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For those of you that don't know who PGM is,


Monday, August 19, 2002 marked the beginning of the end of an era for watching DirecTV. On this day DirecTV began shutting down support for the old access cards known as "H cards" (or P2 cards) and by August 29th support was completely shut down. So why do I say this is the end of an era? Because of one man's contribution to DirecTV hacking. That man is Pierre G. Martineau, from Montreal, or better known on the scene as PGM.

His SLE H card emulator software allowed anyone with a PC, an ISO smartcard programmer, and an H card to easily be able to watch all the available channels on DirecTV without any fear of an ECM (Electronic Counter Measure) being sent down to ruin your H card. HBO, Comedy Central, porn, Pay-per-view, or anything else could be watched at any time for nothing more than the price of all the needed hardware. The alternative way of getting all the channels on DirecTV for free is to modify the code on the access card. However, any unauthorized changes to an access card can be detected and the card can be rendered useless, at least until it is repaired/updated with new code to open all the channels again, when an ECM is sent.

The emulator works by having the PC act like an H card in every way except for a small bit of functionality where an actual H card is needed. However, the emulator completely protects the H card from any damaging ECM. The worst case scenario is that the emulator would crash and you would have to reboot the PC. Of course the emulator itself is quite resistant to ECMs since the image of the H card (bin file) loaded in the computer's RAM looks like a legitimate card.

In the late months of last year, ECMs were coming down about every week but PGM's emulator kept on going. As a result, a lot of people turned to PGM's emulator as a solution for getting their "free" DirecTV. It was some time late last year when the emulator was first targeted (since it was first released some time in 1998) by DirecTV in a feeble attempt to prevent anyone from using it. DirecTV was able to exploit bugs in the emulation code which would prevent you from watching TV with it. A combination of updates to the emulator and other hobbyists that would figure out temporary fixes applied to the bin file meant that there was surprisingly little down time for any educated hacker that knew where to find the latest fixes.

There may have been a small victory for DirecTV in all this and the only people to blame are the dealers (who are no longer in business since it is now illegal to decode foreign satellite signals in Canada as a result of a court ruling earlier this year) and the "free-TVers". Free-TVers are defined as people who simply pay money to have someone sell them a simple solution to give them free TV and don't care to learn about the satellite TV technology and how to hack it. The dealers began selling small dedicated devices that ran PGM's emulator code and when these devices stopped working a lot of people (free-TVers) were upset at PGM since his software was no longer working. PGM's emulator is a copyrighted piece of software and the dealers were stealing from him and trying to profit from it. Some dealers even claimed to support PGM, but obviously they did little to educate the free-TVers to inform them that PGM never supported any of these small stand alone devices. If they stopped working it was not PGM's fault and he was not to blame. Eventually PGM stopped releasing updates to the emulator as a response to being overwhelmed with e-mails asking for help with his software. It was on February 22nd that a fix came out and DirecTV had just about given up on the war against PGM's emulator despite no official updates to the emulator being released.

Around the same time rumours were buzzing around the Internet about what DirecTV knew all along - they would eventually pull the plug on support for H cards, which would make them the final victors in this battle.

Or would it? H cards have been out of the market for a long while now and were replaced by the HU card (also known as the P3 card) which was supposed to be more secure. However, there were around 1 million* legitimate subscribers using H cards that needed to be swapped to a newer card before DirecTV could stop supporting the H cards. Earlier this year a 4th generation card began to show up with DirecTV systems (simply dubbed the P4 card) and now the HU cards are becoming quite scarce. However, there are around 9 million** HU cards in use that will need to be swapped. Why exactly do the HU cards need to be swapped out too? DirecTV may have gotten rid of the H cards and won the H card emulation war, but the hackers have fought back introducing HU card emulation software. Even before HU emulation software was released, enough was known about the HU card to program them (to open all the channels) and even repair them from damaging ECMs. So what seemed like a small victory for DirecTV in the piracy battle turned out to be the opposite. They have simply unleashed a new weapon in the hacker’s arsenal. The HU card swap may be on, but the war is far from over and once again the hackers are winning.

Pierre G. Martineau's SLE44C4xS Processor Emulator 1998-2002.