LulzSec Redirects ‘The Sun’ Homepage To Fake Murdoch Death Story | Hacker News Reader

LulzSec Redirects ‘The Sun’ Homepage To Fake Murdoch Death Story

techcrunch.com

197 pointsssclafani76 comments

News International (NWSA) lost about 5% of its stock value today, and with a special session of the UK Parliament on Wednesday all bets are off - if Cameron is badly damaged enough, the Lib Dems could pull out of the government on principle leading to a snap election, although I would give that only a 20% chance of happening.

Murdoch is probably doomed; unless he pulls a rabbit out of a hat at the Parliamentary committee meeting tomorrow morning, his stockholders seem almost certain to revolt. I'm kind of surprised that his board hasn't cut him loose yet. This Lulzsec joke is in poor taste, but right on the money as a piece of satire. Curiously reminiscent of a 19th century Thomas Nast cartoon jesting about the funeral of NY Tribune publisher (and neckbeard extraordinaire) Horace Greeley.

EDIT: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-07-18/news-corp-said-to-c... suggests NWSA is indeed planning to give Murdoch the boot. Oh, how the mighty are fallen.

EDIT II: A more illuminating story from the trades http://www.adweek.com/news/television/if-rupert-goes-chase-c...

Edit III: I can't help noticing that Mr Carey looks an awful lot like the Lulzsec mascot with those curly mustachios. Coincidence? I think not!

I'll show myself out

Murdoch would have done better if he continued to make up news instead of trying to hack phones and report the truth.

To be sure, he is ultimately responsible, but I highly doubt he himself sanctioned or approved of those actions.

From what I've read, in the WSJ editorial today perhaps foremost, he sanctions those activities implicitly if not explicitly. Don't forget in the midst of all this the NY Post front page story alleging DSK accuser not only of being hooker but pimped by her union! If it is the end of Murdoch, good riddance.

According to the whistleblower, the problem is endemic to the entire industry.

By the way here is the cartoon I mentioned above. I mis-remembered; it wasn't Greeley's funeral exactly, but suggesting he was near death. Greeley had run as a quixotic Democratic candidate in the 1872 election against President Ulysses S. Grant and his continued occupation of the South during the reconstruction period following the civil war. Greeley did poorly in the election, and this cartoon in Harper's Weekly, a strongly Republican magazine at that time, mocked his crusading style and suggested his campaign had no life left in it.

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_OQAiMcEXtec/Re4nyF-d-bI/AAAAAAAAAA...

This is considered an especially cruel editorial cartoon, because Greeley's wife died immediately after the election; Greeley then went mad, and died a few weeks later at the end of November. He had suffered terrible financial losses by being caught in an investment scam earlier that year, and had lost control of his newspaper to another New York publisher, Whitelaw Reid, who fired him. I happened to be reading about these events just before the News International scandal blew up. Technology has changed a lot, human nature not so much.

It may be in poor taste, but they aren't the first to joke about Murdoch this way.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1aZcsY-O8Q

> if Cameron is badly damaged enough, the Lib Dems could pull out of the government on principle leading to a snap election, although I would give that only a 20% chance of happening.

I'd say the chances of that are more like 0.2%. Most of the crap that went on was under Blair and Brown.

Cameron's problem is that he hired former NoTW editor Andy Coulson to be his press secretary, and Coulson was forced to resign last January because of these hacking reports.

Not only did he apparently approve of and even commission hacking while a newspaper editor, he hired a private investigator who had been jailed for trying to plant drugs on other people (to create a newspaper scandal) and who later turned out to be an axe murderer. I don't mean that as a figure of speech; the fellow murdered his business partner with an axe. Now coulson did not know this was going to happen when he hired him, but Cameron (or at least his chief of staff) apparently knew about it before hiring Coulson and decided that he would make a fine addition to the team anyway, desite his extremely dodgy social circle. Add in the fact that Cameron has had a meeting with Murdoch or one of his top lieutenants on average every 2 weeks since becoming PM, at either 10 Downing Street or at Chequers (the PM's official country house, like Camp David for the President), and he looks uncomfortably close to a bunch of rather villainous people.

Remember that Cameron is governing as part of a coalition with the Liberal Democratic party, who are allied with him by necessity rather than by choice. If they pull out and Cameron loses a vote of confidence in Parliament, the government falls.

You're high.

Employing someone who 10 years ago may have engaged in some, or known about dodgy journalistic tactics is hardly much to write home about.

Of course he had meetings with execs from NewsCorp. They own a bunch of newspapers! Blair and Brown did exactly the same.

It sounds like you'd like the government to fall. I don't think most people in the country would.

