Lawyers for EchoStar claim News Corp.'s satellite TV company DirecTV hired hacker Christopher Tarnovsky to steal and sell security codes for its competing Dish Network, eventually costing EchoStar $900 million in lost revenue. Tarnovsky testified in court yesterday and admitted he wrote such a program and that he took money from News Corp. publishing unit HarperCollins for ten years. He said his first payment was "$20,000 in cash hidden in electronic devices mailed from Canada," reports Reuters. Tarnovsky and DirecTV claim the hacker was only "reverse engineering" the Dish technology — a perfectly legitimate practice in the electronics industry. Though not one typically funded through secret international payments from unrelated corporate subsidiaries. (Photo by geraintwn)