Nagravision 3 Work Around Released Today!! This is worth a front page mention, and it is good news for the entire satellite community for the years to come. Nfusion has released a work around for the Nagravision 3 encryption system in use by Bev for NFL Sunday Ticket. As of right now, Nfusion users can view NFL Sunday Ticket while plugged into the internet with their Nfusion. Expect Neosat and other IKS receivers to have similar work arounds available in the near future.
I am told this was accomplished by Nfusion using a subscribed Bev smart card in one of their servers, which than lends the encryption code to any Nfusion connected to that server. Let me stress, this is not a hack, this is a very simple work around, which I believe will have bev on it's toes scrambling to patch without any decent recourse for the next few days. In essence, they will have to find out which exact Nagra 3 smart card is being used in order to patch this hole in their system. They will need the exact number of that card. Whether that is obtainable through connection to the Nfusion server, by Bev, is unknown at this time. If it is, do not expect this to last very long. If they are unable to find out the smart card number, they will have to determine, which of the thousands deployed right now it is, and specifically shut down that card through the stream.
This is good news. As most of us know, Nagravision 2 was not fully hacked until the final days of the scaling back of Nagravision 1. First we saw carded hacks for the weak Rom101, than emulation hacks for DVB cards and hours after, hacks for all makes of FTA Receivers. I will stress again, this is not a hack, but a step in the right direction, which can better help the coders understand the workings of Nagravision 3. We will not need a real hack anytime soon, so to see this so early is promising. It will be interesting to watch how long it takes Bev to close this loophole, if they can at all, permanently. It will be much harder for Dish Network to close a loophole like this when they have to pick the card out of the 14 million Nagra 3 cards they will have in deployment by the time they have finished their swapout. Even if they can find the card, they will never be able to permanently patch it if that was their only recourse, as Nfusion will just switch cards, starting the process over again. Dish Network will need to lobby hard to have receivers with Ethernet ports made illegal to import. Even at that, they will not be able to stop dealers from selling Ethernet ports separately from FTA Receivers, as there is nothing illegal about an Ethernet port with a USB adapter. The game only gets more interesting as time goes on!
Here's to Nfusion for taking the first step, and a ballsy one at that.