The man in the black leather jacket looks nervously around him as he is approached by another man in a dark blue ski jacket and grey woolly hat. They talk briefly, then the first man says something into a walkie-talkie. A couple of minutes later a third, younger, man joins them.
They huddle together. The younger man hands over a bundle of green cards to the first man. The second man then hurries off, slipping a card carefully into his inside pocket.
Almost immediately the ritual exchange is repeated. This time the man in the leather jacket can be heard apologising. "Sorry, we don't want to rip anybody off. It's those bastards at ONdigital. It's a tenner to reprogramme the card."
In the space of the next 10 minutes, half a dozen customers hand over their money for a working card. It is a nice little earner for the trader: the process of reprogramming takes the token techie sitting in the back of an old van just a few seconds, using a device which only costs around £50.
These exchanges are the public face of a cat-and-mouse game being played between broadcaster ONdigi tal and a loosely linked network of pirates. The green cards - a printed circuit board mounted with two chips - offer access to every ONdigital channel. That includes Sky's sports and movie channels, Film Four, pay-per-view, even the so-called "adult" channels.
Porn is a particular attraction for purchasers of the pirate cards. However carefully the name is disguised, a man may still have to account for the £6.99 monthly subscription on his credit card or bank statement. With a pirate card this is not an issue.
Whatever the reason, the pirates at Ingliston Market on the outskirts of Edinburgh are doing a roaring trade in ONdigital cards. The trade has to be attractive for buyers and sellers because, as shopping experiences go, Ingliston on a February morning is not one of the best.
The market itself is in the midst of flat potato fields with little shelter from the falling sleet and icy wind except the ineffectual plastic awnings covering the stalls. The only permanent fixtures are a blue and white toilet block and, for some reason, a huge grey concrete statue of a gorilla.
Twenty years ago the crowds came for cheap denim and dubious antiques but, gradually, the legitimate trade has faded away. There are still legitimate stalls selling everything from fruit and veg to clothes, but while most street markets have a dodgy side few in Britain are so dominated by trade in illicit goods as this one.
Online has made several attempts to contact the managing director of the market's operating company, which is based several hundred miles away in the English Midlands. Although he did not respond to our phone messages, the initial response of the person who answered our calls was to say: "We do condemn the sale of pirate goods. But you had better speak to our managing director."
Eric Robinson, head of regulatory services at Edinburgh City Council, knows of the problem at Inglis ton. "If you said to me that the majority of stalls at Ingliston were selling counterfeit goods, I'm sure my officers would not disagree with you," he says.
The problem for the local trading standards officers is the massive amount of work created by raids on stalls. To prove their case after each raid, each counterfeit item has to be identified as such by the legitimate manufacturers. "About eight stalls is the most we can deal with in a raid. We have to target them and arrive at the same time," says Robinson. "You do get swamped by the work. It ties up a huge proportion of the staff... The work involved in bringing it to court is not worth the effort."
Robinson denies this is defeatist talk, saying the department is working on "other avenues", but in the meantime the brisk business goes on. On the day of Online's visit, stall after stall is filled with PlayStation or Dreamcast games for a fiver each. Videos of films that have just hit the cinema screens are also a steal at just £5. Elsewhere, customers flip through ring binders filled with sheets listing PC or Macintosh games and utility software sometimes worth hundreds of pounds. A CD-rom crammed with programs will set you back £10 - or £15 if you look middle class.
This is also where the black economy meets the new economy. Despite there being apparently dozens of stalls competing with each other, in fact there are rather less in terms of suppliers. And much of the trade runs through a single website.
Regular customers are told the address of this site so that they can go and see what the latest offers are and make their orders. Because of the way the trade is organised there are only a limited number of discs physically available. The pirates "burn" CD-roms as necessary.
This means that not only do they not have to hold stock that might not sell, but in the event of a raid there is little to lose. Blank CDs, their main raw material, now cost less than 50p each when bought in bulk.
The website also has another customer service role. If you have problems with the software you can get advice both from the site's operators and from other users. This goes for the ONdigital cards as well, because these generally need one vital piece of information. The codes.
In common with other pay-to-air broadcasters, ONdigital uses a combination of a set-top box and a smart card that plugs into it. These cards are the size of a credit card with a gold chip near the top which is, in effect, a tiny computer. Every month a set of codes is sent out that tell the card that channels can be unscrambled. The trick is how to get the codes onto the pirate cards.
There are two main methods. The first, which was popular at places such as Ingliston until recently, auto-updated the cards with the codes as they were broadcast. These, however, are vulnerable to "electronic countermeasures" (ECMs). What ONdigital did was to send out signals that knocked out these cards while leaving the legitimate ones untouched.
The crackers, meanwhile, had developed a way of getting updated codes on to their cards. The second method takes advantage of the "parental lock" which is intended to prevent children from watching unsuitable programmes.
It uses a pin number which is set using the ONdigital box's remote control. The viewer with the pirate card uses the same method to enter nine sets of four-digit codes with a few other key presses to get another month of free ONdigital programmes.
Or they did until recently. ONdigital began sending out a signal periodically in January which prevented the cards being recognised and updated through the child lock. Within hours, however, notices were posted in internet discussion groups explaining how two legs on a pirate card's chip could be disconnected to make them write only and, therefore, in theory invulnerable to an ECM. The following Sunday, cards began to appear at Ingliston and elsewhere with a built-in switch.
For the more sophisticated user, cards at around £8 each and programmers for £50 or so are readily available from people who advertise on the internet or who run stalls at computer fairs. From internet discussion groups it is clear that many are used by groups of friends in offices or pubs.
ONdigital claims to be unworried by the problem. "We take it seriously, but it's not a major cause of concern," says a spokesman. "There are occasional outbreaks. But it comes and goes. Generally the people who suffer are the ones who buy the cards."
The crackers exchanging information across the internet believe that ONdigital is more concerned than it lets on. One website until recently opened with a screen that looked exactly the same as ONdigital's, except the slogan was changed. Instead of "Isn't it time you switched on?", it read: "Isn't it time you stopped paying?"
The website is still operating, but sports an angry threat of legal action against any ONdigital employee attempting to enter the site.
Many of the websites are hosted overseas, which would make it hard for ONdigital to take legal action to close them down. The trade itself is also international. In Europe some estimates put as high as 20% the proportion of people watching satellite television without paying.
In North America, pirates have been able to exploit differences the law between the US and Canada to openly sell hundreds of thousands of cards for DirecTV, the satellite broadcaster currently being taken over by Rupert Murdoch. The broadcaster recently got its revenge, however, after it broadcast code, piece by piece, until it was able to knock out almost every pirate card on what has become known as 'Black Sunday'. DirecTV had waited until just before the Super Bowl to launch its attack, the equivalent of hitting the UK pirates on FA Cup Final day.
The pirate internet discussion groups, meanwhile, are filled with concern that ONdigital might be plotting a similar attack. They are even more worried that ONdigital might adopt the same form of encryption used by Sky for the last three years or so. This has never been cracked.
ONdigital's official line is that it is relying on nuisance value by making it difficult to watch for free. It also points out that subscribers since May 1999 have only rented their boxes. If they cancel their subscriptions, as currently around 20% do each year, a van comes and takes the box away. Despite this there is still a saving of more than £30 a month for couch potatoes who would otherwise pay for the full package of channels.
The trade in pirate cards at Ingliston and elsewhere continues. This Sunday the men will be there, huddled against the cold, selling cards at £40 a time or upgrading them for £10. Last year Edinburgh City Council launched two major raids which brought in more than 10,000 pirate CDs and videos. The following week the stalls were full again.
