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Russian 'doomsday' plane's radio equipment stolen by thieves
- qwerty456127 6y agoGood! Country officials should understand they're in the same boat with ordinary citizens and won't be able to escape if they fail to prevent a nuclear attack.
- gregoriol 6y agoI think they have 4 of those
- qwerty456127 6y agoA Russian friend of mine once told me a joke: aliens have abducted a Russian, gave him two perfect steel balls, put him in a perfect empty room without doors or windows and told him to come up with a trick to entertain them once they return in a week. They threatened to disintegrate him if he fails to amuse them. Once they returned and asked him to perform the trick he invented he told them he's sorry but he has broke a ball and lost the other one.
- botzi2001 6y agoI know a variant of this about a Romanian but the important thing is the reflexive: "One ball got lost and one got broken" or as a word for word translation: "One ball lost itself, the other one broke itself"
- acqq 6y agoSo the end was probably supposed to be "I'm sorry I can't show you anything because one ball broke in no time, and later another one simply disappeared."
- pwiecz 6y agoIn Poland it's Polish, not Russian ;)
- cafard 6y agoEzra Pound supposedly told Ford Madox Ford that he, Ford, could be placed naked in an empty room and within half an hour reduced it to complete disorder. Given the wide circulation of quips of this form, there may be some ur-form millenia old. [edit: corrected "of this source" to "of this form"]
- ngcc_hk 6y agoIt was a shock. But in the hk Apple daily it said it is possible just for the scrap metal value.
- MaxBarraclough 6y agoHow do the economics of such a theft work? Would an item like that be worth much on the black market? Enough to risk being shot by the soldiers guarding the airfield? Presumably having an insider would greatly reduce that risk.
- mtgx 6y agoStep 1: Send your CIA agents to steal it. Step 2: Make it look like common thieves did it. Step 3: Profit?
- dexen 6y agoYou joke but there's a historical precedent - the story of Lunik[1], soviet spacecraft that was intercepted, examined, dismantled (!) and then put back together and moved forward, by CIA operatives. [1] https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/kent-csi/vol11no1/html/v11i1a04p_0001.htm https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intellig...
- secfirstmd 6y agoSome other examples. Russia stole a sidewinder from the US. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19042850 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19042850 Brits stole a towed acoustic array from the Russians https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/navy-ships/a28794/1982-uk-sub-stole-soviet-sonar-device/ https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/navy-ships/a28794/...
- varjag 6y agoThese items have copious amounts of gold plated contacts and platinum/palladium capacitors. Many hundreds dollars of scrap value. EDIT: to people downvoting, selling stolen equipment for scrap value is extremely common in former USSR.
- mhoad 6y agoThere is only a very small group of people with the skills, resources and motivations to do something like this and I am positive none of them happen to be random freelancing criminals.
- jakedata 6y agoExamining the stolen equipment might yield insights into encryption used by the Russian military, perhaps even recoverable keys. This of course leads to all kinds of further information potentially becoming recoverable from prior intercepted communications. Or it will just be sold for scrap.
- anovikov 6y agoGiven the way Russia works, i expect it to be sold to scrap dealers in exchange for a couple of bottles of fake Dagestanian "vodka" :D
- jacquesm 6y agoAt a border inspection a wagon full of wodka is opened. It turns out to be empty. The customs officers inspect wagon after wagon. All of them are empty. When they come to the last there is a very drunk railroad official lying on some straw sleeping off a fairly obvious round of heavy drinking. They sober him up and interrogate him. "Where is all the wodka?" "I sold it!". "Then where is all the money?" "I drank it!".
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- bra-ket 6y agonever underestimate the lengths American Intelligence will go to (for a couple of bottles).