Daily Shaarli
January 21, 2022
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On May 23, 2021, at approximately 6:45 UTC, Churo and Fnu Lnu arrived at the operations room of the Minsk area air traffic control center with responsibility for Belarusian airspace. Churo and Fnu Lnu conveyed the purported bomb threat to the controllers on duty, even though the Flight had not yet departed Athens. Churo and Fnu Lnu specifically crafted the threat to coerce the pilots of the Flight to avoid continuing to their final destination of Vilnius, by claiming that the purported bomb would explode if the Flight landed there.
In addition, Churo and Fnu Lnu took the telling steps of directing that the Flight be diverted specifically to Minsk, and even though the Flight was still in the adjacent airspace of Ukraine, prohibiting the Minsk air traffic control center from making any notification to Ukrainian authorities of the purported bomb threat. This helped to ensure that the Flight would enter Belarusian airspace, and the plot to obtain and exercise control over the Flight could be executed. Fnu Lnu remained in the operations room at the Minsk air traffic control center from the time that he and Churo conveyed the purported bomb threat and directed that the Flight divert to Minsk, until shortly before the Flight landed in Minsk after being diverted, in order to ensure that the diversion plot was successfully executed.
Once the Flight reached Belarusian airspace, Fnu Lnu instructed the senior air traffic controller who was responsible for communicating with the Flight to inform the pilots of the purported bomb threat, describe that the threat had been sent by email, and make specific statements to ensure the threat seemed credible and to coerce the Flight to divert to Minsk. For example, Fnu Lnu directed that the air traffic controller should falsely inform the pilots that the threat to the aircraft was a level “red” – the most specific and credible category of threat. Fnu Lnu provided updates on the execution of the plot in real time to his superior in the Belarusian security services, Andry Antolievich Lnu, at one point expressing concern that the pilots might be stalling for time and the Flight might soon leave Belarusian airspace, which would jeopardize the success of their diversion scheme. In response to the false information conveyed as part of the defendants’ plot, the pilots of the Flight ultimately declared an emergency and diverted to Minsk National Airport, in accordance with the directives from Churo and Fnu Lnu.
Once the Flight landed in Minsk, Fnu Lnu left the air traffic control operations room and went to the airport tarmac. The Flight was met by Belarusian security services personnel, including individuals dressed in camouflage military-style uniforms, some of whom were wearing ski masks and carrying visible firearms. Fnu Lnu remained on the tarmac supervising the security forces and monitoring the screening of the passengers as they disembarked. Belarusian security services personnel then instructed the passengers to board one of several airport passenger buses.
Belarusian authorities boarded one of the buses and asked Individual-1 to come forward and identify himself, demonstrating that Belarusian authorities were aware that Individual-1 was on board the Flight. Individual-1 was escorted off the bus, where uniformed Belarusian officers separately searched him again on the airport tarmac. Belarusian officers then escorted Individual-1 back onto the bus and traveled with Individual-1 and the rest of the passengers to the airport terminal. Once the bus arrived at the terminal, the Flight’s passengers were detained in an area of the terminal secured by Belarusian security services. Additional Belarusian security officers met Individual-1 and the officers accompanying him, escorted Individual-1 away from the remaining passengers and detained Individual-1. One group of passengers from the Flight, including multiple U.S. nationals and Individual-2, was detained in a narrow hallway for approximately three hours at the airport. During that time, Belarusian authorities also escorted Individual-2 away from the other passengers and detained Individual-2. The Flight was ultimately allowed to depart from Minsk and continue to its original destination of Vilnius later that evening. No bomb was ever on the Flight. //
Soon after the diversion of the Flight, Belarusian government officials began to cover up what had happened. On or about May 24, 2021, the day after the Flight was diverted, Churo appeared at a press conference in Belarus with other Belarusian officials to address the Flight’s diversion. During the press conference, Churo stated falsely the Belarusian authorities had “done everything according to their technology and their job responsibilities” in handling the Flight. In reality, Churo knew that he and his co-conspirators had contrived the false bomb threat and had directed the Flight to divert to Minsk so that Belarusian security services could arrest Individual-1 and Individual-2. To further conceal the defendants’ plot, Kazyuchits directed Belarusian air traffic authorities to create false incident reports, including by doctoring the reports to misrepresent that the bomb threat was received at approximately the same time that the Flight entered Belarusian airspace and omit the fact that Fnu Lnu of the Belarusian security services was present in the operations room and directed activity during the Flight’s diversion. //
An indictment is merely an allegation, and all defendants are presumed innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law.
A heap overflow bug was recently discovered in the Linux kernel. The patch is available now in most major Linux distributions. //
In this one, there's a heap overflow bug in the legacy_parse_param in the Linux kernel's fs/fs_context.c program. This parameter is used in Linux filesystems during superblock creation for mount and superblock reconfiguration for a remount. The superblock records all of a filesystem's characteristics such as file size, block size, empty and filled storage blocks. So, yeah, it's important.
