anybody here give interview

[stevo25]

is this "her" ? https://www.facebook.com/people/Avig...tman/538014774

[WotTheFook]

They conspired as a team to break the law.

With James Murdoch at the top of the food chain.

[Bald Bouncer]

They conspired as a team to break the law.

Sorry I should have been clearer there isn't enough proof for a conviction or to be honest even the CPS considering a prosecution as the evidence such as it is has been tainted (in the laws eyes) is not from it's original source also important due to collection of evidence laws, they will deny any knowledge or involvement and anything shown to involve them, they will claim to be fake and would also be inadmissible in a court of law and I know this because of my own case and nearly six years in and out of court right up to the High court. I am without checking also not sure on when the law you were prosecuted under was introduced as it might well have been post Thoic.

[blaggard]

They conspired as a team to break the law.

Sent from my Nexus S using Tapatalk

I made the same mistake once before. . . . . .errr . . .

[BigBird]

evidence such as it is has been tainted (in the laws eyes) is not from it's original source also important due to collection of evidence laws,

Pity the servers themselves hadn't been lifted instead of just the info they contained.

Adams & Co may get away with it I don't know and hope not. I don't however think that Ofcom will need absolute proof when making their 'fit and proper' judgement. This may not be enough in itself but it adds fuel to the other evidence of foul play building up against Newscorp.

[4me2]

Fingers, pies and hearsay.

I hate seeing old news being dragged up just to add fuel to the fire to feed the media.

And the fact you work as a Sky installer ofcourse.

[4me2]

News Corporation's Australian branch in new hacking row


The allegations against News Corporation are serious, the Australian government says




Senior Australian officials have expressed concern over allegations that News Corporation engaged in hacking and piracy in order to damage its commercial television competitors.
The allegations suggested that the firm owned by Rupert Murdoch had set up a unit to sabotage rivals.
The Australian Financial Review said this was done by making pirate copies of competitors' smart cards.
News Corporation has denied any role in fostering piracy in pay television.
In a statement, its Australian arm News Limited said the newspaper report was "full of factual inaccuracies, flawed references, fanciful conclusions and baseless accusations".
"News Limited... has spent considerable resources fighting piracy in Australia. It is ironic and deeply frustrating that we should be drawn into a story concerning the facilitation of piracy," it said.
Similar claims that News Corporation was hacking into codes required to view subscription TV and then making them available on the black market were made on Monday in a BBC television programme about Mr Murdoch's company operations in Britain.
The British regulator - Ofcom - says it will investigate all relevant evidence of phone and computer hacking.


Business 'devalued'

The allegations in The Australian Financial Review said that News Corporation used a special unit called Operational Security to sabotage its competitors.



Companies owned by Rupert Murdoch have been at the centre of malpractice allegations


It said that hackers were encouraged to make illegal copies of smart cards used by rival pay-tv operators including Austar and Optus.
The result, the newspaper said, had the effect of taking away millions of dollars worth of revenue and devaluing their business.
The Australian Financial Review belongs to Fairfax - a rival of News Corporation. It said that the evidence was unearthed during a four-year investigation.
A spokeswoman for Australian Communications Minister Stephen Conroy said the allegations were important and called for a police investigation.
"These are serious allegations, and any allegations of criminal activity should be referred to the Australian Federal Police for investigation," she said.
Deputy Prime Minister Wayne Swan also said that the allegations were "concerning".
The latest developments follow a BBC Panorama programme which claimed that a News Corporation subsidiary called NDS recruited a hacker to acquire the smart-card codes of ON Digital, the biggest pay-tv rival to Rupert Murdoch's Sky TV network in Britain.

NDS denied the allegations.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-17536217

[Bald Bouncer]

I don't however think that Ofcom will need absolute proof when making their 'fit and proper' judgement. This may not be enough in itself but it adds fuel to the other evidence of foul play building up against Newscorp.

Absolutely they can use this in judgement of them being 'fit and proper' as that is not only a state of being it is also includes a public perception and they do not need to prove beyond any reasonable doubt this to be the case either and I suspect the reason for this program being made now is more to do with this than anything else.

