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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."
In Soviet Russia, computer blows up you !
this story has everything. technology, spies, massive explosions, and high ranking government officials dying. it doesn't get much better than this.
Rock.
Scissors.
Paper.
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!
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.
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.
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!
Trinity: "Most guys can't."
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
Okay: You are a kook.
That's fine.
However, I do think we need a new term. People who express opinions about the possibility of dirty tricks by governments/government agencies are often labelled "kooks" or "conspiracy theorists", with the assumption that their ideas are not based on fact or logical thinking. However, there is another type of person that is increasingly common today. They are the mirror image of conspiracy theorists, people that - even when there is clear evidence of something funny going on - refuse to even consider the possibility.
For example, in February last year Colin Powell gave a presentation to the UN - remember that? Just in case you've forgotten, he said:
1) Iraq posseses 499-500 tonnes of chemical weapons agents.
2) Iraq has hidden warheads containing "biological warfare agent... in large groves of palm trees".
3) Iraq possesses a hidden factory equipped with thousands of centrifuges to make fissionable material for nuclear weapons
4) Iraq possesses at least seven mobile laboratories for producing biological warfare agents.
And other claims like this. Notice that he didn't say "might" or "perhaps", these were statements of fact. Meanwhile, in the UK Tony Blair was telling his electorate that he had seem incontrovertible evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, but he couldn't tell us what it was so we'd just have to trust him. Now we know that nearly all these "facts" were wrong.
And yet, despite all this, there is a certain type of person that is completely unwilling to even consider the possibility that our governments have lied to us. Many people consider that the intelligence agencies "made mistakes", or perhaps even a few rouge elements in the intelligence agencies might have lied, but not the government.
I think there should be a new word for this type of person - a person who finds it impossible to imagine those in authority acting in a bad way even that is a reasonable logical conclusion based on the facts. Or perhaps there is already a word for this type of person and I don't know it. Any ideas anyone?
The story of the program is partially corroborated here:
Though there is no information about the explosion.
Why not use the Slashot partner link when they are kind enough to provide one?
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/
Did you RTFA?
Straight from the article:
The catch: computer chips would be designed to pass Soviet quality tests and then to fail in operation.
While the main anecdote of the article is about bogus software, computer chips are mentioned.
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
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.
Further, there are plenty of technical details that are "glossed over", but this is hardly suprising given that the writer is not technical. For the rest, you're making TONS of assumptions for which you simply don't have the information.
These chips didn't have to be CPUs, they could have merely been ROM chips. Remember your old design classes (yeah, it's been a while for me as well, but...)? In that manner you want it to function and give correct results nearly %100 of the time (to pass testing), but give wildly WRONG answers when a certian condition is hit. Not hard to do. With that in mind, they didn't need cutting edge technology like their VAX clone.
Therefore, the situation being described is VERY possible and even probable.
Sure you can bring the system down, but not in a predictable way.
EXACTLY my point! If anything, the author described a process which he thought was much more elegant and sophicticated than it really was. Chances are, this Gus Weiss fellow was as suprised as anyone else at the magnitude of the blast.
Finally, the CIA would have no way of knowing that their goosed up control system would not have found its way into a nuclear plant.
The article said we knew they were buying tech for this project from a certian Canadian company. From that it would appear we had pretty good info regarding where this was going.
Computer Science is Applied Philosophy