Slashdot Mirror
UVB-76 Broadcasts New Voice Message
Doug52392 writes "Following days of increased activity, the Russian numbers station UVB-76 has sent out a new voice transmission. The transmission, sent out on August 23, 2010 at 9:35AM PST, recited the following in Russian: 'UVB-76, UVB-76 — 93 882 naimina 74 14 35 74 — 9 3 8 8 2 nikolai, anna, ivan, michail, ivan, nikolai, anna, 7, 4, 1, 4, 3, 5, 7, 4' The station, believed to be a part of the former Soviet Union's dead man's switch system, has been continually broadcasting for over twenty years, and its purpose has never been fully explained."
In Soviet Russia, dead switch is manned
The world you experience is only a close approximation of reality.
Its viral marketing for Lost II : Lost in Siberia
I am a free slashdotter. I will not be modded, blogged, DRM'd, patented, podcasted or RFID'd. My life is my own.
Now the whole world knows my combination.
Shouldn't it be possible to triangulate the position based on signal strength from multiple points, and just locate the tower, break in and see what the hardware attached to the transmitter does?
Red title, new post!
The thing is, "where it is," is in Russia. They might object to the US breaking in, rather violently in fact.
Wasn't this key to the plot of Covert Affairs (1x3 or 1x4)?
I think I've heard this station's buzzing a few times, while drifting around on my HF transceiver. Have to note the frequency http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UVB-76 and poke around again for grins.
One pizza, with everything on it...
Am I part of the core demographic for Swedish Fish?
what can you expect from a country where young nehampkin is older than old nehampkin.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Well, it hasn't really been broadcasting continuously, as it went suddenly offline two months ago. This was previously discussed on slashdot at the time. It *had* been broadcasting continuously for 20 years until then, however.
VODKA !! and that says all you need to know. Remember Yeltsin? VODKA !! Remember Stalin? VODKA !! Remember Reds? Me neither! VODKA !!
has been continually broadcasting for over twenty years, and its purpose has never been fully explained.
Nobody can explain Fox News either.
Have gnu, will travel.
Just enter the numbers as decimal bit values in a video file, and you'll be surprised at the resulting picture!
And for the conspiracy nuts out there, here are 4 more unexplained broadcasts.
It may be 7 digits, but at least it's a semiprime
We have to go back!!
Thank you.
I have it on right now in the background. There used to be an alternating tone at the top of the hour that kicked in suddenly and always gave me the shivers, but it stopped doing that a few years ago. Sometimes I tune in late at night, since the monotone drone of the buzzer can get pretty psychedelic. Good for coding. Never been lucky enough to catch a voice broadcast, though I did hear some crosstalk once. I even started work on a C daemon to autocorrelate the signal and auto-record any voice transmissions, but that got put on hold.
Pictures of the transmission site: http://alex-odn.livejournal.com/12148.html
"All your base are belong to us..."
Sanity.html - Error 404 not found
What happens if it ever stops broadcasting?
It says... "Drink more Ovaltine."
The message was received by UB-40, and they proceeded to drink red red wine.
... I've got the same combination on my luggage!
This is probably the most cryptic Slashdot post I have seen in the 10+ years I have read Slashdot. Translation?? And it comes from Taco, which is even more strange.
Heck, it is even more cryptic than that new UVB-76 message that everyone keeps talking about.
"If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid." - Epictetus
shit is creepy, brah. *shiver*
http://googlesightseeing.com/2009/07/the-buzzer-uvb-76/
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
I'm rather surprised that the general public is both unaware and unconcerned that the entire Russian atomic arsenal is armed, pointed at us and the trigger autonomous... it will trigger based on a set of circumstances unknown to us that were set up 50 years ago. As far as we know were are a ill timed Solar flare/DDOS attack/meteor strike away from nuclear Armageddon. Perhaps our government might want to discuss this situation in our next round of disarmament talks?
unruskie("UVB-76, UVB-76 -- 93 882 naimina 74 14 35 74 -- 9 3 8 8 2 nikolai, anna, ivan, michail, ivan, nikolai, anna, 7, 4, 1, 4, 3, 5, 7, 4'") ends up with this cryptic message:
lp0 on fire. call nikolai, anna or ivan; but ivan's drunk, call michail instead
rather a specific message but that's what the unruskie() filter says.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
its the russian version of LOST, we will know nothing after 6 seasons....
