VK, "Russia's Facebook", Has Some Splainin' to Do.

gretavo's picture

When I first found out the name of the suspect, I googled like everyone else and came upon this page: http://vk.com/id160300242 that is supposed to be a Russian facebook of sorts. Someone on Buzzfeed posted that early screenshot showing someone logged in as the suspect this morningt at 5:04 a.m.

Later I noticed the date of the suspect's last login changed to last night at 9 p.m. Explanations?

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gretavo's picture

about VK

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VK_%28social_network%29

VK (social network)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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VK (social network) Logo "VKontakte"
URL vk.com
Type of site Social networking service
Registration Open to everyone with a cell phone
Available language(s) 70 languages
Users over 200 million[1]
Owner Doraview Limited
Created by Pavel Durov
Launched 10 October 2006
Revenue Increase $ 152 million (2011)[2]
Current status Active

VK (Originally VKontakte, Russian: ?????????) is a social network service available in several languages but popular particularly among Russian-speaking users around the world, especially in Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Moldova, Belarus, and Israel. Like other social networks, VK allows users to message contacts publicly or privately, create groups, public pages and events, share and tag images, audio and video, and play browser-based games.[3]

As of December 2012, VK has at least 195 million accounts.[4] VK is ranked 25 in Alexa's global Top 500 sites and is the second most visited website in Russia.[5] In December 2012 VK had an average of 43 million daily users.[6]

"? ????????" (VKontákte) translates to English as "InContact" or "InTouch".
Contents

1 History
2 Company
3 Website
3.1 Functionality
3.2 Languages
4 Copyright issues
4.1 Litigation
4.2 Anti-piracy efforts
4.3 Promotional use by bands and musicians
5 Popularity
6 Profile Privacy Policy
7 See also
8 References
9 External links

History
Pavel Durov, the founder of VKontakte.ru, on his 26th birthday, 10 October 2010.

Founder Pavel Durov launched VKontakte for beta testing in September 2006, having just graduated from St Petersburg State University. Next month the domain name vkontakte.ru was registered. User registration was initially limited to within university circles exclusively by invitation, but the site still grew quickly. In February 2007 the site reached a user base of over 100,000 and was recognized as the second largest player in Russia's nascent social network market. In the same month the site was subjected to a severe DDoS attack, which briefly put it offline. The user base reached 1 million in July 2007, and 10 million in April 2008. In December 2008 VK overtook rival Odnoklassniki as Russia's most popular social networking service.
Company

V Kontakte was incorporated on 19 January 2007 as a Russian limited liability company. Founder and CEO Pavel Durov owns 20% of shares (although he has majority voting power through proxy votes), and a trio of Russian-Jewish investors, Vyacheslav Mirilashvili, Mikhail Mirilashvili and Lev Leviev, own 60%, 10% and 10% respectively.[7] The company is now completely owned by offshore firm Doraview Limited, based in the British Virgin Islands.[7] The full current ownership is not in the public domain, although Mail.ru Group (formerly Digital Sky Technologies) has publicly acknowledged a stake of 39.99%.[8] Subsequently, the full ownership structure was published.[9]

The company is controlled by Pavel Durov, founder and CEO. On 29 May 2012 Mail.ru Group announced that it has decided to yield control of the company to Durov by offering him the voting rights on its shares. Combined with Durov's personal 12% stake, this gives him 52% of the votes.[10][11]

VK canceled their IPO plans, citing unsatisfactory market conditions after Facebook's IPO blunder.[11][12]

Current shareholder structure as of 2011 is: 12% is owned by Vkontakte founder’s Pavel Durov, 8% by his partner Lev Leviev, and 40% by Vyacheslav Mirilashvili and members of his family. Mail.ru Group owns a 39,99% stake, having acquired 7.44% from Pavel Durov and other shareholders last month for $111.7 million.(reference footnote #14)
Website
Functionality
VK home page for a logged in user, September 2012
VK profile page, September 2012

As with most social networks, the site's core functionality is based around private messaging and sharing photos, status updates and links with friends. VK also has tools for managing online communities and celebrity pages. The site allows its users to upload, search and stream media content, such as videos and music. VK features an advanced search engine, that allows complex queries for finding friends,[13] as well as a real-time news search.

