judgey - I did send you the link in another thread to the cardsharing section. Yes you are right if you type in F5 on youtube it will probably get you to a payserver advert or something like that, that is the problem with these receivers, they are often sold with "gifts" or "Guarantee" - which is basically connecting you to a payserver, and because they are closed source, they tempt the user into paying for a cline rather than getting properly involved in the hobby.
We do not like payservers in this forum for a number of reasons, and because too many of these are ripping off sly UK, they are forced to act and try to prevent this, therefore, those who are cardsharing the traditional hobbiest way will lose out.
The idea of cardsharing is usually based around having a dish that can pick up more than one satellite, such as a motorised dish or one with more than one LNB so to pick up more than one satellite. The concept is, you have a card that can clear say, a german provider, and your friend has a card that can clear swedish pay channels. You both connect to each other, and therefore you then both get both providers, and so on. By installing a linux server and investing in a cardreader, or (bit late now) if you bought an enigma based receiver rather than an F5, you could acheive this.
If you have only got a sly minidish then although it is still possible to buy and use a foreign satellite card on a server, and share this, your only benefit would be to be able to share with someone who has sly UK on their server. It is fair to say that most people who have F5 boxes are probably using payservers (not all, before people jump down my throat!), and this is a sorry state of affairs. Sly will probably not be working in sharing for much longer, so I predict a lot of cheap receivers will be around for auction before long.