NewsCorp/NDS Sets Up Operation To Expose Canadian Pirates; What Could Go Wrong?

Presto Vivace writes "Murdoch's Pirates is a business book that reads like a thriller. The chapter excerpted in the Sydney Morning Herald explains how Operation Duck, an effort to discover the identify Canadian pay TV pirates, went horribly wrong. 'By October 25 Oliver had been in Toronto four days and had programmed a swag of pirate cards, using a program he had ripped off another pirate hack. And he had been paid a lot of money. That evening, he met with two piracy dealers in a car and programmed a few cards for them with his portable programmer box, to demonstrate that it worked. The following night Oliver received a call from a friend in London, a partner in his old piracy ring, who was sleeping with a woman who worked for Federal Express. 'He told me, these guys [from the previous night] sent a parcel to Larry Rissler,' Oliver recalls. Rissler was a former FBI agent who headed the Office of Signal Integrity—the operational security division—of DirecTV, and he had been hunting Oliver for some time. One of the dealers Oliver had met was a Rissler informant and he had despatched a re-programmed smartcard by FedEx to his boss. The parcel would be with Rissler early the next morning—if it wasn't already there.' The story reads like some perverse blend of James Bond and the Pink Panther. It is just amazing."

Just Amazing?

[Antipater]

I don't read many thrillers - does this really qualify as the kind of writing that is "amazing"? It looks to me like a contest entry to write the word "piracy" as many times as possible in a single paragraph.

To Rupert Murdoch: Pay Your Taxes ProperlyFirst!!!

[dryriver]

Murdoch's NewsCorp makes Billions of Dollars in Profit/Revenues a year, and is one of the largest media companies in the world. Yet NewsCorp only pays about 4% in Taxes on all this income, thanks to an intricate network of hundreds of shell-companies in tax havens like Bermuda and the Cayman Islands. Article to back this up: http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/276-74/6796-focus-pay-your-taxes-murdoch [readersupportednews.org] ---- So, Rupert Murdoch, perhaps you should pay your taxes properly before you go after anyone for "Piracy"? You owe multiple governments and territories hundreds of millions of Dollars in back taxes. --- Perhaps you should clean up your "Tax Piracy", before you go after hapless individuals for "Content Piracy"? --- Better yet, run your "archconservative" NewsCorp dinosaur biz into the ground for good, so more ethical, talented, objective news and content producers can fill the gap you leave in the market.

Re:LMAO

[Cid Highwind]

LMAO at people who pirate television.

Agreed.

But then also LMAO at people who think they can bathe half the globe in a radio signal and then decide who is allowed to decode it.