Slashdot Mirror
Evidence of Russian Cyberwarfare Against Georgia
An anonymous reader writes "In what seems to be a repeat of what happened in July, a few news sites have mentioned that there is evidence of a campaign against Georgia. For example, both the government's and the president's sites are inaccessible, among other official websites. For some analysis, the RBN Exploit blog demonstrates various traceroutes that have failed to several sites. They also claim that the RBN (Russian Business Network cyber-crime organisation) are behind the attacks, and that 'Many of Georgia's internet servers were under external control from late Thursday,' before the actual war began. Finally, according to this Twitter account of someone in Georgia (written in Russian), he claims that 'Russia has blocked access to Georgian websites from within Russia' (rough translation)."
After Google told them they were based in Atlanta, Georgia.
I'd cut access to any country I was preparing to wage war against... it's common sense to help stop communications to fifth columnists. Of course, they'll route around it. --Mike--
I don't know Russian... but I do know Google... so here's a bit of a mashup:
Twitter | Google Translate
http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Ftwitter.com%2Fwardirect&hl=en&ie=UTF8&sl=ru&tl=en
This sounds oddly similar to Splintercell 1. Maybe Nicholadze is real and Sam is actively working to stop this menace!
That's what happened the last time.
--points at World War I
Viable Slashdot alternatives: https://pipedot.org/ and http://soylentnews.org/
Times like these are when the red cross is most appreciated. They will likely soon be flying in C-130's full of porn and lol-cats jpegs. 'Round the clock flights will continue until the Georgian internet connections can be restored.
(additionally, the traceroutes could also fail because the routers and computers have been exploded by the russians with bombs from airplanes. this would be a worrying escalation of cyberwarfare).
Georgia is a small republic with very little traffic to web resources under normal conditions. Now they are getting likely several orders of magnitude more traffic. And these are the consequences. But of course the "cyberwarfare" is much juicier piece for journalists to chew on.
"In what seems to be a repeat of what happened in July, a few news sites have mentioned that there is evidence of a campaign against Georgia."
A campaign against Georgia? You don't say! What tipped you off, the explosions? The Black Sea Fleet moving off the coast? The miles-long military convoys crossing into Georgian territory? The planes dropping bombs in populations centers?
Oh, the IP logs. Can't have a real war until Netcraft confirms it, I s'pose.
Everyone is making fun of the invasion of a democratic country?
Thats slashdot for ya i guess. Depends on which country does the invading.
So they claim that the RBN was doing russian government will? That is (government's) organized crime, Discworld version.
Is not the same to have a group of people that believing government sponsorized news decide by their own to cyber-attack a country, to being hired by or belong to the government to do that.
Dude, when the Georgian President realizes that he can't retrieve all of his data from the Google cloud, he's going to be so P.O.'d.
Oh nevermind...
...where would you put a screen door on an M1A1?
"It is possible to commit no errors and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life." -Peak Performance
"I have a bad feeling that this conflict is going to spread,"
You're young. People always get a little jittery when an invasion happens somewhere and they're not the ones behind it. Now you know how the rest of the world feels.
"catalyzing all the violence that has been the undercurrent of world politics in the past few years."
Except that, if you turn off the television from time to time, you'd see that things are still rather peaceful compared to recent history.
"A possible world war."
It's difficult to have a world war without two large international factions aligned against each other. It'd be difficult (to say the least) to determine common enemies in the smattering of brushfire regional wars we're seeing.
Heck, what we're seeing in Georgia right now stands out because it's just so damned old skool: using a fifth column to destabilize a neighbor to soften them up for some good ol' fashioned land-grabbing. You gotta give credit to Putin, he knows his stuff.
Time to root for the little country trying to get its own territory back under its own control.
Puting's claims of "genocide" are pathetic and would only work on the already brainwashed Russians themselves. Seeing these assholes trumpet their government's lies is just as scary as seeing Chinese bloggers' anti-Tibet postings.
They are trying to paint South Osetia as some sort of Kosovo, where the evil Georgians deserve to be punished the same way Serbians did. Except, unlike then, there is no genocide or "ethnic cleansing" (Saakashvili is much smart than that), and no country was giving Kosovars their citizenship left and right so as to be able to pretend, they are defending their own citizens. Lots and lots of South Osetian have gotten Russian citizenship in recent years — just for asking. Imagine, for just a second, America trying to annex Iraq this way — we would not even force Puerto Rico in!
If US is not careful, next year Russia will come up with a "good" claim to send tanks to Brighton Beach — plenty of Russian citizens there!..
