> generic TV boxes that promise unlimited content streaming for a one-time fee
I don't want to blame the purchasers of these things - who are some of the victims - but at the same time, it does seem like a Too Good To Be True situation.
I have an elderly client who sends me links of stuff to buy all the time. One day it's one of these streaming sticks, the next day it's half-price stamps, and I tell her every time, please don't buy this stuff. And yet she does anyway, as if I was almost being mean and saying no just to say no.
So yes, I do want to blame the purchasers of these things, sometimes. To prove her point that her stamps were legitimate, she mailed me a card using one of her half priced (but likely fake) stamps and it made it through!
Perhaps they grew up in a time/environment where "if it was that bad they wouldn't be allowed to advertise it", and they're still using that old calibration?
My falther-in-law was less that and more, if I can get away with it, it's actually legal. Many know their fake, and do it because they can get away with it.
That was his justification for a satellite descrambler, they're sending me the signals, obviously I'm allowed to.
I tinkered with Dish Network descrambling 20 years ago. Not because I wanted to just watch a bunch of free TV (I hardly watched any TV anyway, we mostly watched DVDs from the video store and Netflix). More because it felt like an interesting rabbit hole. And it was pretty interesting!
I picked a good (newer!) satellite dish and LNB from the trash and had a friend help with the installation and alignment because that was his previous job. Normal people use some kind of tool to find the satellites' geosynchronous orbital station in the sky, but he did it often enough that he could simply look up into the sky and point at them.
There were a handful of grey-market satellite receivers you could buy that were technically capable of descrambling a commercial signal. Of course, they did not advertise themselves as such. They were marketed as FTA (free-to-air) DVB-S receivers. These were not illegal as they were fairly popular in regions of the world that actually _had_ a fair amount of FTA (unscrambled) satellite channels. The only satellites visible from North America, however, tended to carry religious, shopping, or Mexican/Central American programming. Oh, and NASA TV.
The receiver I bought had DVR functionality if you hooked up a USB drive to it. I think I still have some recorded shows on it. It would have been a great way to harvest and release pirated TV shows to the Internet, if you didn't mind editing out all of the ads and whatever.
DVB-S was basically a raw MPEG-2 TS stream that could be optionally encrypted. To use these grey-market receivers as descramblers, you install some custom firmware containing the descrambling modifications and keys. I'm failing to remember the technical details, but the encryption they used was not very good. Dish Network would rotate the keys occasionally, and when they did, you had to update them on your receiver. I can't remember now if the keys were part of the firmware, but I remember it being a pain in the ass.
The firmware/keys part of this had a very "colorful" community. You had to sign up to a very specific and somewhat exclusive web bulletin board in order to download the firmware/keys. I don't remember how I gained an account, but I remember it being non-trivial. IIRC, it was like one guy maintaining the firmware/keys and sometimes it took weeks for him to adapt to whatever thing DN did to thwart piracy. The board was moderated by a complete power-tripping asshat who enjoyed banning people for fun and then gloating about it. (I was not banned, that I recall.) I think they started requiring "donations" in order to view certain threads (like firmware releases) after a while. But I could be misremembering that. I just remember the community was very toxic.
After a few months of this setup, DN figured out how to rotate their keys too often for the casual pirate to keep up. I disconnected mine around that time and moved onto other things. Partly because the experiment ran its course and partly because migrating to real-time key updates would have meant buying a newer receiver. For a while, I flirted with the idea of getting a DVB-T PCI receiver card and working on breaking the encryption myself, but it was quite a bit above my skill level at the time and there did not seem to be anyone else working on it out in the open, since the DMCA was still pretty new then.
Your experience describes lots of the kinds of communities you can use to access pirated media. You either pay for the legit service, pay for pirate streaming services, pay with your privacy with the free, dodgy pirate streaming services, or pay with your sanity in dealing with nutjobs.
I recall the “free to air” receivers being pretty easy to configure. My main pita was getting a cheap ftdi usb->serial adapter because that’s how old the underlying tech was. Still easier than jtagging an official receiver.
I migrated into it from the earlier days involving iso7816 card programming and mitm cards so I guess I didn’t have trouble finding which sites to get the fta files. I have good memories of those places being quite welcoming if you did your reading but sometimes ephemeral. Plenty of freeware (but sometimes delayed access). But part of the “payment model” was sevurity vendors trying to destroy their competitors or sell more countermeasures and card swaps to their satellite tv broadcast clients (!!!).
A card swap (and some prosecutions on the nudge nudge “free to air receiver” importers) put an end to most of it unless you went to internet-key-sharing systems where I guess the shared keys come from a handful of slave receivers somewhere. Given the 2-way nature of those key “subscriptions” and network connections required, I could (moreso) understand the paranoia of the operators.