Messaging. VK Private Messages can be exchanged between groups of 2 to 30 people. An email address can also be specified as the recipient. Each message may contain up to 10 attachments: Photos, Videos, Audio Files, Maps (an embedded map with a manually placed marker) and Documents.[14]
News. VK users can post on their profile walls, each post may contain up to 10 attachments – media files, maps and documents (see above). User mentions and hashtags are supported. In case of multiple photo-attachments the previews are automatically scaled and arranged in a magazine-style layout. The news feed can be switched between all news (default) and most interesting modes. The site features a news-recommendation engine, global real-time search and individual search for posts and comments on specific users' walls.
Communities. VK features two types of communities. Groups are better suited for decentralised communities (discussion-boards, wiki-style articles, editable by all members etc.). Public pages are a news feed oriented broadcasting tool for celebrities and businesses. The two types are largely interchangeable, the main difference being in the default settings.
Like buttons. VK like buttons for posts, comments, media and external sites operate in a different way from Facebook. Liked content doesn't get automatically pushed to the user's wall, but is saved in the (private) Favorites section instead. The user has to press a second 'share with friends' button to share an item on their wall.
Privacy. Users can control the availability of their content within the network and on the Internet. Blanket and granular privacy settings are available for pages and individual content.

Languages

As of October 2012 the site features 3 official languages (English, Russian and Ukrainian) as well unofficial user-generated translations into 70 more languages. Advertisements are only shown in the Russian and Ukrainian versions.

Russian-speaking users can choose between the standard Russian version and two extras: a Soviet version and a Pre-Revolutionary version. Other than language tweaks (e.g. telegrams for messages and comrades for friends) these versions contain other easter eggs. For example, all private messages in the Soviet version have a stamp saying 'passed server censorship'. The pre-revolutionary version uses old-style Russian orthography. Both extra versions are also ad-free.
Copyright issues
Litigation

In 2008 the leading Russian television channel RTR sued VK (then Vkontakte) over unlicensed copies of two of its films, uploaded by VK users. In 2010 this dispute was settled by the Russian Supreme Arbitration Court in favor of the social network. The court ruled that VK is not responsible for its users’ copyright violations, taking into account that both parties agreed with the technical possibility to identify the user who posted illegal content and who, consequently, must incur the liability.[15] Another ruling early in 2012 went partially in favor of Gala Records, a recording studio, when the same court ordered VK to pay 7000$ for not being active enough in regard to copyrighted materials.[16]
Anti-piracy efforts

VK is DMCA-compliant and offers a content removal tool for copyright holders.[17] Large-scale copyright holders may gain access to bulk content removal tools.[18]

Since 2010 VK has also entered several partnerships with legal content providers, such as television networks[19] and streaming providers.[20] Most notably, the Video on Demand provider IVI.ru, that has secured lincensing rights with all of Hollywood majors in 2012.[21] These partnerships allow providers to remove user-uploaded content from VK and substitute it with legal embedded copies from the provider's site.[22] This legal content can be either ad-sponsored, subscription based or free, depending on the provider's choices. VK does not display its own advertising in the site's music or video sections, nor in the videos themselves.
Promotional use by bands and musicians

Musicians that use VK for promotion often upload their own tracks to their official VK pages. Notable examples include the Russian rapper Noize MC,[23] as well as international celebrities like Dj Tiesto,[24] Shakira,[25] Paul Van Dyk,[26] The Prodigy[27] or Dan Balan.[28][29]
Popularity

According to Alexa Internet ranking, VK is one of the most visited websites in the post-Soviet countries. It holds the second position in Russia.[30] Ukraine[31] and Belarus,[32] and 5th in Kazakhstan.[33]
Profile Privacy Policy

After submitting profile deletion, you have to wait 210 days to complete submission.

gretavo's picture

http://www.theatlanticwire.co

http://www.theatlanticwire.com/politics/2013/04/menino-says-brothers-act...