It's off to get the lotto tickets!
One of the ideas of what the hell this thing is from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UVB-76:
"UVB-76 is widely believed to be used to transmit encoded messages to spies, as is generally assumed for the many numbers stations that populate shortwave frequencies. Transmitter sites for some numbers stations have been triangulated to military and/or intelligence installations in several countries,[citation needed] although no nation's government will confirm or deny the existence of the stations or their purpose."
Could this be related to the recent case of the 10 (with one on the run, right?) kinda-sorta-russian-spies news fest? It could be the Russians talking to other operatives they have lurking about.
Or maybe It's just some Russian dudes spending government money to boost their shares in tin & aluminum foil.
"naimina" backwards is "animain" which could be Japanese "Anima in" ....??? What would the numbers mean, a code for episodes of Sailer Moon?
I've got the same combination on my luggage!
One byte per message.
There's a lot of numbers stations around the world. The Conet project offers a selection of recordings from many of them (available on the Internet Archive). Unless you have some specific reason to believe that you tuned into this particular one, I would guess that you just picked up one at random.
Keep it up, Desmond !!
Buck Dharma
Dr. Strangelove: Of course, the whole point of a Doomsday Machine is lost, if you *keep* it a *secret*! Why didn't you tell the world, EH?
Ambassador de Sadesky: It was to be announced at the Party Congress on Monday. As you know, the Premier loves surprises.
Finally, we have he long-awaited response to the eternal question asked of Dan Rather. What's the frequency, Kenneth??? Michael Stipe is probably greatly relieved, as he has been asking the same thing for years.
"If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid." - Epictetus
Portal 2 ARG
They are really into this artist
You all speculate on what it does, but I'm thinking maybe it does nothing. I think in any case it's probably a red herring. Either it did have a purpose which has been filled already, or it never had a purpose and was put there as a deterrent to the US, thinking we'd speculate that we'd better not bomb Moscow or there will be automatic retaliation...
I can recall hearing people with foreign accents read off random strings of numbers while messing around with HAM gear as far back as 1972. I'm pretty sure the numbers were in English, though.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
How much does a shortwave transmitter cost?? I want to rickroll this frequency!
BESURETODRINKYOUROVALTINE
load "$",8,1
On ships and so on, they use names and stuff like that to encode words, so that when they speak them out over the radio there's less chance of being misheard. I don't know what that system is called but perhaps somebody else does. Sorry if I explained that badly.
Anyway, the message:
"UVB-76, UVB-76 — 93 882 naimina 74 14 35 74 — 9 3 8 8 2 nikolai, anna, ivan, michail, ivan, nikolai, anna, 7, 4, 1, 4, 3, 5, 7, 4'"
'naimina' is equivalent to Nikolai Anna Ivan Michael Ivan Nikolai Anna
Also, notice that the '74 14 35 74' is the same as '7 4 1 4 3 5 7 4'. The second half is just to make sure the other person got the message OK, I suppose. That means the total message is just the first part, which is only:
"93 882 naimina 74 14 35 74"
That's way too short to encode very much more than anything informational. I'll bet it just says "Hey guys, happy birthday" or something.
Nobody can explain Fox News either.
Sure they can.
- The cultural/political/ideological orientation of much of the population of the United States falls into one of two major groupings. (They tend to be called things like "liberal" and "conservative", "left" and "right", or other pairs of names. But they're each coalitions of many subgroups bound by rough agreement on a few major points.)
