It's a steal

摘要

Pay-TV channels risk ruin if they continue to use today's smartcard technology. Security experts at Cambridge University say that TV smartcards will be wide open to conter-feiting unless the TV companies switch to a new kind of card that automatically destroys secret data if anyone tries to tamper with it. The issue has been thrown into sharp relief by the high-profile lawsuit filed last week by one digital TV company against another, in which the French company Canal+is suing NDS, owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, for $1 billion in damages. Canal+claims NDS obtained the anti-piracy codes from Canal+smartcards and allowed them to be posted on the Web, letting pirates fake millions of valuable Canal+pay-TV cards and sell them illicitly. NDS refutes the allegations and says it will counterclaim.