What are the consequences for our society of us fearing to click on links that they may turn out to be foreign propaganda?
It's not enough to get you a visit from the feds or anything, but it's almost certain that any competent intelligence agency is storing anything that touches that website. Whoever posted it likely has links in their social graph to very high value targets.
Which is really, really sad. It's come to this, where we have to be afraid of drivebys on websites just because they may be honeypots for the US government, or because they might get all of us on some surveillance list.
When is it going to stop?
People like Snowden didnt ruin their lifes so you can avoid clicking links. For fucks sake, the least you can do is grow a pair of balls and exercise your god damn given freedom to do as you wish, stand up.
I can't read it, I'm working my way through the google translation and just starting, so maybe it's all "bad" stuff, but to be honest, I hope iranians can shed some light on what our government is doing - the US government itself certainly isn't going to help with that.
Also, there's some censored text in the upper left. I suspect that's the date and time.
My guess is these pictures were lifted from promotional material like the "MicroSTAR" sheet just below it.
The only context provided so far is that LA Times article talking about a sighting of an "unmanned aircraft or drone" near JFK in March, with (AFAICT) no connection with this forum post at all, except one or more of the posts in that thread also seem to mention JFK.
Is anyone actually taking this seriously? Do people not know that forums are full of bullshit the world over?
Edit: in fact, this person seems to be pushing these "Parastoo" self-published press releases rather hard, which themselves seem to be bullshit aimed at pressing members of the IAEA to publicly denounce Israel (while trumpeting their own hacker cred, of course). The only way anyone is ever going to see the threats in those releases is if they get eyes on them. There may be a story in chaining together these seemingly grandiose claims, but it's not in this random forum post of non-descript screenshots, and until I see evidence otherwise, I'm going to go ahead and assume this person is here to try and get "grassroots" attention on their self promotion.
What we have here is a forum by Iranian semi-military force "Basij". They bluff all the time and you never know what is truth. They have no shame in photoshoping and manipulating the truth.
I'm always fascinated by the way these people's minds seem to work! Reading his posts, this "DarkPassenger" fellow seems even crazier than our good HN friend losethos: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=losethos
To give you a context, these poems are written by gnostic who believed they saw the real truth and they had no fear of dying because you can not never kill their souls. I assume any culture has this sort of things"
First poem:
We are stuck in a deep well of the bad thinking one Our message would not reach to you (God?) easily
Second (red) I have experienced a lot of pain during my life No pain is comparable to pain of Hijran( being far from God, "the one", etc)
Third (red) This is Arabic. I don't know Arabic. I can say it's part of Quran and it's referring to " thos who belive will be able to discove" or something like that.
1) You're not going to be added to "a list" because you clicked a link on hacker news. Remember that the NSA employs some of the smartest people in the world. Would it be meaningful to add a bunch of curious silicon valleyists to a list of "possible terrorists"? Probably not.
2) If you think that an aircraft that is anything bigger than a small pigeon could get anywhere near a major airport without getting itself a nice escort, then you're nuts.
Here is a map of the airspace near JFK: http://www.aeroplanner.com/notams/airspace.cfm?apt=jfk
This is all "Class b" or "bravo" airspace. It's all heavily controlled, heavily monitored with radar, and you have to ask permission to enter it.
It's incredibly unlikely that there was a "drone" in bravo airspace. Possibly a UAV, definitely not the boogey man Iranians.
3) This website doesn't even say anything. It's some pictures that could have easily been photoshopped together. Google translate isn't giving me anything interesting, and unless HN is a LOT more diverse than I realized, you're all going nuts over a couple of grainy photos.
Finally, here is what the drone that Iran supposedly "captured" last year looks like: http://i.imgur.com/ALveZWi.jpg
It isn't a toy. It's huge. There is no way that is getting anywhere near a RADAR without everybody knowing about it. Yes, it is [possibly...meant to be, rumored to be] stealth. That doesn't mean it's going to go undetected into a major airport like that.
Relax. Go have a beer.
2. Based on commentary from native Persian speakers on this thread, it would appear that no one is claiming that the drone was remotely piloted by Iranians into US Airspace, but rather the one that was shot down in Iran several months ago (confirmed by the US Government) had these photos on it.
3. See above, there are at least 2 Persian speakers on this thread. HN is a LOT more diverse than you realize.
If this is true it means the Iranians compromised the encryption on the UAV's drive, which would be seriously not good.
I'm not convinced this shows anything at all. But even if it did, remember, the Iranian government has a history of photoshopping images for propaganda purposes. See e.g. http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/07/10/in-an-iranian-im...
Agree with OP. Very little here. Keep calm and carry on.
EDIT: Turns out they're claiming these were pulled off the RQ-170 Sentinel that crash landed in Iran. If that's true, it would mean the drive was salvaged and decrypted, which is a potentially big deal.
I'm reasonably sure I've got several "aircraft" in my shed which I could easily use to overfly "a major airport" if I chose to do so.
This one, for example, is at least medium or large pidgeon sized (610mm wingspan): http://www.flickr.com/photos/bigiain/5228554566/ - the flight in that video was around 2.5km from the intersection of the runways at Sydney Airport. That plane (with the camera on board) can fly for ~23 minutes doing 20m/s. That'd give me a comfortable 10mins loiter time over the airport while still being comfortably able to retrieve the camera and it's SD card.
Note - that's barely more that $100 worth of stuff, it's less than 150g all up flying weight, and it's got so little metal in it that I'd be astounded if the regular airport radar could distinguish it under ideal conditions, never mind while it's only a few tens of meters up and buried in the ground clutter.
Note2 - that plane would require retrieval to get the images back, someone actually interested in getting airport pictures without getting caught could use a slightly larger plane carrying a video transmitter sending pictures, never intending to get the plane back (ideally, I guess, ditching the plane at sea to avoid anyone seeing it - a hollow balsa/film construction that'd sink easily might be better than a foam "floating" construction.)
Note3 - that plane as it's configured now isn't flyable at 2.5km range, but there's lots of hobbyists who've worked around the problems there.
I'm also okay if the NSA targets OP looking at his submission list.
The first, dated four days ago (and the only I see one preceeding this), is a title making some sort of claim about Booz Hamilton based on a whois lookup. Not exactly a quality submission, but it has nothing to do with Iran or hacking.
The other three submissions are all about what seems to be some news he's stumbled on about hacking/reverse engineering claims from Iran.
Considering this is 'Hacker' news, you can understand why he might think we'd be interested in this. Of course, it would be better form for him to write up an article explaining the separation or link between these items rather than posting lots of direct evidence.
None of that means he should expect to have his privacy breached by a US intelligence agency, and frankly your support for that on the basis of such a flimsy characterisation is blood-chilling.
A lot of people seem to have become alarmed because they've seen persian text and heard that it's about hacking. That's equally chilling.
Is this all it takes?
Shame on you.
That person is basically claiming that the UAV was at one point flown over JFK airport at some previous time before the US moved the UAV to the middle east.
Anyway, can someone (perhaps the original poster) explain what specifically is happening? :)
Recently has started making statements about hijacking drones: http://cryptome.org/2013/07/parastoo-uav-launch2.htm
TLDR: Iranian chap(s) have been on a hacking spree and seem to be honing in on what they like to target. In this case US drones over US skies/assets.
US drones over US skies
Back-story on the series of on-going hacks by Iranians against US entities/corporations: http://cryptome.org/2013/07/ir-hack-forum.htm
Drone sighting at JFK