It is true that VKontakte will be closed. German Klimenko denied rumors about the closure of the social network Vkontakte — RealnoeVremya.com

Head of the press service social network VKontakte Vladislav Tsyplukhin said that the rumors about the closure of this resource are unfounded. "It's all nonsense," he added. On his VKontakte page, Tsyplukhin also noted that "some kind of idiotic" rumor was born, which had to be refuted. The source of these data remains unknown, but the other day the rumor about the closure of Vkontakte again spread through the media and blogs. It is reported that the social network will be closed, moreover, a specific date is indicated - March 15. The authorities will close VKontakte due to the refusal of its administration to close opposition groups: we already wrote, how the leadership of VKontakte responded to the FSB on such a proposal .

In addition, recently the founder of the social network "VKontakte" Pavel Durov posted on his Twitter microblog a summons from the prosecutor's office of St. . Shortly thereafter, he sent a letter to the Lenta editor explaining his attitude to the situation.

There, Durov, in particular, pointed out that if the service wants to preserve the domestic Internet industry, then requests to block the opposition are not applicable, including because it means giving odds to competitors, but he is not going to become an "icon of liberalism" and considers "talks about voting , elections, rallies and citizenship<...>form of mass entertainment, along with discussing football matches and playing Happy Farmer."

Perhaps the panic began after rumors appeared that a new bill was prepared in Russia obliging to block sites (sites “promoting the use, manufacture, sale of narcotic drugs” and “extremist materials” will also be included in the unified database of Internet threats) upon request regulatory bodies.

The Safe Internet League, together with businesses and officials, has prepared a bill requiring operators to block sites with illegal content. The project pursues a good goal - the fight against child pornography, but can lead to the emergence of full-fledged Internet censorship.

However, the bill is not only about sites with child porn - sites that "promote the use, manufacture, sale of drugs" and "extremist materials" will also be included in a single database of Internet threats. Operators will be required to block such sites “on the basis of a decision by the federal authority responsible for supervision in the field of communications to include the site in a single database of Internet threats, that is, Roskomnadzor.

The fight against child porn league begins with "Yandex". The search engine refuses to remove the relevant images and links from the issue, Davydov explains: “We turned to Yandex with a request to filter such content, but the company refused, citing the fact that there is no relevant law in Russia.”

It was possible to agree with the search engine, however, the social network "In contact with" she herself undertook to regularly clean the content, and the pages of Mail.ru are moderated by special people.

07:00, 02.03.2017 47

German Klimenko laughed at the ridiculous spam attack on users of the popular Russian social network

March 6, 2017 could have been a day of mourning for users of the popular Russian social network VKontakte (since the end of February, a message has been circulating on the resource about its imminent blocking), but the next closure of the site was not destined to happen. Realnoe Vremya decided to look into the situation and collected five facts about the problems of the popular social network.

Why won't March 6 become a "day of mourning"?

Since the end of February, a message about the imminent closure of the resource has been “walking” on the VKontakte social network, and on the eve of publications with the same content, spammers were fasting at a rate of once a minute. In the post test, a specific closing date is indicated - March 6, 2017 - and the person in charge who made the official statement is German Klimenko, who, according to the authors of the message, is the press secretary of VK (in fact, Klimenko holds the position of adviser to the President of the Russian Federation on the Internet).

Herman Klimenko has already commented on the situation to the press, saying that everyone openly laughs at this message, and he is not the press secretary of the social network, which, by the way, will not be closed.

Note that even such a clumsy presentation of the message could cause a small surge of panic and increased attention to the news about the closure of the resource. At the same time, users of the social network were frightened by the fact that after blocking VK, their personal information would be in public access, and in order to avoid this, they need to copy this message to their wall.

Accidents in VK data centers and regular failures

Rumors about the upcoming closure of VK were notably fueled by a large-scale failure in the social network that occurred at the beginning of this week and dragged on for several hours. But it is worth noting that VKontakte, like any other resource, is at risk of being unavailable for a number of technical reasons.

In general, in the history of "VK" there are several major failures in the work. One of the most notable occurred on July 25, 2010, when the site remained unavailable for more than four hours due to a power outage in the data center. Another failure took place on July 27, 2014: then, as a result of an accident in one of the data centers, the site was also unavailable to users.

On August 4, 2015, the VKontakte website remained unavailable for more than two hours. According to the press service of the company, the cause of the problem was a physical break in the cable connecting the data centers. It was later reported that the cause of the failure was "a fatal confluence of a number of circumstances." Increasing cases of inaccessibility of VKontakte led to the popularization of the hashtag #vkzhivi on Twitter.

Is Pavel Durov to blame for everything?

In addition to the hashtag, the opinion spread among users that regular failures in work began exactly after Pavel Durov left the company. On April 1, 2014, on his VKontakte page, Durov announced that he was leaving the post of CEO of the company.

