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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 some reason, I can equally imagine something like this happen from the Pentium I FDIV bug, can't you? :)
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
For the tin foil hat crowd, here is a register free link: The Story
In Soviet Russia, computer blows up you !
I rememeber that Russia once developed a base-3 computer called ``Trinity''. I cant find a link on it, but I know that it worked. I cannot imagine how logical operations would work on sutch a thing though.
this story has everything. technology, spies, massive explosions, and high ranking government officials dying. it doesn't get much better than this.
They must have planted an agent inside Microsoft...
Now is a time to remember that sometimes our spooks get it right in a big way.
Let's get this straight - Safire is bragging about the Americans blowing up gas pipelines???? I thought that was terrorism, at least if it is in Iraq. Lucky many weren't killed.
Deconstruct the State
Let's cause an explosion that could cause the death of hundreds (if not more), and then gloat about it.
Cold war or not, this is just callous disregard for human life.
Ich werde nie wieder denken
Instead, according to Reed -- a former Air Force secretary whose fascinating cold war book, "At the Abyss," will be published by Random House next month
:(
So, it's more an ad than anything else, isn't it ?
And the fact that it ended that dramatically just makes me kind of sceptical...
Trolling using another account since 2005.
1. Supply computer chips to Soviets
2. ??????????*
3. PROFIT!
*KABOOOOM!
Tin foil hat on...
This guy works/worked for the intelligence services. He was/is involved in "disinformation" operations. The intelligences services in the USA and UK are currently under increadible scrutiny for having goofed big-time about Iraq. This guy gets an article published in the NY Times about a very successful operation that helped finish the Cold War. There is no evidence, other than this article, and it can't be proved or disproved.
Draw your own conclusions.
Tinfoil hat time!
I am a believer of momentum and curves.
A risky business, but there were thankfully no (recorded) casualties. It does make you realise that for some things it's a really good idea to look at the code!
Nice, in a way, to see the French and US governments working together too.
-Yarn - Rio Karma: Excellent
At first I was thinking it was the big Siberian blast that they said was a comet at the turn of the last century.
Now THAT would have been a hell of a Trojan Horse.
"Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it." - John Lennon.
My father was one of developers of top secret soviet chips in 1970's. Many of them were clones of western devices. We had lots of chips, transistors, Fortran listings and special books at home. Most of them were lost because we moved four times in last 24 years.
As far as we (me and my dad) know no chips or computers were purchased from "the West" before 1980's. We developed and manufactured clones of 360, PDP, VAX and others instead. They were software-compatible with Western ones but contained only Soviet (and other Eastern Europe) components.
Later we got VAXen (I remember two of them), Macs (no personal experience) and IBM PC.
wish to develop their own indigenous computer technologies industries instead of simply buying it from us and possibly subjecting themselves to this sort of intergovernmental terrorism? Had this explosion taken place in a populated area the blood would be on our hands.
It goes way beyond issues of economic competition. It's a question of independence, control and security.
Rather like your use of Open Source software.
KFG
They didn't toss in the towel, they were forced to re-evaluate the viability of all stolen technology. Even "legit" technology would fall under scrutiny.
This would take time proportional to the amount of stolen technology, which is to say, a lot.
Sure, this didn't stop them, but add this and that and the other thing and that thing over there, and you get "lost the war".
Nobody in the article claimed more then "helped win the cold war" (emphasis mine), and I say that if you actually read the article insteading of projecting what you think it was going to say onto the article, you'd find that assertion perfectly defensible. I do.
Reading is fundamental.
Because it's in the NYT, of course!
Alito: A vote for Alito is a punch in the eye to put that bitch back in her place!
Anyone who has read Tom Clancy's "Red Storm Rising" knows that the events which kick off the 3rd World War are indeed a Siberean oil line being blown up, thus damaging their oil reserves unrepairably. Knowing Clancy's tendency to discover little details like this, and his incredibly acurate rendering of "What if" I can't say it would supprise me at all if this were a true event. Indeed the funniest thing to me is that Clancy except for a few years of ROTC never served in the military at all. (I believe he was an insurance salesman but I could eb wrong about that detail) When he first published his books the government tried to courtmarshall him only to find he had no military experience.
This is not a sig
Basically, the Soviets got suckered because they outsourced the software and chips to US firms.
Doesn't anybody see the similarity between what companies are doing now (with outsourcing) and the Soviet Union did 20 years ago?
And in case you're wondering, this is why Congress is afraid of cyber-terrorism - we literally used computers to kill people in Siberia in the 80's. Perhaps they are scared that the same thing could happen here?
I realize the fears of cyber-terrorism are overblown, but it is a real threat. The threat isn't from outside hackers, but rather, from insiders who plant trojan software programs and sabotage hardware. What would happen if a nuclear power plant computer was programmed to silently vent small quatities of nuclear waste over a period of months or years? By the time it would be noticed, it would be too late to avert disaster.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
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)
That's what they get for outsourcing their software.
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
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
We give the Soviets bad chips. They give us TETRIS. Productivity drops to ZERO on both sides. Sounds fair to me.
Any parallels to contemporary situations are left as an exercise for the reader.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Just take a look at key military technology in the '60s and '70s:
First men in space: Russia (implies better ICBMs)
First operational jetfighter with thrust-vectoring (MIG): Russia
First working long-term space stations: Russia (also used for spying)
First undedectable stealth fighter dedected and shot down by: Russian technology in Yugoslavia (nice done, guys!)
World's most powerfull rocket: Russia (Energija), implies that they could launch a BIG amount of plutonium for a BIG shot.
