Conspiracy and an off-by-one error
gist.github.com
gist.github.com
To finish the puzzle, consider the following comment in one open-source mp4 library: https://github.com/l-smash/l-smash/blob/master/core/box.h
"According to ISO/IEC-14496-5-2001, the difference between Unix time and Mac OS time is 2082758400. However this is wrong and 2082844800 is correct."
MP4 stores timestamps by Mac epochs. The wrong value of the difference between Unix and Mac epochs is wrong exactly by 24 hours and is hardcoded in the MPEG-4 reference software, from which it made its way into a number of libraries.
(I work for Google and have contacted the right people in the attempt to address this bug soon).
Sunlight reflected on clouds, misidentified as the launch of a nuclear missile.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Soviet_nuclear_false_alar...
I watched the original video (about the time-stamp) yesterday and someone in the comments section said about the same (that there is a bug in the system).
But I wouldn't label the original poster a conspiracy theorist over this.
It's perfectly normal for someone to assume YouTube is working as it should, in which case, seeing the early time-stamp should definitely set off some question marks.
In combination with the current regime's use of indiscriminate violence, misinformation, and downright lies, it reasonable to question anything they put out.
Note that both the currently most accepted hypothesis (rebels armed by the Russians did it) as well as the Russian party line (Ukranians did it to frame the Russians) involve government conspiracies and are, thus, conspiracy theories.
These things can happen. When political leaders seize on these types of events to promote their agendas however, some people understandably become more suspicious that a conspiracy is afoot.
"shot down by the United States Navy guided missile cruiser USS Vincennes on 3 July 1988," "All 290 on board, including 66 children and 16 crew, died"
"The Fogarty report stated, "The data from USS Vincennes tapes, information from USS Sides and reliable intelligence information, corroborate the fact that [Iran Air Flight 655] was on a normal commercial air flight plan profile, in the assigned airway, squawking Mode III 6760, on a continuous ascent in altitude from take-off at Bandar Abbas to shoot-down.""
It doesn't have much sense in the context, the civilian planes flew there all the time:
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/19/mh17-changing-c...
"the route (...) is one of the "aerial motorways" between northern Europe and south Asia. Malaysia Airlines was one of more than a dozen that flew the route on Thursday. Its flight MH17 was only a few miles from an Air India Boeing 787 and a Singapore Airlines 777 when it was shot down."
Furthermore, double-checking civilian traffic corridors is something you'd expect a professional military to do, but the rebels/separatists are not necessarily professional military. This is admittedly a harder sell, since the SA-11 definitely needs a trained operator and Russia's GRU is known to be leading much of the action on the rebels' side in Donetsk. But it's at least possible to train a rebel operator to do nothing else but operate an SA-11 without also training them extensively in the doctrine of when and why you'd actually use one.
This leaves the question of why they decided to turn on the SAM set at the time they did and shoot down the plane they did... but that can be explained by the rebels thinking that there would be a military resupply flight coming in over the area at a certain time, they turn on the set and "oh look at that, an airplane just where we expected it to be". This "proof" would be horrific to any professional anti-air unit, but again you can see how the theory that a bunch of barely-trained "rebels" that happened to acquire an advanced Russian SAM can't be completely disproven either.
I'm certainly no Russia apologist, and even if the "rebels legitimately screwed up and didn't mean to shoot down a civilian airliner" theory is true, that doesn't really reduce the blame for Russia. After all, if we're assuming the rebels in Donetsk are really rebels and not simply disguised Russian military or GRU units with token Ukrainian participants, then Russia providing these "rebels" a SA-11 set could only have led to something like this happening eventually, the only surprise is that it happened so quickly after Russia provided the SA-11 set.
But I find it hard to believe that even Russia would deliberately target a civilian airliner, or knowingly allow whoever these separatists are to do the same. An inadvertent shoot down of a perceived military flight seems the most likely scenario, it just doesn't turn off the blame for Russia like people might think.
Compare that with the Afghanistan war where the Russian delivery planes were shot while taking off or landing, which is many orders of magnitude simpler to do and only cheap and simple hand-held rockets are enough. (3)
And another construct "rebels intentionally shooting the cruising civilian plane" is also unreasonable as it can clearly only harm the rebels.
The only ones having a clear motive to shoot that plane that way are actually Ukrainians.
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1) http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/19/mh17-changing-c...
"MH17 had initially filed a flight plan requesting to fly at 35,000ft above Ukrainian territory. On entering Ukrainian airspace, however, the plane's pilots were instructed to fly at 33,000ft by the local air traffic control"
2) same link
"MH17's flight path was a busy major airway, like a highway in the sky."
3) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FIM-92_Stinger#Soviet_War_in_Af... (There are pictures too)
You're assuming that the operators of the SA-11 set were a) using the altimeter calculation tool as a standard practice, instead of simply acquiring targets, and b) that they were aware that an AN-24 could not cruise at the altitude of a Boeing 777 (which is the actual reason why 33,000 should throw a flag, as AN-24 isn't supposed to be able to operate there).
After all, if I was Ukraine and my military cargo planes were being shot down, I'd fly them at maximum altitude during the transit across the most dangerous area, so the rebels/separatists might honestly have felt that a target at FL330 could be a Ukrainian cargo plane pre-emptively taking evasive action to the extreme limit of that cargo planes capacity.
