Попытка осудить директора школы за пиратский софт вызвала бурную истерику среди интернетчиков, предлагающих то зафлудить Общественную палату, то желающих сесть рядом с Поносовым на скамью подсудимых. В своем открытом письме "Вебпланета" дает советы, как правильно забраться в тюрьму в знак протеста.

Russian online casinos risk being deprived of electronic cash due to recent amendments to the law "On Government Regulation of the Gambling Business and Amendments to Individual Legislative Acts of the Russian Federation," which bans online gambling as of January 1, 2007. Yandex previously announced its refusal to process payments in favor of online casinos via Yandex.Money. The payment system Moneymail.ru is planning to follow suit.

Google has reached a deal with Samsung whereby Google will install its mobile phone applications on Samsung handsets to be accessed with a press of a key. Webplanet previously reported about the search service of Yandex, a plug-in for which can be downloaded by owners of Nokia mobile phones. Yet Google's combination obviously has more appeal. From now on buyers of Samsung handsets will not have to download any additional software, as their phones will come with preinstalled Google Search, Google Maps, and a Gmail client. Samsung goes neck and neck with Nokia in terms of handset sales in Russia.

At 2 p.m. on January 10, Gazeta.ru suffered a hacker attack that shut down the web portal, according to NEWSru.com. In what appears to be a strange coincidence, once the website went back online its front page featured an article entitled "Secret Swine in Moscow City Hall". Later in the day Gazeta.ru reported that all Internet media have lost their accreditation with the Moscow government. In recent months Gazeta.ru has been in the spotlight in connection with its acquisition by the publishing house Kommersant.

To get a picture of the future of Runet, the Russian segment of the Internet, Webplanet has polled its most prominent figures, asking them to name two or three most significant events or trends they expect in 2007. One of the major events are the presidential elections slated for 2008, ahead of which we will see mass buyouts of content projects and an overall increase in investments channeled into Runet. Big changes (possibly a financial collapse) are expected at the company SUP, which manages the Russian-language segment of LiveJournal. Also named among the upcoming trends are buoyant growth and redistribution of the contextual advertising market, gambling market trouble in Runet, and more stringent copyright enforcement.

The pre-New Year update of the Yandex Thematic Index of Citing (TIC) proved a bad surprise for webmasters and optimizers. Websites with a large number of backward links dropped 30 to 50 percent in their ranking. "Today we did another update of the Thematic Index of Citing. A noticeable reduction in the website rank means that many links to the website came from 'bad-quality' pages or have been flagged as link spam," Yandex press service chief Mikhail Ushakov told Webplanet. In all likelihood, these changes represent the first step on the part of Yandex in its struggle against link buying, which is tantamount to buying the TIC.

All the hype surrounding Apple's iPhone podphone is further proof that today's consumer society is ruled by design for lonely women and sissies. This problem is especially relevant for Russia, where women dominate over men both numerically and in terms of a more active role in life. In his column, Webplanet's editor-in-chief offers a stern Russian view of the fashionable toy.