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Gotta give credit to the Presidents of Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, and Poland. They may be small nations, but they talk like they've got a pair...
http://www.president.lt/en/news.full/9475 [Joint Press Release on the Lithuanian President's Webpage]
I know it's not so slashdotty, but it's relevant to the conflict in general and interesting nonetheless.
Good translation, and thanks for the twitters.
The person also mentions that protesters are out in Tbilisi, notwithstanding Russian bombing runs, that Russian hackers are attacking any news site that relates what is really going on in Georgia, that he has asked some hacker friends to attack CMI (rough translation of a Russian news site) and they have (seemingly) complied, that he hears rumblings - the light has been knocked out, as well as telephone towers and no TV exists now, and finally asks for humanity to help. He provides a link to bombed out suburbs, here: http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/44907000/jpg/_44907206_rubbleafp466.jpg.
Behold, the future of War!
Hell, I'd take what he depicts there to the usual government-sanctioned mass-murder type of war...
I just did a search for Georgian owned websites, and couldn't find any!
Modding me -1 troll doesn't make me wrong.
I think a BMP-1 would be a better example for this part of the world. And the screen would go on the back, where the door is.
Yep, that's what the Georgians use. 149 with reactive armor in 2008. 40 in 2007. Originally 667 were inherited from former USSR in 1991. 80 BMP-1 and BMP-2 IFVs were claimed by the Abkhaziyan Army and the same amount by the South Ossetian Army. But Russia still has 1,543 in active service and more than 9,057 in reserve.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
shouldn't that be "War of the Rebellion?" After all, slashdot was founded in Michigan.
No, that's because they're using Microsoft web servers. Way too easy for script kiddies :)
To understand how Russian "justice" works, read the shocking story published by "The Washington Post" (TWP). Natalia Trufanova was driving a Zhiguli (a lightweight Russian car) with her family in Moscow in September of 2007. She was minding her own business and dutifully obeying the traffic laws. Then, suddenly, a motorcade carrying Supreme Court President Vyacheslav Lebedev and coming from the opposite direction entered the wrong lane -- the lane in which Trufanova was driving. A vehicle in the motorcade smashed into the Zhiguli, killing Trufanova and her family. The Russian police wrote a false report, claiming that Trufanov drove into the wrong lane.
TWP notes, "When angry witnesses started posting video on the Web clearly showing that it was the motorcade that was driving in the wrong lane, the lead investigator looking into the accident said that he didn't have access to the Internet."
Well, yes. But a BMP-1 has very different access points to an M1.
Screen-hatch, perhaps...
"It is possible to commit no errors and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life." -Peak Performance
This may be hard for an American mind to grasp, but *there are no good guys here*.
Georgians are not good guys. Their goal is to militarily crush a national independence movement and to subjugate a people who hate the Georgians' guts. They've been planning this blitzkrieg operation for years (a nation doesn't increase its military spending by a factor of 30 if they aren't planning to invade somebody.) They cynically violated ceasefire terms, used massed artillery to bombard residential areas (killing ~1400 Ossetian civilians in one day), and were ethnically cleansing Ossetian villages. Now that their military effort has failed, they've launched a massive propaganda offensive to convince ignorant westerners that white is black and that a nation that launched an offensive war is somehow a victim.
But Russians ain't good guys either. Instead of trying to limit the killing, it looks like they are escalating the conflict by supporting the Abkhazians in Kodori. They are cynically using the excuse of protecting Ossetians from genocide to conduct a massive bombing campaign against Georgia's military infrastructure. And Russia has neither the desire nor the technological capability to limit collateral damage from its bombs.
What you are seeing is, essentially, a small bully being bullied by a bigger bully.
...where astroturfing, sock-puppetry, slanted journalism and propaganda matters far more than the reality on the ground. Slashdot is a contested territory, and it looks like Georgia's propaganda troops have launched a first strike.
Not that I'm defending Russia here. The only reason Georgian astroturfers have overpowered the Russian ones on Slashdot is that the moronic Russian leadership, as usual, hasn't been investing enough resources in information warfare.
Years ago I witnessed the comparatively clumsy and easily traceable assimilation of a major university's computing center into the botnet of organized crime from two countries now known as major spam havens and phishers' hideouts.
The appropriate authorities were alerted to the danger of this becoming a national security risk as growing sophistication on the part of the perpetrators, if not held at bay early on, would allow them to wreak havoc on critical infrastructures "at their fingertips", as the bot herders came in control of an SaaS cyber-weapon marketable to governments and factions around the world wishing to outsource their dirty work to guns-for-hire.
Needless to say, none of the evidence was thoroughly scrutinized back then before countries could start to make computer crime a branch of their armed forces, and the matter stayed under the officials' radar as a mere annoyance of unsolicited advertising and occasional blackmail of gambling sites, rather than the build-up of a dangerous distributed remote-controlled arsenal.
