Russian officials dump iPads over spy fears

Russian officials dump iPads over spy fears
Math wizards stand ready to join Malaysia Airlines search
FBI: analysis of MH370 pilot’s computer files coming soon
Bad weather threatens to impede search for MH370
Are you afraid of the dark? Earth Hour 2014 to be held on March 29
Nothing found at Tanduo during clearing operation – commando

Posted: 26 Mar 2014 07:17 PM PDT

Russian government officials have swapped their iPads for Samsung tablets to ensure tighter security, the telecoms minister told news agencies on Wednesday, channelnewsasia.com reported.

MOSCOW: Russian government officials have swapped their iPads for Samsung tablets to ensure tighter security, the telecoms minister told news agencies on Wednesday.

Journalists spotted that ministers at a cabinet meeting were no longer using Apple tablets, and minister Nikolai Nikiforov confirmed the changeover "took place not so long ago."

He said the ministers' new Samsungs were "specially protected devices that can be used to work with confidential information.""Some of the information at government meetings is confidential in nature and these devices fully meet these demands and have gone through the strictest system of certification."

Nikiforov denied that Russia was clamping down on US technology in response to Western sanctions imposed over its takeover of Ukraine's Crimea peninsula.

"We are not proposing any sanctions," he said.

But he did mention reading reports that "American special services… will significantly increase the volume of information they intercept (which) of course causes serious concern to many governmental clients."

"This obviously orientates Russian clients, primarily state ones, to be very choosy about their partners in IT," Nikiforov said.

He added that South Korean firms such as Samsung, along with Chinese ones, could be interesting to Russia in this respect.

Russia's then-president and now Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev visited Silicon Valley in 2010 and received an iPhone as a gift from the late Steve Jobs, using it to send his first tweet.- AFP/fa

We encourage commenting on our stories to give readers a chance to express their opinions; please refrain from vulgar language, insidious, seditious or slanderous remarks. While the comments here reflect the views of the readers, they are not necessarily that of Borneo Post Online. Borneo Post Online reserves the right not to publish or to remove comments that are offensive or volatile. Please read the Commenting Rules.

Math wizards stand ready to join Malaysia Airlines search

Posted: 26 Mar 2014 07:14 PM PDT

Math wizards who pinpointed the final resting place of a doomed Air France jet deep beneath the Atlantic stand ready to do so again for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, channelnewsasia.com reported.

RESTON: Math wizards who pinpointed the final resting place of a doomed Air France jet deep beneath the Atlantic stand ready to do so again for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370.

No one has yet asked Metron, a scientific consulting firm, to join the search for the missing Boeing 777, but that hasn't stopped it from getting a head start, using the few nuggets of data currently in the public domain.

"We're trying to get our hands on all the publicly available data so we can start doing an independent assessment," Van Gurley, head of Metron's advanced mathematics applications division, told AFP on Wednesday.

As that assessment evolves, "we'll provide it to anyone who's interested," added Gurley at Metron's head office in Reston, Virginia, a suburb of Washington.

Founded in 1982, with a staff of 170 that includes experts in applied mathematicians, Metron conducts highly specialised mathematical analysis for US national security applications, such as sonar systems.

But it has also developed a much-used search and rescue protocol for the US Coast Guard based on a theorem developed by early 18th century English statistician, philosopher and Presbyterian minister Thomas Bayes.

"It's a structured method that forces you to look at all the available information about a problem and then apply a confidence factor — how confident you are in any piece of information," Gurley said.

No single bit of data is ever thrown away, but as information is confirmed over time — say, when a speck in a satellite image turns out to be genuine debris — the probability that the target item is in a given spot evolves.

In the case of Air France Flight 447, which crashed into the Atlantic in 2009 with 228 on board, the target was its flight data recorder lying at the bottom of the ocean.

The French air accident investigation agency BEA turned to Metron to figure out the most likely spot where the so-called black box might be — successfully, it turned out when undersea drones recovered it in May 2011.

In that case, however, floating debris from the Airbus A330 had been located within a week and the search area was limited to a circle about 80 miles (130 kilometres) in diameter, Gurley said.

