Russian Bloggers Are As Powerful As Russian Hackers

I’d go along with your view that these are “merely” enthusiastic privateers. The independent Russian language news site sobkorr.ru is now down for the fourth successive day in what, to me, has all the hallmarks of a DoS attack. If the government wanted to shut down a news site operating within the Russian Federation, it would hardly need to resort to such tactics - a visit from the local prosecutor’s office would be enough….

@Ian Kemmish: Thanks for the support, glad to see someone going along with my main point. Very true, the government here definitely has a better methods of shutting up the voices it does not want to hear and DDoS attack does not seem to be among them.

I am interested if any of those participating in the polls had lost any relatives in this conflict or they thought and opinion is based on what they see on TV ( does not really matter which TV- US have done terrible job reporting on this conflict). It seems to me that the conflicts in other parts of the world grew old… so why not Georgia.

One dead child, woman or an innocent civilian and the “peacekeeping” turns into terrorism. This as any other armed conflicts are wrong no matter what the Russian or any other “blogosphere” things.

It was CNN’s fault for only leaving two options.

I would have said:

Yes, Russia is taking advantage of the opportunity given to them under the banner of self defense when in the night the US and Israel helped Georgia attack during a military drill.

@Vlad: I have actually posted a very similar opinion on Mashable’s post about the cyberattacks back on Monday - all our online lives are worth much less than a real life of any child killed in the conflict. But where I can’t agree is that Russian actions can’t be qualified as peacekeeping. Unfortunately, if your citizens are killed and your troops are attacked, I don’t see how it’s possible not to fight back. After all, Russia does have an international mandate to preserve peace in the region and I’m afraid there was no other choice for us. And believe me, the war has already come to many Russian families who either have relatives in Georgia or Ossetia or whose sons are in the troops there. It is terrible to see it all and this is the only way why the bloggers here are so passionate in trying to make the world know what we think about it.

@milligence: I agree, this is too difficult of a question to only have two options available. At least adding an “I am not sure” or “I don’t have enough information” could be a better way to handle it.

This Zbiggie Breezy’s work. The quickness of the Russian response as one plot combined with the secret attack as the contradicting plot is his style.

Cheney is too trigger happy for this.

Svetlana, here I will sign the what you’re saying.
it’s really different story from your last Blog’s argument- Blogosphere isn’t the same that a strange a mythical army of “not coordinated Russian hackers” Blogosphere is a mechanism that works fine for the years already, that has some understandable rules, it’s also the where it’s possible to organize the promotion of any idea in a few days, involving thousands of people (I do this on Facebook for commercial & non-profit projects- there is nothing much easy!). So being personally in Social Media Marketing, I see almost every days a prove that it’s “quite easy” to promote in a multi-channel mode any good idea with help of Social Media. on the Blog roots, in Social Networks or wherever- if you have a good IDEA (like “patriotism” for Russians, in the case of this war), if you have something that people are ready to love and so it’s needed only to “explain”:) to them how much important is that idea and how they could make it even greater… so it doesn’t look so much difficult.

but well I agree for the “normal” people, those that don’t understand the rules, it may seem a kind of magic anyway I must admit Russian Bloggers (can we call LiveJournal flood Blogging btw?!?!?!) have done some cool job! well, maybe it was a useless job, since the results of that pool don’t really represent anymore the true readers’ opinion? but it was entertaining! proof of the power of Russian Blogosphere, huh

@milligence: Yes, we definitely see good tutors here. But unfortunately their lessons should be labeled with “How not to behave on the international scene” while the current Administration seems to think otherwise.

@Andrey: Very true, social media can be used to promote any idea - good or bad - virally in a very efficient way. But there’s one thing you forgot to mention: people will only help you promote this idea if they truly believe in what you want them to promote. Otherwise it will not work. And this is exactly what happened here with Russian bloggers acting this passionately to show the world that they also have something to say about the conflict instead of letting everyone listen to what the media outlets choose to tell them. It may not be useful but it is patriotism and it is something to be proud of when a nation is so willing to act united over a difficult situation.

Sveltana,
I agree with your points.

One thing to keep in mind about the CNN survey is that the same botnets used to attack the Georgian networks could be used to place votes on the survey. Thus we could have 390,000 votes placed by a single hacker.

Dave

@Dave: Yes, I have no doubts that hackers could create voting bots easily to achieve these impressive results. But still I believe that this particular case is human-based at least to a certain extent - simply because I’ve seen myself an enormous number of posts everywhere on Russian blogs encouraging readers to vote.

PUTIN IS THE RIGHT ARM OF SATAN . HE HAS IMPRISONED HIS OWN PEOPLE AND STOLE THEIR WEALTH JUST LIKE HE STOLE AMERICAN EQUIPMENT FROM GEORIGA . YOU PEOPLE CAN TRUST HIM WAKE UP RUSSIAN PEOPLE….

@launchex

You comments are pretty pathetic.

@launcherx: You can think about Russian president whatever you choose but I have deleted the first comment because it contained racist speech. So do please keep your words reasonable and avoid attacking the nation as a whole.

Ok now look what is going on with Russia your Gov. is sending weapons to Syria and putting a naval base there with nukes on board , Hence the Bible is being fullfilled to a (T) read the book , the Bear will come from the north and make war war with ISREAL , THE BATTLE OF ARMAGEDDON WILL BEGIN…..

@launcherx: Your previous comment deleted for hateful speech. If you want to share your opinion about Russian people and Russian government in the comments on Profy, I would like you to refrain from racism and hateful speech as they are not acceptable on Profy against any nation, including Russia.