Broadband penetration ultimately killed sat cracking, Netflix et al too. Oh, and what people usually call “iptv”.
Yep. Gone are the days of running out for a "119 IKS" or hunting for Bev and Charlie, now everyone just grabs some pooched RTSP feeds and calls it a day.
Feels fitting recently to discover the Dish Network "Pirate TV" recordings. I should run my own in-home IPTV station and use the Pirate TV bug as the logo...
They aren’t downloading that content from a company with a $2.5T market cap. They presumably aren’t making a living by selling that copyrighted material via a retail that claims to run a legitimate business.
I think that makes a big difference.
Imagine if Amazon Video, Audible, and Kindle will all just pirate stores, where uploaders of the pirated content made money on the downloads, people paid for those downloads, and Amazon took a cut of everything. How long would that go on before they were in court and that was shutdown?
I think that's a default for a lot of the older (and some of the younger!) generation, same goes for news and media. They grew up in a time where there was a practical barrier to publishing and (largely) laws behind you doing it.
So they trust literally everything they read. I still don't think my folks can fathom you can spin up a very real looking newspaper website with fake articles in about 10 minutes.
I find younger people are more likely to trust whatever they read - social media rumors, LLM output, Reddit threads - and older people looking for credible sources.
Honestly, my experience is that it's less age specific and more like 80-90% of the general public. A lot of people just can't recognise the difference between a credible source and a dubious/fake one, and will just share any old random page or social media post they come across online. Heck, the number of people I know that see things like ChatGPT as some magic encyclopedia/sage that knows everything is depressingly high...
When my kid was young I set up a basic web server and taught him how to make a VERY basic web page. I let him write whatever nonsense he wanted to and then we made it live.
It was both a gateway into learning how the web works but also that literally anyone can post anything to the internet and it doesn't make it true. I like to think he's more savvy than many of his peers but we all have our blind spots.
#1 How big is your potential market? It's people still mailing things from home, who haven't figured out how to do postage on their computer.
#2 Of the population in #1, it's those who find real stamps so expensive that it's worth bothering with discounts.
#3 Of the population in #2, it's those who would want to buy something fraudulant (or not know better) and who would want to risk using it.
#4 Considering the size of the #3 population, how many stamps do they use in a month?
#5 What is your margin on a half-price stamp? You have to pay for advertising, printing (we're talking a profit margin under $1), packaging, and your own time, but at least shipping is free!
How can those few people - and again narrowed down to the population mailing letters AND needing stamps AND seeking discounts AND willing or ignorant enough to do/risk fraud - with that little revenue per item, make a half-price stamp operation worthwhile?
The Venn diagram of old people with limited mobility (can't just drive to the post office or grocery store) and on a fixed income (they crave those discounts) is nearly a perfect circle of the people that fall for internet scams (fails to understand that literally anyone can make a shopify store and accept card payments).
Stamp collectors end up stuck with sheets and sheets of unpopular designs, and since the hobby (like many hobbies) has imploded, the dealers will pay less than face value for it; they in turn will sell it for a smaller discount for people who are willing to futz with wallpapering their envelope in 3-cent stamps and Fat Elvis.
What is the world view (aka context) of this little old lady?
Watch the news and see CEO's with golden handshakes after the company is nailed for something. Wall street failures. Companies getting government bailouts. The current US president. It is all about getting away with what you can.
The news - being the news - doesn't show process as per normal. People doing the right thing most of the time.
In this context, fake stamps for the "little person" doesn't even rate a mention. Who the hell is going to raise a moral panic about an old lady with fake stamps...
And so the "little people" will keep buying fake whatevers as long as it stretches their dollar further.
It doesn't seem too weird to me: Selling someone fake stamps is a general act of fraud, between buyer and seller, and would be pursued by state/federal attorneys general.
The USPS becomes directly involved only later, when someone tries to defraud them by using a fake stamp.
They are unable to do much. Look, their systems cannot distinguish them - not since the crooks figured out the phosphor tags. They aren’t detecting any during the course of business. There are no prosecutions of “duped cobsumers” buying cheap stamps claiming to be real online as far as I can find.
Why should anyone assume a product being sold by (or at least on) Amazon, the latest retailer in the country, is an illegal device?
It’s not like they’re buying these things out of a car trunk in a dark alley. These retailers need to be held liable for selling these things. If they sell this stuff, why not illicit drugs?
If they are unable to maintain control of 3rd party sellers, then they should end the 3rd party seller program. It has done nothing but damage Amazon’s reputation, and it just keeps getting worse.
Ok but have fun explaining that to the average person. Buying a dongle is easier than installing software or typing URLs into their TV ("my TV doesn't even have a keyboard").