In 1991, when Georgia seceeded from the soviet union, a civil war followed in which these two provinces separated themselves from Georgia.
Historically, when a province or state seceeded from another country, there has rarely been unanimous agreement as to exactly where the new border should be. Take as an example a certain secession attempt in the western hemisphere in 1861.
Quite often the province borders aren't drawn along ethnic lines, sometimes they're even completely arbitrary. For example the borders between Croatia and Serbia and Bosnia were the one time border between the Austrian and Turkish empires.
In the last two decades, a number of provinces have seceeded from larger eastern european countries, and every time the international community ("the west") was quick to recognize the independence, and the new borders exactly as the breakaway province claimed them, disregarding any claim by the other side as imperialism.
The war in Bosnia for example was a result, as a large chunk of the new country felt more Serbian than Bosnian, and attempted to break away from Bosnia by military means.
More such conflicts (and probably wars) are almost certain, as about 15 million Russians live in former Soviet republics (up to 30% of the population in some), many of whom presumably would prefer to be part of Russia.
The same situation took place in the countries of the present EU as nation states took form in the 19th century, which was followed by about 100 years of terrible wars, and ultimately settled by ethnic cleansing and assimilation politics on a massive scale. (15 million ethnic Germans were deported from central and eastern Europe after WW2, for example, forever ending any German territorial claims)
The owners of the pipeline say it has not been bombed. See http://ca.news.yahoo.com/s/afp/080809/world/georgia_sossetia_russia_unrest_oil_bp
The report about the pipeline attack is almost certainly Georgian propaganda (unless it's simply unsubstantiated rumors) - and it looks like the British journos fell for it. But hey, in this modern world of journalism 2.0, who cares about truth and fact-checking, as long as you can get the pageviews?
"It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried." -Sir Winston Churchill. http://www.quotationspage.com/quotes/Sir_Winston_Churchill/ Sure, democracy kinda works. But it wasn't democracy that gave us the constitution, which in my eyes, is so much more important than a "majority vote". democracy, as soon as it gets down to simplicities, is 51% oppressing 49%. just to put that in words: the majority fucks over any minority as they please. over here in Europe, we're not even so sure that our representatives are actually acting on behalf of the 51%. What say you, America? as soon as the majority can be coerced (I study advertising, it really isn't that difficult), we're back to who has the most money and who can throw the best parties, sucking up to those people who donate the most money. ya, this ain't news. but too many act like they don't know this. anyhow, my favourite quote of the parent's link: "It is proposed that government can be successful, and even vastly superior, if it has the direct participation of all of the governed. Open source governance incorporates the best features of direct democracy and tempers the drawbacks by use of a superior participation model and community structure." Are we talking about a Grassroots Democracy? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grassroots_democracy oh, I get it! it's a government that lets the populace take part in it's decisions! Kinda like how democracy is (supposed to be). Open source government is a government that listens to it's people.. in contrast to democracy (..?!) I'm not bashing you personally, parent, but democracy isn't the A & O it makes out to be. well, in soviet russia, I give you negative karma.
It's not about fate, it's about character.
there be no shelter here, the frontline is everywhere!
oh, heh, I forgot my actual point: a net-based government is in theory only more efficient in obtaining general opinion and "votes". it bumps efficiency to a maximum. no paper, no per-hand counting, no run-arounds for surveys. in practice, you're inviting every black hat world-wide to fraud the vote and the polls. And at that point we're back to voting machines and the surrounding scandals. sorry for the double post. I'm too drunk to find the edit button.
It's not about fate, it's about character.
there be no shelter here, the frontline is everywhere!
Too bad that Osetia's citizens are cut off the communications of any kind: they have no infrastrucure left in the city because of Georgian's missile attacks. Otherwise you'd be trilled by the stories they could tell. Get this: if Russian air-force would start bombing georgians they won't be any left by now. Do you have any idea what a wing Tu-22s can do? Probably not: you're getting your information from CNN and Fox News. Oh and Twitter, of course.
Take care, Cos
if you actually want to know (spoilers ahead) the credit crunch will be/is the actual spark. who cares about some unimportant region fighting for independence? sure, it's a big deal at dinnertime watching the news- sure, many freedom fighters / terrists will grasp the opportunity, just like they're doing now in China and Iraq. but then I think about the oil & gas Georgia exports and I get Iraq flashbacks. Black Sea pipeline and whatnot.. but still, somehow a global economy crisis is a tad more important, no? I know where I'd put my hyper-inflated money.
It's not about fate, it's about character.
there be no shelter here, the frontline is everywhere!
