I brought this excellent post here for our members from another forum to help explain our current "Catch 22". Thanks Lightwriter
[quote=Lightwriter]As I read these posts, two things come to mind. One, there is a lot of money to be made in FTAland and that has been the impetus to get the coding to be correct and work. A lot of people have said why Charlie and not Dave? Charlie worked with FTA at first on a less cash intensive basis than trying to decode Dave. Now they are forced to work on a very difficult level to achieve a miracle...not because of tring to serve those who have purchased FTA, but for future purchases and products of hardware. This is simple economics. No hardware other than a card was tied in with Dave...maybe some money to be made from updating cards, but not the sums involved with FTA.
I have been around since the VideoCipher codes and BUD's...a lot of changes...a lot of doorstops...
I appreciate all the hard work, and hope the coders are successful. However, without all those units ready to be sold, do you really think they would be working so hard? Please don't get me wrong....they want to keep their past customers satisfied so they can sell all the upcoming PVRs and HD....
Second....if everyone wants to work together, maybe they should work together as a real team and not just buying from each other. However, if one company is successful, they shouldn't be expected to hand over the goodies or having the others "steal" it. I hate the idea of "stealing" from each other...just create a "brain trust" and fund it maybe. Charlie, Bev & whoever are going to try more and more difficult procedures and it will take a lot of brain power to keep up with them. I appreciate the manufacturers putting in the money and time to do it right...Good luck!
Just my opinion...for whatever it is or is not worth....[quote]
My reply.
There are very valid points to your post. However the reality of the situation is that nobody wants to share anything in their zeal for TV. Coders who originally cracked the cards have an honest dislike for FTA. They have some valid reasons for this as the FTA makers use their work to build a rep and make money. Getting the ENTIRE community to share info is a noble thought, but has about as much of a chance as a snowball in hell. One of the reasons that people dislike me & a few others is that in some cases we act as a go between for FTA & card hackers. This is a slow painstaking process to get & disseminate information from 1 faction to feed to the others. FTA isn't afforded the luxury of being able to share their source code with the hard core coders & hackers that broke the cards. This leaves an uneven playing ground, and makes it much harder to assimilate and gather any useful information. The manufacturers acknowleges this and is attempting to gather their own information from the card and card coders, and occasionaly I & others have been of limited help to them in their quest. This time however is very different. Coders are very tight lipped about the latest hash in hopes that FTA will fail & the hobby will revert back to the days where you had to have a card and know coding to be able to enjoy TV. This is a much more agreeable rate of piracy for the providers. They do have valid reasons for not sharing info. FTA has their valid reasons for not even being able to contemplate releasing their source code. One very important reason is the manufacturers signature & name are all thru the source, leaving them wide open for litigation from providers. Let alone the fact that once released, providers would be able to see how to best attack FTA and render them useless for piracy. We find ourselves in a very nasty catch 22 situation that you & I have caused by pushing FTA popularity to it's current proportions. With over 1 million hacked boxes out there and more flooding the country every day, make no mistake about it, Nagrastar is taking their signal integrity campaign very seriously now, and we've seen more activity from them recently than ever before in the entire history of Nagrastar to this point.
Will FTA be successful against this hash? Yes, but the info needed to defeat or reverse engineer what has happened is coming slower than ever before with a higher pricetag. MAP57 is only the tip of the ice berg and a full emu of the Rom 102, rev 1.09 only means that it will emu this hash as well as previous hash's, but there's no way to know what will come next, so to say that we won't be down again, even with a full emu is ludicrous. I hope people didn't misunderstand that from any of my previous posts. A full emu running on FTA after this hash will however most likely mean faster fixes in the future for the companies that have this implemented and understand all the protocols and routines. They will in fact be able to sell other companies the latest algo patch to get other units back up & running. The REAL problems will be when Nagrastar starts checking Eeprom AND Rom, not ONLY FTA will be going down then. Thats when our old DTV hackers will surface & shine bright as we draw a little bit closer to a unified responce against providers ECM's. Relax, It ain't over YET!