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Murdoch Faces Allegations of Sabotage
Presto Vivace writes "Neil Chenoweth, of the Australian Financial Review, reports that the BBC program Panorama is making new allegations against News Corp of serious misconduct. This time it involves the NDS division of News Corp, which makes conditional access cards for pay TV. It seems that NDS also ran a sabotage operation, hiring pirates to crack the cards of rival companies and posting the code on The House of Ill Compute (thoic.com), a web site hosted by NDS. 'ITV Digital collapsed in March 2002 with losses of more than £1 billion, overwhelmed by mass piracy, as well as technical restrictions and expensive sports contracts. Its collapse left Murdoch-controlled BSkyB the dominant pay TV provider in the UK.' Chenoweth reports that James Murdoch has been an advocate for tougher penalties for pirates, 'These are property rights, these are basic property rights,' he said. 'There is no difference from going into a store and stealing a packet of Pringles or a handbag, and stealing something online. Right?'"
This guy is basically like Mr. Burns on the Simpsons. What a horrible excuse for a person.
I wonder how much Fox news will report it. You can't tell me all the other networks aren't going to have a field day with this in the US.
If ITV Digital was a publicly traded company
And it has ceased to exist due to bankruptcy
And the bankruptcy proceedings have been all wound up
And the allegations against BSkyB are true
And BSkyB can be successfully sued for large damages for what they did to ITV Digital
Who could bring such a suit? How would the proceeds be distributed? The obvious candidates are ITV Digital's creditors (who got paid less than they were owed) and ITV Digital's shareholders. However, it won't always be clear who owns those shares and bad debts, as they've been assumed to have zero value, so haven't been tracked since the end of bankruptcy.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
Unfortunately no one has invented a vaccine for being an ass-hat. Until someone does, these things will continue.
Murdoch has enough money to buy plausible deniability.
...the close resemblance between Rupert Murdoch and Emperor Palpatine...?
NDS card hacking has been well known for a long time. They spent a year with some 30 guys using electron microscopes to reverse engineer their competitor's cards. When they published each new revision, they destroyed the Dish network's profitability for years, and everyone else using their competitor's technology. NDS mades the cards for DirecTV. They actually rate the security of their chips in electron-microscope years. This is well known, and well known that NDS and DirecTV are more Murdoch properties. I'm sure the people who have been discussing this for years are not surprised by the phone hacking scandal, which is like comparing pre-school with ... electron microscope school?
This incident followed the same pattern as the News of the World phone hacking scandal. An overly aggressive manager broke the law and was rewarded, and News Corp crushed the competition. When the bad deeds were found out the internal investigation was a joke:
Then for some strange reason when the authorities investigate they decide not to press criminal charges (can you say political pressure, i knew you could). In the final stage, there is a civil case and it is settled out of court. In this case the total payout was $650 million. Note this figure includes some other wrongdoing besides the Floorgraphics case.
This is exactly what happened in the News of the World scandal, until The Guardian newspaper in England did some investigation and found out how massive the phone hacking was. Given these two cases, one in the US and one in the UK, what are the odds that News Corp is blameless in this situation.
Why is Snark Required?
"Breaking news! How will obama lower the price on gas? Have we gotten any proof he isn't a muslim? And will he ever show conclusive evidence that he is born in the US?"
If you're a big corporation, piracy is a Good Thing, especially if it takes down a rival corporation.
But if you or I download 1 song 'illegally', it's 250,000 in fines and five years in pound-them-in-the-ass prison.
Have I got this right?
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
There is clear signs of piracy, that was intentional. Close down ALL of it, all the newspapers, the tv stations, everything, and sort it out in court first.
Thats what they did to Megaupload, fair is fair.
We know he's a pirate because he distributes file sharing software: http://www.fileplanet.com/73/0/0/0/1/section/File_Sharing
Scroll to the bottom and note it's operated by IGN Entertainment. Then check who owns IGN: http://corp.ign.com/about/
That's right, News Corp, Murdoch's company.
There will probably be some sharp satire on The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. MSNBC may make a few snide comments. Other than that, I would guess most media will ignore it. Fox will try to frame it as if Murdoch is the victim.
if he ever really goes down, he'll take a few politicians down with him
And that's his protection, right there. All the politicos in a lot of countries know that if they investigate his companies too deeply they'll uncover such a can of politically interconnected worms that their governments would have to relocate to the nearest jail.
