I'm ba-a-ck!!!

I'm inclined to have a tee-shirt printed up saying "I survived the great LiveJournal blackout of 2005!" but I think I'll hold off. There's no place around that'll do the job, anyway.

The hiccup made the headlines in the Russian online press, both for the number of people affected and because of unsubstantiated rumors that the freak power loss occurred at the instigation of the Kremlin (you heard right), presumably because some kind of heavy-duty, organized opposition to Putin has blossomed on LJ, which is a very popular blogging vehicle in Russia. Personally, I find the rumor hard to believe; then again, given some of the people I've met in Russia, anything is possible.

In more immediate news, yesterday was oxidizer loading day here in Kazakhstan. The ILS safety engineer was appropriately dressed for the task at hand:



Prior to this post, I copied and pasted (and backdated) entries for the weekend, seeing as how they were ready to go at the time (though LJ wasn't). With any luck, things are back to their normal state. More later.

Cheers...

ЖЖ против Путина?

More about that Kremlin-shut-down-LJ rumor.

I went back and found the article I saw yesterday on gazeta.ru (in Russian, naturally). Here's part of the screenshot:



The title of the piece reads, literally, "LJ Against Putin." The meat is in the last paragraph of the short item, and reads:

А в сети, между тем, уже появились сообщения о том, что сбой LiveJournal связан чуть ли не с происками Кремля. Дело в том, что накануне в России о себе заявила молодежная организация «Идущие без Путина», объединяющая студентов, недовольных отменой льгот на проезд в транспорте и возможной ликвидацией отсрочек от службы в армии. Посредством «Живого журнала» 29 января «Идущие без Путина» собирались организовать «Марш протеста против кремлевского произвола».

Meanwhile, messages have already appeared online saying that the LiveJournal failure is all but the result of a Kremlin intrigue. It turns out that the evening before, a youth organization calling itself "Progressing Without Putin" had announced its existence. The organization, which unites students dissatisfied with the abolition of reduced mass transit fares and the possible elimination of deferrals from military service, had been using LiveJournal to organize a "Protest march against Kremlin abuse of power" on January 29.

Though we live in interesting times, I suspect the cause of the blackout will turn out to be much more mundane, and that this is yet another example of sensationalizing or "creating" news.

Cheers...

UPDATE: Interesting critique of this squall-in-a-teapot at webplanet.ru ("Как Mignews.com и «Эхо Москвы» сморозили глупость, и все ее перепечатали" ("How Mignews.com and Ekho Moskvy said something stupid and everyone repeated it."), which lays the blame for the propagation of this "paranoid" story on automated news scrapers (hat tip: grosh).