Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by helsinkiandrew | Hacker News Reader

Full thread

helsinkiandrew

It looks like the Belarus KGB was on the flight anyway - presumably the journalist was being followed/tracked:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/may/24/belarus-seizur...

View on HN

I think that’s obvious. Probably they even have agents with EU citizenship that can move freely around Europe.

It would have been ironic if the flight was overbooked and they couldn't buy a ticket/board.

If you're associated with the Belarus KGB it's probably not too hard to have some passengers suddenly missing their flight for one or another reason. Probably they don't even need to buy a ticket, flash your badge at the airport and most guards/staff there lets you through.

I'm not sure how kindly the Greek authorities would take having KGB operatives on their soil

WHY would it work like that?

Seems like a great way to get detained by Greek airport security. I do not see why Greek airport staff would do anything other than call security when someone flashes a KGB badge.

LOL do you think they actually carry badges? That would be quite incriminating.

Instead, it’s more like they are carrying fake passports issued by the Russian Federation. But, one likely would not get caught traveling on a fake passport issued by their country’s government’s spy service, unless they had already travelled on another (perhaps legit) passport abroad (Russia has internal passports too) that has fingerprint information in combination with a photo of the individual. This drastically reduces false negatives when things like this need to be flagged.

My US passport only contains a photo as biometric information, while my European Union passport contains fingerprints and my photo as biometric information.

Russia provides passports for Belarussian agents?

Yeah they apparently had Russian passports and the full support of the Russian state.

Maria Zakharova even wrote that “It is shocking that the West calls the incident in Belarusian airspace ‘shocking,’”.

She is the Director of the Press Department for the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and is famous for claiming things as ludicrous as this one…

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/konstantinbenyumov/mari...

Thanks. I could swear like a decade ago it seemed like Belarus and Russia had had a falling out but I guess they patched things up since then (or the falling out didn’t impact cooperation like these passports).

Belarus is the last Soviet satellite.

> flash your badge at the airport and most guards/staff there lets you through.

No? Why would that be the case?

Within the EU, flights rarely get overbooked. Especially on cheap flights like with Ryanair, the reimbursement that the airline has to provide in case of overbooking can easily be more than 10x the ticket value.

The cultural difference between the US and Europe is very interesting. In the US, when a flight is overbooked, the airline is allowed to bump anyone if they provide good enough compensation. Usually what happens is the airline “auctions” being bumped where they keep upping the “benefit” for staying. Usually that’s just a voucher for the next flight out, a gift card for the future, and a nights stay in a hotel. “We’re sorry we got greedy, and made you miss your multi million dollar business deal, and it fell through. Here’s some money that you can only spend with us. We hope to see you soon!”

At the extreme, if no one takes the offer, they’ll just bump some rando and you have to pray it’s not you.

Of course, nothing is done about it because it doesn’t happen enough for enough people to complain. I also bet that the airline’s systems are programmed to never choose a powerful enough person for the rando being bumped. You wouldn’t want to bump a Congressperson, right? That’d be just rude!

I’m sure they have a list of VIPs, but just “frequent flyer” seniority is a good proxy that sorts the powerful from the plebs.

Just curious, but why wouldn’t one expect reliably repeat customers to be treated with increased consideration in these circumstances?

Seems to me this is true in pretty much every industry, yet for some reason with flights, certain folks (likely not the FFers) get very upset to realize their price sensitivity/lack of airline stickiness moved them to the back of the line.

Can go both ways. The non-loyal flyers may never book with you again if they don’t get what they want.

A lot of the FFers don’t have much freedom in their booking, and are in too deep in the FF program to switch preferred airlines now.

The frequent flyer programs have less lock-in than you might imagine. Many airlines have status match programs, where someone who has status in one airline's frequent flier program will be extended the equivalent status in another's for a short period of time. If the passenger maintains a certain level of activity with the new airline, they keep their status.

As someone that's taken these offers before I think you're making a lot of assumptions. Yes there's some people on the plane with important business but on a plane with a 100+ people it's exceedingly likely there's also people casually travelling. $500+ in airline credit to move their flight to the morning is a real deal.

