Dear Mr. Opzoomer,

I would like to bring to your attention the issue of the web site domains Mama.ru and Doktor.ru outlined below. Since June, 2000 I have been employed as a Director at ZAO DOKTOR.RU, a Rambler Holding company. On December, 2007 I was notified of my employment termination, effective January, 2008. As a director of the company, I have been responsible for managing web site properties “MAMA.RU” and “DOKTOR.RU”.

Prior to my employment by ZAO DOKTOR.RU, I owned these web site properties as well as web site domain names. I transferred ownership of domain names “MAMA.RU” and “DOKTOR.RU” to Rambler. As I will no longer be employed by Rambler, I am now seeking transfer of domain ownership of these sites back to me. So far Rambler has not responded my requests and hence I’m seeking your help and guidance.

On , June 1998 I became the owner of two web site domains, “mama.ru” and “doktor.ru”, registered for me by Redcom, a services company that provided technical support for these web sites. In May, 2000 I was approached by representatives of Russian Funds and Orion Capital Advisors, two investment firms that provided first round of funding for Rambler, with a proposal to invest into mutual development of both sites.

As part of the agreement, I was offered employment as well as assured that I will get a share in the about-to-be-opened joint venture that will deal with my websites (offshore company, that was opened eventually without my participation in it), in exchange of transfer of domain ownership rights to Rambler. Note that only ownership of domains “MAMA.RU” and “DOKTOR.RU”, and not the content of these domains, was transferred to Rambler. In addition, the investment firms arranged for funding to be provided by an Internet incubator company NetValue.

Further owners of Rambler disregarded the issue of domain transfer, which I addressed numerous times; nevertheless, they retained me as a director of ZAO DOKTOR.RU.

The challenge of this issue is that the agreement for domain ownership was not properly documented. I currently cannot supply any records of this agreement, that stipulate details of the agreement, or outlines conditions of domain name transfers. The only document that exists is a memorandum of intentions between the first wave of Rambler investors and me.

As there is not a legally binding document outlining domain ownership transfer details, I am having difficulty gaining back ownership of these domain names. I would like to resolve this issue without litigation. Nevertheless, if I don’t get a clear response and Rambler continues using my content on the sites, you will leave me with no other option than to seek legal action.

The history of Mama.ru and Doktor.ru creation can be found in the news archives:
http://netoscope.narod.ru/profile/2001/07/12/2883.html
http://www.media-atlas.ru/whoiswho/?a=view&id=1483

The first versions of these sites, with my copyright, can be found in web.archive.org:
http://web.archive.org/web/*/www.mama.ru
http://web.archive.org/web/*/www.doktor.ru

I would like an opportunity to discuss my situation in more detail, and provide you with documents and evidence in support of my case.

Sincerely,
Vladimir Voloshin

The protection system which prevents the multiple automatic registration of fraudulent accounts at GMail is cracked following the same breakage in Yahoo! and Microsoft Live webmail services. The example of spambot work is published by Russian security blog urs-molotoff.blogspot.com. The bot goes wild with a trojan. After some user's computer is infected, the bot grabs GMail captcha and sends it to a special server where the captcha is recognized and the result is send back to the bot, so it can register a new Gmail account and start spamming.

The address of the spam server is hidden in this example but the authors of the security blog told Webplanet that the bot "is connected to Russian-speaking site".

In January, some group of "Russian researchers" showed how to break Yahoo! captcha with the recognition rate about 35%. A couple of weeks later Windows Live captcha was cracked, too. These protection systems from Microsoft, Yahoo and Google where considered pretty safe so anti-spammers didn't list these mail services in their "black lists". Now they got a problem: "In the past week or so, Websense antispam filters have gone from blocking fewer than 100 Windows Live accounts per day to a number that's in the thousands". Some people say more spam comes now from GMail, too. We are looking forward to see more sophisticated Turing tests on the Web. Or it's about time to use Philip Dick's tests for androids? Google Androids, in this case.

