An investigation by The Mail on Sunday has discovered that the explosive hacked emails from the University of East Anglia were leaked via a small web server in the formerly closed city of Tomsk in Siberia. . . .
Russia – one of the world’s largest producers and users of oil and gas – has a vested interest in opposing sweeping new agreements to cut emissions, which will be discussed by world leaders in Copenhagen tomorrow.
Russia believes current rules are stacked against it, and has threatened to pull the plug on Copenhagen without concessions to Kremlin concerns.
The Mail on Sunday understands that the hundreds of hacked emails were released to the world via a tiny internet server in a red brick building in a snow-clad street in Tomsk.
The original internet link was quickly removed after the information spread from it like wildfire on to international websites.
A message written in English accompanied the leaked package of emails. It read: ‘We feel that climate science is too important to be kept under wraps.
‘We hereby release a random selection of correspondence, code and documents. Hopefully it will give some insight into the science and the people behind it.’ . . .
Tomcity – the server – and Tomline, its parent company, were unavailable for comment yesterday.
The firm offers an internet security business to prevent hacking and bugs and the ‘compromising of confidential information’.
Other divisions of the firm are involved in laying the cable which provides high-speed internet access to companies in the Siberian city.
The server is believed to be used mainly by Tomsk State University, one of the leading academic institutions in Russia, and other scientific institutes.
Computer hackers in Tomsk have been used in the past by the Russian secret service (FSB) to shut websites which promote views disliked by Moscow.
Such arrangements provide the Russian government with plausible deniability while using so-called ‘hacker patriots’ to shut down websites. . . .
A Russian hacking specialist said last night: ‘There is no hard evidence that the hacking was done from Tomsk, though it might have been.
‘There has been speculation the hackers were Russian. It appears to have been a sophisticated and well-run operation, that had a political motive given the timing in relation to Copenhagen.’
Once in a blue moon, even a country like Russia can act as a force for good in the world. It just takes the world to lose its mind - like now, when leaders like Barack Obama and Gordon Brown are rushing madly to make a global warming suicide pact.
Sergey Gavrilov secured reduced time in jail after confessing: ‘I did not like the meat very much. It was too fatty. But I was so hungry, I had to eat it.’
The 27-year-old was given a lenient prison sentence because the judge said he was starving and needed to eat after spending all his money on vodka and gambling machines.
The Russian man hit his mother Lyubov, 55, over the head with a brick and then strangled her with an electric cable following a row over her refusal to give him her pension money to spend on alcohol.
A court heard how he put her body on the balcony of the family flat near Samara, in southern Russia, and took her allowance before going on a two day drinking and gambling binge.
Returning to the flat, he soon ran out of food and started slicing meat from his mother’s body.
‘She was frozen, like meat in the freezer,’ he told police.
He cooked soup and pasta with meat from his mother’s body over a period of more than a month, he said.
The Russian criminal code dictates 15 years in jail for his crimes but the judge said he was reducing it slightly because Gavrilov – who previously served time in jail for robbery – pleaded guilty and ‘he was not keen to eat the meat, he just was hungry’.
Gavrilov was jailed for 14 years and three months.
Psychiatric tests found the man was ‘normal’ mentally and fully aware of what he was doing.
I don’t know what is more remarkable – the judge’s reasoning or the fact that 15 years in jail is all one normally gets in Russia for killing his mother for her pension money and eating her.
If Obama realy believes the Russians will help him to talk Iran out of nukes if he only throws them the U.S.’s staunchest European allies, Poland and the Czech Republic, he is more naive than Jimmy Carter. It’s even worse if it is just a cover to give him a reason to ditch the missile shield plans that took Bush so much effort to work out with the Czechs and Poles.
Yesterday’s DOS attack that shut down Twitter for two hours may have been a result of Russia’s attempt to silence a Georgian blogger who dares to tell the truth about its aggression against Georgia in 2008. From CNN:
A blogger believed to be the target of the attack that brought down Twitter Thursday has told CNN the cyber assault was politically motivated and timed to coincide with the one-year anniversary of the Russia-Georgia conflict.
“Cyxymu” has identified himself to CNN as “George,” and the owner of the Twitter, Facebook and LiveJournal accounts named by Facebook’s security officer as being the target of a co-ordinated online attack.
George told CNN in an e-mail his username is “the name of my home town, the capital of Abkhazia (Sokhum) written in Russian and typed in Latin letters.”
