Russia Prepares For Internet War Over Malaysian Jet 503
An anonymous reader writes The investigation of a Malaysian passenger jet shot down over Ukrainian rebel held territory is heating up. U.S. and U.K. news organizations are studiously trying to spread the blame, Russian ITAR, which, just earlier today was celebrating the downing of a large aircraft by rebel missiles in Torez (Google cache) is reporting that the rebels do not have access to the missiles needed for such attacks. The rebel commander who earlier today reported the downing of the aircraft has also issued a correction to earlier reports that they had captured BUK air defense systems with Russian sources now stating that the rebels do not posses such air defenses. The Ukrainian president has been attempting to frame the incident as a "terrorist attack". President Obama made contact with Vladimir Putin and has been instead treating it as an accident, calling it a "terrible tragedy" and saying that the priority is investigating whether U.S. citizens were involved. With control of the black box and its own internet propaganda army Russia may be in a good position to win the propaganda war.
meanwhile overnight... (Score:5, Interesting)
meanwhile overnight it's been reported by the telegraph.co.uk that a mobile launcher was seen headed back toward the russian border with two of it's four missiles missing, short video clip provided of one on the move at the website.
Active ops (Score:4, Interesting)
Seeing a lot of pro-russian "psyops" on one local forum attached to a news outlet focused on economics, so much so that it's pretty obvious that it's organized. Massive amounts of downvotes on anything negative to the pro-russian side, and weak conspiracy theories written in broken english moderated up.
Not sure why they're wasting their time, but there you go. I guess the proud Cheka men have nothing better to do than troll forums.
Re:Black box data streaming (Score:5, Interesting)
My guess is cost. Sending data via satellite is very expensive, and there's a lot of data recorded. As for ground stations, I'm not aware of any plane-to-ground data communications currently in use (other than radio for voice) so that would need a completely new infrastructure built.
Re:Black box data streaming (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:It is the fault of.. (Score:0, Interesting)
I dont know about that. Nationalism is a good one, but you dont have jebus on your side after death. I think religion might surpass nationalism by about the infinite amount of time in the afterlife. People say hitler was simply a nationalist, and not a christian but an atheist. Perhaps. His hate of jews is certainly agreed with by new testament scripture, by medieval christian doctrine and scholars, and the people actually running the gas chambers and camps simply had to look to their good christian faith by scripture and doctrine to turn the knobs and bulldoze the deicidal jews. hitler was a total maniac, but he had christianity on his side to fire up a furor against the jews, and blacks and atheists, and homosexuals (omg, the bible describes how all of those things are gross. if you dont believe me on the black part, see: curse of ham. and yeah, could be a wrong interpretation, but many christians took it seriously for long enough to make the african slave trade be totally cool)
Russia has no choice (Score:4, Interesting)
If the rebels are ever confirmed to have shot down the plane all of Russia's denials fall apart like a house of cards. Caught red handed. Except now there's international blood on their hands instead of just Ukrainian. Unfortunately for Ukraine, nobody really cares about them except their neighbors. So on that note, you can be guaranteed they will stop at nothing to prove rebels were not at fault. I have no doubt there will be people that will be "silenced". The stakes are simply too damn high.
Re: meanwhile overnight... (Score:3, Interesting)
There is video of the Buk system crossing the border from Russia with 4 rockets two days ago and crossing back into Russia this morning with one missing. These rockets are large and wouldn't just go missing. The rebels are correct, they don't have these weapons, the Russians do and it looks like they let the rebels borrow one.
Re:Who benefits (Score:4, Interesting)
Separatist have motive - they are trying to shoot Ukrainian military planes. They have means - they were showing BUK launchers themselves, Ukraine later said that they won't be able to operate them, but might have been wrong, especially given technical support from next country.
They had means and motive. And no clue this is rerouted civilian plane, because despite having enough capability to fire BUK (few people with neccessary skills), they weren't up to date on flightwatch... and decided to not ask on radio first.
So, in certain sense it is an accident. Same kind of accident as when sniper tries to kill person A, but person B moves in the way at last second. Sniper is still at fault, even if he had no motive to kill person B.
