Ukraine Notes - LOTS of stuff going on
I'll have more very soon, some much more in depth. As usual, under a cut.
The Mig-29 jets being given to Ukraine from Poland have been stopped by the USA. The jets would have been staged through a NATO base in Germany, and Putin threatened to declare Germany an aggressor in the conflict with Ukraine, which would have made things really nasty. So the jets are going nowhere - for now.
A Russian tabloid, on their web site, posted that over 9,800 troops had been killed and over 16,000 wounded. Ukraine claims over 14,000 dead. Russia admits to 498 dead. Shortly after it was posted, the article was taken off the web site then put back up without the casualty figures and without comment or explanation.
Because of third-party cloud data storage providers ceasing doing business in Russia, it is estimated they have less than two months data storage capacity left.
A friend of Putin’s - who is not on the sanctions list - his super yacht stopped in Norway to fuel. The locals are refusing. They suggest that they row or sail home.
Clinical drug trials have been disrupted. This has literally life and death conseqences for a lot of people who depend on these trials for not only medicatoin, but medication that may be keeping them alive. Not that this is keeping him alive, but for example, my dad is on home chemotherapy pills for leukemia. I imagine there's a lot of people throughout Ukraine in similar or more dire straits. In my dad's case, he's largely beat leukemia, this is more to keep it in check.
Speaking of clinical trials, Pfizer has stopped clinical trials in Russia! But they say they’re going to continue supplying medicine.
Russia has shut down their Instagram feed. It took them long enough, a lot of what they would class as disinformation was being circulated there.
Ukraine has started using Clearview’s facial recognition AI program during the war to identify Russian assailants and also the dead.. Clearview says it has more than 2 billion images from Russian social media to help identify the dead. It can also be used to help reunite refugees, identify Russian special ops/sabateurs, and debunk fake social media posts.
Kaspersky anti-virus/security software is based in Moscow. The German Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) is warning that it carries a risk that the Russian gov’t could use it to carry out mass cyber attacks against anyone using it, especially critical infrastructure organizations. Kaspersky denies what Germany is saying. Well, sorry Kaspersky, but you’re stuck in a disinformation twilight zone and you’re going to be there as long as Putin is in office.
Crypto brokers in the United Arab Emirates are being swamped with requests to liquidate BILLIONS of dollars from Russians trying to find safe havens for their money. Whoda thunkit.
Russian state media has been hit with a deluge of resignations in protest over the war. Dozhd (TV Rain) was forced off broadcast in 2014 and went online-only, it has now completely shut down and many of its people have fled the country. Radio Ekho Moskvy was forced off the air, as was a Latvian news station due to the new Russian disinformation laws.
Belarus railway workers have disabled railway lines connecting their country to Ukraine! This prevents further railway resupply of Russian troops - and also evacuation of Russian casualties by rail. There are no details as to how this was accomplished at the moment.
There is a debate among open source software developers on whether to deny software updates to Russia. This is quite a contentious issue as the Open Source ethos is very anti-discrimination and it’s not like the FSB is the only user, or even the main user. Meanwhile, elsewhere in open source news, there have been some very malign actors who have been coding some nastygram into OS packages that are geofenced and only activate if the computer they are running on is located inside Russia or sometimes Belarus. They range from simple non-harming message taunts to a very clever data wiper! It was extremely basic RM commands that were encoded with Base64 so they weren’t immediately recognizable with a code scan, yet executed no problemo. The article on Bleeping Computer.com says “Developers should exercise caution before using 'node-ipc' in their applications as there is no assurance that future versions of this or any library released by RIAEvangelist will be safe.” RIAEvangelist just burned absolutely all good karma that he had in the open source community to the ground. The problem with such an untargeted attack like this is you’re also hitting hospitals, orphanages, education centers, etc. You can claim this is justified as Russia is bombing such places, but two wrongs don’t make a right.
Three Russian cosmonauts arrived at the International Space Station. And when the hatch opened, they were wearing yellow suits with blue trim, resembling the colors of the flag of a certain country that is being pummeled by Russia right now. When asked what was going on, he replied that they had a surplus of yellow cloth. The suits take six months to make and are in the colors of the technical school that the three cosmonauts went to.
There is bad internal dissension in the Russian gov’t right now: the head of the FSB (Putin’s old homeys), which is co-equal and co-responsible to the military on the invasion, is under house arrest. Apparently Putin is furious over how poorly the invasion has been carried out and now repercussions are being seen and felt. Of course, there is in no way any fault that can be laid on him!
