Head of the Google Russia office Vladimir Dolgov advised on the creation of corporate blogs in the magazine SmartMoney: "There is no such thing as an online diary without visitor comments. Users must be able to leave postings – after all, a blog is a form of conversation over the Net". Meantime, in September, Google Russia opened a blog without a commentary. The blogs of all foreign departments of the company are made under the same standard: only mail is offered as a means to submit feedback. Other managers give far more intelligible advice. Jean-Paul Bergmans, acting head of the representative office of Sun Microsystems in the CIS, speaks of the dangers of information leaks through blogs. Elena Kolmanovskaya, Editor-in-Chief of Yandex, tells of the natural origins of the corporate blog being in the internal diaries of company staff. Roman Shaternik, head of the Red Graphic office in Russia describes the reasons for a possible rejection of the corporate blog and a return to regular press releases.

At the end of the summer, a representative from Peterhost proposed that access to the content of sites on its hosting be banned for the web crawler of the Webalta search engine. Instead of giving the information to real visitors, the servers had to deal more and more with a web crawler. In response the representatives of the search engine accused the webmasters that they issue the content on the wrong format. It turns out that the people producing the content must not only release it for public access, but feed it to the crawler in bite-size pieces. But do we need the search engines so much that we have to learn the language of these robots and play by their rules? The Internet without a global search engine is the same natural thing as life with a television. This is the kind of Internet, with its mailing lists, newsgroups, forums, blogs and social networks, where people now resolve far more serious matters than that enabled by the universal web crawler.

A former member of staff of the Internet provider Trank has been arrested in Astrakhan. After being laid off, the fraudster retained administrator rights in the company’s network, charged money to the personal accounts of subscribers, which he then appropriated. He also had access to the database of the provider’s PIN codes, which he then went onto sell. Finally, he modified the details of certain company subscribers, which meant he could appropriate their traffic and sell it to others. The total loss incurred because of the fraudster came to over 500,000 roubles. The arrested man was sacked from his job owing to his drug habit and already held two previous convictions.

From the 25th October, Russians submitting documents for immigration visas to the USA need to complete an application on the US State Department’s website. This innovation does not yet concern the Consulate General in St. Petersburg or the Consulate General in Yekaterinburg: here applicants for non-immigration visas can for now use the old format for visa applications. It is assumed that the use of the electronic application will help to standardize and make safer the process of applying for a visa.

Издали я принял его за баска. И даже обрадовался. Да чего врать - я хотел, чтобы он был баском. Подлым грязным террористом, которого я возьму.

The Minister for IT and Communications Leonid Reiman believes that from 2000 the Russian information and communications technology (ICT) sector has been growing four times faster than the Russian economy. He made this declaration at the Fourth Baikal Economic Forum in Irkutsk. The Minister also remarked that in 2005 ICT accounted for 5% of the country’s GDP. Here, Russia has something to aim for, as in developed countries this figure is around the 10% mark.

В условиях неопределенности, которая нынче царит на рынке mp3-торговли, многие видят единственную возможность занять ведующие позиции в ставке на новаторские идеи. Так, создатели SpiralFrog.com обещают запустить сервис по бесплатному прослушиванию и скачиванию файлов.