Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Russian Government Edits Wikipedia On Flight MH17

Posted by samzenpus on from the writing-history dept.

An anonymous reader writes A political battle has broken out on Wikipedia over an entry relating to the crash of Malaysian Airlines flight MH17, with the Russian government reportedly removing sections which accuse it of providing 'terrorists' with missiles that were used to down the civilian airliner. A Twitter bot which monitors edits made to the online encyclopedia from Russian government IP addresses spotted that changes are being made to a page relating to the crash. All-Russia State Television and Radio Broadcasting Company (VGTRK) changed a Russian language version of a page listing civil aviation accidents to say that "The plane was shot down by Ukrainian soldiers." That edit replaced text – written just an hour earlier – which said MH17 had been shot down "by terrorists of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic with Buk system missiles, which the terrorists received from the Russian Federation."

2 of 667 comments (clear)

  1. We're all harmed by growth of Internet propaganda by JasonCoombsCEO · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Twitter bots that monitor and call attention to things, or future AI tools we develop that provide similar functionality for monitoring what appears to be the cyber behavior of certain groups or certain people, have a downside, too. Everyone knows it isn't very hard for somebody with substantial financial resources (or a sysadmin who works at a particular ISP and has substantial political beliefs or alliances) to spoof the IP addresses that are thought to be associated with certain groups/nations. This evolving condition of intrinsic uncertainty around digital media and Internet communications needs new technical and social solutions. See: http://slashdot.org/submission...

  2. Re:It was Putin's missle? by oobayly · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I've realised why people keep quoting this. FlightAware provides a low resolution track of the flights - about 100 points* for a flight between Amsterdam and KL. FlightRadar24 provide a track with a 1 minute resolution (~600 points, with large sections missing where there is no ADS-B or MLAT coverage).

    * They now seem to have slightly improved resolution, but now highlight where the track is actually known. Check for yourself - the tracks where data is available is in green, then they draw a great circle where the track is unknown.
    MH17 2014-07-15
    MH17 2014-07-16
    MH17 2014-07-17

    This is the data I originally compiled from FlightRadar24 - All MH17 flights since 14th May - and as you can see, they have data points provided every minute, as opposed to guessing where the aircraft was.

    Basically, you've a choice of using a website that provides low resolution lat/lon pairs (FlightAware), or a website that provides timestamped lat/lon data, along with speed, course, altitude and area (FlightRadar). If you're going to use rubbish data to support a hypothesis, you'll end up with a rubbish hypothesis. In fact, you're doing it wrong if you need to use rubbish data to "prove" your hypothesis.

    As for the altitude, it's true that the pilots request FL350, but were refused - this could have been for any given reason - congestion (apparently there have already been reports of near misses over Russia due to congestion due to aircraft avoiding Ukraine airspace - I'm trying to find where I read that), weather (which has been suggested by a pilot's group). However seeing as an SA-11 has an altitude range of 60 - 25,000m, 600m isn't going to make a difference if you're attempting to shoot down a civilian airliner.