Well damn.

[elisi]

The attack on LJ has reached the mainstream media!

Money quote:

"This kind of attack is something totally new," says Marina Litvinovich, a former government spin doctor who went on to create Russia's main aggregator of blog posts, BestToday.ru. "It is an attempt to uproot not one user but the entire LiveJournal community, which appears to have become too influential, too strong in setting the political agenda of the day."

Indeed, with around 5 million Russian accounts read by some 30 million people per month, LiveJournal has emerged as the country's last truly free and public space for political debate, a chaotic kind of intellectual clearinghouse and the source of not only gossip, conspiracy theories and pro-government propaganda, but also countless revelations of corruption and official incompetence. In terms of the sheer variety of opinions expressed and defended on LiveJournal, it has been leagues ahead of Russia's other media.

Makes me kinda proud. And worried.

Comments

[kaffy_r]

Sadly, I think the current LJ outage is still not in the English-speaking public/mainstream media eye (or even that of the non-mainstream media), since the Time story to which you link hails from April of this year and references that particular incident.

Mind you, the attack is ultimately coming out of Russia, at least per the BBC Russia story I read via Google Translate yesterday. It's probably — nay, indubitably — political in nature. And it needs to be noticed by the English-speaking world, damn it!

[elisi]

since the Time story to which you link hails from April of this year and references that particular incident
Yeah, I realised that way too late... *facepalm*

And it needs to be noticed by the English-speaking world, damn it!
*nods a lot* Stupid politics. :(