I think most people are thoroughly bored of this 'scandal' about a bit of corruption that happened 10 years ago. There's more important news out there. Like the collapse of the Euro.

>Of course he had meetings with execs from NewsCorp.

He had Christmas dinner with Rebecca Brooks, he had a secret meeting with Murdoch on a private yacht before the election. There are meetings and then there are meetings.

"I think most people are thoroughly bored of this 'scandal' about a bit of corruption that happened 10 years ago. There's more important news out there."

Nope. It's more to do with the fact that it's a scandal exposing just how corrupt and cosy the british power elites are. "A bit of corruption 10 years ago" is somewhat akin to Al Capone going down on tax evasion

The problem, as I see it, isn't the dodgyness, it's that the Lib Dems needs cover to back a vote of no-confidence. A vote of no confidence in a government you're part of is a big deal. If they vote no-confidence on the grounds that Cameron had meetings (even meetings) and no hard evidence, then the only thing Cameron needs to do to absolutely end the LDs is to demonstrate how Labour also had meetings (News Intl were behind Labour in all the Blair elections). Heck, Murdoch might just do him the favour and dump the minutes himself on the way out.

Also, LDs are in plenty of trouble with their base. They swallowed tuition rises but are willing to fire the PM over being too nice to Rebekah Brooks? Tuition affects pretty much everybody who will go to university or who wants their children to go to university. Loose ties to repulsive, illegal behaviour at at newspaper everybody already knows to be the scum of the earth affects comparatively no-one.

Finally, Coulson was working for Cameron when the coalition was set up. How does it play to be fine with that, and then suddenly be against some meetings on a vague principle?

All correct - that's why I think there's only a 20% likelihood of a showdown tomorrow. And the main reason I give it that percentage is the history of the Lib Dems dating back to the 80s; they've been willing to go through a schism before, and individual MPs might see a rebellion as the best chance of holding onto their seat, especially if they were already unhappy with the compromises forced on them in the coalition.

From the fake article:

One detective elaborates. "Officers on the scene report a broken glass, a box of vintage wine, and what seems to be a family album strewn across the floor, containing images from days gone by; some containing handpainted portraits of Murdoch in his early days, donning a top hat and monocle."

I've got to give it to them, that's hilarious.

You could almost write a whole novel out of it.

Agreed.

An image Lulzsec use as their identity linked below, for those that don't get the joke they made:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/7/7c/Lulz_Sec...

A box of vintage wine?

I thought these were boxes of wine: http://www.instructables.com/image/FO6BCL6F8DOSUHR/FINISH-OF...

That's the joke.

According to sabu they're going to release the sun's email dump tomorrow.

http://twitter.com/#!/anonymouSabu/status/93062692327264256

I thought lulzsec said they were done after their 50 day mission? Guess they had to come back for this.

Anybody can claim they are from lulzec.

False. Only those involved in LulzSec can post to the Twitter page.

Edit: Though, looking at the screenshots of the tweets on the TechCrunch page, they don't actually explicitly say it was them.

Edit 2: They did claim responsibility for it (just not in the tweets TechCrunch took a screenshot of).

You're making the mistake of thinking the twitter account is somehow "official." It is, again, just an "anybody" claiming to be in LulzSec

Does it matter really? For all we know different people could have been posting stuff during the 50 days all under the same banner.

"Anybody" who has the password to the Lulzsec Twitter account. Or who, very unlikely, hacked Twitter.

It's official in the sense that lulzsecurity.com endorses it (and @LulzSec endorses lulzsecurty.com), so either both @LulzSec and lulzsecurity.com are 'fake' or they're both actually controlled by LulzSec.

I think it's pretty safe to say that they're both controlled by LulzSec.

Sure, but can anybody post from Lulzsec's Twitter account?

Are you suggesting that Twitter is immune to hackers? Which, you know, these people obviously are?

"Thank you for the love tonight. I know we quit, but we couldn't sit by with our wine watching this walnut-faced Murdoch clowning around."

https://twitter.com/#!/LulzSec/status/93103067662258176

Sabu was the leader/only person worth a damn of the bunch. The other kids he "teamed-up" with to make LulzSec have long since fled the group, but Sabu remains.

Seems that the websites of all of NI's newspapers are down:

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/ http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/ http://www.thesun.co.uk/ http://www.newsoftheworld.co.uk/

The LulzSec twitter feed is pretty active right now: https://twitter.com/#!/LulzSec

The LulzSec twitter feed now appears to be empty.

All twitter.com pages come up empty for me for the past 30-40 minutes.

They're all erroring out now. If the traffic from the redirect was enough to take one of News Corp's sites offline, I imagine that it's throwing Twitter to a loop too.