Re:If only... (Score:5, Interesting)
Oh come on now, how could anyone mistake this guy for being gay? [dailynews.lk]
Seriously, though, some of his publicity stunts are almost Kim Jong-* level. While the "flying with geese to lead them home" one was funny, and the saving his camera crew from a savage tiger one was conveniently off camera, my favorite has to be the "finding ancient Greek pottery while diving in two meters of clear water on a popular beach" one. ;) Of course that one was so over the top even for him that they had to backtrack [dailymail.co.uk]:
Again, though, let me stress - not gay! ;)
Re:meanwhile overnight... (Score:4, Interesting)
The question is, was this really a launcher that the Russians gave the rebels? I looked up the Wikipedia page for the BUK missile system last night, and there was a link on that article to a report from Jane's that said Ukraine had some in their possession from their days as a Soviet satellite state. It makes me wonder if the BUK (being a Soviet-era weapons system dating back to 1979) wasn't just misplaced somewhere - if the National Institutes of Health can misplace 300 vials of deadly diseases and biological weapons, it's not a stretch to think that the Ukrainian military might've had a BUK somewhere and forgotten about it.
To me, this almost sounds like the Twitter messages from the rebels claiming that they captured a BUK were correct - the Russians didn't directly lend the rebels a BUK, but they're helping them cover it up after the fact in order to stop any news coming out that goes against their message of the rebels being poor, oppressed ethnic Russians who need protection from their "home country".
To whoever did this (Score:4, Interesting)
To whoever is responsible:
You make think that you're a big balled freedom fighting hero, but in fact you are the worst kind of coward. Instead of admitting what happened, and apologizing, and turning yourself in to the International Crimes Court, you're trying to put the blame on others.
You're a despicable coward. I hope you'll never be able to have good night's sleep for the rest of your stupid life.
Re:Russia has no choice (Score:4, Interesting)
Putin has effectively already admitted that the rebels did it:
The state over whose territory this occurred bears responsibility for this awful tragedy.
-- Vladimir Putin.
Note that he doesn't say "Ukraine did it", he says "It's Ukraine's fault", i.e. that it would never have happened if Ukraine hadn't made such a fuss about having its territory annexed.
Classic victim blaming. "You made me do it, it's your fault".
"treating it as an accident" (Score:4, Interesting)
As someone pointed out in the first thread of this tragedy, this is not the first time something like this has happened.
Obama may be being diplomatic so as to not call the kettle black so to speak. The US accidentally did the same to Iran years ago, except they were in Iran air space, the weapons were fired from a warship, by professional soldiers. Consequently rebels accidentally (and I have no doubt they did) shooting down an airliner, using stolen unfamiliar technology with little or no training by militia in the middle of a civil war seems rather less bad.
Also it dredges up the result which was all dead, and the USA not admitting any blame or fault, and instead writing a check for a few million to throw at the hundreds of victims families.
Re:Black box data streaming (Score:3, Interesting)
That's a good point, but its a small percentage of flights that have Internet access. Even in the US.
Even in the US? I've never seen internet access on a US flight. Flying across Europe, the middle east and Africa, pretty much every plane I got on either had direct internet access or the plane offered streaming data you could pay for (i.e. it had internet, just no wifi) The lack of internet access in the US is entirely due to the FAA being stuck in the 1950s.
Re:Black box data streaming (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:meanwhile overnight... (Score:4, Interesting)
When I was in the US Army, I was a Hawk Missile and Launcher repairer [wikipedia.org], and work in IGLE, Internal Guidance and Launch Equipment back in 1974-78 and I can say with pretty good authority that the technology available in that era required pretty much constant maintence. The Guidance packages was all electron tubes except for one transistor, the microwave reciever was klystron [wikipedia.org] based so everything drifted constantly. When something drifted out f spec it's not amatter of twisting a reostat either, you have to take it apart, unsolder a fixed resistor, and replace with a resistor of different value, potentiometers would never hold their value durring launch G's or after bouncing acrost the grond on top of a tracked vehicle. It's highly unlikely that the rebels could have just stubled upon a lost or abandoned weapon system and have gotten it working with out highly trained support personnel and operators. It takes a lot of finesse to work the old stuff, modern systems just work or not.