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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."
Location: The station's transmitter is located at Povarovo, Russia (56458N 37522E / 56.08278N 37.08944E / 56.08278; 37.08944), which is about halfway between Zelenograd and Solnechnogorsk and 40 kilometres (25 mi) northwest of Moscow, near the village of Lozhki.
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.
I presume you're talking about "Perimeter". While it is supposedly capable of operating in autonomous mode, it's not the normal mode of operation. It's only supposed to be turned on when the danger of a sudden nuclear strike is very likely, so as to ensure a retaliatory strike even in the face of the most fast and overwhelming incoming attack. Assuming it still exists, it has most likely never been on since the dissolution of the USSR.
Worth noting that all of this is mostly conjecture. Aside from the fact that something along these lines exists, there's very little reliable data on what the system even is in practice. Of course, that's what makes it ripe for conspiracy theories.
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