Meduza

Chyorny Yar, the village that nearly banned Wikipedia for 140 million Russians

November 26, 2015 February 9, 2016

In July 2015, a local court in Chyorny Yar issued a countrywide ban on a Wikipedia article about charas hashish, leading to a small crisis in August, where the world’s largest encyclopedia nearly became inaccessible to more than 140 million Russians. In a special report for Novaya Gazeta, photographer Evgeny Feldman went to Chyorny Yar to capture life in …

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Google Maps says ISIS is located at the Russian Defense Ministry’s TV station in Moscow

November 12, 2015 February 10, 2016

When searching for ISIS in Russian (“ИГИЛ”) on Google Maps, the result is the Moscow office address of the television channel Zvezda, a national network run by the Russian Ministry of Defense. The likely culprit is Google’s Map Maker tool, which it temporarily disabled earlier this year, after a series of vandalism acts. (According to Google, the …

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iTunes removes “extremist” songs to comply with Russian regulator’s order

October 30, 2015 February 12, 2016

Apple’s music service iTunes has deleted songs by the groups Korroziya Metalla (Corrosion) and Tsiklon-B (Cyclon-B), which Russian courts previously recognized as extremist, according to a press release by Roskomnadzor, the Russia’s government’s media watchdog agency. On October 26, Russian censors blocked several pages of iTunes that contained music by these two bands. By removing …

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Russia’s leading anti-corruption activist accuses the Kremlin’s Internet Commissioner of profiteering

October 29, 2015 February 12, 2016

The Kremlin’s Internet Commissioner, Dmitry Marinichev, earned billions of rubles on uncontested government IT contracts, and then helped engineer a law that “blackmails” foreign companies into renting data servers in Russia, according to a nonprofit group run by anti-corruption activist and Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny. Marinichev has fired back, accusing Navalny of misunderstanding Russia’s data-localization …

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Viber reportedly bows to Russian data-localization law, relocates user data to new servers

October 22, 2015 February 27, 2017

The second-most popular instant-messaging app in Russia, Viber, has begun storing Russian users’ data on servers located in Russia, the company’s Moscow representative reportedly told the newspaper Izvestia. On September 1, a new law entered force in Russia requiring websites and businesses to store all citizens’ personal data on Russian servers. The legislation was initially supposed to …

Viber reportedly bows to Russian data-localization law, relocates user data to new servers Read More

Russian police investigate Apple for “propagating homosexuality”

September 28, 2015 October 13, 2019

Officials in Russia’s Kirov region have brought an administrative case against Apple, the maker of the iPhone, for illegally promoting homosexuality, according to police documents published by the Russian news site Gazeta.ru. The evidence against Apple is the set of emojis included with iOS 8.3, which contains several images depicting families with same-sex parents, gay pride …

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Russian government hired people to hack the Tor browser – but they failed

September 10, 2015 February 14, 2016

A company hired by the Russian Interior Ministry to identify users of the Tor network, an anonymous Internet browser, has announced its plans to terminate its state contract without finishing the task. According to the Russian business daily Kommersant, the Russian Interior Ministry signed a series of contracts in 2013 and in 2014 with a company called “the …

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‘Uber, Go Home!’ say Moscow taxi drivers

September 9, 2015 March 2, 2017

This past Monday, September 7, a group of Moscow taxi drivers gathered together for a protest against the app-based, ride-hailing service Uber. Drivers say Uber’s lower fares are a threat to their livelihoods, and demand that the company be investigated and prosecuted for “unfair competitive practices” that violate Russian law. Moscow taxi drivers are also demanding …

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Russian Internet censorship: A journey into the belly of the Kremlin’s media watchdog

September 2, 2015 February 14, 2016

This summer, for a short while, pages on Reddit and Wikipedia were technically banned in Russia. While the ban targeted only individual pages of these popular websites, roughly a third of Russian Internet providers lacked the tools necessary to block specific content within a site built on the https protocol. As a result the entire Reddit and Wikipedia became inaccessible …

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Russian lawmakers want government to develop automated system for hunting Internet trolls

August 26, 2015 February 14, 2016

Vadim Dengin, who sits on the Duma Committee for Information Policy and Communications, has submitted a formal request to police and the Communications Ministry asking officials to develop software capable of automatically detecting Internet trolling. Dengin told the newspaper Izvestia that it’s especially necessary to counteract online trolling when it leads to offline criminal activity. He cites …

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Russian video game saves Western food imports from destruction

August 22, 2015 February 16, 2016

Commissioned by the news aggregator Rus2Web, the Web studio Lamarck has released an online game where players must try to save banned Western food imports from being destroyed. “Feed Russia!” is a clone of another computer game called “Just You Wait!” where a wolf tries to catch falling eggs. In “Feed Russia!” however, the wolf is …

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YouTube blocks account of Chechen state TV station

July 27, 2015 February 16, 2016

YouTube has blocked the account of Chechen state television channel “Grozny” from uploading new content because of alleged violations of the site’s terms of service. According to the TV station, YouTube is acting for political reasons. “Given that [YouTube] is a subsidiary of the American company Google, it’s anyone’s guess how the ideology of the content …

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