Elva, crowd-sourcing conflict in the South Caucasus

U.S. calls Ukraine the pirate king

U.S. officials are calling Ukraine the world’s “worst abuser of intellectual property rights,” charging that Internet piracy there has gotten so bad that even government agencies are using illegal software, according to AFP. In response, U.S. trade officials said they are considering trade restrictions against Kyiv. Read More »

New app warns Romanian drivers of upcoming potholes

Although a solution to Romania’s endemic road problems is still nowhere in sight, a team of Romanian IT specialists has come up with an app for mobile phones that allows drivers to avoid potholes. Read More »

Bridging the digital divide (one Central Asian language at a time)

The localization of Skype into the Kyrgyz language in 2011 has been the first step to opening the world’s most popular messenger to the people who do not – surprise, surprise – speak Russian or English. Read More »

Lithuania zooms in on Google Street View

Though initially hesitant to endorse Google Street View, the Lithuanian government has discovered the mapping service may be instrumental in identifying tax cheats. Read More »

Yandex to expand its technological horizons

Internet giant Yandex has become the first Russian company to get access to the vast databases of the influential Swiss European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN). Read More »

That startup fever

Vladimir Funtikov, a 26-year-old Estonian businessman, already has behind him successful studies at university and the launch of several small technology companies, including Creative Mobile, which produces games for smart phones. Now he’s come up with a crazy idea: playing on cell phones should be taught as a subject at university because, among other reasons, his company – with offices in Tallinn, St. Petersburg, New York, and London employing 60 people – can’t find enough skilled developers and programmers.  Read More »

New Russian website sets targets on apartment repairs

After struggling to coalesce the increasingly targeted Russian opposition movement, anti-corruption activist Aleksei Navalny has launched a website to tap into public frustration over poor conditions in Russian apartment blocks. And after a month online, the site seems to be hitting a nerve, The New York Times reports. Read More »

Hunting black swans with big data

In times of worldwide economic crisis, natural disasters, and political turmoil, one often wonders if such events couldn’t have been mitigated or avoided altogether with the help of the latest technological developments. The United Nations Development Programme offers a potential answer in the form of a software that allows better data visualization and detection of irregular patterns.

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Macedonian Schools Face the Shock of the New

SKOPJE | In the past five years Macedonian classrooms have seen many changes. An additional year of mandatory education; “interactive” teaching in place of the rote learning of the past; new textbooks; a computer for every pupil – it all foretold a radical transformation of what most agreed was a woefully obsolete school system. Read More »

The Kremlin’s 21st-century thought police

Earlier this month, Russia’s controversial new Internet blacklist law went into effect, raising serious concerns from bloggers, activists, and human rights watchers. The law, with the particularly Orwellian name “On Amendments to Federal Law On Protecting Children from Information Harmful to Their Health and Development and Certain Legislative Acts of the Russian Federation”, officially gives Kremlin agencies the legal right for deep surveillance of its citizenry. Read More »

Hooked on a feeling: The strange marriage of human rights and CAPTCHAs

About a month ago, the Swedish non-profit Civil Rights Defenders (CDR) released their version of CAPTCHA, the system that is used to verify that the user of the web site is a human (as opposed to a programmed robot). Read More »

Russia: Crowdmapping Corruption with Bribr Mobile App

Bribr [ru; App Store, Facebook] is a newly-launched iPhone/iPad app that allows anonymous users in Russia to submit the locations and the amounts of the bribes they pay. Later, it will be possible to report on the bribes taken as well. Read More »

Uzbekistan targets proxy servers in continued Net crackdown

Internet users in Uzbekistan have reported being blocked from accessing proxy servers, according to Uznews.
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