in the early 1980s in France and the same economic conditions also applied. What a lot of people, and many journalists, don't seem to understand is that piracy is a business. An attack on a system requires that the development consts can be recovered and a profit made. The size of a potential market affects the decision by pirates to target the system.

The things that could be done to protect the signal in an analogue system were limited as it was always a fine balance between protection and degrading quality the signal. With encryption, there was far less loss of quality.

Scrambling and encryption are two related though different things. Scrambling, at its most basic, means changing the order of elements in a signal. Encryption means changing the value of elements in a signal. (That's a very simple explanation.)

Scrambling was used with analogue systems because complete digital encryption was expensive in the early to mid 1990s. Some of the approaches used digital encryption on the audio as that was a cheaper approach. Encryption of audio and video is used with digital systems and they only began to appear in the late 1990s on satellite.

There's a massive difference between an AI summary and actual knowledge. The AI summary above is simplistic and str wrong in places.

With digital systems, and for the more complex analogue systems such as Sky's VideoCrypt, an official decoder or STB was still required because it was the smartcard and its data that was targeted for piracy. Earlier analogue systems typically did not require an official descrambler and could be pirated with a pirate descrambler that could be maufactured for around £20 in parts. A number of designs of pirate descrablers appeared that worked with multiple systems. It was simply a case of adding a circuit board. The main targets for these multi-service boxes were FilmNet, Premiere and BBC World.

It was the widespread availability of broadband that effectively removed the restraining factor of the requirement for a genuine STB and changed the delivery channel from satellite and cable to Internet. That changed the model of piracy to one of exploiting "legitimate" subscriptions used in a way that was not within the contract terms. The Android devices also represented a loss of control over their system for the broacasters. In effect dodgybox networks are parallel broadcasters with many of the same concerns of a genuine broadcaster like Sky. Noq, instead of Sky being faced with a largely hierarchical piracy problem with a few key players, it is faced with a distributed piracy problem with many small players. Some of that also has to do with developments in the costs on the web hosting side of the Internet.

When digital broadcast systems were introduced in the late 1990s, the cost of accessing the Internet was high and many people used dial-up access rather than broadband. The costs of bandwidth and hosting were also quite high. Since then, the costs of web hosting and bandwidth has fallen dramatically and dial-up access is rare. That reduction in hosting costs has made the dodgybox network operation commercially viable. The barriers to entry are lower for a prospective dodgybox network operator. Apart from protecting the service, as with Sky and other broadcasters, the main concern is getting enough "legitimate" subscriptions for each channel and creating a network of distributors and resellers.

Subscribing to services outside the copyright region has been going on for a long time. It is known as grey market piracy where a person from one country uses an address and financial details in another to subscribe to a service. With VPNs and financial services, it is now easier to subscribe. The broadcaster in the other country doesn't really lose money on these subscriptions and it is generally the broadcasters who paid for the rights in the person's country who complain most. The F1 example upthread is a good example of what happens when the subscription fees in one country are higher than those in another. The rights owners make more from a completely fragmented copyright regions model than they would from a single subscription fee model.

Anybody else remember "TV rental" shops, you could literally rent a TV from any high street in Ireland.

I also remember seeing TV's on the baggage carousel in airports. ....People bringing them in on scheduled flights....

But yet theres lads thinking dodgy boxes are something new.

Dodgybox, dodgy journalists, perhaps we could call these AI journalists "dodgyjox" :) There should be questions asked in the Dail about this new threat from AI.

The 'Piracy as a Service' definition was coined by the an arm of the US Government. It is an entirely different model than previous approaches to piracy. Instead, it is very similar to other cloud based services, albeit run by organised crime. The  'Service Provider' provides the platform and, in this case, access to a huge library of stored and live content.

When such a solution is used by a legitimate operator (think eir TV or CH5 in the UK) the available content is limited due to cost and copyright limitations. This means that the end user has to subscribe to multiple retail services such as Sky,  Netflix etc.

The PaaS operator is able to aggregate content from a wide range of content providers, worldwide. This requires geographic reach and technical expertise. Despite using various techniques to piggyback on the originating content providers platforms, they also require very significant infrastructure of their own. The investment and organisational capabilities required to build and operate such a PaaS platform are substantial and to compare such an operation to previous forms of piracy is simply ludicrous.

Thanks for the trip down memory lane in relation to piracy techniques ...

I'm not sure what you're trying to say in relation to Cablelink. The analogue signal was widely pirated, often by driving a nail through the trunk cable - degrading the signal for legitimate downstream users. 

Cablelink initially  used 'out of band' transmission for unencrypted premium channels. Some makes of TV (Grundig springs to mind) could still tune these in, or they could be frequency shifted using a simple mixer.

They then moved to Sync suppression for PAL which was easily bypassed, using a video sync separator. Schematics were published in a number of electronics magazines and at least one was designed as a college project (not by me).
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An "official decoder or STB" was not required for Sky Digital until at least 2010. Many receivers with a CAM ( conditional access module ) or  with a software based CAM emulator (CCcam  was popular) could be used. These had the advantage that the card could be shared amongst multiple boxes, allowing multi-room viewing. The Internet then allowed multi-site card-sharing. 
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Thanks again, brought back memories  :)

Government and industry lobbyists always like to represent problems in the most doom-landen fashion. The US has had a long experience with piracy and with lobbyists from old analogue systems to VideoCipher II to DirecTV and others. Lobbyists always push hard for legislation to protect the services of their employers.

