Monday, July 11, 2011

Murdoch's Cape Cod Times issues no explanation for absence

Over the weekend, as noted here, Rupert Murdoch's Cape Cod Times went away, although you could get in using links to stories you might have found or bookmarked. No news was posted for eight or more hours, a fact also ignored by the Times in their statement today.

Cape Cod Online, the website of the Cape Cod Times, was down and not accessible for hours this past weekend on Saturday and Sunday.

Site users saw blank pages when they tried to access Times stories and other content.

Technicians eventually isolated the issue causing the problem and the site was completely restored by last night.

It's clear that they were hacked, they were served with a search warrant, or Murdoch ordered a review of the outlets he owns and they pulled the site while they worked.

It doesn't take hours to restore an index / home page.

We can be sure based on the non-specific nature of the explanation that the servers were being gone through to be sure they were in keeping with legal practices given the hacking and illegal activities at his other outlets, a case now spreading to the USA as I noted days ago and reposted last night before this appeared:

After he spent time at News International’s Wapping HQ in East London, 80-year-old Mr Murdoch held crisis talks with Mrs Brooks, 43 - who denies any knowledge of the Milly phone tapping - at his home in Mayfair.

The pair chatted behind closed doors as a former New York cop made the 9/11 hacking claim. He alleged he was contacted by News of the World journalists who said they would pay him to retrieve the private phone records of the dead.

Now working as a private ­investigator, the ex-officer claimed reporters wanted the victim’s phone numbers and details of the calls they had made and received in the days leading up to the atrocity.

A source said: “This investigator is used by a lot of journalists in America and he recently told me that he was asked to hack into the 9/11 victims’ private phone data. He said that the journalists asked him to access records showing the calls that had been made to and from the mobile phones belonging to the victims and their ­relatives.

“His presumption was that they wanted the information so they could hack into the ­relevant voicemails, just like it has been shown they have done in the UK. The PI said he had to turn the job down. He knew how insensitive such research would be, and how bad it would look.

“The investigator said the ­journalists seemed particularly interested in getting the phone records belonging to the British victims of the attacks.”

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