publishedmedium:the kommersant

Russia Restricts Use of Foreign Software in Battle for ‘Information Sovereignty’ | Business | The Moscow Times
▻http://www.themoscowtimes.com/business/article/russia-restricts-use-of-foreign-software-in-battle-for-information-sovereignty/550106.html

Russian officials will be barred from using foreign software from next year if a Russian version exists. The move, which is aimed at boosting Russia’s national security and the country’s tech industry, could cost foreign firms hundreds of millions of dollars in annual revenues.

The rules apply to local and national government entities and come into force on Jan. 1, 2016, according to an order signed by Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev and published on the government’s website on Friday.

The order is part of a drive to wean Russia off imports in key areas of industry that was accelerated after Moscow’s falling out with the West over Ukraine last year.

It is also linked to fears of spying and sabotage by foreign intelligence services, who are feared to have access to software and equipment developed in their countries. This anxiety has led to calls to boycott iPhones, build a Russian operating system to rival Microsoft’s Windows, and tighten control of the Internet.

As Communications and Mass Media Minister Nikolai Nikiforov put it a year ago: “We stand for complete sovereignty of information.”

Under Friday’s order, authorities will draw up a register of Russian computer programs that will verify the Russianness of software and promote its use.

Foreign software giants such as SAP, Oracle, IBM and Microsoft recorded sales in Russia worth around $1.4 billion last year, accounting for some three-quarters of the market, according to news agency RBC. This included sales worth 20 billion rubles ($300 million) to government entities, the Kommersant newspaper reported.

Russia: Librarian Is Accused of Allowing Access to Banned Ukrainian Books - The New York Times
▻http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/03/world/europe/russia-librarian-is-accused-of-allowing-access-to-banned-ukrainian-books.ht

The director of a Ukrainian-language library in Moscow was placed under house arrest on Monday by a Russian court that accused her of allowing public access to banned literature. The director, Natalia Sharina, could face as much as five years in prison for what Russian law enforcement agencies said was the dissemination of books by a Ukrainian nationalist writer, Dmytro Korchynsky, that are banned in Russia for promoting anti-Russian propaganda. Ms. Sharina denied the charges, saying the banned books were “planted during the searches,” a claim that was repeated by staff members. “Books cannot constitute extremism, because in my opinion extremism is an action,” she said in the courtroom, the Kommersant newspaper reported. Ms. Sharina’s lawyers have appealed the decision, the Interfax news agency said, and Human Rights Watch called for her immediate release in a statement.

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Dmytro Korchynsky - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
▻https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dmytro_Korchynsky

Dmytro Oleksandrovych Korchynsky (born 22 January 1964, Kiev) is a Ukrainian public figure and leader of BRATSTVO ("Brotherhood"), a Ukrainian Orthodox rooted religious and political organization in Ukraine. Korchynsky is the former leader of the ultra-nationalist UNA-UNSO party.

►http://russiaprofile.org/politics/43017.html
Brotherhood in Resistance

Discussions at Friday’s informal summit in the capital of Kazakhstan have focused squarely on the ongoing upheavals in the Middle East, and on how to prevent the Arab Spring protests from spilling over into the territories of the former Soviet states, the Kommersant business daily reported. But the leaders of the CSTO, a military-political alliance of seven countries including Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, needed little persuasion to appreciate “the destructive role” that social networks had played in such protests. After a three-hour meeting behind closed doors, the leaders decided to create a unified preventive strategy for cyberspace, which could mean restricting the use of social networks such as Twitter and Facebook, widely seen as the bane of authoritarian Arab regimes, the newspaper said.

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