Sen. Lindsey Graham sees holes. He sees holes in the F.B.I. He sees holes in U.S. law. He potentially sees holes everywhere. But these are the ones he's focusing on right now, he told Candy Crowley on State of the Union. "The ball was dropped in one of two ways," the South Carolina Republican explained. "The FBI missed a lot of things, is one potential answer, or our laws do not allow the FBI to follow up in a sound solid way." Graham argued that Tamerlan Tsarnaev should have been on the FBI's radar because of his trip to Russia and his online activity relating to 9/11 conspiracy theories. "It’s people like this that you don’t want to let out of your sight, and this was a mistake," he said. "Either our laws are insufficient or the FBI failed, but we’re at war with radical Islamists and we need to up our game."

gretavo's picture

Unreliable Third-hand Narrative Alleges Trutherism

First clue that this is bogus, the writer claims the suspects lived on the Cambridge/Watertown line, when it in fact is the Cambridge/Somerville line. Subsequent versions seem to have been corrected...

I know the Boston bombers

By Alyssa Kilzer

Published April 20, 2013

| FoxNews.com

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I started getting facials from Zubeidat Tsarnaeva (pronounced Zu-bey-da) six years ago when I was 17 at a spa in the Boston area. She soon after left the spa and contacted my mom to have us start coming to her house, at 410 Norfolk St., right on the line of Cambridge and Watertown.

All throughout my senior year of high school and four years of college I went to her house about three times a year. The last time I went to the house was in December and January of 2011/2012.

The first few years the third-floor apartment was often crowded with her two sons, now identified as the alleged Boston bombers, and her two daughters, one of which was around my age. It was definitely not a glamorous place to get a facial, as the “spa” was set up in her living room, and during these years the family expanded.

The staircase was crowded with their shoes, the house filled with noises of arguing, cooking, etc. She would often apologize for this. Her daughters and Dzhokar, the younger son, always struck me as perfectly nice and normal kids about my age. As far as I knew the daughters also attended Rindge (the local public high school) along with their brother.

She gave a damn good facial, often working on my skin for two or three hours, and this is why my sister, mom and I continued to go back to her home for years.

During this time one of Zubeidat’s daughters, and then the other, were set up in arranged marriages, and started having kids. This was something I found slightly disturbing, as one was just my age (18-19) and didn’t seem to be happily married.

Within two years I heard that she had been beaten badly and eventually filed for divorce, which was at first against her mother’s wishes. Later Zubeidat said that she had accepted the divorce because it was an unhappy marriage. Her daughter then moved back into the house with her child. Her younger son, Dzhokar, was often in the room or the room next door looking after his nephew while I was getting my facial.

There were usually issues with parking on her crowded Cambridge Street. Sometimes she would have Dzhokar go down to the street to put the visitor-parking pass into my car window (Yes, I gave him my car keys). Once he moved my car, which made me nervous, as the street was so crowded and parking spots so small. Dzhokar was always friendly to me and seemed easy going. In 2010-11, there was a day when Dzhokar wasn’t home, so Zubeidat took the parking pass out to the street for me.

I noticed that she first put on a hijab before going outside. She had never worn a hijab while working at the spa previously, or inside the house, and I was really surprised.

Between 2008 and 2012 I got to know her pretty well. During those 2-3 hours I spent a lot of time asking her about her personal life, background and her family. (I’m a writer and tend to ask people exhaustive questions about their personal lives, especially as interesting a character as this.)

The hijab shouldn’t have surprised me so much, because she had become increasingly religious while I was in college. She often mentioned Allah, and the lessons of the Koran. “Allah will reward him,” she said once about my brother, when I told her that my brother and mom were close, and that I thought my brother would take care of my mom later in life.

