The Russian design studio Sema.ru has registered the tradename Gmail.ru at Rospatent, to protect itself from seizure of the domain on the part of Google. The .ru zone has seen the like before: in 2004 the Google.ru domain, which belonged to a private individual was released to the search engine after a court case. However, the Gmail.ru site was registered 2Ѕ years before Gmail.com. Director of the Sema.ru studio Semen Budyenny bought the domain in early 2004 and set up his own mail service. It should be said that even a trademark cannot always give 100% confidence of success in a court proceedings relative to a domain name.

Today the Soundkey project and the new Rambler digital music sale facility, a beta version of the Soundkey showcase (which Rambler can set up itself) got off to an official start. The founders of Soundkey.ru, the company Softkey and the Zvuki.ru portal, stress that the project will become the new technology for establishing transparent relations on the music market. "Talk of pirate sales is now an international subject; the closure of pirate websites came to be a condition for Russia’s entry to the WTO. At the same time, musicians and copyright holders have made their position clear: they want to decide for themselves where and for how much they will sell their music on the Russian Internet", states the press release.

Last week the home page of the Yandex Blog Search was significantly updated, with the appearance of various ratings and even a tag cloud. Head of the company’s communications services department Roman Ivanov gave details in a Webplanet interview: what the Yandex system really consider to be blogs, what percentage of the blogosphere is closed for indexing, how entries are sorted by subject ratings, is there a danger of spam blogs and how to make money on blog hostings.

The Federal Tax Service has decided that taxpayers will find it more convenient to submit accounts and declarations in electronic form. This facility has been around since 2002, but only a quarter of Moscow’ businessmen decided to switch over, with the figure even lower in the regions. In the words of one businessman interviewed by the "Business" newspaper, the system is "ugly". Earlier this year there was an alcohol crisis because of a similar system, the Unified State Automated Information System to account for the volume of production and turnover of ethyl alcohol, alcoholic products and products with a spirit content (EGAIS), which worked so badly that its operations were temporarily halted.

The Mail.ru portal has launched a videohosting service called Video.mail.ru. The company’s General Director Dmitry Grishin hopes that a million users will visit the project in the first month. Videos are shown using Flash Player and many formats are supported: Windows Media Video, QuickTime, MPEG1/2/4, DV and mobile 3GP. For now the business model involves the user being able to send an SMS-text (0.99 USD) and thus announcing their video clip on the home page. And those that always wish to be at the top of the list have to send texts over and over.

The social network Comby.ru has acquired the websites Blogger.ru and Blog.ru. The company refused to detail the price of the acquisition but famous cybersquatter Pavel Gross believes that the sum paid for the Blog.ru domain could equal 25-50,000 dollars. The Blogger.ru domain should cost a lot less, at a few thousand dollars. It should be noted that LiveInternet.ru, the second most popular blog service in the .ru zone according to the Yandex Blog Search, achieved its popularity without such supergeneric words.

By 2007 the company Electrocom plans to connect 12,000 Moscow houses to the Internet over electrical wiring, using PLC technology. For now only 200 houses have been connected. PLC has a multitude of advantages: there is no need for additional wires and the speed of a PLC modem could reach up to 20–100 Meg. Unfortunately, today’s level of PLC development is enough for data transmission only inside a house (1.5 – 2km). Further development depends much on the quality of the electrical wiring in Russia.

Microsoft has opened the first Russian Innovation Centre in the Moscow Engineering Physics Institute (MEPhI). The Innovation Centre unites people from the IT industry, from students to representatives of government organizations. The centre provides services in three areas. The first is accumulation of intellectual capital, including courses on software development, student training and employment programmes. The second area relates to partner programmes in software licensing. The third and most important area of the Centre is the development of software. Microsoft partners will also take part in the operation of the Centre.

"Our company has on numerous occasions confirmed its active social policy and civil position. Today the Board of Directors of Garanthost.ru has decided to halt the provision of our services to citizens of Georgia and from cooperating with organizations from this country, in light of the strong anti-Russian policy being applied", reads a statement from hosting-provider Garanthost.ru. Meantime, hosting specialist Petr Didenko believes that Garanthost.ru itself does not hold a licence to provide hosting services. The law prohibits licensed operators from disconnecting users without significant reason. Therefore, users should really not deal with dodgy providers, where their website may stop working for any dreamed-up reason.

The AntiSpam Working Group under UNESCO’s Information For All programme has tested the "cleanliness" of the administrators of the mail servers Pochta.ru, Mail.Ru, Mail.Yandex.ru, Mail.Rambler.ru and Novaya Pochta. Mailboxes were set up in the course of the testing with deactivated antispam filtration, while sections enabling the gating of partner mailboxes were excluded from the user agreement.

The lack of spam in these mailboxes disproved the "conspiracy theory", according to which operatives of the mail services supply address databases to spammers. The only doubt was raised by the Mail.ru user agreement, which includes the section, "Mail.ru mail messages that contain organizational and technical information on Mail.ru are not deemed to be spam". The project working group has recommended that users direct more attention to forums and other sites, where their postal addresses may find themselves in open access, and to the fight with mail viruses.