That's practically a flyspeck compared to the vastness of the remote section of the Indian Ocean where the Malaysian authorities said Wednesday that "122 potential objects" had been spotted by satellite in recent days — with not a single piece of confirmed debris since the jet went missing on March 8.

"Everybody wants to know where it is, and the answer is: we don't know," said Gurly, sitting alongside a vivid computer image of the entire Indian Ocean depicting the latest search zones west of Australia.

Overlaid on the screen are green triangles, each representing a ship at sea, provided by exactEarth, a Canadian firm that tracks ship movements worldwide in real time using satellite signals.

Just three triangles stood out in the search zone Wednesday, all of them Australian vessels combing the waters for debris.

Commercial shipping lanes to and from Australia lie well to the north, and they're not especially crowded. Gurley acknowledges that Bayesian theorem doesn't guarantee success.

While the Coast Guard regularly uses Bayesian theorem to find, say, fishermen lost at sea, it came up short when Metron was asked in 2007 to find missing US adventurer Steve Fossett, who had been out flying a small airplane in a mountainous corner of California.

A year passed before a hiker just happened upon some of Fossett's belongings, some distance from where he was presumed to be. Bones found nearby were confirmed through DNA tests to be his.

Asked what are the odds of locating Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, let alone the cause of its disappearance, Gurley said the technical means to accomplish the mission is at hand, as difficult as it might be.

"The technology is available to get to the ocean bottom in this part of the world and search it," he said. "But it's an incredibly challenging task — and I think it's really going to come down to time, and will." – AFP/nd

FBI: analysis of MH370 pilot’s computer files coming soon

Posted: 26 Mar 2014 07:08 PM PDT

The FBI will soon complete its analysis of data from a flight simulator taken from the home of the pilot of a missing Malaysia Airlines jet, the US agency's director said Wednesday.

WASHINGTON: The FBI will soon complete its analysis of data from a flight simulator taken from the home of the pilot of a missing Malaysia Airlines jet, the US agency's director said Wednesday, channelnewsasia.com reported.

Malaysian officials had asked the Federal Bureau of Investigation to help recover files deleted from the simulator's hard drive.

FBI chief James Comey told lawmakers that experts were working "literally round the clock" to finish their analysis, in the hopes that the data could provide clues as to what happened to Flight 370, which vanished March 8 with 239 passengers and crew on board.

Malaysia "took us up on our technical abilities, which involves the exploitation of certain computer forensic materials that they've given to us. That work is ongoing," Comey told a House subcommittee meeting to discuss the FBI's 2015 budget request.

"I don't want to say more about that in an open setting, but I expect it to be done fairly shortly, within a day or two."

Malaysian police removed the simulator from Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah's home nearly two weeks ago, after investigators said they believed the Boeing 777 had been deliberately diverted from its intended route by someone on board.

Malaysia on Monday announced that evidence showed the jet crashed in the southern Indian Ocean.

A multinational search for the wreckage continued Wednesday, energised by recent satellite images showing more than 100 floating objects in the remote waters.

Comey did not indicate whether the results of the analysis would be made public.- AFP/nd

Bad weather threatens to impede search for MH370

Posted: 26 Mar 2014 07:07 PM PDT

Thunderstorms and gale-force winds on Thursday threatened to impede a frantic international search for wreckage from Flight MH370 after satellite images of more than 100 floating objects sparked fresh hopes of a breakthrough.

PERTH: Thunderstorms and gale-force winds on Thursday threatened to impede a frantic international search for wreckage from Flight MH370 after satellite images of more than 100 floating objects sparked fresh hopes of a breakthrough, channelnewsasia.com reported.

Malaysia said the imagery taken in recent days by a French satellite showed "122 potential objects" in the remote southern Indian Ocean, although nothing has yet been pulled from the treacherous seas despite a multinational recovery operation.

Acting Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein has cautioned that it was impossible to determine whether the objects were related to the Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 which crashed on March 8 with 239 people aboard after mysteriously disappearing.

The Australian Maritime Safety Authority, which is coordinating the search some 2,500 kilometres (1,550 miles) southwest of Perth, said they were in an area authorities have pinpointed as a potential crash zone.

"Positions in the satellite information released by Malaysia Remote Sensing Agency were within Wednesday's search area," it said as a fleet of planes prepared to head for the search zone once again before the weather worsens.