In his appeal, the creator of the social network claimed that in 2013 his freedom of action as the CEO of VKontakte was greatly reduced. He complained that the principles underlying the social network had become increasingly difficult to uphold and formal positions in the current conditions were not interesting to him. Experts are sure that in this way Durov hinted at serious pressure from the security forces, demanding the closure of the VK opposition groups, censorship and access to users' personal data.

Durov sold his shares to the well-known media manager and former CEO of MegaFon Ivan Tavrin, and the entire social network was taken over by the Mail.Ru Group.

Among users, the opinion spread that regular failures in work began exactly after Pavel Durov left the company. Photo aif.by

Not the first “closure” in the 10 years of the existence of the social network

The upcoming “closure” of VKontakte will not be the first and certainly not the last in the history of the social network. In 2009, the resource was to be closed by a court decision; in March 2012, Pavel Durov himself allegedly stated that "his offspring will stop working because it has become too difficult to manage the site."

In the open spaces of VK there is even a thematic group called “Maybe it’s true, maybe not ... VKontakte will be closed”, in which panic messages appear every year or six months that the social network will be closed.

Hotbed of fakes

VKontakte is a fairly large hotbed of fake news not only about its closure. As well as through any social network, fictional stories of varying degrees are distributed through VK, which, sometimes without prior verification, end up in the media and are perceived by the population as verified facts.

Similar cases are periodically encountered in the Tatarstan press: just last year, a local publication spread the news that during a fire at one of the industrial facilities of the Republic of Tatarstan, a huge piece of concrete ceiling flew away from the explosion towards the penal colony and, when it fell, demolished the watchtower with a machine gunner, broke through the fence and the restricted area, and the prisoners allegedly fled wherever their eyes looked.

Lina Sarimova

Recently, my friends on the social network Vkontakte began to repost a very old "duck" which is already about a year old. It starts like this: “Because from Monday the old VK program is being deleted ...” after reading the text of this message, I just smiled and forgot. But when I saw a dozen reposts from friends, it made me worry and write an article on this topic ...

Let me start with the full text of this post:

“The social network Vkontakte will be closed from next week, I will leave this entry so that my photos, correspondence, etc. do not scatter over the Internet.
In response to new policy"VKontakte" I hereby declare that all my personal data, photographs, drawings, correspondence and so on are objects of my copyright (according to the Berne Convention). For commercial use of all the above copyrighted items, my written permission is required in each case.

Everyone who reads this text can copy it to their wall on VKontakte. After that, you will be protected by copyright laws. This communique notifies VKontakte that the disclosure, copying, distribution of my personal information or any other illegal activity in relation to my social media profile is strictly prohibited.”

So, let's begin to analyze the text of this "warning" in detail. (The article is intended for ordinary Internet users, so I will not use complex it terms.)

“Because from Monday the old VK program is being deleted, I will leave this entry so that my photos, correspondence, etc. do not scatter over the Internet. According to the author of this message, Vkontakte is one program in which all user data is located, and when this program is deleted, all data somehow miraculously scatters over the Internet .... From the first words it is clear that this message is intended for people who are not at all familiar with Web device sites. All Vkontakte user data is located on the company's servers. All programs and even the Vk.com website itself just take information from servers and display it to users. In addition, there are many programs for Vkontakte, in addition to official clients for various devices there are also unofficial clients who work to this day.

“In response to the new policy of VKontakte, I hereby declare that all of my personal data, photographs, drawings, correspondence, and so on are subject to my copyright (according to the Berne Convention). Any commercial use of all of the aforementioned copyrighted items requires my written permission in each case.

It would seem a very serious statement with a reference to such a document as the "Bern Convention". But even here, not everything is as fair as the author shows. The Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works is the title of this document, signed in the 19th century and revised in 1979. Naturally, this document has nothing to do with Vkontakte and the Internet as a whole (it simply did not exist then).

VKontakte is now a public company. That is why all users of this social network are recommended to place such a “privacy notice” on their pages, otherwise (if the notice is not published on the page at least once), you automatically allow any use of data from your page, your photos and information published in messages on the wall of your page.

“Everyone who reads this text can copy it to their wall on VKontakte. After that, you will be protected by copyright laws. This communique notifies VKontakte that the disclosure, copying, distribution of my personal information or any other illegal actions in relation to my profile on the social network is strictly prohibited.

But this paragraph of the message is just a lie, and not even covered up. And I'll tell you why. According to the legislation of the Russian Federation, the content created by the author is already protected by law and no additional actions are required to protect it (in our case, posting this message). Article 1259 clause 4 of the Civil Code of the Russian Federation states: “For the emergence, exercise and protection of copyright, registration of a work or compliance with any other formalities is not required.”

Moreover, all user data is protected by the Federal Law of July 27, 2006 N 152-FZ "On Personal Data" and no additional actions are required on the part of the user.

Still, the words of the author are not entirely clear: VKontakte is now a public company. How the publicity of the company relates to personal data remains a big secret.

From this brief "investigation" it becomes clear that this message is a lie, or in the language of the Internet: a duck.