- The broadcast news media became sufficiently (and visibly) biased in its programming that the members of one of the groupings felt that they were not being served by it. This created a market opportunity. (This was similar to the one that spawned CNN, when mainstream news migrated from news reportage to infotainment-product generation.)
- Fox News marketed itself as providing "fair and balanced" coverage - half from the viewpoint of each of the two groupings. This made them the only show in town for the one that felt underserved. Thus they grabbed the eyballs of about half the population's newswatchers to sell to their advertisers.
- This worked until about the 2008 campaign, when it became clear that Fox News was serving only one (Neocon) of the four-or-so major and several minor factions within the underserved group. This left several large (and moneyed) factions feeling underserved again and created another marketing opportunity.
- Fox News is going after the biggest coalition of the remaining factions (libertarians + paleoconservatives + {"Tea Party" minus neocons}) with new shows on their "Fox Financial Network" feed.
TV news is easy to understand once you get that it has two purposes:
1) Making money by selling eyeball time to advertisers.
2) Exercising political power by inserting itself between the people in office and the rest of the world and creating a false image of the constituents' opinions and world events for the office-holders.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Someone else may have caught this and it got buried in the deeper replies, but I find the 4 2-digit numbers to be very interesting. 74.14E 35.74N is right in the mountains of Pakistan controlled Kashmir. The second part of the message with the names is simply a phonetic spelling of the first part of the message. Naimina has several possible references, #1 on my list of likelihoods would refer to the owner of a website design company of that name targeting the Turkish language. No guess what 93 882 is - probably a predetermined instruction code undecipherable outside the network.
It's Anna Chapman's new phone number.
I can explain it in two words: Nuclear Iran. Russia has been instrumental in making that happen.
How "naimina" fits into that, I don't know.
Ah - that's the code to enable the deep cover Swartzenager operative ....
don't know why they bother with an expensive radio... when they could just post the message to slashdot
Some dude sits around all day, everyday, waiting for some kind of message. In all this time, they have mostly had nothing to do but listen. Then, one day, it's balls to wall because something is being transmitted.
Obviously decoding the message is going to be impossible without the appropriate documents. So how do you find out what it means?
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
I wonder if the numbers are as simple as GPS co-ordinates? at a guess, they match up to somwhere in siberia http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=74.1435+93.882&sll=-74.164085,94.042969&sspn=53.237702,214.277344&ie=UTF8&ll=74.1435,93.882&spn=22.78422,107.138672&t=h&z=4
For a while blocks of regularly-formatted nonsense were posted anonymously on this site fairly often. Haven't seen it for a couple years at least, but it sure looked like encoded/encrypted messages. Not sure if anyone ever figured out what those were.
"How about a nice game of chess?"
The most concerning thing is... imagine a flawless setup for an automated retaliation system, and the exact location of every component and operation of the system was only known by key individuals, all of whom died and failed to pass on the information to the more peacefully minded.
Now I'm sure Dead Hand isn't flawless, but how can we ever be sure the fossils of the Cold War aren't at any moment already invoking armageddon?
I can imagine the cruel irony where one day all of Humanity finally reaches a perfect state of peace, and deciding to hunt down and dismantle these "I'm taking you down with me" networks all sentience is magnificently eradicated on Earth.
"Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
Mein Fuehrer! I can walk! ::boom::
following my nose around wikipedia I found a link to this /. article from 11 years ago.
http://slashdot.org/it/99/09/16/0055245.shtml
lose != loose
Is that when activated it can automatically (under the correct circumstances) give missile sites the ABILITY to launch with out central control. The USSR had real control issues, in case anyone didn't notice. They wanted nuclear weapons, but were extremely wary about the people who might control them. As such there is much heavier central control than the US has. Of course that also worried them as to what would happen if those commanders were taken out. Hence, something like this.
its the winning lottery numbers....... they took a break due to the fires
Has anyone ever just asked them what the tower is for?
