Satellite TV Hacker Tells His Story 160
Wired is running a story about Christopher Tarnovsky, the man who was accused of working for NDS, a company owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., to sabotage a competitor's satellite TV system. Wired had a chance to speak with Tarnovsky and get his description of how the smart-card hacking war developed. Quoting:
"Tarnovsky, who was known online as 'Big Gun,' says Ereiser offered him $20,000 to fix cards that were killed by ECMs, and he agreed. Each time NDS created a countermeasure, Tarnovsky would analyze the code and find a way to circumvent the countermeasure. He did it while working full-time as a software engineer for a semiconductor company in Massachusetts. 'I'd be at work and I'd check the IRC (channel) to see if they'd launched their Thursday countermeasure yet,' he says. 'It was like a chess game for me. I couldn't wait for them to do a countermeasure because I would counter it in minutes.' It wasn't long before NDS came courting. Tarnovsky had a contact at the company to whom he'd begun passing information about holes in its software, even supplying patches to fix them."
Re:Who wants to track down which company (Score:5, Funny)
Now we need the max headroom video Pirate to tell (Score:3, Funny)
Shocking! (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Some lawyer - what's the theory on airwaves? (Score:3, Funny)
Well, your honor, I thought I was working on a SETI project, you know, searching for ET. Damn if I didn't discover it was just HBO, not aliens, after all.
Re:The Video Shows the Holy Grail of Sat Hacking (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Some lawyer - what's the theory on airwaves? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:uh, this is a PR fluff piece (Score:2, Funny)
Re:OLD (Score:1, Funny)
Re:Motivation (Score:4, Funny)