Russia: LiveJournal Under Fire Of Criticism for “Innovations”

Posted 29 July 2010 8:12 GMT

Countries	Russia
Topics	Technology, Media & Journalism, Digital Activism
Languages	Russian, English
Special	RuNet Echo

This post is part of RuNet Echo, a Global Voices project to interpret the Russian language internet. All posts · Learn more

Russia

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 would rather prefer Facebook.

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Updates about Eastern & Central Europe

10 February 2012

Macedonia

GV Author Filip Stojanovski posts pictures of Skopje's snowy and icy streets and reports on his blog: “[…] the pavements and the side streets in the municipality of Centar remain icy. Some are covered by layers of ice or re-frozen slush, by old frozen snow, or an unevenly hardened mash of snow and 'salt.' Fokus daily claimed that the authorities avoid declaring nationwide state of emergency in order to ‘prove' that they were prepared for the snow.”

• Veronica Khokhlova

9 February 2012

Russia

On February 9, 2012, following the widely-discussed leaks of pro-Kremlin mailboxes, LiveJournal, where the leaks were published, became temporarily unavailable, Lenta.ru reported [ru]. Russian representative of Anonymous group @OP_Russia, suggested [ru] that it was a DDoS attack to hide the evidence of massive wrongdoings (including corruption, thievery, political provocations, and cybercrime) [ru] by Nashi youth movement. Later that day @OP_Russia took responsibility for taking down 3 websites of United Russia party: mos-partya.ru, er-region.ru, and er-kaluga.ru.

• Alexey Sidorenko

Russia

At OpenDemocracy.net, Olesya Gerasimenko talks to the parents of three young neo-Nazi men who were convicted of race murders: “One has adopted the views of their only child and says that violence is necessary. One blames the politicians that have incited adolescents to street fighting. One cries, convinced of the innocence of his son. They are all different, but they have all asked themselves one and the same question: ‘am I to blame for what happened?’”

• Veronica Khokhlova

Macedonia

While the authorities in Macedonia remain silent on the country's stance on the ACTA, bloggers, such as Airborne, emphasize the need to gain more knowledge [mk], as the traditional media mostly ignore the issue: “Maybe, one of these days, we'll just simply wake up in the ACTA-ruled world.” The new media attempting to fill this gap in local languages include Metamorphosis and IT.com.mk. Endek blog advocates [mk] standing up for Internet freedom by joining international protest movements.

• Filip Stojanovski

8 February 2012

Russia

Andrey Rylkov Foundation writes about the first case of enforcement of the domain seizure rules in the “.ru” and “.рф” domain zones. The rules [ru] (Article 5, point 5.5) , updated on November 11, 2011 allow any law enforcement agency (like police, Federal Security Service, Prosecutor's office or Federal Drug Control Services (FDCS)) to request domain seizure without a court order. On February 3, 2012 FDCS successfully seized the domain of rylkov-fond.ru, a website of Rylkov Foundation that had severely criticized situation with drug trafficking.

• Alexey Sidorenko

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