A lovely couple of quotes:
"We understood long ago that there is no such thing as an independent western media. If you take the United States, only Fox News is trying to present some alternative point of view." -- Sergei Lavrov, Russian foreign minister
"There isn't a single country in the world that is as easily manipulated as America." -- Kremlin spin doctor Oleg Matveychev
The Mig-29 jets being given to Ukraine from Poland have been stopped by the USA. The jets would have been staged through a NATO base in Germany, and Putin threatened to declare Germany an aggressor in the conflict with Ukraine, which would have made things really nasty. So the jets are going nowhere - for now.
A Russian tabloid, on their web site, posted that over 9,800 troops had been killed and over 16,000 wounded. Ukraine claims over 14,000 dead. Russia admits to 498 dead. Shortly after it was posted, the article was taken off the web site then put back up without the casualty figures and without comment or explanation.
Because of third-party cloud data storage providers ceasing doing business in Russia, it is estimated they have less than two months data storage capacity left.
A friend of Putin’s - who is not on the sanctions list - his super yacht stopped in Norway to fuel. The locals are refusing. They suggest that they row or sail home.
Clinical drug trials have been disrupted. This has literally life and death conseqences for a lot of people who depend on these trials for not only medicatoin, but medication that may be keeping them alive. Not that this is keeping him alive, but for example, my dad is on home chemotherapy pills for leukemia. I imagine there's a lot of people throughout Ukraine in similar or more dire straits. In my dad's case, he's largely beat leukemia, this is more to keep it in check.
Speaking of clinical trials, Pfizer has stopped clinical trials in Russia! But they say they’re going to continue supplying medicine.
Russia has shut down their Instagram feed. It took them long enough, a lot of what they would class as disinformation was being circulated there.
Ukraine has started using Clearview’s facial recognition AI program during the war to identify Russian assailants and also the dead.. Clearview says it has more than 2 billion images from Russian social media to help identify the dead. It can also be used to help reunite refugees, identify Russian special ops/sabateurs, and debunk fake social media posts.
Kaspersky anti-virus/security software is based in Moscow. The German Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) is warning that it carries a risk that the Russian gov’t could use it to carry out mass cyber attacks against anyone using it, especially critical infrastructure organizations. Kaspersky denies what Germany is saying. Well, sorry Kaspersky, but you’re stuck in a disinformation twilight zone and you’re going to be there as long as Putin is in office.
Crypto brokers in the United Arab Emirates are being swamped with requests to liquidate BILLIONS of dollars from Russians trying to find safe havens for their money. Whoda thunkit.
Russian state media has been hit with a deluge of resignations in protest over the war. Dozhd (TV Rain) was forced off broadcast in 2014 and went online-only, it has now completely shut down and many of its people have fled the country. Radio Ekho Moskvy was forced off the air, as was a Latvian news station due to the new Russian disinformation laws.
Belarus railway workers have disabled railway lines connecting their country to Ukraine! This prevents further railway resupply of Russian troops - and also evacuation of Russian casualties by rail. There are no details as to how this was accomplished at the moment.
There is a debate among open source software developers on whether to deny software updates to Russia. This is quite a contentious issue as the Open Source ethos is very anti-discrimination and it’s not like the FSB is the only user, or even the main user. Meanwhile, elsewhere in open source news, there have been some very malign actors who have been coding some nastygram into OS packages that are geofenced and only activate if the computer they are running on is located inside Russia or sometimes Belarus. They range from simple non-harming message taunts to a very clever data wiper! It was extremely basic RM commands that were encoded with Base64 so they weren’t immediately recognizable with a code scan, yet executed no problemo. The article on Bleeping Computer.com says “Developers should exercise caution before using 'node-ipc' in their applications as there is no assurance that future versions of this or any library released by RIAEvangelist will be safe.” RIAEvangelist just burned absolutely all good karma that he had in the open source community to the ground. The problem with such an untargeted attack like this is you’re also hitting hospitals, orphanages, education centers, etc. You can claim this is justified as Russia is bombing such places, but two wrongs don’t make a right.
Three Russian cosmonauts arrived at the International Space Station. And when the hatch opened, they were wearing yellow suits with blue trim, resembling the colors of the flag of a certain country that is being pummeled by Russia right now. When asked what was going on, he replied that they had a surplus of yellow cloth. The suits take six months to make and are in the colors of the technical school that the three cosmonauts went to.
There is bad internal dissension in the Russian gov’t right now: the head of the FSB (Putin’s old homeys), which is co-equal and co-responsible to the military on the invasion, is under house arrest. Apparently Putin is furious over how poorly the invasion has been carried out and now repercussions are being seen and felt. Of course, there is in no way any fault that can be laid on him!
A lovely couple of quotes:
"We understood long ago that there is no such thing as an independent western media. If you take the United States, only Fox News is trying to present some alternative point of view." -- Sergei Lavrov, Russian foreign minister
"There isn't a single country in the world that is as easily manipulated as America." -- Kremlin spin doctor Oleg Matveychev