News Corp "totally hacked" pay-TV rival, leaked company emails reveal | Hacker News Reader

News Corp "totally hacked" pay-TV rival, leaked company emails reveal

computerworlduk.com

52 pointsEdwardQ17 comments

At this point almost nothing about Rupert Murdoch and the behaviour of one his many Slimeball corporations should surprise anyone.

If you are a UK resident, you would know the horrendous actions of his tabloids - Hacking the voice mail of a Murdered Child's parents, etc. If in the US think of Fox News (all that needs to be said).

This guy and his corporations are as close to a nonredeemable "Bond Villain" as you can get in real life.

You're right, we shouldn't be surprised but he's becoming such a caricature of his own evil who knows where it will end?

He makes that crazy statement Rumsfeld came up with about "unknown unknowns - things that we don't know that we don't know" seem like a proper sentence when you think Met Police are trawling through a database of 300,000,000 separate News International emails in East London as we speak, 11 million of which were deleted and then recovered.

"Unknown unknowns" is a sensible statement. It quite often is the case in project risk management. That is why you add contingency.

I thought here of all places would discriminate between "guessing a voice mail pin number" and "hacking".

I'm so confused.

I get that he did it for his own gain, but he funded the cracking of a proprietary DRM encryption scheme.

Isn't the HN community anti-MPAA, anti-copyright-extension, pro-information freedom? How is this against those ideas?

The only victims I can see here are a DRM enforcement company and content producers. I thought we already agreed they were behemoths ready to be destroyed? And here we have someone financing their destruction and we don't like them?

Is it that all that rhetoric about destroying Hollywood was to destroy them without breaking the very laws we're protesting?

(this is an honest question. Please respond before downvoting.)

If that is merely the case, kudos to them.

However, if they did something beyond cracking DRM, that's probably getting into the range of unethical.

In any case, I don't really care about who win the pay-tv wars, because the internet is already the winner. In due time, it will replace traditional television.

He did crack a proprietary DRM system, but only in order to further the success of his own service which used just as much proprietary DRM.

Having said that, the ultimate result was that we got Freeview, one of the better results for UK end users in a while. And perhaps not in the best long-term interests of Sky!

He wasn't cracking their DRM so that he could watch content he purchased at his leisure on the device of his choice, or so that the information could be free, or anything of that nature. He was cracking their DRM to put a competitor out of business.

Nice attempt at a straw-man argument though.

It's weird how it's taken over 10 years for this to come to light. Here's how it was originally broken to Thoic members back in 2001:

http://pastebin.com/TW2rdkrx

The issue has been covered at least a few times before: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/07/satellite/ is one, and links to a great article about the hacker Chris Tarnovsky supposedly responsible, who has also been heavily involved securing and deploying countermeasures against hacked decoders: http://www.wired.com/politics/security/news/2008/05/tarnovsk...

Yes. Here's the actual story that references important parts of the emails:

http://afr.com/p/business/marketing_media/the_news_story_tha...

The emails themselves are here:

https://www.documentcloud.org/public/search/group:%20austral...

Keywords and meanings:

  P2                  NDS card that was hacked & emulated
  P3                  Card that wasn't publicly broken at the time
  C+                  Canal Plus, NDS competitor
  Michael George      Chris Tarnovsky alias
  Stinger             Chris's programmable glitcher board
  Oliver Koemmerling  Smart card hacker
  Lee Gibling         Pirate board who turned over logs to NDS

This has been an open secret for a long time.

Exactly. I think the cloud exists over who exactly the target was, and the news in the UK only seems to be blowing up because they seem to think all the new evidence is more credible . . .

Here we are: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2002/mar/13/media.cityn...

I guess we've lost the "hacked" vs "cracked" war.

"We" lost that war well over a decade ago.

Rupert wants information to be Free!!

Sure, his competitors' information... but it's information. :)

Murdoch and his pals up to their old tricks.

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