THIS is why 4chan is down, right?
--
BMO
" ... catalyzing all the violence that has been the undercurrent of world politics in the past few millennium."
There, fixed that for you.
Sound just like a good SciFi book read, where you use lots of useful fools to take political action.
Halting State by Charles Stross
Not that anyone read stuff this long down on slashdot...
Sorry to disapoint you, but Putin, as a prime minister, would probably not make such decisions. These things are probably done by Dmitry Medvedev now.
Anyone who is surprised at this is probably unaware that disruption, denial and subversion of communications is a common factor in all modern (as in more modern than two groups of grunting and growling rock throwers) warfare. Telegraph and phone lines got cut. Radio got jammed. Alexander had fires built upwind of enemy columns to make it hard for them to see each other easily. The US Army confiscated the radio of the British ham operator on Grenada that was broadcasting a running commentary of infantry firing over the heads of the medical students being "rescued". The US news broadcast footage clearly showed them being forced to run under a line of firing (most likely blanks) M-16s; the early news shows broadcast the ham operator's reports along with the footage, but his reports were absent from the late news broadcasts.
Command and control (C2) refers to the ability of military commanders to carry out strategy and tactics. The addition of Communications (C3) refers to inclusion of the ability to carry out C2 without being present on the battlefield and the ability of units to coordinate over distance. That's the US version, the NATO version of C3 being "Consultation, Command and Control", just a different label for the same process. It's now frequently referred to as C4 because it includes computers. Since they are used for more than communication, the fourth C is not redundant. The other thing they're used for is data analysis for intelligence generation, so the "I" in "C4I" *is* redundant. And all the other extensions out to C4ISTAR is just showing off.
Being "cyber", it's pertinent to /. but it's not news unless one assumes that one particular form of communication should be immune to this "time honored tradition".
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
You don't really know how things work between those two, do you? When Putin says "jump", Medvedev asks "how high"
People who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.
president.gov.ge took down it's MySQL database temporarily during the attack and changed it's front page during the downtime as an effort to reduce automated attacks upon it's initial page.
The National Bank of Georgia took down it's images temporarily when it was attacked producing text-only pages. It has since restored them.
There is no access to The Ministry of Foreign Affair's website, I have no inside information on what occurred but when the attacked start I do know they purposely turned off web services at some stage, whether or not they have restored them I do not know.
- Ð'ÐÐÑоÑ
Big Mac Thesis: No two nations with McDonald's franchises have ever gone to War
It seems like this rule is going to be broken.
McDonalds Moscow vs MCDonalds Tbilisi
No way am I supporting those Georgians. May I remind my fellow Americans that a Georgian separatist once tried to kill the governor of California?
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_Doctrine
Excerpt
Later it came to include additional elements, including the controversial policy of preventive war, which held that the United States should depose foreign regimes that represented a threat to the security of the United States, even if that threat was not immediate (used to justify the invasion of Iraq), a policy of supporting democracy around the world, especially in the Middle East, as a strategy for combating the spread of terrorism, and a willingness to pursue U.S. military interests in a unilateral way.
The new crop of Russian trolls on slashdot seems to be quite large and very vocal. I'm seeing a disproportionate number of posts attacking both Georgia and anyone who seems to support the Georgians. I have no idea if the Russians are really using the RBN to engage in cyberwar with Georgia as per the original article. A few posts note some legitimate reasons why various Georgian web sites are down or inaccessible. On the other hand, the number and vehemence of the pro-Russian posts even just here on slashdot is remarkable.
So, are the Russians attempting to influence public opinion around the world by astroturfing their side of the story anyplace they can post it? Sure looks like it. Lots of the pro-Russian posts have grammatical errors that indicate the English is not the first language of the poster (as opposed to the usual slashdot poster's bad grammar and spelling that just indicates how poorly these subjects are taught in U.S. schools).
Cheers,
Dave
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.
Ben
Well, I cannot confirm, if in the past there were direct links between the Russian' Transtelecom (or Rostelecom, I'm not sure, which one provided the connection) and Georgian segment of internet, but even if they were shut, the connectivity is still available:
this one is from a Unix box hosted on the premises of a Russian hosting provider Agava
this one is from my home LAN:
Anyone else seeing Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan as blank areas with no towns or roads in Google Maps? The change happened sometime in the last few hours.
"In the last two decades, a number of provinces have seceeded from larger eastern european countries, and every time the international community ("the west") was quick to recognize the independence,"
Because more often than not those eastern countries maintained their borders solely by force of arms. Practically since inception, Yugoslavia had been a state dominated by Serbian people and Serbian interests, with the ruling Serbian elite viewing the other nationalities as racially inferior, imposing Serbian language, customs and religion on the rest. The eventual ethnic cleansing campaign initiated by Belgrade in the 1990's as Serbian power over the state waned is a pretty good indication of how Serbians felt about their "fellow" Yugoslavs.