The legacy_parse_param() "PAGE_SIZE - 2 - size" calculation was mistakenly made an unsigned type. This means a large value of "size" results in a high positive value instead of a negative value as expected. Whoops.
A local attacker can use it to escalate their user privileges or crash the system. This can be done with a specially crafted program that triggers this integer overflow. That done, it's trivial to execute arbitrary code and give the attacker root privileges.
To exploit it requires the CAP_SYS_ADMIN privilege to be enabled. If that's the case, an unprivileged local user can open a filesystem that does not support the File System Context application programming interface (API). In this situation, it drops back to legacy handling, and from there, the flaw can escalate an attacker's system privileges.
Bill Cosby had his sexual assault conviction thrown out Wednesday — in a stunning ruling by Pennsylvania’s highest court that found a prosecutor’s decades-old agreement should have shielded him from criminal charges.
The fallen funnyman, 83, is set to walk out of a Philadelphia-area prison a free man after serving more than two years of a three- to 10-year sentence. //
In its 79-page ruling, the State Supreme court found that an agreement with then-Montgomery County District Attorney Bruce Castor Jr. prevented Cosby from being charged for allegedly drugging and molesting Andrea Constand in 2004.
Constand first reported the alleged encounter in 2005 to Castor, who decided not to pursue charges in the case, noting it took her a year to come forward and saying there were inconsistencies in her case.
So Constand sued Cosby in civil court weeks later, and the case was settled for an undisclosed sum.
But as part of that civil case, Castor and Cosby’s camp say they made a behind-the-scenes verbal agreement to have the actor give a deposition on Constand’s allegations in exchange for Cosby never being criminally charged over them.
Cosby had admitted in the deposition that he drugged Constand before performing a sex act on her, although he said it was consensual. //
“When an unconditional charging decision is made publicly and with the intent to induce action and reliance by the defendant, and when the defendant does so to his detriment (and in some instances upon the advice of counsel), denying the defendant the benefit of that decision is an affront to fundamental fairness, particularly when it results in a criminal prosecution that was foregone for more than a decade,” the ruling says.
“For these reasons, Cosby’s convictions and judgment of sentence are vacated, and he is discharged.”
The rollout of 5G cellular phone service has started affecting operations around the country—a terrific story in The Air Current by Jon Ostrower detailed the confusion at Palm Beach International yesterday, writing, “The aircraft’s radar altitude abruptly ran down to zero, causing repeated loud aural warnings: PULL UP WHOOP WHOOP DON’T SINK TOO LOW GEAR. The flight landed without incident in good weather, but it wasn’t the first time. ‘Exact same location multiple times the past two weeks,’ the pilot, who was on the flight deck for both anomalies, told The Air Current.”
And now Airbus has issued guidance to pilots that details the many things that could go wrong with their planes’ systems if the radar altimeter, built into a handful of systems, including Autoland and Ground Proximity Warning Systems, were to get erroneous readings.
https://theaircurrent.com/aviation-safety/5g-network-disruption-cluster/
Ryanair flight 4978 from Athens to Vilnius was forcibly diverted to Minsk while passing through Belarus airspace on Sunday, 23 May. The flight was 72 kilometers from Vilnius (VNO) when it made a 180 degree turn before diverting to Minsk at the behest of authorities in Belarus. The aircraft was allowed to depart about 7 hours after landing. //
On 20 January 2022, the United States charged four Belarusian government officials with aircraft piracy for forcibly diverting Ryanair flight 4978. The US was able to bring the charges because four of the passengers onboard the flight were US nationals. The charging documents for the first time lay out US version of how the flight was diverted. Those charged are either employees of the state air navigation service provider or state security services. //
A Washington-state based aerospace company has exited stealth mode by announcing plans to develop one of the holy grails of spaceflight—a single-stage-to-orbit space plane. Radian Aerospace said it is deep into the design of an airplane-like vehicle that could take off from a runway, ignite its rocket engines, spend time in orbit, and then return to Earth and land on a runway. //
The current design of Radian One calls for taking up to five people and 5,000 pounds of cargo into orbit. The vehicle would have a down-mass capability of about 10,000 pounds and be powered by three liquid-fueled engines. The idea would be to get as close to airline operations as possible, by flying, landing, re-fueling, and flying again. //
If Radian can succeed technologically, large markets would likely open. A vehicle like Radian One would be well suited to fly people to commercial space stations in low Earth orbit, which NASA seeks to foster development of by 2030. These planes could also perform Earth observation work and play a role in bringing back space-manufactured goods. There is also the potential for point-to-point travel on Earth.
There can be no question that this is a hugely challenging endeavor that many people have tried before. Will Radian find the right stuff, at the right moment in time? We'd like to think so.