NewsCorp/NDS Sets Up Operation To Expose Canadian Pirates; What Could Go Wrong? 95
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."
Reading TFS (Score:5, Interesting)
The story reads like some perverse blend of James Bond and the Pink Panther.
Well, TFS reads like a chinese instruction manual. What the hell? Piracy dealers? Discover the identify?
Re:Reading TFS (Score:5, Informative)
Don't mod the parent down! Now on to my real point...
Interesting headline there, timmyboy. Another misleading title for a slashvertisement. Once I read the article, I discovered that this is an account of events from FIFTEEN YEARS AGO. 1997, dude. That was the era of the F cards and H cards. The era before the emulators and even before the unloopers. SERIOUSLY? How does this count as news? You have NO date in the summary, and you are deliberately misleading the reader to think that this is something recent.
It's nothing really engaging. It's just a historical account which might be a little entertaining to those of us who used to program DirecTV cards for the fun of it and resell receivers with Hu cards (unprogrammed) for hundreds of dollars on ebay.
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Once I read the article, I discovered that this is an account of events from FIFTEEN YEARS AGO. 1997, dude.
The book itself is coming out now, is the point of the article.
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Oh, then why doesn't the article title say that its a book that's coming out? Instead, the article is framed like its a current event.
I concur, slap the shit out of Timothy for posting an article about a book release and trying to make it look like a current event.
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How does this count as news?
The technology is not the story, it may have happened 15yrs ago but the fact is that Murdoch bought an Italian media outlet to prevent it bringing them to court and accusing News corp of wreaking their bussiness model with a well organised and well financed campaign to spread hacked cards on the internet. I find it odd that you don't think it's news to see the first detailed account of how Murdoch (the granddady of piracy alarmists) was using piracy as a coporate weapon against competing payTV vendors, OTOH
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The story reads like some perverse blend of James Bond and the Pink Panther.
Well, TFS reads like a chinese instruction manual. What the hell? Piracy dealers? Discover the identify?
Apparently my mod points didn't survive Sandy, so QFT.
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Reading the summary, I'm reminded of numerous scenes in "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia" where someone tries to read Charlie's dyslexic writings.
Re:Reading TFS (Score:5, Funny)
loose translation:
Dude X was selling counterfit decoder rings.
Mr Man McManniman wasn't happy about this and so orchastrated a cunning plan to catch him, Operation: DUCK
Operation: DUCK was foiled by Dude X's super sexy cohort, Hennry "The Horn" Hornison, when he managed to seduce a Delivery one, Miss Baggage.
Miss Baggage had information that Phil Squealer, who Dude X had recently met and shown his ring making device to, had sent a ring to Mr McManniman...
Can Dude X get to the package before it's opened?
Will The Horn manage to handle anymore baggage?
Why exactly is Mr Man McManniman so manly?
Find out in next weeks thrilling installment of "Meglomaniacs Eye Patch!!!"
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loose translation:
Dude X was selling counterfit decoder rings.
Mr Man McManniman wasn't happy about this and so orchastrated a cunning plan to catch him, Operation: DUCK
Operation: DUCK was foiled by Dude X's super sexy cohort, Hennry "The Horn" Hornison, when he managed to seduce a Delivery one, Miss Baggage.
Miss Baggage had information that Phil Squealer, who Dude X had recently met and shown his ring making device to, had sent a ring to Mr McManniman...
Can Dude X get to the package before it's opened?
Will The Horn manage to handle anymore baggage?
Why exactly is Mr Man McManniman so manly?
Find out in next weeks thrilling installment of "Meglomaniacs Eye Patch!!!"
Punchline: Be sure to drink your Ovaltine.
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Just Amazing? (Score:5, Insightful)
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News Corp and Pirates?! (Score:2, Funny)
So, this is a work of fiction then?
Or are they saying things like, "The Liberal pirates who like to steal from the job creators...."
How many of these pirates had their phones tapped?
Yu-Gi-Oh: Pirate Edition (Score:3, Funny)
had programmed a swag of pirate cards
Are we talking about children's card games here?
Re:Yu-Gi-Oh: Pirate Edition (Score:5, Funny)
I be summonin' ye Dark Magician Wench in face down position. Yarrr!
