Mr. Durov (Photo: RBTH.ru)

Russian police have carried out a search of the offices and home of Pavel Durov, the founder and creator of VKontakte, the country’s most popular social network. The 28-year-old mogul is commonly referred to as the "Russian Mark Zuckerberg" for his influential site, which has more than 200 million users.

A spokesman from the Investigative Committee in St. Petersburg told the AFP that it was investigating a case from early April involving a hit-and-run. Detectives claim that a traffic officer was injured by a driver of a white Mercedes vehicle who ignored an order to stop, plowed into the cop, and then drove off.  Local media alleges that Mr. Durov was driving the car.

Being the good company man, Mr. Durov joked about the incident on his VKontakte profile writing: "When you drive over a policeman, it's very important to drive back and forward a few times to squeeze out all the soft parts." Nicolai Durov, his brother and the site's cofounder, wrote on his page that they were working and "suddenly 20 silent men in leather jackets appear."

"I wonder what they are looking for. Or perhaps they are gathering information and planting bugs," he wrote, according to the BBC.  He was most likely referring to the Russian government's ongoing crackdown on anything on the Internet it doesn't like.

A VKontakte spokesman denied that Mr. Durov was involved and said he doesn't even own that type of car. No arrests were made and the investigation is ongoing.

Ground control to Major Vlad. (Photo: Time)

Fun fact: The U.S.S.R. put the first man into space on this day in 1961. And Russia doesn't want you to forget it, either. Today, president and part-time action hero Vladimir Putin unveiled a $50 billion initiative to get the nation back into space, starting the construction of a shiny new cosmodrome in the far east.

The AFP reports:

"Putin said in a live link-up with the multinational crew of the International Space Sation (ISS) that Russia hoped to have the first launches from Vostochny in 2015 and the first manned launches in 2018.

'It's going to be a great launch pad. It took a long time to choose but now work is fully underway,' said Putin."

According to the guy in charge of Russia’s space agency, they’re hoping to establish a moon base by 2030 as a jumping-off point for trips to Mars. (So go ahead and dust off that spec script about Reds on the Red Planet.)

This new facility and aggressive timeline isn't simply about some boyish desire on the part of Putin to get to Mars. (That's more Elon Musk's thing.) No, Russia wants the ability to defend against space weapons. Bloomberg reports:

Russia will have the technical means by 2030 to counteract threats from space by other countries, Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin said at a government meeting near the country’s new cosmodrome in the Far East today. Until then, Russia will continue to expand its orbital capabilities to monitor potential threats and prevent rocket attacks, Rogozin said.

Let's hope they earmarked a little cash for an asteroid-monitoring program, because the good old U.S. of A. doesn't exactly have that on lock.

Still allowed. (Photo: Hashgram/ObeyTheRussian)

Eric Schmidt left Russia off his world censorship tour for a reason. Until now, the government has kept Internet freedom largely in tact. But it's about to get a lot stricter as Russia has begun to selectively block content online that is potentially harmful to children, reports the New York Times.

The Orwellian-sounding Federal Supervision Agency has been cracking down on “objectionable” material (i.e. child porn, content discussing drug use and suicide) spreading on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter. The law was passed last November but has only been enforced in the past few weeks. The Russian government insisted the laws are to protect the kids and not to stifle controversial issues, like political dissent, the Times said:

The child protection law, they say, builds a system for government officials to demand that companies selectively block individual postings, so that contentious material can be removed without resorting to a countrywide ban on, for example, Facebook or YouTube, which would reflect poorly on Russia's image abroad and anger Internet users at home.

So far, YouTube is the only website to voice a complaint. The Google-owned site filed a lawsuit in February disputing a claim from Russian officials that a video showing how to make a fake wound using a razor blade was for entertainment purposes. Facebook also found itself in the crosshairs of the law last Friday as it was forced to take down a page about suicide.

Teenagers aren't entirely without online freedom, however. Judging by Instagram, selfies are still permitted.

You might miss Kimmie's new bangs, though. (Photo: Instagram)

It's almost time for Lent in the Russian Orthodox church, and this year, the faithful are being asked to give up a little something extra. The Guardian reports that spokesman Vsevolod Chaplin is now urging followers to forgo social media for the next few weeks, as a way of cleansing the soul.

You mean keeping up with Kim Kardashian's Instagram isn't conducive to quiet contemplation?

The Guardian says: 

"I don't mean just people who use depraved, entertaining, stupid and empty information," Chaplin said. "Even useful information, that relates to our work and well-meaning interests, clogs the brain and soul too much."

