Was also used in N. America. It had many vulnerabilities in every card generation. You could program OEM cards, have man-in-the-middle devices, and full emulators.

You Never needed to actually use the cards for Nagra. But The competitor DTV system built by NDS had an ASIC on the chip, so all solutions required a card at some level. But some setups could use one slave card for multiple receivers. Even over IP.

Fun times!

I did not realise that NDS is actually the News Datacom referred to by McCormac in European Scrambling Systems. The wikipedia entry for them makes interesting reading.

News Digital, but ya, owned (for a while) by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.

Those cardsharing schemes still exist today, although they're being cracked down more and more.

Yeah, DirecTV's aggressive legal actions in the early 2000s drove that whole scene very deep underground.

It’s a funny full circle.

Instead of using OEM receivers and compromised cards, they’ve gone to running emulated receivers and regular full-sub cards.

Do you have more info on this?

I used to be really into FTA satellite, but have not played with it in awhile.

Never really played with them hands on. Ubiquitous broadband and streaming services really nailed InternetKeySharing’s coffin.

Yes, with PICF84 microcontrollers.

Nagra hacks exclusively ran Atmels. But dunno what chips F cards used. The H cards were the ones that had ASICS.

I remember seeing pirate decoders (probably Discret 11, not Nagra, though) at the time, obviously for scientific curiosity only, which used a Motorola microcontroller. I think it may have been a 68HC705.