Russia’s most (in)famous spammer, Vardan Kushnir, 35, was dead in his apartment in downtown Moscow on Monday, July 25. Someone repeatedly smashed his head with a heavy object, authorities say, and then ransacked his entire apartment. The authorities have obviously got no clue as to who that someone might have been.
And, as a matter of fact, they don’t seem to really care: every day between 10 and 20 people meet a violent death in Russia’s capital, and a significant part of those crimes remains unsolved (Russia’s Interior Ministry reports 1,935 unsolved murders, 73,000 burglaries and 11,400 robberies between January and May in this year alone). There is no reason for Moscow’s law enforcement officials to give Kushnir’s case any special treatment, so they most probably won’t. But the Moscow-based media is awash with comments and speculations, expounding one simple, albeit largely irrational, theory: someone (ranging from God almighty to an irate IT office worker) finally punished Vardan Kushnir for his seemingly unstoppable spamming activities.
...
It’s little wonder, then, that Vardan Kushnir became as popular a character among Russian-speaking Internet users, as Lord Voldemort must be among Hogwarts’ fans. And a tale of some anonymous ’Harry Potter’ paying him a private visit on a warm July morning produces quite a predictable sensation among the audience. Of course, everybody understands, that spam will not stop with Kushnir’s demise — it will persist for years to come, exactly the way Lord Voldemort finds his way back into the picture with every new installment of the Harry Potter saga. But this time, the magic wand has for once dealt a deadly blow to the arch-villain, and there seems to be no option left for the spectators, than to hail the magic.
Law enforcement officers happen to be the most typical representatives of Russian bureaucracy: unless they’re economically motivated by the plaintiff, or act on orders from the very top, they will use any pretext imaginable to avoid doing their duty. And in the case of spammers they are very successful in doing nothing.
Time on this recording has been compressed, so that 73 seconds corresponds to 27 minutes. Since the frequencies of these emissions are well above the audio frequency range, we have shifted them downward by a factor of 44.
I don't understand the shifting down. Radio waves are not audio waves. How are we hearing radio waves?
Dave wrote:Just a guess, but I imagine they take radio noise and translate it into an audible form, hence the downshifting comment in your second quote.
that's what i thought - but if they're translating it to audio, it doesn't make sense to then claim they downshifted it to make it audible.
Whatever audio frequencies they translated the radio waves to were already arbitrarily scaled.
By saying they scaled it down 40 times, they're giving the false impression that the original scale was somehow closer to the original, when in fact it was arbitrary.