The costs of operating an online service have fallen since the 1990s and the barriers to entry for a dodgybox network operator are much lower. This makes it easier to set up such an operation and it has created a distributed problem for broadcasters whereas before it was largely hierarchical. In a hierarchical system, as with pirate smartcards, taking out a few key players could reduce the problem considerably. This is how the broadcasters went about dealing with smartcard piracy. Large operations are often easier to detect and some can be eliminated as a result. The smaller operations are more difficult to detect as long as they remain small and have small numbers of subscribers.

Your "piracy as a service" model has commonalities with earlier forms of privacy that might not be immediately obvious in AI summaries. They are Exploitation, Implementation, Distribution, Monetisation and Evasion.

The content has to be exploited. With dodgybox networks, that often involves "legitimate" subscriptions. With the earlier forms of piracy, it inolved reverse-engineering the official descramblers or smartcards.

Implementation involves creating a working solution. For dodgybox operations, this has to do with building a backend, arranging the content and making it available. With previous forms of piracy, it involved manufacturing a pirate descrambler or pirate smartcards.

Distribution means getting the product or service to the customer. With a physical device such as a pirate descrambler or smartcard, that meant posting it or handing it to the customer. The battery card (first proposed in 1991) was a means by which a specific pirate smartcard could receive update codes from a phoneline or fax and the user could enter them on a keypad on the card. The VideoCipher II system in the US used to have phonelines and fax services outside the US where people could get the updated keys. The dodgybox model is hardware independent and off-the-shelf hardware can be used. That's a major change.

A hack or a service still has to be monetised. Otherwise it is simply an academic exercise. That involves getting customers and getting them to pay. In that respect, a hierarhical model of distribution unintentionally like that of the broadcasters emerges. Payments with such a network are problematic in that they can generate large amounts of cash if payment is in cash or an electronic trail if payment is made online. Digital currencies have helped with some of the anonymisation pf payments. With previous forms of piracy, pressure was applied to credit card payments companies to withdraw their services. This was made easier in the EU with various EU directives and legislation.

Evasion simply means not getting caught. Any potential dodgybox operator has to be able to evade detection and avoid problems with the money made from their operations. The broadcasters, as with older forms of piracy effectively use private investigators to detect and infiltrate dodgybox operations. Some law enforcement agencies also investigate operations and shut then down.

The same issues that applied to older forms of piracy still apply to the current form (streaming and dodgybox operations.) They may not be immediately apparent.

Cablelink had realised that frequency shifting was not a good solution. I think that the part of the spectrum where channels were moved was nicknamed S-Band. The problem with Cablelink was funding and rolling out a complet4e end to end scrambling solution was not viable. It tested a few systems, from what I recall and then chose the French Discret system, This used pseudo-random video line delay rather than synch suppression. The system had been compromised as early as 1984 and the plans for a pirate descrambler using commonly available components were published in the now defunct Radio Plans magazine even when someone from Canal Plus was being widely quoted in French media claiming that it had an unhackable system. The pirate desramblers wored by ensuring that all the video lines were all delayed by about 1,800 mS. It was an elegant solution. What limited a potential attack on Cablelink's system was getting access to the demodulated video and audio signals. I think that the Cork cable network used a variant of the Jerrold system.

Most synch suppression systems were easily defeated. Radio Electronics and other publications in the US published designs and Elektor magazine in Europe published a design for the system used by FilmNet. With satellite TV, there was easy access to the demodulated video and audio. Each PAL video line contained a colour burst which could be used to generate a new set of synch signals that could then be combined with the video line. It had some concepts in common with the devices used to remove the Macrovision anti-copying signals from video tapes. The colour burst approach was also used to hack Sky in the 1980s before it was taken over by Murdoch. That system also used digital audio.

With Sky's digital system in the late 1990s and the other European digital systems, there was a lot of debate in the Conditional Access industry about the proposed DVB system which provided a common framework for digital broadcasting. The hardware could be used with different broadcasters simply by using a different CAM and smartcard. Sky's provider, News Datacom, made a decision that gave it some breathing room in getting its system established. It decided to maintain its proprietary approach.

Emulating a CAM in software was more difficult then. The few years that the decision bought allowed Sky Digital to get established. As for the cardsharing solution, it was amazing to see a solution from 1989 work decades later. There were various attempts by News Datacom and others to provide effective countermeasures including encrypting the data on the link between the smartcard and the decoder along with marrying the card to the decoder or STB. However, once a valid keystream can be extracted, that can be reused. Such solutions are time limited in that the system providers typically come up with a countermeasure. Sky's approach to CAMs being emulated in software was to make its CAM more hardware dependent. This was, in some respects, similar to how Sky and News Datacom limited piracy on the Sky 10 (0A) card by having a microcontroller and a custom chip (ASIC) to make it more difficult for a pirate smartcard emulation. The pirate smartcards started out with a copy of that custom chip and then had to resort to using official chips from deactivated Sky cards. The problem was that the widespread roll-out of broadband made the dodgybox and streaming approaches viable and they used hardware that was outside the control of the broadcasters.

The form of piracy may have changed. The same issues remain for the broadcasters and the pirates. It is still a business for all those involved.