Het Rupert Murdoch imperium in het nieuws-topic

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Op dinsdag 19 juli 2011 16:17 schreef Breekfast het volgende:
Je zou een mooie drinking game kunnen maken bij elke keer dat de woorden 'I have no knowledge of that' valt

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Politiechef onthult nauwe banden tussen politie en News Corp

De opgestapte Britse politiechef Paul Stephenson heeft vandaag verklaard dat 10 van de 45 perschefs van zijn departement in het verleden hebben gewerkt voor het mediaconcern News Corp. Hij zei dat tegenover een Britse parlementscommissie die is begonnen met het ondervragen van betrokkenen bij het afluisterschandaal dat Groot-Brittannië in zijn greep houdt.

De Lagerhuiscommissie onderzoekt de omvang van de misstanden bij de zondagstabloid News of the World, terwijl er ook een onderzoek is ingesteld naar het mogelijk betalen van agenten door journalisten.

Stephenson ontkende dat de banden tussen de politie en de krant News of the World ongepast zouden zijn. 'Ik heb begrepen dat er tien medewerkers zijn die in het verleden werkten voor News International (een onderdeel van News Corp. waar onder meer de tabloid News of the World onder viel, red.). In sommige gevallen waren dat journalisten.' Stephenson zei niets verkeerds te hebben gedaan en zou niet hebben geweten dat de krant telefoons afluisterde.

De politiechef noemde het genant dat de politie de vroegere adjunct-hoofdredacteur van NotW heeft aangenomen als PR adviseur. Hij had geen reden om Wallis in verband te brengen met het aftappen van telefoons toen hij werd aangenomen, aldus Stephenson. In 2009 werkte Wallis tijdelijk als communicatieadviseur voor de politie, in een periode dat Stephenson een nieuw onderzoek naar afluisterpraktijken bij de krant niet nodig achtte.

Ook plaatsvervangend commissaris John Yates, die net als Stephenson zijn ontslag heeft ingediend, ontkende voor de commissie iets verkeerd te hebben gedaan. Wel zei hij dat het achteraf gezien een verkeerde beslissing was geweest om het onderzoek naar de afluisterpraktijken af te blazen.

Op dit moment worden Rupert Murdoch, de baas van het mediaconcern News Corp, en zijn zoon James ondervraagd door de commissie. Zij moeten antwoord geven op de vraag wat zij wisten van illegale praktijken door journalisten die voor hen werkten. Later op de middag is Murdochs rechterhand Rebekah Brooks aan de beurt.

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Anonymous To Release Sun, News of the World Emails

"After having hacked Rupert Murdoch's flagship news website, thesun.co.uk, and redirecting its readers to a spoof front page and pilfering its email servers, Anonymous' unofficial mouthpiece, Sabu, has revealed that the group is 'sitting on [the sun's & NOTW's] emails' with a press release from Anonymous & possibly more coming in a few hours. While that website has already been taken down, the email bounty is likely to be potentially more damaging with Sabu releasing details of two of the Sun's top three employees, Rebekah Wade and Bill Akass, the former editors of the Sun and News of the World respectively as well as Lee Wells & Danny Rogers, Editorial Support Manager at News International and Sun Online Editorial Manager respectively, as a taster of what's coming next."

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Op dinsdag 19 juli 2011 18:27 schreef Papierversnipperaar het volgende:

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Op dinsdag 19 juli 2011 18:24 schreef Frutsel het volgende:
Is er al iets bekend over de laptop van Rebecca Brooks? of d'r vent?
Die had ze weggeflikkerd ofzo? Beetje dom om dat opzichtig te doen op zon moment

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Op dinsdag 19 juli 2011 18:37 schreef Aether het volgende:

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Over een paar minuten wordt ze verhoord.

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Choosing a bad password, the Rebekah Wade way.

Twitter user and LulzSec member AnonymouSabu also announced that they had access to usernames and passwords and posted a couple, including one belonging to Rebekah Wade. There they show the password hash, tell you that the salt used is the username 'rebekah' and that her password was 63000.

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First, it's easy to verify that the password hashing scheme is md5(username . password):

$ echo -n "rebekah63000" | md5sum

62dd0bd92bf4fafae73c531ee5108c77 -

That's a simple and not uncommon scheme but the use of MD5 means that if they've got the complete password file they'll be able to attack the passwords very, very fast using something like John the Ripper.

But even more interesting is the fact that her password was 63000. At first I wondered if it might be a randomly generated default password, or something interesting on a phone keyboard, or something interesting in hex, but it's much worse than that.