"and the new borders exactly as the breakaway province claimed them, disregarding any claim by the other side as imperialism."
Maybe because the international community you so deride had already seen that kind of Sudetenland bullshit before? How long did the Serbians shell Sarajevo again?
"The war in Bosnia for example was a result, as a large chunk of the new country felt more Serbian than Bosnian, and attempted to break away from Bosnia by military means"
And yet, after the Dayton Accords, Bosnia and Herzegovina still has the same borders. Funny how, after the UN stopped the Belgrade government from pouring in propaganda, men and materiel, the Serbs in B&H discovered that they could live just fine under a new federal arrangement.
"More such conflicts (and probably wars) are almost certain, as about 15 million Russians live in former Soviet republics (up to 30% of the population in some), many of whom presumably would prefer to be part of Russia."
Because it's not possible to be ethnically Russian and not want to be a part of the sacred motherland? There's a whole bunch of ethnic Russians in Brooklyn, does this mean that Moscow would be justified in sending troops to Long Island to "look out for their interests?"
We've seen this over and over again; if the Russian minority is being marginalized, the solution is to reorganize the government to satisfy their legitimate concerns. But "I miss the good ol' days under the tsar and the Soviets when we ran things around here" is not a legitimate concern. A third party, whose interests are hardly neutral, pouring in large helpings of military force into the region, is historically how problems like this are made worse, not ended.
"The same situation took place in the countries of the present EU as nation states took form in the 19th century, which was followed by about 100 years of terrible wars, and ultimately settled by ethnic cleansing and assimilation politics on a massive scale."
But this ignores the centuries of wars and ethnic campaigns that started it all. The Ukrainians never asked to be Russian, the Serbs never asked to be Austrian, and the Greeks never asked to be Ottomans. But in each case, an ethno-imperial power felt they were more than justified to march in, displace the government, marginalize the locals, suppress the local tongue and the like. The solution is obviously not to do more of the same.
"(15 million ethnic Germans were deported from central and eastern Europe after WW2, for example, forever ending any German territorial claims)"
Because Germany's neighbors learned their lesson: having ethnic Germans among you justifies imperialist expansion in Berlin's eyes. After all, nobody even asked the Czech Germans if they wanted to trade Prague for Berlin. And as this example shows, as Moscow pours troops into Georgia, it's only logical that the other countries of the CIS, not just Georgia, will start to see the ethnic Russians among them as a liability and a threat to national security, serving to make conditions for ethnic Russians worse.
Which really goes to show that Tsar Vladimir doesn't really give a damn about the "plight ethnic Russians" to begin with, he just wants to plant the flag. Moscow only tolerates "independence" for the CIS republics so long as they continue to kowtow to Russian interests, but now they're daring to seek protection from Russia in NATO, and we can't have that, can we?
The Russian is also unsurprising, as most Linux zealots are hardcore Marxist-Leninists.
Wow, you're just as much of an asshole as twitter himself.
What I wonder is if this is sponsored by the Russian government, or simply a bunch of nationalist hackers. Somehow I think the Russians have more pressing military objectives than taking down the "personal website" of Gerogia's president. Wouldn't a military attack focus on logistical systems rather than propaganda targets?
the Russian state news agency (RIA Novosti) web site is out since this morning? Their two DNS servers (her.rinet.ru, her.rian.ru) seem to have dropped off the face of the earth. Seems someone is might be engaged in cyberwarfare against them, doesn't it?
Because more often than not those eastern countries maintained their borders solely by force of arms. Practically since inception, Yugoslavia had been a state dominated by Serbian people and Serbian interests, with the ruling Serbian elite viewing the other nationalities as racially inferior, imposing Serbian language, customs and religion on the rest. The eventual ethnic cleansing campaign initiated by Belgrade in the 1990's as Serbian power over the state waned is a pretty good indication of how Serbians felt about their "fellow" Yugoslavs.
Your facts seem to come from a parallel universe...
Tito was a Croat, and under his 40 year rule it was practically forbidden to call oneself Serb. Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian people are of the same race and speak the same language. To an outsider they're completely indistinguishable, and I personally never understood what the fuss was about, but that's up to them, not us. Ethnic cleansing is something all sides are guilty of. All ethnic Serbs have been forcibly removed from Croatia and Kosovo for example.
