Andrew Mayo <andrew@GEAC.CO.NZ> wrote:
> The interest in Europe regarding PIC code protection defeating is
> largely due to the use of these chips in satellite scrambling systems.
> There is a thriving black market in smartcards which defeat the
> encryption systems.

AFAIK, the PIC was never used in any original satellite descrambler or
smartcard.  It was designed into some of the pirate smartcards.  The
interest in defeating the PIC16C84 code protection was from people who
thought it would be easier to copy a pirate smartcard than
reverse-engineer the real (original) smartcard.

The processor of choice for new pirate stuff seems to be the Dallas DS5000,
which is designed to be very secure.  I haven't heard whether anyone has
figured out how to dump the memory of the Dallas part.

> Why they bother, I can't imagine. Its only 500
> channels of utter crap, anyway, but that's human nature for you.....
> What these minds could do in solving the world's *real* problems (sigh!)

Typically the people who do the reverse-engineering aren't the same people
who spend eight hours a day watching television.  It is done by people who
notice the large revenue stream from that group, and want to divert some of
it into their own pockets.  There is enough potential revenue that the
pirates are willing to spend the money for some very heavy-duty reverse-
engineering, including microprobing.

Note that I don't condone any of this.  And I personally don't have time to
watch more than two hours of TV a week (Babylon 5, The Simpsons, and King of
the Hill).

I've got a big pile of Sony audio and video gear, and I've gotten really
fed up with the fact that the volume control buttons on all the remotes
send volume commands with the TV device code, not to the receiver/preamp.
The speakers on my TV aren't even enabled.  I've hacked some PIC code to
receive the IR, decode the TV volume commands, change the device code, and
forward them via Control-S to my preamp.

Cheers,
Eric