This is a little bit different, DirecTV has a huge advantage in that there is a hardware assisted encryption mechanism. The smart card that you insert in the directv box knows how to get a valid DES key, but the smart card is pretty hard to tear open. Being able to peer inside the PC, and tear apart software like PowerDVD to see how they work make things much much simpler.

I do agree that assembly is important, it wasn't until I learned assembly (6809 for me) that I understood what a pointer was, or how it worked.

On the other hand, I think language is actually a really small part of comp sci. The language is just a mechanism for expressing the concepts you will learn. It's much much more important to learn and understand the conceptual things, like sorting, searching, trees, etc etc.

Go ahead and try, all that will happen is that services will use rotating ports and encryption to get around filters. Good luck, let the arms race begin.