[Updated March 25] On Monday, March 23, Russia’s Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin instructed the communications ministry to “organize the creation of a system that can track people who have come into contact with patients infected by the new coronavirus.” Based on individual geolocation data from telecom operators, the system should also notify users about their …
Around 2,500 people arriving in Moscow from China have been ordered to be placed under quarantine for the coronavirus and are being monitored by the Russian capital’s facial-recognition technology, Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said Friday. All arriving passengers from China are required to undergo a physical examination and coronavirus test at the airport, Sobyanin wrote on his website. …
Moscow deploys facial recognition in mass coronavirus quarantine Read More
A Russian government agency has proposed banning the use of foreign information technology for critical national infrastructure, a draft government order shows, as Moscow moves to step up its control over the internet within its borders. The Federal Service for Technical and Export Control (FSTEC) has proposed increasing the technological sovereignty of critical infrastructure, systems …
Russia proposes banning foreign IT for critical infrastructure Read More
Dmitry Golovin, who leads the Moscow IT Department’s video surveillance division, has revealed during a forum called Security Technologies that 105,000 of the city’s security cameras are connected to a facial recognition system. Over the course of Russia’s New Year holidays, Golovin added, that system helped state officials arrest 34 individuals who had been wanted …
The Russian Federation has a new prime minister, Mikhail Mishustin, previously head of the country’s tax administration. In this position, Mishustin made comments about cryptocurrencies on multiple occasions, crypto news outlet Forklog reminded. Nobody trusted paper money when it was introduced into circulation and it had to be backed with the gold reserves of central …
Russia’s new prime minister has an opinion of cryptocurrencies Read More
In November 2019, Russia’s so-called “Internet sovereignty law” took effect, requiring all local telecom operators to install special equipment designed to “withstand foreign threats” and block anything added by Roskomnadzor (the federal censor) to the government’s registry of banned online content. The new regulations are still unenforceable in practice, but officials are already testing the …
Five top Russian corporations – state-controlled financial giant Sberbank, Internet groups Yandex and Mail.Ru, mobile operator MTS and oil major Gazprom Neft, – together with the sovereign fund RDIF, intend to pool their resources to foster Russian AI technologies. The agreement was inked earlier this month, a few weeks after a “National Strategy for the …
Russian Internet, financial and oil majors join forces to foster artificial intelligence Read More
Russia’s State Duma is in the process of passing over 50 laws to regulate new technologies in the IT sector, which last year generated almost 5% of GDP and is growing at a rate of 10 to 15%. The most controversial of them — the so-called sovereign internet law that will allow Russia to cut …
Russia’s flagship tech companies, LSE-listed Mail.Ru Group and NASDAQ-listed Yandex, both reported strong third-quarter results amid ongoing concerns over government proposals to limit foreign ownership in Russia’s largest technology companies. With revenues and earnings up at both companies, representatives confirmed they were lobbying the government to water down the potentially damaging legislation to the two …
Russia’s Yandex and Mail.Ru report strong growth despite ownership threats Read More
On Nov. 14-15, thousands of professionals will gather at the New Retail Forum to discuss global and Russian trends. Join the event to hear more than 150 speakers from leading retailers, service providers and institutions; discover next-gen solutions; and expand your network tremendously! New Retail Forum is the largest event ever organized in Russia on retail and …
Massive retail and e-commerce event by EWDN and Russian Post (Skolkovo, Nov. 14-15) Read More
A “National Strategy for the Development of Artificial Intelligence for the period until 2030” was approved earlier this month by Russian President Vladimir Putin, as reported by TASS. The presidential executive order defines AI as “technological solutions that can simulate a person’s cognitive functions and get results comparable at least to the results of human …
President Putin signs national AI development strategy Read More
Officials in Moscow have spent the last few years methodically assembling one of the most comprehensive video-surveillance operations in the world. The public-private network of as many as 200,000 cameras records 1.5 billion hours of footage a year that can be accessed by 16,000 government employees, intelligence officers and law-enforcement personnel. Now the entire system …
