Pinboard (jm)
https://pinboard.in/u:jm/public/
recent bookmarks from jmGerät 32620: the machine that powered numerous number stations2020-09-02T09:52:20+00:00
https://blog.ardy.io/2020/8/geraet-32620/
jmGabriele Gast: 'After agreeing to help [the Stasi], Gast very soon found herself sent on an intensive spycraft course, including hands-on training with the latest in covert communications equipment. She was given a Stasi code name, "Gisela", which came with a false passport and a new handbag, incorporating a well concealed secret compartment. Back home in Aachen, every Tuesday evening at the same time she tuned into a shortwave radio station from East Germany and carefully wrote down a long line of numbers, read out in a monotone, without further elaboration, by a "radio presenter". When she decrypted the messages from Schmidt she found some were instructions while others were simply encouraging love messages.'
]]>spies number-stations 1980s history ussr hardware encryption gabriele-gast germanyhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:a101db64879d/Chernobyl True Story: What The HBO Miniseries Gets Right (& Changes)2019-06-25T22:04:26+00:00
https://screenrant.com/chernobyl-hbo-true-story-characters-aftermath-explained/
jmchernobyl fact fiction hbo tv fictionalisation ussr historyhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:e9637769b37f/The Rise of Pirate Libraries2016-04-22T16:04:11+00:00
http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-rise-of-illegal-pirate-libraries
jmToday’s pirate libraries have their roots in the work of Russian academics to digitize texts in the 1990s. Scholars in that part of the world had long had a thriving practice of passing literature and scientific information underground, in opposition to government censorship—part of the samizdat culture, in which banned documents were copied and passed hand to hand through illicit channels. Those first digital collections were passed freely around, but when their creators started running into problems with copyright, their collections “retreated from the public view,” writes Balázs Bodó, a piracy researcher based at the University of Amsterdam. “The text collections were far too valuable to simply delete,” he writes, and instead migrated to “closed, membership-only FTP servers.” [....]
There’s always been osmosis within the academic community of copyrighted materials from people with access to scholar without. “Much of the life of a research academic in Kazakhstan or Iran or Malaysia involves this informal diffusion of materials across the gated walls of the top universities,” he says.
]]>pirates pirate-libraries libraries archival history russia ussr samizdat samizdata academia papershttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:ec56f81da810/The Alternative Universe Of Soviet Arcade Games2015-09-07T10:56:16+00:00
http://io9.com/the-alternative-universe-of-soviet-arcade-games-1729012559
jmUnlike machines in the West, every single machine that was produced during Soviet-era Russia had to align with Marxist ideology. [...] The most popular games were created to teach hand-eye coordination, reaction speed, and logical, focused thinking. Not unlike many American games, these games were influenced by military training, crafted to teach and instill patriotism for the state by making the human body better, stronger, and more willful. It also means no high scores, no adrenaline rushes, or self-serving feather-fluffing as you add your hard-earned initials to the list of the best. In Communist Russia, there was no overt competition.
]]>high-scores communism russia cccp ussr arcade-games games historyhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:ec3a87c954a2/The Titanium Gambit | History | Air & Space Magazine2015-07-22T16:30:26+00:00
http://www.airspacemag.com/history-of-flight/the-titanium-gambit-3804526/?all&no-ist
jmvia:maciej titanium history cold-war detente ussr usa boeing russia aerospacehttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:183fdfbdd66f/The 1940s origins of Whataboutery2013-08-03T21:32:19+00:00
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/08/the-soviet-era-strategy-that-explains-what-russia-is-doing-with-snowden/278314/
jmThe exchange is indicative of a rhetorical strategy known as 'whataboutism', which occurs when officials implicated in wrongdoing whip out a counter-example of a similar abuse from the accusing country, with the goal of undermining the legitimacy of the criticism itself. (In Latin, this rhetorical defense is called tu quoque, or "you, too.")
]]>history language whataboutism whataboutery politics 1940s russia ussrhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:e42e90e12549/