Great to see that you found the link I have already posted in an earlier reply! I didn't hold an

I just raised the point which I believe is important that the criminal's name he presented as a significant result is likely to be fictional. If you were a security researcher yourself and a criminal you traced would call himself Joe Bloggs, you would want to recheck your sources before presenting your discovery, would you?
There were lots of other questionable moments in his "research" related to Russian hackers, such as attributing all forum accounts having the same very common Russian username (which was a simple derivative of a word or a name, such as my username) to a single person who he coined as the culprit, without any additional justification that the accounts were actuall theirs.

It's not just Vasily Petrov. It's Vasily Ivanovich Petrov. Three very common placeholder names chained in a row. At least one person does have this name, but it seems very fishy to see a name like that in a hacker's credentials. I did not claim anything, all I did was make a valid observation that casted certain doubts on the results his work and he effectively muted me instead of giving his thoughts about this or just silently approving my comment.

First of all, I greatly doubt his article was read by millions. Second of all, how many readers spoke Russian to spot the questionable moment? Very few, I must imagine.

That is certainly a valid thought. However, a few comments praising his research got approved both before and after mine. In addition, he commented on some of them in person. This is leading me believe that he did read my comment, even though I will never be able to prove it (great way to deal with the critique, Krebs!).

He did not approve it, so it never became visible. A comment cannot be "deleted" it never gets "approved". How convenient.

He never approved my comment, so it never made it in the comment section. I didn't do anything significant, I just made a couple of observations that made his research look less exciting, the most significant find I already mentioned above. A good lesson for me to avoid dealing with blogs and bloggers that pre-moderate comments or at least preserve them locally.

I posted a comment on his blog a while ago where I questioned the validity of the results of his research that caught a lot of attention a while back. For example, one of his biggest finds was that that one of the scammer' name is Vasily Ivanovich Petrov, which is just a placeholder name just like Joe Public in Russian. He never approved my comment or provided any feedback. If he was an actual researcher, he wouldn't silence reasonable criticism towards him.

It's sad to see him get one meaningless article after another on Slashdot.

Nothing, apart from whimsical craving for tasty food. At least for the civilized countries where pretty much anyone has enough money and supplies to switch to a veg{an,etarian} diet.

For crying out loud, Google Trends compares search terms without any context. All the comparisons I've seen in this discussion make as much sense as mine. Time to write a new story about Gnome losing to goblins and dwarves?

(Disclamer: I'm no expert in routing algorithms or network problems in general)
Aside from both these problems having to do with finding a path on a graph, I see little similarity. In the TSP you need to find the shortest path to cover all nodes("cities") on a graph, while here you need to find a path between two nodes ("computers") which would both be fast and not cause traffic bottlenecks. I feel there may be many various metrics to define what an "optimal" path should be, each one better in one regard and worse in another (e.g. minimal/average ping, tendency to cause bottlenecks, average router load worldwide, percentage of traffic routed through the NSA headquarters and so on).

There may be valid reasons the Iraqi forces are using these fake detectors. If the look of these devices makes some clueless criminals afraid of smuggling explosives, they are serving their purpose in preventing crime.

I admire him as much as anyone else standing up for the free flow of information, even though what he did may have been short-sighted in our dystopian and violent dog-eat-dog world. I just hope he won't be turned into a propaganda tool by the government of the country he ends up living in. I'm sure there are people in this world who would not mind using a little bit of torture to extort some convenient made-up "disclosures" from him.

I meant the original content creator which is the developer, while the video maker/uploader (i.e. derived content creator) is the letsplayer.

Gameplay videos can be entertaining for their plot, dialogues and visuals even if the player says nothing and plays poorly. On the other hand, a good "letsplayer" can make it much more entertaining to watch and ultimately attract some buyers. They should realize that such a symbiosis is good for both of them. The developers should stop removing or taking all the ad revenue while letsplayers should share it with the developer.
Would be nice to see if Youtube allowed to share revenues between the content creators and the video makers/uploaders.

They do not do it for free. They collect information about my interests in news and articles to pick the ads I'll most likely click. This is a fair tradeoff, not charity.

Although I seldom use their search engine directly since they focus more on searches in Russian, I can confirm that it works very well. They also have, among other things, better maintained and more detailed maps of ex-soviet countres with better traffic jam and accident tracking, an EXTREMELY convenient product search that lets you specify an insane amount of properties and features to pick the most fitting item that exists on the market and then find a good rated and cheap place to buy it, a great multilingual online dictionary and a convenient online storage service which has existed far longer than Google Drive. Their web pages have a simple, consistent and concise design, their ads are few and non-intrusive, and, on top of all this, the company has an almost cult standing among many tech students for its high wages and free CS and data mining school where they teach interested people in-depth data mining, artificial intelligence, algorithms and many other related and not-so-much things.

Why do I mention all this? First, to confirm that they are popular for a very good reason and, second, because most of their services use Internet data mining techniques to gather results, so if you live in CIS, chances are you are hooked anyway and you generate many internet searches indirectly even if you don't use their search feature. Unless Google pays as much attention to foreign countries as it does to the U.S. and keeps expanding its services, it should not be surprising to see sound local competition in some countries.