· July, 2010

Stories about Russia from July, 2010

Georgia: Frozen conflicts, frozen happiness

With a little over a week to go before the second anniversary of the short war fought between Russia and Georgia over the breakaway territory of South Ossetia, Evolutsia turns its attention to another one of the country's two frozen conflicts, Abkhazia.

Russia Tops Aggressive Internet Traffic Rating

RuNet Echo  30 July 2010

Habrahabr users discuss [RUS] the latest Akamai‘s “State of the Internet” report. According to the research, 12 percent of all the Internet-attacks in the first quarter of 2010 were carried out from the territory of Russia, while the U.S. hackers took the “second prize” for 10 percent of the world's...

Russia: Prosecutor That Banned Youtube Gives Interview

RuNet Echo  30 July 2010

Marker.ru publishes an interview with Vladimir Pakhomov, city prosecutor that obliged the local Internet provider to block Youtube, Web.archive.org and other websites [EN]. Pakhomov expressed Chinese-government-style philosophy on Internet-filtering: “Provider is obliged to filter the information that goes through its channels to the Worldwide Web”, and didn't exclude probable filtering...

Russia: LiveJournal Under Fire Of Criticism for “Innovations”

RuNet Echo  29 July 2010

LiveJournal, Russia's still most popular blog platform, recently fell under severe criticism for several “innovations”: purging suspended and “inactive” accounts [EN] and closing OpenID registration [RUS] (allowed LJ-users to comment in other blog-platforms). Blogger sviridenkov observes [RUS] more and more bloggers switching to stand-alone blogs, while Artur Welf says [RUS] disappointed users...

Russia: Forest Park Defenders Attack Khimki City Administration

RuNet Echo  29 July 2010

User berillii posts [RUS] a footage of the storming of the Khimki city administration [EN] by anarchists and antifascists that took side of the Khimki forest park defenders. LJ-user mmet supplies photos of the event. A peaceful meeting grew to a chaotic demonstration, after authorities once again detained [RUS] the...

Russia: Reginal Court Blocks YouTube for Extremist Content

RuNet Echo  28 July 2010

Komsomolosk-on-Amur [ENG] city court, at the Russian Far East, ordered local Internet provider “Rosnet” to block access to Youtube and four other websites (including web.archive.org), Cnews reported [RUS]. The decision was made due to a request by the city prosecutor's office. YouTube had been blocked because of the nationalist movie...

Russia: “Putin's Pee Joke”

RuNet Echo  28 July 2010

At The Huffington Post, Simon Shuster explains Vladimir Putin's “manner of winning the public's support”: “Find an issue that annoys a lot of people, find somebody to blame for it, and lace into him, publicly and with some classic village wit. Show on state television how the problem gets fixed.”

Russia: Blackout of the Social Network Triggers Twitter Panic

RuNet Echo  26 July 2010

The word “vkontakte“, standing for the name of the Russian social network, found itself among top Twitter trends. It happened after millions of Russian users were not able to access [RUS] the social network because of a failure [RUS] of a local power station. Some bloggers started the online panic...

Russia-Ukraine: Putin the biker

  26 July 2010

Siberian Light sums up some reactions to Russian Premier Vladimir Putin's participation in a biker meetup in Ukrainian city of Sevastopol.

Russia: Ask a Search Engine About the Weather

RuNet Echo  24 July 2010

“When the heat will pass away?” is this week's most popular search enquiry in the Russian Google. Another most popular search requests include: “How to survive heat wave?”, “How to cool down the room without an air conditioner?” and “Where people swim in the Moscow region?”, RIA Novosti reports [RUS].

Russia: First Cyrillic Word Tops Twitter Trends

RuNet Echo  24 July 2010

Russian heatwave makes history not only in the streets of Moscow but also in the virtual space. The Russian word “дождь” (rain) turned to be the first Cyrillic word in Twitter's worldwide trending topics, RIA Novosti [RUS] reports. It happened after Moscow bloggers witnessed a minor rain, that followed several weeks of unusually...