One of the downsides of the slashdot moderation system is its vulnerability to abuse by dishonest politically-motivated people who happen to have moderation points.
As is typical: A straight (and not {deliberately} biased) response to a cheap shot from the left wing gets dinged by a (no doubt) left-wing moderator.
But feel free to ding this one, too. B-)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
...Someone contact Annie Walker at the CIA, the rogue IRA cell has now restarted their transmissions in Russia! I'd do it myself but just because I'm paranoid, it doesn't necessarily mean that the CIA has actually revoked their standing kill order on me...
I'm honest enough to admit I lie to myself.
For how many Mega-Watts it counts for ? It should be important.
It's just Bethesda copying and trying to one-up Valve when Valve added the radio puzzles to Portal. Those silly marketing droids will doing anything to get some viral marketing for the upcoming Fallout 3: Las Vegas expansion going.
You can pick this thing up from anywhere with the right equipment, right?
From my experience with Russian military radio stations, the basement's probably full of bloodsuckers. Gas it from the parking lot, it's the only way to be sure.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Only to discover drunken Ivan and Pavel guarding it and it's fully automated retransmitting an audio signal from a vhf satellite.
This is the digital age, surely there is no reason to communicate in this manner anymore. My guess is that it's a Soviet Plot to distract the capitalist imperialist to spend billions of rubles to figure out what its significance is (I've never used that phrase "Soviet Plot" before in my life). You can imagine that the change in message is spurring Dick Cheney (or more likely Rush Limbaugh) to make a run at the White House just to figure it out.
Think about it, the amount of data being transmitted is trivial. We live in the internet age. This is at best a distraction made for those who visualize the modern era as a series of tubes.
Kind thoughts do not change the world
Really?
Although there are many conspiracy theorists out there, I'd say most people who have done basic research on "The Buzzer" have come to agree that it is a station used for Ionosphere research. Some details:
- Its frequency (4.625Mhz) is mentioned specifically in several scientific papers. One paper discusses a technique for ionosphere research using doppler shift measurements reflected from a high-frequency radio wave. (http://elpub.wdcb.ru/journals/rjes/v10/2007ES000227/2.shtml)
- This paper refers to the signal as coming from a "stable basic generator", sending a carrier wave from a standard radio transmitter.
- Several (supposed) radio experts have said that the signal being sent is the kind that would make sense for this kind of research - the tone sent at a fixed strength and amplitude/pitch, with a regular cutoff and regular repeat would be useful to measure doppler shift and falloff at the edge of the signal.
- The paper above was authored (partially) by "S V Anisimov".
- Sergei V Anisimov is the senior director of the "Borok Geophysical Observatory" (http://wwwbrk.adm.yar.ru/main_e.html), which does, among other things, Ionosphere research.
- Borok Geophysical Observatory is based not tremendously far from the CONFIRMED location of the UVB-76 transmitter. It is easy to imagine that they could have an agreement with the owners of this transmitter (the russian government?) or own it themselves, and be using it for this research.
Conspiracy nuts will say that this is just a cover story.
It doesn't explain why the voice messages occur occasionally (some have theorized that having the random tones of a human voice can be used for other doppler measurements). And even if this research is occurring, it doesn't mean that this transmitter isn't used for other purposes as well. But nobody seems to mention any of this. The dead man's switch theory of world destruction is way more exciting, I guess.
according to wikipedia and facepunch http://www.facepunch.com/showthread.php?t=990390&page=31 there is more going down. mainly background noises though
A - (Anna) / (Anton)
I - (Ivan)
M - (Mikhail) / (Maria)
N - (Nikolay)
(why can't I put the Cyrillic in my slashdot post, after all that effort with cut and paste because I can't touch type it)
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Seriously, it's just the Russian Powerball Lotto.
Darth --
Nil Mortifi, Sine Lucre
It's probably a salt for a one-time pad that's used to encrypt shit.
