Russia: April Fool’s Online Pranks · Global Voices
Alexey Sidorenko

Although the beginning of the week has been marked by the disaster and grief [RUS], Russian bloggers and computer geeks tried to leave some place in their lives for a smile. Below are few of the pranks proposed by bloggers and several software companies.
Blogger Smoking Observer published the photo of the new “Stealth” tank named T-90 “Ghost”:
T-90 "Ghost", collage by Smoking Observer
Russian leading search engine Yandex turned all the images in its images search upside down. Some bloggers thought [RUS] it was a browser's bug, however the date of the unusual “feature” spoke for itself.
Yandex upside-down pictures, screenshot by Pchel
Software company ABBYY that specializes in electronic translation services announced [RUS] that it was going to include a Na'vi language dictionary in the next release supporting the announcement with the Na'vi-like picture of one of the top-managers:
Naavi-like picture of Alexander Rylov, photo by ABBYY
Popular humor portal bash.org.ru changed its interface to Empire-Russian language (the style of writing existed before 1917):
Bashorg Empire-Russian interface, screenshot by Mithgol
Initial mistakes in the old-Russian orthography provoked a lengthy discussion [RUS] among bloggers.
Israelinfo.ru, a Russian-speaking Israeli portal, posted info [RUS] on the upcoming e-mail tax, proposed by Knesset.
But the most influential (and most make-believe) was a prank by popular portal “Novy Region” with the photo of missile launcher S-300 stuck in the puddle of mud:
S-300 in the puddle of mud, collage by Novy Region