I just remarked that drawing and recognizing borders with complete disregard for the actual people living there, has always led to trouble in the past. The choices as to whom to support also seem rather arbitrary. Kosovo seceding from Serbia is good, needs to be recognized right away, with the borders as chosen by the seceding party, and backed by military force from a super power, while South Ossetia and Abkhazia seceding from a former Soviet republic is bad, and when it's backed by military force from a super power, it's super bad.
What would happen if Virginia tried to secede, claiming the historic borders of the Virginia colony? What if say, France, were to recognize its independence and borders? I think we'd tell them to mind their own fucking business, send the army to suppress the secession and nuke France if they'd even consider interfering.
And yet, after the Dayton Accords, Bosnia and Herzegovina still has the same borders. Funny how, after the UN stopped the Belgrade government from pouring in propaganda, men and materiel, the Serbs in B&H discovered that they could live just fine under a new federal arrangement.
The country is de facto divided into three ethnically cleansed parts that largely ignore each other today.
Because it's not possible to be ethnically Russian and not want to be a part of the sacred motherland? There's a whole bunch of ethnic Russians in Brooklyn, does this mean that Moscow would be justified in sending troops to Long Island to "look out for their interests?"
An American with a Russian surname living in Brooklyn isn't an ethnic Russian but an American. It's completely incomparable. The difference between feeling Irish or Italian is not remotely like the difference between feeling Irish- or Italian-American.
A third party, whose interests are hardly neutral, pouring in large helpings of military force into the region, is historically how problems like this are made worse, not ended.
Except in Bosnia, where a third party whose interests were hardly neutral poured in large helpings of military force, and ended the conflict?
But this ignores the centuries of wars and ethnic campaigns that started it all. The Ukrainians never asked to be Russian, the Serbs never asked to be Austrian, and the Greeks never asked to be Ottomans. But in each case, an ethno-imperial power felt they were more than justified to march in, displace the government, marginalize the locals, suppress the local tongue and the like.
Are you now supporting my argument that perhaps when foreign powers decide for other peoples where their borders ought to be, and that the city of their ancestors should now switch from being Polish to being Russian (replace with any two other nations where applicable) is bound to lead to less than amicable
While true, it hardly applies to this particular case. Russia has originally acquired Ossetia together with Georgia; it only makes sense that Georgia has declared independence within its historical borders. Then again, Ossetians have been living there for all that time, too, so their claim also has some basis.
But which historic borders? Every sufficiently old country has had different borders at different periods.
The country of my own ethnicity has been much larger than it is now, much smaller than it is now, a province of another country, dominion of yet another country independent again, and not always in exactly the same location.
Make what you will out of it...
You certainly remember that "Russian attack" on Estonia turned out to be not related to Russian government at all, right? :)
So, I agree. Just like with Estonia here we probably have other things happening -- overloaded lines, servers crashing under the load, and so on.
By default in large enough country there will be enough people who will do something bad out of "patriotism".
Blaming "big bad government" for something like that is a good way to play up victim status ("we didn't do anything (except, probably, started a war because we wanted to re-take the breakaway area) and this evil Russia sacked hackers on our servers! Oh horrors!") with no real way to disprove it.
Only after all of the simpliest explanations are ruled out I will believe in something a conspiracy nut would propose
Hyperom.com
No disrespect, Tetromino, but you're wwwayyy wrong on this, and the AC is right. Russia is sending a quite clear signal to NATO: NATO would be crazy to allow Georgia in, for the quite simple reason that NATO doesn't want to be drawn into a war in Asia -- Russia's "home court" -- on behalf of Georgia.
Naturally, Russia is not eager to get in a tussle with NATO either. So hmm, what's the ideal solution? Hey, I know -- invade Georgia *before* they join NATO!
Think about it. You're suggesting that the Georgians thought it would be a good idea to be INVADED by a much, much, much bigger, more powerful and more autocratic neighbor. That defies belief. Being INVADED is NEVER the "least bad" option. You lose a war, and bang, that's it: Game Over.
- Alaska Jack
PS Of course, the proof is in the pudding: After this, I guarantee you're not going to be seeing NATO admitting Georgia anytime soon.
The owner of the Twitter account is also publishing in English: http://twitter.com/wardirect_en
I've got to get back to work. When I stop rowing, the slaveship just goes in circles.
Dude, I'm psyched. For years the bigger, smarter, better guys have been taking over the weaker, smaller guys. It's like evolution of nations. Now we can do this without killing people thanks to cyberwarfare. This is gonna be fuckin' awesome.
Now that countries have to consider the internet as a potential front during wartime, the actions of citizen hackers become particularly interesting. I'm going to assume that the Russian government has control over the majority of the attacks against Georgia's sites. At the same time, it's not hard to imagine a few nationalist Russian hackers deciding to "help a brother out" by applying their skills. What does this mean in terms of international law? Are these guys enemy combatants? I find it interesting that some young guy has the option to join in his country's fight without leaving his parent's basement.
