On December 6, 2016, President Vladimir Putin ratified Russia’s new Information Security Doctrine to replace a document that was in force since September 2000. This official document defines the main sources of threats against Russia in cyberspace and offers solutions to deal with them. The document was part of Russia’s national security strategy, which was …
According to the human rights group “Sova,” which monitors the enforcement of anti-extremism legislation in Russia, 119 people were convicted last year of criminal activity for posting and reposting content on Vkontakte, Russia’s leading social network. For comparison: in 2015, police went after only three users of Odnoklassniki (another Russian social network) and just a …
Why Russian police targets people on Vkontakte rather than on Facebook Read More
The FindFace mobile app, which makes it possible to find a random person’s social-media page on Vkontakte after taking a photo of them in the street, has made news headlines for its use in experimental art projects and bullying women who appear in pornography. Daniil Turovsky, special correspondent for independent online publication Meduza, sat down with the authors …
On June 21, Ekaterina Romanovskaya — one of the two founders of Russia’s most popular satirical Twitter account, KermlinRussia — launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise funds for her new project, Nimb. The product is a “smart ring” designed to help users inform family and friends quickly when they find themselves in danger. With almost 1,500 backers, …
Russian smart ring overreaches crowdfunding target on Kickstarter Read More
Earlier this week Roskomnadzor, the Russian telecom and Internet regulator, added Amazon’s cloud storage domain (s3.amazonaws.com) to the register of prohibited sites, before cancelling this access restriction. The web address was included into the register on June 21, although the Tax Service had already ordered to do so in May. According to Russian tech blog Habrahabr, the …
Russian authorities block, then unblock, Amazon’s cloud service Read More
The billionaire Evgeny Prigozhin is demanding that Yandex delete from its search results an article about the Internet Research Agency, better known as Russia’s “troll factory.” Several news outlets, including the newspaper Novaya Gazeta, have published articles claiming that Prigozhin is the brains and money behind the troll factory. The billionaire has also demanded that Yandex …
Russia’s federal financial monitoring service, Rosfinmonitoring, has announced that the country will soon have its own national cryptocurrency, according to the newspaper Kommersant. No official proposal has yet been written to this effect, but the idea of a cryptocurrency is being discussed with bank representatives at sessions organized by the Ministry of Finance and the Central …
Russia plans to launch its own national cryptocurrency Read More
Russian police have apparently begun pressuring mobile phone operators to intercept authorization text messages generated by the messaging app Telegram, according to the service’s creator, Pavel Durov. Durov said in a characteristically colorful statement published on the radio station Echo of Moscow that such policing measures are usually adopted by the “cannibalistic regimes that don’t care about …
Russian police might be involved in hacking Telegram accounts, says Pavel Durov Read More
Some of the Russian Internet’s biggest “entertainment websites” aren’t formally registered as media outlets, but for millions of young people they are trusted and beloved sources of news and information. Visitors populate these communities with their own “demotivators” and GIFs, often creating mashups and memes more popular than any articles or photo galleries published in …
How viral websites replace news media for Russia’s younger generation Read More
Uber is teaming up with Russia’s Interior Ministry to help find missing children. As part of the campaign, the portraits of missing children will be painted on the sides of some of the cars in Uber’s Moscow fleet. The campaign launched on Monday, April 18. Uber encourages Muscovites to photograph its cars that bear the …
Uber launches campaign to find missing children in Moscow Read More
Russia’s Federal Anti-Monopoly Service has begun reviewing an allusion to World War II in an advertisement for the computer game “Armored Warfare: Project Armata,” which the Russian company Mail.Ru Group launched into open beta testing last October. Mail.Ru Group says the complaint submitted to Russian regulators is a scheme by its competitors—an unsubtle jab at the …
Since Russia’s new law on the “right to be forgotten” took effect on January 1, 2016, Yandex — Russia’s most popular Internet search engine — has received 3,600 takedown requests from 1,348 people. The company says it has complied with 27 percent of these requests, rejecting the rest. Yandex says its high rejection rate has …
Yandex reveals the early results of the ‘right to be forgotten’ Read More
