Mail.ru Group is controlled by Alisher Usmanov, an oligarch from the 90s and an old friend of Putin. Few years back Mail.ru group with the help of russian secret services staged a hostile takeover of VK, biggest social network in russia, essentially forcing the founder to leave the country. Since then VK data has been freely available to any russian enforcement agency, or even anyone pretending to be one. In russia there isn't even a pretense of privacy/independence from them, everyone knows FSB&Friends have unrestricted access to their stuff
the third one is Moi Mir (https://my.mail.ru), an extension of by far the most popular email service in Russia. Mail.ru corporation actually owns all three of them.
VK absolutely does remove anti-putin groups and events. [1]
Yes but he also mentions it originally existed to block child pornography, and has been repurposed to block copyright infringement. Since mail.ru is neither of those, it has obviously been repurposed for something else as well. But what?
For Russians, Gmail accounts aren't filtered on the orders of censorship agencies. It's only national mail services like mail.ru that belong to Putin's oligarchs that do such things
Not from Russia, but pretty close in all senses of the word. It was heavily used in my circles up to about 2010-2011, then started losing market share to other messengers (one¹ of the popular messengers was from the same company that now owns ICQ), and then Telegram came and buried it completely in no time at all.
If it wasn't owned by Russian corporation Mail.ru--which is under full control of FSB and Russian government--my nostalgia would give it a try. But no way I'd install anything on my devices that Russian security service has direct access to.
Oh, my. Just now I've seen second biggest federal news channel reporting on the issue and... and advertising TamTam messenger (created less than 6 months ago) or "even a better alternative" -- ICQ, both of which, surprisingly, are products of Mail.ru group.
reply