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And the summary.. (Score:4, Funny)
Is a synopsis of a story that reads like a cocaine monologue.
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Apparently it was written by a group of SNL writers in 1981.
What went wrong? (Score:5, Informative)
I read the summary twice, and skimmed the (long) article it links to, but couldn't figure out what went so horribly wrong. Did 007 capture the SPECTRE bad guys?
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I don't know what the happened there either, but I think this from TFA says all we need to know:
Toronto is a mean town when you're looking for a bolthole. The operation was blown, and the agent was running. No ordered retreat here—this was panicked flight, strung out on adrenaline. Far beyond the threshold of fear and desperation, it is when the quarry knows his pursuers are close and all he wants in life is a place to go to ground.
-Fairfax reporter Neil Chenoweth.
This kind of gawful prose can only happen when you force a writer who didn't make the cut into a job reviewing books.
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Toronto is a mean town when you're looking for a bolthole.
I usually look for a bolthole in the center of a nut.
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Like that dear little Bolthole of mine.
To Rupert Murdoch: Pay Your Taxes ProperlyFirst!!! (Score:5, Insightful)
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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.
So you're saying they are 100% in compliance with the law and are paying all their taxes?
I'm more concerned with the Obama aides in the White House [investors.com] who owe back taxes. They all have security clearances, and an adversary could use that as leverage to extract intelligence or other favors.
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I'm more concerned with the Obama aides in the White House [investors.com] who owe back taxes. They all have security clearances, and an adversary could use that as leverage to extract intelligence or other favors.
You can't be blackmailed with public knowledge. "We'll tell your friends about you back taxes if you don't give us this document!"
"Uh... that's on my website. What next, you're going to threaten to spill the beans on my porn collection?"
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Re:LMAO (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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The deal in Canada is there is no legal way to watch DirecTV.
We had bootleg satellite recievers all through the 90s. We had no access to cable, only 2 OTA channels, so we gladly got the DirecTV dishes.
We would happily pay DirecTV for the service, but there is simply no way to do so. CRTC won't allow it
Of course, my story, and the TFA are 15 years old. It's all over and done with now.
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We would happily pay DirecTV for the service, but there is simply no way to do so. CRTC won't allow it
And how exactly does the CRTC prevent it? Do they rifle through everyone's outgoing mail to see if anyone is sending a check to DirecTV to pay their bill?
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We in the US would not have DirecTV had Al Gore not gotten the abomination called the Satellite Home Viewer Act passed. This makes it a Federal crime to illicitly decode DirecTV's signal.
In Canada there is no revenue model for DirecTV since anyone can decode the signal for free. Give it a month and there would be Chinese receivers flooding the market. Might be nice for some Chinese manufacturers, but DirecTV wouldn't get a dime. And HBO would cut them off.
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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.
Seems to me that the people that are wealthy/powerful/influential enough to actually decide what you are allowed to do with the signal, should be the ones laughing their asses off at you.
Re:LMAO (Score:4, Informative)
That this exists at all is a result of Mr. Al Gore who sponsored and shepherded through the Satellite Home Viewer Act. What this did was made it a Federal offence to decrypt an encrypted signal that was broadcast. Until this was law it was perfectly legal to receive and decode any signal that happened to come into your home.
This was done, ostensibly, to stop people with a C-band dish from receiving HBO for free. The real effect of it was to create DirecTV and Dish Network - before this law was passed these services could not have existed because anyone could simply receive their signal and decode it. With the power of the Federal Government behind them, however, it became a viable business model.
Just something else we have to thank Al Gore for, in addition to the Internet.
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You've obviously never been poor in your life.
The people for whom TV costs too much are exactly the people who need it.
Are you seriously suggesting that any people, anywhere actually need pay-per-view television content?
Re:LMAO (Score:5, Funny)
Are you seriously suggesting that any people, anywhere actually need pay-per-view television content?
Well, the alternative is that they start breeding.
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Hah! Well-played, sir!
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No no, lets hear him out.
See ... um ... poor people are addicted to TV and can't just go cold turkey on it. Pay-per-view television doesn't have advertisements (I've never actually seen pay-per-view , so that's an assumption), and advertising convinces people to spend money. So poor people need pay-per-view television content to satisfy their addiction and not get the overwhelming need to spend money on magic bullets.
