Debugging Behind the Iron Curtain (2010)
35 comments
·August 20, 2025vzaliva
wojciii
Also I remember reading the exact same "story" on the daily WTF website .. ~20 years ago. It surfaces regularly. :)
mlyle
Bullshit. There is no way that living things are releasing enough ionizing radiation to interfere with a computer, especially an older one--
attenuated both by the rest of their flesh, the building's walls, the computer's chassis, and at least several feet of free space/inverse square.
ACS_Solver
Yes, the story is definitely false. I looked into some details the first time I saw it on HN, seemed strange then, and it cannot be true. Radiation from the disaster could, and did, mess with electronics, but close to the disaster area. Most contamination is with alpha-decay elements, and alpha rays aren't going to make it from inside a train to a computer inside a building by the tracks. And yes, any living creature radioactive enough to affect electronics would be rapidly and painfully dying.
It's a funny story, but the physics is impossible, and there's several historically implausible details as well, so I'm comfortable saying it's made up.
sillywabbit
BASHIR: Out of all the stories you told me, which ones were true and which ones weren't?
GARAK: My dear Doctor, they're all true.
BASHIR: Even the lies?
GARAK: Especially the lies.
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y-curious
You're right. This and the "banned Geiger counters" are both implausible.
Shame, I already sent this to my coworkers. Time to retract this cool story.
croemer
Chernobyl food contamination was mostly Cs-137 which emits Gamma rays. But Gamma rays aren't the type of radiation well suited to flip bits. To reliably flip bits, the cows would have to contain so much Cs-137 that they'd die within a day or so.
Story is likely made up.
guga42k
Those poor cows would have to glow in a dark to emit such level of radiation.
croemer
If I'm reading [1] correctly then the SM-1800 was a clone of Intel-8080A, not PDP-11.
[1]: page 2, line starting with K580 of https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP86R00995R0005011...
reillyse
but don't you see, Communism is so bad that it changes the laws of fundamental physics! But of course you are right, this is a total nonsense story but it is interesting to reflect on why somebody would feel compelled to tell such a lie and spread such propaganda. Also interesting to reflect on what the capitalist analog of this story might be - do we trust that American food corporations would never knowingly ship unhealthy meat?
flohofwoe
Calm down Igor, it's probably just a tall tale the seniors told the juniors and the juniors took it in as the truth.
Also didn't you have sarcastic Chornobyl jokes in the 80s if you lived anywhere near East or Central Europe? We certainly did have a lot of them in East Germany.
reillyse
what?
It is not being presented as a tall tale or a sarcastic joke. It's being presented as fact. I'm merely asking why people feel the need to make up stories and to propagate stories that are untrue. That is a question I am genuinely interested in.
Why, when we know this is complete BS, do people feel the need to 1) make it up in the first place and 2) propagate the story without engaging their mental faculties.
krapp
>do we trust that American food corporations would never knowingly ship unhealthy meat?
We know for a fact that many American businesses knowingly allow faulty and dangerous products on the market (see the Ford Pinto,) and that American food corporations have allow tainted meat onto the market.
But for some reason we don't fault capitalism for that the way we would fault communism for this, if it were true. If anything, the most likely reaction this happening in the US would be to deregulate industries so capitalism could capitalize even harder.
dang
Related. Others?
Debugging Behind the Iron Curtain (2010) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41586836 - Sept 2024 (21 comments)
Debugging Behind the Iron Curtain - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24208014 - Aug 2020 (1 comment)
Debugging Behind the Iron Curtain (2010) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16628877 - March 2018 (19 comments)
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adzm
> Possession of personal Geiger counters was restricted by the Soviet government
A tangent, but why was this?
guga42k
It wasn't restricted per se. Just it didn't exist or produced as a civil appliance, so you won't be able to buy it. But civil defense kits usually had the counter, so if you really wanted one you probably could get it. My dad got one right after Chernobyl disaster.
potato3732842
"restricted by economic circumstance"
evan_
pretty sure this explains it:
> the government plan was to mix the meat from Chernobyl-area cattle with the uncontaminated meat from the rest of the country
I wonder if this was posted now as a result of a report of radioactive shrimp being sold at Wal-Mart:
https://www.fda.gov/food/alerts-advisories-safety-informatio...
lb1lf
I do not know if this was the rationale, but presumably the powers that be could not see any upside to civilians possessing such equipment - after all, it could be used for purposes like calling the bluff on the official narrative
('During the recent fire at the Chornobyl nuclear power plant, only trace amounts of radioactivity has been detected outside the immediate vicinity...')
or espionage ('Hmmm... I wonder why many of the freight cars coming down the track from the alleged paint factory in East Podunkskij are 100x more radioactive than those from other areas?')
We are, after all, talking about a system which restricted access to photocopiers.
y-curious
This was news to me too. I did some surface level research and couldn't find any mention of that.
That said, my parents are from the former USSR and just because there isn't a law on the books doesn't mean it wasn't de facto banned.
barbazoo
> just because there isn't a law on the books doesn't mean it wasn't de facto banned
Same is true the other way around. Just because someone claims something to have happened, it doesn't mean it actually has. Maybe they were just "impossible" to obtain similar to how a lot of non essential things were hard to obtain in socialist/communist countries at that time.
cyberax
It was not. Moreover, decommissioned Geiger counters from bomb shelters were available. It's more fair to say that Geiger counters were not sold on the open market because they were considered to be specialized equipment.
The USSR was strictly controlling radio transmitters and survey equipment but not regular measurement devices.
Analemma_
I mean, the post itself kinda answers it.
AnimalMuppet
Not really.
But the answer that one would conclude is "so that private citizens can't find out all the shady things we're doing with radioactive stuff".
I presume that was the policy even before Chernobyl. The US did not run an entirely clean nuclear program, but the USSR was worse (perhaps because ordinary people in the US could have Geiger counters, and so the powers that be knew that they were less likely to get away with spilling radio emitters).
gostsamo
there is no problem if nobody knows about it. explain many government decisions both inside and outside the USSR.
xenonite
Original post: https://www.jakepoz.com/debugging-behind-the-iron-curtain/
dang
Ah thanks! We've changed to that from https://beza1e1.tuxen.de/lore/crash_cows.html now.
Submitters: "Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
imzadi
Company antivirus blocked this page and said it contains malware
dang
We've since changed the URL (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44964232)
jannyfer
My company blocked the new URL as "games" but the old link works.
_def
time wasting activity detected, deducting estimated cost from salary BEEP
I was living in Kyiv at the time of the accident, and later I worked for the Ministry of Chernobyl (a special government ministry created to deal with the aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster). I assisted groups of international researchers in analysing data on the consequences of the accident, including radioactive contamination distribution through food chains.
This article is complete rubbish. Everything was tightly measured and controlled. The radiation levels required to trigger memory bits (ferrite memory!) in a building next to the train station, through the walls and metal panels enclosing computer blocks and at such a distance, would probably make a cow glow in the dark :) Geiger counters weren’t restricted - they just weren’t sold to the general public. But somehow, after Chernobyl, every one of my friends managed to procure one (I had three). Even the final part about "filling in immigration papers with any country" is implausible. It wasn’t possible to simply emigrate from the Soviet Union to any country. There was a limited Jewish emigration path, but it was far from easy.