The visit of the Free Software Foundation leader Richard Stallman to Russia in March 2008 could be canceled because of the problems with too-late visa application. A part of the trouble appeared to be Stallman's rejection to get help from Victor Alksnis, the State Duma member and the only Russian politician who helps Free Software and Open Source movements in Russia.

Alksnis promoted Stallman's upcoming visit thru his blog posts, and said he could help with "administrative issues" as well. However, the moderator of linux.org.ru Sergey Udaltsov (who lives in Ireland not Russia) wrote a letter to Stallman saying Alksnis is a bad guy for Free Software, because of "his fight against the independence of the Baltic countries" in late 80s. Udaltsov also says Alksnis wants to use GNU/Linux for his own political goals including the creation of Russian "National OS" (independent from Microsoft). After this letter, Richard Stallman said he didn't want Alksnis to organize his visit to Russia. Perhaps, Stallman won't come at all.

We at Webplanet.ru think the rout of this problem in not politics but the "language barrier" we already described. Western folks don't know much about Russian IT situation 'cos they don't read Russian. The only information channel for them is "former Russians" who live abroad and speak English - like Irelander Sergey Udaltsov who controls linux.org.ru. But these "foreign Russians" usually get pretty paranoid about their "former motherland" calling it a dictatorship daily (perhaps as an excuse for their departure). So we hope Russian linuxoids find some sane local leaders. No need to marry free software and politicians, it's true. Yet we don't see why Free Software activity in Russia should be killed by some old-fashioned Cold War rhetorics from Ireland.

Intel announced today it is giving 2500 Classmate PC to schools in Russia in terms of Intel World Ahead program. Another 500 arriving at Ukrainian schools and 300 at schools in Kazakhstan.
Last year Intel was seeking Russian government's support for another part of its global initiative, targeting school teachers. Its educational program on how to use technology in study process was presented in June 2006 at the economy forum in St.-Petersbourg. At the same time Intel's ground in Russia was attacked by AMD, which claimed its competitor doubled governmental expends on hardware ever purchased for federal needs.
With 1 mln Asus Eee PC bought for Russian schools last year by Deripaska's charity fund, Intel's Classmate PC action might be either a miserable PR effort or a give-2500-get-a-federal-order demo.

Poor imagination of Russian people often helps them to fight craziness of western civilization. When the plan to open cyrillic domain names was announced last year, it didn't make much noise in Russia. The idea is simple: people want to use Russian web-adresses, but they don't want to mix cyrillic and latin letters in it, because such a mixture would help criminals to make fake web-cites. The solution: domain names in .RU zone will be in latin only, as it was before, because RU suffix is already in Latin. And new cyrillic names will be registered with new domain suffix .RF (spelled in cyrillic only!), so the whole domain name will be in cyrillic letters. Russian critics of this plan say this is nothing but another money-making scheme for the domain registrators.

But West go nuts about it. The Guardian's article "Kremlin eyes internet control" is the wildest non-science fiction we've seen so far. First, it says "Russian Cyrillic keyboards make it difficult for Russian users to search for domain names using the roman letters" - false, all our keyboards get latin letters (though some get no cyrillics yet). Second, it says "Russian international domain names would use their own root servers" - false again. The root has not been split, said Vint Cerf; what is more important, there is no need to split roots to control the traffic, and China proved this already.

Third, cyrillic domains somehow "will put a wall between cybercriminals and their victims... makes it very difficult to track Russian cybercrime", said Guardian's no-one-knows-who experts. Sure they don't see (or don't want to tell?) the whole picture. Look: criminal RBN network moved from Russia to China, music pirate MP3Sparks.com moved to Turkey, same businesses Allofmp3.com and MuzF.ru shut down by Russian authorities. Even Google, the worldwide spy #1 and the worldwide security breach #1, is scared to open its new spy services in our country. Doesn't Russia fight cybercriminals, huh?