He confirmed he is 34 years old and based in Tbilisi, Georgia, but declined to give further information which may reveal his identity.
George told CNN his blogposts may have “irritated” someone enough to incite a cyber attack.
His recent posts include: “How Russia was preparing military agression (sic) against Georgia, how they were training soldiers and mobilizing military equipment, what kind of provocations were carried out by the separatists prior to the war.”
“Seems somebody did not like such a chronicle of events,” he told CNN.
“I was also writing about all reforms implemented in Georgia in recent times so that all people outside Georgia could have proper information.” He said the main purpose of his blogs was to promote the resumption of relations between the Abkhazian and Georgian people.
“I assume the above-mentioned could irritate those who are the authors of the given cyber attack and who will never accept the idea of the United, independent, democratic and prosperous Georgia,” he said.
The United Industrial Corporation, a Russian manufacturer, said this week that the world’s first floating nuclear power plant will go into operation on Russia’s eastern coast by the end of 2012.
The manufacturer, known also as O.P.K., told Green Inc. that the first model would be used to help power Viluchinsk, a city on the Kamchatka peninsula that serves as an atomic submarine base.
O.P.K. said similar models could power other cities in northern Russia in the future. But according to nuclear experts, mining companies are likely to use Russian-built floating reactors to power operations to extract oil and gas and valuable minerals from the Arctic and other remote regions.
O.P.K. is building the plant in the shape of a ship 144 meters (472 feet) in length and 30 meters (98 feet) wide to accommodate two 35-megawatt reactors. Construction of the plant, called KLT-40C, began in February this year.
I just hope they don’t sale them through the Gulf of Aden.
Nigaz: that’s how Russia’s Gazprom and a Nigerian gas company have named their joint venture, prompting the creation of a Facebook group called “Nigerians No Nigaz”.
It looks like an honest blunder, but it still won’t help Russia’s efforts to persuade the world it’s a civilized country.
A Russian postcard (yes, postcard) from the 1900s. It is titled “Revellers” and depicts men drinking vodka in front of a government-run liquor shop in Kursk province.
Eighty per cent of Russia’s gas supply to the EU goes through Ukraine. You’d think Putin would want to keep Ukraine happy, instead of acting as if punishing it for choosing independence was more important to him than being seen by Europe as a reliable supplier of the only product he has to offer it.
When another cut-off of gas supply to Ukraine over its debt loomed late last year, Putin assured Europe that this time it would not be affected. If EU leaders were still worried, they were right to be:
Russia shut off all gas supplies to Europe through Ukraine on Wednesday — leaving more than a dozen countries scrambling to cope during a winter cold snap.
As of Wednesday, nations including Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Greece, Italy, Macedonia, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia and Turkey all reported a halt in Russian gas shipments. Others — including Austria, France, Germany, Hungary and Poland — reported substantial drops in supplies.
In the Balkans, people celebrating Orthodox Christmas scrambled to find other sources of heat for their homes as authorities cut off some gas to conserve supplies. Croatia announced a state of emergency, which allows it to begin rationing to industrial users.
Schools and kindergartens in Bulgaria closed down as authorities tried to find alternative heating. In Bosnia, where gas operator Sarajevogas said the situation was close to a humanitarian disaster, woodcutters revved up chain saws to cut wood for fireplaces.
Romania and Bulgaria held national security meetings to address the issue, while Hungary and Slovakia, which receives all of its gas from Russia, began reducing natural gas deliveries to big industrial customers.
Putin needs to decide what is more important to him - Ukraine’s relatively small debt, or Russia’s reputation as a reliable energy supplier in Europe’s eyes. He’s ruining the latter by pursuing the former. He is even alienating Russia’s traditional allies in the Balkans by cutting off their gas on Orthodox Christmas Day.
Stalin comes in third, nearly wins in “greatest Russian of all time” poll in Russia: Is some rethinking in order?
What’s interesting is that Russians voted on the Internet and through text messaging. I take it they were much younger than the usual Stalinist crowd consisting of 70-year-olds who march with Joe’s portraits on October Revolution day. It’s even worse than I thought, then.
My vote, were I Russian, would go to Alexander Pushkin, a poet, artist and free thinker, who was also on the list. Free thinkers, however, are not as popular as tyrants in Putin’s Russia.
Russia is a rather xenophobic nation, to put it very mildly, and Georgians (of whom Stalin was one) are especially unpopular now. But even that doesn’t prevent many Russians from loving their most terrible tyrant.
