Newspaper to close its doors over hacking scandal.
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
And a few weeks ago Rebekah Brooks announced that editorial roles would be merged between the Sun and the News of the World. ( http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/greenslade/2011/jun/28/newsi... )
So I think Ken Clarke said it when he said: "All they're going to do is rebrand it." ( http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-14070856 )
(was also registered with 123-reg, for the record)
Also, it would be The Sun On Sunday, not the Sunday Sun, as that already exists: http://www.sundaysun.co.uk/
And the paper was largely finished by this point. No advertisers, no readers, an utterly tarnished brand...
But yes, the Beeb has just reported that employees will be placed at other titles within NI. But I would be surprised if they didn't still lose some headcount. After all, most newspapers have been trying to shed employees the last few years. The announcement that they were going to merge some functions between The Sun and the News Of The World was largely motivated by that.
hmm where do you get that from? All sources point to NOTW having the highest readership of any sunday paper.
"Procter & Gamble, Asda and Tesco consider pulling News of the World ads
Coca-Cola GB and other major brands voice concerns as Halifax, Co-op, Vauxhall and Virgin Hollidays join ad exodus"
-- The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/jul/06/news-of-the-worl...
Let me emphasize, that was yesterday. The trickle turned into a flood and then a tsunami today: by the time NewsCorp announced the closure of "News of the World" they only had one major advertiser left on board.
They have by far the highest readership of any sunday paper. That wouldn't evaporate overnight.
The top advertiser, Sky, spends £2m a year with the paper.
So I find it hard to believe that advertisers are all that important.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2002/may/13/advertising.circ...
Politicians and rival media outlets are afraid of the NewsCorp empire. They own 30% of the UK newspaper market and a big chunk of its TV programming, and they have long memories. Not people you would want to have holding a grudge against you if you worked in that industry or had to run for re-election.
Of course they'd be attacking.
(I am reminded of the expenses scandal - The Guardian had a journalist who was petitioning the government to release the expense data for years, but didn't get anywhere except repeated trips to the courtroom. Then the Telegraph gets copies leaked from within the expenses office. It's a dirty world out there...)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jul/06/news-of-...
Tokenism on all fronts. NI will launch a Sunday version of the Sun within a few months with content suspiciously similar to NotW.
The scandal, which blew up massively again after evidence was presented of them interfering with a missing-persons/murder enquiry and has only got worse after evidence that the families of bombing victims and those injured/killed in overseas conflicts were also subject to similar invasion of privacy, has caused significant activity in government and a large amount of embarrassment for News International - possibly to the point of threatening their attempt to buy the rest of Sky.
I wonder how many more phone and email hacking/monitoring scandals, involving the media or other organisations, will drop out of the woodwork following (or during the investigation of) this one...
edit: removed the quotes from "news"paper in the title. A tad hypocritical of me to editorialise like that while taking shots at a tabloid!
Taking stuff from my house is still robbery even if I left the front door open.
Getting in to PIN-less voicemail boxes is like walking down a street and checking which doors are unlocked, and then assuming a lack of security means the owner is permitting you to take whatever you can find inside.
It would be more accurate to say that you left your curtains open, and someone took a picture of the inside of your house through the windows.
Maybe an invasion of privacy, but not theft.
And if I was naked at the time, and if they then sold those pictures of me, I'm fairly certain it would be a crime.
If you setup a directory /admin on your webserver, and forget to password protect it, and someone accesses it, you can't really call it hacking.
My point which you gloss over is in the definition of "attack".
Whether browsing to a publicly accessible url with no security is an attack or not, is a very grey area.
Whether or not accessing anything on a webserver is illegal depends partly on your intentions while doing so. That's a basic function of most court trials--to discern your intentions. For example, see the differences between the various degrees of murder, and the way such trials often hinge on "preconceived intent."
If my intention in accessing "/admin" was to access your server without your authorization to access some protected piece of information, damage computers, or defraud you, that may indeed be a crime. See http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/18/1030.html . It doesn't matter whether it was password protected or not. If I went there by accident, however, it probably was not a crime, although depending on what I accessed I may wind up having to go to court to prove that my intentions were benign.
In at least one case, voicemails were deleted from a murder victim's inbox.
One - they could have been evidence (apparently killers often leave sympathetic messages to try and deflect attention), and two - it made the parents and the police think she was still alive when she was in fact already dead.
A lot of nerds are under the very faulty impression that the severity of "hacking" crimes scales with the difficulty of the attack. No. It has nothing whatsoever to do with how hard these things are to pull off.
It would be more like "I leave my front door open, and you walk in and take a photograph".
Also, I believe that the voicemail "hackers" also deleted some voicemails, and in that case something was indeed taken.
By your logic, just because I didn't password protect it, doesn't mean it's legal open for you to load in a browser.
If you run foo.com, and you open it to the public, then you have made the decision to allow the public to use it. You've got a DNS record that tells the world they're welcome to access your site. On the other hand, if I sit outside your house and use your open WiFi to scan for computers inside your house with open ports, I'm probably committing a crime. If you have not made your desktop machine public, my accessing it is almost certainly against your wishes.