Most reliable rocket technology: Russia
First figher plane with look-and-lock systems (you look at your enemy and the rockets automatically lock onto that target): Russia (IMHO the MIG25)
Well, sure, USA has a great deal of hightech gadgets lying around, but the Soviets are the guys that actually made them working.
There was also a big fuss about that the USSR stole the space shuttle technology for their Buran shuttle. Actually, the Buran uses a more modern design, has a much higher capacity, better aerodynamics and even can fly completly on automatic (whereas the US shuttle must be landed per joystick).
Sure, the USSR stole *some* technology, but the US wasn't any better. Didn't they steal MIG's whenever they saw a chance, just to try out how to beat them in air combat and integrate russian thruster-design into US fighters?
Look, this thing is totally safe! Built it myself, you know. You just press that button like this and then turn that lev
You are lucky that you have never lived in a communist country. I live in a former Soviet "satelite" country which was not so poor but there was poverty during communist times. It may have been not so bad as in third world countries (people generally had something to eat and a place to live) but nevertheless quite a lot of people had miserable lives in Western standards. There were shortage of many basic products, many people lived in crappy homes (small rooms or only one room for the whole family, sometimes no hot water, no toilet, etc.) but the Party bonzos were affluent. There was strong corruption and there were people equal and "more equal". There were some areas that worked OK (I think the education was not that bad) but in general it was bad.
And did I mention freedom?
It may not be great now several years after collapse of the regime and not everything is perfect now (being unemployed is not funny), and there is a lot of room for improvement but most of the people are better now.
Save the bandwidth. Don't use sigs!
The story is total crap.
I served in Strat. Int. and I can say with total confidence that -if- such a thing happened heads in the community would roll.
In a time of all out war, yes it would be ok.
But the Cold War was not all out war and such a thing would have been an act of war, and not worth the risk.
The Nixon and Reagan administrations would have been stupid enough to risk GTNW for a feather like that, but nobody else until GB2.
The pipeline was not a proper target for such an action.
The primary difference between acts of war and acts terrorism is the target. When al Qaeda destroyed the Twin Towers, that was terrorism. When they crashed into the Pentagon, that was war. Terrorism is the specific targetting of civilians for the purpose of inspiring fear.
:)
That said, certain elements of the US media would do well to remember this distinction. If I hear Fox News calling attacks on military installations in Iraq "terrorism", I'll start suspecting them of bias.
All of that communist-era rhetoric sure sounds out of place in the 21st century.
First, the distinction between the "working class" and the "idle class" is bogus. Today, many workers own shares and many owners and owner/executives work extremely long, hard hours. Most CEOs are workaholics and entrepreneur-owners are worse.
Go to Best Buy and see what is happening with your "worker class". We are consuming goods and services that were simply unavailable and/or unaffordable in the 1960s. We are objectively richer in that we can afford to do and buy everything our predecessors could and more.
Communist rhetoric will fail as long as it is totally out of step with the lives people live every day. For instance, I would listen much more attentatively if you would stop talking about the working class (who are doing pretty damn well historically speaking) and start talking about the chronically undermployed class. But Marx wasn't interested in them so today's communists aren't interested either.
Here's some info about the fall which killed Gus Weiss:
washinton post article and Nashville Tenessean obit
Notice that Audrey Wolf, mentioned in the latter obit, is Joseph Wilson's literary agent.
Not that that should mean anything...
"Our interests are to see if we can't scale it up to something more exciting," he said.
The CIA actually has a fairly long article (study?) on their website about this incident here
I'm not surprised that you pump out this type of appology for fascism as AC. No, Pinochet did not 'execute', he had people murdered. There were 4,000 murdered during the coup alone. The figure of 40,000 is well established.
But lets imagine for a moment that he 'only' murdered 4,000. Was the Nixon administration justified in putting a murderer into power?
There is of course no evidence whatsoever for the claim that Allende was not elected by the people or that he planned any form of coup. Of course there are a lot of people who will make these claims to try to justify the coup, but they have no more substance than allegations that Saddam had WMD "that are ready for use within 45 minutes" as Tony Blair claimed.
Similar is true of the fascist Mossadegh. The Shah held off the advent of the much worse Khomeini reign of terror.
Mossadegh was no fascist, he was a nationalist whose 'crime' in the eyes of Eisenhower and Churchill was to insist that BP pay a fair price for the oil they took. Operation Ajax was justified to Eisenhower by claims made by the Dulles brothers that the USSR was plotting an invasion through the North. The fact that Stalin died before operation Ajax was not allowed to affect this analysis.
Justifying operation Ajax by what followed is ridiculous. The mullahs could not have taken over if Mossadegh had not been replaced by the Shah. The mullahs are the result of operation Ajax, not a justification for it. Next you will be claiming that the Versailles treaty should have imposed harsher conditions on Germany to prevent the rise of Hitler.
This happened only rarely. The CIA overall has been quite successful.
There actions have backfired far more frequently than they have succeeded. Noriega and Saddam were both CIA proteges, Pinochet, the Shah of Iran were installed in CIA led coups. Meddling in Guatelmala, Honduras, Nicaragua led to civil wars. And those are just the cases where the CIA were the principal actors.
The record of the CIA is by any objective standard a failure. The problem with the macho posturing they engage in is that you have to have brains and a strategy for realpolitique. The CIA strategy has been to prefer a strong man they feel they can control no matter how repressive and corrupt. This strategy fails because the strongmen who can be controlled can rarely control their own populations who depose them and the strongmen who can control their populations tend to refuse to be controlled themselves. Iraq and Iran show both modes of falure of the CIA strategy.
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Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/