Yandex (NASDAQ and MOEX: YNDX), one of Europe’s largest internet companies and the leading search and ride-hailing provider in Russia, today announced that it has reached a settlement with the Federal Antimonopoly Service of Russia (FAS) and a consortium of Russian Internet companies in connection with an antitrust claim brought against Yandex. The claim related …
Yandex announces settlement of anti-monopoly claims Read More
On Friday last week, Russia slapped tech giants Google and Meta with penalties totaling over $125 million for repeated failure to remove banned content, the media reported. A Moscow magistrate’s court fined Google 7.2 billion rubles (around $98 million at the current exchange rate) under a legal clause that allows courts to impose between 5% and …
Russia imposes record fines to Google, Meta for failing to remove banned content Read More
Four scholars from Swiss and German universities studied “the presence of pages promoting conspiracy theories” across the world’s main search engines by “conducting a comparative algorithm audit to examine the distribution of conspiratorial information” in their search results. Juhi Kulshrestha, Mykola Makhortykh, Roberto Ulloa and Aleksandra Urman used a virtual agent-based infrastructure to “sytematically collect search outputs for …
On Sept. 17 Apple and Google disabled Russian users’ access to the pro-opposition ‘Smart Voting’ app in their online stores. Just hours later Telegram, the international instant messenger whose creator Pavel Durov touts its full independence, dealt a new blow to ‘Smart Voting’ by suspending — in a selective and controversial way — bots associated with …
How Russia forced Apple and Google to block anti-Kremlin app on parliamentary election day Read More
In the run-up to Russia’s parliamentary elections on Sept. 17-18-19, the Kremlin’s battle against online dissent brings new developments almost daily. Tech giants are not spared, with Google at the forefront earlier this week. Court marshals visited the company’s Moscow office to enforce an injunctive measure to remove the opposition-minded ‘Smart Voting’ site from search results. This …
Court marshals visit Google’s Moscow office to enforce censorship decision Read More
A cyber attack on Russian tech giant Yandex’s servers in August and September was the largest known distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack in the history of the internet, the company said on Thursday. The DDoS attack, in which hackers try to flood a network with unusually high volumes of data traffic in order to paralyse it when …
Yandex says it repelled biggest DDoS attack in history Read More
Russian tech firm Yandex said on Tuesday it had removed jailed Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny’s tactical voting website from its search engine to comply with a government ban ahead of a parliamentary election this month. Navalny and his allies want to use the website and a separate app, dubbed ‘Smart Voting,’ to organise a tactical …
Russian search engine delists Navalny’s tactical voting site after ban Read More
Last week Yandex, the NASDAQ-listed Russian digital giant, announced a novelty in the field of image-to-text and automated translation technologies. Its browser, Yandex Browser, is now capable of translating text embedded within images “from 47 languages,” says the company, touting the feature as a world’s first for a desktop browser. “Now users can easily translate and read [an] image that contain text …
Yandex Browser translates texts in images from 47 languages Read More
Russia’s competition watchdog has launched a formal probe into Yandex, alleging the country’s largest technology company could be abusing its dominant position in the search market to promote its own services at the expense of competitors. The Federal Anti-Monopoly Service (FAS) said Tuesday that Yandex has failed to comply with a previous warning that it must stop favoring …
Anti-monopoly authority open case against Yandex for abusing search dominance Read More
According to Boris Ovchinnikov (a co-founder of e-commerce research agency Data Insight), the frequency of Internet searches for the word obonyanie (“sense of smell” in Russian) may serve as a metric for gauging the spread of the novel coronavirus across Russia. Since temporary loss of smell is a common symptom of virus, tracking the public’s interest in this …
Digital epidemiology: How to chart Covid-19 using search engine queries Read More
Last week, Yandex evacuated a part of its Belarusian employees to Russia following a police raid on its Minsk office amid the unrest in the city. According to the Russian search giant, the Belarusian police were seeking to seize user data. Thus, on August 13, unidentified armed people came to Yandex’s office, presenting themselves as …
Yandex offices raided by police in Minsk, employees evacuated to Moscow Read More
Like other Russian majors, Yandex is demonstrating its commitment to combat Covid-19 through a series of initiatives. The latest one is Yandex.School, a free online education platform which the search giant created “in record time” using its existing educational programs. Launched on March 31, Yandex.School helps teachers, students and parents “retain a sense of normalcy …
Yandex launches covid home testing and online school Read More
