solution, but some corners had been cut in the initial implementations in the rush to launch the service. The first US DirecTV smart cards were based on the BSkyB VideoCrypt card known as the Sky 09 card. The Sky 09 card had been introduced in 1994 as a replacement for the compromised Sky 07 card. The former had been totally compromised in Europe at the time (1995). The countermeasure employed by NDS Group, the designers of the VideoCrypt system was to issue a new smartcard (known as the Sky 10 card) that included an ASIC in addition to the card's microcontroller. This innovation made it harder for pirates to manufacture pirate VideoCrypt cards. Previously, the program in the Sky card's microcontroller could be rewritten for other microcontrollers without too much difficulty. The addition of an ASIC took the battle between the system designers and pirates to another level and it bought BSkyB at least six months of almost piracy-free broadcasting before the pirate Sky 10 cards appeared on the market in 1996. Initial pirate Sky 10 cards had an implementation of this ASIC but once supplies ran out, pirates resorted to extracting the ASICs from deactivated Sky cards and reusing them. The first US DirecTV "F" card did not contain an ASIC and it was quickly compromised. Pirate DirecTV cards based on microcontrollers that were often ironically more secure than that used in the official card became a major problem for DirecTV. Similar errors had been made by the developers of the UK's terrestrial digital Xtraview Encryption System, which provided no encryption and relied on hiding channels from listings. The DirecTV "F" card was replaced with the "H" card, which contained an ASIC to handle decryption. However, due to similarities between the "H" and other existing cards, it became apparent that while the signal could not be received without the card and its ASIC, the card itself was vulnerable to tampering by reprogramming it to add channel tiers or additional programming, opening TV channels to the prying eyes of the pirates. Two more card swaps would be necessary before the piracy headaches at DirecTV would finally go away; a number of other providers are also in the middle of swapping out all of their subscribers' smartcards due to compromised encryption methods or technology. A number of vulnerabilities exist even with digital encryption: The same algorithm is used, potentially, for millions