I'm Russian and in Moscow now, I also have some Georgian ancestry and I've been in Georgia and really like this country and people. I'm on large government owned ISP and I have no problems reaching .ge sites, same ISP providing me with digital TV, with CNN and BBC news amongst the channels. I mast say I see much more viewer manipulating on CNN than on russian news channels, I might suggest http://www.russiatoday.ru/ as information source, if anybody is interested in whats going on there. Every news channel is trying to show the facts in some light, but CNN just shows only the facts they need, CNN is a serious brainwash. I'm living in Russia for like a month in a year, traveling other 11 months, so don't call me brainwashed by Russian TV - I'm getting my news from very different sources.
.ru domains and blocked all Russian channels, not sure if it's indeed true, any people from Georgia here can clarify this?
I've seen on Russian TV that Georgia blocked access to
For me (and I beleive many Russians feel the same) it's a sad turn of events indeed, because historically we always were friends, Georgia was in Russian empire then in USSR for like more than 200 years, and it was not joined by force, but because we are same faith, and Russia protected Georgia from Pessians and Turks. Georgians took a part in what is now Russian and USSR history, Georgians can be proud or ashamed of that history no less then Russians - many prominent people were Georgians, Stalin is the most known. And now Georgia have crazy pseudo democratic president Saakashvili, clearly installed there and ruled from US, who is confronting Russia in all possible ways!
Georgia's gamble was that whatever the outcome of the war in Ossetia, the border issue would finally get settled. At that point, there would be no more legal justifications for Germany to keep Georgia out of NATO. And once Georgia is in NATO, Russia would think twice before invading.
Really, think, what were the possible outcomes from Georgia's decision to invade Ossetia on August 7?
1. Most probable - everything goes according to plan. Georgian blitzkrieg succeeds, Ossetia surrenders within 1-2 days. Russia perhaps wants to intervene, but can't gets its troops into place fast enough to make any difference. Abkhazia caves in after seeing the might of Georgian arms and the Ossetian civilians massacred in Tskhinvali. Georgia regains its rebellious provinces and joins NATO.
2. Less probable - Russia manages to mobilize some of its forces in time, intervenes, and takes over South Ossetia. Georgia loses the war, Russia loses whatever it has left of its reputation. In the peace talks, the status of South Ossetia and Abkhazia is finally settled - either as independent nations, parts of Russia, or parts of a federal Georgia. Either way, Georgia's borders are no longer in doubt, and it can finally join NATO and the Western world.
3. Even less probable - Russia does not intervene, but the Ossetians successfully resist the invasion on their own; the result is a long, bloody mountain war. Thanks to Georgia's overwhelming advantage in manpower and technology (Georgia has been spending over 10% of its GDP on its armed forces), this scenario appeared to be quite improbable.
4. Nearly impossible - Russia intervenes, and goes on to conquer all of Georgia. This scenario would be quite unlikely because a. Georgia is economically worthless to Russia, and the occupation would inevitably result in a very long, bloody and expensive guerilla war (something that Russia has experienced in Afghanistan and Chechnya, and doesn't want to repeat); and b. the international community would not allow Russia to actually annex one of its neighbors. At the very least, Russia will face crippling trade sanctions from its most important foreign trading partners.
As you can see, the most probable outcomes are, in the long run, advantageous to Georgia and disadvantageous to RUssia.
But Czech Rep, Poland, Slovakia, Bulgaria and Romania are already NATO members!
Someone fights for independence, someone just brings democracy - all the conflicts are always the same and always bad when the big guys decide it's time to do something about it - unfortunately, the civil population is always in the middle.
What kind of tinfoil mickey are you trying slip in my drink?
Grenada, blanks, ham operator, WTF? citation or door.
CBS news broadcast footage, 25 October 1983, compare early and late night versions. The early version included a voice over of the radio operator. But both showed the same insanely ridiculous staged "rescue" tactic of having the St. George's students running crouched beneath a line of M-16s being fired by members of the 22nd Marine Amphibs. You can corroborate by looking for the reports of the SEAL team that secured "Radio Free Grenada", and compare when that was supposed to have occurred compared to when that station went off the air, also compared with other hams' CQ logs showing LOS from an operator on Grenada.
If you'd like to do your own homework to get the aluminum taste out of your mouth, try to come up with a logical reason why the US Marine unit mobilized to replace those killed in the Beirut barracks bombing were diverted en route to "save" students at an off-shore medical school instead of reinforcing the part of the US presence lost in the bombing. To give you a head start, conceive of a form of presentation between fiction and documentary and then watch "Wag The Dog".
