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The website of the Tax Inspectorate in Moscow has posted a of heads of companies, cooperation with which could lead to problems. The list contains ten names, each of whom is an entrepreneur who has been disqualified or fined by the court for submitting deliberately false information to the tax inspectorate when registering a company. This is not the first time the tax inspectorate has published such lists. In March information was published on the supposed locations of registration of fly-by-night companies and their nominee directors. At that time the list of nominee directors contained famous names, especially that of Georgi Boos, Governor of the Kaliningrad Region and Chairman of the Board of the "Magazin goryaschikh putiovok" [hot tours shop] Andrey Ozolin.
Aeroflot is running a month long action, selling tickets from Moscow to Europe and back at special rates, that will be accessible only when booking and buying air tickets through the official websites of Aeroflot - , , . The action will run from 10th November to 10th December this year. The online payments system was launched by Aeroflot back in June this year. Then passengers at last obtained the ability to not only book but also to pay for a ticket using a credit card over the Internet. Furthermore, from January 2007, e-ticket technology will be introduced across the network of the Russian railways.
The disconnection of the Live Journal site on the morning of 4th November generated a number of assumptions about the "close correlation with events taking place in the country". First of all it coincided with the banned "", which was organized by the "". The mass actions included several meetings in different parts of Moscow and other cities and a dangerous plan for a meeting in the Moscow Metro. The participants dug up all the operative information they required on the locations of the actions from the journals on Livejournal.com. Therefore, there was an assumption that the service was disconnected deliberately, to disorient the participants of the "Russian March". There was also a version that the disconnection was linked with the company , which had received the licence to support the Russian part of LJ. As far as the announcements on the Live Journal website itself are concerned, they declared stated that the problems are connected with an accident at the Internap hosting centre, where LJ's servers are located. And it was not only Russians who suffered, but users from other countries as well.
Russia's largest lapidary enterprise, Kristall in Smolensk, is commencing trading in unmounted diamonds over the Internet. Kristall's entry to the Internet is a result of the fall in demand for cut and uncut diamonds on the world market (according to ALROSA data the surplus is estimated at $500-700 million). With the opening of the Internet store the company hopes to compensate expected losses. Clients can make use of the services of FSUE Glavny Tsentr Spetssviazi [Chief Special Communications Centre] (it transports for Gokhran and the Bank of Russia), and they don't need to travel to Smolensk to get the goods. Furthermore, the costs of the shipper (0.7 – 1%) are considerably lower than the mark up in the shops (25%). However by no means all experts predict a rosy future. Particular note is made of the fact that Kristall has no experience in retail trade. In addition, diamonds are something that you want to hold in your hand before purchasing, while the Internet is not the most romantic of places for making such a selection.
From 3 November the newspaper Vedomosti will become accessible for all visitors to the website , without compulsory registration or other restrictions. The latest issue, the paper's archive for the previous month and all supplements will all become free of charge. The electronic version of Vedomosti has been around since 1999, but to date there has been no free access to its texts. The number of visitors to the website in October amounted to 992,000 people.
The investment holding Finam has launched a beta version of a , where financial content will be relayed, only in as unserious a manner as possible. Finam's head of internet projects Sergey Mikheev believes that users are already tired "of the dull and pretentious image of finance companies" and they want to get something substantial in an easily-accessible format. Once a week the hosts of the blog, moose Piff and Puff, to whom a bull and a bear will subsequently be added, will interview real financiers, devoting the rest of the time to talking "about serious things in an unserious way".
The Verkh-Isetsk Court of Yekaterinburg has sentenced a pair of marriage fraudsters to a total of 10 and a half years in prison. With the help of a programmer, student of the Ural Institute Of Economy, Management and Law Alena Fedorovskaya conned foreigners, keen to get married, out of a total of $15,000. Her accomplice Vladimir Osipov created the site "Russkiye devushki" [Russian Girls], imitating an online dating service, although the "database" contained photographs of only one girl.
The programmer sent out letters in Alena’s name to potential victims and offered intermediary services for $150. Then Fedorovskaya herself got involved in the correspondence with grooms-to-be, offering that they send her money for a foreign-travel passport, visa and tickets to reach her betrothed. Five years imprisonment is the minimum term prescribed by the criminal code for mass fraud. There has long been an entire business setup in Russia devoted to swindling foreigners who hunt through the mass of advertised Russian beauties. However, just last year the hugely popular American and the found themselves at the centre of a similar scandal.
In October the most widespread virus came to be a remake of Warezov, letters, modifications of which, , accounted for over a quarter of virus traffic for the month. At the end of the month the virus-makers were able to release up to 20 modifications of Warezov a day, not enabling the antivirus software producers any breathing space. Experts note that the three most popular viruses and their modifications, Warezov, Bagle and Scano, have a Cyrillic origin and it is quite likely that they were written by Russians, or residents from another country of the former Soviet Union.
Last Friday, 27 October, the search giant Google the results of the Global Code Jam 2006 programmer competition, held in New York. First prize was awarded to the Russian Petr Mitrichev, fifth-grade student of the mechanics and mathematics faculty of the Moscow State University. Over 21,000 programmers from 100 countries took part in the competition. , representing 24 countries. 32 Russians found themselves in the top one hundred, far more than from any other country. In an interview with Webplanet.ru Mitrichev informed that he had been invited to work at Google but that he had turned them down for now, as he wants to complete his studies and has no plans for the present to work on search engines.
The company has announced the signing of an agreement under which it will create a new private city in the online game. The clients are a group of individuals to whom complete power in this city will be handed after its creation. The owners will be able to determine the circle of players they will admit to the city and they can create their own closed world for themselves alone. The cost of the development is not disclosed but it is unlikely to be less than the previous project of its kind, named Edemian, which set the buyers back some 28,000 dollars.
