The Kremlin vs. LiveJournal?

[monk222]

Things get curiouser and curiouser in LJ Land. I had heard the news that pro-Kremlin groups were attacking some government critics, and that we happy-go-lucky bloggers were just collateral damage, with the site crashing for hours at a time. Though, I did have my suspicions about the Russian government, and my doubts about LJ's viability were raised to the n-th degree, about how sensible it is to have one's e-home built on the shifting sands of Russian society, and whether I need to be more serious about nabbing a Dreadmwidth account, we now have a news story to give some heft to these dark thoughts, though the story itself also comes from Russia, and so who knows:

"The reason for attack is more than clear in this case — someone wants LiveJournal to disappear as a platform," he said Tuesday in a post on his own LiveJournal blog, Igrick.

The hackers sought to leave the Russian blogosphere without a single stable platform to operate on, dispersing them to other social networks where "it's easier to fight individual users," Dronov wrote.

He stopped short of naming any names, predicting only that more attacks would follow. SUP will have to ship more powerful equipment to Russia to resist further attacks, Dronov said.

The company "doesn't exclude a lawsuit option," Svetlana Ivannikov, head of LiveJournal Russia, said late Monday in a statement. But she also identified no suspects.

Bloggers, however, minced no words, naming the Kremlin as the only power capable of staging such a large attack.

On the other hand, I do like one LJer's comment, despite its muddy syntax and semantics: "Suuurrreee, like the government if they really needed it wouldn't be able to make shut up a few people without causing a global scandal." It does make more sense to me that this was the work of a Russian sort of 4Chan group. Either way, one does not feel a lot of confidence in LJ's Russian connections.