Six military planes from Australia, Japan and the United States will fly sorties throughout the day, along with five civil aircraft, AMSA said, in an increasingly frantic hunt for clues to exactly what happened.

The plane deviated inexplicably off its intended course between Kuala Lumpur and Beijing, flying thousands of kilometres in the wrong direction, before plunging into the sea. Malaysia believes the plane was deliberately diverted by someone on board.

Five ships are also in the search zone, including Australia's HMAS Success and Chinese vessels Xue Long, Kuulunshan, Haikon and Qiandaohu.

They are operating in a wild expanse of ocean described by Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott as "close to nowhere as it's possible to be" where gale-force winds and towering waves are routinely whipped up.

Australia's Bureau of Meteorology warned the weather was expected to deteriorate later Thursday.

"Potentially thunderstorms down there as well as winds picking up, and they could get to gale force conditions," said bureau spokesman Neil Bennett.

The new images, provided by European aerospace giant Airbus and depicting some objects as long as 23 metres (75 feet), came as US lawyers fired the first salvo in an expected barrage of lawsuits on behalf of grieving families.

Seeking closure, anguished families of those aboard are desperately awaiting hard evidence, which the aviation industry hopes can also provide clues to what caused one of aviation's greatest mysteries.

As the search continues, US law firm Ribbeck Law Chartered International said it was getting the ball rolling on potentially "multi-million dollar" lawsuits against Malaysia Airlines and Boeing.

"We are going to be filing the lawsuits for millions of dollars per each passenger based on prior cases that we have done involving crashes like this one," the firm's head of aviation litigation, Monica Kelly, told reporters in Kuala Lumpur on Wednesday.

A separate statement by the firm, which filed an initial court petition in the US state of Illinois on Tuesday, said the two companies "are responsible for the disaster of Flight MH370″.

The airline declined detailed comment.

Malaysia's Prime Minister Najib Razak on Monday said that satellite data indicated the plane plunged into the sea in a region off western Australia, possibly after running out of fuel.

MH370 relatives have endured more than a fortnight of agonising uncertainty.

Two-thirds of the passengers were from China, and relatives there have criticised Malaysia in acid terms, accusing the government and airline of a cover-up and botching the response.

Scores of relatives protested outside Malaysia's embassy in Beijing on Tuesday and China kept up the pressure, with Premier Li Keqiang urging Malaysia on Wednesday to involve "more Chinese experts" in the investigation, according to a Chinese foreign ministry spokesman.

While Malaysia believes the plane was deliberately diverted, other scenarios include a hijacking, pilot sabotage or a crisis that incapacitated the crew and left the plane to fly on auto-pilot until it ran out of fuel.

Hishammuddin hit back at criticism of Malaysia's handling of the crisis, saying "I think history will judge us well."

Authorities hope to retrieve the "black box" and precious flight data, believing it could hold clues to what happened.

Australian Vice Admiral Ray Griggs said a specialised US Navy black box locator device had arrived in Perth and could be taken to the search area within days.

The clock is ticking, with the battery that powers its locator signal expected to run out in two weeks.- AFP/fa

Are you afraid of the dark? Earth Hour 2014 to be held on March 29

Posted: 26 Mar 2014 05:05 PM PDT

Bandar Seri Begawan: The Sultanate will once again participate in the fifth global World Wide Fund for Nature's 'Earth Hour' movement which will be held on Saturday, March 29, ©BRUDIRECT.COM reported.

Five landmarks have been selected to signify the country's support for energy conservation. The places are Kg Ayer Cultural and Tourism Gallery, Taman Haji Sir Muda Omar 'Ali Saifuddien Mosque, Yayasan Sultan Haji Hassanal Bolkiah and Hassanal Bolkiah National Stadium.

Brunei Earth Hour Ambassador, Sheikh Jammaluddin Sheikh Mohammad announced that the official iconic landmark for Brunei Earth Hour 2014 is the Yayasan Sultan Haji Hassanal Bolkiah. He encourages members of the public to join and support the event.

