The Foundation for Assistance to Small Innovative Enterprises (FASIE) and the company Nigma.ru Ltd are prepared to support the development of the intellectual search engine Nigma.ru, elaborated by students and postgraduates from the Lomonosov Moscow State University. In total the project requires 9m roubles over a period of two years. FASIE will contribute half of the sum (4.5 million roubles), for the creation of new products. The remaining half will be provided by Nigma.ru Ltd. The Nigma.ru website is already displaying a call for programmers and system administrators to be involved in the project. Candidates are promised flexible hours and lunches at the MSU canteen.

After the fall of the Soviet Union and the advent of the market economy, the classical media lost the faith of the Russian people. In this situation the Internet communities came to play a decent role, where the audience members consult with one another of practical matters of survival without middle men. It is simply that these systems of social interaction have yet to become a mass phenomenon. This was the main idea behind our report, which we presented at the World Public Forum "Dialogue of Civilizations".

However, Western participants of the forum, it seems, did not really understand this idea. Seymour Papert from MIT voiced the assumption that the Internet in Russia is now at the level of development that it was in Canada five years ago and that in the future we will reach the current Canadian level. Personally I do not doubt that we will overtake Canada, at least in terms of the number of visitors. But the .ru zone will not be the same. For the Westerner with the "self-made-man" and "do-it-yourself" concepts it is sufficient to fill the Internet with services for independent solutions to one’s problems. In Russia, though, with its tendency towards collegiality, platforms have to be created near the services, where your actions can be discussed with a collective group. This is similar to a "veche" popular assembly, such as those applied in ancient Novgorod.

The Russian President has proposed the removal of the gambling industry from the cities to special zones (practically the same as "exile to Siberia"). The President compared the harm caused by gambling establishments with the "alcoholization of the population", and he added that they cause "serious moral and at times serious material damage".

It is well known that reasonably large amounts of money circulate in the gambling industry (in 2005 the turnover equalled $5-6 billion), and a part of them are "criminal". Here, on the gambling market the talk is direct: there is no intention of leaving for Siberia, rather of disappearing into the shadows to continue operations. Meantime, the Internet is one of these "shadow zones". It is logical to assume that if the new legislative draft is approved, the war will then be directed to the online casinos. Russia could introduce bans similar to those that were introduced in America earlier in the month.

The owner of the dating website Amur.by was summoned to the police and accused of operating without a licence. Last year a resolution was issued in Belarus in accordance with which any activity that is linked with the collection and distribution of information on private individuals for acquaintance purposes is subject to licensing. The administration of the website explains that it is not involved in the collection of information. This resource, as with many others, takes information from the database of the Russian Internet dating service Mamba.ru. Amur.by owners stress that their aim is not to establish unions of marriage. However, if the owner of Amur.by is found to be a "marriage agency" and penalized under Article 154 of the Republic of Belarus Administrative Offences Code, it may have its domain taken away.

The administration in the town of Penza has concluded an agreement with Perm company ER-Telecom for the construction of a municipal telecommunications system. By the end of 2007 it is planned to connect 100,000 Penza apartments to the Internet using a high-speed channel. 40 schools and authorities (administrations, management bodies, ministries and the District Department of the Interior Ministry) will be connected to the network free of charge. The agreement also assumes the development of the project known as "Bezopasny Gorod" (Safe City) with video surveillance cameras installed on the streets and central department store. With this project the city administration aims to kill two birds with one stone: provide schools with broadband Internet access and give the authorities the ability to effectively interact using hi-tech resources.

In 1999 the organisation IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) formed the working group IDN (Internationalized Domain Name), authorising it to devise how to register domain names with the symbols from international alphabets. We are now in 2006, but where are the Russian domains Producers of browsers are in no hurry to give full support to the solution proposed by IDN, through security concerns. This solution opens up scope for fishing – net fraud, when users are lured to false websites, the addresses of which use Cyrillic letters, similar to Latin equivalents. Although ICANN has developed a system of recommendations, the administrators of international domains have themselves to resolve the issue of domains that contain symbols of the national alphabet. This matter has still to be resolved in the Russian zone.

From the start of the "electronic" ticket sales service, passengers have acquired 14,500 such tickets on the Moscow - St. Petersburg route. OAO Russian Railways introduced this service in only May 2006. Tickets are purchased using bank cards, with tickets being issued only at the terminals in Moscow and St. Petersburg. From the 1st January 2007 the "electronic" ticket service will be introduced over all routes operated by Russian Railways. Previously, completing a form on the website was no guarantee of a reservation being made. Now, though, it states in the regulations on electronic ticket purchase that at the moment of acquisition and payment the original ticket is printed on Russian Railways letterhead at the chosen collection point and will remain guaranteed until the passenger comes to collect it.

Specialised stores generate the trust of the majority of Russian Internet users – 95% of the total number approached in a survey for ROMIR Monitoring. 2296 active Internet users aged over 20 were given the chance to respond. Shopping centres were the second most popular, with 62%. With that, when choosing expensive electronics, mobile telephones, photography equipment and domestic appliances, furniture and household goods, only a third of users make purchases over the Internet. Visitors to Internet stores are either people who earn over 25,000 roubles a month (39%) or residents of Moscow (41%). Even in St. Petersburg the popularity of the Internet is 4 times lower (10%), not to mention the provinces.

The barges on the Frunzenskaya Embankment of the Moscow River, which house a number of the capital’s IT companies, have been disconnected from the water supply and the sewerage system, and they now face disconnection from power as well. Mayor Yuri Luzhkov announced in early September the intention to get rid of the barges. The authorities are annoyed that the rental of a square metre of water is 60 times less than the going rate on land in the centre of the city. Officials are now citing different reasons for the disconnections on the barges: excessive effluent discharge into the river, too high a water and electricity consumption or simply "preparations for winter".

One of the barges is home to Konstantin Rykin’s New Media Stars Consulting, where the well-known publications Dni.Ru, Vzglyad, Bourgeoisny Zhurnal and the dating service Neznakomka.ru are all created. Another barge is used as a floating office for several television projects of the company ViD.

Under the Rambler on the Map project only Moscow, St. Petersburg, Ekaterinburg and certain of their respective suburbs are currently accessible. Omsk, Kazan, Nizhny Novgorod, Samara and Toliatti are to be the next cities to appear. The list of maps includes (albeit in an inactive format) a map of Russia and a map of the World. However the Rambler maps unfortunately hold no information for drivers. Not even one-way streets are detailed (as they are in Google Maps and Yandex.Maps).