I'd also suggest you read Paul Linebarger's "Psychological Warfare", but I know you'll no more do that than you will attempt to follow up on the other stuff.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
So here I am, russian in russia, posting on /.
From news@tv I`ve heard that russia *never* invaided georgia itself, only protected russian civilians in south osetia. And yes, reinforcemets were sent there since our peacekeeping forces were greatly outnumbered.
Then I took a look at what CNN says: "Russia targets & bombs civilians" and then bbc "100% unprovoked brutal invasion"
What a shock... Whom should I thust? wtf is goin on?
I recommend a splendid book about the history of desinformation by the russian state, written by insider, Anatoliy Golitsyn: "New Lies for Old"
http://www.amazon.com/New-Lies-Old-Anatoliy-Golitsyn/dp/0945001134
Inside the book you'll find why I wrote "russian", not "soviet"...
Except that you're again making the mistake of thinking of Russia as reasonable. With the events of today, it seems pretty clear Russia is determine to annihilate Georgia. First they outright a peace treaty and now they've actually invaded. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7554507.stm Let this be a lesson to whoever still thinks russians are to be trusted. As of two days ago, the russian government fully insisted it has no plans to enter Georgian territory. Nevermind that they have now begun to threaten other bordering countries - russia's ambassador to Latvia officially warned the Latvian government from even making remarks supporting Georgia, saying that will have "dire and permanent consequences".
...Russians are resorting to cyber warfare now? I'm shocked. Maybe the should get some lessons from the US on how to stop the information flow.
I can't find any information on whether Georgian govermnent is using similar measures? Can anyone confirm if Russian web sites accessible from within Georgia? If not, does the goverment even view the percentage of people connected to the Internet in Georgia significant enough in forming public opinion at all? Seeing that the GDP per capita is around $4,700 and that the montly ADSL tariffs I can dig up on Google are around $50, I'm not sure.
Folks, it's war. People are suffering there. Russian Big Oil vs. American Big Oil (yay, this is bound to get me modded up on /.). Pipelines. World domination strategies. Whichever way it turns out, average Georgians and Ossetians are going to end up f**** over. My sympathy goes out to them. War should be outlawed.
Georgia isn't in NATO, so they're on their own. Obviously Russia knew this before they made their, er, humanitarian intervention. So unless China decides to suddenly get pro-Georgian, it's unlikely there'll be a world war.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
5th column, in this case, is about 100% of the population of two regions. Although, of course, allowing them to have Russian citizenship, was exactly the way to make them even more loyal.
However, this also gave them freedom of movement, including the freedom of moving out of that region to either Europe or Asia. Georgia didn't give them even that.
You forgot to add "IMHO".
I really am upset about how the (FSB controlled) Russian government is acting. However, in this case, perhaps there is something those people outside of the conflict zone can do.
The rest of the cyberworld can protest again Russia by overloading the Russian Business Network.
It would be a whole new and interesting concept. An online world war? :)
Well overall they're very mature and intellectual. I like them. But the current government is a little bit too good at playing the "Crazy Ivan" bit for comfort. Putin has more or less co-opted power by rigging an election and we all know where that sort of stuff ends up. What would happen if they did menace Ukraine? Maybe we'd start to give them money to keep them quiet. Maybe they'd just help themselves to Azerbaijan or Estonia in the meantime. You know, a bit of "breathing space". BANG - next thing you know, the French have surrendered, the Italians have changed sides and we're sat in the back of a lorry wearing helmets and holding rifles.
You thought you could break the laws of physics without paying the PRICE?
Oh God, I can't believe he's making even MORE fake sockpuppets. If I'm not mistaken he had wileyhill already, and now he's going as far as to exploit non-serif fonts... lol, what an idiot. And me for falling for it.
... isnt the first goal in warefare to leave your enemy blind and confused?????
Joe Investor
It is evident that there is no direct evidence of Russian hackers, or Russian government attacking Georgian website. According to the latest information by posted by ShadowServer.org of Tuesday, 12 August 2008 titled "Georgian Websites Under Attack - Don't Believe the Hype", specifically refers to the fact that there is no proof that above mentioned organization are in fact responsible to the attacks. According to ShadowServer.org, the attacked sites fall under the following categories: * Adult video websites * Prostitution websites * White supremacy websites * Carder websites (sites that trade in stolen credit card numbers) * Online gambling websites * Virtual currency websites (think PayPal, but not nearly that legitimate) * Russian news websites * Random Russian websites * Many other websites Another speculation is that RBN is somehow involved in DDoS attacks. Nobody has a proof of that either.