[-X-]

killer is despite all the bad press hes set to make a fortune out of the sale of nds.

[FR15K]

Worse than that is I have now had to ditch my fav hoody.

BASTARDS

[FR15K]

is this "her" ? https://www.facebook.com/people/Avig...tman/538014774

We believe it is although we may be wrong.

[JonEp]

Original URL: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/03...doch_panorama/


Who killed ITV Digital? Rupert Murdoch - but not the way you think
Snobbery and Tranmere Rovers dunnit, not smartcard pirates
By Andrew Orlowski


Posted in Music and Media, 28th March 2012 09:18 GMT


Comment After 25 years of watching the Murdoch TV empire unfold, the battle plan to beat him should be fairly obvious. You buy the best content - the most popular sport and movies - and raise lots of capital, and make watching it easy. Then you dig in for a very long fight.


In other words, this is the entertainment-business-as-usual. Wannabe telly and radio empires have failed because they bought the wrong stuff, were inconvenient to use or because they were under-capitalised in the long run - and typically it's a mixture of all three. Entertainment isn't an essential utility. It's a discretionary purchase for households, and the market doesn't tolerate inconvenience or rubbish for long.


But when the tale involves Rupert Murdoch, people will always look for diabolical reasons for his success. The myth demands it. A fascinating BBC Panorama researched by Guardian reporter David Leigh may give supporters of this view plenty of ammunition. It was enthralling TV about the TV biz, and must have been an eye-opening for anyone not familiar with the decade-old telly crypto saga. But for those of us familiar with the details and the context, the smoking gun just isn't there. Murdoch's telly rivals would have gone down even if nobody had ever watched a single one of their programmes for free.


How Pay TV partners became rivals
The story begins with grand plans to bring multichannel digital TV to the UK in the 1990s. Cable was a natural delivery system for this, but for everyone else, digital multichannel telly was a dauntingly expensive proposition.


At the time, BSkyB's crufty analogue satellite service couldn't offer the choice, and didn't have the capacity to deliver it. Sky was also saddled with huge debts. So terrestrial-analogue big boys Carlton and Granada hooked up with Sky to form British Digital Broadcasting (BDB) in January 1997, intended to be a multichannel rival to the cable operators.


But, in possibly the single most important decision a media regulator has ever taken, the (then) Monopolies and Mergers Commission scotched this consortium. Carlton and Granada went alone with BDB, while Sky was obliged to become a rival. Sky had to renegotiate its supply chain and delivery contracts to rush its own multichannel digital satellite service to market.




BDB's ONdigital terrestrial service would be beamed into households via £199 boxes attached to ordinary UHF antennae - like Freeview today - and the alliance was confident that snobbishness and suspicion of Sky would assure its success. [Our US readers may be unaware that large sections of the UK middle classes - to some degree even today - tend to regard a satellite dish as a shameful badge of the shiftless sofa-potato junkfood-scoffing eyes-glazed proletariat. -Ed]


"You shouldn't underestimate how much the British hate satellite dishes," ONdigital's head of brand management Marc Sands confidently told journalists.


So it didn't look promising for Sky. But the satellite broadcaster had a beachhead that it had held onto for over a decade: some 3.45 million subscribers in the UK, against cable's 3 million, with penetration into 14 per cent of UK households. Sky thus went head-to-head with ONdigital.


A year after launch the market was voting for Sky's new digital service in significant numbers: it was taking four viewers for every one ONdigital was signing up. ONdigital limped on until 2001 when it rebranded as ITV Digital and expired a year later.


Crypto battle
All three multichannel digital rivals marketed their own set-top boxes, using conditional access systems based on smart cards. By the mid-1990s these smart cards had been hacked, and counterfeits giving free unauthorised access were in widespread circulation. Where there was a box, there was a man in a pub selling a counterfeit card. Sky used a system called Videoguard by an Israeli company called NDS that it had established in 1988. (NDS was sold to Cisco for $5bn earlier this month.) ONdigital had originally agreed to use NDS's system, but instead opted for SECA's MediaGuard, developed and owned by the French cable operator Canal+.