"The Night of Inspiration" will kick start the Earth Hour at Omar 'Ali Saifuddien Mosque, whereby a mass Isya' Prayer, recitation Surah Al-Fatihah and one-minute moment of silence in memory of the crew and passengers of the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 will be performed there.

2014 marks the rebranding of Earth Hour to Earth Hour Blue where the change seeks to highlight activities which include observing a one minute moment of silence for the crew and passengers of MH370.

Sheikh Jamaluddin will then present a speech followed by a countdown to lights off. Several activities will be held before the lights are turned back on.

Activities will include a Fun Run from the Hassanal Bolkiah National Stadium to Yayasan Sultan Haji Hassanal Bolkiah, facilitated by Amtrix Enterprise; and a night walk in the Sultanate's capital led by Minister of Development, Yang Berhormat Pehin Orang Kaya Indera Pahlawan Dato Seri Setia Awg Hj Suyoi Hj Osman.

The Earth Hour's team will show videos from 2010 to 2013 and also Instagram, YouTube and Google Map activities for the public to participate in by visiting www.earthhour.org.bn

"Earth Hour has always been more than just about lights off, it's about people from all walks of life coming together throughout the year to show what they can do protect the planet," said Andy Ridley, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of the global Earth Hour movement.

In a first of its kind, the Marvel superhero "Spider Man" will be named the first superhero ambassador for Earth Hour, aimed at inspiring everyone everywhere to become good role models for others and in turn, become superhero themselves in their imaginations.

Earth Hour has grown to involve people from all walks of life across seven thousand cities and towns in one hundred and fifty four countries.

The one-world initiative has garnered large support in the country, including government agencies such as the Energy Efficiency & Conservation Unit, Energy Department at the Prime Minister's Office; Department of Environment, Parks and Recreation (JASTRE), Tourism Development Department, Bandar Seri Begawan Municipal Services, the Science, Technology and Environment Partnership Center, Heart of Borneo, Orchid Garden Hotel, BHC Magazine and Matrix Enterprise as well as the Rizal Group.

Nothing found at Tanduo during clearing operation – commando

Posted: 26 Mar 2014 04:52 PM PDT

by Chok Sim Yee. Posted on March 27, 2014, Thursday

KOTA KINABALU: A VAT 69 commando told the High Court here yesterday that he and his team did not find anything during a clearing operation in Kampung Tanduo, Lahad Datu, where the Sulu gunmen had holed up.

Sergeant Mohamed Sukeri Rejab testified before justice Stephen Chung that he, who led VAT 69 commandos in the operation, did not find any weapon, firearms, camouflage uniforms or leaflets in the vicinity of the village.

"After the aerial bombing by the Malaysian Army, I was tasked to clear the village area and to ensure that there were no more Sulu gunmen in the area," he said under cross-examination by counsel Datuk N. Sivananthan.

Mohamed Sukeri was the 15th witness called by Attorney-General Tan Sri Abdul Gani Patail to give oral evidence against 29 accused persons, including the nephew of the late self-styled Sulu Sultan III Datu Jamalul Kiram, who was believed to be the man behind the intrusion in Kampung Tanduo, Lahad Datu.

All the accused persons were alleged to have committed terrorism activities at several places in Lahad Datu, Semporna and Sandakan areas between February 12 and April 10, 2013.

To a question by Sivananthan, the witness said that he and his team found a bullet casing and kitchen knives but they did not collect the items.

When asked by Sivanathan: "After the clearing operation you and your team came out from Kampung Tanduo with nothing?"

Mohamed Sukeri answered: "Yes".

To another question by Sivananthan, Mohamed Sukeri said that during his assignment as a spotter at one of VAT 69 snipers' points, he did not see any of the Sulu gunmen discharging their firearms while guarding the two water points near the village area.

Abdul Gani was assisted by deputy public prosecutors Datuk Abdul Wahad Mohamed, Ishak Mad Yusoff, Mohd Dusuki Mokhtar, Cheng Heng Kher and Anati Kisahi while Sivananthan was assisted by counsel James Tsai, Stella Simon, Zakaria Ahmad and Teressa Sirri. Other counsels involved were Kamarudin Mohd Chinki, Ram Singh, YS Lo, Rowiena Rasad and Abdul Ghani Zelika.

The trial continues today.