The Secret Service have arrested two Miami, Florida residents/business owners for possession of Bogus DSS access cards. According to reports, DirecTv and Datacom provided technical support to the Secret Service prior to the searches. The arrest were made after a search of two area businesses, Southern Technologies, owned by Robert Forman, and Sheikh Enterprises, owned by Mohammed Sheik, who was an authorized DirecTv dealer. Both have been taken into custody by the Secret Service.
A recent article in "Wired" magazine indicated that Canada has permitted the hidden indentification and disablement of cross-border phone traffic. According to the article, this matter evolves around "callback" services which involves the reverse routing of phone traffic through the U.S. in order to allow callers to reduce their bills for international phone calls. Reportedly, callers in the Yukon and NW Territories can grealy reduce their long distance phone bill by using a callback service offered by Seattle-based International Telecom Ltd. (ITL). Canada's Northern Telecom has real operators monitor phone calls, listening for distinctive pattern of a trigger call: one ring followed by a hang-up. They then blocked calls to those numbers. So ITL substituted a busy signal for the ringing sound.
According to rumored reports a Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) official confirmed that the RCMP is investigating a Dallas, Texas company for telecommunications fraud and unauthorized access to a computer, following complaints of excessive phone charges that appeared after some consumers accessed a World Wide Web site run by the concern.
An estimate of the amount of money allegedly swindled from people visiting and downloading a "viewer" from the site runs in the millions of US dollars.
An ongoing investigation shows that the owners of the adult-oriented "sexygirls.com" site took excessive amounts of money from Web surfers -- without the users' knowledge -- by redirecting their computers' modems to a phone number in the southeastern European country of Moldova.
According to the reports, when a internet user accessed sexygirls.com. to look at the pictures at the site, they had to download what the site called a "viewer." After the program was downloaded and installed, it secretly disconnected the user from their internet service provider (ISP) and dialed the phone number in Moldova -- all while de-activating the modem's speaker. From Moldova, the user's data link was rerouted to a company in Scarborough, Ontario, Canada. The link then ended up at server at an unnamed company in Dallas, Texas.
The result was phone charges for the unlucky users that ranged from $600 to $900. The Web surfer would not know about the charges until their phone bill was delivered, up to a month later. Part of the reason the phone bills were so high is that the modem stayed connected to the server, even if the Web surfer thought they completely disconnected from the Internet. The only way to terminate the link was to either reboot or completely shut down the computer. This means if a computer user kept their computer on all night or all day long, the charges would keep mounting.
How many people were taken in by the alleged scam? RCMP reports that in Quebec only, Bell Canada received more than 1,200 complaints about the site. There are ten other provinces in Canada, and complaints from those areas are not known. In the US, AT&T has received "hundreds" of complaints.
The problem the RCMP has with what the unnamed company did lies in the fact it was largely kept a "secret" from the Net user. While a vague disclaimer appeared on one page of the site much of the time, a person who went directly to the page where the viewer could be downloaded completely missed the disclaimer, a spokesperson for the RCMP said. Plus the fact that "the modem's speaker was turned off" shows an intent to deceive, he added.
The RCMP has not revealed the name of the company to the public, because it has not yet been officially charged with any crime. But did say the company appears to know that authorities are "onto them," because the disclaimer at the site changed several times -- to the point where the business spelled out exactly what happened when the "viewer" was downloaded.
The big danger from this alleged scam is that the technology behind it can be copied and used by other Web site owners with many other types of content. A Web user has to be certain of both a Web site's owner and the program they are downloading to be protected from such a scam.
DirecTv, in a continued effort to stop piracy, recently filed civil suits against three sports bars - two in Chicago and one in New York City - for alleged illegal broadcasting of the DSS service.
Named in the suits filed in Federal District Court were Snickers and the parent company of Boss' Bar, Washington Square Liquors, both Chicago area establishments. The Good Sports Limited Partnership, which does business as Boomer's Sports Club in Manhattan, were also named in a civil suit from DirecTv.
Specified under the Federal Communications Act, DirecTv could seek $110,000 in damages for each violation, DirecTv has also asked the court to order the defendants to cease their broadcasts of DirecTv programming.
A new twist in spying on your neighbor was recently reported in The New York Times "Commercial spy satellites are about to let anyone with a credit card peer down from the heavens into the compounds of dictators or the backyards of neighbors with high fences," reports the paper.
The first satellite is scheduled to fly into orbit in April; it will rival military spy craft in the sharpness of the photos it transmits back to earth. "The new American-made satellites are designed to see objects on the ground as small as a yard or so in diameter - cars and hot tubs, for example."
The total number of spy-class commercial satellites that will reach orbit will likely be at least a half-dozen in the next two years, says the Times. Images are expected to cost as little as a few hundred dollars each.
The Outdoor Channel will take up residence on Hughes Communications' Galaxy 1R, on Feb. 28 and will transmit from C-band trans. 24. For the time being, the network will continue to transmit its analog signal unscrambled from Galaxy 1R.
(This is an amend to Thomson Industry article).....
Recently, French officials restarted talks on the sale of government-owned Thomson CSF. French officials want to avoid problems that led to the initial collapse of the sale in December when the government wanted to sell the Thomson stake to Lagardere, but the agreement came apart after the commission objected to the terms. Lagardere is expected to renew its bid along with engineering giant Alcatel Alsthom. The new plan calls for a private placement proposal to be submitted to an independent Privatization Commission, the government said.
General Instrument's NextLevel Satellite Data Networks Group appointed Consumer Satellite Systems (CSS) as a distributor for the company's 4DTV digital satellite receiver.
CSS, based in Indianapolis, offers satellite and consumer electronics products. CSS supplies more than 6,000 dealers in an area stretching from Wisconsin to Florida. The company also owns National Programming Service, a programming packager. The company said 4DTV is set for roll out in the first half of this year.
It has been brought to our attention a trojan is floating around on the internet. If you are a surfing the net and you come across a file "dss.exe" described as "Cool Prg for free tv." Beware! Here are a few comments from some surfers who have encountered the culprit.
...erases windows files and all files in the root of C:
...Macafee with the 1297 data update didn't detect anything
...Of course not, it'll only detect a virus. If you suspect a file contains a trojan, disable your hard drives, and run it on a floppy.
...Erased my config.sys file, the X@#%?!*!
...This is a trojan, if you use the undelete command you can recover what you have lost. provided you have not overwritten the erased sections ...good luck.
We visited DirecTv's web site searching for information on Music Choice on-screen info (song/artists/album) as requested by R.A. in January's letters to editor. Here's their reply: "Thank you for your interest in DIRECTV. Regarding your inquiry, we have not made any formal annoucements regarding song listings on our Music Choice digital quality audio channels. It is something we are looking into, but do not have any futher information at this point. Please feel free to keep in touch with us on the status. Or please visit our web site (Press section) for the latest news and information about DIRECTV. Our address is: http://www.directv.com."