But there were alleged links between NDS and the web's underbelly. NDS has been the subject of several lawsuits from pay TV broadcasters around the world claiming that News International, via NDS, abetted piracy. Lawsuits have been brought by Canal+, Telepiu, DirectTV, Sogecable, MEASAT and EchoStar in the past ten years. Only one reached a verdict, with EchoStar winning nominal damages of $1,500 - somewhat shy of the $1bn it wanted - and EchoStar had to pay legal costs.


In the first of these lawsuits, in 2002, Canal+ detailed the allegations [1] against NDS - that NDS's security chief had made payments to the owner of Thoic.com, The House of Ill Compute, run by Lee Gibling. Thoic users distributed encryption codes which allowed counterfeit access cards to be created, giving unpaid access to ONdigital. ONdigital claimed it was losing £100m a year to piracy - a considerable sum. Gibling disappeared into thin air and Canal+ dropped its case the following year.


NDS' defence was that Thoic was an intelligence-gathering "honeypot" operation - such things are routine practice in the tech-security industry - and it never sanctioned the distribution of rival encryption codes onto Thoic nor condoned such actions. Gibling was paid purely as an informant, says NDS. After years of silence - during which he was paid by News International - Gibling finally talked to Panorama.


"It was NDS, it was their baby and it started to become more their baby as they fashioned it to their own design,” Gibling claimed.


But the most damaging allegation in the Panorama was that the published ROM details were traced back to NDS' own reverse-engineering lab in Haifa, Israel. NDS denies this. Gibling also alleges that the operational keys to the ONdigital smart card were supplied by Ray Adams, NDS security chief.


Adams has denied providing the keys, or any software that would - and indeed has done so under lie detector. He is a former senior officer in the Metropolitan Police, well known [2] for his involvement in several high profile cases during the 1980s and as one-time commander of the special SO11 intelligence squad (since disbanded, with its tasks taken up by the Counter Terrorism Command).


But numerous lawsuits have failed to establish in court the connection Panorama invited us to make. Reverse engineering was commonplace, and counterfeit smart cards were easy to build and obtain by the time ONdigital launched in 1998.


And frankly, it doesn't matter. When ONdigital aka ITV Digital collapsed in early 2002, the company said there were 100,000 counterfeit smart cards in circulation for its service. It had a subscriber base of 1.3 million, compared to Sky Digital's 5.7 million: so whatever killed ONdigital, it wasn't pirate smartcards.


So then, what did?


Who killed ONdigital?
A browse through the Reg archive offers enough clues. Here's a PR script [3] for executives we obtained a week before an ONdigital press conference. By early 2000 we called ONdigital "TV's secret service [4]" - even those willing to sign up were frustrated. The broadcaster had a churn rate of 25 per cent.


By that stage, with pay-per-view about to go live, the early technical problems were being fixed - but many still found they couldn't get it at all, or suffered terrible reception. ONdigital had failed to subsidise its boxes on launch, but by 1999 it was matching Sky and bundling them for free, or at very low cost, in special offers.


ONdigital also made some catastrophic errors. It paid £315m for the rights to screen live second-tier Football League games as the jewel in its pay-per-view crown. ONdigital was therefore betting on subscribers digging into their pockets to watch [5] Grimsby Town, Walsall and Tranmere Rovers. This deal ultimately broke the consortium's finances - it was unable to pay the Football League the contractual instalments.




Meanwhile Sky subscribers paid extra to receive digital channels - £11 a channel, up to £18 for three channels. Analyst research from the turn of the millennium showed Sky was using its budget much more shrewdly, with 57 per cent going on programming. Sky merely had to convert existing users to digital rather than sign new ones up - and it boldly dismissed worries about cannibalisation.


"With the mix of channels on offer from ONdigital not straying too far from the choices already on offer through analogue cable and satellite services, the company might have to work hard to build a market," a trade magazine warned [6] the new venture in January 1998. But the ITV grandees from Carlton and Granada were convinced that the UK public loathed Rupert Murdoch, and were too snobbish to fix satellite dishes on their houses. Neither would be a decisive factor.