To most people IPTV is a bunch of gibberish letters, indistinguishable from the gibberish brands on Amazon. Someone's grandma from Colorado doesn't deserve to get scammed because she didn't research the acronyms.
Most of it seems to be first-party streams of content which is also available as unencrypted over-the-air broadcasts.
It is paid for via ads or subsidies, so there's no reason to block access to the stream, so they just don't bother, and make life easier for anyone building streaming devices wanting to integrate their channel.
Someone accessing the stream directly is not the originally intended use case, but it isn't any different from someone accessing it via their smart tv.
- How are these "legitimately free"? For example AMC is a commercial TV channel and as far as I know, they don't offer free streaming. Same goes for MGM, FilmBox etc.
- Strictly speaking this isn't IPTV, it's just web streams. IPTV is usually delivered via multicast (MPEG-TS/RTP/RTSP streams, over UDP mostly).
Or straight up unavailable on paid services. There’s often no way to legitimately subscribe to programming from $HomeCountry, especially if you’re not in a big Diaspora country.
The streaming services have fractured and taken so many movies off their service so much that it is too hard for most people to figure out where that show/movie can be found.
From a link above to the story on darknetdiaries:
> For Pokemon, there is a website that tells you how to watch this. You start off on Netflix, then swap over to the Pokemon streaming service, which is the only place that has Season 2, then swap over to Prime Video for Seasons 3 through 5, swap to Freevee, then Hoopla. Season 13 is only on Amazon, though. Then swap to Tubi, then Hulu, then Roku channel, and then finally back to the Pokemon streaming, and then Netflix. Easy.
That's 8 different streaming services to view one series.
If you offered most people free streaming for a $37 USB stick but directly told them it would be faking ad clicks when the TV is off, would any of them really care?
No, and that's is the root of the problem. The buyer is happy and so is the seller. They don't care to understand what they're allowing and everyone is allowing it to happen.
I wouldn't use a device like this for a lot of reasons, but the fact that what they are doing might be taking advantage of the incredibly predatory digital advertising system is neutral to positive for me, if I'm being fully honest.
If they were using the system to rip off random people, I'd be 100% against it, if they are fucking Google and the giant corps that advertise with them, ehh.. not my problem and can't be assed to care. Google is not a positive force in the world. Hasn't been for many years.
Proctor & Gamble did an experiment: they cancelled all of their online advertising and watched their sales numbers. Sales didn't change. That sort of thing is downstream of this sort of thing. Online advertising is a money black hole, a sacrifice to the gods. It doesn't really do anything.
Let's say you are an ad buyer. Previously 1M clicks resulted in 1000 sales, now 2M clicks result in the same 1000 sales. If you previously paid $1000 for 1M clicks, you paid $1/sale. If they are now asking you to pay the same $1000 / M clicks you'd be paying $2/sale, so Google would have to drop to $500 / M clicks to offer the same value to advertisers.
But the same applies to ad sellers as well. Google would have to slash payouts to websites displaying ads by the same 50% / click or they'd be cutting into their margins. A competing ad platform without fraudulent clicks would be able to slide into this space, offering both a better value to ad buyers and a better payout to ad sellers, so they'd be taking market share from Google without having to do anything themselves.
Of course that assumes a market in which the value of ad clicks, views, and placements is clear to everyone and switching between ad platforms is trivial, which is not even remotely the case.
Sure but for the ad network, it means they can brag to new clients about how many clicks they can get them. If the ad clicker isn't buying, that's the client's problem, you already did your job by getting them to click. Maybe the client needs a more direct campaign (which costs more) or needs to change their website/prices, people are walking into the store but they just aren't buying.
Its either the ad network running these click botnets or contracting someone to do it. If it was just impressions getting boosted, that just looks shady, those are barely worth anything.
And why should they care? There is literally no reason they should care, it does not affect them in any way, if it causes ad companies to ban their IP address that's actually good for them personally, and most people outside of the ad business would agree that hurting ad companies is good.
> They don't care to understand what they're allowing
If you told normal people that they could get free content with a TV streaming stick that would also constantly fake clicks on AI generated websites to screw advertisers over, they would think of it as a bonus. Also it would make them trust the stick more (fallaciously), because they would know how the people who sold it were getting paid.
Maybe they wouldn't care about the ads but the residential proxy is another story. I'm sure lots of problematic stuff goes through that and you take the risk of being associated with it.
There are probably quite a few others who consider that a bonus. I'm not going to support illegal actions, but it's also not one of the things I would really lose sleep over if I found out that it have been doing that.
> it does seem like a Too Good To Be True situation
It's difficult to judge the price of media products. We have legal music streaming services that charges you an album's worth of money a month and lets you listen to millions of songs. You can pick up old AAA games for less than ten bucks. I'd say when people say that price tag, they don't think they get scammed into being a part of a botnet. They think the device manufacturer cut a good deal with the media rights holders.
