RosPil is not about whistleblowing, they're better. What they do is they analyze public government purchasing tenders and try to stop illegal ones by filing official complaints and trying to publicize the issues. There are many reasons a tender can be "illegal" – e.g. if it does not contain enough information on what the government wants to be able to check that the bidder did the required work.
Alas, I have a feeling these guys won't last long if they're effective.
In August, 2004, two passenger planes fell out of the sky within three minutes of each other, killing eighty-nine people. It turned out that they were downed by two female suicide bombers who had bribed an airport security officer with five thousand rubles—around a hundred and seventy dollars—to let them onto the planes. </quote> http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/04/04/110404fa_fact_... from http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2508107
A few months ago, Facebook and Twitter took flak for deleting the accounts of revolutionaries, as it was a form of censorship.
Thinking about it, I decided the action wasn't all bad. If those services are unencrypted, and operating in a regime that might compel them to disclose information (& hurt activists), it makes sense to delete the accounts. Let the people know they aren't using the right tool for the job. Not only would this act as an impetus for the creation of new tools, but it might directly save lives.
It sounds like Yandex found itself in a similar position here, but failed to act (or whatever). And now people will probably die or be ruined.
If you run a service that people could hurt themselves with, take a moment to think about what will be safe for the user— aside from what you must do to be safe/legal yourself. We live in a world where technology has created a new, more dangerous form of illiteracy.
A phrase that describes it in my mind: "Adults become children when they play on the information superhighway."
Yandex Money is more like PayPal. This is money changing hands, and to do business you'll have to comply with various strict anti-money laundering/anti-terrorism/tax/whatever-the-next-anti laws. The only alternative is cash and/or better government.
Yandex had planned to sell up to 20 percent of its shares in New York before the onset of the global 2008 global financial crisis forced it to postpone the
And the article cuts off. Would assuming the word "listing" was intended to be at the end of the sentence be a bad assumption?
Alas, I have a feeling these guys won't last long if they're effective.