I don't really see the difference. The Kinect is a piece of plastic and lead-free solder that you buy. DirectTV is a radio transmission that they broadcast into your house.

Once the Kinect is in my house, who cares what I do with it? I can smash it with a hammer, I can send it USB commands. My Kinect, my house, my rules.

DirectTV is the same. Once the radio waves are in my house, why can't I decrypt them to watch TV for free? If DirectTV wants me to pay for TV, why are they sending the signal into my house!?

I completely agree in terms of ethics and what the legalities should be. In terms of what's possible to do, and to do so easily, the satellite TV vendors have managed to stay neck-and-neck with those trying to watch TV for free, precisely because of little details like being able to alter the format and update the software to work with it.

If you agree with 'jrockway, then you must also believe it's perfectly ethical for me to listen to your cellphone calls.

Otherwise, this argument is a bit more nuanced than either of you are acknowledging.

Break the crypto and enjoy.

The difference between cell phones and DirectTV is that you have session keys for your phone calls, but there is one global key for every user in the country for DirectTV. Such is the nature of broadcasting.

They chose a "cheap" method to distribute TV to users, but it's also very "insecure". The cell-phone companies, on the other hand, developed a very expensive infrastructure, and it's more secure as a result.

I don't see the difference between hacking the machine that makes DirecTV work and the machine that makes Kinect work, but since we're a community of nerds, I'm sure there's at least 1223 distinctions to be drawn here.

The utility of DirecTV is the service it provides. The box has no utility per se. Because being able to receive DirecTV's service is dependant on having compatible software, there has to be some way for the box (hacked or not) to receive updates. If the pirates don't patch, they lose their utility.

The utility of Kinect is a physical piece of equipment. There's no service (although it may be used with a service), therefore there's no requirement to receive updates once hacked. Microsoft only gets one chance to deploy their defences: when the Kinect is in the factory.

You apparently think the Pay TV providers can issue new smart cards on a semiregular basis. No, they can't. They operate under approximatelly the same constraint Microsoft does; updates to their core protection scheme are ludicrously expensive.

(Microsoft could use the exact same scheme by bricking their devices with fuses when they fail some routine checkup; they could also brick every device and then issue a recall/reissue. They have better options than that, though).

DirectTV is a service. You hack the machine to receive the service for free. It can never be impossible for them to detect that and shut you down.

I don't follow. People used to hack DirecTV machines to receive the service for free. DirecTV detected that, and shut all those people down. How much does it cost today to obtain a device that gets free pay-per-view?

There are still people that do it, so far as I understand, but it is a dedicated bunch and takes enough time that it's not something that will easily be in the hands of people that don't have intimate knowledge of the systems.

It used to cost $150? to get unlimited free pay-per-view. I know; I had a hacked card (we paid for DTV, but I liked being able to record The Simpsons from every local network carried on DTV, back when The Simpsons was actually decent).

What does it cost now?

Do you not see the difference between pirating a game and pirating cellphone service? One is easier to detect and cancel out on the provider's end.

(a) No.

(b) Limor isn't putting a bounty on pirating a game. She's putting a bounty on forced interoperability with a hostile proprietary peripheral. The bounty is great (even though I think "her team" will lose). I think it's kind of insulting to compare it to pirating games, which is indefensible.

The difference is this: The machine that makes DirectTV work lives in another city, in an air-conditioned building behind a barbed-wire fence.

If I understand this comment correctly, that's pretty much not at all the way DirecTV works. The people who "broke" DirecTV in the '90s didn't do it by hacking into DirecTV's servers.

It just means that the usual arms race between defenders and attackers isn't as clear-cut as it is when both the peripheral and the host are sitting in your living room or lab.

No, I'm serious: the arms race we're talking about in DirecTV's case happened entirely in the living room.

They did something with consumer hardware that made tampering with it economically infeasible.

The exact same technique they use is available to Microsoft, should they be willing to pay to integrate and (more painfully) license it.

What Pay TV providers did to stop Pay TV hackers is an open secret, but I don't work in Pay TV and don't know exactly how "open" the secret is, which is why I'm dancing around this argument rather than just killing it with facts.