On March 29, 2019, a new law took effect in Russia to punish those who express “disrespect toward the government on the Internet.” A fine for that offense was added to Russia’s existing list of administrative penalties for small-time disorderly conduct. The human rights group Agora compiled a report on the first 180 days of …
The Russian Internet and telecom regulator, Roskomnadzor, has begun to install tools in Internet service providers’ networks that will allow the agency to cut off Russian web traffic from the rest of the world in case of a cyber threat to the Russian Internet as a whole. Roskomnadzor head Alexander Zharov told the TASS news agency that …
Russia begins installing tools to isolate national Internet in case of a threat Read More
Today the Russian Federation Council’s Commission on Protecting State Sovereignty and Preventing Foreign Interference met for the first time since nationwide local elections on September 8. As usual, the senators warned that anti-Kremlin opposition leaders and U.S. media companies pose an existential threat to Russia. Meduza offers a rough summary of the most colorful remarks …
This week, the television and digital network Current Time will release “Holy War,” a new miniseries by journalist Andrey Loshak about the evolution of the Russian Internet, spanning the first experiments on the Web to the rise of giant corporations, covering everything from the first startup investments to the explosion of government regulations and the arrest of …
On August 25, Russian programmer Leonid Evdokimov delivered a presentation at the “Chaos Constructions” IT conference in St. Petersburg, where he presented a paper titled “SORM Defects” about the public availability of Russian Internet users’ personal data. It turns out that Russians’ mailing addresses, telephone numbers, login names, and geolocation coordinates are openly available. Evdokimov …
On Friday, August 9, a day before a massive political protest at Sakharov Prospekt in Moscow, the Telegram channel ‘Comrade Major’ (@MayorFSB) posted an Excel spreadsheet containing thousands of fields with personal information and contact details of alleged opposition supporters. ‘Comrade Major’ presented the file as coming from “these idiots from [opposition leader] Navalny’s team,” but Navalny’s office …
Since March 2019, Russian military service members have been banned from using smartphones and posting photos taken on the job to social media. The new regulations were proposed in September of 2018, and Russia’s State Duma and Federation Council approved them the following February. After the new law received President Vladimir Putin’s approval as well …
Russian military puts soldiers in jail for using smartphones and social media Read More
Moscow’s first test for a new remote electronic voting system ended in a technological failure, prominent election analyst Grigory Melkonyants announced on Facebook. The Internet voting mechanism was put to the test during an election for the best student congress president in Moscow’s higher education system. 1,794 “voters” — that is, Moscow university students — were asked …
First test for Moscow’s online voting system ends in failure Read More
Moscow Vice Mayor Maxim Liksutov has told the BBC Russian Service that the Russian capital’s municipal government is tracking the movements of its residents using tools as diverse as taxi data, cell phone data, security cameras, data from Troika multi-ride metro passes, and customer complaints about the city’s public transport system. Liksutov said that all this geoanalytical …
In February 2019, a Russian entrepreneur who uses Wikipedia in his work began to notice something mysterious: a relatively new user on the Russian-language version of the platform was making regular edits to political articles. While the user clearly attempted to dilute the effect of the edits by making politically neutral changes elsewhere, much of …
Roskomnadzor, the Russian Internet and telecom regulator, has submitted an administrative protocol citing Google for censoring its search results in Russia insufficiently. The news agency Interfax cited Roskomnadzor as saying that its most recent test of the search engine in May indicated that “more than a third of the links included in the unified registry …
Russian censor cites Google for including banned content in search results Read More
The arrest of Ivan Golunov under drug trafficking charges on June 6 triggered a flurry of emotion in the Russian media and social scene. Many see in the case a manipulation to intimidate or punish an independent-minded journalist and its employer, the Riga-based online publication Meduza, whose investigations often target behind-the-scene interests in the Russian …
How federal censors monitor and punish Russia’s mass media Read More