He's been in so deep for so long that no major party would come out with clean hands, or be able to "cast the first stone". He knows it, they all know it and are just hoping that the media knows it too.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
I see you're one of those ultra sensitives today's society pumps out in droves, who then lobby to make life so whitewashed and locked down that it's no longer interesting.. grow a thicker skin already, if you can't tell the difference between a joke and seriousness, or contextual reference.
"And what about all the nerds that actually did it? It's not like he sat around writing code himself. What about their (existent?) scruples? Did they know who paid them or wonder why? Did they just ignore those questions so long as they could?"
None of that happened. The company that made the decryption cards was owned 50% by News International, and it made cards for Sky, and competitors like ITV's On Digital. Murdoch was a non-executive director at the company then this happened too.
There was no hacking, the company that made the cards was leaking the decryption keys, likely at the behest of James Murdoch/News International who had such a stake in the company.
It's not so much being nice to each other. Fox and MSNBC employees seem to loathe each other from what I've read. The issue is that the businesses are looking at something more long term than todays viewership. Sure, CNN kicking Fox while it is down will help improve ratings tonight. The problem is when the current administration is no longer in power. If beating on Fox is ok now, you can bet beating on CNN will be ok in the future. This is merely the networks acting out of fear of mutually assured destruction.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
What's it like where money matters above all else, nepotism abounds and professional ambition transcends all known ethics? Let me tell you.
I've been an employee of NewsCorp for the last 4-5 years. I stay with them because they offer the best compensation in my field, security in this recession, and yet we have our differences. On many occasions I've defended my employer and media outlets, mainly Fox News by saying, "I may not agree with the narrative but no one can say it's not a commercial success." Each business unit only worries about the bottom line, and not a soul has the well being of the U.S. and it's future in mind. Now it's starting to bother me.
Rupert Murdoch may be more feared by his employees than Steve Jobs ever was. Instead of a razor sharp focus on perfection and simplicity, Murdoch works his media holdings like a venture capitalist, his political influence like the dirtiest lobbyist, and just doesn't seem to 'get' the web and social media. This old-fashioned media tycoon acquires, prunes and drives companies and their talent to exact his will.
The pressure on his people shows. Employing very creative accounting (tax havens), phone hacking and leveraging threats of media smear campaigns, NewsCorp employees cross ethical boundaries more often than Rupert crosses time zones. It's no secret he enjoys the power he wields. On the editorial conferences he attends, on the way he treats political enemies, competitors and anyone else that dare disagree, it is striking from the inside.
Rupert has always shown his considerable ego, from the (good for all of the British press) breaking of the print unions in Wapping to his new rambling outlet, Twitter (@rupertmurdoch) . This 80 year old man tweets solo from his iPad, attacking Google, President Obama and others, all the while disregarding his plethora of Lawyers, PR entourage and social media experts. But that's the thing. He doesn't care. He's an old, angry, ballsy billionaire with mostly incompetent, disappointing children who is set on nothing more than doing what he and he alone wants for the rest of his life. I would say his tireless work has earned him that privilege if his empire wasn't pro-SOPA, against LGBT and other rights, constantly polarizing America and driving the Republican Party farther right than I ever predicted. The national dialogue has turned into a screaming match and I know who to thank.
With Roger Ailes as his Dick Cheney, Murdoch has incredible control over conservatives. 'Fair and Balanced' stopped being a funny joke years ago. I never thought I would live in a country where science was laughed at on the news, calling the sitting President a Communist was acceptable, or where a GOP candidate has no chance without the backing of Ailes, Czar of Fox News.
This might be the future, where only money matters, your voicemail isn't safe and anything can happen when dirty police officers get their take. It might be, but I don't like it.
It's a different kind of theft, different ramifications. You can't compare stealing a physical good to stealing personal data. What's he is comparing isn't apples and apples. They're different laws, different acts, different outcomes. Look it up.
All I can think of is how in 1577 Queen Elizabeth gave financial backing to pirates in the Caribbean to break the Spanish hold in the area at the same time publicly being very against the whole idea (why yes you would be hanged as a pirate if you were caught without the secret papers). This is not any different (well except that in this case no one was actually hung). It does put a different view on everything overall how a large company actually can benefit from some well placed and promoted piracy.
All the more reason to make an example out of Murdoch. What type of society do you want to live in? One where the powerful break the law and cow politicians by endlessly propagandising the public? The Murdoch's probably think of themselves as stand-up guys, but they have caused so much harm that it is an embarrassment to a civilised society. Jobs said that Murdoch should think about his legacy, like somehow the karma boggie-man will do something about his behaviour. I would put more faith in jail-time for serial malfeasance.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right