Murdoch's Satellite-TV Hacker Tells All

[lovuian]

http://www.wired.com/politics/security/news/2008/05/tarnovsky?currentPage=1

Talk about Coporations spying WOW

SAN DIEGO -- Christopher Tarnovsky feels vindicated. The software engineer and former satellite-TV pirate has been on the hot seat for five years, accused of helping his former employer, a Rupert Murdoch company, sabotage a rival to gain the top spot in the global pay-TV wars.

But two weeks ago a jury in the civil lawsuit against that employer, NDS Group, largely cleared the company -- and by extension Tarnovsky -- of piracy, finding NDS guilty of only a single incident of stealing satellite signals, for which Dish was awarded $1,500 in damages.

"I knew this was going to come," Tarnovsky says. "They didn't have any proof or evidence."
snip...

Those smart cards are at the center of the controversy over NDS, a British-Israeli company and a majority-owned subsidiary of Murdoch's News Corp. The company makes access cards used by pay-TV systems, most prominently DirecTV -- itself a former Murdoch company. Nagrastar, a plaintiff in the case and NDS's chief competitor, makes access cards used by Dish Network and other runners-up in the market.

According to allegations in the lawsuit, in the late '90s NDS extracted and cracked the proprietary code used in Nagrastar's cards, a fact that NDS doesn't contest. What happened next, though, is hotly disputed. Nagrastar says Tarnovsky used the code to create a device for reprogramming Nagrastar cards into pirate cards, and gave the cards to pirates eager to steal Dish Network's programming. Tarnovsky was also accused of posting to the internet a detailed road map for hacking Nagrastar's cards.

Nagrastar says NDS had an obvious motive for these antics: Their own chip, the so-called P1 or "F Card," had already been thoroughly cracked by pirates, and the company wanted to level the playing field with its competitors.
more...

This guy worked at Ft Detrick ,Nato , and quite the double agent
Murdoch is quite into the Web Warfare

[itsrobert]

1. hmmm

-----"I knew this was going to come," Tarnovsky says. "They didn't have any proof or evidence."-----

GUILTY!

[Occulus]

2. I think these people came to my door once!!

It was a pair of guys offering a Dish Network receiver and a "special" card that would get me Dish without having to subscribe. And they were going door to door with this!

I thought it was suspicious as hell when they told me what they were there to offer me, and quickly turned them down. I also told them I already had Direct TV (it was through my apartment complex at the time), and they said something to the effect of "yeah, but this special card we're offering you will get you more channels for the same price" or something to that effect.

This was several years ago. I'm thinking I very well may have seen what spurred this suit firsthand. I wish I'd known about it then; I might have had something of value that would have sunk them in the case.