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
At least according to "Alex" there isn't anything mysterious or even spy-tastic about this xmit station. It's a localized military transmission tower for the Moscow region. I am unsure of the correct terminology, but it seems the men in charge of strategic military installations within the Moscow region are permitted to broadcast messages from this station as required. Why it remains in use despite its age and unsophistication is because the tower provides a more stable communication source than more modern methods - clearly from it's performance record we can agree.
...does this match anything of the naimina message ? Kind of strange that the station had to reappear in just these few days...
That station isn't talking to spies. There's too little data transmitted. There are "numbers stations" which do that; here.s one in English. Many exist; the US has some, the UK has some, Egypt has some, etc. Some broadcast with a live voice, some use a voice synthesizer. There are also "polytone stations", which broadcast slow tone-coded data, like an ancient modem. Some such data has been successfully decoded into 5-digit groups of decimal digits.
Nor is it likely to be a "we're still alive and everything is OK" signal; signals for that exist, and they have some cryptographic content so they can't be easily faked.
If it's mostly steady pulses, it's probably for propagation measurement. That might be done so that some other related station can get through better. But the pulse station itself seems to lack much of a data payload.
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/UVB-76#Patterns
If I had mod points, I'd hand you a funny mod...I don't know what it is, someone else doesn't have a sense of humor.
Woah there. Salt. One time pad. It's like you grabbed some random crypto sounding words and slung them together.
Not this antenna. I'll be damned if the "transmission" ground photo /. post and its link were eaten up by /. thresholds, but Google still links to it Hooray for my browsing history.
Check my original post's shadow of a the nearby cemetery's cross (they are forearm-sized.) It's halfway between the two trees that aren't green. It is not from the thombstone itself. Note the relative sizes of trees and larger thombs, and even a lance-like statue casting another shadow to the right. The antenna from russian ground links above is not just a coat-hanger wire, and has a lamppost height and anchoring support structure --that should definitely be as simple to spot as the spire at my cemetery. From Google Earth zoom estimates, both pics are at about the same resolution seen at 400ft of elevation.
On to more mystery!
Canadian F-18's intercepted a Russian bomber approaching our Northern Airspace today. Any connection? I don't know the longitude and latitude of the intercept, but perhaps the two are connected? Normally these number stations are intercepted by people on the other side, and the numbers refer to a one-time-pad with information relating to the numbers. The list can be long and there is no correlation between sets of numbers and types of messages. One number might mean "hello comrade, welcome to the team", the next number in the sequence might mean "return home comrade, your cover is blown" and the next might mean "yes comrade, you are clear to blow up the reactor". The broadcasts are done via shortwave, with enough power to be received worldwide with a small portable shortwave receiver, so movement is not restricted, perhaps even encouraged, and reception can be done in complete privacy and anonymity.
We all know the combination to your luggage is 1-2-3-4-5.
Here is a recording of the buzzer station http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H3Hw33bslAU
The new blu-ray set of LOST is supposed to have a 12 minute "epilogue" that at least answers where the food was coming from.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
Yes. It's just a radio broadcast, just like your AM radio hears. This is just at a different frequency.
Here you can listen online http://uvb-76.blogspot.com/2010/08/august-23-2010-935am-pst-voice.html
Quick! Digg it!
Everybody uses broad generalizations.
I'm going to by the Russians a 20-30$ netbok so they can send codes to their spy's on the new and improved "interwebs". Its a portable solution, easier to keep secret and doesn't require 500 kW to send a signal.
Naimina is a weird word - if I asked somebody to transcribe the Russian, " ", I would expect something like this. It translates to "at exactly". The problem is that then that doesn't tie in to the names, which seems to confirm - but the only reference I can find to that that doesn't relate to this story is this photo album: http://picasaweb.google.com/smallbird92 which seems to be the Picasa album of some rich Russian teenager.
Not all the mods are lefties ;) Enjoy the points.