63000 is the phone number of The Sun's tip line.

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US senator invokes website-hacking trial in call for Murdoch inquiry
Attorney general asked to consider evidence of hacking into site of small firm, which News Corporation later bought outright

In July 1999, two brothers called George and Richard Rebh, the founders of a small start-up company called Floorgraphics, were invited to lunch with the dominant firm in their new area of business. The brothers were excited: they had invented a new product that involved sticking giant adverts on the floors of supermarkets, and were keen to show it off to the market leaders and talk about possible joint promotions.

They met the two top executives from the big firm, News America Marketing, in a Cantonese restaurant called A Dish of Salt in midtown Manhattan. Over hors d'oeuvre, News America's chief executive Paul Carlucci said: "So, I understand you're here to sell your company?"

According to transcripts of a trial that took place 10 years after the lunch, the Rebh brothers were astonished. No, they replied, they only wanted to talk about working together and had no intention of selling. George Rebh told the jury that Carlucci then said: "From now on, consider us your competitor and understand this: if you ever get into any of our businesses, I will destroy you. I work for a man who wants it all, and doesn't understand anybody telling him he can't have it all." News America is owned by News Corporation, whose chief executive is Rupert Murdoch.

The 2009 trial of Floorgraphics versus News Corp was invoked on Wednesday by Frank Lautenberg, a New Jersey senator who has called for an official inquiry into News Corporation behaviour in the US. He has written to the attorney general Eric Holder, asking him to take into account evidence thrown up during the trial that News America had engaged in computer hacking and to incorporate it as part of the ongoing justice department and FBI investigation into News Corporation practices.

The Floorgraphics case, also recalled this week by the New York Times, is being seen as revealing the lengths to which Murdoch's American companies are capable of going in attempting to neutralise competition. When the startup decided to stand firm in the face of News America's alleged threat to destroy them, the Rebh brothers claim they experienced at first hand the empire's competitive instinct at its most intense.

As the lawyer acting for the Rebh brothers summarised it to the jury: "What this case boils down to is, one small startup business that grew successful being crushed by a very, very large powerful competitor who didn't want competition."

The most controversial element of the trial was the evidence presented by Floorgraphics to the jury that its website, protected by password security, had been broken into without authorisation. The computer breach, which Floorgraphics discovered in 2004 and had taken place 11 times over four months, was traced back to an IP address registered to News America's offices in Connecticut.

The unauthorised access of the firm's computer from a News America address became the subject of a 2005 FBI and US secret service investigation. The outcome of those inquiries is not known.

The computer hacking, the jury at the Floorgraphics trial was told, gave News America access to information that could be used to damage its rival including details of every sale Floorgraphics had made, its client list and projections.

Soon after, the jury was told, Floorgraphics began to lose crucial contracts with key clients – Safeway, Winn-Dixie, the South Carolina retail chain Piggly Wiggly and others – many of whom defected to News America.

The defence lawyer at the trial, in an opening statement, said that the computer breach had occurred at a crucial time and gave access to "private, confidential, proprietary business information that they could use against Floorgraphics in negotiations for getting bids in retail contracts ... After that, one retailer, then the next retailer, then the next retailer fell."

By the time of the trial, the firm had had to lay off 60 of its 85 employees.

News America's lawyer confirmed in his opening statement that someone using one of the company's computer addresses had indeed accessed a password-protected Floorgraphics website. But News America told the jury that the site was available to hundreds, if not thousands, of Floorgraphics retailers, representatives of consumer packaged goods companies and Floorgraphics's own employees.

A News Corp spokeswoman said: "There is considerable employee movement within this industry, and we believe it was someone with an authorised password. News America Marketing condemns such conduct, which is in violation of the standards of our company."

The spokeswoman added that News Corp "categorically denies" any suggestion raised in the trial that it bullied and threatened a startup company. The company's lawyer also disputed during the trial George Rebh's account of the conversation at A Dish of Salt. News America claims that over the years Floorgraphics had approached them about selling the company.

After only a couple of days of testimony, the trial was halted without prejudice as part of a deal in which News America bought Floorgraphics outright in return for Floorgraphics dropping the case. The New York Times put the cost to New Corp at $29.5m (£18.2m).

During the trial, the jury heard from a former News America manager, Robert Emmel, who recalled the chief executive Carlucci telling his staff: "If there were individuals concerned about doing the right thing – bed-wetting liberals in particular – then he could arrange for them to be out-placed from the company."

