Last week the BBC broadcast what may turn out to be the biggest Murdoch scandal of them all.
NDS [a News Corp subsidiary] is accused of leaking information from On Digital which could be used to create counterfeit smart cards, giving people free access to paid for TV.
The latest claims have been made by Lee Gibling - who set up a website in the late 90s known as The House of Ill-Compute, or Thoic.Today James Murdoch, Rupert's son, has stepped down as chairman of BSkyB.
Mr Gibling told the BBC he was paid to publish stolen information. His contact at NDS was Ray Adams, who at the time was head of UK security for the firm - which manufactures smartcards for all News Corporations' pay-TV companies across the world.
The NDS/Sky rumors have been circulating in the cryptography world for quite a while but without sources. The BBC program (region locked to UK unfortunately) puts faces to the statements. What the BBC is alleging amounts to a multi-billion dollar fraud that may have bankrupted ITV On-Digital, a pay-per-view system that threatened to compete with Murdoch's own pay-per-view system BSkyB.
The BBC team claim that the man behind 'The House Of Ill Compute' site (THOIC) was paid to distribute instructions for hacking the ITV On-Digital system. In other words, the allegation is that they tried to kill the competition by showing people how to get it for free.
Who could have imagined that News Corporation's business practices might be as dishonest and corrupt as the 'news' they publish?
