[caption id="attachment_6552" align="alignnone" width="497"]
What's it mean? Search me. It's in Russian.[/caption]
My post on Adblock Plus, got me wondering about Yandex, the most popular search engine in the Russian Federation, and one of the online services reported to be paying Adblock's developers Eyeo to be on the program's "whitelist" allowing Yadex's ads to get through the popular ad blocker.
Yandex has a 60% market share in the Russian Federation, but they're far from being just a big fish in a small Russian pond; they're a pretty big deal, period. They are the fourth largest search engine worldwide, with more than 150 million searches per day as of April 2012, and more than 50.5 million visitors (all company's services) daily as of February 2013, all according to the Wikipedia entry.
According to this Guardian item, Yandex, is offering an open-source web app engine, provocatively named Cocaine, which allows users to create automatically scalable cloud-based Web applications. written in C++, Python and JavaScript programming languages, with Java and Racket support in development. It's available for download on GitHub, and can be installed on most custom hosting web servers, distinguishing it from Google's App Engine, which provides web app hosting only on Google's servers. reviews makes sure to point out that it's traffic is not necessarily routed through the U.S (read as "avoids NSA surveillance").
Back in June the revelations about the National Security Agency's (NSA) Prism program had lots of people looking over their shoulder. The U.S. signal intelligence agency, the NSA was getting cell phone traffic straight from the carriers, and Internet message traffic, by the boatload, from the biggest Internet players like Google. What to do? A spate of postings appeared with solutions: Mask your IP using Tor; use the DuckDuckGo search engine, which didn't record your personal information, and use Yandex, both for searches, and as a free Web mail provider. This June post covers all that. Unfortunately Tor's site is down at this posting so here's some info on the wonderfully-named "second-generation onion routing" technology they use.
Yandex does offer both search, and Web mail in English -- both seem perfectly comparable to Google's services. And, this June post declared, "unlike Google, Yandex is guaranteed NSA-free," if not NSA-proof. That may be so, a lot of postings back in June said it was, but Yandex is most certainly not FSB-proof.
Back in May, 2011, Yandex admitted it had effectively been forced to provide confidential information to the FSB, the Russian intelligence service, relating to donations to an anti-corruption website, made through the web-based service Yandex Money, according to this BBC item, among others. A Russian site went so far as to post that Yandex was effectively a subsidiary of the FSB.
So Yandex might be a Google alternative, but it certainly won't replace that tinfoil hat. I may just get myself a Yandex mail account, but just because. There's still no quick fix to protect our privacy on the Internet. I guess If you can't stand the Heat then you just have to get off the Grid, and hope satellites haven't learned how to lip-read.
[caption id="attachment_6551" align="alignnone" width="497"]
We can always communicate via tin soup cans strung between houses, except then the Campbell's Soup Company can probably listen in.[/caption]
What's it mean? Search me. It's in Russian.[/caption]My post on Adblock Plus, got me wondering about Yandex, the most popular search engine in the Russian Federation, and one of the online services reported to be paying Adblock's developers Eyeo to be on the program's "whitelist" allowing Yadex's ads to get through the popular ad blocker.
Yandex has a 60% market share in the Russian Federation, but they're far from being just a big fish in a small Russian pond; they're a pretty big deal, period. They are the fourth largest search engine worldwide, with more than 150 million searches per day as of April 2012, and more than 50.5 million visitors (all company's services) daily as of February 2013, all according to the Wikipedia entry.
Yandex rolls out free "Cocaine" cloud thingie
According to this Guardian item, Yandex, is offering an open-source web app engine, provocatively named Cocaine, which allows users to create automatically scalable cloud-based Web applications. written in C++, Python and JavaScript programming languages, with Java and Racket support in development. It's available for download on GitHub, and can be installed on most custom hosting web servers, distinguishing it from Google's App Engine, which provides web app hosting only on Google's servers. reviews makes sure to point out that it's traffic is not necessarily routed through the U.S (read as "avoids NSA surveillance").
Using Yandex to avoid the spies
Back in June the revelations about the National Security Agency's (NSA) Prism program had lots of people looking over their shoulder. The U.S. signal intelligence agency, the NSA was getting cell phone traffic straight from the carriers, and Internet message traffic, by the boatload, from the biggest Internet players like Google. What to do? A spate of postings appeared with solutions: Mask your IP using Tor; use the DuckDuckGo search engine, which didn't record your personal information, and use Yandex, both for searches, and as a free Web mail provider. This June post covers all that. Unfortunately Tor's site is down at this posting so here's some info on the wonderfully-named "second-generation onion routing" technology they use.
Yandex does offer both search, and Web mail in English -- both seem perfectly comparable to Google's services. And, this June post declared, "unlike Google, Yandex is guaranteed NSA-free," if not NSA-proof. That may be so, a lot of postings back in June said it was, but Yandex is most certainly not FSB-proof.
Back in May, 2011, Yandex admitted it had effectively been forced to provide confidential information to the FSB, the Russian intelligence service, relating to donations to an anti-corruption website, made through the web-based service Yandex Money, according to this BBC item, among others. A Russian site went so far as to post that Yandex was effectively a subsidiary of the FSB.
So Yandex might be a Google alternative, but it certainly won't replace that tinfoil hat. I may just get myself a Yandex mail account, but just because. There's still no quick fix to protect our privacy on the Internet. I guess If you can't stand the Heat then you just have to get off the Grid, and hope satellites haven't learned how to lip-read.
[caption id="attachment_6551" align="alignnone" width="497"]
We can always communicate via tin soup cans strung between houses, except then the Campbell's Soup Company can probably listen in.[/caption]
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