Starting from September 2015, the personal data of Russian citizens must be stored on servers located physically on the Russian territory. Adopted last year in a bid to affirm Russia’s digital sovereignty, this new law has provided many players with challenges due both to its demanding requirements and the ambiguity of some of its key provisions (see details in EWDN’s …
Yandex.Direct, Yandex’s pay-per-click advertising platform, is changing its auction system and introducing new ranking rules for paid search results. Starting tomorrow, instead of a generalized second-price auction (GSP), Yandex.Direct will be using a Vickery-Clarke-Groves (VGC) auction to serve ads in the premium positions on its search engine results page (SERP) and the SERPs of websites …
Yandex launches new SEM offer with enhanced auction model and ad relevance ranking Read More
After blocking a Wikipedia article for less than than 18 hours, the Russian media watchdog Roskomnadzor removed it from a list of banned webpages this past Tuesday. At the end of July, a local court in the southern Astrakhan region declared that a Wikipedia article on charas — a form of hashish — violated the …
Russian telecom regulator blocked Wikipedia — then recanted Read More
The Russian law on personal data storage will not apply to airlines and air ticket booking systems, the Ministry of Telecom and Mass Communications has announced on its website. Adopted last year, the new legislation forbidding storage of Russian citizens’ personal data in foreign countries has posed new challenges to many companies – both foreign and domestic – which store their …
Russia exempts airline ticketing systems from personal data storage law Read More
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 …
Russian lawmakers want government to develop automated system for hunting Internet trolls Read More
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 …
Russian video game saves Western food imports from destruction Read More
Russian entrepreneurs have launched something similar to Handy, the U.S. home-cleaning service. In the past year, Qlean has attracted more than $327,000 in investment, and in the near future the young ambitious service plans to expand to Asia. The founders of Qlean take their inspiration from the success of the world-renowned car service, Uber. “We …
Here’s a crazy report: Kaspersky Lab, makers of a popular antivirus service, might have created fake malware for over ten years to harm its competitors. The software was benign, but Kaspersky fooled other antivirus software into marking it as infected. Two ex-employees told Reuters that the clandestine attack was originally meant to punish smaller rivals that Kaspersky felt were …
Kaspersky Antivirus accused of creating fake malware for over 10 years Read More
Russia is considering blocking access to Reddit for its citizens over complaints that the site is hosting information showing how to cultivate narcotics. According to a post from Roskomnadzor (the ‘Federal Service for Supervision in the Sphere of Telecom, Information Technologies and Mass Communications’) on Russia’s VKontakte (VK.com) social network, the organization has been in touch with Reddit …
In the middle of July the Telegram messenger created by Pavel Durov, founder of Russia’s largest social network, Vkontakte, was subjected to a series of large-scale DDOS attacks. They caused the application to breakdown all over the world. Shortly before, the application had been deleted from the Google Play store for several hours due to complaints …
Russia is the leading suspect in a sophisticated cyber attack on the unclassified email network of the U.S. military’s Joint Staff that prompted the Pentagon last month to restrict access to portions of that network, U.S. officials said on Thursday. Early reports firmly linked Russia to the attack, said one U.S. official, who declined to be named since the investigation is still underway. “It was a spearphishing attack …
Russia prime suspect in cyber attack against US military, say US officials Read More
Russia’s media watchdog has classified 640 blogs and online communities as equal to the media, making their content subject to certain restrictions, the watchdog said on its Twitter page Monday. Under the law adopted last year, bloggers and Internet users with public web pages visited by more than 3,000 people a day are eligible for inclusion …
Hundreds of Russian bloggers registered with media regulator Read More