The difference is only expectation. Some folks have the expectation that voicemail is as private as, for instance, an answering machine. Which is clearly not the case if you are technically savvy, which I'm thinking a judge is not.
I'm not sure how you think an answering machine is different from voicemail. I can access my answering machine from any phone in the universe, too, or at least I could if this was still 1995. Voicemail is just an answering machine than handles a lot of telephone lines.
Edit: bins == trash (sorry was thinking in anglicisms)
It does seem bizarre, doesn't it? Sometimes petty legal issues are resolved using precedent and it can seem arbitrary, probably because it is.
For instance, its accepted in the US that in a rear-end collision its the car in back that is at fault. In Austria I've been told the car in front is at fault!
Both sides could be argued. But like in baseball with the infield-fly rule, a rule gets made to settle it once and for all, and it is really arbitrary.
What on Earth are you talking about? That phone was still the property of Apple. Gizmodo's blogger was investigated for involvement in felony theft. Leaving your property does not stop it from being your property. If someone finds your property and refuses to return it (or in some cases simply neglects to turn it into the police), they are guilty of a crime.
So by extension, you're saying if I setup a directory on my website called /admin and don't password protect it, then you could be committing a criminal offense if you decide to access it?
Personally I think there is a difference. If there is NO security, then it could be argued that it was intended to be public. If there is security, but it is bypassed, then obviously that is a violation.
So I'm with you that the difficulty of hacking isn't related to the severity. But in the particular case of having no PIN, no password protection, there is no hacking taking place. So it's a moot point IMHO.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Misuse_Act_1990#The_Co...
Like my profile says: "I'm not trolling; I actually think that."
However, generally, if you find, say for instance, a wallet in a public thrash can and you can determine the identity of the owner (because, for example, there is a driving license in it), you cannot keep it.
Certainly if you have a whole set of willful misconduct associated with the act, like in this case, then it's illegal/wrong even if the page was wide open and prominently linked.
I guess I was just saying that you couldn't just hold someone culpable for a hit in the access log like you could for being in the wrong kitchen. The bar to prove bad intent is higher.
There is a reasonable expectation of privacy in these cases. The actual severity might be different depending on the circumstances, but it's still fairly obvious if what you are doing is wrong or not. Obviously, their are grey areas. Does a husband have the right to access his wife's voice mail? What about her computer? What if they share a computer or accounts?
A good example I've always heard concerns banking on public computers. If you accessed your bank account on a public computer, and then left without logging out, would it be okay for someone to then transfer money to their account and keep it? No hacking was involved. No security was breached.
That's not hacking, but it is theft. How about this: If you accessed your bank account on a public computer, and then left without logging out, would it be okay for someone to glance at the screen, see your account balances, and log you out?
> If there is NO security, then it could be argued that it was intended to be public.
You then go on to this:
> If you accessed your bank account on a public computer, and then left without logging out, would it be okay for someone to glance at the screen, see your account balances, and log you out?
You really think things are black and white. Trying to tidy things up into a neat little package.
No, the intent, or motive of the person is to close the sessions. However, if I'd closed the browser window and left, and someone came and opened and then browsed the bank's site, and then made note of some information, and use it in some manner (perhaps, a PI or something), this is more likely criminal in nature.
You cannot simply say: "This is bad" and "This is good." However, it's absurd to think that just because someone forgets to secure something that it's free for public consumption. There is a reasonable expectation of privacy in certain cases. Just because it's easily accessible doesn't mean you have free reign to do what you will with whatever it is.
You will be afforded the opportunity to argue that /admin was "intended to be public" in court. Depending on what you do with /admin, a judge or jury may even listen to you.
Oh yeah and all the links these people had right to the highest level of our government.
WRT more scandals: every newspaper does this. It is standard industry practice. Why do you think they never gave notw a hard time over it, all these years? The same reason political parties never attack each other over funding. Because they all stink.
Which is one of the reasons we might see a few more scandals become public, either because people in the know see the opportunity to milk a few quid out of the momentum built up by the current publicity or because people currently getting the sack don't want to go down without taking a few rivals out on the way. Or, less cynically, just because any public investigation (one of which is promised by the government) into NoTW uncovers significant evidence of the wider issue.
Assuming this is true, it makes irrelevant a lot of gedanken experiments in the thread here.
Edit: thinking about it, the enquiry will go ahead regardless. This is more to do with protecting rebekah brooks and the sky merger. He must really like brooks.
But this is all about the Sky TV deal.
- Why the police have utterly failed to investigate this.
- Why the phone companies aren't being hammered for security lapses. Data Protection Act anyone??
- What other papers have done the same. The News of the World is in the same building as The Times, and under the same ownership as The Sun. I don't believe those two papers are clean either.
News of the World paid bribes worth £100,000 to up to five Met officers - http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/jul/07/phone-hacking-br...
