In December, street stalls with pirated CDs started selling a digital database of addresses, telephones, and personal details of high-ranking clients of Moscow prostitutes, along with police materials of high-profile criminal cases and tapped telephone conversations. The database contains details of some 90,000 individuals and has a price tag of 1,500 rubles ($55). At least 1,000 CDs with the database are said to have been released. Yet some experts have questioned the fact that the Moscow police may be the source of the leak. Many believe this might be a mere publicity stunt by pirates seeking to rev up sales of other databases containing private information of Russian citizens.

Web designer Artemy Lebedev has criticized Apple's iPhone as part of his Business Lynch project that features his critique of young web designers' work. He is perplexed by the "idiotic American idea of tying the handset to a specific mobile operator" and the fact that there is little feedback from those who tested the new iPhone. "A handset without keys is crap because you just can't dial a number without looking while driving. And you can't even send a short message properly. The only hope is that producers, the likes of Griffin or Belikin, have already started developing a compatible keyboard," he writes. Instead of using a full-size sensor screen, Optimus keyboards of Artemy Lebedev's design studio consist of keys with OLED (organic light-emitting diode) screens, which can be configured to perform any function.

The company Rambler Media has finalized a deal to transfer its television channel Rambler-TV to the company Osgora Productions Ltd, an affiliate of the Prof-Media holding, which recently acquired a stake in Rambler Media itself. Rambler Media representatives have said that $23 million in proceeds from the sale of the television channel will be used to buy profitable projects that will supplement the key Internet services of Rambler. It's a somewhat bewildering statement, since in terms of the number of its Internet service offers Rambler goes neck and neck with the two other market leaders – Mail.ru and Yandex, while prices for internet projects in the Russian segment of the Internet have soared to a point where it may not be always wise to buy them. In all likelihood, the cash infusion is not likely to help the Internet holding to increase its market presence. Alternatively, this could be accomplished by tweaking with the company's management and development strategy. Yet market participants believe that Prof-Media is not usually inclined to change the management of the companies it acquires.

Mail.ru general director Dmitry Grishyn said in an interview with Computerra journal that he is closely watching the development of his Western competitors – Google, Microsoft, and possibly Yahoo! In his view, the best business model is to have users to accumulate personal information on your portal, such as photo albums, blogs, and other services. Such people are much harder to lure for competitors. Mail.ru marketing director Anna Artamonova has confirmed that Mail.ru services are designed in such a way as to get users to grow attached to them, unlike LiveJourna.com with its English-language interface. Dmitry Grishyn also said that instant messaging is the only area where Mail.ru does not have a lead, but is second with its Mail.ru Agent messenger.

In an unprecedented ruling, the municipal court of Abakan ordered the website New Focus to register as a media outlet in order to resume its operation. Observers fear that this precedent might be used by other courts to justify closure of other network resources, even though such registration is still voluntary. Justice Svetlana Shapovalova handed down this ruling despite a date error exposed in the investigation materials, as a result of which the case had to be dismissed under the statute of limitations. The lawyer of New Focus chief editor Mikhail Afanasyev said she would appeal the ruling with the Supreme Court of the Republic of Khakassia.

Several torrent trackers have simultaneously stopped working in Tomsk. The forum community in Tomsk has attributed the closures to a possible operation to combat distribution of pirated software and multimedia content. The Interior Department in Tomsk region has denied there is an operation underway and refused to comment on whether it may have anything to do with the closures. Meanwhile, it has become known that usage of p2p channels among Tomsk ISPs has dropped 4 to 5 times. This leads one to believe that the possible reason behind the closures may be attempts to curb excessive traffic. Vadim Andrianov, creator of the Already in Tomsk website, believes that since the website torrents.tomsk.ru continues to respond to ping requests and serves existing downloads, this rules out the possibility of its hardware having been seized by the Department K. In a similar incident with the website EliteTorrents.org, the site administrator was sentenced to 5 months behind bars and 5 months of house arrest along with a $3,000 fine for illegally distributing movies, music, and software.