In short, ONdigital created a poor product, and once it was losing £1m a day it couldn't find any more backers to fund the venture. It failed for very traditional reasons: unexciting content and technical errors. Today we remember it only for the knitted monkey.


Even if counterfeit smart cards hadn't existed, it wouldn't have made any difference to the fate of ONdigital. In its rush to tell a sexy story, Panorama seems to have overlooked this vital fact - the program makers omitted this crucial context. It makes the allegations about hackers and smart cards - and a questionable relationship between NDS and the pirate site - all rather moot. ®

[casio]

I haven't watched it yet (its downloading lol) but it has brought some memories back, all that learning and programming was more enjoyable than anything they were broadcasting that and you could jump online (at a whopping 56k!) any time day or night and between DF, modshack and Thoic there was always somewhere to go and read and learn (and still can only now its not at the speed of smell lol)

I was telling my better half about all of this with Thoic, NDS and what was going on and she didn't have a clue, she knew there were "Goldcards" but didn't know any of the background. Now she knows though she thinks it sounds like a soap opera lol

shes currently learning to program for iOS (neither quickly or successfully) but she wont let me help which is one of the things I love about her, If she doesn't know something she makes an effort to teach herself, kinda like me when I was way back in my 20's lol although she doesn't stay up till daft o'clock trying to un-f*ck a mosc lol


EDIT - @FR15K its nice to see you again m8 it seems like a million years since Modshack, MrSporty and the rest, hope you and yours are keeping well

[BigBird]

Original URL: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/03...doch_panorama/


Who killed ITV Digital? Rupert Murdoch - but not the way you think
Snobbery and Tranmere Rovers dunnit, not smartcard pirates
By Andrew Orlowski

Just emailed the author with this:

You may be right that the pirate cards isn't what killed ondigital, who can be sure, but the info and codes to program the cards was published on the thoic site which is a criminal offence. Ray adams must have known about the codes. In an email he stated:

---------------------------------------------------------------------
"If you are in dialogue with anyone, including Avi, or giving anyone
instructions that in any way impacts or concerns THOIC then I insist
on being copied and kept up to date. I do not want to find out
second hand. I may or may not have a view on any of your thoughts,
but, I created THOIC and still consider it my baby."
---------------------------------------------------------------------

I also have a eleven year old printed copy of the first thoic ezine which has articles on how to program ondigital cards and how to chip a cft2100 cable box. There is also an introduction by Lee gibling and every page has the words 'Copyright thoic.com 2001' on the bottom.


So lets recap. The published hacking info is copyrighted to thoic.com which adams clearly states is his baby. And yet he claims he is innocent of any wrongdoing.


I can send you a pdf copy of the ezine if you want it.


All the above is true. Nobody has fabricated anything or made anything up. I was there as an admin on the thoic site. The info I have is first hand and not something I've read somewhere.

BigBird

There are still people who wont believe the truth. maybe because they haven't seen the evidence, or maybe they know the truth but are just printing an alternative view to make a story. To many of them it's just a story. I doubt if they care if its true or not.

[WotTheFook]

I've just posted this on Datacave. It seems Rupert is a bit pissed off with the recent publicity....

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-17547568

[Raptor]

This hit the news over here today - mainly on MSNBC - nothing on Fox of course

Big article in the Huffington Post about it all too http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/0...n_1387451.html

I noticed my name was mentioned in an email back then - no idea why as I never had anything to do with any of it. The sat side of things on DF was never anything to do with me or any interest to me other than it being part of the community - I was always on the video game side of things.

My only ever attachment to any of this was having a mystery customer working for FACT and a hidden mic come into my shop back in 2001 trying to get me to admit all sorts of shit about ondigital - trying to get me to program some cards for him. of course I told him I couldn't do that and we only sold blank cards. A week later we were raided and they spent all their time trying to get us to admit that we knew what the cards were being used for and that we were doing it ourselves.

Naturally, no charges were ever filed - all we ever did was sell blank cards. That was the extent of my own personal involvement in the sat scene. Exciting huh ? lol

[Morph]

about 20 minutes in I heard the Radio Stoke news "7 arrested in Stoke on Trent" - hmmm, wonder who they were lol. The good ol' days eh

[Morph]

forgot to add - covert name "Bill" LOL! Very inventive!!!

