Tag: Vladimir Putin

Putin gets Facebook page blocked

Posted on December 23, 2014 by - News

Vladimir Putin - Wikimedia CommonsA page on Facebook has been pulled in Russia after a state comms regulator asked the social networking corporation to pull it down.

The pages were promoting a rally to be held on January 15th supporting an opposition politician called Alexey Navalney.

According to Bloomberg, Navalney faces a 10 year charge and has been on house arrest since this February.  He is a popular figure and is an anti-corruption activist.

Earlier this year, Russian president Vladimir Putin signed off on laws that gave him and his regulator more power over the internet. The government already controls much of the media including the press and TV.

Bloomberg quotes a Navalny spokesperson as saying that the opposition was surprised by how quickly Facebook blocked the page from its 10.5 million or so users in Russia.

Facebook had nothing to say on why it took the decision to take down the pages.

Navalny faces sentencing on the 15th of January, the day of the proposed rally.  He personally has no access to either the internet or the telephone.

Tsar Putin bans iPhone and iPad

Posted on November 5, 2014 by - News

Movie-Ivan-the-Terrible-by-Sergei-EisensteinApple will be banned from selling its iPhone and Apple iPad in Russia, from January as the Russian Orthodox Tsar Putin orders a crackdown on the cargo cult.

Initially appeared that Apple was being banned from Russia because it has a gay CEO and Putin is homophobic in such a way which caused a business group to dismantle a memorial to Steve Jobs in St. Petersburg. It turns out that the reason is a little more sensible.

The iCloud that has Russian authorities concerned because data saved in it is not stored locally and is wide open to any US spook who wants to have a look at it. It could also contain pictures of homosexual romps in the Kremlin which could be distributed on 4Chan for a laugh.

The law was not created to harm Apple specifically, as it applies to all online services including social networks which have their servers in the US. However, it will probably harm Apple more.

Apple could put up a server farm in the country, but that that would mean that the data could be sniffed by the Russian spooks, and Jobs’ Mob only gives its data to the Americans.

What will get sticky is when Russia enforces the ban at the retail level. Those in Russia who currently own an iPhone or iPad that supports iCloud, might have to put up with relentless searches from the authorities.

It is not a big problem for Apple. Unlike China where there are people prepared to sell a kidney to own one of its phones, Russians are a little more pragmatic about handing over two months’ salary for a gadget which will be out of date in a year. An iPad and iPhone ban will only extend to the Russian mafia who are the only ones who can afford them.

 

Russians hack Wikipedia entry on flight MH17

Posted on July 21, 2014 by - News

imperial_russiaAs it looks like the missile that downed flight MH17 was fired by pro-Russian separatists armed by Tsar Vladimir Putin, another war is breaking out on the online encyclopaedia Wikipedia.

Tsar Putin’s government has been caught out removing sections of Wikipedia which accuse it of providing the missiles that were used to down the civilian airliner.

The Twitter bot which monitors edits made to the online encyclopaedia from Russian government IP addresses has spotted that changes are being made to a page relating to the crash.

A user from within the All-Russia State Television and Radio Broadcasting Company (VGTRK) changed a Russian language version of a page listing civil aviation accidents to say: “The plane [flight MH17] was shot down by Ukrainian soldiers,” which is what Tsar Putin wants you to think.

This replaced text, written an hour earlier, which said MH17 had been shot down “by terrorists of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic with Buk system missiles, which the terrorists received from the Russian Federation.”

The government was caught by an automated Twitter bot called congress-edits was created to monitor for changes made from US Congress computers and immediately tweet them.

That source code powering that project was made public, allowing the creation of RUGovEdits which performs a similar role in Russia.

Tsar Putin has denied any responsibility over the shooting down of the jet, which should have been an end to the matter. He said that the “government over whose territory it occurred is responsible for this terrible tragedy.”

If you read that literally he is saying that the Ukrainian government was responsible for him having to arm the separatists, and also had to face blame for the trigger happy nutjobs mistaking a passenger plane for a Ukrainian government cargo plane.

Normally it is the US government which tinkers with Wikipedia entries with staff of Congress members often having a crack at improving their boss’s image.

Microsoft once offered an engineer money to update articles on two competing standards.