Monthly Archives: March 2009

[DVB] Rumors about NDS Hack in Germany (Update)

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In german forums people are rumoring that the NDS Videoguard encryption for the german Pay-TV channel Premiere has been compromised. As this has not been confirmed we currently expect this to be a hoax like the Nagra3 hack that has been reported in august 2008.

For completeness we release a translation of the hacker’s statement (original in german to be found here on Gulli.com) of the allegedly hackers:

NDS hack eventually confirmed!

In the meantime the NDS hack has been confirmed by an admin and a smartcard distributor. They have been send pre-programmed white DPSCs (digital pirate smart cards).

At this moment the NDS hack has only been confirmed to be working for Premiere (german Pay TV station). The hack is based on the NDS temp crypthack from october 2008. This has been the starting point. In combination with the BlueCryptCam that also has a weakness in its NDS Videoguard implementation.

With a little modification it then became possible to access and dump the NDS card’s Eeprom and Rom areas. If this hack can also be applied to Sky Italia or Great Britain is currently unknown and will take some time.

Kudelski seems not to be involved in this hack although this is rumored.

There won’t be any emulators (emu). The “blue cards” containing an own operating system will be released and distributed within the next week . They will be programmable using a Phoenix, CAS3 or Infinity programmer.

More news to come…

Kind regards from the Ukraine

From a technical point of view this statement does not look serious. As the described approach is far to vague. The described NDS temp crypthack was an exploit during the transition phase from Nagra2 Aladin to Nagra3 or NDS Videoguard. Some satellite receivers got an unencrypted firmware update over the air that allowed to watch Premiere even without any smartcard (more information in german here on Dragon-Cam.org). As this was only possible during the transition phase, it is highly unlikely that this might be the basis for a successful compromise of NDS videoguard.

Moreover even if this card was real, we would not expect this card to see the light of day. There haven’t been many NDS hacks in the last years. Among other gentleman like business practices (read on TheRegister.co.uk, on Denver Business Journal and on Wired.com) NDS as a company of Rupert Murdoch’s imperium is rumored to have hired the best investigators to at least monitor hacking scene activities.

Update: March 30, 2009: reliable sources from the scene say this is a hoax. Further information are not available currently.

Update: March 31, 2009:We found a nice “Wired” Video. Tarnovski – one of the best known hackers on this planet – describes how to hack nowadays smart cards. It “only” takes some equipment and a “little” bit of experience ;-)

» Wired.com: Tarnovski, NDS and NagraStar…
» TheRegister.co.uk: Murdoch’s chief hacker testifies in California…
» BizJournals.com: EchoStar says rival hacked its signals…

[iPhone] Apple to present iPhone OS 3.0 feature’s tomorrow

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The News

According to several U.S. journalists, Apple will present the iPhone firmware 3.0 tomorrow. As of now there are some rumors, that it eventually will contain:

  • MMS
  • Bluetooth and USB Tethering
  • Copy and Paste

Comment

As a normal cell fon user you may ask if this is really worth the  news, since both MMS and tethering is standard in almost any 10US$ cell. Well you are right. But this is the Apple world. Apple knows by including these features their clan of fanboys will immediately be satisfied. The internet will be immediately full of flames if anyone utters criticism. Anyway we don’t believe it will have all those three features. It will have one. Firmware 4.0 will than have another of these and so on.

And there is still the question of Sun Java or Adobe Flash. What about these? Will we have them in firmware 8.0 or never? We really like the iPhone’s UI. It definitely brought the mobile internet thing major steps forward, but we expect the iPhone’s time is up. We currently recommend to not buy an iPhone or GPhone, but wait for the Palm Pre with WebOS.

Did you know the Palm Pre is beeing developed by the former Apple iPod creator Jon Rubinstein?

[iPhone] Developer strikes back against Cracking

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The developer of Full Screen Web Browser strikes back against cracked copies. Instead of just punishing the users for downloading cracked copies, he included a rather intelligent strategy: Full Screen Web Browser runs for 10 times but then ceases to work.

Full Screen Web Browser obviously has a protection included that checks for validity on their own servers and then submits the unique iPhone ID. Thus making reinstalling of this cracked copy impossible.

Although we feel this is a very good strategy and we really liked to have other devs followed this example, we also know that there will be some crackers who will circumvent this part of the protection easily aswell. The next cracked versions will likely not call any servers or show nags. For moral reasons that hopefully some crackers will have, this may also not happen.

Anyway for really making people addictive we would recommend to let the application run  for 50 times. In the meantime people will get used to it and will buy it. 10 times is too seldom for people to adapt.

This picture is courtesy of benchatelain.com. Find more information there…

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[iPhone] iBluetooth available

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Eventually a Bluetooth application has become available for the iPhone. As this is not approved by Apple it can be downloaded only via Cydia on jailbroken iPhones.

iBluetooth costs 4US$ and can be downloaded from the iSpazio repository. The purpose of the shareware fee is buying a complete Bluetooth stack to make it available to all customers. Currently iBluetooth comes with a seven days trial period.

The pictures are courtesy of iSpazio. See more pictures here…

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[News] UltraEdit for MacOS and Linux in Alpha Testing

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Many Windows users say this is the best editor in the world. Mac Switchers always said they were desperately searching for something like it, but we did not find it. As we are long time UltraEdit users this is good news, as we will not need to run UltraEdit in Codeweaver’s Crossover anymore. Anyway there is no information about the release date for Linux or MacOS. Only the Windows version 15 will be released April 15th, 2009.

As you can see from the screenshot, it looks like UltraEdit for windows, but it is the Windows version. We expect this to be a commercial Crossover/Wine porting. Rewriting of the whole code would simply be too expensive.

The picture is courtesy of IDM Computer Solutions. Find more pictures on their site…

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[News] iTunes Gift Card Algorithm Cracked

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On auction sites worldwide chinese faked iTunes gift card serials are getting sold for a lot less money than their iTunes value. Currently 200US$ gift cards cost about 3-5US$ in China. In Europe prices vary between 40-60€ per 200US$ gift card.

This issue reveals that Apple seems to have at least one problem: either they don’t have a database of valid gift card keys at all, but is only using checksum algorithms to test for validity of these cards – or their database of valid gift cards has backdoors that have been found by some chinese guys. Although – as always – Apple did not comment on this yet, they are most likely working on this problem.

We strongly recommend to not buy iTunes gift cards currently via auction sites. It is fraud and by knowingly buying those faked codes you are accountable. Moreover technically will Apple block these codes.

Always remember: if it’s too cheap to be true, it is fake.

[News] Pirate Bay Court Hearing Ends

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With the final speech of the defense the court hearing ended today. The Pirate Bay guys have the public opinion on their side. As expected the defence negated responsibility for copyright infringement and continued to argue that Pirate Bay is basically a search engine, that provides torrent index files. The court is expected to take several weeks to rule in this highly complicated case.

According to the german newspaper TAZ, seven in eight newspaper articles in Sweden reporting in a positive or neutral style. A PR counsel for the music industry is quoted to be saying “We lost the fight for public opinion”.

In the meantime the media industry is trying to make the European Parliament push governments to persecute web services providing indexes of copyrighted material.

Because of the unknown illegal status here in Germany we cannot link directly to the trial page, that has been set up by the PirateBay team. You may use google.com to find it. It is linked from their main site.