Early January, anti-piracy group FACT and West Mercia Police Announced they would be visiting addresses in the UK to warn people to stay away from pirated IPTV services.
Police had obtained a list of clients from a service they raided last year, and since many people give their real details to pirate services, tracing some subscribers would have been trivial. None were meant to be prosecuted, but they served an important purpose.
The visitors are the physical proof that people who simply watch illegal broadcasts risk a visit from the police. That's a psychological step, but not enough on its own.
People also need to believe that the punishments are criminally significant. More fundamentally, millions of people must be exposed to that message first. Paid advertising is an option, but it cannot compete with free advertising.
UK tabloids need clicks
After failing to consider the finer details and broader implications of FACT's carefully written press release, the UK tabloid media published tabloid stories without context.
The first claim (the police were knocking on the doors of 1000 IPTV subscribers suspected of being pirates) was a gross exaggeration. The second, two men had already been sentenced to months in prison for just watching pirated streams โ failed to mention that they both ran their own hacking operations and received convictions for fraud. In just one of those cases, the prosecution estimated damages of more than ยฃ10 million.
Because of their media footprint, other publications had little incentive to set the record straight. As a result, a substantially distorted 'fact' reached millions in the UK and the public in dozens of other countries around the world. Comments in a Russian state newspaper article described UK police as "extremists";
Since a reality check appears to be in order, in a forthcoming report we will reveal the truth about those convictions for illegal streaming and compare it to the risks faced by ordinary consumers. In large part, the motivation to reveal those details came from new and completely unsubstantiated claims published in the media over the past few days.
Sports news, subscription/PPV promotion, hacking warnings
In recent years, a new generation of articles has appeared in the UK tabloids.
Usually published before a big PPV boxing event, the articles appear with three components: miscellaneous news about the fights, โstern warnings"don't hack the fight (or Go to prison), and then the details of where the fight can be legally purchased.
He the same format appears just before the start of a new football season, year after year.
Eubank Jr vs. Smith: Big fight, even bigger warnings
After reading hundreds of similar articles, the desired effect may wear off, but a few days ago something extraordinary appeared in not one, but two differently owned UK tabloids. Both articles promoted the boxing event Chris Eubank Jr vs. Liam Smith PPV that took place this past Saturday night and they did it in almost identical fashion.
The Mirror carried the headline: "Boxing fans sent warning to prison over illegal broadcast of Chris Eubank Jr fights." the article itself He did not mention who issued the warning or what was actually said, but left room for the following sequential paragraphs:
Sky Sports Box Office is showing off the grudge match, with the price for the first major British boxing card of the year set at ยฃ19.95.
And new technology now allows sports rights holders and broadcasters to track the unique IP addresses of users illegally streaming the fight for up to six months.
Mail Online posted with the headline: "Boxing fans handed out a PRISON warning ahead of Saturday's highly anticipated middleweight clash." This time the article cited a source for the warnings: โPolice have again issued warnings for those attempting to illegally broadcast the fight.โ
No specific police unit or officer was given credit for the warning, but the Mail Online repeated the same IP address claims published by The Mirror. Unfortunately, no one cited a source or attempted to explain how this "new technology" might work. How sportswriters got the best anti-piracy scoop in the last 20 years also remains a mystery.
Remember the TV detector vans? Meet the hack detectors that track cars
If you're not wearing a tinfoil hat right now, find something with equivalent protection and buckle up. The articles referenced above were written by two different people and published in two separate publications with different ownership.
Both articles are based on the same exclusive information, have the same structure, and make the same extraordinary claims. Some take scare tactics to a whole new level.
Mirror: "Cars driving around the UK have also been fitted with tracking devices for police to identify households illegally broadcasting such events during the crackdown."
online mail: "It's part of a broader police effort to decrease illegal transmission, and cars have been fitted with gadgets that will allow them to pick up and track streamers back to their homes."
If this claim had substance, real substance, it would make a compelling tabloid headline, not something you casually skip between paragraphs in a boxing article. Then there is the question of how he came to appear there.
Two freelance journalists simultaneously discovered the existence of pirate spy vehicles circulating across the UK? In the balance of probabilities, the theory fails to convince. Equally unlikely is a scenario in which one writer saw the other's work and thought the claim was so generic that no one would notice that it was republished in a rival newspaper.
Is it possible that, by some coincidence, the articles are based on the same source? Without cooperation and full disclosure, that would be difficult to prove. But if there was a goal, somewhere along the shady information supply chain, to deter hacking by revealing the existence of illegal transmission sniffer cars, this is the breaking news: It's been tried before and it didn't. it worked.
DeepAI's interpretation of new detection/tracking technology
bbcTV detector vans' have been the subject of ridicule in the UK for the last 60 to 70 years. The BBC refuses to discuss them in response to FOIA requests and the suspicion here is that the ISDCs (all anti-piracy terms MUST have an acronym) will find themselves embroiled in a similar mystery.
In the meantime, all "Hacked and Dodgy Firesticks" should be immediately wrapped in foil and buried outside. For added protection, make a hat out of tinfoil and take two tablespoons of common sense every four hours.
