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?
The thing is, "where it is," is in Russia. They might object to the US breaking in, rather violently in fact.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
It says... "Drink more Ovaltine."
The message was received by UB-40, and they proceeded to drink red red wine.
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."
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.
Same thing that happened when MySpace stopped being cool.
Rupert Murdoch will buy it.
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.
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.
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?"
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
You can pick this thing up from anywhere with the right equipment, right?
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.
Seriously, it's just the Russian Powerball Lotto.
Darth --
Nil Mortifi, Sine Lucre
Woah there. Salt. One time pad. It's like you grabbed some random crypto sounding words and slung them together.
Which is exactly why real numbers stations broadcast continuously and not only when sending useful messages. Otherwise you can correlate activity with broadcasts, which can be a huge information leak.
Here you can listen online http://uvb-76.blogspot.com/2010/08/august-23-2010-935am-pst-voice.html
Could it be a pun on words?
93 882 naimina 74 14 35 74
93 = Page 93
882 = Edition 882
naimina = at exactly = certainly
74 = D
14 = E
35 = A
74 = D
So the message is "Certainly dead." = Dead man's switch is dead for certain.
The phrase "100-calorie pack" popped in my head when I read your post. I'm going to hell for sure.