But the objection that a cargo plane wouldn't fly at high altitude even to land at a nearby Ukrainian base doesn't add up, as the plane could certainly overfly its eventual destination (at high altitude) to get to safer airspace and only then turn around and start its descent over safe territory.
> The only ones having a clear motive to shoot that plane that way are actually Ukrainians.
Given the number of cargo planes already shot down, there's evidently a perfectly clear motive for shooting down more, especially when you're already assuming that you know the operating schedule for the next cargo flight (and the separatists might very well known this, if they are under operational control of Russia' GRU).
And either way, there were tons of celebratory Twitter and Facebook posts by the rebels/separatists claiming that they shot down... a Ukrainian military cargo flight, posts which were subsequently deleted when the truth became clear. The "rebels shot the airliner down... perhaps by mistake" theory isn't just some vague NATO supposition, it's the thing that actually makes sense given the evidence available.
There's tons of evidence that the rebels shot MH17 down, even ignoring Ukraine and NATO's intelligence contributions, as the rebels themselves admitted it by mistake. The question is how the rebels came to the decision to do this, not whether they did it or not.
> MH17 had initially filed a flight plan requesting to fly at 35,000ft above Ukrainian territory. On entering Ukrainian airspace, however, the plane's pilots were instructed to fly at 33,000ft by the local air traffic control"
The SA-11 can target aircraft far in excess of 35,000 feet. Remember, it was designed to fight the best American aircraft Cold War money could buy. Changing the altitude for MH17 by such a small amount wouldn't have mattered one bit to the SA-11 set.
> OMG STINGERS
As the nice Wikipedia article you linked makes clear, Stinger missiles can't make it to 33,000 feet. AFAIK, no MANPAD in the world can do this. 33,000 feet is a perfectly safe altitude for civilian air traffic with regard to military shenanigans going on below, as long as having advanced SAM batteries pointed in your direction by amateur militaries is not in the possible threat model...
After all, civilian air traffic has overflown Iraq and Afghanistan since 2003 and 2001 respectively, even with long-running insurgencies in both nations. Where's the outrage about that?
The reason Ukraine is different is because a certain large actor on the geopolitical scene has gone out of their way to make it different.
> After all, civilian air traffic has overflown Iraq and Afghanistan since 2003 and 2001 respectively, even with long-running insurgencies in both nations. Where's the outrage about that?
Outrage? You suggest somebody should be outraged for no civilian planes being shot in 2003 and 2001? Actually Ukrainians shot the civilian Russian plane in 2001, 78 victims.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siberia_Airlines_Flight_1812
"shot down by the Ukrainian military over the Black Sea on 4 October 2001" "Ukraine eventually admitted that the disaster was probably caused by an errant missile fired by its armed forces.[1] Ukraine ended up paying $15 million to surviving family members of 78 victims ($200,000 per victim)."
Because if your working theory is "UKRAINE DID IT (again)", you should probably know that the missile came from separatist-held territory. You know, while you're busy lecturing the rest of us on standards of evidence.
Ecoded date from the downloaded youtube file:
Encoded date : UTC 2014-07-17 10:44:19
Exact upload date using the API:
<yt:uploaded>2014-07-18T10:43:10.000Z</yt:uploaded>
Excellent analysis, but the last statement is reversed. It's probably just a typo/oversight (like that's never happened to me before (sigh)). The encode timestamp is 24 hours before the upload timestamp, which is impossible since it must be uploaded before it's encoded.
I don't think native speakers will use "in front of" or "behind" to describe time coordinates. Those words are used to describe relative positioning of events, and in such use I think they have the opposite interpretation from what you suggested.
"Event A occurred behind event B", for example, or "A is behind schedule" (although you could then argue that scheduling has its own semantics for "behind"). However, even "I'm running behind" means running late, not early.
Even on a timeline, it's not clear whether the point of perspective for determining "in front of" or "behind" is a point in the past or a point in the future.
Simple: use before and after, or earlier and later.
btw, the overall semantics of "a means b, depending on whom you are speaking to" made me cringe even though I know you meant "A usually means B, but it depends..." (which I don't think is even true—see above—but that's a factual not semantic complaint). Taken literally, you could just as easily have written "a means (not b)..."
"Behind" is not incorrect in the original text, but it can be terribly, frustratingly ambiguous. As you've noted, "I'm running behind" means "I'm running late," i.e. I will arrive after the correct time. But "My clock is running behind" means "My clock is running slow," meaning it shows a time before the correct time.
Similarly, when projects are behind schedule (i.e. likely to complete after the correct time), we sometimes solve this by pushing the schedule back... Meaning by pushing the correct time into the future, as opposed to most contexts where "pushing something back" would mean "pushing it further behind." So we push schedules back to move deadlines forward.
Personally, I usually use "into the future" and "into the past" to be precise. Treating time with spatial-positional-relative language is fraught with inaccuracies.
(Fun fact: did you know "biweekly" means either "twice a week" or "once every other week?" I can't think of any other measurement unit that has a factor-of-four error built into its very definition).
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/biannual / http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/biennial
Just to stay, that evidence does not usually persuade beliebers.