So the only clear message we got from The Guardian: western security experts and government agencies want more money. For this purpose, they use media to create Big Enemy Image and start Cold War 2.0. And the worst thing is: the provocation started to work on Russian side. The fake story of "isolated Internet plan" made up by one British newspaper is already picked up by Russian bloggers and press. Some Russian politicians already use it saying the idea is good, and discuss who is to be in charge for this project. Our only hope is that poorness of Russian imagination will save us again, and this crazy British dream won't come true.

Alex Patsay, one of Mac devotees in Russia, has posted an open letter to Apple in his blog. He's reasoning of Apple's 'PR fiasco' in Russia and criticizing its overpricing policy. "When the price for the gadgets is 75% higher than it’s in the US, it just looks extremely strange for the locals. Even though Russia has oil and other natural resources, the average salary here is still mere $300 per month", he writes.

Starting with opinionated speech on why Apple should be interested in 'gaining some grounds in the emerging markets', he expectedly came to implying that such unproper policy would be of much interest to the proper institutions. In particularly, he reveals, it might be of RosPotrebNadzor competence (organization similar to Attorney General Office in the US), 'the extremely powerful organization that can forbid operating on the market till the certain conditions are met'.

Patsay distributed his statement to popular online news sites and appealed to the members of Mac-users' LiveJournal community to rate his letter on Digg.com.

Russian web-design studios created less sites in 2007, mostly because of growing prices and demand from serious brands, according to TAGLINE report. It says Art.Lebedev Studio designed 45 sites, half as much as in 2006, Defa Gruppe scored 10 compared to 40, RBC Soft - 35 compared to 55 a year ago. Along with self-made inflation most studios were targeting business diversification, and the niche leaders (like Flash- or 3D-design) showed the best results in 2007.

Jan,15 Corel Corp. announced it's supplying 1 mln CorelDraw Graphics Suites for all primary and secondary schools desktops in Russia under the terms of the licensing agreement with the Russian Federal Agency of Education (RFAE). Jan,21 Adobe Systems released a press-note in which it says is will suppl the same million licenses both of Suite 3 Production Premium and Creative Suite 2.3 Premium to the same school desktops. The Adobe note emphasized that Corel "rushed to distribute its press-release" creating the "wrong idea" of the contents of software set installed on schools desktops in Russia.

On Jan, 13 'Black Energy' botnet (reportedly of Russian origin) shut down ultra-online.ru and plati.ru online stores. DDoS-attacks of this kind were actively promoted in Russian part of Internet since November, thru email spam or forums. Later in December 'Black Energy' exploited Utro.ru banner network to infect users' computers.

According to the security blogger urs-molotoff.blogspot.com, the number of such DDoS attacks started to grow on New Year's eve. As he told in interview with Webplanet.ru, attacks of this kind are ordered by competitors among online merchants, and they will continue to spread until the first case of criminal prosecution.

At the same time, Western security experts forecast the general growth of political DDoS-attacks with the spread of botnets in Russia. In fact, the previous series of DDoS-attacks on Russian web were political already, with opposition sites permanently down on the eve of parliament election. But now, after the election, it looks like commercial rivals are to use this weapon more often then politics.

Management company Finam Management has bought a 99.99% interest in Garant Service. This asset was included in the portfolio formed as part of close-ended mutual fund of risky (venture) investments Finam – Information Technologies (RTS Board: finmit). Thanks to this acquisition the mutual fund gained around 10% of UK-registered Badoo Limited that owns global social networking website Badoo.com. The transaction price equaled RUB 750 mn.

Badoo.com is a multi-lingual global networking website that offers its users the ability to communicate, create photo albums, and search for other people in the system, etc. The project was launched in November 2006 in London and it has already achieved leadership positions in Europe and some Latin American countries. The site already has over 12 mn registered users.

The purchase of a stake in this social networking portal by Finam – Information Technologies was the first step towards promoting this project on the Russian market. The Russian section of Badoo.com will launch operations in the weeks to come. Its objective is to reach leadership positions among Russia-based portals where the social networking segment has achieved the fastest growth. Based on Finam's estimates, registered users within Russian social networking websites soared 5-fold in 2007 and rapid growth is also expected to continue this year.