piracy

News Corp, which owns the Wall Street Journal, MySpace, Fox News, and DirecTV hired the world’s “second best hacker” ,Christopher Tarnovsky. Tarnovsky was used to flood the market with pirated DISH smartcard devices, giving free satellite television to potential paying DISH customers, which ultimately tanked about $900M from DISH. Tarnovsky says he was paid on a regular basis for 10 years, and received paychecks from Harper Collins, News Corp’s publishing company.

Smart cards enable satellite TV converter boxes to bring in premium channels, Tarnovsky hacked the smart cards,duplicated them, then flooded the market to effect DISH’s competitiveness.