Dave's been making his own test cards??

[peramus]

Check this out...

http://www.usdoj.gov/criminal/cybercrime/smartcard.htm

Of particular interest is the fact that DirecTV, US Customs, and NDS technologies (whoever they are) cooperated in distributing hacked cards in order to entrap dealers and individuals.

Ok, do you think dave just used the generic Shareware or did he maybe design his own 3M? If so who's 3M is better?? Did dave's 3M get the 900's? Just little things to think about when you're sitting back watching wrestling and guzzling beers....

This is old news, peramus. Do a search. Whether DirecTV's "3M" is better than the hackers' is a moot point. It wasn't even necessary for them to roll a 3M. All they had to do was concoct an unused (or even a formerly used - more on this later) CAM ID, clone it up the wazoo and distribute it through the sting. Once the bait had been cast, it could be 745'd anytime DirecTV wished. If any "testers" were inadvertently using the same bin unrelated to the sting, they would go down, too. Hint, be very suspicious of old bins that suddenly work again. You never know whether it's intentional... As to who NDS is, that's like a Ford owner asking who Henry Ford was. NDS are the nice people who brought you the access card that DirecTV uses. They wrote the code under contract. They also supply cyber-security methodology for other corporate and governmental agencies in the U.S. as well as other countries.

[Strangelet]

NDS... remember that name. They provide Smartcards for a whole slew of digital TV encoding systems around the world. A very shady outfit, IMO. A subsidiary of The News Corporation, which is Rupert Murdoch's evil empire. They own newspapers around the world (including NY Post), the FOX network in the U.S. and much, much more. They claim to be based in London, but most of their operations are based in Israel. Their top guys were arrested recently in Israel on tax charges. Very sleazy, as is just about everything connected with Rupert Murdoch.

65% of their business comes from Smartcards. I'll give you 3 guesses who their #1 customer is and the first 2 don't count. Dave just renewed his contract with them for another 4 years. Here's the kicker: NDS wants to BUY Dave from GM/Hughes! It'll probably hapen, too.

NDS sold Dave a pathetically weak security system. Then when it got hacked, they charged him to fix it! NDS gets payed based on how many subscribers the client has. This translates directly into the number of Smartcards they sell to each client. The fiasco they found themselves in last year forced the switch to the newer HU (P3) cards now coming out. Of course, Dave needs to buy a boatload of these new cards now... about 10 million of them at $35 a pop.

You could make a case that NDS's plan all along was to suply Dave with inferior CAMs, and then hit them up again for all new cards when things got out of hand, thereby causing Dave to spend a lot of cash he didn't really want to spend. Oh well, Dave can afford it. He made over $5 Billion last year.