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Trojan Horse Caused A Siberian Explosion
An anonymous reader writes "William Safire of the nytimes [nytimes.com] has an interesting column this week describing how the Soviets purchased bogus computer chips from the West in the 1970's. These chips caused what "was the most monumental non-nuclear explosion and fire ever seen from space." Fascinating story."
For the tin foil hat crowd, here is a register free link: The Story
Because voltage levels tend to drift a bit (especially with time and erosion) a system that's set up to read as either one state or another has quite a bit more built in tolerance for drift than one that's built to sense more than two states. It's been a LONG ass time since I took any compsci however so I'm probably missing a few things. Basically what I'm saying is that it's not only possible, such a system "could" be faster and more compact but it would also be horribly prone to errors in the long run.
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Though the article doesn't actually mention bogus computer chips... it talked about software stolen by the KGB which was altered with deliberate flaws, causing their oil pipeline to malfunction and explode.
I wonder if the editor RTFA.
A brief explanation of ternary logic for those who don't want to bother reading my link.
:= f(TRUE) := FAIL
In addition to TRUE and FALSE, you have another state, which represents "I don't know". It's conventionally called FAIL (well, at least it is in Maple).
How do the truth tables work? The basic idea is that if you have a function f(x) where x is TRUE or FALSE, then you can define f for FAIL with this rule:
IF f(TRUE) = f(FALSE) THEN
f(FAIL)
ELSE
f(FAIL)
END IF
So this means you have TRUE AND FAIL = FAIL, but TRUE OR FAIL = TRUE (because TRUE OR TRUE = TRUE OR FALSE = TRUE).
Converting ternary logic to arithmetic modulo 3 is a little more complicated, but once when I was bored I worked out the rules for myself.
From the article:
President Francois Mitterrand of France also opposed the gas pipeline. He took President Reagan aside at a conference in Ottawa on July 19, 1981, to reveal that France had recruited a key K.G.B. officer in Moscow Center. Col. Vladimir Vetrov provided what French intelligence called the Farewell dossier.
This little bit of information is more or less correct. "Farewell" was the code name assigned to Col. Vetrov by his French DGSE (French CIA) handlers.
The next time you are tempted to say that France is not an ally of the USA, just remember that little bit of transatlantic cooperation. I personally think Mitterand was a crook, a thief and a sleazeball -- and I am trying to stay polite, here... But, ultimately, he may have done the right thing here.
But Safire glosses over the saddest part of the Farewell history (emphasis mine):
Vetrov was caught and executed in 1983. A year later, Bill Casey ordered the K.G.B. collection network rolled up, closing the Farewell dossier. [...] Now is a time to remember that sometimes our spooks get it right in a big way.
What Safire does not says is that:
In short: every good intelligence in this story was supplied by the French, and the USA made a mess of it, an important source was killed and years of hard work were wasted.
A little bit like the recent situation with a middle-east country with vast oil reserves, but I digress... You can mod me down now. End of Rant mode.
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
The story of the program is partially corroborated here:
Though there is no information about the explosion.
> The Soviets stole Canadian software to control the operations of the pipeline. The Americans added a trojan horse to the software.
Not precisely true. The Americans sold technology to the Canadians, but wouldn't sell it to the Soviets. Soviet agents posed as Canadian defense contractors to get purchasing rights. The Americans knew they were doing it, and fed poisoned devices to those agents. The agents took the tech home to Russia and BOOM!
Virg
The CIA actually has a fairly long article (study?) on their website about this incident here
kremvax was an April Fool's joke.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
There were EPROMS with software on in the telemetry boards but they didn't have the control software. Hell, there was no control automation, all the kit did was to report on instruments, collect operator adjustments and send them to actuators.
As for the VAX 11/780, actually thanks to VMS it could give about 20 people some degree of word-processing, so a little better than the PC even though smaller and slower. I later at a chemical company used VAXen to run above the basic PDP-11 based telemetry systems to provide plant-level supervision.
The usual with a hot-standby system was that both would be active and one would follow the state of the other (we did something similar for the telemtry system). There would have been two PSUs definitely.