News Corp accused of getting hackers to pirate and clone Sky-rival smartcards
The BBC has accused News Corporation company NDS of paying computer hackers to crack and freely distribute keycodes that would allow pirates to clone the pay-TV smartcards of a Sky rival.
BBC Panorama, first screened on the evening of 26 March, claims that the firm, itself a manufacturer of smartcards, hired hacker Lee Gibling to expand his website The House of Ill-Compute (aka THOIC), and discover and post the codes needed to open up pay-TV company On Digital's smartcards to cloning.
On Digital, which later became ITV Digital, was a UK terrestrial pay-TV rival to Sky in the late Nineties. It is believed that the wide distribution of pirated smartcards, which circumvented paid subscriptions, was a major contributory factor in the company's demise. "The business had its issues aside from the piracy," said ITV Digital's former chief technical officer, Simon Dore during the programme. "But those issues I believe would have been solvable by careful and good management. The real killer, the hole beneath the water line, was the piracy. We couldn't recover from that."
