This kinda makes me thing back to scrambled channels and how companies detected the use of illegal decoder boxes. A lot of them used equipment could detect the demodulation used by a decode and checked to see if you were paying the fee.
An easy way around it was just using two VCRs, one before the decode and one after, to stabilize the RF signal.
I remember a satelite TV company put a message to call a particular number, and then filtered out the message in their official smart cards. Everyone who called the number was pirating their signal.
It was a genius counter-hack -- distributing the countermeasure piecemeal, in undetectably small pieces, over time, and then building it into the fatal payload before pirates could analyze or block the change.
> Several weeks ago, DirecTV began transmitting to its receivers, via satellite, small pieces of the programming code that ultimately killed the altered cards, according to company sources and accounts published on HackHU.com, a Web site devoted to the satellite TV hacking community. The bits of digital information ultimately formed a complete program that--when triggered Sunday--permanently maimed any H card that had been altered.
> The result shocked bootleggers, who long had dismissed the steady trickle of software updates as more annoying than serious. When the pirates turned on their television sets Monday, they saw nothing. (The pirates saw the “GAME OVER” message when they studied the software coding that killed their cards, according to HackHU.com and other sites.)
huh .. but the Superbowl is always on a broadcast network too, so people could always just get out the ole rabbit ears (unless they had really bad signal from their local state)
An easy way around it was just using two VCRs, one before the decode and one after, to stabilize the RF signal.