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If TV costs too much you are exactly the kind of person that could benefit greatly from not having it.
They would know.... (Score:5, Interesting)
After all, NewsCorp seems to have funded the design, manufacture, and distribution of hacked cards to bring down British DTV competition. (And were successful. Poor ITV) http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-17494723
Not to mention illegally listening to voicemail...
Maybe they should cut their piracy out first.
It's a script from a cop drama, idiots. (Score:1)
So the chick is a mole scanning millioms of incming packages a day?
Crook: I just reorpgeammed cards for x and y.
Guy on other end of phone in bed in London: Cool! Hey honey, he just reprogrammed cards for x and y.
Crook: Telling your gf? Cool.
GF: Those names sound familiar. While 10,000 packages whipped by on my shift tonight, I glimpsed their name on one. It was going to...hmmm...to person z.
A little convenent.
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Who the hell still uses ROT-13? ROT-26 all the way, baby.
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Still... (Score:2, Funny)
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Every love story is better than twilight. Even Titanic was better.
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Apocalypse Now: A Boy and his Napalm, A Love Story that Never Dies
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Canadian pirates? What, they attack people with canoes?
Have you never heard of the Last Saskatchewan Pirate [letssingit.com]?!?
"And it's a heave-ho, hi-ho, comin' down the plains
Stealin' wheat and barley and all the other grains
It's a ho-hey, hi-hey farmers bar yer doors
When ya see the Jolly Roger on Regina's mighty shores!"
Arrr, matey!
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Captain Tractor, a band who gets their namesake from that song, does an excellent cover of it as well.
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Captain Tractor, a band who gets their namesake from that song, does an excellent cover of it as well.
That's true, although I like the original Arrogant Worms' version better. IMHO, they have a lot of good songs, check out their other (kinda) famous hit: Carrot Juice is Murder [letssingit.com]
For the Canucks in the crowd, check out Canada's Really Big [letssingit.com] and We Are the Beaver [letssingit.com] :o)
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Captain Tractor, a band who gets their namesake from that song, does an excellent cover of it as well.
Have a Listen [youtube.com]
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Dear lord, did the awful writing in the summary affect posters in here as well? That's my only explanation for almost half of these topics...
Some missing context (Score:3)
It's a lie, Murdoch was caught red handed (Score:3, Interesting)
Murdoch's NewsCorp was caught pirating DirectTV's cards. Claiming it was done by their NDS subsidiary, and was really to benefit Direct TV, misses the fact that NewsCorp and DirectTV were rivals in cable TV.
Murdoch did it to damage Direct TVs business, it was behind the pirating to make selling Direct TV cards not worthwhile to sell.
Proving you can program a card, doesn't get you an in with other people who can program cards. It makes you a competitor, a rival, someone who might like to rat them out at the first meeting. So this version of events doesn't make sense.
1. The basic premis that Oliver was programming cards to get an in with other card programmers. Doesn't make sense.
2. The girlfriend who has access to Fedex computers and tracks all packages and happens to known enough to make a connection. That doesn't make sense.
3. The argument that Oliver ran from Direct TV because DirectTV wasn't 'trustworthy'... garbage. If he really had been investigating pirates, he'd hand over his info to DirectTV and they be fully behind him, and they're certainly not connected to the pirates of their own cards.
4. The claims that NDS only knew him as 'Alex', why would they need to keep deniability if he was legit? Again bollocks.
So what we have here is a work of fiction, to try to make News Corp look like good guys, at a time when they've been caught hacking phones.
What they did was simple, their subsidiary had a contract to make cards and had been bought out by Murdoch, they then pirated DirectTVs cards to try to drive out their competitors. They hid the links between their card subsidiary and their pirate. He got caught.