But don't think the church is wholly anti-Internet. Just recently the head of the church himself, Patriarch Kirill, told a bunch of bishops they need to step up their online game:

"When a person makes a query on church life in an Internet search engine, he finds a lot of lies, hypocrisy and hatred," the patriarch said, the news agency RIA-Novosti reported. "Blogs, social networks – all offer new opportunities for Christian testimony."

We eagerly await those Snapchats.

(Photo: Igor Rossak, RIA Novosti)

The international community, it seems, is still publicly grieving the loss of Apple founder Steve Jobs. In fact, the St. Petersburg National Research University in Russia unveiled a statue of a huge iPhone today to commemorate Mr. Jobs' death, because it's Russia, you guys.

The super tall iPhone replica features a screen that displays a photo and video tribute to Mr. Jobs' life. There's also a QR code appended to the back that visitors can scan to learn more about the Apple founder.

Sadly, the monument does not come equipped with a vodka dispenser to help drown your sorrows.

In your networks, downloading your databases.

Hacking group Team GhostShell, which recently hacked records from major universities around the world, has materialized again to announce a declaration of war against Russia. It calls the operation Project BlackStar and claims it already has "access to more russian files than the FSB (Russia's answer to the CIA)."

Team GhostShell has a novel approach to promoting its ops--it uses mulitple hacked Twitter accounts, posting the same message directed at various tech blogs and writers on each one:

#ProjectBlackStar - GhostShell declares war on Russia pastebin.com/yXN7uc6r @breakthesec @stevehuff @betabeat @arstechnica @wired @johnedunn

— Susie Hargreaves (@SusieHargreaves) November 2, 2012

The user whose account was used to post the preceding blurb later tweeted, "Any GhostShell or Project Blackstar tweets are not mine. Account compromised."

In the Pastebin post linked from the hacked accounts, Team GhostShell's DeadMellox explained why it is targeting Russia:

For far too long Russia has been a state of tyranny and regret. The average citizen is forced to live an isolated life from the rest of the world imposed by it's [sic] politicians and leaders. A way of thinking outdated for well over 100 years now. The still present communism feeling has fused with todays capitalism and bred together a level of corruption and lack of decency of which we've never seen before.

Later in the post, DeadMellox writes that even while the Russian people are having a hard time, "the Russian Government has enough resources to spend on it's [sic] spies." That's why, the hacker writes, "GhostShell is declaring war on Russia's cyberspace, in "Project BlackStar."

Aimed directly at the Russian government, Project BlackStar has begun with what DeadMellox calls "a nice greeting of 2.5 million accounts/records leaked, from governmental, educational, academical, political, law enforcement, telecom, research institutes, medical facilities, large corporations (both national and international branches) in such fields as energy, petroleum, banks, dealerships and many more."

Betabeat reviewed some files with assistance from Google translations and our rusty college Russian, and Team GhostShell appears to be true to its word. Example: a large database dump from the Russian Academy of Sciences Institute of Scientific Development. It's hard to say whether this or other files contain vital information--we'll leave that to the Russians.

(Photo: 4 the Media)

Ain't nobody can hold Kim Dotcom down. [Wired]

Celebs are flocking to a new Twitter-like site called "Pheed" which allows them to charge monthly subscriptions or pay-per-view for content. [Forbes]

Google announced a $249 lightweight, durable Chromebook that it's hoping can begin to corner the market on inexpensive laptops. [Google]

Airtime is flailing and its user stats are pretty depressing: "AppData, a service that collects data about sites and services that connect with Facebook, indicated that Airtime had just 400 users a day and 10,000 over the course of a month, but Mr. Parker and other executives at the company suggested those figures were off. Nielsen and comScore, two independent analytics firms, both said that traffic to Airtime was so small that it did not yet register on their charts." [New York Times]

Apple's logo is apparently considered blasphemous in Russia. [CNET]

"Who, us? Certainly not." -- The Kremlin (Photo: flickr.com/macle)

Today, in international diplomatic incidents: CBS News reports that the owner and several employees of a Houston-based export company have been indicted, accused of engaging in a "surreptitious and systematic conspiracy" to funnel military technology to Russia.

You know you're really in trouble the feds bust out the sibilant alliteration.

See, like classical statuary found at a Roman flea market, there are laws governing the export of certain sensitive types of technology. Microelectronics of the sort that go into radar and missile systems can't be merely spirited away from the States. (Scorsese fans and the Boston-born might remember the plot of The Departed revolved around on getting this type of technology to the Chinese.)

That means that if you want this kind of cutting-edge tech, you'll either need to develop it yourself, or get covert. Hence, accuse U.S. authorities, the conspiracy.

CBS reports:

Prosecutors say Alexander Fishenko and others sold cutting-edge microelectronics that could be used in Russian weapons systems, exchanged communications with Russian intelligence and tried to hide documents when they suspected authorities were onto them.