Personally I'd rather be in this system and pay lower airfare prices than pay a premium to guarantee I'll never be bumped off my flight.

For me, the rub is with the benefit being a credit, not cash. If I’m not flying frequently enough, those credits are kindof worthless. Don’t they also have expiration dates?

Ryanair famously also increases prices closer to takeoff time.

They give big discounts to people who book early and make their planning process easier.

In theory this makes the need for overbooking less necessary. If you don’t show up you’re not getting your money back anyway and the plane will use less fuel on its flight.

This from the airline that wanted to charge people for using the toilets. If overbooking was a better model I’m pretty sure they’d use it.

It was a ryanair flight. They know exactly how many people are going on their planes, because every unsold seat could be another €20 and someone looking for a return ticket.

Belarus official version is that Protasevich's girlfriend send a photo of him from the Athens airport to a guy (Anton Motolko) who is officially considered extremist or something like this by Belarus and who published the photo in his Telegram where monitoring it Belarus authorities saw the photo. If it is true, then the social media is definitely wet dream of state authorities like Stazi.

I thought the official Belarus line was that they had a tip about a bomb and that when the plane landed they "happened" to find a wanted person on board? Are they now admitting that the plane was forced down to arrest him?

Isn't Telegram e2e encrypted? Or I am understanding your comment wrong?

That's a common misconception. Telegram private chats are by default not e2e encrypted (but you can create a separate "secret chat", which will be).

Really? What does it mean in practical terms? Anyone can see my chats?

Is it worst than Whatsapp in that sense? I understand (again) that WA is e2e encrypted by default?

Thanks!

Quoted from article [1] on how someone 'hacked' some Brazil politicians:

"A hacker with little technical skill and no specialized equipment could, it turned out, do quite a bit of damage with access to someone's voicemail. Delgatti, for instance, figured out he could use this VoIP spoofing technique to target Telegram accounts. At the time, when a Telegram user wanted to attach their account to a new device, they had the option of requesting a verification code via an automated voice call from Telegram. Delgatti realized that he could spoof a victim's phone to request that code. Then, if Telegram's automated voice call didn't get through—because Delgatti initiated the hack late at night while his victim slept, or kept the line busy by calling his victim at the same time—the code would be sent to the person's voicemail. He could then spoof the target's phone once again to gain access to their voicemail, retrieve the verification code, and then add the victim's Telegram to his own device. After that, he could download their entire chat history from the cloud."

[1] https://www.wired.com/story/brazil-hacker-bolsonaro-car-wash...

I think the least everyone who wanna continue using telegram must do is enable 'two-step verification' in Telegram settings.

Or use Signal. Or Wire if you don't wanna expose phone number. But Wire stores metadata.

Edit: Yeah WA is e2e by default. But if you or your friend has enabled backing up chats to Google account, everything will be backed up in plain/weak encryption. Also at least in android, WhatsApp automatically stores all received/sent pics, videos etc in a folder named WhatsApp which is available to any app with storage permission.

> Also at least in android, WhatsApp automatically stores all received/sent pics, videos etc in a folder named WhatsApp

Note that this is true even for unread messages, including messages in group chats.

In practical terms, non secret chats messages are stored, more or less cleartext, on Telegram servers. In this sense, yes, it is much less secure than Whatsapp. Though I don't know if, in whatsapp, the metadata is also e2e encrypted

Yes, it is much worse than WhatsApp. I use it because it has global searchable groups. Also you can make it such at other people who chat with you will not be able to see your phone number.

Whatsapp has a nag screen about backups on like every other startup and the backups are plaintext in Google Drive (not sure about the iOS version). So if your contacts just use the defaults you are not better off.

And that secret chat only works on mobile and only for 1 on 1 conversations.

> Belarus official version

Why it would be treated seriously, especially after they blatantly lied about supposed bomb? And obviously fake bomb threat from Hamas of all things?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com