I had a streaming piracy site that I went to federal prison for. I can chime in on these people.
It's worth separating the two populations:
My users had money and had considered legal subscriptions. They paid me because the legal product was worse—in my case, sports blackouts, a bunch of different apps, etc. They knew what they were buying into and they had weighed the risk. I can tell you right now some of my former users have bought into this market.
Then there's the unwitting: a person buying one of these devices at a too-good-to-be-true price is treating it as a hardware purchase from Amazon, where the actual monetization isn't inferable from the listing. Calling it too good to be true assumes the buyer can see what shit they're standing in. They can't. There's no visible market here. It's just a product page with reviews.
To add to this: the proxy exit is exactly why these cost so little. Demand for residential IPs is booming (check some of the proxy subreddits to see what I mean).
The ironic part is that there's a chance the person who bought one of these boxes to watch pirated sports was the exit node I was using to acquire the feeds in the first place.
Yeah, isn’t this a classic kind of scam the would-be scammer situation? If you think there’s some way to buy one cheap device and somehow get around subscribing to streaming services[1], then of course you’re going to be in a market with fraudsters…
[1] Can someone explain what the theory of the product is here? It sounds like they’re marketing these things as ways for the customer to commit fraud, for example by connecting to someone else’s login. How else would the customer expect to be able to get free Netflix or whatever?
It may be the case that these devices are front-ends for pirated content that's hosted in various places. They're not streaming it from Netflix servers. It's content similar to that offered by Netflix and other streaming services, pirated by someone else, and hosted by someone else for streaming by anyone who can figure out how to find it.
Maybe, but if they're a not-very-tech savvy older person buying this, they probably remember shows being free from over the air antennas and may think it is something like that.
Yes, in fact I have an antenna and a HDHomeRun nestled in my attic to record over the air shows that I occasionally consume.
But, I think it's far more common for people to have a TV service today, perhaps since comcast and their ilk push hard the TV/phone/internet bundle, and gone are the years when everyone would fiddle with the antennas on the back of their TV to get the right reception.
Well, analog broadcasts did stop in Finland some 15-20 years ago. DVB-T stopped a few years ago. Only T2 receives anything these days AFAIK. Physical antennas are the same, though. (And C if you have cable.)
Uhh, I have an extended family member, who not only uses it, but now also tries to get other people to get into it. Since I was familiar with this practice ( and the issues it makes worse ), I noted those to him in an attempt to both politely decline and, hopefully, spare him, and society, some future problems. Without going into any identifying details, he didn't take it well ( and I don't think I got on my high horse ).
According to the Darknet Diaries podcast episode "Superbox", some of these devices are sold via multi-level marketing schemes, which would explain why there are random individuals selling these, collecting a commission for each device sold. Which is why the person you mentioned is unhappy when someone points out the problems with these devices.
I used to know someone doing this. They said they know it is too good to be true, but they hate corporations and it's their little way to stick one in.
I know a few people who buy these, and they kind of know what they're doing. They just try and not think about it too hard.
It reminds me of the saying: "It Is Difficult to Get a Man to Understand Something When His Salary Depends Upon His Not Understanding It".
If these people thought about it for a few minutes, they would understand, but they choose not to, as ignoring it is too advantageous.
I admit I was tempted, as the price of all streaming services goes up, and services become more and more fragmented. During the same period where I have not had a raise.
In the 90s, there was a cottage industry selling CDs of bootleg software at swap meets and flea markets. A guy my dad knew was almost condescending to anyone who paid for software despite having been hit by viruses multiple times because it was so much cheaper. Even having to deal with a client(!) who naively called the vendor support only to be informed that they hadn’t actually purchased a license wasn’t enough to get him to resist that savings.
I won't argue the ethics of piracy. That was not my point, but if you want to I suppose I could.
My point was, their ethics WOULD have prevented them from doing the thing. But they chose not to think about it too hard. Perhaps subconsciously. I'm not above doing this sort of thing either. We all do it for various things.
I've added code that is bad for the user (overbearing telemetry for instance) because my salary depended on it. At the time I tried not to think about it too much, as it would cause cognitive dissonance.
Did OP say "I want something vaguely similar that requires a greater investment of my time and money"? Did you in any way indicate that's what you were proposing?
It could be possible, I haven't done the math though.
Stremio +Torbox is $3/month and they can probably share 10+ households on one TorBox account so it could work out. The seller could just stop paying the TorBox subscription at whatever point and they have an incentive to do so.
I don't want to blame the purchasers of these things - who are some of the victims - but at the same time, it does seem like a Too Good To Be True situation.