Murdoch NDS hacked OnDigital/Canal+ (Score:4, Interesting)
In 2002, Canal Plus accused NDS of extracting the UserROM code from the MediaGuard cards and leaking it onto the internet.[15] According to The Guardian, the NDS laboratory in Haifa, Israel had been working on breaking the SECA-produced MediaGuard smartcards used by Canal+, ITV Digital and other non-Murdoch-owned TV companies throughout Europe. Canal Plus brought a $3 billion lawsuit against NDS but later dropped the action. News Corporation agreed to buy Canal Plus's struggling Italian operation Telepiu.[16][17]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NDS_Group
"On 26 March 2012, the BBC programme Panorama broadcast that NDS employed computer hacking to undermine the business of ONDigital.[19] At the time, ONDigital was the primary TV rival in Britain of BSkyB, a News Corporation company. The accusations arise from emails obtained by the BBC, and an interview with Lee Gibling, the operator of a hacking website, who claims he was paid up to £60,000 per year by Ray Adams, NDS head of security.[20] UK broadcasting watchdog Ofcom is to investigate these claims.[21] These claims are vigorously denied by NDS and NewsCorp.[22]"
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Following that link and looking around a bit, this whole story is still unravelling through the courts in several countries. . That was "Tron"? His death made the news in Germany. At the time I thought the whole thing was simply too far-fetched but some of the other documents on the Net offer pointers to it being murder. News International has broken the law in several countries but a murder would be a new dimension.
From the FA: Twelve months later, Alex's offsider in Germany would be dead . .
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Two sting operations (Score:1)
This kind of positive feedback loop is not James Bond, it's Spy vs. Spy. [youtube.com]
What could go wrong? Aaarrrr! (Score:1)
Ah Canada... (Score:3)
Where DTV is effectively illegal...and you wonder why piracy is rampant on this stuff.
http://www.ic.gc.ca/eic/site/smt-gst.nsf/eng/h_sf05562.html [ic.gc.ca]
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No, no it isn't. It's not illegal to pirate Dish or DirectTV. It becomes illegal when you try to decrypt Bell or Starchoice signals. If you can, you can even subscribe to an American sat provider if you can convince them to sell you their service. You need an US address.
Mind you, the RCMP has done a great in shutting down a lot of dealers in the gray market, because these devices are CAPABLE of getting Canadian sat provider signals illegally. Lots of choicr in the past. nagra3 may it harder as well.
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No, no it isn't. It's not illegal to pirate Dish or DirectTV.
You might want to go take a look at that there thing called the criminal code. Here, let me help.
326. (1) Every one commits theft who fraudulently, maliciously, or without colour of right,
(a) abstracts, consumes or uses electricity or gas or causes it to be wasted or diverted; or
(b) uses any telecommunication facility or obtains any telecommunication service.
Definition of "telecommunication"
(2) In this section and section 327, telecommunication means any transmission, emission or reception of signs, signals, writing, images or sounds or intelligence of any nature by wire, radio, visual or other electromagnetic system.
and
327. (1) Every one who, without lawful excuse, the proof of which lies on him, manufactures, possesses, sells or offers for sale or distributes any instrument or device or any component thereof, the design of which renders it primarily useful for obtaining the use of any telecommunication facility or service, under circumstances that give rise to a reasonable inference that the device has been used or is or was intended to be used to obtain the use of any telecommunication facility or service without payment of a lawful charge therefor, is guilty of an indictable offence and liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding two years.
Marginal note:Forfeiture
(2) Where a person is convicted of an offence under subsection (1) or paragraph 326(1)(b), any instrument or device in relation to which the offence was committed or the possession of which constituted the offence, on such conviction, in addition to any punishment that is imposed, may be ordered forfeited to Her Majesty, whereupon it may be disposed of as the Attorney General directs.
Marginal note:Limitation
(3) No order for forfeiture shall be made under subsection (2) in respect of telephone, telegraph or other communication facilities or equipment owned by a person engaged in providing telephone, telegraph or other communication service to the public or forming part of the telephone, telegraph or other communication service or system of such a person by means of which an offence under subsection (1) has been committed if such person was not a party to the offence.
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Nope. That's why it's still a GRAY-market. There was even Supreme Court decision supporting this (you can look it up, since you have some cool googling skills).
Show me a case where a CANADIAN citizen has prosecuted by a CANADIAN court for infringing against Dish and DirectTV. Lots of a default decisions in US courts for Canadians running sites, HW vendors and against US citizens pirating. Spend some time on http://satscams.com/ [satscams.com] to stay up to date. Usually Canadians get hammered (by the Canadian governm