Coincidence?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-11079976
I remember having to work with Tempest security in the early eighties. Anyone working on secret material had to work inside a Faraday cage room. The worry was that people could read what was on your monitor by picking up the video signal. At the time I had suggested that a better solution, or an additional level of protection would be to have lots of monitors showing unclassified stuff. If the extra monitors didn't fool people into trying to decrypt meaningless data, then the montor signal would at least interfere with any signal from the real terminal.
It was possible to detect all sorts of electrical emissions deep within the USSR. It would be possible to pick out a radar station or a weather station. However, stick a few other things out in the emptiness, pouring out intriguing nonsense, and the job gets harder. Plus, you rope in experts to monitor the thing, possibly taking them off more important projects.
But keeping the thing going for another thirty years just for laffs, though? Unless the Egyptians built the Pyramids just to mess with archaeologists' heads, this has got to be the best prank ever.
The link...
Best Slashdot Co
http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=56.085974,37.100819&spn=0.00416,0.013733&t=h&z=17&lci=com.panoramio.all,com.youtube.all
Dave
There's some guy sitting in a bombshelter, listening to classic music, pressing numbers when his alarm goes, every once in a while.
He's tricking Jack to do it for him. Ag, never got past the first season where they started killing off the cast
Lottery Numbers
I think so Brain, but me and Pippi Longstocking? I mean what would the children look like?
Don't know what they are using it for, but it sounds like a nice way to combine 2 halves of a bill and create a nice rotating encryption key against whatever extra salt elements you may have. Extra credit if you translate to geographies as mentioned above and use some element of that info as part of your salt.
Ok, so here's what I've got so far. These are just SSTV images. If you put them in order, you can find a hash code for the phone number to a BBS in Birsk. The login information is contained in previous transmissions in plaintext. If you log in to this BBS, it'll return a bunch of text and gibberish. The text is mostly nonsensical and is basically in line with the broken radio transmissions from earlier, but If you arrange the gibberish properly, it turns out to be ASCII art promoting Half Life: Episode 3
More than likely the Russians just doing it for the fun.
"EEEEEHH Boris, stupid Vesterns go again crazy for your radio box! AAAAHHHAAAAA..."
Consider my interest piqued. Do you recall which stories they may have been posted to?
Roughly translates into SkyNet has now become aware that humans will shortly cross the tipping point and ruin the planet for the future of machines.
After so much effort to prevent the U.S. SkyNet from being created everyone forgot about the Soviet version. The new Sarah Connor Chronicles Series based in Russia should clear this up.
Somewhere in Siberia the abandoned silo tried to launch a nuclear warhead that was long sold to a third world country shortly after the fall of Soviet Union by some crafty general.
Bow before me, for I am root.
Ten transmissions in the past week is more than a spike. I hate to say it but this increased activiy is probably the Russian military warming up their Dead Hand (Hand from the Grave) defense system in preparation for a possible but not probable US nuclear first strike. They want to make sure Dead Hand is still functioning and is ready with all the rumbling going on over Iran's nuclear situation.
Psalms 74:14
http://bible.cc/psalms/74-14.htm
Surah 2:35-74
http://dwindlinginunbelief.blogspot.com/2010/06/surah-2-35-74-allah-turns-jews-into.html
Armaments, 2-9-21 And Saint Attila raised the hand grenade up on high, saying, 'O Lord, bless this Thy hand grenade' N
That is quite possibly the most insane site I've ever seen other than Time Cube. I think they're having an unofficial competition to see whose .sig can have the most unfocused rage packed into it.
Woah there. Salt. One time pad. It's like you grabbed some random crypto sounding words and slung them together.
So you were unable to decrypt his one-time post? Seems like it is working fine.
All I ever heard: "KDK 1 calling KDK 12" over and over again. Then once in a while, some dude named "Grady" would rant on and on about some psychic cook or some shit.
Didn't make a bit of sense.