News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:An Anti-Reverse Engineering Guide by Estragon on Wednesday March 14, 2012 @05:27PM (#3705448)

  > ...as far as I know there hasn't been a break in DirecTV 
  > for over half a decade.
Curious what you think of this commercial software which claims to break DirecTV's DRM. (I have no means to evaluate it, google found it for me.)

http://drm-removal.com/features/DirecTV-Save-Download-Captur...

Re:An Anti-Reverse Engineering Guide by bri3d on Wednesday March 14, 2012 @06:50PM (#3705842)
Note the instructions. It's just capturing the video stream via analog source, as far as I can tell.

I believe your comment's parent was referring to their over-the-air stream DRM (i.e. the stream to the dish receiver), which hasn't been publicly broken.

Re:An Anti-Reverse Engineering Guide by reitzensteinm on Wednesday March 14, 2012 @07:10PM (#3705918)
And since cracking follows the path of least resistance, it's likely that the DRM would have been cracked if that was the only way to get at the content.

This is a case of deadbolted door, window left open.

Re:An Anti-Reverse Engineering Guide by bri3d on Friday March 16, 2012 @05:48PM (#3715471)
I agree with you there - all HD video DRM is "deadbolted door, window left open" at this point since HDCP is fully opened (both by the ability to clone or purchase the HDCP hardware from a real TV and by the leaking of the HDCP master keys).

There's still some incentive to crack video DRM, since ripping through HDMI requires a re-encode and degrades quality, but the approach is good enough that the payoff is reduced substantially.