She started to refuse to see boys that had gone through puberty, as she had consulted a religious figure and he had told her it was sacrilegious. She was often fasting. She told me that she had cried for days when her oldest son, Tamerlan, told her that he wanted to move out, going against her culture’s tradition of the son staying in the house with the mother until marriage.

She started saying things like, “Don’t worry, there aren’t men in the house today,” when I asked if I could use the bathroom, which I thought was kind of funny at the time, since I didn’t mind if there were men in the apartment or not.

In my last year of college I was getting a facial from her, and asking her about why she had originally come to the United States with her family about eight or ten years previously.

She told me that she and her husband had been lawyers and political activists in Russia. They had fled the country after “something that her husband did.” Her daughter had recently been divorced at this time, and her daughter’s ex-husband had taken their child to Russia, refusing to return him. Finally the child was returned.

When my mom asked Zubeidat how they had gotten the child back, she told her that “my [Zubeidat’s] husband is crazy” and everyone knew it. When he threatened the daughter’s ex-husband’s family, they returned the child.

During this facial session she started quoting a conspiracy theory, telling me that she thought 9-11 was purposefully created by the American government to make America hate Muslims. “It’s real,” she said, “My son knows all about it. You can read on the internet.”

I have to say I felt kind of scared and vulnerable when she said this, as I am distinctly American, and was lying practically naked in her living room.

Throughout my years of knowing Zubeidat I certainly had more contact with her daughters, one of whom attended the Catherine Hinds Institute and aspired to open a spa, and Dzhokar, than with the older brother Tamerlan.

Those three children were always friendly and kind to me. I think I only met Tamerlan twice, and he wasn’t friendly. Zubeidat certainly mentioned arguing with him, and being worried about him in general after he got his girlfriend pregnant. I never met Zubeidat’s husband. I know that a few years ago her husband got cancer, but she told us that the doctors had caught it early, and that he was doing well. She made one long trip to Russia in the period of 2011-2012.

While Zubeidat was very good at giving facials, I can say that her increased religious zeal and offensive political suggestions about 9-11 in part influenced my decision to not return to her home since January 2012. Those details aside, she struck me as a hard-working woman who cared a lot for her family.

When my mom called me earlier today telling me about how she had seen the picture of Dzhokar this morning and called the FBI, I couldn’t believe it. As her client for years I felt affection for Zubeidat and was very distraught to hear that her sons could have committed such horrific crimes.

When I read online that she had left for Russia a few months ago, my first reaction was to think that she might have known about the attacks her sons were planning. Articles online suggest that she is in Russia because of her husband’s poor health. I know that her husband often went to Russia without her, and for extended periods of time.

She was also very close with her sons and showed many signs of political leanings herself. Of course this is only my personal conjecture, and to my knowledge there is no proof about the parent’s involvement at all.

The actions of the two men have been atrocious beyond words. I wrote this story in order to help clarify some of the untruths I read online during the past few days, and I hope that any knowledge I have shared about the family can help investigators get to the bottom of these terrorist actions and not cause any further harm.

Since writing the original article I have experienced enormous relief following the capture of Dzhokar. I continue to pray and think about the victims of the bombings and everyone in Boston.
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URL

http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2013/04/20/know-boston-bombers/

casseia's picture

Resentful because the woman couldn't fix her bacne.

(Back acne). I mean, WHO has facials that last 2-3 hours?

gretavo's picture

people who get them half-naked?

I think she probably didn't want to admit that she was getting a brazilian wax done...

casseia's picture

If...

that kind of waxing took 2-3 hours, people would go into shock. It was bacne.

gretavo's picture

whatever ...

...she needed a lot of things done?

casseia's picture

No...

I think she was trying to justify all the "information" she had about the family with this notion that she spent large amounts of time there and was, like, an amateur journalist so she pried a lot. That's different from having been there a couple times a year for a facial lasting an hour.

gretavo's picture

he also misspelled...

...the name of his own high school? It's Cambridge Rindge and Latin with a D in Rindge...