Scotland Yard took no further action, apparently reflecting the desire of Fedorcio [met police press relations officer], who has had a close working relationship with Brooks, to avoid unnecessary friction with the News of the World. - http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/jul/06/news-of-the-worl...
What security lapses? Honestly asking, the article didn't seem to mention anything.
They should take some of the blame for it. But nobody seems to care.
Couldn't have put it better myself. (Side note, Tom Watson is one of the few MPs in this country supporting the games industry, which makes me like him already.)
Sadly The Sun will obviously just add Sundays, as suggested in the piece, but still, one less piece of shit to see on news stands I guess.
It's sad to see such intellectual crap condemning the masses for enjoying what they enjoy.
If you don't enjoy reading a newspaper, don't buy it.
Reading a terrible newspaper is different, and worse. They're not just getting entertainment, they're getting news, they're getting their world view and their political beliefs influenced by it. That's the difference.
Who are you to tell me not to watch Fox News? Why shouldn't I buy a tabloid paper to see who some celebrity has had an affair with?
You're inflicting your views of what is "good for the masses" on others.
If the masses want to be misinformed, non-intellectual gossip merchants (Which basically they do), let them.
My issue is with the way papers like this, and indeed Fox News, report real news, important news. Reading celebrity gossip may be something that I don't understand, but it's not something than affects me, whereas the actual news, that has a very real impact on people's views on politics, society, the world and so on. That is something we should all care about.
If people want to read the bible, and believe it as factual "news", they should be able to.
As I say, if people want to live in blissful ignorance, they should be allowed to do that.
"Wrongdoers turned a good newsroom bad and this was not fully understood or adequately pursued."
"As a result, the News of the World and News International wrongly maintained that these issues were confined to one reporter."
"The paper made statements to Parliament without being in the full possession of the facts. This was wrong."
"The company paid out-of-court settlements approved by me. I now know that I did not have a complete picture when I did so. This was wrong and is a matter of serious regret."
Just read it, it is all complete bullshit, who honestly believes that he did not have the "complete picture" when those settlements were made... Let's face it, settlements were made precisely because they HAD the complete picture. Does anyone think that they did not have "full possession of the facts"? This is careful phrasing to avoid admitting to lying to parliament which is what I for one think they did.
"So, just as I acknowledge we have made mistakes.."
This is laughable, using double-speak in acknowledging mistakes that are not the mistakes you actually made is meaningless.
It will be interesting to see whether killing the paper makes the phone hacking story go away (or at least lose a lot of its momentum) or whether a few people will feel there's no reason not to spill more beans now.
I assume with the staff mostly folding into a Sunday edition of the Sun (presumably) its really more a rebranding, and so they'll hope the story dies.
Sharks circling one of their own wounded.
edit: the silly headline is sort of thing you see in British tabloids. I suppose it's not funny if you aren't familiar with the NotW.
But no-one cared enough to turn it into action.
Then suddenly a court had evidence "someone" had deleted voicemails from a kidnap/rape/murder of a 13yr old. Within hours everyone from the PM down had hung them out to dry.
Overstepping the line is a herd instinct. I heard it on radio and just said "someone has to go to jail".
I am just wondering if Murdoch's lawyers are saying "It could be you"
Not just any murder victim -- she was one of the victims of serial killer Levi Bellfield, just recently convicted of multiple rape/murders. And the deletion of voice mails (allegedly because Milly's voicemail box had filled up, and the journalists wanted more material to work with, so they deleted earlier messages to free up space) had mislead Milly Dowler's parents, and probably the police, into thinking she was still alive -- thus impacting an investigation into a serial killer.
Let's also add that another assault/attempted abduction prosecution against Bellfield had to be called off this week due to the tabloid news media prejudicing the jury.
This goes beyond hacking and phone bugging and into the territory of interfering with the judicial system, to the detriment of extremely serious investigations and prosecutions.
Pray for its improvement, not its demise.
But an example of just how vile the Daily Mail is can be seen here:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2010193/Teachers-str...
As can be seen from the URL (but subsequently excised from the headline and the story itself), the Daily Mail blamed the death of this schoolgirl, killed by a falling branch, on teachers who were striking on that day.
The original story can be seen here: http://ontoberlin.blogspot.com/2011/07/daily-mail-claims-tea...
Over the Anglosphere seventy million people read the Daily Mail. It's a highly successful enterprise. I agree that that does not mean it cannot be 'ridiculous' or 'dubious' but it does suggest that a smidgeon of supporting evidence for your view should be forthcoming. I read it most days and find it amusing and interesting in its reporting on topics not covered in the British broadsheets. Personally I enjoy a spot of reasonably-sourced gossip. I also enjoy looking at pictures of nice girls on beaches. Probably I'm a lost soul.
And so, how would you improve it? Please don't construe my comment as suggesting that that should not take place.
See: http://kill-or-cure.heroku.com/
Then there's the whole MMR thing, and the rest: http://www.badscience.net/category/media/papers-mail/