this post was submitted on 15 Feb 2025
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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Canadians were some of the OG tv pirates. They were the hookup for hacked satellite boxes in the 90's.
It's why most of the shows I watched as a kid had the maple leaf in the corner.
I tried searching for this but only found recent news. Anywhere I can read about this? Wikipedia, article, or book?
I love tech history.
There's a little bit in this Wikipedia article but I can't find much either.
IIRC it mostly stemmed from a lot of US tv channels not being available in Canada at the time. So to make them available, they started hacking satellite descramblers and Direct TV cards. Then they found a giant market in the US willing to buy these boxes and cards to get free tv.
There were people in the US making them too, but the Canadian stuff was more reliable and updated quicker when Direct TV changed codes.
This is great! Thank you.
We had a big ass satillite dish in the backyard when I was growing up, and I remember my dad needing to input these codes every so often to unlock a bunch of channels.