So much attention, so little value to society

Newscorp or LulzSec?

Both. But in that order.

Satire is an important form of political commentary.

Indeed. Too bad that so much useful information won't be digested b/c folks get more vicarious thrills reading about criminal acts. Too bad too that folks have to get off harming others irrespective of how they pretend to justify their actions. Yeah I know, grow some, get over it, that's life...

A Javascript redirect has been added to http://extras.thesun.co.uk/sol/breakingnewspage.html.

http://pastebin.com/pWQtngDc (Line 8).

Firefox + RequestPolicy users are unaffected, thanks to RequestPolicy's defences against cross origin requests and redirects.

we'll show those jerks that hacking people's voicemail is unacceptable... by hacking their CMS.

Not to excuse Lulzsec's actions, but don't you think that we should hold an international news organization to a higher standard?

We should... they are sufficiently compensated for their position as an international news organisation, that they should operate at a higher standard.

But the internet has leveled the playing field. We should hold ourselves to a similar standard. Rather than lulzing as it burns. We should step up.

That's sort of like telling insurgents that they should engage in an infantry battle instead of roadside bombs. You can disagree with the cause but it's pretty obvious, given their capabilities, that they have to play by different rules.

Lulzsec don't have a half dozen global media organizations to push their point of view -- they have funny website redirects and email dumps. So that's what they're doing.

EDIT: Hey downmodder, read, I gave you permission to disagree with the cause if you want. Comment is about tactics.

If we're torturing analogies, that's like a child saying "but he started it!"

There seems to be a momentum developing based on adults who have been maintaining pressure on this story through legal investigative journalism... setting fire to a paper bag filled with shit on their doorstep and ringing the bell doesn't help.

(edit: didn't downvote you btw... that's for the drive-by kids)

I refuse to accept responsibility for petty vandalism. It's impossible to prevent in any community.

Ourselves = all the people with Internet access?

You're acting like this has anything to do with the News of the World allegations, other than the fact that it is what gave them the idea. It's mostly about them entertaining themselves. Lulzsec/antisec does have a message (essentially that the security industry is exploitative) but when they act under Lulzsec it really is just for the lulz.

It's mostly about attention seeking.

Same thing

Seems like just deserts to me.

Hacking a dead girl's voicemail and lying about it to the police is not the same as hacking the CMS of the assholes responsible for it.

why, that's almost as hypocritical as stopping enemy soldiers from shooting at you by... shooting at them!

From Twitter:

"@thecoldgun It's like having a psycho mercenary on your side in a fight - you worry what they'll do when they're not."

The Sun is now "dead".

Error 324 (net::ERR_EMPTY_RESPONSE): The server closed the connection without sending any data.

"Murdoch Meltdown Monday."

www. works for me, * . doesn't.

*.newsinternational.co.uk has that error uniformly.

Internal Server Error - Read

The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request. Reference #3.1fc38f18.1311029956.4e5f0fc

This is the first time I've seen them "call their shots" - that is, this isn't just whoever they could bust into.

This is untrue. Hacks against the Arizona cops and (secondary) attacks on Sony were 'called' as well.

I wonder what Murdoch's response will be.

410 Gone?

view-source:http://extras.thesun.co.uk/sol/breakingnewspage.html

edit: here's the right pastebin http://pastebin.com/ksu585vM

I read through the pastebin (the source is currently down) and I'm still not quite sure I get how Lulzsec did this. Could you (or someone) explain?

Heh, not sure how the pastebin got mixed up but I updated the post above. It was setting parent.location.href to the twitter account.

Thanks for updating! I've opened the new pastebin but still am not sure how it all worked together with the sun website to get it to redirect.

That html page is normally included on the homepage as an iframe. The pastebin is entirely untelling of how it got there, but it is the source of the redirect.

Do you happen to know how it got there? Though the pastebin does not show it.

That looks like it's an iframe that normally has no content but which can be updated by commenting in the sample bits to put a breaking news headline onto the homepage. Because the CMSes that run newspaper websites are often terribly crufty, people resort to workarounds like this.

It would have been a little more convincing if they'd bothered to use an apostrophe: Media Mogul's Body Discovered. Not to nitpick, but you want a media prank to work, you need to think like media people. They wouldn't forget punctuation.

The grauniad would.

From wikipedia:

"The nickname The Grauniad for the paper originated with the satirical magazine Private Eye.[109] This anagram played on The Guardian's reputation for frequent typographical errors, such as misspelling its own name as The Gaurdian."

Who would know (outside the UK)? Thanks for that. (Maybe the lack of apostrophe was on purpose!)

That's the thing that is bugging me the most as well.

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