In 2005 Carlucci was rewarded for his stewardship of News America by being appointed publisher of the New York Post, Murdoch's prime tabloid newspaper in America. News Corp said the promotion, despite the allegations of tough-guy tactics, was "entirely appropriate".

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Rupert Murdoch's Fox News ran 'black ops' department, former executive claims

Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News television channel had a “black ops” department that may have illegally hacked private telephone records, a former executive for the station has alleged.


Dan Cooper, who helped launch Fox News as managing editor in 1996, said that a “brain room” carried out “counter intelligence” on the channel’s enemies from its New York headquarters.

He was threatened after it found out he spoke to a reporter, he claimed.

Another former senior executive said the channel ran a spying network on staff, reading their emails and making them “feel they were being watched”.

The channel, which has come under pressure amid allegations that outlets owned by Mr Murdoch might have attempted to hack the voicemail messages of September 11 victims, firmly denies all the allegations.

Mr Cooper, who left Fox News soon after its launch, provided a quote for a 1997 article about Roger Ailes, Fox News’s president, by the journalist David Brock in New York magazine.

The quote was not going to be attributed to him, but he alleges that before the article was published, Mr Cooper’s agent received a telephone call from Mr Ailes threatening to withdraw Fox’s business from all his clients.

“There are only two possible ways Ailes found out,” Mr Cooper said. “Either Brock told him or they got hold of Brock’s phone records and saw I spoke to him.”

He first alleged that the records were obtained by researchers in the “brain room” in 2005 in an article on his website about the launch of the channel.

“Most people thought it was simply the research department of Fox News,” he wrote. “I knew it also housed a counter intelligence and black ops office. So accessing phone records was easy pie.”

Mr Cooper said yesterday that he helped to design the high-security unit. “It was staffed by 15 researchers and had a guard at the door. No one working there would engage in conversation.”

Mr Cooper said he was “willing to consider the possibility” that Mr Brock named him, but added: “I assume he operates under journalistic ethics and protected a confidential source. Brock told me at the time that Ailes told him he would never work again if he wrote the article.”

Mr Brock now runs Media Matters, a Left-leaning American media watchdog. A spokesman for the group said: “He declines to comment.”

Another former Fox News senior executive, who did not wish to be named, said staff were forced to operate under conditions reminiscent of “Russia at the height of the Soviet era”.

“There is a paranoid atmosphere and they feel they are being watched,” said the former executive. “I have no doubt they are spying on emails to ensure no one is leaking to outside media.

“There is a unit of spies that reports up to the boss about who was talking to whom. A lot of people are scared that they’re going to get sidelined or even that they’re going to get killed.”

A Fox News spokesman said: “Each of these allegations is completely false. Dan Cooper was terminated six weeks after the launch of the Fox News Channel in 1996 and has peddled these lies for the past 15 years.”

The FBI is investigating allegations that journalists on a British newspaper may have tried to have September 11 victims’ phones hacked. Both former Fox News executives said they thought Mr Ailes would never have let his reporters do likewise.

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News Corp-schandaal breidt zich uit naar Nederland

News Corp, het mediabedrijf van Rupert Murdoch, is na het afluisterschandaal bij tabloid News of the World opnieuw in opspraak. De Europese uitgever van de Wall Street Journal, Andrew Langhoff, is opgestapt na een intern onderzoek naar een dubieuze deal met een in Nederland gevestigd bedrijf. Dat heeft de Europese editie van de krant vandaag gemeld.

Langhoff had een deal gesloten met het bedrijf Executive Learning Partnerships (ELP). De Wall Street Journal beloofde positief over het bedrijf te schrijven. In ruil daarvoor kocht ELP een groot deel van de Europese oplage van de krant voor een eurocent per stuk. Op deze manier werd de oplage kunstmatig hoog gehouden. De Europese oplage bedraagt officieel in totaal 75 duizend stuks.

De Europese editie van de zakenkrant werd in 1983 opgericht. In 2007 kocht Rupert Murdochs mediabedrijf News Corp het dagblad op. In een redactioneel commentaar verzekerde toenmalig uitgever Louis Gordon Crovitz dat zowel de nieuws- als de opiniepagina's redactioneel onafhankelijk zouden blijven van de nieuwe eigenaar.

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Op dinsdag 12 juli 2011 04:00 schreef Linkse_Boomknuffelaar het volgende:

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Eens.

Walgelijke man die Murdoch.