[WotTheFook]

I don't think that the Murdochs or any of their stooges will get out of the fact that anything they posted on THOIC was copyright. as they claimed copyright on it big time, even down to the newsletter, as BigBird pointed out.

Given that a lot of these convictions would have used the Designs, Copyrights and Patents Act as part of the prosecution into the card codes, they must have realised that claiming copyright on THOIC was about to bite back at them.

Still, James' CV looks great now, having 'stepped down' at at least four or five companies in the last few years - Glaxo SmithKline, Sotheby's, BSkyB, The NOTW, etc.

All's well that eNDS well, eh, James?

[BigBird]

I don't think that the Murdochs or any of their stooges will get out of the fact that anything they posted on THOIC was copyright. as they claimed copyright on it big time, even down to the newsletter, as BigBird pointed out.

Given that a lot of these convictions would have used the Designs, Copyrights and Patents Act as part of the prosecution into the card codes, they must have realised that claiming copyright on THOIC was about to bite back at them.

Still, James' CV looks great now, having 'stepped down' at at least four or five companies in the last few years - Glaxo SmithKline, Sotheby's, BSkyB, The NOTW, etc.

All's well that eNDS well, eh, James?

Came accross a printed copy of the Thoic Ezine from 2001 while looking for other documents. It got a mention in The Observer last Sunday.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology...al-hacking-nds

Story was reported By Jamie Dower who I also spoke to back in 2002. Sent him a message for Rupert Murdock which I Wrote last week after Murdock's outburst on twitter calling everybody a liar. Unfortunately It wasn't printed.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
To Mr Murdock:


It has been said that you had no involvement in how the NDS unit was run. So you didn't know what was going on, in which case you didnt know that OnDigital codes were being released on the thoic site.


So how can you claim, on twitter that ""Seems every competitor and enemy piling on with lies and libels," Why not admit that you don't really know whether the allegations are true or not. I can assure you the allegations are true. including Ray Adams's involvment. The emails clearly show this. And I don't mean the txt extracts of the emails recently released on the net. I saw the original emails in their original form when they were copied from the thoic servers back in 2001 and can honestly say that the txt files are a true, un-edited copy of what is contained in the oiginal emails.


You may not realise that the original email files are still available and can be indepenently verified as genuine, which will prove once and for all that Ray Adams is a liar.


There is also an original 2001 printed copy of the Thoic Ezine available for independant dating anaysis which contains info on hacking the OnDigital system and Cable TV. The Ezine has 'Copyright thoic.com 2001' printed on the bottom of every page. In one of the emails Ray Adams claims that he created thoic and still considers it "his baby". In that case the Ezine is part of "his baby". He also requests to be kept informed of everything to do with thoic. He also had access to the Thoic website and everything that was going on, so he must have known about the OnDigital codes that were being published on the site.


The Ezine is a thoic.com published document with information on hacking OnDigital and Cable TV. NDS have collected evidence which has sent people to prison for publishing hacking information, something NDS are themselves guilty of. Much of this evidence NDS collected by hacking their private emails which is illegal in itself.


Also why were the thoic server hard drives destroyed as stated by Lee Gibling on Panorama. NDS have addmitted that they were running the thoic forum to catch potential hackers which is a perfectly legal and accepted practice. If on the other hand they were not destroyed, then make them available. They will include the database of the entire forum with all the threads and postings. If NDS did nothing wrong you have nothing to hide.


I am a former moderator and administrator of the thoic forum (not in the employ or paid by NDS) and I base my statements on facts and evidence I have witnessed first hand. Your statements seem to be based on your personal disbelief that an organisation and empolyees under your control could have done what they are being accused of. You are obviously an intelligent man so after the phone hacking scandal I would have thought that you would know better. Either you are very naive or you did know what was going on in which case you are a liar. Which is it Mr Murdock?


BigBird (former Thoic moderator and administrator).
-----------------------------------------------------------------