The Russian government is apparently claiming there's nothing to see here, move along, these guys aren't officially sanctioned and are definitely not spies. (Of course, saying anything else would be pretty dumb, right?)

But authorities say they've got a smoking gun in the form of messages regarding forged or otherwise altered documents:

The indictment quotes messages between the Russians saying, about the documents, to "make it up pretty, correctly" and "make sure it looks good, make sure that these are listed as things that can be used on fishing boats and not anti-submarine craft."

"Oh, that? It's a fish finder, definitely not a next-generation missel guidance system. Like for bass fishing?" -- very convincing, we're sure, gentlemen.

When will people learn not to communicate via traceable media when scheming to conceal evidence? This isn't rocket science. It isn't even fifth-grade science.

A screencap from the video. (Photo: Red Hot Russia)

It starts with a young blonde boy, who looks to be in his early teens, his face covered in dirt and bruises, bent over on his knees kissing the pink sandals of a teen girl. The video, which was filmed in Novomoskovsk--a city in western Russia--and depicts three teens violently bullying and abusing one of their peers, has gone viral on the Russian Internet.

At first, the video is difficult to parse without understanding Russian. Is this a game? you might wonder for the first few seconds. But as the video plays on, it becomes evident you're watching an assault. A few more seconds into the video, another teen in the group kicks the young blonde boy in the stomach. The girl's brother, in a blue Nike shirt, joins in and kicks him in the belly, in the face. Soon, you might begin to feel sick.

Betabeat has not been able to verify the source of the video independently. But according to Russian news sources, the video was initially uploaded to YouTube before being removed by administrators. It was then copied to a Latvian server, where it's being hosted on the site RuCrash.com. Russian web sleuths wasted no time unearthing the identities of the students in the film. The girl is said to be Tataiana Muravyova, a 13-year-old student who was dating the bullied boy in the video until he decided to dump her for another girl. Ms. Muravyova allegedly sought her revenge by getting her brother and a few of his friends to beat up the boy, all while the camera rolled.

Ms. Muravyova's VK profile page. (Photo: VK.com)

LifeNews reports that police in the Tula region where the video was allegedly filmed are investigating the incident. Meanwhile, though the video only hit news sites a handful of hours ago, Ms. Muravyova's profile on the Russian social network VK has already begun filling up with hateful comments by users who have seen the video. "You're a stupid whore," wrote one user in Russian, translated to English via Chrome. "Tanya's mother, why do not you think about abortion?" asked another, also in Russian, translated to English.

The video, bleak and sickening, is yet another sad example of teenage bullying gone viral. Back in June, when a video of a bus monitor being bullied by teens in Greece, New York went viral, the victim--Karen Klein--received hundreds of thousands of dollars from an Indiegogo campaign started in her name. Ms. Klein decided to use the funds to start an anti-bullying foundation.

That incident, however sad it was in the beginning, ultimately ended happily. But the story of the viral Russian bullying video is a little more complicated. For one, the backlash against Ms. Muravyova seems to be far more violent and aggressive than that against the teenage bullies in Greece, NY ever was. In this case, bullying has begotten more bullying--even if Ms. Muravyova's actions seemingly make her a complicit in the attack.

So far, in this situation, there's no redeeming crowdfunding outlet, no spot on the Today show. There's just the young blonde boy with the dirt and the bruises, and the 13-year-old girl with a checkered past being sought by police.

Stone cold grillin'. (Photo: flickr.com/alisdair)

It's July 4th, which means you are either at a barbecue, planning to go to a barbecue later, or desperately searching for a barbecue to crash. However, the limited availability of green space and roof decks means you're likely to find yourself in a situation that requires small talk with strangers. To that end, we've selected a few thematically appropriate conversation starters.

1. Russia's parliament is considering creating an Internet blacklist for sites featuring “banned pornography, drug ads and promoting suicide or extremist ideas.” Certain elements of the U.S. Congress might try, but our all-American legislative gridlock isn't likely to let it get far.

2. The European parliament gives ACTA the thumbs-down. Freeeeedom!

3. However, thanks to a recent injunction, you will not be free to buy Samsung's Galaxy Nexus phone here in the good old U.S. of A. If the party gets boring, we recommend springing this one on an Apple fanboy.

4. So, just how bad can we expect cyber attack fallout to be? More importantly: How will the Hollywood of 2076 make its Dirty Dozen-style take on a hypothetical mid-century cyber war exciting?

5. France is investigating Microsoft for tax fraud. What would the marquis de Lafayette think?

5. Andy Griffith. Get nostalgic for a time before Twitter. Or, alternatively, envision Mayberry with technology. We'll start: Can you imagine the trouble Barney Fife would cause with a few Facebook tips?