On November 18 the company WebMoney Transfer registered its three millionth WMID account. Starting with 2004, the number of registrations climbed into the millions, while the volume of money transfers through the system doubles each year. The past year has seen an increase in the number of WM currencies with the addition of the Belarusian ruble equivalent. In the near future the system will launch its own investment instrument.

Last week the Google Video collection added a videotaped statement by Amir Sayfullah, known in Russia as Anzor Astemirov, leader of the Wahhabite underground movement in Kabardino-Balkaria and mastermind behind the raids on Nalchik. The 7.5-minute video was posted by the press service of the Kabardino-Balkaria sector of the Caucasus Front, which is based on the infamous website Kavkaz Center. In his statement Astemirov calls for "a jihad against the system of international Satanism, which includes the Russian state", and threatens to carry out large-scale terrorist acts in Kabardino-Balkaria.

This year the issue of getting Russian schools connected to the Internet has migrated from the project Electronic Russia to the federal priority program titled Education. Yet the latter program does not cover the training of teachers and preparing guidelines, a task left to the regions. It appears that the program is merely a politically convenient window-dressing, as it seems easier for those in power to fake progress with the help of reports on the length of cable laid.

On the bright side, we may just as well be thankful to those who are delaying the spread of the Internet at schools. After all, in the absence of a clear educational objective, its place is quickly occupied by the objective of enrichment. This academic year, some Russian schools are already giving students a hard time by sending their grade and conduct reports to their parents' mobile phones. Meanwhile, schools in St. Petersburg will have their websites developed with the money of sponsors, who will in return receive eternal banner space on such children's resources. Meanwhile, there is still a question mark over the benefits of the Internet in education. A number of Western studies have revealed that the Web is more of a distraction for students than a learning aid.

Russia's Channel One general director Konstantin Ernst believes that in recent years television has lost between 15 and 25 percent of its audience. Ernst thinks that those who have abandoned television now prefer to use the Internet as a source of information and watch DVD movies for entertainment. In order to stop the exodus of viewers, Ernst insists on paying greater attention to programming content. In his view, Russian television channels have become very similar to one another in terms of content, while the amount of air time they devote to movies far exceeds that of Western channels. This makes young viewers turn their backs on television.

On November 20 a Moscow court convicted Radical Politics editor-in-chief Boris Stomakhin, sentencing him to 5 years behind bars. Despite Stomakhin's disability, he was found guilty of inciting religious strife and publicly encouraging extremism. The journalist became disabled already as a wanted man. To escape arrest, he jumped out of a window of his fourth floor apartment and broke his spine and leg. The arrest was prompted by four issues of the underground bulletin Radical Politics, which lashed out against the authorities' policy in Chechnya. Stomakhin's materials were featured on the infamous website Kavkaz Center.

Statistics of the Economic Security Department at Russia's Interior Ministry suggest that over the last ten months Russian pirates deprived rightholders of some $94 million in lost income. In 6,432 criminal cases filed over the last year in connection with infringements of copyright and neighboring rights, only 3,082 individuals were prosecuted. As a result, the authorities recovered a little over $1.5 million in losses caused by pirates. However, market participants disagree as to the actual figure of losses. While some believe that this figure is estimated using the knockdown prices of pirated CDs and DVDs, others insist that rightholders overrate the value of their products and by extension their losses.

The November 16-17 conference "Search optimization and promotion of websites on the Internet", organized by the IT consulting company Ashmanov and Partners, proved quite a dynamic event. The report by Aleksandr Sadovsky, who heads the Yandex web search department, caused a storm of indignation as he offered examples of websites which Yandex will blacklist, excluding them from the results page. The speech by Vladimir Dolgov, country manager of Google's operation in Russia, did not live up to expectations. He gave a standard Google sales pitch without lifting the lid on the company's plans in Russia. During the closing roundtable discussion, noted search optimizers of the Russian Internet admitted that the standoff between search engine operators and search optimizers is leading into a dead end. Still those attending the discussion were unable to offer any insights into the future of search optimization.