Tag: Russian

Small air leak on space station traced to Russian service module

Posted on by [email protected]_84

The case of the small air leak on the International Space Station may be nearly cracked.

Investigators have traced the source of the leak to the “main work area” of the Zvezda Service Module, the heart of the Russian part of the station, NASA officials announced today (Sept. 29).

“Additional work is underway to precisely locate the source of the leak,” agency officials wrote in an update today. “The leak, which has been investigated for several weeks, poses no immediate danger to the crew at the current leak rate and only a slight deviation to the crew’s schedule.”

In photos: The Expedition 63 mission to the International Space Station

That deviation included a wakeup call last night for the three astronauts living aboard the orbiting lab, NASA’s Chris Cassidy and Russian cosmonauts Anatoly Ivanishin and Ivan Vagner. The trio collected data with an ultrasound leak detector throughout the Russian

… Read More Read More

Russian surveillance tech startup NtechLab nets $13M from sovereign wealth funds

Posted on by [email protected]_84

NtechLab, a startup that helps analyze footage captured by Moscow’s 100,000 surveillance cameras, just closed an investment of more than 1RUB billion ($13 million) to further global expansion.

The five-year-old company sells software that recognizes faces, silhouettes and actions on videos. It’s able to do so on a vast scale in real time, allowing clients to react promptly to situations It’s a key “differentiator” of the company, co-founder Artem Kukharenko told TechCrunch.

“There could be systems which can process, for example, 100 cameras. When there are a lot of cameras in a city, [these systems] connect 100 cameras from one part of the city, then disconnect them and connect another hundred cameras in another part of the city, so it’s not so interesting,” he suggested.

The latest round, financed by Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, the Russian Direct Investment Fund, and an undisclosed sovereign wealth fund from the Middle East, certainly

… Read More Read More

Facebook takes down more fake accounts linked to Russian intelligence

Posted on by [email protected]_84

“While we have not seen the networks we removed today engage in these efforts, or directly target the US 2020 election, they are linked to actors associated with election interference in the US in the past, including those involved in ‘DC leaks’ in 2016,” Gleicher wrote.

“These fake personas posed as editors and researchers to solicit articles for these websites. This network posted primarily in Russian and English about news and current events, including protests and elections in Belarus, Russian and Ukrainian politics, geopolitical conspiracies, Russia-NATO relations, Russia’s relations with neighboring countries, and criticism of US foreign policy, socio-economic issues in the US, and US political candidates on both sides of the political spectrum.”

This isn’t the first time Facebook says it found fake accounts linked to Russian state actors. Earlier this month the company took down a handful of accounts tied to Russia’s Internet Research Agency that successfully tricked

… Read More Read More

Can Media and Tech Giants Avoid Becoming Russian Tools in 2020?

Posted on by [email protected]_84

With the election just 39 days away, major tech and media organizations are wrestling with how to avoid a repeat of 2016. From mass bans targeting the Kremlin’s social media-bot networks on sites like Facebook, to news outlets like the Washington Post preparing its reporters to stay vigilant when receiving purportedly leaked information, there appears to be an attempt this time around to not become “a de facto instrument of Russian intelligence,” as the New York Times once put it.

Facebook announced this week that it had discovered and shut down two separate disinformation networks run by Russian “military intelligence services.” The social media giant also took out a third network that had ties to the same internet troll farm that was involved in the 2016 election-tampering operations. “We removed 214 Facebook users, 35 Pages, 18 Groups and 34 Instagram accounts for violating our policy against foreign or government interference

… Read More Read More