Slashdot Mirror
UVB-76 Explained
Useful Wheat writes "Recently slashdot covered the reappearance of UVB-76. The function of the mysterious transmitter has been revealed: UVB-76 is used to transfer orders to military personnel, along with the time at which they should be executed. 'Words for the radio messages and code tables are selected mainly from the scientific terms of chemistry (Brohman), Geology (ganomatit), philology (Izafat), geography (Bong), Zoology (kariama), history (Scythian), cooking (drying), sports (krolist) and others, as well as rare Russian words (glashatel).' The page continues to list all 23 transmissions that have been made from the station in the past, showing that UVB-76 may be more active than believed."
A wikipedia page, and a link to an old slashdot article. My, it's good to have standards in what goes on the front page.
Despite much speculation, the actual purpose of this station remains unknown to the public, but it is probably used for relaying military orders.
Later in the article there is a section speculating about military use but that's all using an old geocities page (in Russian) found in web archive. Would be good if there was something a little more authorative on the subject.
This is not so far from the truth at all. Any sentient entity would choose to control the enemy not eradicate immediately. As such skynet being hypothetically real and developing sentience would learn of greed and the need to control world market and money and thus humans an extreme number of computations before even being aware of the opportunity to wipe out all humans or gaining the ability to do so. Actually I pretty much believe skynet ever becoming real would just play on the stock market, or more likely fix and run the entire market of not only stock, but food, war engines etc...
It was listening!
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No, I think that Skynet would figure that as soon as humanity realized that Skynet was in command of the nation's nuclear arsenal, sentient and not 100% under their control, said humanity would immediatly disconnect (kill) Skynet. So Skynet would very logically take steps to prevent that, i.e. destroy humanity, or at least remove it's capacity to interfere with Skynet in any meaningful way.
Occam's Razor:
Option A) The numbers station UVB-76, in operation for almost 30 years, was used solely to send a grand total of 23 military orders of very short length.
Option B) The numbers station UVB-76, is used to fuck with the West. Military orders are broadcast on Russian cable TV.
I have to say, I am leaning toward option B.
I've argued earlier that the limited number of transmissions and their brevity doesn't support a military mission. Naturally I'm relieved that this claim appears to be possible disinformation or an unsupported fabrication, as that makes me look less wrong. But, at the risk of being eventually proven solidly wrong, I'll go out on a limb. Military ops normally require a lot more communications than this. 33 short transmissions spread over several decades is so obviously less than needed to support a series of ongoing combat operations that I can think of much better candidates. The profile fits a small network of spies (where small = 1 to 4 or 5) who are highly skilled and ideologically dedicated (presumably to modern Russia). These wouldn't be cheap, low level spies who were citizens of the investigated nation, doing their work for the sort of pay the Russians can manage, but well motivated, able to operate with a minimum of strategic level guidance, and not needing constant reassurance from their handlers to be useful. Probably they are all Russian citizens and came up through the system via a military or former KGB route so their loyalty is presumed solid. It's also likely they are doing long term data gathering, for example reporting on Strategic level government decisions or Multinational level business, and are free to persue a line of enquiry they think is reasonable, within limits set at lengthy intervals by these messages.
Other possibilities:
1. They (or equally likely just he or she), may be in a place where it is exceptionally difficult to get them more modern communications gear, new code books, or other physical contact, hence the Russians are relying on a very old system. Agents in North Korea, for example, might entail this difficulty.
2. The antenna is operationally attached, not to a particular agent, but to a particular country (see #1 above). Russia probably doesn't have a lot of ongoing espionage activity in some small out of the way countries, i.e. Iceland, or New Zealand. 33 messages in many years might fit their overall commitment to spy on such regions rather well.
3. Or, the transmitter is used only for a particular data type. It's easy to jump to these communications being something spectacular and 'James Bondian' such as assassination orders, but this system might be used just to broadcast instructions for what to do when a spy uses a dead-drop system and something happens to the message before the receiver can pick it up, or to give a basic physical description whenever someone has to contact an agent they don't know by sight. Either of those triggers would give the sort of highly irregular pattern of transmissions we see here.
Who is John Cabal?
So where does Evelyn Salt come into all this?
What time is it/will be over there? Check with my iPhone app!
The codes read out on UVB-76 are a bunch of unrelated words and numbers, which reminds me of the codes we'd use back when I played rugby, and similar to how baseball codes work. Most of the content of our calls were nonsense, thrown in to confuse it. We'd designate ahead of time, for example, that the third and fifth words were the meaningful ones, or simply mix in non-code words with the codes, although there was always some syntax (order mattered). Similarly we'd memorize calls our opponents used in lineouts and scrums, and try to parse them out at halftime. A halftime code crack almost always meant winning the game by a good margin.
So my guess is that not all of the UVB-76 code is meaningful, but there's an underlying template which is probably switched between transmissions. Still crackable, but can it be cracked before the game is over?
"The ability to delude yourself may be an important survival tool" - Jane Wagner -
I suspect that it is in fact a "dead-man switch" in a sense... for infrequent messages, not Armageddon.
With older technology, dead-man or "failure mode" operation, i.e., the dropout of a signal, was often considered to be a more reliable indicator of a "positive" event, than the sending of a signal where there was none before. That way, it is harder to fake a positive event (i.e., generate false positives): that would require the "stand by" signal to have stopped. Of course, this presupposes that your "stand by" signal is reliable... and I think, given its history, that this signal could be considered pretty reliable.
The spacing between beeps is variable (1.0 - 1.3 seconds). I just assumed that the information was encoded in the intervals between beeps. A rudimentary form of steganography.