Video identifies GRU generals

After a month long hiatus, I am back, posting, in the middle of a long and tedious project. What prompted me to post is an email from a distant acquaintance pointing out that several names on the list of GRU brass has appeared on this video.

See Ivanov describing what he believes is an ingenious security feature that refuses to let out a pass card that failed to lock an interior door, at 4:24 in the video.

My acquaintance says that these generals are identifiable in the video (some patronymics are not available or in question, as marked):

Васильков, Алексей Ф(?) -Vasilkov, Alexey F(?), visible at locations 3:19, 4:06,

Романенко, Леонид -Romanenko, Leonid, at 3:19, 4:06,

Гурьянов, Александр - Guryanov, Alexandr, at 5:13, 5:18, 6:14

Венгереш, Виталий С(?)- Vengeresh, Vitaly S(?), at 5:18, 6:14, 6:19,

Лыков, Роман - Lykov, Roman, at 6:14, 6:19

Гуща, Юрий Андреевич Gushcha, Yury Andreevich, at 6:14, 6:19

Головастик, Виктор Денисович - Golovastik, Victor Denisovich, at 6:14, 6:19

Долгих, А. П.(?) - Dolgikh, A. P.(?) location 6:54 in video (the lone general snacking in the background while Putin and Ivanov are picking out a cake)




Of course, your input is welcome - you can always leave comment as an anonymous.

compare with the list of FSB A-K, K-Z

Russia breaks Swiss banks

I launched another bot on Friday morning, and a trifling matter of the day distracted me from following up on the bot's findings. I remembered it just now, on Sunday evening, and, instead of another harvest of secret information on Russia's communication and naval matters, the raw text returned contained the names of Alexey Kudrin, Sergey Ignatiev, Alexey Ulyukaev, Dmitri Pankin, Alexander Gorban and Nadezhda Ivanova (Алексей Кудрин, Сергей Игнатьев, Алексей Улюкаев, Дмитрий Панкин, Александр Горбань и Надежда Иванова).

The reason the bot found these names was that the text originated in a Russian Government's interoffice memo discussing the forthcoming visit of these Russian financial official to Washington, DC. The team , it seems, is to participate in the meetings of the IMF and the World Bank. This all seems to be innocuously Russian, or even nouveau-Russian. Except there appears a sprinkling of neo-Russian words that my acquaintances from Moscow have identified as egotistically pompous proclamation of money withdrawals. Except the withdrawals were from such easily identifiable insittutions as UBS and Credit Suisse, and among the destination were Nekrasovian pseudonyms for Gazprom, and LUKoil(!!!???)

It comes as no suprise that the news now is percolating through the printed media, and, firstly, of course, through the blogosphere (as confirmed by Huffington Post) that the UBS and Credit Suisse and about to writedowns (or writeoffs) of loss, the first in five years, as a result of unprecedented market conditions. It appears that, concerted or not, Switzerland became too small for the Russian Bear's wallet, and might be assigned the status of a quaint and picturesque winter resort.

Hutch's E-mail application

Associative memory brings back an episode of the Internet's nascent days, 1995-early 1996. Hutch asked me to accompany him on a electronic mail procurement mission.

We knocked on the door of a Palmer Park apartment walk-up, and were led inside a turmeric-fumigated abode. The Indian engineer, a software magician, was uneasy, since it became clear to me that he owed Hutch a big favor for an INS matter. Hutch asked in no uncertain terms if in a matter of three (3!) weeks he would have a program he could carry around on a floppy diskette (1995, remember? No sign of USB), which would allow him "to send electronic mail from any computer" connected to the internet and having a floppy drive.

And thus the Indian wrote the magic code. Hutch used it mainly at random terminals of public libraries. The peculiarity of e-mails which he sent was that the headers From: field contained a domain of a web site he had to be on to send the e-mail.
I remember seeing headers like

From: Curious George CGN @07.22.1995.politics.cnn.com

I think this was the coolest e-mail application I ever seen. It was just like my bot that has been working wonders for me, see Russian Torpedo, Putin's Letter, espionage search results, FSB Employee list, FSB secrets, and Bot writing.