I don’t know whether to laugh or cry at this news story from ComputerWorld. NBC TV producer, Michelle Madigan, for the show Dateline, was at the DefCon security conference as an undercover attendee. It was believed that she was going to film other attendees at the conference with a hidden camera in an attempt to ‘out’ them. I must admit if I were an IT manager and found my network guru was attending such a conference, the first thing I’d want to know was what freebies he’d gotta his grubby little mitts on. Anyway I digress, the conference organisers had got wind of her dastardly plans which probably wasn’t surprising as the producer had told a show volunteer ‘I have to go into the bathroom and put on my hidden camera’. I don’t think the CIA will be asking her for any tips on undercover operations.

The farce situation came to a head when conference organiser Dark Tangent (!), aka Jeff Moss, outed Madigan during a conference session.

“It came to our attention that a reporter might be here with a hidden pinhole camera,” Moss told the crowd. He said that he had two options: to let her corner some 13-year-old and get him to admit to hacking, or to escort her away.

At this point Madigan made a swift exit from the conference building with chants of ‘burn the witch’ ringing in her ears!

As I said at the beginning I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry over this - DefCon is obviously based around a ‘shared knowledge’ principle, it’s a place where people can go and discuss security concepts (aka hacking tips) openly and without fear of their motives being questioned. If I was responsible for network security at a big corporation, I’d be keen to attend as well. What Madigan tried to do was despicable and would have irreparably broken the trust that DefCon has built up amongst its attendees. If people say that hackers are the scum of the earth, then TV producers are the next layer down.

Oh yes, except to see the NBC site down ‘for maintenance’ soon!

Source: ComputerWorld

Featured Tags defcon, nbc, security


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Heavyweights Viacom and NBC have joined in to support Robert Tur’s lawsuit against Youtube.

In a friends-of-the-court brief filed Friday, Viacom and NBC Universal asked a U.S. District Court judge in Los Angeles to deny a motion filed by Google to dismiss Tur’s suit.

Tur filed a copyright infringement suit against Youtube last year prior to their acquisition by Google. Google have now filed a motion to dismiss his case as Youtube is protected under the safe harbour provision.

Viacom and NBC are concerned that the judge’s decision in Tur’s case will have an impact on their own lawsuit against Youtube. In their legal brief they try to emphasise differences between Tur’s case and their own.

(Viacom and NBC Universal) request that the court consider that its works are more popular, more commercial, and far more numerous than Tur’s,” wrote Frackman, of the law firm Mitchell, Silberberg & Knupp. “They comprise a significant portion of the infringing works contained on YouTube, viewed billions of times, and are among the most-viewed and highest-rated videos on YouTube.

Roughly translated they are saying ‘we have more copyrighted material than Tur and our copyrighted material is viewed more often and makes more money than his, so his case has no bearing on ours’

What double talk from Viacom and NBC, they’ll support Tur but if he loses then they are nothing to do with him. Personally I think they’re scared.

Source: ZDNet

Featured Tags copyright_infringement, nbc, viacom, youtube


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