MOSCOW — Russia (click here) has taken another major step toward restricting its once freewheeling Internet, as President Vladimir V. Putin quietly signed a new law requiring popular online voices to register with the government, a measure that lawyers, Internet pioneers and political activists said Tuesday would give the government a much wider ability to track who said what online.
Mr.
Putin’s action on Monday, just weeks after he disparaged the Internet
as “a special C.I.A. project,” borrowed a page from the restrictive
Internet playbooks of many governments around the world that have been
steadily smothering online freedoms they once tolerated....
...Widely
known as the “bloggers law,” the new Russian measure specifies that any
site with more than 3,000 visitors daily will be considered a media
outlet akin to a newspaper and be responsible for the accuracy of the
information published.
Besides
registering, bloggers can no longer remain anonymous online, and
organizations that provide platforms for their work such as search
engines, social networks and other forums must maintain computer records
on Russian soil of everything posted over the previous six months.
“This law will cut the number of critical voices and opposition voices on the Internet,” said Galina Arapova,
director of the Mass Media Defense Center and an expert on Russian
media law. “The whole package seems quite restrictive and might affect
harshly those who disseminate critical information about the state,
about authorities, about public figures.”...
This is just more problems for Russian bloggers that have existed over a year.
19 July 2013 Last updated at 03:25 ET
After hearing the sentence he sought to keep up his
supporters' morale, with the tweet: "Fine. Don't miss me too much, you
guys. And most importantly, don't sit around doing nothing. The toad
won't get off the oil pipe by itself." The "toad" was what he called the
Russian government in a post on his LiveJournal blog....
Makes complete sense to me. A blogger opposing Russian corruption is truly at heart corrupt himself.
2013 (click here)
Many experts believe that Alexei Navalny's blog was the initial target
...LiveJournal.ru, which is one of Russia's most popular websites and blog hosts, and is frequently a venue for open political discussion, said through the Russian-language blog of its host, SUP.ru, that it had sustained a "powerful and prolonged DDOS attack" on April 4 at 2 pm Moscow time....
...Popular blogs targeted
Kaspersky Labs, one of the world's leading computer and network security firms, which is based in Moscow, confirmed that this DDOS was organized by the Optima botnet, adding that the firm had been "monitoring one of these Optima botnets for some time now."
"Analysis of the data acquired showed that the first DDOS attack on LiveJournal occurred on 24 March," wrote Maria Garnaeva, a Kaspersky analyst, on the English-language blog SecureList on Wednesday.
In the same post, Garnaeva listed 36 websites that became targets during the April 4 attack.
"It should be obvious to specialists in the Russian-speaking blogosphere that the list affects some of the most popular bloggers on LiveJournal who write about a wide variety of things," she wrote. "It is not known if this was an attempt to 'blur' the real target of the attacks, which may have been clearly designated during the first DDOS attacks, or if the list of blogs that had fallen out of favor had become bigger."
On April 4, a British computer security firm, Netcraft, also confirmed the attack on its blog....
This is just more problems for Russian bloggers that have existed over a year.
19 July 2013 Last updated at 03:25 ET
...Russian anti-corruption campaigner (click here) Alexei Navalny, 37, was sentenced to five years in prison for
embezzlement on 18 July 2013, after a highly controversial trial.
Makes complete sense to me. A blogger opposing Russian corruption is truly at heart corrupt himself.
2013 (click here)Many experts believe that Alexei Navalny's blog was the initial target
...LiveJournal.ru, which is one of Russia's most popular websites and blog hosts, and is frequently a venue for open political discussion, said through the Russian-language blog of its host, SUP.ru, that it had sustained a "powerful and prolonged DDOS attack" on April 4 at 2 pm Moscow time....
...Popular blogs targeted
Kaspersky Labs, one of the world's leading computer and network security firms, which is based in Moscow, confirmed that this DDOS was organized by the Optima botnet, adding that the firm had been "monitoring one of these Optima botnets for some time now."
"Analysis of the data acquired showed that the first DDOS attack on LiveJournal occurred on 24 March," wrote Maria Garnaeva, a Kaspersky analyst, on the English-language blog SecureList on Wednesday.
In the same post, Garnaeva listed 36 websites that became targets during the April 4 attack.
"It should be obvious to specialists in the Russian-speaking blogosphere that the list affects some of the most popular bloggers on LiveJournal who write about a wide variety of things," she wrote. "It is not known if this was an attempt to 'blur' the real target of the attacks, which may have been clearly designated during the first DDOS attacks, or if the list of blogs that had fallen out of favor had become bigger."
On April 4, a British computer security firm, Netcraft, also confirmed the attack on its blog....
