Two Russian investigative reporters have uncovered plans for extensive monitoring of electronic communications during next February’s Winter Olympics in Sochi, the Guardian reports. Read More »

Throughout the Moscow mayor’s race, Alexey Navalny’s campaign has taken a beating from all sides on questions about financing, nationalism, and even transparency. Read More »

Despite receiving positive reviews following its release, ‘Company of Heroes 2’, the sequel to the extremely popular RTS (real-time strategy) game by Relic, has recently elicited a strong backlash emanating from countries in the Commonwealth of Independent States that has cut to the very heart of historical accuracy and regional politics, according to the video game news site Polygon. Read More »

Moscow’s metro system will soon be equipped with devices able to read data off people’s mobile phones.

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Four Russians and a Ukrainian have been charged in what U.S. officials call the largest hacking attack in the country’s history, RIA Novosti reports.

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Ilya Segalovich, co-founder and chief technological officer of the Russian search engine Yandex, passed away 27 July, in a London hospital due to cancer-related causes. Read More »

Russia Beyond the Headlines details  a tender for a new iPad custom-made for Gazprom chairman Alexei Miller. Read More »

On the eve of being sentenced to a five-year term in a penal colony, Alexey Navalny blogged about puffer fish. The Russian opposition would be remiss to think of itself as a school of small fish being pursued by a big predatory fish (i.e. the Kremlin), he wrote on his blog. The predator was simply putting on an act to conceal its weakness.

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Released by a Russian Orthodox youth organization, a new video game explicitly targets the feminist punk band Pussy Riot that became an international cause after its members were jailed for an antigovernment performance at a Moscow church last year, Reuters reports. Read More »

The recent allegations over the widespread extent of the America’s surveillance program have prompted Russia to regress to a more low-tech alternative to computers—typewriters. Read More »

On 9 July, the Russian Constitutional Court in St. Petersburg ruled that website owners are responsible for the removal of defamatory information from their sites even if it was posted by a third party. Read More »

On July 2, 2013 three of Russia’s popular online libraries blocked user access to their websites and collections as a way to protest a new law aimed at combating internet piracy (see RuNet Echo coverage here [GV]), which passed Russia’s lower house of parliament on June 21, 2013. Read More »

Not so long ago, in a country not so far way…

It is a period of a civic crackdown. Opposition leaders striking from all sides are trying to win their first victory against an evil empire. But the empire, losing ground on the virtual battlefield, hopes to bolster its forces with a new recruitment drive of … Jedi?

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The Baikonur space center, a Russian-leased launch site located in Kazakhstan, was the scene of a corruption case that resulted in the embezzlement of more than 15 million rubles ($456,000), RIA Novosti reports.

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