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Chris Gerlinsky Profile picture
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Oct 24, 2018 • 6 tweets • 3 min read
A table of contents thread for my satellite TV pirate history of the 90s/2000s series. There are still a lot of untold stories - I will share more memories as they come up.

The thread with each story will be linked below.

#tvpiratehistory Image
If this kind of history interests you, think about supporting @internetarchive - without the Wayback Machine, a lot more hacking history would already have been lost forever.

archive.org/donate/
“Black Sunday”, the most well-known counterattack against DirecTV “H card” pirates, in 2001.

The battery card - the first pirate card sold to watch free DirecTV, a hack for the “F card”.

The “HU card” was the third DirecTV smartcard, and was widely pirated in the early 2000s.

RON.EXE, a 1996 hack for DirectTV “F cards”, with a colourful rant directed at a competing satellite TV pirate.

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More from @akacastor

Chris Gerlinsky Profile picture
Feb 10, 2020
@philpem I spent a lot of time playing (along with many others) with nd13-based glitchers in the 2000s - fond memories.

I don't think I have the original nd13.asm source, but here is a commented disassembly: nd13dis . asm

pastebin.com/h8ng6rKn
@philpem Here is ndish . zip from 18 July 2004, including asm and txt files and a schematic, posted by no1b4me.

dropbox.com/s/585nj32cw59h…
@philpem The "Tucker schematic", included in the ndish zip file, was the de facto standard for glitchers used by satellite TV pirates in the mid-2000s, during the N2 era, at least in North America.
Read 6 tweets
Chris Gerlinsky Profile picture
Oct 29, 2018
The pirate business isn’t always friendly - November 30 1996, RON.EXE released by pirate DirecTV hacker “Fast Eddie” included a rant directed at competing Canadian pirate Ron Ereiser. It was also the first “freeware” hack shared on the internet for DirecTV.

#tvpiratehistory
This was a significant release for DirecTV hackers. At the time of RON.EXE, there were not many options available to the public for programming DirecTV smartcards - pirate dealers kept a tight grip on the few hacks developed.
RON.EXE was released during the “F card” DirecTV smartcard era. For many pirates on the internet, it was the first software they could download and use with an inexpensive smartcard programmer to hack DirecTV cards - an alternative to the battery cards.

Read 26 tweets
Chris Gerlinsky Profile picture
Oct 24, 2018
A thread about a small piece of hacking history - memories of the DirecTV “HU card” and the pirates that hacked the smartcard to watch free satellite TV.

#tvpiratehistory
The smartcard used by DirecTV after the “H card” became known by pirates as the “HU” card. This was the third smartcard series for DSS (P3 card - period 3). Sometimes referred to as “the football card” because of the artwork on the back of the card.
Oddly enough, the “football card” was not the one OJ Simpson was busted for pirating. That was the previous generation of smartcard, the “H card”.

Read 45 tweets
Chris Gerlinsky Profile picture
Oct 19, 2018
A thread with some of the story of the “battery card” - the first pirate card sold for hacking DirecTV in the mid 1990s.

#tvpiratehistory
The battery card was a PCB slightly longer than a credit card, with chips on it to emulate a smartcard. Visible on the top of the card when inserted in a satellite receiver was a coin cell-type 3V battery.
Because the chips are thicker than a smartcard, the board would extend out of the cardslot to make room for the chips. Inside the satellite receiver, the battery card emulated an original smartcard. The satellite receiver wouldn’t know the difference.
Read 59 tweets
Chris Gerlinsky Profile picture
Oct 17, 2018
In a Discord chat, a link came up to an article from 2008 looking back on the 2001 “Black Sunday” countermeasure against DirecTV satellite pirates. I wanted to tell a bit of what I remember of the background to Black Sunday for some additional context.

blog.codinghorror.com/revisiting-the…
In the late 90s and early 2000s, satellite TV piracy was a big business. Online streaming, at least anything practical for home users, didn’t exist yet. 56K dialup modems were standard. Satellite TV was unbeatable both for selection as well as quality.
A thriving pirate business existed, in which pirate dealers would sell modified smartcards that enabled access to all the TV channels on the satellite.
Read 58 tweets

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